Makeitstop
@Makeitstop@lemmy.world
- Comment on the council 5 weeks ago:
Huddlefish
- Comment on BioWare knew the deepest secrets of Dragon Age lore 20 years ago, and locked it away in an uber-plot doc 2 months ago:
They’re trying to portray it as something that was done from the very beginning, as opposed to something they only pinned down in preparation for the 3rd game in the series. Nothing wrong with them getting through two games before writing out their bible, but that doesn’t make for a very compelling article.
- Comment on BioWare knew the deepest secrets of Dragon Age lore 20 years ago, and locked it away in an uber-plot doc 2 months ago:
“A lot of that was in my head until we were starting Inquisition and the writers got a little bit impatient with my memory or lack thereof, so they pinned me down and dragged the uber-plot out of me. I’d talked about it, I’d hinted at it, but never really spelled out how it all connected, so they dragged it out of me, we put it into a master lore doc, the secret lore, which we had to hide from most of the team.”
So, no they didn’t know the “deepest secrets” of the lore 20 years ago. One guy had vague notions in his head, and they only actually fleshed it out when they were working on Inquisition.
- Comment on "Give me a 3d printer and a place to plug it in and I will create the world." - *Archimedes* 2 months ago:
That’s why you start by printing more printers.
- Comment on Treegasmic 2 months ago:
Bloomkkake
- Comment on Jade Empire, the prototype for Mass Effect 3 months ago:
I think you can very easily see the progression of KOTOR -> Jade Empire -> Mass Effect - > Dragon Age Origins. It’s not all straight lines, but you can see the things they keep, the things they tweak, the things they cut, and the things they bring back.
I love Jade Empire. There are a lot of things I think could have been better, but I do really love it.
The combat was cool, and I liked the different styles, and the fact that you were not going to learn them all in a single playthrough. It also incentivized switching between hand to hand, weapons, magic, support and transformation in ways that still allowed each type to feel like it was useful and filling a niche rather than being the kind of samey rock paper scissors bullshit that many games use. That said, the balance was not great, and some options were significantly better than others, to the point of making some things seem almost useless. Most of them are usable, but if you try them all out you’ll find that there are some you will probably never use again. That said, on replays I would always pick white demon for my martial style even though objectively it’s the worst choice because I found it more fun and challenging than the other two.
Story-wise, the companions were fairly standard for Bioware games. I don’t hate any of them, but I also can’t say I have as much of a connection to them as I have to HK-47, Jolee and Canderous, or Garrus, Wrex and Tali, or Alistair, Oghren, and Morrigan. It’s not that there’s something wrong with the characters, as much as there’s just less opportunity due to the way Jade Empire handles them in gameplay. Unlike those other games, you only get 1 companion in your party at a time, so there’s no banter between them while you walk, and just less interaction with them overall.
This is made worse by the way the game handles combat for them. Followers can be set to fight or support, where they meditate to give you a bonus but leaving you to fight the enemies alone. A neat idea in theory, but the problem is that fighting really just translates to them distracting one or two minions until they get knocked unconscious. They can’t stand up to anything tough, and they will not be dispatching enemies, just acting as a momentary distraction before they fall (even the two that are combat only and are supposed to be incredibly strong). In support they will each give you a different bonus. One scatters bottles around that temporarily let you use drunken master style… which is not better than what you already have so it’s just a novelty. Two others slightly increase your damage with either weapons or martial attacks. And the remaining three each refill one of your resources (health, focus and chi). Since Chi is able to heal you and increase your martial damage, and powers your magic and transformations, that chi restoring character is by far the most useful, with the focus restoring guy being a distant second since it allows you to slow time and is needed for using weapons.
If I had one suggestion I could send back in time it would have been to allow 2 or 3 followers at a time, with a dedicated combat slot and a dedicated support slot so that you can have a larger party and less incentive to just pick one character to the exclusion of everyone else.
The morality system was a great idea, but like Mass Effect, there is a clear disconnect between what they describe it as and what it actually is in practice. The way of the open palm is supposed to be altruistic, while the closed fist is supposed to be about strength and growing through conflict and adversity. They aren’t intended to simply be good and evil. The problem is, you get lots of pointlessly evil options that don’t correspond with that philosophy they describe, and yet they still give you closed fist points. In fact, I struggle to think of a single time in the game where you couldn’t just replace the open palm and closed fist points with light side and dark side points and get the exact same result. It’s a shame, because it would have been great if they had more of a focus on the competing philosophies, with times when open palm might seem less than ideal, and times when closed fist comes across as respectable in its own way. In fact, I would have loved it if they’d had open palm, closed fist, and a third hidden stat for just being a dick, and had people react to all three.
One other big difference is the pacing of the game. The others all start in tutorial town, then move on to a second area which launches you on your quest, then opens up the map and lets you pick which order to do things in, before taking you to the endgame. Jade empire technically follows that description, but the part where it opens up is basically just letting you choose between 2 options, so it’s not nearly as dynamic. And based on the number of places which are frequently mentioned but never seen, I suspect there were multiple areas which were cut from the game.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, there’s nothing wrong with the pacing, it’s just notable once you’re familiar with that classic Bioware formula.
