Chariot archers > horse archers

So after immediately getting it and going through a few settlements, wow did this patch break my muscle memory hard.

I was panicked-looking for my Geyser Pumps and my Rain Collectors. (they’re under gathering now)
The new stuff seems all awesome. Fishing Huts are an interesting change of pace since you can haul in the nets early but that instantly depletes the node. Frogs are fascinating and a giant headache, being unable to be housed in non-specialized homes. The change on Foxes to no longer be rainwater-specialized makes the races feel more balanced. The new recipe combinations are weird as hell (again, all muscle memory gone) but seem balanced so far.

All very nice. Am impressed.

It cannot be front and center and normal at the same time.

Why not? If it’s normal, any possible identity and any possible element will be front and center every so often, no? That’s what normality means after all? Something has to be front and center, and if everything is normal, everything will appear there repeatedly?

But like you say, if you want to normalize it, shouldn’t it be front and center then? Since that’s part of being normal, also being front and center?

Because things like black protagonists with hip-hop music in the background make no sense in a feudal japanese setting and people are sick of games being abused as vehicles for morality preaching.

But games about dudes in medieval-looking sci-fo power armor stomping around WW1-styled soldiers do?

And that doesn’t preach any morals? But a black guy in a samurai setting does? How come one does, but the other does not?

Also…

An example from borderlanfs two could be Sir Hammerlock, who was introduced as a normal (for borderlands) character early on and later in a side quest was revealed to be gay in passing.

Maybe don’t make it as readily apparent how much you internalized gayness being abnormal. Telling. You wouldn’t write sentences like this if that wasn’t a normal thought process for you, since you did probably not have to actively consider your wording.

Why would firing DEI consultants improve the work?

And if you want to have lgbtq characters, then do it like borderlands 2, that game got it right in 2012.

In what particular way do they differ?

I love how this continues to crank out articles with 0 information and everyone speculating what it might be about.

Don’t get me wrong, Nintendo are dickheads, but you can clearly see how everyone greedily clicks on these articles considering how often they get rehashed.

Do you? Then how come examples like OP’s don’t really specify much.

Is that any keyword? All keywords? Where? Tags? Title? Name? Description? If all, do they all have to appear int he same field(s)? Anywhere? On the whole page including crosssellers?

This is what to mean: it’s easy to say “just search for exactly this!”, but what you intuitively think of as “exactly this” is not intuitive from the perspective of a search index. At all. So it gets preprocessed and changes before being used for a search, and in many cases, widened. Because we humans are very bad at putting in an accurate search such as: name:"60w" and description:"standby". We rarely do that.

There’s nothing in it for them, the simple fact is that the virtual all of people does not look for specific terms.

Hence the search is optimised to give you loads of things that relate to some parts of your search at least.

Source: did backend code for shopping frontends for years.

The search is incredibly fuzzy, plus the tag words of products themselves are fuzzy. And usually they don’t allow forcing a hard match search, though you can try + or and between each word. We had one site that allowed it, just use lucene search syntax.

Oh no, people trading in make-belief money are losing or gaining some of their make-belief money selling the make-belief money to each other! 😱

I mean, “cozy games” isn’t really a genre.

What are we talking about? Stardew Valley like farming sims? Zero-gameplay diorama builders? VNs with happy contexts? These are all so wildly divergent.

Sounds positive. Not quite a BotW/TotK-banger, but I didn’t expect such a quirky concept to score big on the first outing. Only spotted one truly critical review in there, and even that was more “It’s a neat idea, but doesn’t truly pan out all that well”.

Definitely getting this. Exciting!

They said to get her own game. Not her own interactive nightmare.

I finished the game perfectly fine? It wasn’t difficult? My point was that it was too easy, after all? 🤷‍♀️

If Anno had somehow managed to channel the narrative of Snowpiercer and the compulsive clicky crunch of Clash of Clans it would be this.

Depending on how you read it, that explains why FP1 did not have the staying power nor depth nor draw of Anno. 😛 Still enjoyed playing through it once, but as far as best-paced goes, I don’t think the granted-much-newer Against The Storm can be beat in that regard, successfully managing to remove the rote nature of most long-tail city building from the genre - even FP1 sadly has that, more on account of how shallow its underlying systems are though, not that the campaign is done too long.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve promised mutually exclusive things to a bunch of council members and I have to somehow navigate a multi-party system without being forced to use the elderly for food.

This is kinda what I mean, actually. FP1 sells its narrative and atmosphere and story super well, even if once you try the waters, it becomes painfully obvious stuff like that is just a story-cover draped over a very rudementary core. These decisions are trivial in their nature and effect even as they sell themselves as being sweeping. The core directional decision sounds gruesome, but never truly amounts to much mechanically, so it peels off pretty quickly, too.
Either way it’s just about maxing your tree depth so you essentially “beat” the game as people no longer become unhappy, and then optimize grid layout a bit (not even much) to survive the ending.

Don’t get me wrong though, FP1 was fun to play. In hindsight it’s a mediocre city builder polished to an absolute gleam, which makes it “good”. I would not say it’s more than that, tbh, but then again it kinda doesn’t have to be, either.

No, tedious. Frostpunk 1 is genuinely tedious.

It’s not difficult, it’s not complex, it’s not deep. It’s incredibly pretty, and it brings its atmosphere along incredibly well. But the moment you run into challenge, the veneer cracks and flakes off, as all you have to do is load&save constantly and go through the same few events until you know which option to pick when.

Until that point, it is amazing, past that it depends on when it gets you. Luckily I was close to the ending of the main mission, so pushing through did not take long, and the end is pretty damn exciting to get through.

The other missions unlocked after are… well… they kinda lack the veneer from the get-go, at that point. Which ruins it a bit. I’ve heard only good things about FP2 in regards to fixing this particular problem of the first game though.

Damn, that’s a good building expression of the shit I see at work coding software. 😅

What am I looking at here? Something on a roof?

I would say that if you non-jokingly talk like that, you got bigger issues than any specific gaming sites or which consultants are brought in to work on which game.

It’s a fair bit dated low, but also by far the best of the three IMO.

The second was quite good in a lot of ways but also very obviously super rushed and partially unfinished.

And then the third was just a sad grindathon with a Dragon Age mask pulled over it. Some good ideas again but covered in the worst gameplay of the three.