Ouch. The primary care situation in some parts of Canada is grim too but at least my appointment wait times are 1-2 weeks

A new engine would just have to have a new mod API. Plenty of engines have mod APIs. Nothing's really stopping them, but they really love driving creation engine onward for some reason.

90% of the badwebcomics wiki exists for no reason but to shit on someone for daring to put themselves out in public where others can see them. I completely agree. There's the odd creator on there that fully deserves criticism for genuine assholery and abuse, but mostly it's like "this guy makes a very cringy comic, jump him!" bullshit.

"yeah we always thought this could happen," the family said in a statement. "We're very negligent, to the point of abuse."

Idk what people are expecting to see.

They've already killed people.

I'd go back to around the time my daughter started sleeping through the night. Don't want to risk a reality where my kids don't exist. I'd tell my friend the cancer is coming back, when it's still early enough to do something.

Don't really know what else I'd do. Don't really care. Be nice to live through those years again without changing much else to be totally honest

You got some good answers but remember too, you're only seeing a fragment of those kids at your place. The screen might for example be a special rare reward for them to keep them quite so your friends can visit you... doesn't mean they're on scree s all the time.

My kids aren't particularly screen born most of the time, but when we're out I often relax the rules to keep things smooth. The fact that it's a rare treat makes it even more effective

"I can't fathom it" doesn't mean "I haven't heard the criticisms of this movie". I mean that I remain surprised at how long lasting and vitriolic the hate for it is, as you're demonstrating by popping in to complain about how toxic last jedi fans are while also trying to tell me what you hate about a thing I love.

And I know you don't mean it that way but goddamn am I tired of having a conversation like this every time I mention liking the movie online for more than half a decade.

I wasn't asking for someone to explain why they didn't like it thanks. We went through that six years ago.

That seems to be part of it. I haven't paid any attention to any of the news before it launchedd, because I don't give a damn about console wars or todd howard. I just got the game because my friends were playing it and it sounded like something I'd really like, and it was.

Huh?

My chief complaint has been that there are too many things. If you go to a moon in the middle of nowhere, your landing site will have an abandoned research station and a secret factory and an observation post all within a couple KM around it. These aren't tied to the location, but they are hand-crafted, and as soon as the mod API drops I plan to decrease the frequency they show up, because my only complaint is that I hear after a while they get repetitive. So far I've been doing enough different things that I haven't found the same one twice, a hundred hours in.

Many of these sites contain their own storylines and characters, and links to other quests.

Maybe you and I just have different definitions of interesting. I actually got annoyed at one point during a survey mission because I kept going past something new and compelling that I wanted to explore, but I also really wanted to finish the mission I was on.

edit to add: I think it's specifically interesting to compare this to NMS, which has the exact same problem but a far lower variety of locations to stumble on, none of which have any story or link to each other at all... yet I think we're all okay with the exploration in NMS?

I'd also give it an 8 or so and I haven't liked anything they've done since Morrowind. I think the internet hate-train has its fangs in this one now, and it'll be a while before a lot of folks can give it an unbiased chance.

I can't speak for everyone (including you) but I just can't understand that feeling. It's hugely open, it just uses tricks to capture that openness in a few places. It's nice to, say, fly down to a planet seamlessly in NMS, but we all know it's also kind of a pain in the butt sometimes, it can be annoying to land and it can take a long time and when you've done it a bunch it essentially turns into just another loading screen. Flying to or from a planet in SF is slightly less immersive but for me, it's just a tiny detail that could have been a bit better but doesn't materially impact the game.

And I've so far never reached the edge of an on-planet instance, the fields are huge and it seems to me you have to actively go hunting for the borders.

I'm not too surprised it isn't 'the' game to play, myself, but I am surprised at the amount of backlash against it online. It seems to me to be everything it says it will be on the tin, warts and all

I mean... I think it's a pretty good space game too, depending on what you want.

