No, and I hadn’t even heard of Soulism before now. I think I’d probably be considered a Relativist, and I’m definitely an Anarchist.

WRT the above, I just think that humans have a very narrowminded view of the universe around us, where we try to make everything conform to our own paradigms (e.g. our attempts to define animal intelligence based on them exhibiting human characteristics, rather than classifying each of their forms of intelligence by their own behavioral characteristics).

Is the less-intelligent brain the baboon one that doesn’t bother trying to tell whether something is a reflection of itself, or is it the human one that can’t see a similar-looking human without their mind doing a double-take to avoid otherwise descending into dreadful existential ponderings.

Baboon brains simply can’t create Jet Li’s The One, is I guess what I’m saying, and I think that really tilts the intelligence definition in their favor.

I don’t know if anyone else here read the books as kids, but I’m hopeful they’re leaning more into the lore of D’ni, which the older games were always (imo) too slow and puzzle-focused to deliver well.

what a horrible lineup.

“NEW IP” (2031)

TWENTY. THIRTY. ONE.

Where did he say he was smarter or wiser? I must have missed that quote.

Yeah, I can imagine the frustration of seeing people who don’t know anything about what happened during development blame you as a dev for something that may have been design decisions or budgetary or time constraints that you had no say in or control over.

“So sure, you can dislike parts of a game,” he concludes. “You can hate on a game entirely. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is (unless it’s somehow documented and verified), or how it got to be that way (good or bad).”

“Chances are, unless you’ve made a game yourself, you don’t know who made certain decisions; who did specific work; how many people were actually available to do that work; any time challenges faced; or how often you had to overcome technology itself (this one is HUGE).”

This is a totally fair take. He explicitly says it’s fine to not like the game, but just don’t try to pretend you know what happened on the back end to make it the way it was, because you’re probably gonna misplace blame.

Morpheus, holding up a AA: “7 billion”

Yeah, if you didn’t enjoy MTaP I wouldn’t recommend it. :)

My Time at Portia and My Time at Sandrock (sequel). They’re both on Switch.

I think MTaP and to a lesser extent MTaS both really carried over a lot of the complexity from Planet Explorers, Pathea’s first game they released internationally. It’s a survival crafting game, with a LOT of complexity (e.g. manual, voxel-based weapon and vehicle designs). I don’t think it worked well in combination with other systems like farming being very underdeveloped (in MTaP especially).

Why does “Stardew Valley” get it totally right, and the rest not get it right at all?

I am not an expert on SDV, but my wife plays basically every HM-like out there, and her take is that Barone focused so heavily on the ‘economy’ balance in SDV that all of the activities feel like they’re worth doing, so it doesn’t become “only farming”, or “only adventuring”, etc, like many others do. Even just picking up wild plants feels worth it when you drop them in the sale bin in the evening.

Science is a human paradigm for interpreting the universe. Certain scientific truths are accepted by humans, at this time, which constitutes a very small part of the universe.

I’m not saying none of the accepted scientific principles may be correct (and I’m certainly not saying they should be discounted by humans, since after all, it’s our own paradigm), I’m just saying that they are only coming from a very small and narrow ability to interact with the universe. If they are universally true, it’s not because we exhausted all other possibilities; we literally don’t have the means to say we’ve examined anything in all possible ways that can exist in the universe. We can’t know what we don’t know, after all.

I do think that saying we have achieved anything that qualifies as definitive, objective Truth, beyond the limited realm of human perception and experience, is not true. Nothing within science is universally, unquestionably settled.

For humans? With the instruments and models we have now? Sure, absolutely.

But once again, that’s very narrow.

As a little aside:

These truths aren’t necessarily rooted in personal biases but rather in the pursuit of understanding the world objectively.

That is also an agenda. Agenda doesn’t mean something nefarious, it just means an ideologically-driven plan. Wanting to understand the universe better within a certain paradigm (i.e. science) is an agenda.

Literally everything is just a concept humanity made up, informed by our very specific and limited abilities of perception.

