Ang-zigh-uh-tee!

Doot doo doodoodoo

Poe’s Law hitting hard on this one.

Yup. You are probably healthier now than you ever will be. Might get smarter, though. That won’t make you happier, though.

It really doesn’t (union workers get ~10-20% more, which can be ~5-15% on overall expenses for a business, vs ~$100/month for ‘teambuilding’ with pizza and dollar store soda) but you know what does? A bazillion hours of OT, training time, opportunity costs, and HR time spent on hiring and firing churn because no one wants to work under shitty management.

Vintage Story is a slowburn survival game with a Linux version from the developers, not a compat layer. It’s focused on realism.

Ranch Sim is a game in which you design your own ranch.

Starship Evo, formerly Sky Wanderers, is still in development but has reached a very playable stage. You build bases and ships out of predefined shapes but with highly variable scaling, as in ranging from 12.5cm grid up to 1m with all the standard slopes, panels, etc. It has logic systems, inventory and production systems, and control systems for space ships, hovercraft, mech walkers, and space stations, all using that heavily customisable building system. Then you can fly around doing little missions, trading, space ship combat, etc.

Archean is similar building but with more realism and programming but more sandboxy with no NPCs.

I’ve heard some good things about Steamworld Build.

I have heard someone say Icarus was like Ark but better.

7 Days to Die ticks much of those boxes as well.

Stationeers is another struggle, survive, thrive game with very realistic mechanisms.

Foundry is Factorio in 3D. Satisfactory is Foundry without a Gödel grid.

Not something I’ve experienced in a long time but you could try Super+Shift+left/right arrow to see if you can sling it over.

Not something I’ve experienced in a long time but you could try Super+Shift+left/right arrow to see if you can sling it over.

Coworker: No way. That’d be socialism.

Me: Socialism isn’t a bad thing. Do you like having a fire department and roads? Those are collective funding of collectively beneficial services through government programs. Socialism.

Coworker: That’s different.

Me: No, it’s not. How is it different?

Coworker: That’s… Socialism is… Um… Yeah, well…

That… Yeah, it does seem you are having trouble understanding.

That line you quoted is not to say your opinion is invalid. It is to say that it is hypocritical to complain that I do not approach it from a disinterested perspective when you don’t either. If we were disinterested, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be into something other than games and wouldn’t think about these things, so it’s a bit absurd to expect disinterest.

…tell me which open world…

This also shows you aren’t understanding the point. The one thing these games have to offer is scale, bigness, lumpen sum size, so either you’re just trolling me at this point or you’re not getting that size isn’t the goal. There aren’t other games with that big open world because there can’t be. It’s the defining trait of AAA games because they are the only ones with $100000000 to burn hiring giant teams, so nothing else has it. The whole point, though, is big does not mean good. It doesn’t matter if your dinner is 3 ears of corn or 300. It’s still just corn. Not poison. Not shit. Might taste a bit better with some mods like salt and butter on it, but it’s still just bulk. There are far better options available, customized to your palate, what you find to define quality. Whatever you think of as ‘good’ in games is probably better served by something outside the AAA space by something specializing in that thing (Unless you really just like big more than anything. I suppose you could just be the ‘size queen’ of gamers.) and might even be elevated by the investement of some of the money that is currently being sucked in by the gravity well of the big companies, but because those big companies suck up so much of the light, air, and resources, lots of indie projects just wither.

Don’t misrepresent me and then pretend to have defeated my positions by defeating your own misrepresentations.

I didn’t say they suck. I said they are designed by committee, mass market, crowd pleaser, middle of the road, and mechanically stagnant. They are the corn of gaming. They aren’t poison, or shit, but they are decidedly mediocre in their makeup, and there are so many options that are better on one metric or another, basically any metric other than scale, if the players weren’t locked in or tricked in, the AAAs aren’t going to get the kind of support they have. Saying ‘some of my happiest memories are eating my way through a big trough of corn,’ isn’t a demonstration that corn is better, or even good, but that you, specifically, anecdotally, really like your corn.

And yes, there is something about them that bugs me on a deeper level, specifically their manipulative place in the industry/culture, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong to call them mediocre. Are all opinions invalidated by emotional entanglement? Then why should we trust your word as an avowed supporter of AAA game companies? You have an emotional reason to support them. Why should anyone listen to you about them if your views are emotionally tainted and your own standard requires detached judgement?

Cool. Welcome to the world of options that exist outside of designed by committee, mass market, crowd pleaser, middle of the road, mechanically stagnant gaming.

It’s telling that your prime examples of AAA are games that choke on their own development but ultimately only offer bigness as their value. Big maps… big, mostly empty maps. Big crowds of NPCs… that do the same three idle animations, duck and cover like a choreographed team at a gun shot and then go back about their day 30 seconds later. Big, powerful engines… with big piles of bugs that take a year of dev time after release to fix. Big texture files… that you probably don’t notice because you’re playing on less than top of the line hardware or just ignore if you aren’t. Big ‘storylines’… that ultimately end up being ‘choose path A or B and then shoot/stab a giant pile of mostly similar enemies,’ and 95% of your game time is the distraction of sidequests you wander into with no effect on the main story. Big collections of voice acted lines… saying generic things and repeating them so often they hit you like an arrow to the knee. Big teams… that get so big they have to have meetings about their meetings with the meetings team before scheduling a meeting with someone from art, marketing, sound, code, and three other people to decide whether its reasonable to have a meeting about adding a hair to the dog in side quest 37.

So, yeah, welcome to the part if gaming where you experience the small, but meaningful. ‘To the Moon’ is never going to have an impressive trailer, but it might make you weep, if you have the heart for it. Disco Elysium doesn’t have square lightyears of map to wander, but its creators paid attention to everything you can see. Pacific Drive was made by a team of less than a dozen people, but was put together with incredible skill and artistry. Bullets Per Minute took an idea many have had and made it real, and even did a great job of it. Quality over quantity, every time.

Let them die. AAA games are games built to be marketed, not played.

Don’t pretty much all pens just end up getting lost long, long before they get worn out? I’ve managed to hold onto a few for a few months but eventually they just get stolen by a borrower or the pen gnomes.

Face ID? Has he not been paying attention? It’s pretty triival at this point to generate a picture of someone’s face.

I don’t. I want the ones who have something to contribute to a conversation to join Lemmy. I want the rest to take their meme-blasted voids where a person should be and sit in contemplation until they’re ready to join the adults.

Still using 4chan so there’s definite room for improvement.

A unique identifier potato.

"THIS IS MY POTATO!

THERE ARE MANY LIKE IT BUT THIS ONE IS MINE!"

I mean, a slap on the wrist sentence might be the rest of his life if he’s that old.

I’m digging ‘login with caution.’ I like to think it’s mostly the same generic login page but with ‘Warning: you are logging into site X. This will involve the use of your sensitive login credentials. Take precautions against their loss or theft.’ and yellow/black hazard tape borders on every div.

That response is in itself an example of the issue at hand. Are you actually asking or just being sarcasticly snide in a way that doesn’t fully come across in text?