Ye gods. A new GTA game should not take THIRTEEN YEARS to come out. The games make more money than Portugal - how is their project pipeline this bad?

Are we looking at less than one GTA game per *decade* now?

I feel like this console generation has dragged on and on with so few exciting new games. I’ve been waiting to buy either a PS5 or a Series X and when I look down the exclusive lists I sigh with boredom. What happened? Was it games as a service that happened?

The previous generation wasn’t anything super exciting, but it feels like we’re just trending downwards. On consoles I want big, flashy experiences, not indy games. Nothing against indies, of course, but I can play those on my Steam Deck.

Optimistically priced, as I like to think of it.

I can get a second hand one from CEX today for £350!

Thank you! I hate how many people act like dark mode is The One True Way these days. No, I don’t want to use feckin’ dark mode, I’m sorry I don’t have your 1337 h4x0r eyes. I have shoddy astigmatism eyes and find it very uncomfortable to use dark mode.

Is there a version of this that wasn’t awkwardly resized?

Is it going to be the size of a small fridge like the base model?

I’m part of the admin team for a group on Facebook dedicated to a niche wargame. Anyone can apply to join but there is an entry question. The question itself tells the user where to find the answer (it’s both on Wikipedia and in the rules of the group!). We still get people that either don’t answer or put something like “I can’t be bothered looking it up”.

Those people do not get to join.

I’m firmly of the belief that if people are working to maintain a space for you then it’s on you to put a bare minimum of effort in to be allowed to use that space. We curate the group to keep content on topic and try to keep it a nice place to be.

The nuance is of course in what level of gatekeeping is healthy.

I don’t like that there’s so few people questioning the core concept of “one platform for everyone”.

Why does it have to appeal to everyone? Why can’t its audience be a subset of humanity who like nerdy shit? It’s what I liked about Reddit in the early years - it wasn’t completely inaccessible but it was niche enough that there was a bit of a filter, allowing me to find content and people that appealed to me.

Aiming for lowest common denominator doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.

The race to the bottom continues.

If we reword the question as “Is Elder Scrolls 6 doomed to be a mediocre experience?” then my money would be on “yes”. Bethesda generally seem to aim to make games just as good as they need to be to make money. Capitalism over creative expression.

If the game is good enough to get people to buy it and consider buying the next one, that’s all the effort it’s worth putting in (as far as publishers are concerned). It’s not a new approach, they’ve just had a lot more practice at it than game developers/publishers had in the '90s.

Temper your expectations as unless you’re willing to buy a few million copies yourself, they can’t justify the cost of caring what you think.

…and no, I do not approve of this system one jot. It’s gross and antithetical to creativity. I’m glad we have a lot more independent developers who aren’t as beholden to neoliberal capitalism these days.

I’ve been enjoying Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. It’s got just the right level of compulsivity to keep me playing without destroying my life. Pretty relaxing, to be honest, although I don’t think “easy” mode is actually easy!

I think we’re going to need a bit more context than that.

I suppose at some point I should learn Node.js and other JS-related stuff. I speak vanilla JS but I’ve not really touched frameworks. Anyway, thank you for the recommendation.

I mostly find the design of WP clunky as all hell. I’d like to add some features to my site and doing so feels tremendously awkward. Learning how to implement stuff in their way of doing things doesn’t feel worthwhile to me, I guess.

I found it very relaxing and enjoyable. Excellent escapism. I don’t particularly care for the RPG mechanics but I put up with them for the rest of the experience.

I suppose what I’m looking for is a lightweight, multi-user CMS, with support for both static pages and a blog. If the blog could support (at least one-way) federation that’d be a bonus. It should ideally be built to work with both desktop and mobile devices (so that I can customise the look rather than build it from scratch).

It’s something I could build from scratch but if I can do it then I’m sure lots of more skilled people have done it better!

Same boat here. I had some good times with it but these days it seems to be a bloated mess. Are there any good, lightweight alternatives these days?

Can the next step be deprecating Discord entirely? Trash.

I’ll check with the cat.

I’d not heard of this game but it looks to be pretty good ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/1469610/Last_Train_Home/ ) and if Russia disapproves that’s generally a good sign.