Yeah, I feel like my initial post wasn’t as clear as it should have been making that distinction: I meant that bots should have distinct ‘playstyles’ in any given match, rather than in a way that persists from match to match.

Yeah, I didn’t necessarily mean that the specific bots should carry the same strengths/weaknesses from match to match - if you only have three dozen different names, it would be way to easy to go ‘oh, that’s 343Hundy, he sucks, I can kill him with impunity’ after just a handful of matches. Just that mixing and…

‘According to 343, all of the bots are on equal footing, and any runaway wins were thanks to the most human attribute of all, one that no developer on the planet could write into code: luck.’

See, I don’t know that ‘fandom’ is inherently insular - if you go with fandom as meaning ‘having an overriding affection for something’, that doesn’t necessarily preclude being open to other ideas, or even not being able to understand why other people wouldn’t like the thing YOU like. (I love Star Wars. I also…

I think you’re absolutely right that the specifics vary; my point was more that the end result is always the same: a community that feels like they’re in a position of absolute moral surety, yet are beset on all sides by those who - out of ‘bad faith’, and for no other reason - want to drag them down. And that’s how bo…

Or at least, ‘fandom that’s inherently insular breeds toxicity the way that a physical community that’s inherently insular breeds xenophobia’.

As someone who knows nothing about Tumblr, and very little about Boyfriend Dungeon, I find a lot of the (well-put!) discussion in this piece pretty broadly applicable across social media as a whole, whether that’s ‘social media lets people build communities’ or ‘social media acts as an echo chamber’ or ‘social media…

Cheers! I know it was on GamePass when I originally played it, though it may have left since then: I think most of their agreements are for roughly a year or so, and it’s been well beyond that since I first played. (Though some companies turn around and immediately ‘re-up’, as well.)

I found myself pleasantly surprised by just how well it played on console - I prefer console gaming as a general rule, but this sort of game I often have to play on PC just because the controls don’t translate very well. It helps that (as I recall; it’s probably been a year since I played any) this is the sort of…

I was like 95% sure they’d said as much at some point - but like I said, I’ve been wrong before. It just seems weird they wouldn’t reiterate that here, even if only with just a chyron during the trailer or something: ‘Sable, Day One on GamePass’. (Full disclosure: I watched the individual trailers, but not the actual…

I could have sworn Sable was already slated for GamePass. That’s a problem I have with Microsoft’s messaging in general, though - what’s coming to Xbox at all, versus what’s coming to Xbox exclusively, versus what’s coming to GamePass, versus what’s coming to GamePass on day one... it all gets very muddled, very…

Wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest - but at this point, ‘what gets initially announced as the release date’ and ‘when the game actually releases’ rarely have anything to do with each other. (And to be clear: I mean that as an indictment of ‘publishers announcing release dates years in advance’ rather than ‘the work…

I mean, I get what you’re going for, but I don’t think ‘doesn’t play less than AAA games’ is necessarily a requirement for ‘is disappointed by the delay of a AAA game’. You can be disappointed you’re not getting something specific even if you already have other things you could play - even other things you’re also…

This one specifically, that date always felt... optimistic to me. I couldn’t exactly put my finger on ‘why’, but it felt more like ‘that’s when Sony wants the game to come out’ rather than ‘that’s when Guerilla actually thinks they’ll have the game ready’. (And, as always, yeah, I’d much rather see a game get delayed…

At this point, so much stuff has been delayed I honestly thought this already had been as well. If you’d asked me yesterday when Horizon Forbidden West was due out, I would have said ‘Q2 2022, I think?’

I think the original Destiny ‘beta’ was the first one I recall being like... ‘wait, the only thing this is ‘testing’ is whether or not a general audience finds a vertical slice of the game fun or not: the only reason for the limited availability is marketing, really.’ Take away that ‘only available for a limited…

And then painstakingly explain to them why we couldn’t just download the ‘beta’ off the magazine’s servers - after a detailed explanation of exactly what a ‘magazine’ was, of course.

Unrelated to Halo specifically, I just find it kind of hilarious that this is exactly what ‘beta’ used to mean - a technical test of specific gameplay elements open to a limited number of public players chosen from a limited audience - but now that ‘beta’ has more or less come to mean ‘demo’ to the public at large,…

I thought it was a lot of fun; it just kinda felt like ‘Star Wars meets Dune meets Conan’. Which isn’t at all a bad thing - originality isn’t necessarily required to tell an engaging story. (It’s not as though Star Wars itself was shy about its own influences, for example.)

Fair point; when I saw the movie, it had probably been fifteen years since I read any of the books, so I didn’t remember which ones they were lifting what from, honestly. (It didn’t hurt that I had pretty much the same reaction to the books: for no fault of their own, they didn’t really have anything that other, later…