It’s just nice reading everyone ripping this article to shreds. Thanks for making my day brighter.

Taxes are a percentage of profit/income/wealth. If someone is getting hit with nearly a million dollars in taxes I would argue that likely means they need to be getting hit with even more taxes. We tax the wealthy too little practically everywhere in the world, and one doesn’t get millions of dollars wealthy without systemic injustice - not even speaking about hundred millionaires and billionaires who should absolutely have 95% of their wealth taken away and redistributed to the public for the betterment of the species and the planet.

I’m arguing some of the developers know it’s broken (including arguably all PoE leads and No Rest for the Wicked leads)(I would extend this to an even larger group but I won’t to keep it verifiable).

I don’t think all isometric ARPGs copy D2 because they think it’s not broken, I think they do it because it was an innovative genre defining game for its time, most of the devs look back to it with nostalgia, and it was a blockbuster hit. And I wouldn’t minimize the innovations in the scene to just QoL. I think what PoE1 and 2 and LE are doing around their systems is very innovative, including their financing model and tech. I would argue that they’re still fundamentally maintaining the moment to moment loop while expanding all the subsystems that give the game as a whole massive complexity and content - and that’s great but will inevitably pale in comparison to a game that innovates the moment to moment gameplay. I think most genres have innovated their core moment to moment gameplay compared to their genre defining counterparts 25 years ago, but that ARPGs haven’t.

And I completely disagree on my expectations being “unrealistic, unknown to the genre, or incompatible”. That’s laughable imo and something only a player incapable of imagining change would say.

• to be self-insert character or at least one of many characters as a form of self expression
  • Diablo 4, LE, and PoE2 (going forward “the big 3”) all do this well to extremely well. Diablos transmog system is peak, PoE2 has unbelievably good cosmetics and they’ve just started, LE is a small studio but I still feel like I’m playing my wizard when I play a wizard.
• I want mechanical self expression ideally in the form of dozens or hundreds of skills and their customization along with a skill tree that enables further customization on how your character plays. My load out of 10 abilities should look and feel and play very differently than your load out of 10 abilities.
  • the big three all do this but do it poorly. Diablo has low variability in abilities, poor customization, and my load out consists of mostly number go up choices. But importantly the bones are there, this makes it neither non-compatible nor unknown to the genre, it just means these devs did a poor job implementing it. PoE has a ton of this but fails to provide a meaningful load out or mechanical skill expression because nearly all builds converge to press a single button to blow up the screen and a second button to move around the screen fast. Again, they have all of the bones and far more customization than I’d ever expect from a game, and yet a lot of it is meaningless the second you close Path builder and actually start playing because it trivializes the game.
• I want to fight monsters and bosses that are varied, challenging, and uniquely rewarding ideally. Challenging and varied are putting in a lot of work in that sentence so I want to further expound and say combat should feel like a dance, a puzzle, high octane, and skill rewarding (not simply build skill or farming skill, but actual play skill).
  • the big three have varied down, and arguably uniquely rewarding down (D4 sucks at this imo) but they all falter on challenging or good moment to moment gameplay. I would argue PoE2 campaign is pretty good for this, but mid-end game is pretty awful and it really only ever shines in the boss arenas. They seem incapable of further innovating the mob combat because they seem to differentiate good combat in a boss arena (engaging) from good combat while mapping (mindless). LE’s Pinnacle boss is fantastic for this (and I like it better than all PoE bosses at this moment). Even as I heap praise in these areas, I’m rarely using reactive abilities, I’m rarely using multiple skills in a fight that aren’t just buff my one damage skill. Again, none of this is incompatible, none of this is unknown to the genre, all of this is achievable, and in a lot of places already in place just used poorly from a design perspective.
• I want the pacing around playing to be focused on fighting and clearing encounters more so than exploration and discovery.
  • the big three do this perfectly, as that’s essentially one of the ARPG innovations - fight fight fight and then plan/craft/prepare then fight fight fight. I think poe has some work with their towers and LE has some work with the size and rewards of their maps, but it’s hard to tease out changes here when this is typically the most mindless portion of all the games. They keep me clicking blow up screen at the right pace, I just wish I didn’t have to. Again, this quality is completely inline with the genre and done well.
• I want an additional system of collectibles that further modify the way I play and look, most consistently this looks like loot or crafting (this however should not be primarily satisfied with #'s go up).
  • again, the big 3 all do this well. I wish the qualities on items were more impactful and not just number go slightly up, but generally they’re doing okay. The uniques being added to PoE2 have been awesome to see, like the song crossbow and stuff, so I’m hopeful. Diablo let’s you collect transmogs. Again, totally typical of this genre.
• I want to do this with friends in a multiplayer format, ideally at times requiring multiplayer because that opens up a lot of unused design space (looking at you remnant 2 which was awesome or only theoretically Diablo world bosses and black dungeon).
  • multiplayer is possible and rewarded in all of the big 3. Only Diablo has content designed for multiplayer. I think PoE has a ways to go on making this experience more multiplayer friendly, in fact it’s my least favorite to play with friends despite it being my favorite of the three by miles. I wish they’d design more multiplayer content but I understand why they don’t. If the combat wasn’t so screen explosion based it would probably be a decent enough experience. Again, another quality entirely a part of this genre already just not fully implemented well.

