I’m not even entirely sure it’s a capitalism problem. Making a solution for a given problem known does require hawking it in some form, even if that’s a character standing on a soapbox at a street corner.
Even without capital, there are motivations for someone to push their own solution over someone else’s, even if that’s just “my solution is better”.
I think all it takes is a good E3 reaction to make me understand just how much developers want to own those reveal moments, position them perfectly. If you find out 5 hours ahead of time that you have a surprise birthday party waiting for you at home, that’s “really nice”, but probably doesn’t have anywhere near the same impact as if it goes off just as the planners organized.
I’ve also heard of on-paper spoilers that sound really stupid and aggravating how an article describes them, but then playing through the game events that lead into it, I end up respecting the outcome quite a bit more as something that makes sense. This happened for the oft-forgotten Prince of Persia reboot; the one where you have a teleporting lady cohort with you the whole game.
The game ends with the lady being locked away in order to seal off the evil that had been plaguing the land. An article lamented how the game’s full ending is to just have the prince undo the locks, reversing all your hard work over the game, and releasing the woman he’d been getting to know all game. The bit they didn’t describe was how the credits had already rolled, signalling it as an ending, and no objective marker actually told you to do as such - it’s just something you can do if you’re left unsatisfied post-credits, making it a decision owned by the player.
It’s definitely more towards character-scenes than any overarching plot where a big bad wants to use a virus to rule the world. I genuinely think the messed-up behavior of Jack from Resident Evil 7 was well-done though. The general theme of “a weird, angry, and incredibly decisive guy” is generally underused.
It’s not beyond them to write something pretty good on that vein.
I remember visiting the teens center at a local library. I saw a bit of nerd merch I thought was really cool, so I went to take a picture of it, and the librarian there was on me in a flash to stop photography. Recording protection is a real thing when it matters.
People follow “rules/systems” and notice “patterns” when pulling slots too.
I feel sorry for this game, because it was a pretty well-written story and a bit of a better grappling with anger and the dark side. Also a great choice for a story, given that it occupies a span of story where “The Empire is winning, and none of the heroes can change that until Luke flips his dad.”
As mentioned, the performance issues make it hard for anyone to experience that. I think I heard a claim that it performs better on Linux than Windows, which I didn’t take time to verify yet. Sadly, while they’ve made some cool findings here I don’t think this is enough for anyone to pick it up. If I ruled EA, I’d want them putting out a re-release by fixing the issues themselves, and throwing in some new skin or something to market it.
It’s a very tricky thing, I’m sure thousands of people will cry foul about it, but I do think “low framerate” has a good place in design, mainly around cinematic moments where the loss of clarity triggers an intentional panic. Ex: PTSD-riddled hero is in shock from a sudden violent event, and has a panic attack blurring their vision.
One thing that comes to mind is the reveal of Ganon (final form) in Ocarina of Time. The game kind of overloaded the N64 with all those active effects, which worked really well especially with the lightning silhouetting the beast.
Another scenario is some scenes in Final Fantasy 7. In 3D, all tweened animations are naturally smooth. I can’t quite tell what triggers it, but a few hard-hitting character scenes somehow bring that animation framerate down to emphasize certain actions (one specific example is Barret, in the town below the gold saucer, raising his gun to shoot his teammates - but actually hitting an ambusher behind them).
NO ONE WANTS YOU NOT TO BE ANGRY!!
LOOK AROUND LEMMY! Every political community! Every discussion! EVERYONE is angry, jaded, fucking upset the system isn’t working! The difference is, SMART angry people get angry at the actual causes of that economic disparity. Not going on wild, racist tangents to blame people even poorer than them that have barely done a thing to even affect that economic situation!
I don’t fucking trust anyone who’s not angry at the world. Those people are blind. But worse are people who are angry at the most victimized part of the world, instead of the ones doing the victimizing; or those who are angry at politicians who did in fact try to give rural America something to do with their hands - read the Inflation Reduction Act - but were spat on because Fox News parroted Shell’s line that renewable energy is a scam.
Don’t you dare say I’m demonizing people or “wagging my finger at them” for being fucking angry. That is a bald-faced lie. I demonize people for taking their anger out on people that should be brothers and sisters in the fight against injustice.
I’ve tried Remake once or twice, and cannot adjust to their “action battle” system. Give me old turn taking to make sense of things.
