I mod a worryingly growing list of communities. Ask away if you have any questions or issues with any of the communities.

I also run the hobby and nerd interest website scratch-that.org.

  • 105 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • “What makes money” is always relative to how much it costs to make though.

    Season passes, microtransactions, and DLCs. Additionally creating brand recognition among the masses along with flashy trailers. These are all reasons that AAA behemoths are still banked on to make huge net profits.

    Sometimes these massive games fail and lose money in spectacular ways, but it happens a lot less than us enlightened good taste gamers would like to imagine. Money gets shoveled into creatively safe massive games because they usually make a huge profit. I love say, Wasteland 2, but that game probably has made less money in its entire life than the newest Fifa game made in a week.



  • Unfortunately the good taste of people who actively comment about games often has only slight overlap with what makes money.

    Three of the top ten US game earners in 2024 were yearly sports game rehashes. One of the top ten games was Call Of Duty. One was Fortnite.

    These are money making machines. We can argue and beg and plead all we want. There is a huge mass of gamers out there was simply don’t care, and who will continue to buy formulaic rehashes and microtransaction infested treadmills.

    The AAA publishers are not in it for the art. Look at AA and indie if you want games that are willing to appeal to a niche. I’m talking to you and everyone else reading this because this might actually have an effect. Saying what AAA publishers and developers should do is pointless, not like they will ever read it.






  • It’s not uncommon to see massive trucks with insanely bright LED lights (a certain personality type), which puts the lights just about windshield level on a sedan.

    What’s extra fun is now the lights also blind drivers going the same direction as the truck, as every mirror in the sedan is filled with light.






  • Wasteland 3 is a good CRPG style game with modern presentation. There is backstory from the first two games, but the third one is self contained enough that you won’t be confused by the story.

    I think making regions safe is a great idea but I would want it tied to a challenging side quest. Like maybe you can intentionally fight a harder version of an area’s enemies to make it safe?

    That’s one way to tackle it. The point is that there is something to prevent the experience of being super high level and getting mugged by guys with rusty shivs. I’m throwing out many ideas, which could be refined by specific games.

    When it comes to random mobs, a game which relies on them is Kenshi, as an example. Without wandering random mobs to encounter, the game loses a lot of flavor. Kenshi does a few things uniquely, with the main one being that many random encounters that end in defeat don’t end in death. Rather than it being a case where a random mob annoyingly forces a start from a previous save, Kenshi can often be played past the defeat with the player now enslaved, in jail, or injured. The emergent story telling from those fights is what makes the game.