So what exactly is incompatible here? I think the answer you’d give is engaging combat, because that’s what I always get when I have this conversation. “All changes that have already been made to the genre are great but no more changes to the genre would be good.” That’s the sentiment I always get. “I want to mindlessly grind mobs while watching a show I can only partially pay attention to on my second screen.” Is something I get a lot as well. Which just feels like a mobile game, an idle clicker, but not what most people want when they go to play a video game including in the ARPG genre. Even if we said there’s room for idle clickers in the genre, why are our stand out examples all idle clickers, that to me feels like a clear sign of stagnation in a genre. Dota, rainbow six, BG3, BioShock, portal 2 - none of these games would be better if they were less engaging such that we could watch TV on the side, so why is it okay when talking about the genre defining games of our Gen in isometric Diablo-like ARPGs?

I think you’re getting the wrong impression.

I absolutely like isometric ARPGs, I just like them exponentially more in theory. Most of them have barely innovated on Diablo 2’s core moment to moment loop and it’s something that seemingly everyone is aware of but no studio has yet to be able to fix. I’m looking for good combat, which was what PoE2 pitched in all of their videos, in most of their dev interviews (although as of late it feels like they’re pulling back on this), and has so far failed to deliver outside of the boss arena (and sometimes in the boss arena too).

I want:

• to be self-insert character or at least one of many characters as a form of self expression
• I want mechanical self expression ideally in the form of dozens or hundreds of skills and their customization along with a skill tree that enables further customization on how your character plays. My load out of 10 abilities should look and feel and play very differently than your load out of 10 abilities.
• I want to fight monsters and bosses that are varied, challenging, and uniquely rewarding ideally. Challenging and varied are putting in a lot of work in that sentence so I want to further expound and say combat should feel like a dance, a puzzle, high octane, and skill rewarding (not simply build skill or farming skill, but actual play skill).
• I want the pacing around playing to be focused on fighting and clearing encounters more so than exploration and discovery. Elden Ring is fantastic but it’s slow between clearing mobs and escalating the stakes/rewards - relying on the underlying exploration to be meaningful (and it is and it’s a 10/10 but not what I’m talking about in this post).
• I want an additional system of collectibles that further modify the way I play and look, most consistently this looks like loot or crafting (this however should not be primarily satisfied with #'s go up).
• I want to do this with friends in a multiplayer format, ideally at times requiring multiplayer because that opens up a lot of unused design space (looking at you remnant 2 which was awesome or only theoretically Diablo world bosses and black dungeon).

