Ninety-Three

I doubt it, I can't imagine a change that would affect how I use it in any way, other than perhaps making it boot faster (though if anything, I expect four years of updates to do the opposite).

I bought my 3DS ages and ages ago (long enough ago to qualify for the Ambassador program that I never got to use) and never messed with any of the internet stuff because it absolutely refused to communicate with my router. I recently tried it with my new router and got it to recognize the network after only moderate struggling. Now I have a new problem: I have no idea how to use any of the 3DS's wireless features. I want to download a game demo that I'm told is in the online store, and I have no idea how to do that. I don't even seem to have a store button in the menu, and a quick Google is completely unhelpful. Is there some magic step to get to the Eshop?

Well as you know, fun is zero sum. If you're having less fun, then I must be having more fun!

The traditional AAA hype model (perhaps best exemplified by Destiny) is definitely gross, it just seems to me like a completely different thing. I think it's the fact that AAA hype comes from marketing departments, faceless corporate entities composed of people doing their jobs to make a game as popular as possible. It's hard to feel like I've been deceived when I can't point at a specific lie, or a face that made it.

It's not so much the mistakes as the fact that he seems unable or unwilling to change the behaviour that leads to the mistakes. That's fair, it may have been poor word choice on my part. I'd meant to suggest that he was incompetent about marketing, but careless is probably a better way to describe it. Sure, "hype" is an overall unhelpful thing. I remember Spore where in retrospect, nothing could have possibly lived up to the vague imaginings I had based on that initial one hour E3 demo (and that didn't even really misrepresent anything). That said, I think there's a big difference between Watchdogs hype and Molyneux hype. Watchdogs was a pretty disappointing game, but I can't think of many (any, actually, but there were probably some) PR promises the game broke, it just wasn't as good as people had hoped. Molyneux, on the other hand promises specific things. It's not "This game will be great and you'll enjoy it", but "Knock off an acorn and you can watch it grow into a tree!" Getting let down on a promise of "This will be good" is something we're all used to, and it's an inevitable consequence of marketing (no one's not going to say their game is good), but when they say "This will have X" and it doesn't, it feels worse. It's not fair to say "They could have made it good if only they'd tried harder", but regarding something like acorns, it's not as if they failed because they simply weren't up to the task, they chose not to invest the work to implement it. Now maybe they decided it wasn't a good use of their time to add acorns, but the point remains that if keeping their promise was important to them, they could have put in the effort to do so, and they didn't.

Ah, hard to tell on the internet. I hear the Unicode company is implementing a sarcasm font next year, that should make things a little better.

I definitely agree with this part, Walker was going in with a list of points to address, and each of those points was one of Molyneux's perceived failures. However, as Walker put it: I feel like that was Walker's goal, to get Molyneux to recognize his tendency to overpromise, and hopefully do something about it. Unforunately it's a matter of discerning the intentions of someone we've never met, so I'm not sure how much further a disagreement over those intentions can go. If you read it as Walker setting out to make Molyneux look bad, I understand the reaction. I agree that Molyneux is (seemingly and probably) not malicious, but I don't think that alone is reason not to villify him. These expectations weren't put on him unexpectedly by the gaming community, every expectation arose because of a promise Molyneux made. If it's not his fault through malice, it's still his fault through incompetence. The central problem is still Molyneux. If he could rein himself in and think through "Okay, can I actually deliver this?" before promising, we wouldn't be here. I'm saying that asking every discussion to have a purpose is unfair. People can aimlessly discuss important things.

I think at this moment in society, that's outside of anyone's control. Biddle was responsible for the Sacco tweet taking off, but it's easy to imagine a world where it took off without any one significant person or malice behind it: one person gets it seen by two, who each get it seen by two more, and so on and so on until it's blown up just as big as it did having Biddle to kick things off. If you can remove Biddle from the equation as an instigator, and still end up with the tweet blowing up, we'll still end up with the company firing her to save face at the end. From that perspective, the core problem is essentially the way human nature interacts with social media, and both human nature and social media are unlikely to go away. I really have no idea what to propose as a way to fix the scenario. I'd say companies shouldn't fire people for non-work-related problems due to public pressure, but it seems like we'd have more luck changing human nature than the actions of profit-motivated companies. EDIT: I don't mean to say that because of this, we should give up on calling people out. Just that it is outside of our means to entirely prevent something from becoming another Sacco tweet and getting someone fired over what is ultimately not that big a deal. Maybe that's rare enough that it's an acceptable cost of doing business, maybe not, I'm not trying to weigh in there (it is a very complicated issue that would take a lot of thinking through), just recognize that the cost exists.

