I love folks over at lemmy :D

Something that’s very different, unique, with its own touch to everything.

1. There’s very little explanation about the story despite a lot of really high quality cut scenes
2. The combat is turn based but also very real time due to parries, dodges, jumps and what not
3. The turn based combat is very addictive and yet very easy to understand.
4. The art, you probably have never seen stuff like you see in the game
5. The dialogues are really well thought
6. Music, fresh.

Basically, they are doing a lot of stuff that isn’t what you commonly see in games yet it all works really well together.

[…] The formula to make […] Game of the year is stupidly simple, but somehow it keeps on getting lost.

The studio made their game because they wanted to make a game that they wanted to play themselves.

They didn’t make it to increase market shares. They didn’t make it to serve a brand. They didn’t have to meet arbitrary sales targets or fear being laid off if the didn’t meet those targets.

Furthermore, the people in charge forbade them from cramming the game with anything whose only purpose was to increase revenue, and don’t serve the game design.

• Sven, Game Awards 2024

Clair Obscure: Expedition 33. 60 hours in, still going through all the content in act 3. It’s really addictive, beautiful and fresh.

Mafia 1 DE and 2 both were largely linear and didn’t waste your time with fluff. I really enjoyed those two. Mafia 3 on the other hand had good story drip fed to you after hours of grind.

Ubisoft like mechanics:

• Each area has wiretaps that help a lot, but are very much like liberating radio towers, less grand.
• Once you open up a district, you’ve to do a checklist of repetitive missions, x2, and then go back to one of the areas from the already done missions to kill the underboss. Rinse and repeat 9 times. So that becomes more like (6 missions + 1) x 2 x 9. Some missions are optional. But it’s quite a lot. There’s some variety and some interesting story beats, but when it’s given in such grindy manner you have to have a lot of patience to enjoy it.
• A lot of the missions are set up like far cry outposts or assassinate a target style. In fact you are incentivised to play stealth, to the point you start feeling like an assassin or hitman.

Mafia 3. I’m probably half way through and starting to get burnt out by the grind and the buggy nature of the game. It is infected by Ubisoft formula, but it’s much more notorious and less fluid. Glad they are going a different route for Mafia 4

I don’t know since I’ve only played DE, but the sound tracks were very nostalgic and reminiscent of game radios like Fallout 3.

Sounds good. I really like changes that just flow from start to end, though they’re rare. It’s easy to forget about collectibles if they’re too annoying, so that’s that.

That sounds great! I’ll be playing it on Series X, should be okay.

I’m planning to play Sleeping Dogs next after completing Mafia trilogy! Hope the base game is not too repetitive.

Just finished Mafia 1 DE and 2 DE. Taking a breather before I dive in 3, which I suppose will require a lot of patience.

I really enjoyed 1 and 2. They’re anti GTA in some senses where there’s basically little to no fluff or sandbox, just pure story telling and some gameplay on the side. But the stories are definitely so well written. The DLCs of 2 showed signs of GTAfication, and the first 30 mins of 3 also reek of it, but I feel the first two definitely feel timeless only because of their writing.

About to finish Alan Wake 2 and its DLCs. It’s a great game but for me it’s bit too artsy fartsy. The flow breaks each time you switch the character, which in turn affects the pacing. Having said that the concept is cool, the fmvs integrated into the game are really high quality, they act as emmisive light sources, causing surroundings to reflect it. Pretty cool.

Doom 2016 and Alan Wake 2. Enjoying both of them!

I think there’s a marketing slide from AMD saying they’re renaming their GPUs to better match competition. So 9070 series cards are supposed to match 5070 series cards, that’ll be 5070, 5070 Ti as of now and super later on.

While it’s true that both python and js are interpreted languages, making them highly portable, JS at that time was a very lightweight language with a robust runtime offered by mozjs, that was built to be easy to embed into other systems, while python was designed for being the framework in which you build apps directly, hence requiring deeper dependencies.

Sources:

https://blog.fishsoup.net/2008/10/22/implementing-the-next-gnome-shell/#comment-1691

https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2008/09/09/embeddable-languages-an-implementation/

https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/120edc0/comment/jdgwyoq/

From what I can gather

1. JS is system agnostic, doesn’t require compilation or multiple dependency binaries, as opposed to say Python.
2. JS is widely understood, could get more contributors.
3. JS is a good enough scripting language made with UI stuff in mind.

I also see people lamenting that lua wasn’t chosen, so there’s that.

And that’s a fact

Fun fact, roughly half of gnome-shell codebase is written in JavaScript.

Stalker 2 had bugs on launch yet it easily sold 1 million copies. Black Myth Wukong uses frame gen to achieve 60 fps on PS5 and otherwise it locks to 45 fps, yet it has broken all records. Elden Ring is still a stuttery mess on PC and barely hits 60 fps on consoles, even the $700 one, yet it’s beloved.

These people aren’t the ones talking about resolutions and frame rates on X, but just playing the damn game in millions.

Just like millions use sub par TV settings and stream music or don’t have much clue about team sports but still have a great time.

I feel it’s a bit like any hobby. You’d see casual film enjoyers and then those who refuse to watch unless it’s a bluray on their 4k Dolby Vision TV with 1000 nits OLED brightness. There are some who just enjoy listening to music on their airpod knockoffs by streaming on YouTube music and then there are those who buy $500 headphones with high quality gold plated aux wire and a custom DAC and use some obscure format to really enjoy music. There are some who enjoy team sports and then there are those who know personal routine of each player and the wetness of the grass or the year of the ball’s manufacturing and its impact on throw.

It’s a spectrum.

Thanks again for sharing this. I’ll try to read more about this.

Of course I know how close it is, I was there. But the drills weren’t casual drills obviously, they were in response to National Day celebration. It actually made us nervous about our trip.

A side note: I’m happy to learn more and understand different perspectives, however what’s with ad hominem attacks of vibes, propaganda and all? You can share your thoughts without making it sound like a keyboard war.