with no concessions

I don’t know how true this is. I’m not American and haven’t followed it all that closely. But I did see a post earlier today which said this:

And what they voted for (or more accurately, as this is was a cloture vote, voted to allow a vote on) is not the same thing as was voted for in the previous fourteen votes. The new version has:

• A full CR through January 30th;
• A return to work for the slew of federal workers who Trump fired, and a block against him firing anyone else before January 30th;
• Funding for the USDA - including full SNAP benefits - through next September;
• Funding for the VA and FDA through next September;
• Protections for the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which Trump has tried to decimate;
• The promise of a vote on ACA subsidies no later than the second week of December.

If that’s true, it would be very inaccurate to claim it had “no concessions”. You could certainly say that there weren’t enough concessions, but at least a few of those bullet points seem relatively significant.

But Lemmy users are only going to post, and only going to upvote, the same sorts of stuff that interests them. How is that different from Lemmy users posting their own writing?

!vampires@lemmy.zip?

I’m not sure what “piece linked” you’re talking about, since none of the parent comments of this comment actually have a link in them.

This is the first time I’ve ever heard of FUTO, but I did read their statement about open source and it sounds pretty good to me. I actually think they’re capitulating a little bit too much by deciding not to call it open source anymore. As far as I’m concerned, if the source is available and anyone can contribute, that’s open source. I don’t particularly care whether or not it’s free for Google to incorporate it into their increasingly-enshitified products or not.

Creative Commons (an org to which FUTO says they have donated) doesn’t like their licences being used for software, presumably for finicky technical legal reasons. But if you imagine the broad spirit of their licences applying to software, all the main CC licences would be open source in my opinion. All combinations of Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike, and No Derivatives, as well as CC0 respect the important elements of open source.

Ludo? I haven’t played that since I was a tiny kid! I can’t say I remember much about how it’s played.

There are two separate issues with lootboxes.

First, children. Porn games (and videos) have never been marketed at children. Lootboxes have. It’s not an age-gating issue, it’s an issue of actively promoting gambling for children. Games with gambling elements should be illegal to sell or market to children, and platforms can back this up with parental controls tools, without the need for any privacy-invading ID or facial recognition.

The second is relevant to adults. General things around lootboxes being exploitative bad game design, regardless of the audience. You don’t have to support banning it to be able to say it’s really shitty. Personally, I would advocate very strict reporting on odds of success, and mandate the implementation of self-exclusion features, the same as the law requires (at least here in Australia) for casinos.

I’ve followed this probably closer than the average gamer, but I still wouldn’t say I’ve followed it very closely.

The sense I get is that once TCR took it over, they moved the game in a direction that allows less personalisation in terms of roleplay. You’re no longer playing some newly-embraced nobody, you’re playing a hundred-year-old character with a very specific backstory. But it’s honestly still not completely clear. I’ll be interested to see feedback from people after its release.

Yeah fair enough. As I said, there was at least one Werewolf game released kinda recently. It doesn’t seem to have had a brilliant reception, but it does exist. They also did release a Wraith game not too long ago, so they’re obviously not afraid to reach into the more niche parts of the world. Changeling may be possible at some point.

Even gothic did fall victim to the trend. G2 was “triple the size!!!”

If “triple the size” comes with triple the budget—or at least triple that component of the budget that goes towards writing, worldbuilding, and modelling & animating characters, terrain, and buildings—along with triple the time for those tasks…then that sounds brilliant! But more often they get the budget for maybe 1.5x the content, leaving the world feeling half as full.

Oh kingdom come. In theory I would have highly enjoyed the last one. But I only managed 5 hours or so. It’s just too “realistic” for my taste somehow.

Oh yeah for sure. Personally I quite liked its experience of travelling in it. That’s a kind of realism that I enjoy, because the cost (in terms of time) of travel made me think about whether I want to travel.

But its combat system was certainly really polarising. The Souls comparison is a really good one, I think. Usually in an RPG, your chances of success depend mostly on your character’s stats. But KCD’s combat is more like a soulslike or an action game than an RPG. It’s more about your skill as a player than about your character’s skills or gear. And it’s designed to be extremely punishing if you’ve got multiple opponents. Which is realistic, but not usually very fun.

But…Gothic isn’t a big open world. It’s like the size of bg3’s tutorial

To be honest, I find some gamers’ obsession with the land area of open world games rather tedious. I remember the same criticism being levied at KCD during its Kickstarter, saying things like “oh, that’s less than a quarter the size of Skyrim” or whatever it was. I don’t really care. The density of things to do within the area is much more important. And even more important than that is the verisimilitude of the world. That quests feel interconnected in believable (not forced) ways, that questgivers feel like the quests they’re giving are things they would actually care about and that would actually matter, given the worldbuilding and story. That’s all stuff that, from what I’ve heard about it, it sounds like Gothic does really well. Idgaf if Skyrim or BG3 have a larger land area.

Counterstrike was once just a nod/gamemmode too

I mean, LoL was inspired by DotA, which was originally a mod for Warcraft 3, so it wouldn’t even be the first time RTS spawned a major new genre.

You’re no superhero but just a regular are able to maybe lift a stick and kick a bug

That’s exactly what appeals to me. I really enjoyed that aspect of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, too. Though unfortunately I don’t have a lot of time for big open-world computer RPGs. I never finished KCD, and barely started Baldur’s Gate and the original VtM Bloodlines (among the only other RPGs I can remember starting over the last decade). I don’t think I finished anything since like 2016. But at least in principle, everything I’ve seen about Gothic appeals to me, so if the remake is good I would definitely like to give it a try.