In theory this describes games like Diablo/LE/PoE as well as remnant 2/destiny/borderlands. But classic ARPG’s have so much of these needs theoretically covered that if they’d just tweak the moment to moment gameplay they’d have a perfect game for me. Where as games like Borderlands barely has a dozen skills in the entire game and they barely change how you play (coming from B3 and B4), the combat by the nature of being an fps is more engaging but it’s not much past that - it’s very repetitive and the number of mobs that are interesting or good is low imo. If each quality I’m looking for is scored 1-10 borderlands may have some of them but they score lower than most ARPGs. Remnant 2 was fantastic but it didn’t have the hundreds of hours of content and systems to do that wasn’t grinding story paths (I’d still rate this experience at 10/10). Hades and Enter the Gungeon and most roguelites have fantastic moment to moment gameplay but lack most of the other qualities I’m looking for. Wo Long and DS and all of those are fantastic games with good moment to moment gameplay but similarly lack multiple qualities I’m looking for.

I honestly think I want an open world Diablo where it’s designed more like a Gauntlet and DND-esque groups in mind, with better combat and better loot and more skills. I want exactly what PoE2 was promising and delivers in their campaign (by and large, some things would still need to improve to score highly in my desired qualities) but which they completely abandon in the mid-to-late game. I want something in between No Rest for the Wicked or Hades or Remnant 2 and PoE 2 or LE or Diablo. And listening to the developers in this space on various podcasts and dev interviews, they know that is what’s missing but seem unable to get there quite yet. I think PoE2, if it doesn’t fix combat, will be an innovation on PoE1 but will be remembered as PoE1.5 and lumped into the age of ARPGS that were still Diablo 2 successors or the age after of innovators instead of the next generation of ARPGs i think we’re on the cusp of.

I think an ARPG without meaningful combat would require a significantly good story for it to be worth it for me. At least at the 20-25 hours of depth level. PoE 1/2 at thousands of hours of depth are struggling to hold me because their combat isn’t very good, and I really like the PoE2 campaign so far.

I guess as someone who loved Titanquest when I was a kid, I’m a bit disappointed in Titanquest 2 as of right now. And there are other great slot machine ARPG’s and I don’t have much desire for them as is, so it’s hard to justify this games asking price when the reviews are saying a play through is 4 hours at act 1. Maybe when the story is complete I’ll pick it up, but can you imagine it being €50 instead of €30. I mean even €30 with no crafting and minimal legendaries… Idk, not trying to be a downer but ya - those are my honest thoughts.

I generally agree with you, a fun short game is worth more money than a forever game to me right now.

It looks like it falls very short of the engaging combat I’m still looking for in an ARPG. €30 for less than 10 hours of an incomplete ARPG at that makes this a wait to buy if ever for me. I’m not certain I have the faith it’ll ever have 30 hours of content, this release feels like a “we’re running out of money” situation more than a “we’re confident in our product” scenario.

I burned out of Last Epoch in their last patch I think for good, because the combat is so bad. And PoE2 is approaching that for me as well - at least they have an engaging story and a long guaranteed road ahead of content - so maybe this is the slot machine ARPG I keep on hand (but I wish they’d just fix their combat). And I’m waiting for multiplayer to play No Rest for the Wicked, but I suspect it’s not ARPG enough to be a long term game.

Sometimes I feel so new to setting up my own digital ecosystem because I look at a thing and think “that’s so cool” but struggle to imagine it at home. So could someone help me understand.

This would be a replacement for something like Google Drive or Proton Drive? The actions I would use this for would be:

• sending files to friends
• managing a collection of files like PDFs, music, ISO’s that could be accessible by my friends (or just my household)

So I would spin this up on my NAS or my main PC and replace those services and accomplish those actions using this software?

Are there other services or actions I’m missing? Am I misunderstanding the premise entirely?

I mean, I don’t know what actionable advice looks like if I’m being honest. I haven’t exactly connected the dots between wanting something political and achieving something political.