I present to you, a single person here in this thread who, while aware of Molyneux's habit of exaggeration, expected Molyneux to deliver better than he did with Godus. That's me as well. I never think his games will be as "revolutionary" as he likes to claim, but I still sometimes believe a thing he says. What bothers me about a lot of the "In Peter's defense" arguments I hear is that they seem to say "Yeah, but we all know he overpromises and underdelivers, so why are we talking about it?" Because it's bad, that's why! Should he be absolved of his failures simply because they were predictable? As for what we're trying to achieve, this is a forum on the internet. Two threads down you'll find someone saying "I really liked this thing and it was cool" just to share their opinion, and nearby is a page of posts on the pronunciation of "senpai". We're not trying to achieve anything, we're discussing things because we like discussion. No one asks of any of the other threads "What are we actually trying to achieve here?" I think your wording has helped me understand why other people are angrier at John Walker than I am. He didn't tell Molyneux "You are a pathological liar", he asked him "Would you say that you are a pathological liar?" To me, there's a significant difference between asserting it to be the case and asking it, but a lot of people seem to be reacting as though Walker opened with an assertion. As a question, it's certainly floating the possiblity (you don't ask someone if they're a murderer unless you think they may have committed a murder, after all), but neither is it insisting it to be the case. Would you say it's the case that to you, the distinction is less important? If so, I understand the reaction to Walker: outright calling Molyneux a pathological liar would be pretty shitty.

I ended up pursuing a romance with one of my officers, and I realized that this game handles romance in an interesting and perhaps unique way. Pretty much every game I can think of has what I'd call an affection model of relationships: You do things that make the person like you, and eventually they like you enough that romance ensues. Sunless Sea instead looks at romance as a matter of compatibility. One of your officers is a wild rogue with no interest in "tiresomely sincere" lovers, to romance them you must have a Veils stat (stealth and skullduggery) at least 20 points higher than your Hearts. The doctor respects insight and has no patience for crassness, your Mirrors (perception) stat must be at least 20 points higher than Iron (the "combat" stat). Is your character a 150 Iron badass war hero? The doctor's not interested, and you'll never get to pursue her. It's very interesting, both from a mechanical implementation perspective, and just because it made me realize that seemingly everyone else handles romance essentially the same way. I suppose it comes down to the fact that beyond a "Light side points vs dark side points" system, most games don't really let you define a personality for your character (sure you can roleplay, but the game doesn't recognize that your roleplaying adds up to, say, "I'm a loose cannon cop who doesn't play by the rules"). Then again, Sunless Sea managed to take character stats and build them into personality, so maybe all those other games are just slouches.

I think what might be good is to limit not the sanitarium's effectiveness, but its capacity. You can use it to keep one or two heroes in flawless shape, or you can cure the more serious disadvantages across your whole team. Basically make the building into more of a choice, and less of a mechanism for converting resources into sanity.

The best theory I've heard is that the Valve offices look like The Wolf of Wall Street. They haven't made HL3 because it's a nonstop parade of hookers and blow and marching bands. Seriously though, it seems Valve employs a lot more people than they put out content, I have to wonder where all those hours of work are going. Like what's the average's employee's day consist of? Do they keep getting halfway through a project then scrapping it? Or does everyone just play DOTA 8 hours a day and call it playtesting?