I definitely think they sorely mishandled the story with so much “addition”. They completely lost the feel of “less is more”, like only seeing the results of Sephiroth’s warpath instead of seeing every pixel of his presence.
I didn’t even bother with Rebirth. A while ago I thought “I’ll just wait until the full story is actually out, I don’t buy into this piecemeal bs” But now, I really don’t think I’ll ever play it from what I know.
When on sale, it’s about $100 for a year of access to a general library of games. Xbox Game Pass never goes on sale, costs at least $15 a month now, and doesn’t even have many of the singleplayer exclusives Sony puts out. So this comment seemed completely the wrong way around to me.
I’d especially like to see more games making a modern take on this battle. We used to view Nazis as a historical, comically evil villain. I’d like something new that makes every one of them alive feel thoroughly unwanted in this world.
Fuck shit damn. Cunt piss bitch. America was built on goddamn slave labor. Ooh boy, all that cursing was so, so difficult for my civilized upbringing.
This is what chuds don’t get, since they never read terms of use. Social networks don’t often oppose aimless expletives like “Let’s fucking kick a baby into lava haha!” They oppose pointed, meaningful intention like “I’m going to shoot up my school because it’s been infested with n%%%%s.” Hate is a language used everywhere, separate from curses, and it’s one I don’t mind blocking on every front possible.
Oh my god, my eyes saw the word “Lay-“ and knowing this is a studio in 2026 that makes singleplayer games, it automatically filled in a different word.
I’ve seen this in video games. The Trails series builds itself on slowly assembling these big Avengers teams of heroes - but each dynamic only works when there’s like 2-4 of them.
Get as far as Sky the 3rd, and you get one lead saying “It looks like this next dimension will be tougher than ever” and then some 13-odd people giving generic barks of affirmation in turn.
We’re in a reality where groups like ISIS have actively recruited followers through gaming networks. There’s genuine, violent risk in allowing hate speech to reach across land masses and be granted some form of discoverability, even if some of the recipients are just looking for answers to the question “Man why no girl want me”
One of the problems with that is, many publishers don’t care about curating a discussion community. Many didn’t even want to generate a “forum” when publishing their small indie game. So, it’s entirely possible, and even likely, for many game discussion forums to be filled with hate speech, or even recruiting into extremist cults.
I’m all with you about word-based censoring, and I honestly want to see a bit more use of AI there to lower that burden; to better pick up hateful context separating “Fuck you, random user” and “This boss fight is fucking hard”. That should only be in place to better alert real moderators, though, since I’m sure many people don’t like getting directly banned by silicon.
The purpose of a blocklist is to have a large group work on the large task of identifying a certain set of trolls, and then share that list automatically with themselves.
Individually blocking 8 or 9 trolls yourself as you browse 20 new indie games becomes a laborious task. But, if a community of hundreds all knows “Yeah, every time someone posts the ‘Please include LGBT!’ comment on these block-matching puzzle games, it’s a troll” then 99 people don’t even have to wait until they’ve identified trolling and blocked it each time.
Bluesky uses these sorts of blocklists, and it works pretty well. By having members opt into them, it evades the issue of Valve “promoting an army of hundreds of highly opinionated moderators”.
One of my favorite video game romances takes place in the Legend of Heroes: Trails series. When first described on paper in a quick summary, it’s something some people might roll their eyes at, but it’s built very well.
Something that had to be nailed down early about it was, it really couldn’t be optional, based on “relationship score”, or even happen on its own time. One of the best scenes in this duology centers around a huge character reveal, which puts forward the confession of love all at the same time; while that relationship had been a slow tease through individual scenes, it suddenly became a huge, very important part of this large conflict.
I definitely think for better relationships in games, we need a lot more focus on characters, and we need to stop viewing the relationships as rewards; sadly I don’t have many further ideas than railroaded stories, but I think there’s probably more options out there.
Part of me thinks the devs should just be more settled about having more relationships that don’t involve the player. You get 5 supporting characters, and character A, in their “relationship event” with you, admits that they have feelings for character C and want your advice because they don’t know how to express it.
I’ve said this before about games like Dragon Quest. I’ll play a good JRPG, but it needs a hook to make it stand out and seem interesting, be that storywise, combat wise, etc. A game showing off swords and magic still needs to define why it’s different and why I should care.