Bruh if you’re still giving a shit about what any pre-election polls were saying after they’ve repeatedly failed to predict so many elections I don’t know what to tell you.
I said it before he stepped down- America is too misogynist and racist to vote in Harris. Even the economic left. Would Biden have done better? I can’t say. But I do think it’s pretty damning that Harris didn’t even win the popular vote like Biden and Hillary did.
What the fuck are “modding values”? Women with ridiculous anime proportions and almost non-existent armor? Adding Shrek and Thomas the Tank to Skyrim? Gatekeeping mods to a small community of individuals who play on PC and have the technical skills to do that? Slaving away while the rent and bills like up out of some sense of obligation to a community? Hoping people donate? Putting all the time and effort into creating something and taking on all of the risk? Being. Subject to the whims of Bethesda’s management and hoping management doesn’t change their tune to be more like Nintendo?
How can you calin that Bethesda doesn’t give a shit about modders getting paid, when they pioneered the first real legitimate attempt at paying modders? That’s some serious cognitive dissonance. And perhaps the most important piece of the equation is the financial security it provides. The Creation Club paying modders up-front greatly mitigates the business risks of investing that much time and effort. It is not the best fit for everyone, but that allows a lot of mods to be made that never would have been possible otherwise. And it doesn’t remove any of the mods that already existed or prevent anyone from making free non-CC mods.
As for donations to modders- those companies like Patreon are taking their own cut as well. And that’s a legal grey area because modders are profitting off of Bethesda’s platform. Then you have the issue where Bethesda updates their game and provides an improvement for literally millions of people while a couple hundred PC players flame them on Twitter for breaking the mod they paid or donated for.
Personally, I’ve never donated or paid for any mods because I don’t use them. I’ve messed around with mods and the vast, vast majority of them suck. They feel completely out of place and ruin the vibe of the game. It’s not worth all of the hassle of installing a mod manager and working through all of the issues just to add memes to the game. The ones that add more quest lines are usually just way worse versions of the radiant quests that already exist. Maybe if I had a more powerful computer back in like 2012 or 2013 then graphics mods might have made sense, but with the updates in the Special and Anniversary editions there’s not much point. If I wanted to go back to Fallout 3 then maybe there’s an argument there, but I’m not really interested in going back there in general.
The “best” mods can be created In a variety of ways. I’d argue that the Hearthfire, Dawngard, and Dragonborn DLC’s are better than any free mod I’ve ever seen. The vast, vast majority of free mods are shitposts or school projects that no one cares about.
I mean… It’s hard to really find solid numbers because Bethesda hasn’t published them, but we know that Prey’s opening week of sales was 60% less than Dishonored 2’s was. All the estimates and discussion i can find on the Internet either concludes that the game lost money or, at best, broke about even.
It got great critical reviews. People who identify as “gamers” seemed to love it. But it gets compared to Bioshock a lot- Bioshock Infinite came out 4 years earlier and the market was saturated with similar games by the time Prey came out.
So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for management to want to move in a different direction. That direction ended up being a terrible one with Redfall, but i can’t automatically assume that the studio would have been any better off making another game like Prey.
You can find every example you could look for in history. Studios who changed direction successfully, like Insomniac going from FPS to 3D platformer. Gamefreak went from platformers like Pulseman to making JRPG’s and ended up making the most successful media franchise in history, while all of their later attempts to do anything else have failed miserably.
And it’s not as if it would have made sense to have Arkane make Weird West. You can’t just slash a AAA studio down to an indie overnight.
I still don’t understand why people have so much hate for Bethesda for… Paying independent creators to make better mods for their games and charging for those mods.
I can understand criticizing the execution: the quality and price of each mod, the grey legal area where these weren’t included in Season Passes that were supposed to include all DLC, etc. And I certainly wouldn’t call the results a success.
But nothing about it ever seemed particularly greedy or “unfair” to me. It solved a lot of problems that the modding community has. It protected the creators from having. Their content stolen and re-used or re-distributed. Mods (especially for-profit) were always kind of a grey area legally because… It’s Bethesda’s platform and IP. Bethesda may not be as great with modders as other companies, but they’re a lot better than the worst offenders like Nintendo. The Creation Club has better quality control. And it’s better for the end users- easier to install, usable on consoles, no need to go to sketchy 3rd party websites or mess with the installation. I know people complain on the Internet anytime Bethesda updates one of their games because it breaks their mods- I could be wrong but I’ve never heard of that happening with CC mods.
Seems to me like most of the hate for CC comes from people just wanting more content without paying for it.
Scarlet and Violet may only run at 10FPS and there are plenty of other flaws, but it’s still a ton of fun. And those are sequels, not remakes. The gameplay is a dramatic shift from everything the mainline series has done before.