So I’d say that starting with raising awareness about root causes, building a community with an expectation of that awareness, and then manifesting meaningful action when an opportunity presents itself is likely as actionable as I can get. I think the benefit of doing this here on Lemmy is that it will make things more positive. We don’t have to have childish comments defending the rich and make the space more negative if we have a robust resource that explains the position. Maybe it’s short sighted of me, but a chunk of the negative articles and daily happenings can be chalked up to “rich people attempt distraction by talking about thing that doesn’t effect you or matter really much at all”. I think a community that posted those with a consistent title of “DISTRACTION - (news of the day)” would go a long way in allowing actual news to elevate itself. Because this is a root issue to a global problem, I think this awareness could effect nearly every community on Lemmy so why not talk about this more, educate yourself and your peers, and the more people who are up to speed the less time you have to spend talking about it and the more likely it gets fixed.

Idk, it’s not exactly “do X and get Y more positive posts” but it’s the kind of advice I think leads some percentage of people to start a union and then get parental leave and overtime protection. Like it’s not exactly sexy work, and it’s slow and not fun, but it’s the best I’ve got. I need to educate myself more on how to make actual political change in my local area (let alone online).

Are you claiming better living standards for everyone wouldn’t reduce people’s aggression, apathy, or lack of energy? I’m just trying to understand what your point is, because it seems immature putting it kindly.

People having money for good education, good healthcare, good public transit, time for community building, for hobbies, for art logically, obviously, and experimentally reduce trauma - crime - sadness. I mean you name it, money helps people in every statistic (up to a point). That seems fuckin obvious and not worth debating if someone disagreed.

All I did was append the notion that right now most people are losing purchasing power, losing quality of living, compared to just a few generations ago, because of wealth inequality. It’s why we can’t buy houses, it’s why there’s so much debt, it’s why we can’t seem to make effective change at the rate at which it’s needed. Tax the rich out of existence such that money remains in the hands of the working class and we’d all start to see improvements along every metric we care about.

If Lemmy seems negative, it’s because the world is in a negative zeitgeist right now due to the negative happenings. If one would want to make Lemmy positive, just like every where else in their life, they would need to address the root cause which I’m suggesting is wealth inequality.

I also further express that artificially creating a positive space on a site who’s purpose is Link aggregation seems less useful to me than one that keeps me informed about the various topics I like - including the positive and negative.

Tax the rich out of existence and watch how the quality of life goes up everywhere and everything starts being good again.

Idk, I think the fediverse is sufficiently positive. I also think society is going through a wealth inequality period common with most of history, and we’re either going to correct it or continue to suffer on a global scale. I don’t think I want to be a part of any aggregation site that isn’t tuned into the real world.

I’m one of the privileged people to have studied engineering and was able to move to Germany relatively easily (due largely to luck and some good planning). If you qualify for an EU Blue Card that may be an easy path towards a new life outside of the US.

If you are in college or younger it’s easy to start making plans to give you your best chances of success. And if you’re retired, approaching retirement, self-employed, or something akin to a digital nomad you should have less problems moving somewhere close like Canada or Mexico.

Not saying it’s easy, but there are paths. The cool thing about borders and countries is they’re all made up. French people need the same goods and services as Americans (with variation of course) and thus most labor is needed in most places. With declining birth rates nearly everywhere, the smartest countries are opening their borders to immigrants or have been open for a long time.

I was just getting this set up, this and the music one, because I want to leave Spotify. Hopefully an alternative solution shows up.

The technical alpha slapped and I’m fuckin dying to get back in. I was really hoping for them to open up a beta but now I’m just sad I have to wait till October to play this.

I understand the delay to get things right, but there’s almost half a year where no game is satisfying this itch which is a shame. Marathon hasn’t been delayed yet and I know Hell Let Loose guys are making an extraction shooter that looks sick as hell that’s due to release this year as well.

