The season pass is worth it for the actual expansion alone, the rest of the DLC stuff like outfits and items are pretty great. Tears of the Kingdom is fantastic too if you've enjoyed Breath of the Wild.

Agreed on the latter, though I think it played a part in killing my switch's fan xD

I mean.. given the beatings I give my switch with Vampire survivors...

Welp... this night at work I browsed the work emails and saw that my boss got the receipts for the staff christmas bonus. Papa Lastik treated himself to both the season pass and Tears of the Kingdom lol. Will only play Tears after finishing Breath of the Wild tho.

As you should, it's a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild. Have fun with them mate.

On one hand, I never liked durability in equipment or inventory management, but on the other playing with the physics is hella fun. My first death was bombing myself trying to dislodge a boulder

I really enjoying the freedom in exploring and can't wait to get the glider and get out of the babi area so it really opens up. It's ironic that in a game where there's urgency of a 100 year old seal wearing off, the main draw of it is actually do anything but the main quest and just goof off and explore lol

It was like that with RAID Shadow Legends for me. At a certain point, it's less a game to enjoy and more of a series of daily chores for non-existent prizes.

Yeah, I experimented with a bunch of Gacha games and even played some extensively for years. At end I was doing things by rote and whenever an event popped up that required more than a few clicks on my part I'd go "ugh, not this again", that coupled with the power creep of increasing harder to get heroes made me question, why am I even playing this?!

That said, I did find one game recently that's has some minor gacha elements to it and it's been highly amusing so far. It's called Capybara Go and you play as.. you guessed it, a capybara.

Yeah, sounds familiar. At a certain point in RAID, they had it where the only way to unlock the best charactes, was to get 100 shards. But the shards were won through tournaments. Some tournaments were about defeating a boss so many times and such, but others were "Summon 3K worth of points." Common characters were about 5 points. The most rare characters to get from shards were like 500 points. And those shards, if you didn't stockpile them from events, were on SALE for around $40 EACH. With a success rate of 0.25% chance of getting the Relic tier characters unlocked. Didn't feel like spending $200+ to gamble for shards to one a PORTION of the requirements to unlock a character? Well tough luck scrub!

Became a money harvesting gambling machine. Graphics were good, never glitched, and the combinations for characters in a team and their gear was cool, but all the money required to win and the like 8+ GIGS it took up on my phone were just too much.

Yeh similar to AFK, they also made those heroes an essential part of the meta and release them so often that it was impossible to build them in time. Also not all of them were indispensable, only some, so it was a toss up whether or not the hero you were investing on your very limited resources would end up being good.

The worse, most predatorial one was Street Fighter Duel tho.. at least the other games you had a chance to eventually get the heroes for free. In SF Duel, some you could only get by buying them directly. Also you know those uber-characters I mentioned above? In AFK or Saint Seiya they'd release one of those like.. in a 3-4 month period. In SF Duel, they'd release FOUR of them at once (like the TMNT crossover event). I dropped SF Duel very early on cause that shit was too much predatorial even for me.

Totally understandable. If these places want to make good games, than great; but if it's going to be predatory sales and gambling games, screw that noise.

You do realize Bluesky makes all images available to the entire Internet, rather than limiting it to registered users, right? Which means, if you're worried about AI getting trained on your art, that Bluesky is just as bad an idea as Twitter.

As for prudish inquisitions, well, many of the same people who ran those on Twitter have flocked to Bluesky in droves already. Not to mention more insidious shit-stirrers who just want to start drama. A friend of mine observed that people on Bluesky were already starting up lists of alleged pedophiles, and when he quite reasonably pointed out that it's not a good idea to let some anonymous dude run a list like that without any accountability or burden of proof, he was immediately declared one of them.

Twitter didn't magically become a hellsite when Elon bought it. It was always a cesspit of clout-chasers, shit-stirrers, and witch-hunters, and I've seen absolutely no evidence that Bluesky is actually better, because the real problem runs far deeper than which site it's on and predates the Internet by millennia. The best choice is to stay away from Twitter and all its clones. Just my $0.02.

As for the rest...I can't wrap my head around playing multiple gachas. I only play Limbus Company and that's already more than enough for me. Nonetheless, if you're not having fun with a game, quitting's always the best call. Can't weigh in on Zelda, though. I haven't given Nintendo a single thin dime ever since they started locking on-disc DLC behind limited-run hunks of plastic.

I actually got a few amiibos 'cause I like miniatures and those are actually pretty good in terms of quality / price (and let's not talk about GW and Warhammer, I'm glad I quit THAT plastic crack addiction).

I'm well of what cesspool twitter was even before the purchase, I've deleted it yesterday but had that account for many years. Like here I managed to avoid shite drama partially 'cause I don't like to doomscroll, partly 'cause my laziness helps keep my mouth shut (or at least stops me from pressing the "tweet" button) and partly 'cause I'm not a beeeeeg mainstream artist with tons of followers. Plus I'm from the group that believes themselves to be responsible for their own viewing experience, if I see something I don't like, I block and move on, I don't feel traumatized just because something I don't like popped up on my feed.