Overall, I highly recommend Jade Empire. It’s fun, it has an engaging story, an interesting world, and a lot of that old pre-EA Bioware charm.
- Comment on Happy 25th Anniversary, Sega Dreamcast! 3 months ago:
I should play Skies of Arcadia again.
- Comment on Linus Tech Tips uploaded a video showing how to block ads on Youtube. Which was removed by Youtube for community guidelines violations. 3 months ago:
It does indeed.
- Comment on If Necromancy suddenly became possible, can the undead be called as a witness during court proceedings? 4 months ago:
I think the most reasonable interpretation is that the law doesn’t currently recognize the undead as being people, let alone being the same person they were in life. It would need to be shown to be a reliable source of evidence, similar to any new technology that claims to offer insight into a case. A random judge might allow it, but it would be easy grounds for an appeal if it can’t be shown to do exactly what it claims to do.
DNA evidence was new once, but so was the polygraph. Only one of these is admissible, and for good reason.
- Comment on Duality of Man 5 months ago:
A felon who incited a riot that led to the deaths and injuries of multiple law enforcement officers. And who has since attacked those officers (and anyone supporting them) in public statements whenever they became a politically inconvenient reminder of his actions.
- Comment on Stay Mad 6 months ago:
I’d vote for ToS era Pike over Trump. I’d vote for a candidate who only communicates via ouija board over Trump. I’d vote to not have a president for 4 years before I’d vote for Trump.
It’s crazy that Trump can get convicted of fraud, be found liable for sexual assault, promise to abuse presidential power to get revenge against those who cross him, actively undermine both national and global security, promise to round up millions and put them into camps, attempt to overthrow the election and refuse to not try it again, and so on, and his side is still so loyal they’ll wear solidarity diapers for him.
- Comment on Also, you have been turned into a worm. 6 months ago:
- Comment on Galaxy S10 til the wheels come off 6 months ago:
I like wireless, I just fucking loathe earbuds. Unfortunately, they have completely replaced the wrap around on-ear headphones that were the best for wearing while running errands or exercising.
I don’t want something big and bulky while I’m walking around, but I also don’t like having shit jammed into my ears. And critically, those on ear headphones are just the right size to have a convenient button layout so I can easily pause or go back a few seconds in my audiobook whenever I need to.
But Apple decreed that wireless earbuds were the future and the market for everything else fucking died.
- Comment on Another mystery solved. 6 months ago:
He’s firing from both ends.
- Comment on Don’t expect Fallout 1 and 2 remakes from Bethesda any time soon - Todd wouldn’t want to “paste over” their charm 6 months ago:
Because they could sell them as new games.
Fallout is hot right now thanks to the show, and from a business perspective its kind of crazy that they didn’t plan to have something available to capitalize on that interest. A Fallout 1 & 2 remake or remaster would have been an easier option than a whole new game. And it’s the kind of thing you can outsource to another studio, so it doesn’t have to disrupt their current plans.
If I were some soulless executive at Microsoft, I’d have been getting this put together the second I saw that the show was a huge hit. I’d be trying greenlight remasters of basically all the games, plus a new non-numbered game in the series that could have limited scope but keep the same basic flavor, and maybe a new game in a different genre altogether. Things that could be handled by other developers and pushed out over a reasonable time frame so we could at least have something to announce before season 2, while letting Bethesda keep Fallout 5 for whenever they finally get around to it.
- Comment on Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown is coming to Steam in August 6 months ago:
Unless Ubisoft has stopped requiring that I log into an ubisoft account for every game, I will have to pass.
- Comment on "Outrageously" priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care 7 months ago:
The ten years of exclusive control is such a shitty idea. I was on a medication that actually had that period extended beyond 10 years, and I struggled to get the medication I needed pretty much from the day it hit the market until a generic was finally made available. And even that was only after the company resisted hard enough to get a class action suit filed against them.
It would be so simple to change the patent laws so that getting the patent requires them to allow other manufacturers to produce the drug as well, and instead of exclusivity, they can get a 10% cut. Still plenty of incentive to patent a new drug, but now that incentive is only raising prices by 10% instead of 10,000%.
- Comment on 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later 7 months ago:
Don’t worry, it might still bubble up to the surface in the hallucinations of an AI.
- Comment on Futures 7 months ago:
In the long term, it’s also possible to alter the atmosphere on Venus until it’s approximately the same as Earth. It would be a massive undertaking, but a hell of a lot easier than getting Mars to a comfortably habitable state. And you could potentially get an entire habitable planet out of the deal, which would be nice.
Kurzgesagt had an interesting video on the topic.
Obviously it would take a significant investment of resources that would benefit some future generation, but not our own. So, back to being impossible, at least for now.
- Comment on The Force should be plural 8 months ago:
Could be worse. Wheel of Time has “the one power” which is actually two. And then there’s another one…
- Comment on Has pay kept up with inflation? 8 months ago:
I find that Betteridge’s law of headlines usually holds up pretty well.
