Jim Sterling (The Jimquisition)

If you don't get this latest bit of Red Dead Redemption madness, you are stupid! Yes I know its insulting but its also the truth.

Edited by MightyKombat on Nov 8th 2019 at 10:41:13 AM

I feel like Jim should talk about this guy when there's nothing crazy going on.

I don't get the obsession with realism in games, about a decade ago people whom wanted realism where made fun of and blasted out of the park. Nowadays you hear lots of bitching about realism related things.

But dude, the ice cubes melt in real time!

Trends homey, they be shifting.

It's a generalized thing about entertainment these days, where people want more realism out of their entertainment. Taken to it's more ridiculous degree, it's the kind of stuff that gives us a "live-action" movie about cg lions that were better when they were traditional animation.

Hopefully, it's a trend that will either pass or find it's small personal chunk of the industry where it can live without bothering the rest of it.

I don't think the push for realism is necessarily bad. There's people who draw enjoyment from that. and the more from them. Plus trying to be more realistic is how new mechanics often come into being. Like reloading in first person shooters, which wasn't a part of the genre's origins, but which it borrowed from more simulation-based games like light gun shooters. The mechanics in a realism-heavy game can become mechanics that future less realistic games will use.

That said I do think the difference between RDR 2 and Death Stranding is that RDR 1 was not a realism heavy game. So if you came there wanting more RDR 1, the heavy realism-based mechanics in the 2nd one can turn you off, and annoy you because they are not what you wanted out of a sequel.

Death stranding is a new IP, it's free to make whatever insane crap Kojima wants.

I don't think "People want more realism today!" is even a true statement. People have always wanted more realism in games. That's always been a push, a reason technology advanced. And the push for realism can be found in old games. Go play old RP Gs where gold coins have weight, for example. Where you have hunger mechanics despite this not being a survival game. Or RPG with complex systems of bags for example, rather than generic weight inventory. Saying there's a greater push for realism today takes a very myopic view of gaming's history.

Plus ya know, some of the most popular indy games are games who despite their very simplistic graphics often have ludicrously complex mechanics to support "realistic" systems. Look at Dwarf Fortress.

Edited by Ghilz on Nov 8th 2019 at 8:04:50 AM

It's not a bad thing per se. I quite like the stuff people have come up with to make stuff more realistic. Hell, I'm one of the, like, three people who actually enjoyed GTA IV more than V. But it does get taken too far with some things, like the Lion King, or, apparently, Death Stranding. Or, to put it better, the whole Survival "You have to obsessively manage this x amount of bars" genre.

I wouldn't throw a whole genre under the bus because not every single one of them is great. Frankly, calling survival games too realistic is hilarious because the human body doesn't metabolize that quickly. Several use it to contribute to the game's tension and to further sell the world. Remove all that anxiety and you're just a mere spectator of the downward spiral in front of you. One obvious example is the excellent Pathologic games.

Sure, they're not as popular now or whatever, but games like Subnautica, Long Dark, and Pathologic 2 show you can do some good stuff with it.

Edited by UltraWanker on Nov 9th 2019 at 8:30:56 PM

The issue with survival games that I've noticed is that it's rather difficult to find the right balance of their "need meters" going down fast enough to matter, but slow enough to not be a pain in the bottom.

Realistically, getting hungry (in real-time) takes longer than a typical sitting of a video game (not entirely coincidentally). Straight-up dying of hunger takes an amount of time that vastly exceeds the playtime of just about any video game that is actually beatable (2 months or so). A survival game needs to take place in not-entirely real time in order to really work.

Going back to the balancing thing: This is a problem We Happy Few ran into in Early Access. The survival mechanics were getting in the way of exploring the city and doing things players wanted to do in the city. Their solution was to make it so that your survival needs were buffs and debuffs, rather than straight-up necessities to live. I like this solution, personally. Strangely, I imagine that's technically more realistic anyways: I'm really not an expert, but I imagine it's less likely that you'd die of thirst or hunger, but that hunger and thirst would make you too weak to do the things you need to survive. Though that does run into the issue of Unstable Equilibrium.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Nov 9th 2019 at 4:23:21 AM

In the case of Subnautica, I'd put a YMMV. The air bar is the one that's really creatively used, acting as a barrier to exploration (along with crush depth on the various subs).

I've found the food and water bars however to be kind of a bother. Like others have said, it's funny that my character metabolizes that fast. All it serves is to further clog your limited inventory space and demand you pause every few minutes to refill them.

No one really looks at Subnautica and goes "oh the way it manages food and water is great!" it's all about the environment, story and exploration. The fact there's a mode that disables food and water but keeps oxygen is telling.

