When I was young and dumb, I followed the anti-feminist YouTubers that used Anita Sarkeesian as their punching bag. I loved video games and bought into their idea that she was trying to ruin them. Now that I’m older and wiser, I can see that that was a load of baloney. I watched the original Tropes vs. Women in Videogames series and it was very level-headed and rational. There were a few things that the anti-feminist YouTubers said “well what about this???” and Anita actually covered that in the video but the YouTubers cherry picked and didn’t show the response. Anita has done a lot of good and has had so much hate and harassment that I feel she deserves a break.
This was the whole ethos of the first Star Wars films - Lucas made a point of getting everything look worn, to the point of having a term for it: the "used universe". Exemplified by C-3PO's whole look, Luke's clothes or even Han Solos's sweaty shirt.
It's a shame he seems to have completely forgotten this when it was time to make the prequels...
I'd argue it wasn't forgotten in the prequels. Most of the characters and plot revolves around and is supported by very large well funded organizations (Republic, Trade Federation, ect) which means the clothing and equipment they have is less likely to be worn down. The same can be seen in the original trilogy with the Empire, storm troopers and imperial ships are well polished and not "used".
No, it’s success is because it’s extremely addicting. Especially for people with ADHD because there’s so many small and easily achieveable dopamine hits that’s easy to get lost for hours.
That’s from that Diablo presentation back then right? The audience wasn’t too happy, lol. But looking where we are now Diablo seems to be doing great on desktop and mobile.
IIRC what made the immortal announcement so incendiary was that fans were anticipating a Diablo IV announcement and Blizzard had teased something Diablo related. Had they just said “btw Diablo 4 is in production, in the mean time check this out” it would have gone over much much better.
That’s fantastic news. It’s so lame how there hasn’t been any serious move to take wikis off Fandom and make them independent or even just on another platform. Fandom is just the worst, and it’s terrible that Google suggests it as the top result now over the independent wikis.
Like, Bulbapedia is head and shoulders a better resource than the Fandom Pokemon wiki. It’s been around forever, it’s very active, it has far more information, yet Google always suggests Fandom first anytime I do a Pokemon related search. It’s gross.
If anyone ever gets annoyed at Wikipedia asking for donations, go spend time on Fandom with ad blockers off, and remember that’s the end result of public information wikis relying on ads.
it’s fairly annoying how SEO’ed Fandom and Fextralife are. The Don’t Starve wiki is borderline useless through both Fandom, but good luck finding the better Don’t Starve Wiki being listed through just a google search.
Thankfully we have extensions for browsers like IndieWikiBuddy that redirect to much better wikis getindie.wiki
One of the few successful fan wikis that got away from fandom has been the Path of Exile community. I don’t play the game anymore because it just got to be too much for me and demand too much time, but I really appreciate that they collectively got pissed enough at fandom that they made sure that poewiki.net took off.
Edit: even better, the developers (Grinding Gear Games) apparently agreed to take over hosting of the wiki about a year ago so that the community members that started it didn’t have to deal with the financial burden. Definitely a good idea for them to take over hosting so there’s no concern of the owners taking a valuable resource offline.
Successful games really should have the dev/publisher hosting the wiki. It's better for everyone involved. I'll always appreciate Arenanet for hosting the Guild Wars 1 and 2 wikis.
I really cannot stand fandom sites. It always lacks content so pages are filled with useless information such as links to review sites. Also, it’s an atrocious experience on mobile.
The number of CSS hacks needed to make the site anything but obnoxious even on desktop is obscene. Not just the ads, but the constant pushing of unrelated content and wikis, popovers, auto-play videos... it's awful.
“It gave me space to breathe a little more,” she said. “I remember a moment where I did get harassed, I don’t know what it was, but it was either a Twitter [message] or an email. And [when I saw it], I was like, Oh, that hurts. And then I was like, Wait a minute. That hurts. That’s cool. Being able to feel again, that’s a form of healing.” And by stepping away for a bit, she hopes to keep giving herself more and more space to grow.
I learned a lot from Anita Sarkeesian’s work, and it was a nice thing to see, growing up as a girl who had to justify my existence in the space, despite gaming making up a huge portion of my youth
I read the article expecting to find some mitigating circumstances, like maybe he was underage. Turns out he's 22 and that sentence includes the punishment for other swatting calls, and DDoS attacks against French government sites. This seems like a shockingly lenient sentence, but I have to acknowledge that almost everything seems shockingly lenient when you come from a place with the largest incarcerated population in the world.
3 years of community service and mandatory mental health care will probably help this dude a lot more than locking him up for 5 years with violent criminals.
For sure but it’s insane that this don’t give him prison time. But then again European countries have a justice system based on rehabilitation rater than locking em up and throwing the key away like the US so i get your point.
If someone said they were a fan of Japanese literature, cinema or music, no one would blink twice. Why is the suffix "Japanese" suddenly an issue when applied to one genre of gaming?
I really don’t like when my games change so much over time that they’re not even the same game anymore. I got the old game. I want the old game. If I wanted a new game, I’d get a new game.
Ya know what other game is basically the same game 8 years later? Pretty much all of them. Games almost never just up and fundamentally change their core design after release. Why would a dev do that, when they can just make a new game?
People don't really like to read the articles before commenting, huh.
Knowing Stardew was such a beloved game, I knew I had to get context before judging the author because it could be read both ways.
People who assume games not changing = criticism are telling us more about their own uncharitable view of others than anything else.
EDIT: That said, if I were to offer criticism, I feel like the author gives too much credit to Stardew as though it invented or pioneered the tight gameplay loop: perhaps at least some mention could have been made to Harvest Moon, the game from which Stardew borrows - and perfects - most of its major systems.
Also to be fair, it doesn't go anywhere with that thought that Stardew hasn't changed. Felt a little low-effort, like a retrospective on Stardew that just basically listed what people liked about it.
I did read it, and I did notice that the title was editorialized a bit here, and I think that’s immaterial to my main point. The article is basically “sun found to rise once again after 8 years”. As you mentioned yourself, it really doesn’t go anywhere with the idea.
Then you get shit like Stellaris that fundamentally changed their game at least two times. It’s not even close to the game I originally bought, and I say that with mixed feelings.
Stardew is in a good place, it doesn’t need to change. If you want Stardew-but-not then play something else, plenty of good games. Slime Rancher, Core Keeper, Sun Haven…
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