Been a minute but I only remember that being bad for the fight

. But I ran a wizard MC so I had CC and light nuking down by then and my party was mostly handling positioning and meat shielding.

What? You aren’t a fan of a mandatory minigame that can cause instant failures at any moment and is all but guaranteed to during the lead up to the penultimate dungeon (note: Fail states on that can and should be disabled)? Or are you talking about said penultimate dungeon being nothing but translucent enemies with mind control who respawn unless you do the exact opposite of every other battle in the game and rush in to take out their spawners?

In all fairness, you can trivialize a lot of the hell in Kingmaker just by metagaming and preparing for the endgame early. If you don’t… yeah.

Whereas WOTR’s ridiculously plentiful enemy type(s) are much less obnoxious (and very clearly telegraphed the entire game) and they got rid of said endless failstates.

To clarify:

Rogue Trader is Owlcat, not Larian. They are also gods of CRPGs and tend to have really good dialogue and character writing. But Larian’s thing is more the environmental systems whereas Owlcat tends to prefer to go REALLY hard on the core rulesets as well as the way branching narratives work.

If you like RT, check out Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous. It definitely appeals to those of us who grew up on 3(.5)e D&D (since that is basically Pathfinder) but a lot of people (self included) will regularly argue that it is in the running to be the best CRPG ever made. Yes, that includes Planescape.

It is important to question what you think a boycott will do.

Do you think you are going to make a giant movement that changes the world? If so… you should stop eating those lead paint chips. Consumers, historically, will only engage in a boycott if there are alternatives. Shop at Walmart instead of Target. VERY short term you might get someone to boycott Amazon for a few days but… just check “leftist” forums like resetera for everyone immediately losing their shit over how a few older activision games they will never play are on sale.

Video games, contrary to what people will say, don’t really have alternatives. We’ll joke that The Last Descendent was “waifu frame” but the people who love Warframe very much have reasons for not wanting to play TLD and vice versa. Let alone games like Call of Duty where there really is nothing close to an alternative.

So “boycott to fix the world” (and I am gonna expand on what THAT would be shortly…) ain’t a thing.

So… now it is up to why? Personally, I “boycott” Ubisoft and have for the better part of a decade at this point. I think the last game I bought “from them” was GR Breakpoint and I got that years after the game was basically dead and on a hefty discount (see: lack of alternatives). I am under no illusion that my wallet is going to lead to yves et al leaving their own company out of shame for their role in enabling a culture of sexual harassment (and allegedly more). But I do know that I feel a lot better when I look at myself in the mirror and most games I am interested in DO have alternatives.

So do you think you are going to change the world? Cue Nelson Muntz. Do you just not want to contribute to the culture of loot boxes personally? Go for it. And it doesn’t matter what people on not-reddit tell you.

As for what you think will happen: I think we can all agree that Nintendo upping the… Err, let me rephrase that. I think we can all agree that any company other than Nintendo upping the base price of a game to 80 USD (pre-tariffs…) is REALLY bad for the industry. But… inflation IS a thing and while game sales have skyrocketed… game dev has too. Money has to come from somewhere. And RMTs (lootboxes, cosmetics, etc) and constant flows of DLC have actually been great for the industry. It, for two decades or so, stopped the endless “ramp up, ramp down” model where people would be hired to work on a game, fired when it went gold, and then hired again 6 months down the line if it got green lit for an expansion. Get rid of RMTs and we go back to that for all but the largest studios because you don’t need artists when you are fixing a bug in Batman’s cape and so forth.

So, personally? I buy and play games that I like. And a lot of that does have to do with the monetization model. Something like Warframe is RMT based and has some sketchy purchases but also is (mostly) playable as a free game and is built around “free” content. Whereas something like Genshin Impact is marketed as “you never have to spend a dime” but… yeah. So the games that “do it wrong”? I am… kind of already “boycotting” them because I am just not interested in them.

I and many people with a Cool PS2 can attest that AMD hardware has no problems running Switch games.

nVidia genuinely does not care about gaming. It is just a way to have a few extra bins to increase effective yields for their datacenter/AI chips. If Nintendo wants to buy in bulk they’ll sell in bulk. And if Nintendo doesn’t like nVidia’s prices they can talk to AMD… like the other consoles did. Jensen will just sell those chips as mobile devices or cars or whatever.

Most speculation was around 400 USD for the switch itself for the given specs, tooling, etc. The Steam Deck is a different process but their LCD model is pretty indicative. 450 was a bump that would account for economic uncertainty and give them room to drop back down for regular discounts and the like.