Edited by Ghilz on Nov 9th 2019 at 7:40:56 AM

I tried the hardcore mode for New Vegas back then and ended up being inconvenienced so much by it in the end.

My patience got extremely thin it would've snap if I didn't quit and went back to normal

suit yourself.

Edited by Dhiruxide on Nov 9th 2019 at 1:43:06 PM

I should prolly use that mode.

I've always prefered the buff-debuff aspect to survival, as well. I think it does a better job of adding to the atmosphere of the game, rather than just amounting to busy work.

Hm, that's fair. Many consider to be Sunbautica to be an overall more relaxing experience, whereas my other examples are a little bit more on the horror side of thing. But yeah, using these things to build atmosphere is the best approach to me. One thing I like with Pathologic 2 is that the supernatural plague actually sped up everyone's metabolism, and by the Playable Epilogue when it's gone your "meters" function 'normally' and don't drain as you tie up loose ends. Combined with the relaxed music, it really does an exczllent job at telling the player they've, despite everything, managed to save the town.

Edited by UltraWanker on Nov 10th 2019 at 1:31:52 AM

One of the discussion I had with a friend was about how Subnautica lacks a map. It's kind of a bother, to not have the biomes laid out for you in game. But the argument was that lacking a map makes the environment all the more oppressive. That the lack of map, along with the limited visibility a lot of the time and the limited oxygen supply builds a tension in the game, by making so easy to get lost or turned around.

It also forces you to pay attention and memorize your surroundings.

Nothing's gonna happen to Jim's channel...right? Right? I don't want to be worried or concerned.

What are you going on about?

Update to youtube TOS says they can disable any account they deem "commercially nonviable". See the general youtube thread. The actual meaning behind it may be just catching accounts that spam completely meaningess trash out to game the algorithm, but when extended this is basically "free to ban whoever, whenever, for whatever reason, lol"

And there also was a suuper weird wave of bans for no reason. Bans that disable not just youtube but entire google account. And refuse all appeals.

So youtube is just going crazy.

Edited by Adannor on Nov 10th 2019 at 12:59:48 PM

In other news, water is still wet.

Jokes aside, that's horrible. Lots of people depend on the stuff they use their google accounts for.

Edited by TheLovecraftian on Nov 10th 2019 at 8:04:53 AM

If I am thinking on the same thing, then people aren't quite being banned for "no reason" but, rather, for "really stupid reason". It is an overzealous anti span measure that Google have been failing to review properly.

So, yeah, still massive concerning and relevant to the TOS situation. You Tube automated systems are awful and their consequences can be devastating.

Yeah. This can literally ruin people's livelihood. Many people rely on Google for work related stuff so losing all data, even temporarily (and we don't know if it will be temporarily) can wreck their jobs.

It's like YouTube wants someone to actually compete with them. The thing is, even if a company manages to be a viable competitor to YouTube, will that competition actually encourage both companies to improve their services, or will it only manifest itself in a way that won't benefit customers, like the sheer number of subscription services that each have their own exclusive shows? Has Jim ever commented on the subscription dilemma?

Look at Epic Games Store. Epic has all the money and influence and yet from what I heard EGS lacks some simple stuff like a shopping cart. That could have changed and I could be wrong.

YouTube has competition. Daily Motion and Veoh are still around, and there's also Vimeo, which this very site uses for the video examples.

YouTube is big due to the network effect. It was the first video sharing site, and because video hosting is expensive, nobody else seriously tried for some time. As a result, YouTube became synonymous with Internet video, rather like how Google is synonymous with search engine. With no other options, everybody who wanted to put videos on the Internet put them on YouTube, because there was nowhere else to go.

And this was powerful. When the likes of Veoh, Daily Motion, and Google started trying to get into Internet video, they faced a powerful hegemon. People searched for videos on YouTube because that's where the videos were, and people posted videos on YouTube because that's where people went for videos. Even Google, who already had hegemony on search engines, couldn't compete with the might of YouTube's network.

Yeah, that's right. Some of ye might be too young to remember this, but Google didn't start YouTube. In fact, for a while they had their own video sharing service, Google Video. But nobody used Google Video because YouTube had a way better selection. So after a couple of years, Google shut down Google Video as they do to so many of their other products, and bought out YouTube for that sweet, sweet influence. But such is the power of the YouTube brand that Google made an exception to their rule of renaming acquisitions to Google N and left it as YouTube, because the YouTube name was and is so strongly linked to Internet video in the minds of users.

And it is that very meme that means other sites have to climb a cliff if they want to compete.