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Elden Ring doesn’t even feel like a game for everyone who liked Dark Souls. They completely lost the plot on what a fun challenge is.
Elden Ring doesn’t even feel like a game for everyone who liked Dark Souls. They completely lost the plot on what a fun challenge is.
It’s crazy that this is real. It looks like a comic someone would make to make fun of the idea. Like the fact that they’re watching some guy shoot someone, then the burger commercial comes on and the guy stands up and cheers “McDonalds!” Before sitting back down to watch more of guy shooting other guy.
This is peak “dumb Americans” humor, and they’re using this unironically to describe their business idea.
I’ve been torn on the game as well. The platforming has been enraging/draining and you need to do so much of it in the process of backtracking around the map for metroidvania stuff. I’ve been kept going by the intrigue of the secrets, but I’m not sure how long that can carry me past this much frustration, especially as new discoveries get fewer and further between.
It seems I’m near the end of the basic ending, but honestly if I don’t end up going beyond that I’d consider the game a failure. The core gameplay isn’t fun enough if I don’t get some solid payoff on the secret hunting.
It’s a shame. I really like these kinds of games that reward exploration and discovery. Tunic is up there as one of my favorite games of all time. But the key there is that while there was some skill based combat I had to struggle through, once I did it, I usually didn’t have to do it again to get around the map. I constantly need to deal with the same platforming bits and puzzles to get back through certain parts of the map in this game.
Just like the Simpsons or XKCD, there’s always a relevant Star Trek episode. It’s unfortunate none of my friends have watched any.
I tried a 2nd time and just got the same automated message about the 2hr limit.
…Except you knew it was sarcasm. Hence why you made your comment in the first place. Unless you thought I was earnestly praising Google for making new ads?
Idk, because it’s a joke and I’m not really that invested in the specifics of the latest ad garbage a tech company is pushing? Ads expand to fill all available space. If it can eventually become a video ad, it will. Just give it time. These things never go in the other direction.
I already adblock. For a good reason. The ads only get worse. I’d be surprised if it didn’t turn into that after some time. It’s not an unreasonable assumption.
Oh yeah that too. It’s bad enough when YT does the thing where it pulls up suggested videos when you pause.
Ah yes, because what I want when I tell my computer to stop playing audio and video is for YouTube to play some audio and video of some random thing I didn’t ask for at like 3x the volume of the video I just paused. Thanks google. Such an innovative company!
Agreed. This is one of the frustrating casualties of live service microtransaction games. Can’t let people run servers or mod it because otherwise how can you sell them stuff?
I’ve tried looking into that but I couldn’t get it working. It didn’t add any subscriptions to my feed. Going to the site now I don’t even seem to be able to click on anything. I just tried disabling my ad blocker and now I can click on stuff, but none of it won’t load any videos. Any idea what’s up with it? I’d love to be able to switch off YT if I can.
Maybe I missed it, but do they say that anywhere in the course of the gameplay or required interactions for getting into the gameplay? If it’s missable, it’s going to be missed. That’s fine for some stuff, but if your messaging relies on people with the most incurious ideology actively seeking it, you’re going to be disappointed.
We’re talking about it because it is something people misunderstood. You can’t wholly blame the audience without acknowledging the flaws of the media. Not that they bear no responsibility for their reading of it, but it’s not without value to critique the way the message was delivered.
There are some others, although I don’t know that they always need to do a “this is bad btw” message. Like Paday or GTA are crime fantasies. The player gets to have fun pretending to act outside the bounds of law and/or morality and get away with it in a safe environment. In the same way you root for the thieves in a heist movie. Although in a movies usually they do more to give you reasons to like the heroes like giving them some sad backstory.
These aren’t really trying to be a political commentary on crime. They might have a component of criticizing the society that forces people into crime, but I don’t know they have anything to say about the act or the people who do it in specific. And they don’t really need to. Not just because they don’t need to send a political message, but also because the game depends on the general understanding that crime is bad and. If it didn’t have that cultural context as a backdrop, the element of the game that makes the player feel like they’re getting away with something they shouldn’t be wouldn’t be effective.
Or to make a more direct thematic comparison: Call of Duty. They’re military fantasy games. The games are pretty much unironic imperialist propaganda. They, like a lot of big budget action movies that include military hardware, get direct support from, and in exchange cede editorial control to, the US military. In these games you are cast as a heroic soldier for either the US or an ally fighting against a bunch of evil, scary foreigners who want to destroy our way of life. When the bad guy turns out to be part of the military, it’s one rogue guy/faction. The one setting that doesn’t twist real life imperialist invasions as being good is WWII. But in the broader context, by placing the fight against the Nazis next to conflicts which have largely been about resource extraction and access to markets, they project the roles of WWII, where America is the good guy and the ones they’re fighting are evil, onto those invasions.
While CoD has to do some work to characterize the enemies to avoid humanizing them, they are heavily leaning on the pre-existing cultural assumption that America is good and brings freedom and democracy to the world. So while I’d criticize CoD for being what it is, I can’t really critique its effectiveness in conveying its message. It might not win over someone who already knows what’s up, and it probably doesn’t make any difference to the complete fascist nutjobs, for most people who don’t like violence and war, but might be convinced it’s necessary for some greater good, it helps reinforce the message that the wars we’re fighting are necessary and are for the greater good.