Then trump trumped the bed and the previously expected buffer zone just isn’t enough. Which is why we are seeing the massive price hike.

Been more than a minute since I touched my PSP but I remember the stick on that (and the Vita?) being pretty dogshit. Less of an tilting analog stick and more of a weird slidey one. It is Nintendo so whatever they do is amazing and perfect but they probably wanted to use the same parts on both the pro controller and the joycons.

Unless they change away from using cheap potentiometers, it will.

For those not aware: A potentiometer (“pot” from here on out) is effectively a resistor where you move a contact back and forth. When it is at one end, the resistance is very low because electricity barely moves through the resistive material (often graphite). When it is at the other end, the electricity needs to move throughout the entire stretch of graphite. With very basic math you can figure out what percentage X and Y you are at which translated to analog movement.

Designed well? The contact moves across the resistive material in a way where there is no damage (scraping). Given infinite time it will eventually become a problem but that is well beyond the lifecycle of the console.

So why do analog sticks wear out so fast? Because they aren’t enclosed systems. Dirt and dust WILL get into the chamber and then it gets caught between the contact and the material and scrapes up said material. This leads to drift in the sense that dirt causes the contact to stick and loss of precision as material is scraped off. That is why electric contact cleaner was a great stopgap but couldn’t actually repair any damage.

So why is the switch in particular so shit at this? Because an xbox or playstation controller has a big rigid plastic cover that more or less seals the pot off from the environment. It isn’t perfect but you are getting very little dirt and dust into the controller and up that dome.

The switch? It is a rubber flap over the joycon that you can lift up with your finger. Great for cleaning, horrible for keeping clean.

I haven’t looked too close at the new joycons but I would be shocked if they changed that design. So they will almost definitely still suffer from excessive drift REAL fast.

If anything, Duskbloods further confirms this is a B game. They took a mode of Elden Ring/Dark/Demon Souls that people have historically loved (jolly coop) and built a game around that. It is no different than building a game around dodging (Bloodborne), blocking/parrying and traversal (Sekiro), or even just one off arena fights (… MANY of the Armored Core expandalones).

They built it for Nightreign. They did a much scaled down version for Duskbloods as a way to get a sack of cash from Nintendo and to pressure Sony into letting them go back to an IP they like (Bloodborne).

It really IS fun to watch reactions from people who have never had any experience with From outside of as “The Dark Souls company”. They have ALWAYS done this kind of shit (hell, they even did it recently with the VR game nobody played). They have their A team work on their flagship IP whether that is Dark Souls or Armored Core or King’s Field. They have their B team(s) work on more experimental games. Sometimes it is something nobody ever remembers (was it Decirine?) and sometimes it is a cult favorite like Shadow Tower Abyss or Bloodborne. But the existence of Master of the Arena didn’t mean an AC2 wasn’t coming just like AC2 Another Age being weird barely connected missions on a pseudo-tactical map didn’t mean we weren’t getting AC3 and so forth.

I think it is more that people identify with a character that they REALLY should not. Scarface (first remake?) and Taxi Driver are pretty infamous examples of that. It HAS definitely gotten worse as media literacy has dropped to an abysmal level but it is still that fundamental concept of “This is the protagonist. I want to be like them. What they do must be right”

I can’t go too in depth on the harry potter movies since I never watched them. I was the cool kid who instead read about Harry Dresden and… that is a whole different bundle of misogyny, grooming, and copaganda. Yay…

But yeah. I still think so many people would benefit from sitting down and watching Yu Yu Hakusho of all things. That was a show that spent 2-3 major arcs tearing apart (what we would later call) toxic masculinity and pointing out that it is okay to like the cool as fuck thing but that you also need to understand what it actually is and reassess.

Yeah… every time people do the “Well Harry Potter as a universe was great. It is just the creator that is shit” I just think of all the threads about the underlying racism, slavery, etc. The reality is that most of the die hard supporters never read the books and just watched the movies that already whitewashed over so much of the bigotry.

But yeah. I generally put it on the same level as stuff by watsuki and the like where it will be a REAL simpler world when that bastard dies and, until then, it would be a real shame if that linux iso happened to contain a copy of Rurouni Kenshin and Harry Potter.

Just REALLY annoys me when people are caping for it and trying to say “oh, its fine. She makes money off this but she would be really annoyed if she saw that there was a black person in it”

Can we mod out the transphobic creator who benefits monetarily?