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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • The problem is the idea of working on games sounds amazing… and it allows them to pull in a constant fresh young pool of eager workers willing to completely destroy themselves to make their mark on the world and release something they’re passionate about…

    And all these publicly traded ghoulish-MBA-run companies would rather have more cheap inexperienced “Pikmin” type workers to throw at endless “copycat-chase-whatever-concept-is-popular-and-constantly-pivot-toward-the-popular-right-now” type game projects than experts in their field with dozens of titles under their belt, decades of design, or artistic, or programming experience.


  • Actually Nintendo is one of the few companies who hasn’t burned out their designers - as easily exemplified by people like Shigeru Miyamoto literally having been there his entire life for more than 40 years at a single company.

    This is something unheard of outside of companies like Nintendo, but also Japan in general. Even major industry figureheads like John Carmack, Ken Levine, Jason West and Vince Zampella (the guys who made Call of Duty that Bobby Kotick fucked over and then started Respawn and made Apex Legends - whose features Fortnite stole and added to their own game - just like Fortnite also did with PUBG) - all of whom no longer are at the original companies where they made multi-billion-dollar IPs possible… and then there’s guys like Cliff Blezinski who were on the literal front pages of game magazines and keynote speaking roles at industry events like E3 in the mid-2000s with Gears of War… who just literally quit making games after leaving Epic and then starting a studio that went out of business a few years back.

    Nintendo’s biggest problem is that the old master game designers running the place basically don’t seem to “get” the internet… so they have dumb ideas about emulation and ROMs, online fan interactions and e-sports, terrible support for modern ancillary features indirectly related to gaming like voice chat, complex parental controls, advanced technical features like Dolby ATMOS sound, HDR color space, DLSS and modern shader pipelines.


  • The only thing I do NOT like about Elden Ring (and the From Software games in general) is the truly missable stuff that isn’t clearly shown as permanently missable until after you watch some YouTuber’s video talking about how after you cross this invisible line suddenly a bunch of NPCs die or disappear because of a story bit that action triggers without saying anything to you or warning you… this is real by the way and this is that line on the map. this is the line on the map

    If you go north of it, the DLC IRREVERSIBLY changes a lot of stuff with pretty much every NPC you have met up to this point

    Another example of this though - in the base game, I really wanted to get that “raging wolf” armor set that you see in so many videos and images promoting the game but it turns out I progressed the story and killed the NPC who gives you that quest line before he gave it to me and I can’t go back and get it now unless I want to NG+ it and make the game even HARDER for myself…














  • The biggest issue with GIMP is its weird UX choices. They should just make it more like Adobe’s UX. I know there’s tools that bring it closer, but the fact still is that they do some really dumb shit when it comes to experience decisions. Like if I want to change the font of what I’m typing, it works like this…

    I have to TYPE in the font I want, no dropdown, and the font selection toolbar off to the side just straight up doesn’t apply to what I’ve typed or selected… and this is AFTER I ran one of those GIMP retrofit tools that tries to make it more in line with Photoshop.

    Seriously, I’ve used Photoshop since 5.5 (not CS 5.5… FIVE POINT FIVE in 1999), and I STILL have to watch a tutorial for almost every single action I could intuit in 5 seconds from Adobe’s garbage malware tool.

    That being said… the one important thing that GIMP is not… is Adobe garbage malware… GIMP just has a janky UX that no one’s going to bother fixing b/c the tool is free so no complaining!

    And in any case, just like with Blender coming on to the scene in earnest like a decade ago to end Autodesk’s defacto monopoly with its $$$$ per year licensing scheme for proprietary 3D modelling tools… with Adobe rapidly getting worse, and just like with Unity’s “pay us per install” debacle made people jump ship to Godot - never to look back… I’d bet that GIMP is going to begin accelerating its improvement… or that Krita will do the same and overtake it in popularity.

    …And once that happens, Adobe is cooked. And it can’t happen soon enough.