Legends Arceus has performance issues too, but was was critically acclaimed.
As for the remakes, they’re generally pretty good upgrades. Gen 1 has really aged poorly, but FRLG are fantastic. I never liked Diamond or Pearl, but BDSP were really solid and fixed almost everything they could without making fundamental changes to the game. I’m really hoping they re-make Gen 5 because those are my favorite and they are stuck on the DS- my adult hands can’t handle holding something that small for hours on end.
Or… Maybe for most of human history we re-told the same stories over and over again for thousands of years until the relatively recent concept of “intellectual property” has forbidden us individuals from doing what comes naturally, forming this sort of weird resentment for when corporations do it?
Depends on how you define important"
The HD Zelda remakes would be nice to have on a real console.
It’s notable that there is still a Kirby game stuck on the WiiU.
I’ve heard good things about Nintendoland but I’ve never played it. Still, that’s kind of the soul of the WiiU so might not be likely to get ported.
Paper Mario Color Splash is notable, though I don’t think it sold well. If they ever do a compilation of the second wave of Paper Mario games it’ll probably get included.
I liked Pushmo World. I wouldn’t mind a new entry in the series, though as a puzzle game the line between sequel and remake is kind of blurry and irrelevant.
Sega loves to do Sonic compilations so I would guess Rise of Lyric would get re-released at some point.
There’s the infamous Star Fox games. Nintendo has been known to re-release old games that were obscure, sold poorly, or were just plain bad before. But I wouldn’t expect that for a decade or two. Either as part of a compilation or hidden away with a bunch of other games on a digital storefront.
Devil’s Third may end up as lost media someday. The spinoffs probably do too. Pokemon Rumble, plus the “party” and “sports” games.
There was the whole big lie about Obama’s birth certificate because he was black.
John McCain was born in Panama but no one seemed to care about him.
Melania Trump was an illegal immigrant and that didn’t stop her career or prevent Trump from winning the presidency.
Raphael “Ted” Cruz was born in Alberta yet no one seems to care.
White and Right is alright. I’ll cede that maybe if some useful idiot with dark skin and murky citizenship rose to power conservatives might decide to look the other way, but you need to be at least one for them to do so.
Not a big enough age gap for lib-right
Crazy how the HC with the most Superbowl trophies has had a reputation fall off so hard.
The bad Browns tenure I can chalk up to the Browns just being a bad organization. The Jets incident was more funny than anything else. But then the cheating scandals kept coming and putting asterisks on those wins. The question of whether Brady or Bellichek was more important loomed over the franchise. Matt Cassell had a decent year in 2008 that suggested it might be Bellichek, but the question was pretty solidly answered with “Brady” when he went on to win another one with Tampa and have a couple of good years there while Bellichek floundered without him and was eventually let go.
He was a terrible GM. So many bad contracts and bad draft picks. Brady’s willingness to play for less could only go so far to fix that. Despite going under .500 in 3 of his last 4 seasons he left the cupboards bare.
His coaching tree is almost a meme for his bad it is. Matt Patricia, Josh McDaniels, Eric Mangini, Romeo Crennel, Jim Schwartz, Joe Judge, and more have been anywhere from some of the worst coaches in the league to maybe mediocre at best.
There are a couple of guys with potential still. Flores really got screwed by the Dolphins and seems to be on a path to getting another shot, but how much credit does Bellichek deserve? Do Tomlin and O’Connell get credit (although I suppose you could argue O’Connell should be part of Bellichek’s tree from his time as a backup QB?). Daboll… Idk what’s going on in New York but I wouldn’t be shocked if they make a change there within the next couple of years. Mayo is just getting his first shot here so maybe there is hope for him. Bill O’Brien I thought was a good coach and terrible GM for the Texans.
And now here he is trying to absolve himself of culpability for the terrible team he left behind in New England. He should have retired when Brady left- could’ve rode off into the sunset as a hero and no one would’ve cared if he left behind a roster full of holes in the 2020 covid season.
I’m trying to verify these numbers and I’m not finding much.
The closest I can find to a source is that these were claims from Moshe Elad in articles in Tablet Magazine and Algemeier.
In Mashal’s case, he was the treasurer of Hamas at the time and Elad seems to be just attributing the entirety of the organization’s assets to him personally.
I’d be really interested to see if anyone else can find more concrete proof of this claim than I could.
Yeah it sounds like something mainstream media would accuse TST of doing. Like, I strongly suspect that most of the “movements” to include pedophiles in diversity conversations are really just bigots astroturfing because that just makes more sense.
And I still think it’s worth supporting TST just for the legal work they do alone.