All I’m saying is I would have paid €40 for that alpha it was so good, October will be a slam dunk, but the genre will be more crowded by that time.

I mean, I guess you’re right as far as I’m willing to debate the point. Does that change anything? I don’t feel like the franchise has done the Lost thing where every episode (in this case game) only asks more questions and never answers them. I also don’t feel like I’m dying to learn more about the world or that the small scope of their answers takes me out of the experience. Like, it’s perfectly encapsulated to what I need to enjoy the “movie” that is this game.

I completely agree that this has costs, and that it probably can’t go on for forever. Like one of the costs is I don’t super care about this world, it’s not a world I want to run a TTRPG in, or could envision a hundred spin-offs. I want the end of this story and I’d be okay if it stopped. Idk, that’s a fine thing to make imo. And again, it’s been top of it’s class in execution since it’s inception (never played the smaller games like Blue something or other) so idk - hard for me to nitpick the world or the game.

Now Valve please release your new VR set so I can buy it or the Big Picture 2 and get back into VR.

I appreciate difficulty options for other people and I think everyone should agree it’s a good thing to make games more accessible or more challenging depending on what a player is seeking.

My only caution is maintaining the vision for the expected experience. I imagine we’ve all played games where the normal difficulty or the default experience feels bad or improperly tuned. Multiple difficulty options can, I imagine, lead to less tuning on the default experience. I have no doubt I disliked games I would have liked if they’d encouraged me to play at a different difficulty or spent more time tuning their preferred difficulty. I have no doubt I liked games that if they’d provided difficulty options I may have changed the default experience to my detriment without realizing it.

Speaking entirely personally, I thought at least Half Life Alyx’s story worked on two levels. It was about freeing the gman as Alyx but gman sorta represented… Oh man, now I’m worried I can’t remember the game well enough to communicate my original thoughts. I remember playing it and feeling like the gman represented the writers or creativity, a bigger picture concept or something that went meta. And if that was the case it felt like Valve creating a piece of art that said Alyx and VR have revitalized our desire to tell stories and GMAN is free again.

The moment they drop their new headset I’ll buy it and play again just to relive the experience but I’d say I’m excited about Half Life because Valve makes A) good games B) they make solid diegetic games which I find to be kinda rare C) their games often feel like they came from a team of artists than just a team of coders. Maybe that’s the polish or maybe that’s the massive amount of testing I’m led to believe they do but when valve makes a new game it often feels like the guy who made Stanley Parable just made a new game - easy to recognize art because it’s so good.

That’s sorta my point, it shouldn’t be seen as a start. We can agree that the AfD would be an immediate loss, they would make things immediately worse and the country would very quickly decline for everyone but the elite who would be insulated from their own policies.

I need people in Germany to see the CDU as a slow loss, because they make things worse at a slower time scale, and the country will continue to decline under their guidance for everyone but the elite who will benefit from their policies.

The AfD losing is good. The CDU winning over the AfD winning is better. But both scenarios are still a loss, and they are the signals that the system is organically producing worse results and it’ll continue to increase the magnitude of those poor results until we improve the system.

The CDU should barely be considered a win in Germany. They pave the road that the AfD will walk down. Conservatives make everything worse and fascists thrive in poor conditions.

I assumed pretty immediately upon hearing him in a couple of interviews that he was exactly this right winger camoflaughing as a centralist. I gave the game the benefit of the doubt because I hadn’t seen any hard evidence but I’ll stop talking kindly about the game based on this info.

Politics is how we organize our society. Most of everything is political. When society starts organizing movements against groups of people, stripping away rights, and generally being Nazis you have to get more political to stop them. Taking no position is taking a position. Join the rebellion or support the empire, there is no in-between.

That’s a stupid comparison and I think that’s self-evident. I’m not interested in having a conversation about this with the quality of output you’re displaying. I hope this does as well as it deserves and that you’re getting paid upfront.

I’m responding to your advertisement buddy. I don’t have to go to a landfill to know it’s a dump.