R.E.P.O is a better Lethal Company in almost every way. I would highly recommend it.
Lethal Company is also great and they’re both worth anyone’s time but I would recommend playing them LC -> Repo because I struggle to imagine going back to LC after Repo.
I find that relativity is one of the greatest frictions against doing better - and it’s frustrating for this reason. 5 years is better than most other countries. That’s true. Is that a good number though, or is it just better? That’s the actual conversation I want to have, and I think relativity ruins meaningful progress and improvement.
Eating bland, unseasoned chicken is better than eating raw chicken - but that doesn’t mean we should settle for it.
Just because other nations have antiquated and arguably bad citizenship requirements doesn’t mean we shouldn’t improve ours. And reversing progress is worse than being stagnant, and defending that is encouraging it imo.
That’s totally cool by me, it’s a fun game. PoE2 is probably the best ARPG on the market, it’s just falling short of what they sold me (and the community at large) on. But for now, it’s definitely an idle game during mapping with the right build (and the wrong build will see you roadblocked progression-wise).
This is fucking depressing to read. As someone who moved to Germany two years ago, gaining citizenship is important to us. When we moved here they were just announcing the expedited opportunity and we were stoked to know we were welcome in this country. It reinforced our decision. Now they look to take it away and although the 5 year plan will still exist, it signals clearly that the CDU don’t want highly educated immigration - they will blame immigrants while they raid the coffers of their country - and the SPD will gladly move further to the right if it means they get to stay in power.
This is incredibly disappointing. It’s not enough to change our plans, like if the AFD won, but I consider the grand coalition to be a “continued decline” coalition. If another country offered me and my family a guaranteed path to citizenship, with similar worker rights and benefits as Germany, we’d now have to consider it seriously. As aerospace engineers we’re not exactly struggling to find technical work.
Furthermore the fact that both parties considered revoking citizenship for any reason from anyone is unbelievably terrifying. If anyone’s citizenship can be removed, everyone’s citizenship can be removed and that’s something I completely disagree with. It’s dangerous territory and completely disgusting to read that the SPD considered it.
As someone who moved to Germany in the last two years, gaining a permanent right to stay in this country was a part of our thought process. Gaining citizenship, which gives us voting rights and makes us “German” was just as important because we were picking our new home country. Who doesn’t want to feel “at home” in their country, instead of a guest? And earning EU citizenship which further protects us from shitty singular governments like the current grand coalition is even furthermore important.
So yes, this decision sucks ass and it has further cemented my understanding that the grand coalition are centralist or right leaning parties who will continue to allow the decline of society even if it’s more gradual than what the AFD would achieve. Our version of Democrats and Republicans-lite.
I mean to say “idol” as in… Oh fuck. Omg I’ve been misspelling idle in literally weeks worth of comments. Woooooow. Okay. Feeling a bit dumb.
I meant idle mechanics. Hopefully that makes a bit more sense but just in case - I’m making the argument that most modern ARPGs since Diablo 2 have not innovated on the gameplay directly but have innovated on the systems of the genre. This behavior has led to what I consider to be a stale endgame game to game that often or exclusively boils down to trivializing the content such that it’s comparable to a slot machine, an idle game like Eggs Inc., or a “phone” game.
I think PoE2 is working hard to evolve the genre to what id consider to be a “next gen” ARPG, where most or all previous games fall into a large “Diablo 2 inspired” bucket. I think No Rest for the Wicked is similarly attempting to evolve the genre. A counter example for the genre is Titans Quest 2 which seems to be falling squarely in the “Diablo 2 inspired” bucket.
I’d like to see more “No Rest for the Wicked” level of swings regardless of if you consider that EA game a hit or miss in its current state.
I think you did a great job of talking about the various issues and I haven’t played noita yet but I appreciate the example. I think there is a way to create a game with a baseline power level of 1x and give the player a range of 0.8 - 1.6x power creep based on their build and 0.8 - 1.6x power creep based on their mechanical skill. Capping the possible player power range from something like 0.6 (a game twice as difficult as it was designed) to 2.5 (a game that’s a slightly more than twice as easy as it was designed) seems feasible to me - a none game dev. I believe this would allow me to have build expression from a power perspective and not reduce the game to a slot machine’s level of engagement. I think the problem is the lower range is closer to 0.1 or worse in the end game maps and the upper end is 100x+ even on the hardest content in the game. That to me is the core issues.