Oh I remember seeing that in development a while back when I looked up what the BioShock devs were up to. I didn’t realize it released!
Another similar game in my backlog is Vale: Shadow of the Crown. Except instead of having a visual flash, the game relies entirely on audio cues to play and is completely blind-accessible. So completely different, but somehow feels like the same realm.
I’ll admit I’ve never been a member of either organization, but I have friends who were TST members and last year a good chunk of that congregation split off to join GoS. And they’ve since helped others so the same. So this is basically how they’ve described it to me.
From Wikipedia, it looks like GoS started in 2018 as a UK split-off for various concerns. Wikipedia focused on specific issues the UK branch had, but I was also told a huge factor was the logistics and goals. TST is a very US-focused organization that puts a lot of resources into US legal battles. They also had strict controls over branding, policies, and structures that just didn’t suit them.
The main reason for the schism in my local chapter was more specific. TST regularly streams online services and last year had a leader from a chapter who advocated for welcoming, accepting, and celebrating people regardless of sexual preference. Which sounds great…, except he also explicitly called for the inclusion of pedophiles as part of LQBTQ+. Despite pedophilia being in direct opposition to tenents 1 and 3. The local chapter (and several other chapter) complained to their national representatives and the response was… Nothing. No statement from the national organization, no consequences for that leader. Just swept under the rug.
Also of significance was allegedly there was some sort of documentary released in 2023 called “The Lies of the Satanic Temple” by Dead Domain that claims to expose fraud and abuse from TST leadership. I have not watched it (although coincidentally I have watched a couple of her videos on videogames- she had a really interesting interview with the creators of Paradise Killer), but I heard that it caused several other congregations across the country to split off of TST.
GOS is much less centralized. It’s more of a collection of guidelines, resources, and suggestions. Some chapters keep their own branding, like the House of Heretics in Seattle.
From an outsider’s perspective, it seems to me like GOS is more focused on replacing the role of the church in an individual’s life with a secular alternative. They do charity work like adopt-a-highway, food drives, clothing drives, etc. A lot of the members are young, queer, alternative people, and if their families disowned them they don’t have a support system. They have support for things like non-religious sobriety programs. I almost get the impression it’s like a religious rehab for people who grew up in very restrictive or abusive churches. At Pride this year the local chapter was doing “un-baptisms”. They have potlucks and parties and other social events. I think some of these things they might have carried over from TST.
They keep a much lower profile than TST. They don’t engage in the legal battles that TST does, and a lot of the people I know who left TST still respect the organization for fighting that fight. Personally… I’m really confused as to why GOS still keeps the “satanic” imagery of TST because I thought the point of that was to serve as a counterpoint to Christians in those legal battles.
Personally I’m just introverted and not interested in all that “community” and “networking”. But I’ve donated to both organizations for the work they do.
Edit: in the interest of fairness I’ve seen claims that the Dead Domain documentary has been debunked.
I actually love this in videogames. It’s a really cool way to interact with the environment and literally see the world through a different lense with a level of control that no other medium of storytelling can achieve.
Maybe this dude should go watch a movie if he doesn’t want to interact with things.
Oh yes of course there’s very good reasons for the different organizations. Personally I’ve been a bit turned off by some of the stuff TST has been doing and more interested in the Global Order of Satan (GOS).
I just think it’s funny how Christians don’t seem to have any problems separating (and feuding against) the hundreds of thousands of different denominations, many of which have nearly identical names. But two different organizations with 0 words in their name in common is apparently too confusing for them to handle.
But it’s really weird and sinister to even bring up the Church of Satan. The Church of Satan purposefully does not publish numbers, but the best estimates I can find have them peaking at 300 members. They haven’t been relevant since the 80’s when LaVey got in front of the media during Satanic Panic. TST might have more congregations than CoS has members.
It would be like saying “the Roman Catholic Church, which is different from Christian Scientists”.
Despite its name, TST is not affiliated with the Church of Satan
I find it really funny that they need to call this out given the thousands of different Christian churches that all have varying degrees of affiliation or animosity with each other and often nearly indistinguishable names.
As embarrassing as liking a social media post about getting rid of one of your active players?
I mean, that kind of stuff already exists today with the current copyright laws. I remember as a kid reading all sorts of X-Men books and wondering why the characters in the cartoon were so different. Did Han shoot first in Star Wars?
I played the Ratchet and Clank (2016) game this year that’s like… Kind of a re-make ish of the first game? Except the story is quite a bit different, there’s new characters added and some old ones removed. Half the old levels are gone and there’s a couple of new ones added. Mechanically it’s a completely different game. And yet that’s even from the same studio.
Are they even good at gauging general sentiment though?