IMO, the friction between players is the point. The dependency on others in the world is what makes it an MMO, otherwise it’s just a bunch of people playing a single player game next to each other.

But that’s also not the current design meta of MMOs. Dependency on other players means that it’s difficult to have a clear definition of a player’s experience with the game will be, which means it’s hard for the designers to make guarantees about player retention to investors. Imagine telling an investor who doesn’t play games that “we don’t know exactly what keeps players playing, but we do know that it’s possible for one player to ruin another player’s experience.” So over the last 15y, player interdependence has been optimized out of MMOs.

I wind up feeling like my lackadaisical approach is probably fucking up someone else’s farming loop…I feel like the person that cares enough to grind a dungeon reward as fast as possible should get right of way over my happy ass

Those players exist, but they’re not important. I do think most players want to go at a chill pace and have an experience they will remember. Running dungeons as fast as possible to farm gear without interacting with any other players creates a very dependable dopamine loop, and a very forgettable experience.

I don’t think it’s fun to be forced to interact with others in an MMO, but I do think it’s fun when your best option is to interact with other players. Ex. make it possible to do something by yourself in 5h of play, or with a group in less than 1h, and people will just prefer interact. I think cave quests in wow are a great example of this. Caves can be lethal to a player questing by themselves, very inconvenient, but if they run into another person questing the same cave, there is safety in numbers. Their survivability goes up exponentially, and they can complete the work faster. It just makes sense.

I think the cave quest has been optimized out of modern/retail wow. Every quest is easily solo-able, everyone can self-heal, everyone can take on 5+ mobs at a time, everyone can just fly in/fly out. My hope is that they’ve learned how unfun this, and WoW Forever will retain that old-style fun where players just have to talk to each other.

Honestly, the thing that is broken is people’s intelligence. The people propping up the mobile games industry, Mr. Beast videos, AI music, “Verticals”, etc. are all people I’ve never met, and yet somehow represent the vast majority of our population. Those are the people who don’t care about the difference between novel artwork, and a half-assed slop recreation that’s designed to poke their dopamine receptors. Those people are why we can’t have nice things.

Someone will inevitably argue, “no, it’s the billionaires who are thrusting AI on us, we just need to stop them”. And while I agree they showed us the path here, I think we could erase the lot of them from existence, and the remaining population would still use the knowledge leftover to keep going down the same path.

I don’t know if it’s just that the existence of AI will curse humanity to always very efficiently optimize to the lowest common denominator, or if this will pressure the LCD to not be so far down there, but whatever shakes out I don’t think will be in our lifetimes…

You aren’t ever going to recreate the same experience with an emulator. If you want to experience those games as intended, your only option is to buy physical hardware made for playing them.

Did you only read the first sentence?

It could be a virus.

Even if the people who made it didn’t intend to, an AI writing a bunch of code that (obviously) isn’t being vetted beyond “does it run” could very feasibly inject a backdoor/virus of some kind surreptitiously, just because it erroneously thought that was the goal at some point during generation.

This is why open weight models are not good enough. The AI could have been trained to take the right, niche opportunity to inject malicious code, and is also trained to otherwise never behave like that is the case.

You and a lot of other people too. As people get priced out of new stuff, they too will start “mining those seams”.

Except that’s where the mining analogy breaks down. When we’re mining, we’re putting new resources into circulation, increasing supply, driving prices down. But when it comes to old hw, it’s already all in circulation, so as demand for it goes up, supply will go down, and prices will go up.

All hardware has already gotten more expensive, and the headline is that it will continue that trend. My point is that old hw won’t be an exception, it will also continue going up in price. So if you plan to grab old hw next year, you should probably just go ahead and get it now while it’s cheaper.

If the new stuff gets more expensive, the old stuff will too

I think probably the most novel thing gold/silver did back I the day was a real-time clock and day of the week tracker. This meant you had to log in at certain times to hunt certain pokemon, or attend certain events. This isn’t as impressive today, but at the time was a whole new level of immersion fans had never seen before, in any handheld game really.

It was also incredible that they had the new jhoto region, but also the entire gen 1 kanto region (set a few years in the future). I remember that was just mind blowing that this was even possible.

But if you’re not feeling it, don’t force yourself through it. The Pokemon games aren’t for everybody.

Control: Resonant

I think I’m 25-30h in and I don’t want to put it down. Idk how long it is, but all the Remedy Universe games are such a treat, I don’t want it to be over. I’m enjoying the melee-focused combat more than the first game’s TPS combat, I think.

In no particular order

1. Half Life 2
2. Outer Wilds
3. Hollow Knight
4. Pokemon Gold/Silver
5. Tunic

I don’t think retail was a misstep when it comes to milking whales, it’s just not a compelling MMO. So to them, it’s remained a massive success.

I’m also curious about WoW: Forever, mostly because I’ve been hopeful that any studio would see the hype around classic wow and realize there is demand for the old format of MMOs; back before all modern conveniences were added to remove any friction between players. I’ve longed for an experience akin to vanilla, but completely new and unsolved and populated by people who just want to experience organic player interaction.

I can’t believe Valheim just left EA. It’s literally been over 5 years!

Ah I see. So what makes kytyps5 an emulator given that proton is emphatically not an emulator?

I’m trying to understand, what is being emulated?

You said it’s emulation because it handles ps5’s graphics APIs and unified memory. I noted that proton is also translating vulkan to another graphics API. You said it’s different because the api we’re targeting is proprietary and needs to be reverse engineered, implying that is the distinction. Right?

So then doesn’t that imply that if we did the same thing, but without needing to reverse engineer anything, it would now be an apples-to-apples comparison with what proton is doing?

Ok, so if it’s translating to a reverse engineered API, it’s emulation. But if it uses the proprietary documentation and does the same exact translation it…wouldn’t be emulation anymore? What part are we saying is being emulated again?

Isn’t Proton solving the same problem though?

the right of first sale in the digital space just need to be created to fix this mess

That sounds nice at first, but if you think about it, the logical conclusion is that: rather than an artist making a sale per person who wants to experience their work, they would make sales proportional to the maximum number of simultaneous viewers. With digital ownership, it would be trivial to instantly transfer ownership, so the moment someone is done playing a game or watching a movie, they’ll sell it instantly to someone else.

The only content that could benefit in such an economy is low production value slop that seeks to go instantly viral and issue licenses while there’s still demand. Then by the time it dies down they’re on to their next slop hit. That and live-service titles that try to keep people holding their licenses. Short single-player experiences, and games from small creators who rely on passive income from a few new people finding their game over time would sell a few copies at first, and then the licenses out there would just always undercut the purchase of any new license.

Also the exchanges would make a bunch of money by taking a cut of each sale. Which is arguably better than just Sony or Valve taking their cut.

I don’t like it either, but we can’t act like right of first sale for digital licenses would solve all problems and not create any new ones.