If you simply start at the base and just get going, the branching paths quickly add up to an enormous amount of options. If you don’t get any decision paralysis from a tree with literally over a thousand nodes, you might just be a superhuman being.

You gotta have a crazy amount of hours in that game. That tree is complicated to read, nevermind to understand.

I’m all for the cultivation part, but not when games make it so planning it wrong means starting over and grinding a hundred hours more. To keep the analogy, if your farm is not going too well you can just change things after the next harvest. Experimentation is something that helps these games stay fresh.

And yet people still say “if you don’t like ads, pay up” as if getting ads in a subscription is not a matter of time, like it’s happening to streaming.

I’m not extremely against all of copyright because I believe artists should have some protections (though the law sucks at this), but I also believe that once something becomes a decades-old billion-dollar franchise, non-identical imitation should be fair game. Can you imagine what would happen if companies could simply say that they own whole genres?

Right? Steam provides better service and functionality than any other PC storefront. It’s ridiculous that there’s so much whining about them charging for it. So what if it’s a higher percentage? It’s also a better service and a large audience. Whoever doesn’t like it is free to go elsewhere, unlike console games that can only be sold though the manufacturer’s store.

A dumb oversight but an useful method to identify manufactured artificial manipulation. It’s going to make social media even worse than it already is.

However logical it may or may not be, it’s a reality. Just yesterday we got a stark reminder of how pervasive poor decisions are.

Also, simply “calling out” your boss and HR for making poor decisions is more likely to put them against you than to fix anything.

Frankly feels like this anti-DEI wave is more politically motivated than a matter of results.

We don’t live in a perfect meritocracy where people are judged solely in grounds of their skills, we live in a society that is already prejudiced where a lot of minorities don’t get the chance to prove themselves. There’s studies proving how young white men are favored over any other demographics even when other people have equal or better resumes.

Man, we should break more stuff.

A couple years ago it wasn’t thoroughly and transparently sucking off every bit of personal data it could get, and gearing up to put adds on the desktop on top of that.

There’s only a handful of games who really need the PS5, no surprise.

You can avoid the grind at first since the game is PvE, but the further you go the more the game demands you to increase the World Level, and the more grind you need to do to get each character playable at that level.

I didn’t max out my World Level because at some point it felt like undoing my work of powering up the characters, but the game definitely pushes you that way. Not only story quests, but doiing Abyss levels for more free currency requires high level characters.

That’s not even mentioning Artifacts which have so many layers of randomized stats that you could be basically grinding forever to get one which has exactly the stats you want.

I can never shake off the feeling that if Genshin wasn’t gacha, if you could get characters from quests and weapons and artifacts from exploration, it would be a much, much better game, even if it was smaller and shorter. But more and more, this seems to be the kind of game that companies want to make.

China seems to be showing a bit more pulse than many countries as far as reining in lootbox games goes, but it’s still not enough, and it doesn’t seem the benefits of these efforts can be seen worldwide.

Genshin is good in some aspects, but it shows how desensitized we are that we accept the egregious gambling and the endless grind that only exists for the sake of retention. Can Genshin players really talk shit about this when in average it takes around $200 to get one single 5* character? Even if you are not paying that yourself, the game is built that way to exploit those who do.

Cheap? I must have missed that part.

Should we distinguish it though? Why shouldn’t (and didn’t) artists have a say if their art is used to train LLMs? Just like publicly displayed art doesn’t provide a permission to copy it and use it in other unspecified purposes, it would be reasonable that the same would apply to AI training.

Good that they do, because our wages sure aren’t.

Culture was just different back then. Spoilers weren’t a big deal, except maybe for Star Wars fans.

I remember the era when anime episodes would tell you what would happen in it, if someone dies and stuff like that.

Problem: My ego still hurts from not getting to use that single letter domain I got 20 years ago.