Yesterday I took my custom-built ship to explore an alien world. On my way in, I was hailed by a merchant and warned there were pirates in system. I thanked them, they jumped off, and being me, I decided to go planet hopping until I ran into the pirates. Destroyed two, saw that one had a cool looking ship so I switched to EMP weapons and took out their grav drive and engines. Once those were offline, I boarded them. The damage had taken out their gravity so the whole ship was in zero-g, with pens and junk floating around, obscuring my vision. The firefight against the crew was surprisingly tough, as they had mounted auto-turrets that were at a distinct advantage against me because I was being thrown around by the micrograv, but I did eventually capture the ship. Once I got the gravity on, though, all the stuff in the interior crashed down and was scattered everywhere. I searched around to see if I could find some contraband... but it was too messy, and I guess I missed some, because when I jumped into a more civilized sector the SysDef patrols caught me. Here I am, flying a stolen pirate ship, trying to explain to the cops that the drugs in my hold aren't mine and I didn't know they were there. Usually I'd bribe the guy to let me through but that didn't work out well this time, and the next thing you know I find myself in the brig aboard the UC Vanguard under a bright lamp being interrogated by someone with far too much brass on his chest to be dealing with a reported drug runner. Looks like maybe I got myself in a bit over my head...

Anyway. If that's not a space game, I don't know what is. I can't think of any other space games that would offer that particular mix of space combat and RPG experiences. And that wasn't really an unusual play story! It's just that this isn't NMS, as I think that shows.

I hate typing this ugh... in bethesda's defense they've already started releasing key patches and announced further changes based on feedback. Here in the NMS forum I'd say people should be more sympathetic to that than usual. I don't have a lot of faith, because of who it is, but then... I knew what I was paying for, and I think most other people did too.

I also started having fun right away. The reason people say it starts slow is that the game doesn't expose you to every aspect of play right away, for reasons both good (it would be a lot to take in) and bad (the game has some sort of allergy to showing you its cool systems and seems to expect you to learn them from wikis instead). So, when people tell me they're not having a good time, I often check that they got to these systems in the main quest before haring off to do side quests without realizing they hadn't encountered key features.

This is a flaw in the game, but the flaw isn't "the game is boring", it's "the game lacks an adequate tutorial". It's still not for everyone but a lot of the people I talked to were pretty happy once they learned they were missing bits.

it seems like it's a little bit more than April? Doesn't mean it isn't the biggest in a few years, but it's not like it's head and shoulders above. August and July look like they were fairly slow months so the gain in the 30 day average is kind of a skewed stat when the article's talking about it being special int he span of years.

I don't think you need to keep your expectations low, just keep them realistic. It's a Bethesda game, it plays like their other games... it's a whole ton of jank muddled up and duct taped until it holds together just enough for launch. This time they raised the bar to what counts as "holding together" to the level of the other major studios, but a lot of the gameplay systems still feel unfinished. In this I actually think it's a lot like modern NMS, where things like outpost building feel like they're actively contradictory to things like settlements; outposts in SF feel like someone did them early in the dev cycle and was then pulled off to work somewhere else and the only attention they got from then on was making sure they didn't crash the game. Then you've also got the typical Bethesda game stuff that people are acting surprised Pikachu about. The character animations look weird sometimes, low poly NPCs especially, there are too many load screens in some places, performance is poor considering the level of graphics, etc.

However, as long as you know what you're getting into, imo it's a great game. The storyline is interesting enough to be fun, but also manages to skip that annoying thing where you're off learning to be a space pirate for months while your family is being held hostage or something. Some of the side stories are excellent, and the game rewards you well for just taking your time doing stuff. I got caught with contraband yesterday... usually I hit the grav drive and escape rather than paying the fine, but I decided I didn't care and suddenly found myself embroiled in a shockingly compelling crime drama scene instead of the usual simple dialogue options. There's shit like that everywhere. There's an entire cyberpunk mini city half-hidden beneath the main city that you can just not find for dozens of hours, and when you finally get taken there it's really cool to realize it was under your feet the whole time. And these aren't even significant spoilers, there's more that I could tell you that would wreck the surprise for you.

Basically, go in expecting a game like morrowind/Skyrim/oblivion, where it's all about a huge breadth of interestint content (and yeah a fair bit of mediocre content because there's so much of it all) rather than any specific thing being the best in the genre, and you won't have to keep your expectations low.

Yeah, recommending starfield can feel a bit like recommending a show that gets going halfway through the first season.

That is pretty much what my first hundred hours of starfield have been like as well, though, except Starfield has some story, and fewer of the systems seem to contradict each other.

Mostly I don't think it's fair to either game to compare them. They're trying to do different things for different audiences on different budgets and different timescales.

I always assumed that was a joke, because they're just kind of bland generic rock and roll that it seems like it would be comical to pretend to have any really strong negative reaction to it. Then I met a few real people who actually despise them, and realized it's not a joke.

People in general are so weird about other people eating stuff they don't like.

Listen Karen, you don't have to have a slice of my pizza.

