Just wanted to say that I love Reze.
In my mind, the current timeline always starts with 2013 and the death of Aaron Swartz. You could argue it was his prosecution that started it, but his death was the moment it began to become clear. Maybe he saw where we were heading. He was being over-prosecuted. Almost everyone who wasn’t part of the establishment came to that conclusion.
He represented everything that the new digital age could be: self-educated, a lover of learning, a humanist, an activist. A common man fighting for the common people. Everything he did was to spread information and protect our ability to learn, grow, and fight against injustice.
Maybe he had a Howard Beale moment with someone when his plea deal was rejected. Maybe he saw where we were heading and knew that he would never be able to fight it again. They had done everything to make an example of him…to make it impossible for him to enact change. All he really did was find ways to use the system to share information and help people.
I know, this was about PC gaming, but everything in this current dystopia ties back to this loss for me.
Such a tragic story.
Cross out “of PC gaming” and you got it.
OOP is wrong about one thing: They’re not happy.
Seeing shit get worse and worse every year has thr goblinest mask of all callin’ like:
At least an age verification law didn’t turn valid just yesterday for OP.
I think the “patient gamer” model could be the way through don’t buy new shit and encourage your friends to play older games too. Hardware can be not great and the games are cheap.
That only works if you already own the hardware and/or the majority does NOT do that model. The moment most people jump on board, the cost of old hardware will skyrocket too.
How long is that going to work though? Today’s slop is not going to unslop in 5 years, and it seems like every big name game publisher is exclusively doing slop now. Especially the optimization issue won’t go away, and it looks like the times where you could just wait for a generation or two of more powerful hardware are over, too - hardware might be getting more powerful, but the performance per dollar isn’t improving because the performance is only improving incrementally and I don’t see hardware prices going down to what was normal pre-Covid.
Still plenty of indie devs making good games. Really, you could just work through all the good games made up to this point and be fine for the rest of your life.
Otoh, if what you really care about is the social connection you get from playing games and talking about them with other people, you can just take up gardening or community service or pole dancing to get that.
it seems like every big name game publisher is exclusively doing slop now.
You have to understand the capitalism, it is doing slop because slop is what sells to people
You will need to shift your monies away from big name game publishers to smaller ones that make content that you prefer thereby encouraging them to make more non-slop
But I’ve been saying it for years even before AI, call of duty 29 and fifa 56 etc are all cash cows
There is no incentive to improve if what you’re doing works
We’ll just mod the old games.
There are options that don’t involve buying. Open source games exist.
I’m talking about the hardware. “not buying” that and getting away with it is quite a bit harder than for software.
Cheaper hardware also exists, raspberry pi can run loads of games. Could even run old flash games on it.
Pis (Pi’s? Pi-s?) are cool, but it seems like overkill in this case. A second-hand thinkpad should be accessible enough, both cost-wise and difficulty-wise.
Yeah that also works. Still want to make a briefcase pi some day. Power everything by USB and stick a few powerbanks in there so it would run for days. It’s also easier to fix any broken part compared to a laptop. Made with some padding and it should be reasonably impact resistant too.
Oh yeah, that sounds awesome. Kinda like something out of a spy movie or something.
Which games are slop nowadays?
I have enough unplayed games for years. And I haven’t even bought all games that interest me on my wishlist.
So to answer your question: I think it will work long enough till AI either implodes or is big enough that the state forces you to connect your brain implant to it.
Theoretically, we could see the PC gaming market come to resemble that of eastern Europe in the past, where everybody has very minimal or outdated hardware and the indie scene builds games with this in mind.
That’s pretty dire, but I prefer it over cloud subscriptions becoming the norm for gaming and other compute heavy tasks.
Buy old PC, play Minecraft, be happy.
Also use Prism Launcher or PolyMC to play all the modpaci you can dream of.
Also uzdoom/gzdoom and all the Doom II mods you can download
quake also has endless content! i’ve been going through the hundred or so levels from the recent brutalism map jam, there is so much good level design with quake’s awesome gameplay
Prism launcher -> new instance -> modrinth -> fabulously optimized
To get a vanilla experience with all of the best performance mods preloaded
Team Fortress 2 is still populated.
It’s way better than "you will have a big car, a big house, an fat wife and a dog "
Hell, Kristi, did you get so bored after being fired that you found the fediverse?
?
oh no, not home ownership and pets
Lmao you think that’s happiness? Owning stuff?
I pity you
it fucking beats not having control over my home fucking environment
and food security
It is the grim dark far future of all gaming. Forget the promise of freedom to upgrade and superior graphical fidelity. There is no peace among the Discord servers, only an eternity of monetization, and micro transactions.
fires up klondike
Microslop ads intensify
“We have upgraded your klondike game to be CoPilot Klondike, with more CoPilot enabled features, such as CoPilot and CoPilot 365 for every move!”
Uses DOSBOX to run Windows 3.1 to play Solitare Vegas Mode
When companies stopped being able to actually make anything new, they then choose to find new ways to extract profit from the customer. Far cheaper than expending money on R&D, retooling, etc. They all decided to become landlords of the worst kind, squatting on their tech and extracting rent while ensuring the rest of us own nothing.
Offline games will stay existing, even if the AAA studios won’t create those.
But fuck em.
There’s already more amazing games than you or I could possibly play in a lifetime. If they only make shitty games, I’ll just play old games. I’ve been gaming on a retro handheld and honestly there’s so many amazing games I missed.
Indy devs are also killing it in the multiplayer space with silly and charming co-op experiences. I played a lot of Peak and Motor Town with friends lately and both are just so fun.
I LOVE MOTOR TOWN
When you blamed the SJWs and Anita Sarkeesian.
Did I miss the part where Anita demanded for Bezos to hang?
She did not say that, but I saw things being said like this during gamergate:
I’m bet microtransactions are due to Anita, she probably said something like “difficult games are sexist, unlocks should be paid”, then developers followed suit.
Others think horny gachaslop with decent-ish gameplay at first invalidates the argument, that microtransactions are bad.
I’m not happy. Are you?
I am when I refuse to buy their slop.
