Yeah, I think it’s partly a coping mechanism and partly just the current drama that everyone’s aware of, which makes it safe common ground to make jokes about, as well as pretty much the only thing most people can be fairly sure they have in common with others on a platform that is pretty new to them. A week or so ago Mastodon was pretty full of Titan stuff. Things will move on again.
Sort of. It’s still at its core a game about exploring the universe(s) alone, so you can’t unfortunately just decide to inhabit the same freighter as your friend and adventure with them that way, but it has some multiplayer elements you can participate in if you choose to do so. You can visit each others’ freighters and bases, gift the other person stuff and so on, and you can participate in multiplayer Nexus missions (from the Anomaly). There’s also pvp as a default option and hence unfortunately a few griefers, but mostly the community is pretty nice. These days they also sometimes run expeditions where everyone does a bunch of tasks starting from the same planet and on largely the same mission route and on those days, the universe feels anything but lonely. People also build bases to simplify expedition tasks and provide handy supplies for other players - and the odd person builds bases to lure you into going there and then have you toasted in a volcano before you’ve figured out why it’s suddenly so darn hot, so, you know, caveat emptor :-).
Getting the other half to try gaming involved a fair amount of that. A copy of No Man’s Sky of course so we can visit each others’ bases, and a copy of Eurotruck Simulator because honestly it’s pretty relaxing, and so on.
I sort of feel sorry for them, having heard that they are good at what they do, which… isn’t this (it’s point and click adventures apparently).
Honestly, emulation has really helped me to enjoy the games and consoles i own legally. I’ve had BOTW for the Wii U kicking around on a shelf for ages, and a Wii U attached to the TV, but for technical reasons (specifically, family like to use the telly for watching stuff) I’ve never been able to get into the game on the Wii. Realising I could emulate it on my gaming PC finally made it practically accessible.
Interesting one, this. I have a tendency to associate “Annapurna” with brilliant games because of titles like Stray, everything thatgamecompany did and so on, but thinking about it this is Annapurna’s first go at running a game design studio themselves so honestly idk what to expect. Trailer looks good, at least.
IRC and eggdrops, or the equivalent. Okay so we spent half our time netsplit and pinging each other forlornly across gaps but you could do really worthwhile things with those basic tools, and most things were very portable across providers so you could straightforwardly move the whole kit and caboodle if a reason to do so arose, and you could self-host. I appreciate that this is probably more a commentary on slack/discord than forum culture, though.
It’s usually at about this point that I resort to tearing at things with the teeth of an (unimportant) key. Sometimes works.
The standout example of this for me would be Qube. I was having a bit of a difficult time when I first bought the game and that soundtrack lured me in and getting through to the end just became a total compulsion. I was a lot calmer by the time it was over, too.
Kairo had a bit of a similar effect on me, except that the very last jump in the whole game just would not work, spoiling the zen. Quantum Conundrum also got a full playthrough in one sitting but tbh I think that was because I wasn’t enthusiastic about coming back to it another day.
I kind of don’t want to be excited about it because a lot of component parts of the game seem to exist in other games, plus I don’t really play that many Bethesda games, but by the time they got around to “oh yeah and here is a mecha ship design” it was pretty clear that I was going to end up buying a copy of this weird No Kerbal’s Dangerous Sky crossover thingy.
I think in part there’s an essential misunderstanding of current events at the core of Reddit’s behaviour (not yours, I mean - spez/investors/etc).
Historically the rule was supposed to be ‘if it’s free, you’re the product’, which is to say that our attention (and profiles and demographics) were on sale to advertisers. The big recent development is someone figuring out, or thinking they’ve figured out, how to monetise us a different way - specifically, by using the things we create as training data for AI. A sensible organisation would continue to balance these two possible cash flows and, since both really require user retention to remain profitable in the long run, seek a middle ground. But the perception is that there’s more money in the training data than there is in the user attention, so they focus on maximising that and spit on the users. The obvious consequence is that they lose users and their source of training data dries up.