I think part of the fun in ARPGs, something almost all of them do better than say Dark Souls or Hades, is that the individual abilities are way different per character or per class/weapon/etc. I can play a magma barbarian in PoE2 in a way I just couldn’t in Elden Ring in a satisfactory way. I can play a lightning Amazon and a poison archer and a frost monk and the builds are visually (and in the best cases mechanically) diverse enough to make experience a new power fantasy that in itself is super cool. There are items and powers I can’t or wouldn’t experience on one play through that I could in another, and the best games in the genre provide me a ton of variation. That to me is more important to build expression than the power of my build, at least it’s more important than the share it gets in normal conversation. A build for me becomes bland and identical the moment combat is trivialized, but ideally before it trivializes things it can feel expressive if the moment to moment gameplay is unique compared to other builds.
So personally I’m confident to the extent “the needle has to be threaded (lol)” it’s not critically hard or critically important that it’s gotten perfectly right. I think it just has to be choice from the developers on what the power range is and how much of that is mechanical vs itemization based.
I disagree completely. I think you can have a game that is “about the builds” when engaging in meaningful combat. I think you’re right to hint that people may play these two kinds of games for two different reasons, but I think there’s a massive untapped market for the overlap.
I want the build creation and fantasy expression of typical ARPG’s but I want to use them to do more than just idol click monsters into loot. I don’t like the phone game playstyle of modern ARPGs. It’s not compelling to me to trivialize the gameplay loop in order to get slightly more powerful gear to further trivialize another tier of difficulty.
I think if GGG took their boss combat design philosophy and extended it out to their monsters - mimicking genres like roguelikes or action games - they’d have a lot more success than the hybrid game they’ve produced. I think they’re moving towards that but haven’t quite yet committed publicly to reworking the monsters.
Imagine Hades or Dead Cells or Enter the Gungeon but in Raeclast. I don’t think they’re far off on the player side, a few more abilities per weapon type, especially interactive defensive options, and monsters re crafted to roles in an encounter and they could mimic the compelling gameplay of a rogue-like but give you far more expression than the four guns you have on you or the two weapons and two items or the boons you pick during a run.
I think the genres are wholly compatible. I don’t think the idol vs engaging mindset are and that’s where all the friction seems to be coming from.
I do not believe “everyone” wants to zoom. I like the engaging combat they’re going for. I think the loudest people in the community like the idol game mechanics of most modern ARPGs but I think the genre is ripe for innovation.
Everyone praises their boss design and enjoy that aspect of the game, which to me reads “we like engaging combat with balanced rewards” but when that logic is theoretically applied to monsters we get people throwing online temper tantrums which tells me they don’t know what they want except for the thing they’ve already been given.
They’re missing the mark with the monster design, getting closer than anyone else in the genre (besides maybe No Rest for the Wicked). They need to look at roguelikes such as Hades and make each monster have a “role” when building encounters. Give each monster abilities like the bosses in the game and don’t make it about being auto-hit to death and they’ll have a truly next-gen ARPG.
I’m positive the first team to crack the infinite loot/immense player expression of ARPGs and engaging combat loop of action games (or really all other genres besides idol click farmers) will make the next genre defining game akin to Diablo 2.
I think PoE2 is on the road to doing that but the immense pushback they’re getting online seems to be wearing them thin. Which they asked for, for releasing an unfinished game and not having a clear line in the sand.
I’m still having fun. Pushing T4 maps today.
It wasn’t a silver bullet. I’ll keep working on this. HL-L2400DW. Freaking nightmare printers are.
Thanks for trying.
Swapped to Arch Linux! I wouldn’t say it’s been a bug free swap but it’s been extremely doable and everything I needed to work worked like a charm. Gaming was uninterrupted and nothing hasn’t worked yet.
I need to figure out how to connect my stupid printer but I couldn’t do that on windows either, which is sad cause I thought printers were gonna be easier on Linux but I guess this brother model is a pain in the ass or something. Oh and connecting to network drives while on a VPN. That’s my list of pending problems and I’ve been on Linux for two months. Not bad really.