I have a generally positive impression of remakes at the moment, since the games I’ve put more time into than any other over the last 5 years have all been extremely good remakes. Age of Empires 2 and 3 Definitive Editions, Age of Mythology: Retold, and Spyro Reignited. And I’ve heard good things about Oblivion. So without knowing who the developers behind the Gothic remake are, but knowing how beloved it was, my hopes are high that it’s being done with care.

The aoe thing wasn’t too bad tbh. It wasn’t a standalone game, just a game mode, like a custom scenario. And it was kinda fun for a little while, but they added a full queue for it in the UI and everything. It was moderately popular for about two weeks, and now there’s a queue languishing that nobody ever uses. It was amusing.

My current fear is also the remake of “Gothic”

I only learnt about Gothic fairly recently, thanks to this really interesting video. I’m certainly hoping the remake does it justice, because it looks really interesting.

When you lay it out like that it does sound like a mess.

But actually looking at what they’ve done, from the outside, it wouldn’t be obvious at all. They’ve had a steady pace of what seem to be fairly well-received books, and accompanied them with decent media such as the Jason Carl–storytold LA By Night actual play series. A lot of the old folks don’t love the changes to lore and mechanics, especially in Werewolf, but more broadly they seem to have attracted relatively positive reviews.

I replied to @Agent_Karyo@lemmy.world with more information about the corporate structure, but the TL;DR for the purposes of your comment is that Paradox bought White Wolf, dissolved White Wolf shortly after V5’s release in 2018, and brought White Wolf back earlier this year and White Wolf is back in charge of both licensing and publishing. (I suspect they also have in-house development, but it’s not super clear.)

I’m not 100% clear on what you’re getting at in your final paragraph, but Werewolf W5 came out in 2023, and there have been numerous non-vampire World of Darkness video games released during the Paradox era, including 2020’s Werewolf: The Apocalypse — Heart of the Forest.

As for Changeling, after doing Vampire: The Masquerade, Hunter: The Reckoning, and Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the lead designer at White Wolf has said their next likely release will be a 5th edition Mage: The Ascension, but he also hinted at Changeling: The Dreaming, so it’s not unreasonably likely that that will get a 5th edition release some time in the next decade. 2018 for VtM, HtR in 2022, WtA in 2023, I’d think worst case 2027 for Mage, 2031/32 for Changeling, unless they stumble across problems that force it to be cancelled.

Yeah Paradox bought White Wolf in 2015, a couple of months after the previous publishers announced they were working on 5th edition. White Wolf brought the development of the game in house, underneath Paradox.

Then shortly after the release of V5 in 2018 there were a few scandals within White Wolf, and Paradox dissolved the company, handing off development to Modiphius with Paradox retaining final approval rights.

In late 2020 they partnered with Renegade to do the publishing of future V5 products. Paradox Interactive were the developers of Werewolf W5, and Renegade published it. It’s unclear to me who exactly is developing W5 and V5 supplementary material, but I think it might be a mix of Paradox, Modiphius, and maybe others.

Then earlier this year, Paradox announced they were re-forming White Wolf to be the company in charge of licensing and publishing of World of Darkness content.

It’s all super complicated, but the bottom line is that since before the release of 5th edition, Paradox has been the big business daddy.

In a world where the budget of the game would line it up with (let’s say) a 60 USD price point but it was actually 50+DLC=60?

Unfortunately, in Australia the base game is $85, and the version that includes Lasombra and Toreador is $130. That makes the DLC almost as much as an entire new game, not merely a DLC.

But yeah, I agree that if the DLC was added to a game that was receiving otherwise good press, and if it didn’t feel like they had just lopped off something that most players are going to want, I could maybe look past it. But this really feels like pouring salt into the already gaping wound.

I thought it was dumb enough when Age of Empires jumped on the bandwagon. But they managed to find something even less in-keeping with the original game’s themes…

It’s not the next multiplayer war-game or FIFA.

Remember when World of Darkness jumped on the battle royale bandwagon?

Yeah. It looked like it was getting close to release in like 2020? Might even have been 2019. They released a trailer back then. Then it got postponed a bit. Then the entire original development team, Hardsuit Labs, was fired from the project, and after a delay, a British company called The Chinese Room (known for linear adventure games like Dear Esther and Little Orpheus) took over development and basically redid it from the ground up. I assume some assets were reused, but the entire story is completely changed, including swapping from a thin-blooded vampire to an elder vampire re-awakened after a century of torpor.

I’ve preordered games before and not regretted it.

This is definitely not going to be such a case. The amount of development hell this game has gone through, it’ll be a miracle if it even ends up good enough that I decide to buy it at all. I’m certainly not buying it sight unseen.

They don’t even seem to be offering any incentive to pre-order? Which honestly might be a good thing. It reduces the accusations of gating content…and they’ve got enough to deal with on that front already, considering two clans and a heap more content are gated behind day-one DLC. $45 day-one DLC, in fact (in Australia at least). That’s as much as a full game in many cases. (Including all of the other games in the VtM franchise. In fact, of the 20 other games in the World of Darkness franchise linked in a collection on Steam from this game’s Steam page, only 2 are more than half that.)