So yeah. My criticism of Helldivers 2 isn’t just that it doesn’t say it to your face that the things it depicts and represents are bad. It’s just that if it is a satire (and I don’t really have any reason to doubt that given a lot of context), I don’t know that it’s that effective at conveying its message. Sort of responding to some of the other comments: I don’t think you can reasonably expect that the majority of players playing a mission based co-op live service action game are going to stop to read lore or chat with NPCs that aren’t mechanically relevant. So if you want anything to get across, it has to happen in the course of gameplay, maybe even integrated into the mechanics. Granted, that game might not turn out to be fun to play, but that might just be a case for video games in general not being a very effective vehicle for anti-violence messaging.
Going back to those 3 groups:
For anti-imperialists, it doesn’t matter. We know already.
For straight up fascists, it doesn’t really do anything to make them re-evaluate their worldview. Maybe they might get something out of the way the lives of the soldiers is so valueless, but I kind of doubt it. But it certainly wouldn’t change their minds about their enemies being non-human and dangerous/worthy of being killed.
For the average person… they might get the overly patriotic propaganda part of it, but there are so many times when these kinds of people recognize that, but then are like “it’s just like some communist dictatorship! Good thing we’re not like that.” There’s zero self awareness. For the part of it about the nature of the enemy and the necessity of military conflict, the killer bugs and bots that we see in game really only reinforce the idea that this is a necessary conflict.
Idk. It’s fine if the game wants to just be a fun goofy shooting game, and I don’t begrudge it for trying to be something more than that even if it fails, but it’s kind of hard to give it much credit either when it basically just copied someone else’s homework poorly.
So, I think there’s something weird about the nature of the satire in Helldivers 2 that might lead to some problems.
I don’t feel like it’s that controversial to say that the game is pretty obviously ripping off Starship Troopers. Like to a point that goes way beyond mere homage. Now I don’t view this as an inherent problem, because I don’t believe IP should be a thing, but this fact, combined with the way they’ve adapted it into a game leads to some issues.
The game basically has all the aesthetic elements of the satire of Starship Troopers: The over the top patriotism, nationalism, militarism, the devaluing of the individual and life, etc. On it’s own, this is enough for people who have already become disillusioned with the US war machine to get what it’s saying. However, to someone who’s deep in the propaganda that America is a force for good in the world that is simply fighting evil enemies who hate freedom and democracy, there is no cognitive dissonance there. Of course we’re gonna be all patriotic about fighting against some big bad enemy that’s threatening us.
Not that people didn’t also misunderstand Starship Troopers, but a key difference it has in driving it’s point home is that moment at the end of the movie when they capture one of the bugs and learn it feels fear and then they all cheer. We see that no, the bugs aren’t some unthinking monsters bent on destroying us, they’re intelligent creatures and we’re the invaders, but the people are so indoctrinated at this point that this fact doesn’t even phase them.
Helldivers 2 doesn’t really have that anywhere within the main “text” of the game. Sure, you can read some lore and get a bit of that from some conversations with NPCs on the ship, but that’s not really how people interact with games, or at least a game like this. Most people are going to load into a lobby, pick a mission, maybe mess around with their loadout, then go jump into a game where the bugs ARE horrible unthinking monsters who represent an existential threat to humanity. In the ways the game lets you interact with it, there’s no option where you make peace with the bugs or come to understand the horror of what you’re doing. The bugs are just enemies and you have an assortment of guns and bombs to interact with them.
So since the mechanics of the game itself don’t really mesh well with the message of the satire, what it relies on is either a) You already having seen Starship Troopers or b) You already understanding imperialism, fascism, and recognizing those traits in America’s military culture.
It’s kind of a weird place for a piece of media to be when it’s message only makes sense in the context of another similar piece of media or when the player/reader/viewer already agrees with it’s message.
It’s not terribly surprising that it hasn’t had any success breaking through to the people who need their minds changed.
Nobody is saying it isn’t. But if you genuinely care about the harm it causes and don’t just want an excuse to throw political enemies in jail, then the solution is obviously not to criminalize its use. The correct thing to do is to provide social and health services to addicted people to get them off of it.
All criminalization does is ruin the lives of the people it targets and enrich the prison industry.
$10 million easy. Sure maybe you could get more if you were going back in time and insider trading on everything. But $10m is already enough money to live a comfortable life, especially if you just invest it in something safe. And that way you don’t need to go through school and puberty again.
Not that this has anything to do with Jan 6th since it was just right wingers throwing a hissy fit, but elections in America don’t work. People aren’t given real alternatives to the establishment through all sorts of structural barriers. The government doesn’t represent people’s interests to any statistically significant degree. When you consider the US’s efforts to coup left wing governments around the world, it’s easy to extrapolate that if we ever were to successfully elect someone who could enact real change, the military/intelligence agencies would step in to stop them.
You don’t need to defend our broken system just to call right wingers fascists. If anything their prominence is an indictment of our system. That our government is more open to people who want to subjugate the majority of the country and violate our supposed constitutional rights than people who represent the majority of the country tells you all you need to know about American “democracy.” And before you say it, no, it’s not because a lot of people want fascism, they’re still in the minority by far, but our electoral process is set up to favor them over more majoritarian interests.
Maybe they’re raising an army of nature’s angriest animal.