“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
- Comment on House Moves Toward Bundling TikTok Bill With Aid to Ukraine and Israel 8 months ago:
Ukraine is a major global food supplier. The war has directly impacted food prices. And if Russia succeeds, it will only encourage more conflict of this kind. And that’s ignoring the possibility that this will escalate into an even larger conflict because Putin decides that NATO’s resolve is weak enough that article 5 is no longer a plausible threat.
Also, that stupid argument applies just as much to funding schools, cancer research, fighting climate change and basically all other functions of government that serve the public good. We should do more to address economic issues, but that doesn’t mean we should stop doing everything else.
- Comment on Boston Dynamics introduces a fully electric humanoid robot that “exceeds human performance” 8 months ago:
My dad used to tell me “It’s a lot harder to carpet the world than it is to wear shoes.”
Ambitious redesigns of existing infrastructure are neat, but they are rarely more efficient or practical. Especially when you are overengineering to solve an issue that’s already been dealt with. A self cleaning room requires a lot of additional hardware, all of which has to be designed, built and installed, and has to be powered and run by software that needs to be programmed. It also needs to be maintained, and depending on how it’s cleaning things, it may also be dangerous, or at least capable of damaging property (ever have a motion activated light turnoff while in a bathroom stall? now imagine it triggers steam jets). Not to mention the potential hazards of water damage on a room if anything goes wrong.
Or, you can buy a mop for 0.1% of the price.
Humanoid robots can escape this problem because versatility adds value. The upfront cost may be tens of thousands of dollars, but for that price you’re getting something that solves many, many problems. They can potentially go from task to task, filling a multitude of roles, and ideally with minimal down time.
It also helps that we can use existing processes to train them. They can observe human workers performing a task, attempt to replicate that task, and use feedback to improve. And that’s critical because the hardware is the easier part, it’s software that’s the real challenge.
- Comment on Boston Dynamics introduces a fully electric humanoid robot that “exceeds human performance” 8 months ago:
It’s easier to build a specialized robot for one task than to create a general purpose robot to handle that task. However, as the technology matures, I think it becomes much more practical to create a general purpose robot that’s capable of performing millions of tasks than to create millions of different specialized robots. Not only is that far less to design, source parts for, build and maintain, but it also makes it much easier to repurpose them as needs change. The same basic design can potentially be used for factory work, household chores, new construction, search and rescue operations, food service, vehicle maintenance, mining, caring for kids/elderly/pets, building and maintaining other robots, etc. We’re not there yet, but that’s where this kind of technology could potentially take us.
The advantage of a mostly humanoid robot is that it’s versatile and can use existing solutions built for people. Yes, you could replace the legs with wheels or treads, and you’d probably be just fine for most functions with a Johnny 5 type design, but there will still be exceptions. Being able to climb up or down a ladder for example means that you don’t have to engineer a solution to deal with getting onto a roof or down into a tunnel system. We’ve already spent thousands of years solving those problems for humans.
- Comment on Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers 8 months ago:
If companies terms of service said “we can do whatever we want whenever we want, and we don’t have to promise any service, and you have no rights” nobody would sign those terms.
Nobody who took the time to read the terms of service, and who felt that there was a real risk of those terrible terms being invoked, and who felt they had a viable alternative. But for the other 99.9% of people, they will just hit agree and move on.
- Comment on What's your favourite colour? [Non-political version] 9 months ago:
Ultraviolet. It makes other colors look cool. And it kills stuff.
- Comment on How Google is killing independent sites like ours 10 months ago:
Lying about testing a product in order to get people to buy it so you can get your affiliate revenue sounds like fraud to me. Seems like the kind of thing that should lead to lawsuits and potentially criminal charges. Not that anyone would actually try to do something about this or most other problems facing consumers.
- Comment on Amazon Prime Video won't offer Dolby Vision and Atmos on its ad-supported plan | The company is now facing a lawsuit over its decision to charge $3 more for ad-free viewing. 10 months ago:
Prime was a reasonable value for me a decade ago. The streaming side was never the main draw but it was a nice added bonus, especially when Netflix started to lose a lot of the content I actually wanted to watch.
Unfortunately, Amazon’s been flooded with worthless trash, and they made the conscious decision to make searching and filtering as useless as possible. It’s actually impressive that they’ve so degraded their service that it’s usually more convenient for me to go shopping locally than to try to navigate the unending mine field on Amazon.
So of course they try to ruin the last thing keeping me subscribed. I’m done, they can fuck off. I’ve got a jellyfin server, I don’t need these assholes.
Unfortunately, I’m sure they’ll make an obscene amount of money with this move, because apparently the world is full of people who will pay good money to bend over and take it.
- Comment on Google News Is Boosting Garbage AI-Generated Articles 11 months ago:
I use it to skim through headlines and pick through various sources on each topic. There’s probably a better free news aggregator out there, but I don’t know what it is.
- Comment on Is It Worth The Time? XKCD 1205 updated for open source and shared tools. 11 months ago:
Not since I was a teenager.