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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3793 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 14, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I think AAA vidya simply mirror the gradual enshittification that has already set in their siblings in other creative media like blockbuster movies or popular comics, e.g. Modern Warfare 2 was the last Call of Duty game I ever played and I'm okay with letting it stay that way. The increasing penetration of DEI/political bullshit didn't help too although in my opinion it's not the main driver, the real culprit seems to be either filthy casuals settling into the hobby or people legitimately becoming allergic to difficulty - at some point challenge in vidya became something you seek out in specific niches (insert dank souls meme here) instead of being the default waterline of competence videogames expect from the player.

I mean, the one begat the other. Once you accept the premise that "games are for everyone", it's not far from removing all hard skill gates, sanding off all the rough edges, turning the game into an effortless amusement park ride from point A to point B, and then also going full clown world on having it star some ugly lesbian with Ron Pearlman's jawline.

The western game industry is probably more people who think "games are for everyone" in the worst possible sense than not. They don't even like games in any sense you would have grown up with from the 70's through the 00's. They want everything to be some combination of slot machine and safe-horny visual novel.

They want everything to be some combination of slot machine and safe-horny visual novel.

Depending on how you define a VN and how you define difficulty, you can have a difficult VN. I've never managed to find the true ending of Kara no Shoujo, for instance. It's even somewhat possible to have difficulty on replay or with a walkthrough, although that requires a PRNG somewhere and it can be tricky to cross over from "memorisation" to "understanding required" (Miyuki's security questions in Totono are randomised, for instance, and thus immune to walkthroughs, but I wouldn't call that difficult since it's a pure rote recall task), particularly with strict definitions of what counts as "VN" vs. e.g. "raising sim" or "turn-based strategy".

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