That was such a weird one to me. I think partly they leaned too hard into trying to leverage controversy for attention, but still, the movie was fine. Like... except for the first one, they've all just been "okay" movies, in that context it's probably one of the better ones.

Was scrolling for this comment. I spent a few nights excitedly going over it with my friends before I learned about the internet meltdown, it was utterly baffling. I still can't really fathom it, it's one of the best SW movies ever made imo.

I'm not sure how you can argue that. Starfield does have some of mass effect's fun, but also I can build my own ship, dogfight a group of mercs in it, play house with the parts, disable and board a pirate ship in zero g... mass effect, in turn, has a much tighter story and gameplay loop. The core similarity is, what, that they have a space looter-shooter component?

They're different games. Starfield is kind of a fusion of mass effect and no man's sky, there are plenty of similarities between the three but also a lot of differences.

I'm loving starfield and I'll agree with this. It's a mid eighties score kind of game. If it's what you want it's amazing, but the people calling it game of the century and whatnot are buying their own hype.

On the other hand, it's likely to have serious staying power as an all time classic game, Bethesda is great at that and there's a ton of room for people to use it as an incredible mod canvas. I don't think that should affect launch reviews though.

I think this is it. I enjoy making fun of the NPCs in starfield but mostly when I'm playing I don't notice them at all. I do have a few very pretty screenshots of the game. It's not perfect by any stretch but the scope is impressive and most of it really is pretty good

I don't think Bethesda has ever sold based on graphics no matter how much they want to pretend it. Morrowind and oblivion both looked under par when they came out as well.

I'm not a fan of Bethesda's reliance on mods to do basic shit, like fix a broken UI and inventory management system, by honestly I also think this argument is overused. People pay for these games because they want to mod the shit out of them, it's like ninety percent of the appeal. Nobody is forcing modders to work on them, either. That argument can only stretch so far. For comparison, No Man's Sky is actively hostile to modding, and as a result I probably won't be going back to it despite loving it. They're not going to add the kind of content I want, they're likely never going to, and they're not letting anyone else do it either. I wish they'd allow free volunteers to finish off some of their 75%-of-the-way-to-greatness features.

With starfield, I'm excited for the mods, and the game is far from flawless goodness knows, but I've had a friggin good time and definitely got my money's worth on vanilla. Now I look forward to spicing it as I like.

The upper whites thing has led to some of the funniest memes I've seen in ages, not gonna complain about that one.

I miss forums so much. A federated backend for forums would be nice. I'm so tired of having these giant communities of angry strangers if I want to talk about anything

It's literally not possible to ride my bike home from work without going through traffic on one of the busiest streets. They force us into the car traffic and then portray us as getting in the way. It's infuriating

Assigned snake at birth, it's a yuan-ti thing

ADHD isn't particularly hard to diagnose most of the time. If we're going to wait for psychologists in every bog standard case, good luck with the upcoming twelve year waiting list to get your kid some help.

People just need to know when to identify confounders and refer out. Takes a few good training seminars.

I fudge enemy stats all the time, or at least I used to. These days I play blades in the dark, and before that I no longer needed to fudge much after years of practice.

The argument about fudging usually presumes some sort of pity for injured players and creates a strawman out of that. I don't fudge hits or misses to save people, I fudge to keep the fight moving along. Six rounds of "your sword clatters against its scales but it seems to be holding up okay" gets old really fast. If the fight is taking too long I whip out some kind of tension ramping effect and drop the enemy hp. "Oh no, it dumps over a cauldron of acid! (But it only has 20 hp left not 60 because this is getting slow)"

It's perfectly reasonable to wait. Games only gonna get better.

I'd try not to read too much into the internet fuss. It's a better release than Bethesda's usual in most regards. I wound up sinking almost the entire weekend into it, haven't done that in ages. The games really fun. That said, it is only going to get better with time.

I'm playing starfield way too much. Every now and then I get a break to continue my Minecraft project with the kids. The internet keeps telling me I'm not supposed to be having fun with starfield but it's just not working, I'm really excited about the new capital ship I'm working on now.

I found it took a long time to really get rolling. On the other hand I'm 70 hours in now and keep finding more depth and things to do and mechanics I haven't even explored, it sometimes is a bit daunting how much there is to do in it.

!dda_discussion@cdda.social - we've got a micro-instance for our ultra-nichd foss roguelike, cataclysm: dark days ahead.

I'm not sure. It's a good game, but the fun you can have in it is more Minecraft style than Bethesda style. If you want that, then it's probably worth a try