Ditto. The tutorials teach you all the game verbs, but after that they just dump you in a level with a handicap in your favour and say "Go". I haven't been losing badly, but I'm probably developing a ton of bad habits and wasting a lot of time as I figure out strategy for myself. A tutorial that teaches grand strategy instead of just moment-to-moment gameplay would be very welcome. For instance, how far abroad is it wise to build your mines to get access to better resources? That's one of those things I'm just having to develop a feel for (the game isn't explicit in giving the numbers for fuel consumption per distance, so I can't just do the math), and it would be great to have a tutorial tell me "This is about how far you want to go". With how clear and simple most of the game's numbers are, it's kind of aggravating when they don't explain systems. What causes market prices to change, is it only when a player buys or sells that resource? How is fuel consumed? And why does it automatically buy water to keep colonists hydrated, but not to run my farms? I don't know if I have it in me to watch hours of video tutorial to learn the game. I may put it down and wait for a better in-game tutorial.

Technically they also have Shamus Young's column, but I don't read the Escapist except when he links his columns from his main website.

My approach to the issue comes down to "It's okay to say something if it's accurate". Molyneux definitely has a pathology, he admitted in the interview that he can't help but get excited and promise things. And there's no question that he says a lot of things that turn out to not be true. From there it's just a question about intent. Some of Molyneux's falsehoods seem deliberate (in that the only explanation is either intent, or incompetence so grand that intent seems more likely [see: project deadlines, budget/publisher estimates, Linux port, etc]). That makes "Do you think you're a pathological liar?" seem like a fair question to me. EDIT: I didn't like some of this post, so I edited.

Well it didn't quite fall. The Bazaar stole London three decades ago. Of course, only revolutionaries say "stole" any more. I am so in love with the game's weird lore.

That one I'm even more inclined to defend. I'm hesitant to outright say that Molyneux should be called a pathological liar, because to a lot of people that implies intent which of course we can't know is there. However... If Molyneux added a stretch goal he knew he couldn't deliver, that was shitty of him. Just objectively shitty. So he deserves to be called on it. And it really looks like that was the case, given this earlier Molyneux quote regarding Kickstarter:

Yeah, although I didn't examine those statistics in depth. If arrests were distributed evenly, at the 2012 rate, everyone would be arrested three times in their life.

What the fuck? That's an insane number So I did some rearranging of numbers because I was having trouble with perspective. 50,000 raids per 300,000,000 US citizens per year, times an 80 year lifespan and an assumed one person affected per raid. It works out to one person affected per 75 US citizens. At 2005's rate of raids per capita, more than 1% of US citizens will be the subject of a raid at some point during their life. Jesus, that is an insane number. I also did the same rearranging with the US arrest rate out of curiosity, and holy crap. But that's probably a matter for another thread.

I agree that it may not have been necessary, but I don't take that to mean "Walker shouldn't have done it". There's an area of "Acceptable" between "Necessary" and "Not okay". Calling someone a pathological liar is not okay in general conversation, but if Molyneux hasn't earned it, I think we can at least agree he's working towards it.

Boy, that is a long article. Interesting read. I found this to be the most interesting quote: I have no clue if he's being honest any more. On the one hand, it fits with his Manic Pixie Dream Developper reputation, but on the other hand, surely even the biggest optimist will have reality break through their bubble at some point. I guess I can't say I believe him, because if he was going to lie about Godus, that's exactly the lie he'd tell. After being caught in what was either a lie, or a truth error in his favour, he said this about Konrad. That gave me a rather dreary epiphany. It doesn't matter if he's lying or incompetent, the point is that we can't trust him. As John put it:

So you're willing to accept 60 deaths as permissable in the pursuit of...? My point was right there.

I too must defend common knowledge. Taking from this 2014 article: And 50000 raids were executed in the year 2005 alone (source: same article). Let's call 2005 a bad year, and guess the figure at 25000 per year from 1995 to 2014. That works out to one innocent/nonviolent death per 8000 raids. Now there's an argument to be made that one in 8000 is still too high and SWAT should do better, but that's hardly attempted murder level lethality.

No, if you for instance, raise a particular faction to Supremacy, that has some wide-reaching effects, and those will go away on reset, as will permanent world-changes, like the death of specific characters. To be clear, the lore and story are not randomly generated, they're prewritten and the same each time, it's just that your progress through them resets with each new character.

That's the story I keep hearing about this game. "The negative quirks are a fascinating element, then you get the sanitarium, start rotating out characters between missions and therapy, and that entire dimension of gameplay just goes away". I hope it's a balance issue rather than working as intended, and they're going to nerf to the sanitarium so that you're forced to deal with disadvantages again.