I think you’re misattributing things here that I think can and should be explained by wealth inequality. Big box stores don’t kill small towns because they destroy competition, they kill small towns because some percentage of money spent at a big box store leaves that small town. It’s not the lack of competition that kills small towns it’s the fact that after those small town businesses close less wealth exists in the hands of people in that small town. There’s less money moving around in that town because a portion of it is being siphoned off to big box store profits which go to shareholders and out of state C-suites and the likes.
Yes, higher density means more taxes are raised per area which means it’s easier to spend on infrastructure in high density areas but you’re missing the point. If wealth was distributed properly we’d have enough money to build all the infrastructure we want comparatively almost regardless of the density of the population. As wealth inequality grows less taxes are being paid to the government in high density and low density scenarios. As wealth inequality grows the more the government is in debt to the wealthy and the less it can spend on vital services. There’s enough money in the system to pay for Internet and hospitals and rail and school to service every person in the US but the money isn’t held by everyone, it’s held by people who have those services covered where they are and so they don’t care if they drain the rest of the country of those things. Wealth inequality explains why small towns are dying because it explains why they can’t afford to stay open, stay profitable, stay connected, stay healthy.
And to circle back around to your original paragraphs, I don’t care how much people like living in big cities they can’t live there on vibes alone. They have to go where the money is, and you best believe when Boeing opens up a new plant in a city they put a whole lot of money into that city (ignoring city special contracts for a moment). I like living in a big city, I want to move to an even bigger city, I’m not because I don’t have a job there right now. I live where the work is. And yes, denser cities means more jobs and more opportunities but that only gets less true and less meaningful the more wealth inequality grows. If I can’t afford to rent a flat in 10 years, the same way I can’t afford to rent a house today then what’s the point? If my job doesn’t pay me meaningfully more in 10 years because stocks have to go up (please read that as wealth inequality) then what’s the point? Cities don’t create jobs or high paying jobs because money moves fast, it’s because that’s where the wealth is. Look at any major city in the US (at least) and you can find the increasingly small list of increasingly massive companies that have offices there and you can trace the money. If Kansas city lost Garmin or Hallmark they’d feel it, if the government went further into debt and had to slash services Kansas City would feel it, if one of the massive freight companies left KC would feel it. The point is cities are built on wealth and the movement of wealth, but if it increasingly is drained out of those cities it will be harder and harder to sustain those cities. It won’t matter where people like living, they’ll have to move to where the money is.
I really do think looking at where money comes from and where it’s going is critical to understanding why the standard of living is declining while there’s never been more wealth or productivity in history. We could all own homes, all have healthcare, have highspeed rail, higher education, if only the rich didn’t exist. We have to tax them out of existence and build a system that works for the overwhelming majority of people instead of the 1%.
“Not as consumers, no. The 1% doesn’t consume more than the 90th percentile.”
But that’s the thing, as the wages of workers goes down their ability to consume goes down as well. Sure they’ll never stop needing food and clothes but new cars, sushi, new TVs, vacations, preventative healthcare, higher education, etc - these things become impossible. Debt will surely be the next step to keep the engine running but that will only accelerate the transfer of wealth because debt is paid to those who have assets. And quite frankly we’re already there - university (in the US), the rise of buy now and pay later programs, healthcare the moment you need to use it - these things require massive debt today. It’ll only get worse.
As wealth gets drained from the working class into the owning class, the only meaningful consumers for the majority of goods and services will be the owning class. Services will increasingly be focused on the wealthy or on methods of serving the poor via borrowing from the rich (which only exasperates their poverty).
I don’t think I am being over dramatic, I’d love to know what specifically you think isn’t grounded or reasonable.
Plenty of businesses do thrive off of the lower 90% of wage earners but those businesses are increasingly owned by the 0.1% and I’m talking about a slope here - a velocity. “Increasingly…” means there is a trend. When all wealth is increasingly owned by the wealthy 1% then we’ll see all possible wealth be within their immediate vicinity, within serving their needs. When there’s 50 businesses offering a service or product you can expect to see the wealth of those 50 companies spread out over many locations, but when all products and services are produced by 1 company you can expect most of their wealth to be situated in fewer places. Less competition means lower wages which means everywhere those workers are there is less wealth circulating. More wealth in fewer hands means less money flowing around to enliven cities, towns, villages.
More restaurants in cities because there’s more money in cities because there’s more people - but small towns used to have good restaurants too, with variety. But as wealth drains from the hands of the many into the hands of the few more corners have to be cut. More quality goes away. Another restaurant closes because people have to eat out less. It’s all a matter of how much wealth is in your community and owned by your community.
