To be honest, hating the sequels makes it less likely that you’re a prick. They weren’t that good at launch, and now that the “new movie smell” has worn off, now people have the time and perspective to see that they aren’t actually that good.
If they were any other sci-fi movies that didn’t have the “Star Wars” name in front of them, they probably would’ve bombed.
Same. I stay away from #Explore and just keep to my feed of people I actually follow. And I make sure to unfollow those who are too stressful to hear from constantly.
I agree with almost all the of all politics all the time people who constantly post negative things, but it’s too tiring to read them, especially since knowing about it does me no good and I can’t do anything about it anyway. I already vote and donate as much as I can, and I live in a Blue state so anything outside of my area’s just not possible for me to influence.
I’ve found it’s better just to ignore it and focus on positive things that make my life better.
This is also why I stopped going to Mastodon. In addition to negative ragebait politics being almost the only thing that’s trending (and I have too much of that in my life already) there’s no real nuance or tolerance for anything outside the echo chamber.
You DO get called a racist nazi transphobe for stepping outside the box or trying to support people, ideas or places that might not be 100% perfect or pass the strictest ideological purity test. I thought Liberal Twitter was pretty exclusionary and echo-chamber-y, but Mastodon’s a lot worse.
Given how modern AAA games are and Bethesda’s recent track history, it’s not negative to be skeptical, it’s smart.
Especially since despite Microsoft watching over them and helping them to have the most “bug free launch in history” it’s still probably going to be a hot mess for weeks to a month after launch. I want to be pleasantly surprised, but I’m not getting my hopes up.
Plus, the recent release of Baldur’s Gate 3 with no microtransactions or season passes, etc. has gotten peoples’ standards up, and given that Microsoft paid a lot of money to buy Bethesda, we’re aware that they’re going to have to make that money back somehow, and will probably give into the temptation to do some really player unfriendly things to do it.
Bethesda’s been going all in on surprisingly expensive microtransactions for really tiny amounts of content, like in Fallout 4 and 76, and it wouldn’t be shocking for them to continue in that direction. People aren’t being mindlessly negative, they’re looking at current and past trends and making an educated guess about the future.
Recettear is something I recommend too, as it’s really unknown for how good it is. You play as an item shop owner (who’s a young girl) that has to make a profit from making and selling items, and there’s a dungeon crawling elmenet too.
Aren’t “Boomer Shooters” actually Millenial Shooters? That’s who played them when they came out.
Honestly, one of the reasons to get a physical copy is to save time on the download. Not everyone has blazing fast or reliable internet where they live. Just having to download a patch as opposed to the entire 80+ GB game can be a big deal to some. I know it was like that for me back when the only thing available in a past residence was DSL. No cable or Fiber, just DSL.
As someone who is good at memorization (although not as much post COVID) but has been historically poor at critical thinking, I agree. People kept telling me I was “smart” and that there was no way I could fail X or should fail X, but life experience and slow but steady analysis showed me that no, everyone (including my parents and teachers) were wrong. I was dumb as bricks, I’m just good at memorizing things.
I’m aware that my critical thinking skills aren’t great. I’m also aware that I had no business going to college (and failing of course) studying what I did (computer science) and that it’s actually very good and liberating to admit how fallible you are, and how bad you are at things, because it gives you the freedom and insight to know what you can do instead of what you can’t.
I’ve lived long enough to see stupid people succeed at what “smart” people fail at, just because they’re honest enough and humble enough to admit when they can’t do something, and also when they’re wrong. I saw that doing something right imperfectly (but effectively) is more useful than doing something wrong with perfect execution. It’s the difference between going forward at a walk, and going backwards with a rocket thruster.
Other people have made good points, but one I’ve noticed is that there’s no advertising or profit motive (so far) and there’s also no leadership that encourages dark patterns like increasing negative engagement through encouraging stuff like doomscrolling or starting or continuing arguments.
I’m on Kbin, and I like how by default all the notifications are turned off. So people aren’t automatically told to respond to every little thing they participate in. If they really care, they have to manually go back on check on things they wrote about or were engaged in. Makes it less likely that people will argue endlessly, lowering the quality of posts and replies, and derailing them with long subthreads of off topic discussions or arguments.
I’m disappointed, but not surprised. This is how they are, especially during times of stress, like war. Culture could probably get better if not for their leadership, but I doubt we’ll see it improve until Putin and the people backing him get purged.
Honestly, I’m shocked by this. I would have thought that they’d at least be not-stupid enough to have something like that.
My theory is that we were created by whatever most mythologies define as the devil, or altered / modified genetically by such a being into what we are today. The nice people who are altruistic are genetic throwbacks that the devil tried his hardest to breed out of the human race, but he wasn’t 100% successful.
Also, the true purpose of humanity is to destroy the earth via pollution and by killing and eating all the animals rather than to save the earth / take care of the animals. Things like cognitive dissonance were installed via software reprogramming (brainwashing) to take care of the remnant “moral feelings” that couldn’t quite be gotten rid of through DNA tweaking.
If you look at what the vast majority of what humankind are doing (rather than the small vocal minority of environmentalists) it honestly makes sense. Then again, I’ve come to see “God” as a mad scientist / absent minded professor who was all “Let’s move fast and break things, it’ll all probably work out post-beta” rather than an all powerful creator being. One of the many reasons I left the church.
What’s wrong with people is that sociopaths who crave money and power to do awful things like this tend to be very good at getting them, whereas people with compassion and kindness tend to be overly generous and want to see the good in others, so tend to give away too much money and power to those sociopaths, especially if those sociopaths are good at putting up a noble front.
Plus, vast segments of the human population are basically blind sheep that don’t think for themselves, and do whatever the media tells them to do. Only way to really solve this in the long term is by convincing people with morals to be more ambitious and to understand how to gain, then use money and power to influence society and the media. The dictator / oligarch types are very good at this (controlling money, power, and the media) whereas nice people who just want to help everyone are very poor at this.
Sad, because I was a fan of them and bought all their games from Saint’s Row 1 all the way to Gat out of Hell (although not in chronological order) and got Agents of Mayhem for free somewhere, but think they’ve made some bad moves lately.
I think it all started going downhill from Agents of Mayhem, and them screwing up with the reboot of Saint’s Row was probably the nail in the coffin. I wish they’d just made Saint’s Row 5 instead, with wacky time travel shenanigans and a more polished set of superpowers.
At the point where they decided to “reboot” to something old school and grittier (TOO old school, imo) they really didn’t get what their fanbase wanted, and what new players who’d only heard of and experienced Saint’s Row 4 would get excited about.
They could’ve probably taken Saint’s Row up to 6 entries if they’d just iterated on the formula from 4 and possibly Gat out of Hell (I wouldn’t know, I got distracted and didn’t play it after I bought it, ironically). Similar to how United Front Games (the developer of Sleeping Dogs) could’ve probably stayed in business if they’d just made Sleeping Dogs 2 instead of that horrible “free to play” multiplayer asset flip of some of the least interesting elements of Sleeping Dogs 1.