Even numbers are represented differently in different languages, and different cultures teach different methods of interacting with them, and aliens could have completely different paradigms for interpreting physical reality than us altogether.

Anyone who tries to make claims about something being a universal or scientific “Truth-with-a-capital-T” that transcends human definitions is pushing an agenda.

I really dislike that it’s game news outlets that get the vote, because they’re just plain gonna have a different outlook on games than people who don’t have to engage with ones they both do and don’t like as a job, and it really shows in the kind of games that get picked (shorter main storylines, narrative-driven), and the ones that don’t (sandboxes, open-world games, strategy, simulation games, etc).

And that’s only even when it’s not a selection of the 5 most well-known games, since just like the Academy Awards, not all of them have even played all the games they’re voting on.

I know very well what was shown and what was stated, versus what was there at launch, but I’m interested in what you were going to cite. And I specifically asked about what was being referred to, because there’s a huge gap between the validity or veracity of many of the claims of lies.

Because if it’s just about the multiplayer working like anyone would obviously expect multiplayer to work, rather than just being able to see message boxes left by other people, yes, he lied to players about that, and he’s apologized many times for that, and talked about and shown the development pitfalls they ran into while they were trying to build the multiplayer, and has since implemented what was originally promised.

But I see people make other claims, almost always based on the original cinematic E3 trailer, which usually boil down to, “x feature that was present didn’t look like it did in a pre-rendered eye-candy trailer”, or things like “the flight system wasn’t 6DoF” which never even got mentioned, but was just assumed because spaceship, etc, and years later players still lie about what was or wasnt promised for a game that has since grown into having more content than was ever promised.

Which lies were those, exactly? Please be precise so you can’t move your goalposts later.

This is the worst take I’ve seen in a LOOONG time. The language learning is one of the best systems in NMS. The developers literally spent YEARS adding to the game, completely for free, but they don’t “respect their players”?

Not every game has to be for you, bud.

It’s sad, but I think that the massive explosion of really high-quality smaller games means there’s ultimately less money to go around from buyers, all at the same time as big companies are consolidating funding into a few big-name series.

Anode Heart, Moonstone Island, Spirittea, My Time at Sandrock, Empty Shell, Quasimorph, Fae Farm, Sunkenland, Black Skylands, Techtonica, The Leviathan’s Fantasy, Forever Skies, Ghostlore, Roots of Pacha, Stranded: Alien Dawn, Homestead Arcana, Terra Nil, Sifu, Industries of Titan…

All of those released this year. That’s a LOT of really good small games (and that’s just from the games I got), even if they’re not all technically indie. I personally LOVE space games, as well as colony/group management sims, but Jumplight Odyssey just didn’t feel like my vibe, sadly.

I’d argue that any software that is adversarial towards the user/computer owner, and takes actions specifically to hinder an action by them, on their own machine, is malicious.

We’d be absolutely apoplectic if the government demanded we install a surveillance tool on our laptops in order to e.g. access the DMV website or file our taxes, but when someone tells us to in order to play a game, it’s okay? Nah.

I remember back in like 2016~2017 seeing one of those spinning aimbots with a wallhack, just sitting at CT spawn in Dust 2 and killing everyone on T. We all watched it for 5 minutes until it got VAC-banned. That one was hilarious.

I do wonder if West Coast US (where I am) is more heavily policed than other regions. That would make sense if Valve is doing some kind of post-match automated analysis of player behavior, which would probably be too compute-intensive to run everywhere.

I’m usually ranked either 3rd or 4th in FFA deathmatch matches, so if they’re hiding it so well that they’re not pushing the non-cheaters down, what is the point of cheating? And if they’re hiding it so well that they’re not actually even winning, how are they causing so much grief?

Maybe it’s a bigger issue in Ranked/ competitive, but if you’re not actually on an esports team I just don’t get caring about rankings and playing ranked (is it just for the ranked season profile badge? I did that one year to get to Gold Nova 3, and then never bothered again).