Things to do is facilitated by that same factor, but additionally by infrastructure. If the US had high speed rail connecting every major city and town, everyone would have a lot harder time justifying being within 30 minutes of city center by car when a train could take them into city center for cheaper, less hassle, and quicker from a much farther distance. We can’t build that infrastructure because… of a lot of reasons, but I’d argue most of them come back to too much money in the hands of too few people and that it’s only getting worse.
It’s why populism is so popular right now. It’s why the US is sliding rapidly into fascism. It’s why most European countries score as better places to live in nearly every metric, and it’s why if they’re not careful they’ll be in exactly the same situation in a few years time.
Wealth inequality is everything.
The more wealth inequality grows the less important 99% of the population is as consumers and the more important the 1% becomes. As our governments go increasingly into debt to the benefit of only the rich, infrastructure will continue to suffer. As wealth inequality grows the standard of living for the 99% will continue to decline, making the ability to own assets like housing an impossibility.
Add these factors together and you can see why people are forced to move to where the rich are, because that’s where the business is, because they’re the only people with enough money to constitute a customer, and because everyone else doesn’t have the money or infrastructure to go where they’d like to regardless of business smaller communities get choked out.
The only way to get the life you deserve, a better life for everyone in your country regardless of where you are in the world, is to tax the rich out of existence. Remove the possibility of becoming a threat to organized society, to democracy. Remove the threat of amassing wealth beyond reason and watch as your country becomes profitable, your job pays you more, the price of goods and services go down, and the quality of life for everyone begins to rise instead of plateau or decline.
Ya, I personally didn’t swap between two different ones during that time and I remember the first time u went back to a single board qwerty keyboard I struggled for less than an hour and then the muscle memory kicked in. I think my wires get crossed when I jumped between the two while learning and I decided to just stick with the one until I had “recovered” and that really helped.
Good luck!
I switched to a new key layout and was slowed down for like a month, and almost every day I could literally feel myself speeding back up. It was such a cool experience, and one that I imagine has beneficial like neural effects, that sometimes I think about switching it up just for fun.
I’d suggest just sticking with it. I now use English, German, and my custom Workman layout at home without any issue switching between them. Practice makes perfect and cause a bunch of work and fun things encourage typing a lot, practice comes easy and getting back to your normal speed happens quickly.
Picking a new layout like Workman or Dvorak where you can feel the benefits, plus a split keyboard’s ergonomic benefits, and I think anyone would struggle to go back (assuming they do it for a month and give it a fair shake).
To add, I’ve gotten dozens of hours out of:
20 hours out of:
10 hours out of:
5 hours out of:
Less than 2 hours:
I probably have less than 150 hours in VR but I was moving for most of the years I owned my vive or index and in small rooms for their use, and I sold my index a little more than 2 years ago because I moved from the US to Germany and assumed valve was releasing their next set anyday.
I’ll be buying the first headset that seems next gen, most are getting close but always missing something I consider rather important like HFR or decent pixel density or outside tracking (although I’ve heard maybe inside out is getting better).
I think another factor to consider when looking at my 150 hour estimate is some amount of that is with other people. My dad, my less engineering savvy friends, at house parties. Those hours are worth more than X hours on my normal PC. It was an amazing experience to put my friends in their first VR headset and see them light up. I’d pay what I paid twice over to be able to give that experience to more people.
Which I think highlights that hours in VR needs to always have a multiplier applied to it because you can’t get that experience elsewhere. I imagine a good racing setup or horas setup would have the same intrinsic value compared to normal gaming. Now that I think about it, same thing applies to handheld gaming too. These different unique modes or experiences are worth more than their hours tell.
Totally valid take. I just think the text to voice system is hilarious, the animations/models are more enjoyable, the actual item gameplay loop has more fun and interactive components in repo, I like the items in repo more although shout-out to the boom box in LC, and the monsters in repo are way more interactive imo - I miss the coil head and the turrets and the teleporting randomly into base but otherwise the monsters are really fun in repo. I agree that Repo’s difficulty doesn’t scale too well currently but I expect them to balance things as it goes on.
I think LC is a great game and I hope everyone tries it out as well. Repo just feels like a more polished iteration on the concept and I’m happy to see the genre expand.
Sorry about the motion sickness, that’s rough.