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Let's discuss: The Sims
  • I can’t think of another game that I like so much and enjoy playing so little. I will spend countless hours creating families and houses and then five minutes playing the actual game before I’m like “oh, right, I hate this” and then I start making another family.

  • The level of engagement on Reddit these days
  • I think this disparity in votes and comments is also hugely affected by how the UI has been changing over the years as well as the destruction of third party apps. The site is now designed in a way where active participation is less encouraged than ever before unless you’re running old reddit on a traditional computer with an ad blocker.

  • What is the most unhinged conspiracy theory?
  • Flat Earth.

    It’s not the most immediately shocking, not the most colorful and dramatic, but there are two factors where no other conspiracy theory can compete:

    1. It is so easily falsifiable that basically more people would have to be in on the conspiracy than not.
    2. Nobody would stand to gain anything from the lie.
  • What did you buy that improved your life?
  • Furniture of proportionate scale to my body.

    To all you fellow deviations from the average height: look up the ratios of how your body is supposed to relate to chairs, tables, counters, and screens and search for ways to make that happen. These things are not supposed to cause you inevitable pain.

    You can’t make everything perfect, especially if sharing spaces with people who don’t match your scale, but do what you can and it will make a huge difference.

    Also this is good advice for the regular-sized, the problem is just less pervasive for them.

  • Was banning human slavery an authoritarian decision?
  • What these questions are missing is that the government didn't start from a place of neutrality, they started by enforcing the institution of slavery. They didn't go from having no authority over slavery to having all of it, rather the authority they had remained static. The only variable for the amount of authority then is that the classes of "slave" and "slave owner" stopped being a thing, so there were no longer slave owners that had absolute authority over slaves.

  • Dragon Age Inquisition free on Epic right now
  • Not in the sense where they failed to make it interesting, more in the Breath of the Wild type philosophy where any side-content you do is indirectly progress toward the main goal so there's a mix of things of varying levels of interestingness in all directions. You have an organization that raises in "power" or whatever they call those points whenever you do a side quest and you need to bank up certain amounts of those power points to do the next story mission or unlock the next region. That progression is paced in such a way that you simply don't need to do most things.

    Many quests are genuinely interesting but other ones are just filler. And some filler between good quests is inoffensive, maybe even a refreshing little diversion. One generic filler side quest is essentially "stand next to this portal and kill all the ghosts that come out of it". Doing that once in a while is okay, doing it as many times as there are portals to find is torture.

    I still haven’t played the sequels, would you say they’re still worthwhile or is it for the best to leave the story at the end of Origins?

    The short version of that answer is that the sequels do not have what you love about the original but you might also like them for the different things that they are.

    Awakening feels less like a sequel (technically an optionally standalone expansion but I'm counting it) and more like a fan mod. It's nerdier, sillier, edgier, and has that high-effort mod habit of adding concepts that should logically be new mechanics but are executed by old ones because you're doing it on minimal skill and zero budget. I think that's a pretty cute vibe but it's fundamentally just Origins again but worse.

    2 has high highs and low lows and, while I personally love it, it's negative general reception is very fairly earned. The thing that it was trying to do in the first place, story-wise, is something that would already have been divisive even if the rest of the game were flawlessly executed and it was emphatically not flawlessly executed. The simplest way I can describe it is that it is not a story about an adventure, it's a story about a place. You do not leave that place, you just stay there over the course of several years and experience the historically significant events that are happening there. So the narrative focus for you as a protagonist is on how you feel about things rather than what you're accomplishing.

    Inquisition, conversely, is the least interesting one from a conceptual standpoint but, like, it's competent from a technical standpoint and the harsh criticisms you tend to hear usually stem from misunderstandings about its design rather than the lack of creative ambition. There's another new evil horde and you're another special dude who's the only one who can stop them and now you've got a personal army instead of being an underdog. There's more political conflict than the first game but the politics are less complex. Ultimately, though, I think the most important factor of any open world game is simply the degree to which you want to spend time in that world regardless of what it is you're actually doing and it's an interesting enough world to spend some time in. Certainly, it's worth trying for free.

  • Dragon Age Inquisition free on Epic right now
  • For anybody playing this for the first time, an important piece of advice:

    Don’t be a completionist. Leave areas before you’ve done everything in them and don’t do any side quests you’re not interested in.

    It’s my least favorite Dragon Age but it got a lot more hate than it deserved because other open world games trained people to play it the boringest way possible.

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    Stepos Venzny @beehaw.org
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