I wouldn’t be surprised if basically every person with over 1k hours in a game isn’t seeking some sort of escapism, not counting the anomalies like people leaving servers running etc.
I suppose every minute in a game is escapism of some sort, but escapism from dysphoria or something else significant, I think would be common.
Or anyone can tell anon is alone in one glance.
This is what the US have encouraged Taiwan to do. Taiwan wanted to purchase a few incredibly expensive fighters and ship from the USA, but basically all war simulations just had China target these and secure a fast win. The USA instead encourage Taiwan to take the “porcupine” technique, spreading many small weapons, particularly handheld anti-aircraft type weaponry across the country. The plan is to make invasion too inconvenient. The flip side is that without a reliable way to show a display of strength, anywhere the larger aggressor does pick on (USA to UK China to Taiwan) can focus on one part of the country and reliably cause massive damage there.
The chances of a future where the UK and USA go to war where those military bases aren’t long since gone is nearly impossible.
I’m on a GTX 980ti and my plan is to pick up a 4000 series, maybe a 4080 super, when the 6000 series is announced.
To be fair, my 980ti has been amazing at punching unreasonably far above where it should.
Honestly I think their higher upvote / post ratio is a better formula. Most of Lemmy has too little engagement on it’s posts for my tastes.
I think he’s holding it deceptively far from his body to make it look bigger, and it’s having the same effect on his hands.
I’ve been told by literal Brewdog barstaff that if they know he’s coming, they need to encourage their female staff to either dress moderately or not come in, to minimise his sexual harassment.
I don’t know how true that is, but the city I’m based in, which is pretty happy to boycott assholes is filled with people who boycott Brewdog.
I do think a huge world with an engaging and dense design can still be made worse with size. In some games like Skyrim, Breath of the Wild or GTA 5, you could probably drop me anywhere and I’d know where I was, half due to good and differing region design and half because the map isn’t that big.
Back in 2015 I’d dream of a GTA 5 expansion that adds San Francisco and Las Vegas to the map, turning the north and east of the map in to a 500 yard straight of water, but in reality, two more large cities and their surroundings suburbs and wilderness would have never kept it’s memorability like the first region.
Honestly I think these games need more points of interest that are not marked on the map whatsoever, and don’t matter towards 100% completion.
I eventually went through the Witcher 3 post game and got every single marker but it was basically background work while I listened to audiobooks, I didn’t come across anything interesting for hours. However I do acknowledge that those markers aren’t necessary meant to be sought out, but stumbled upon.
The execs probably get away fine from it as well, even if the company sinks, they’ll end up high up somewhere else.
Online service games are just peak venture capitalism, grinding a small studio to dust and causing massive misery followed by unemployment for a 1/50 shot at making a money printer.
Funnily enough The Witcher 3 is one of the games I always think of for the trope of not following the plot. Often I think of the ludonarrative dissonance specifically between Gestalt’s paternal drive to find and protect Ciri Vs Gwent.
For large scale, AAA open world games, I mostly think of Breath of the Wild, which transparently sets itself up as being about taking as long as you need to get strong enough to save the world and Red Dead Redemption 2, which doesn’t care about the stakes of the world.
I sometimes can’t wrap my head around the fact that Witcher 3, BotW and RDR2 were each two years apart. I don’t feel any open world game has occupied the cultural space those games did since.
This is Call of Duty 22.
I used to play call of duty way back in the day and fell off around the time Black Ops 2 came out, mostly because I felt like there are too many games and I didn’t need another black ops.
There’s now more Black Ops games than I’ve bought games this year.
This is definitely a selfish opinion but people who block adverts or torrent being a small percentage of users can be a good thing.
If they lose even 5% of their userbase to Firefox over this decision, they’ll find a way to make grand modifications to Google search and YouTube in a manner that stops you blocking ads from alternative browsers, and while I’m happy swapping to an alternative search engine, it’ll definitely becometedious to sidestep Google’s gaze.
But if it’s 0.1% of people who swap due to this, and Google already don’t care about the small percentage they lose to Firefox then I would rather sit under the radar and not be cracked down on.
To be fair, modern AI voices sound pretty real. Making it artificial would have been a tell in it’s own right.
Long before ZA/UM closed, I was certain that we’d never see a new game of that quality again from the same studio.
I’m not confident any of these new teams will pull it off, but I’d rather have four attempts than one.
Microsoft will definitely have the power to bulldoze all other things named copilot, like Facebook did to meta. I’m still not over AI being a lame word now. I miss the time when it felt sci-fi and not like a corporate buzzword.
The most common cheat is probably gaining money or experience, but there have always been pretty extensive mod menus for GTA Online with tools from invincibility to making your vehicles rainbow, to randomly causing other players to explode or setting hundreds of muggers on them.
In 2015ish, I used to cheat, other than getting rich, all I was interested in doing was making an indestructible chrome bus with smoke trails that I’d drive around picking up players in, to teleport us all to North Yankton and back like a tour guide.
One thing I did notice a while back, was seeing the 2022ish interface for YouTube and Google search and feeling how dated it was, still absolutely usable mind you, just clearly with a design ethos from an older era.
Most the time, I feel that changes Google make are absolutely arbitrary, rounding a button and then squaring it again, but I need to give them credit that there is something more, something about staying at the forefront of GUIs. It’s still all bullshit of course, the old one looks older but is identically useful.