On that note I saw it all before, I was part of the Tumblr exodus after the lewd ban (tho it wasn't so much an exodus on my part as I already had several accounts set up, I simply closed my account). I saw what happened in that migration, and I see it again on Bluesky. While I'm positive and optimist (personally I see no merit in negativism and cynicism), I'm not so invested in social media that if any (or all for that matter) would go down, my life would be significantly impacted by it. I realize tho that that is a position of privilege as I don't need to do commissions for a living, for someone that's relying on it for basic needs it's a whole different shebang. Still that need is a financial one, not a social one.

As for AI, not even that my friend. Even if somehow my images only remained in registered sites, nothing prevents users from saving the images and feeding them, and that's not even taking into account folks that upload the images to public sites. Moments after I posted the gargoyle pic, it popped up on e621, and while I don't mind (and even admire the hustle, like daaamn that was fast), it's very easy to mine the images. Even in registered places it's easy, short of subscription based platforms, accounts are easy and free to create. Honestly the only way to prevent that is to never upload anything ever, but that defeats the purpose. Besides that's there's Glaze, a program that does exactly that, glazes the image so it poisons any AI that gets the image fed, tho it's been a while since I last heard anything of it. Of course it's always an arms race between AI bros and people trying to protect the artistic community, but let's be real, we all know who the big bucks are backing.

Honestly my defence is that I'm a small time artist that doesn't have a big pool of images to train with. Like I said before, I'm a positive person, I put in the effort to be positive (because it takes effort) so you know what? Fuck it! If my choices are between safeguarding my works by never sharing them with anyone or have them trained, I'll share it with the world (wether the world wants it or not ) so at the end of the day they'll make someone's life a little bit better.

And yeah, regarding gachas that was my reasoning as well. That said I did find one that's been highly amusing to me so far, Capybara Go, which as you might have guessed, you play as a capybara lol. It has gacha but it's minor stuff, not like Raid or AFK.

Side note: This night at work I perused the work emails and saw my boss got the christmas bonuses for us. That did it, Papa Lastik treated himself to the expansion and Tears of the Kingdom!

Even if they were hand-crafted by master artisans from the finest jewels and precious metals, they'd still be limited-run trinkets meant to lock poors out of content that was already programmed into the game they already bought. Letting one company screw over its customers just emboldens other companies to do the same.

Glaze just sounds like DRM for images. I'd be surprised if there weren't already at least three different ways to crack it by now. And all that big money had to come from somewhere; there are limits to how much even the biggest and sketchiest of investment firms can do to keep a corporation afloat if it doesn't have any paying customers. But if you really want to be positive about the AI situation, consider that the tech has already peaked, and no amount of pumping money into it or creating bigger models has been able to push it past the level of quality it's already at (ie. low-grade coomslop and dumbshit chatbots). It's wryly amusing that a bunch of math nerds and finance bros forgot how averages work.

I didn't mean gachas specifically. Once any game stops being fun, play something else.

My dood, no ethical consumption under capitalism, you can find problematic (much as that word is overused to the point of losing all significance nowadays) tactics and behavior at all levels in every industry, from one-person businesses or devs to big-corpa. I got the amiibos 'cause I like the minis, dlc didn't even factor into my decision and I don't have that many games that use them to begin with. I can make arguments for it, but I'm no more a nintendo fanboy than you are a nintendo hater. I grew up with nintendo games (portable ones mostly), I enjoy them and their consistency but I have no need to neither defend a corporation nor justify my enjoyment or purchases to anyone (and no, I'm not salty at you or anything lol, we just chatting).

Side note, if I have a beef with anyone it would be Microsoft, but even then it's not so much them as it is the customer service who shafted me over a 360 which red-ringed.

As for glaze, last I saw it it wasn't so much drm but more an AI poison. It adds a subtle distortion to the image that screws with the learning algorithm "poisoning" it. And I believe you, tho the sad part of it is that corpa likes mediocrity 'cause it's cheap and marketable. At the end of the day AI doesn't create as much as it combines and runs probabilities and therein lies the flaw as creation by necessity is outside probability since it doesn't exist (as in, it's yet to be created).

And yeah, when you reach that realization that you're playing a game out of rote or duty rather than fun, it's time to stop and move on, tho I guess some folks get into a certain sunken cost fallacy mindset in that regard.

If I have one regret it's probably having got the diablo expansion. I don't particularly like the aesthetic of diablo 4 overall, and I don't care for the new class. Had I known Path of Exile 2 was coming out soon, I would have skipped it entirely. Oh well.

Seriously? You're using a Communist slogan to justify supporting predatory corporate activity? I'm not even reading the rest of that.

Nah, not a commie if that's what yer askin', besides that would be a hella of mental gymnastic to defend big-corpa with communism lol. Besides like I said in the post above (do read the rest), while I do enjoy nintendo games I'm not a fanboy that needs to defend corpas of any kind. My point is that you'd be hard-pressed to find any sort of business that won't have some sort of iffy or dodgy practice, particularly in media (I mean let's not get started on Disney's tendrils). It's not justification.

I get it that you have a beef with Nintendo, and I likewise have stuff I don't go near with a 10 ft pole. Heck I played Street Fighter Duel and that shit was so predatorial it made me delete the game (and that's coming from me who plays gachas). Likewise I couldn't stomach Diablo Immortal.