Same here for Dota 2.
An insufferable playerbase combined with thousands of obscure mechanics, details and interactions makes it basically impenetrable as a casual game for someone to try it out. I got 4k hours in it and too many of them were filled with negative emotions towards myself or others.
It’s unfortunately also the best competitive game ever made, both for playing and watching.
For the mentioned reasons, any ai art and it’s generators should be treated the same way as toxic waste. It’s radioactive garbage that should be buried under 120000 tons of rock and salt with a big sign with a skull Infront of it.
It’s a hallucinating computer, but it can’t die and we are giving it the worst drug cocktail imaginable and then tweak whether it needs more fly amanita, gasoline or dried centipede to make the titties just right.
It is the best intersection of human and machine that we are capable off and the results is exclusively the worst of both worlds.
That fairy design was so wildly out of place. Zelda was never completely prudish, but heeeeelllo there with the see-through leotard, very pointy boobs, high pitched giggle and very suggestive posing from basically a frog perspective.
I was 11. And then I was slightly older.
If you try to look up anything DIY or household related, you used to get forum posts, maybe a blog, or a at very least a company site that still made a human write a little article about the topic.
Now it’s just pure ai generated garbage. They all have the same bullet-point list form, endless blabbering in a casual tone (So you like many other people want to drill a hole into a wall. Well there an many things to consider…), lack any specifics and are like three times as long as they should be. And then 10 product referrals to Amazon with names like the above.
The internet was always kinda fucked, but this feels like digital Kessler syndrome. Once you hit a critical amount of garbage, every bit of useful information will just be buried by trash.
I don’t want to compile anything. I don’t want to “make”. I don’t want to use command lines. I don’t want to download Rust. Or know the difference between python2 and python3 and how you still have to be specific about it. I never wanna read a git manual with lines that mean nothing to me again. I don’t care about snap or flatpack or whatever package distribution gives me a year old version of my program on this distro and how that version differs from the one from the webpage.
Sorry Linux, but a big download button, double click, “install to c:/program files”, “want a short cut to desktop”, done. is the gold standard for 99% of applications.
I know there are reasons. But still, it sucks.
You don’t owe any employers anything unless there is already a contract stating otherwise.
“Thank you for the opportunity but I’ve decided to explore other options.” would be the professional phrasing if that helps.
It’s really funny how peas just do that and those birds happen to have these useful beaks.
Morrowind is 2002, oblivion is 2006.
And yes, in 2002 video game designers already figured out to make combat not complete ass. At least a handful of playtesters must have stabbed the air against like 4 cliff racers for a minute and they just released it anyway.
The moment that wonderful raspy voice told the kid to pick up the hammer, I was hooked. And the aesthetic of the self assembling world before your feet was immaculate. Marvelous game.
You also get to wade through eye cancer inducing lava with copypasted dragon butts for minutes and fight a gimmicky platforming boss that can just randomly kill you if it feels like it.
They just didn’t finish the game properly. It doesn’t take away from what that game means to me and to the medium as whole, but it is undoubtedly a flawed product.
The only fault I can find are the relatively unwieldy controls. Had a friend who just got frustrated with the spaceship control and dropped it, despite my strong recommendations.
And spoiler do not click if you want to play the game ever which you should just do it stop arguing it’s fantastic:
i got stuck on the hourglass twin puzzle with the warp. I understood the concept of warping to the other planet right, but apparently if you miss the timing, the sandstorm just yeets you into the sky. After three attempts I gave up and hours later had to ask the internet. Was a bit sad, because I just missed it by a fraction of a second.
It just went above and beyond what a game of its size and scope should achieve. It should have been a little niche game, praised by some critics in a blog post here and there and gotten some mild success in a steam sale. But the music and the writing dragged it into the spotlight and made it unavoidable for anyone talking about games ever again, as it should be.
Zelda - A link to the past: Set the Zelda formula for the next two decades. Aged imho better than OoT, because it stayed within the capabilities of the SNES and the pixelart is timeless. Wonderful vibes, great pacing and just so much fun.
DS1 is many wonderful things, but far from perfect. Iconic, visionary, genre defining - yes. Perfect? Only if you stop at Ornstein and Smough.
I am baffled how from software still makes the games they make. There is zero loot boxes, always online, games-as-a-service bullshit and not a single fucking micro transaction in their whole incredible lineup. The scummiest thing they did was a half assed remaster of DS1 that replaced the original Prepare-to-Die edition, which sucked but in a world of EAs, Blizzards, Ubisofts and Bethesdas I can’t really stay mad.
Hundreds of furious consultants must have pointed at big excel sheets projecting the millions they’d make on the Malenia Armour DLC, but they just keep saying no. They just make a real game and people buy it and then they make another game. It feels truly anachronistic.
When her lungs start glowing, we should begin to worry.
I know exactly how I feel about ai “art”. It is hideous beyond measure and every place that values anything about art or just human beings needs to shame it and everyone who touches the stuff.
Do not legitimize anything about it. Writing “prompts” is as absurd as augury and less meaningful too. Do not use it for “inspiration” or sketches or suggestions. Poison your actual art work so it fucks their database. Fight this trash at every cost. Every scribble you do on the side of your notebook is worth more than the entirety of Dalle and Midjourney combined.
I’m 100% Luddite on this. If I could smash their datacenters with a brick hammer, I wouldn’t stop until my fingers bled.
Thinking back to my dota days makes me cringe so hard. I loved the game but by god was I a whiny bitch at times. Solo queue is a disfunctional game mode that should be purged from the planet.
The only way these games truly can bring joy is if you play with friends that share the same attitude. Talking to real human beings really mitigates so much of the negative feelings that these games potentially generate.
Aim assist being in everything - if it’s crossplay, sure, level the playing field, but if it’s console v console there’s no need for that shit.
I love aim assist. It just needs to be reframed as an accessibility option. Especially with gamepads, having some tracking and magnetism makes games where you have to aim so much more enjoyable. My wrists and thumbs just aren’t doing the same things any more as when I was younger.
It’s probably not easy to find the balance, but in any single player or casual multiplayer game it is a very welcome sight.
I’m not a avid league player, but as far as I know Flash has been mandatory in competitive on like 99% of champs for pretty much most of leagues existence.
Blink is just a different approach on the topic of instant movement skills.
Flash is free and has no downsides, but is rather short and has a long ass cooldown.
Blink Dagger is fairly expensive, can be disabled through player damage, gives zero stats but has long range and a reasonably short cooldown.
Both fundamentally shape their game for the better, because without them the game would be a lot slower and less spectacular. Probably 80-90% of all “greatest highlights of dota” scenes feature a blink and I presume it’s vice versa in league.