Yeah honestly AA games deliver the experience AAA games gave 15 years ago, and that’s what I want way more than whatever AAA is today.

This has implications with digital content in general

Not even just digital content. This is only half a step removed from right to repair campaigns, and that’s all about physical hardware, ranging from mobile phones to tractors on farms.

It’s really unfortunate that Lemmy handles deleted posts in this way. It’s one of very few genuine advantages of the Reddit platform. Over there, if the OP deleted the post, the text they wrote would no longer be visible, but all the comments under it still would be. And people could continue to have that discussion, so long as they had the link.

That’s a bit doomerist of you. Why leap to the assumption that voters are against it rather than the far simpler explanation that people are unaware of its existence, or don’t feel they understand it well enough to have an opinion?

In which case what’s needed is a much stronger social media effort, preferably headed up by the organisers themselves, or someone else who can make it their entire thing, from where it can hopefully radiate out to other interested parties.

I never played Civ VI. Stuck with V instead. Though to be honest, what I really wish they would do is return to the cool alternate game modes that Civ II: Test of Time added. Being able to keep playing with a second playing arena after completing the ship to Alpha Centauri, or play an entirely different game of fantasy or science-fiction flavoured civ was really cool.

Oh that’s amusing. So it’s just a complete coincidence that you posted it shortly after midnight on Wednesday in the very earliest time zone, then?

Also you confuse me. French pronouns, on a German-hosted instance, and you say you live in Spain. Pick a country!

I played one (1) game of Age of Mythology. Just too busy to play much more. I do so enjoy it when I get the time though. It was a win, but I looked up my opponent afterwards and it was only their 4th or 5th game.

Also finally got back out an went for a run today, for the first time since the start of the month.

To be fair this is a very early post. It’s 10:30 pm here as I write this in Australia, and the post reads “2 hours”. So that means it’s set for somewhere 4 hours ahead of me, or UTC+14, the very earliest time zone there is, home to the Line Islands of Kiribati, and nowhere else.

This has been a thing since at least Star Trek: TOS. It’s just more prominent today as online culture becomes more ubiquitous and makes it easier for more people who aren’t quite as dedicated to get involved.

AO3 is a website for sharing fanfiction. Archive of Our Own.

Slash fiction is a subgenre of fanfiction focused on romance, because for example you might describe your fanfiction as “Kirk/Spock” (pronounced “Kirk slash Spock”).

“Shipping” is the act of supporting a “ship”, short for “relationship”. It can be in fanfiction or just in fan discussions. It may or may not be supporting the “canon” ships, which are relationships actually shown in the original story. (Kirk/Spock is absolutely non-canon, but Picard/Crusher is a canon ship.)

Sometimes ships get given names, which might be a portmanteau of the characters’ names (Castle and Beckett from the show Castle being “Casket”), or associated with a characteristic of the characters (“rocketship” is Team Rocket characters Jessie and James from Pokémon), or reference something that happened to the characters in universe (Young Justice’s “Spitfire” referencing romantic advice given to Wally West that in part lead to him getting romantically involved with Artemis).

Even if you’re not particularly interested in shipping, if you get involved in online communities discussing long-running series, you’re bound to become familiar with it.

I’d rather just spend a fraction of the money on a Nebula subscription.

This is what really shits me. “Oh, the sports companies won’t be able to fund themselves.” If that’s true, too fucking bad. Our laws shouldn’t exist to arbitrarily prop up certain industries even when we’ve decided that the industry is causing harm.

But also, it’s just fucking not true. You can make an argument and say “oh but gambling companies fund 60% of the sport league” or whatever number it is, and pretend that banning gambling would cut the NRL’s budget by 60%. But that’s just not how it works. They’re sponsors because they were the highest bidder, not the only bidder. You’d just go to the next highest bidder if gambling sponsorships weren’t allowed. In the short term, maybe a 10% loss of revenue at most. Realistically, in the long term, it’d be negligible.

Same goes for pokies at local pubs and clubs. Australia has 0.3% of the world’s population and 18% of the world’s poker machines. And if you look specifically at poker machines not located in casinos it goes up to a ridiculous 76%. The entire rest of the world doesn’t allow poker machines at local clubs like we do, and their venues do just fine. The cries that venues would die off if they couldn’t have pokies are just nonsense.

I doubt it. Other forms of AI could be useful, but generative AI? I doubt it.

And tbh even deep learning through neural networks doesn’t seem to be making the leaps we’d hoped for. AoE4 promised, prior to release, a machine learning–based AI would be delivered down the line. It’s now almost 3 years since release and we haven’t heard a thing about it.

Maybe eventually we’ll be able to easily train a machine learning algorithm to play any game at a wide variety of skill levels (or at a very high level, if not at customisable levels), but it doesn’t seem like it’s any time soon.

Ok this got a chuckle out of me. But yeah, I don’t see any problem with people expressing agreement verbally.

Imagine a real conversation where you’re only allowed to agree with someone with nods, never saying “yeah I agree completely” or any other verbal feedback.

Honestly I didn’t even read the article. Shared it purely based on the headline.

You say “handful”, but it still hand thousands of players, and the thing that makes me sad about this screw up is that of those who played it, it was probably someone’s favourite game…

…Is what I was going to say, until I looked at the Steam charts. It hit an all-time peak of 607 players, with estimates of total ownership ranging from 9.5k to 25.1k. It very well still may have been someone’s favourite game and I feel really sad for them that it’s gone, but wow the game still did so much worse than even my expectations based on the reporting.

See also: Born Sexy Yesterday

See this, this I get. This is an actual reasonable problem. And we could be talking about it wrt Retold, since Freyr is a day one DLC.

Personally I’m not too concerned with it because even if you ignore Freyr, the cost of Premium is $25 AUD more than standard, and it includes two future DLCs (which they’ve already said will be $15 USD, probably $20 AUD each). So Premium is worth getting just for the two future pantheons. And since Premium includes Freyr in addition to the future pantheons, it ends up not looking like an added cost in the way it would otherwise.

But it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth that there’s actual playable content not included for free that’s available day one. And it would leave me very angry if the prices had ended up such that the best deal for everything except the day-one DLC actually cost less than the best deal for everything including Freyr. But all this discussion about cosmetics. Not even interesting cosmetics like unit skins, but something that’s basically just profile pictures. Is annoyingly distracting from that conversation.

You buy it for the expansions. The Chinese, one more as-yet-unannounced pantheon, and Freyr. The other stuff you get with Premium is basically irrelevant.

I’d much rather have a conversation about the day-one DLC of Freyr, and the fact that they’re charging for the future Chinese pantheon despite Chinese being available in 2014 Extended Edition and no previous Age of Empires Definitive Edition removing a civ that was previously available (indeed, aoe2 and aoe3’s DEs both added new civs in addition to all the existing ones). Granted, there are extenuating circumstances there, in that the EE Chinese DLC was so terrible it basically killed the game and they’ve promised the upcoming expansion to Retold will be “all new Chinese”. But it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

This discussion about what is basically profile pictures is some irrelevant bullshit as far as I’m concerned. I don’t give a shit about it, and I find the rhetoric from people claiming they do care (especially that one person claiming that this is a reason they’ll avoid Retold entirely because it’s “an advertisement, not a game”) extremely unconvincing. It’s eye-rollingly stupid to care about this when there are real things to get upset about both with this game and in the wider gaming industry.

where I’m actually playing a game and not an advertisement

That’s more than a little bit hyperbolic.