June 2024 PC Gamer Article Discussion

[Colif]

We also don't know the age involved: a small number of US states have an abnormally high age of consent set at 18, but nearly everywhere else sensibly sets it at around 16. Yet 17-year-olds are sometimes referred to as “minors” as a general principle even though that's not the case nearly everywhere in the world, and even in a large majority of the US.

Is Legal drinking age still 21? Or is that state by state as well?

If so, I can understand why Holidays to Australia are so popular as we 3 years ahead. As are many other countries.

As there is possibly a legal case involved in that Twitch case, easiest answer is to wait and see what happens.

 

[Hveðrungr]

The same Jody that just started an article with:

“Critical Role's campaigns are like children: they seem nice, but I couldn't eat a whole one.”

He's on a roll!

To be fair that is an extremely old joke.

 

[Hveðrungr]

We also don't know the age involved: a small number of US states have an abnormally high age of consent set at 18, but nearly everywhere else sensibly sets it at around 16. Yet 17-year-olds are sometimes referred to as “minors” as a general principle even though that's not the case nearly everywhere in the world, and even in a large majority of the US.

I'm hearing that she was indeed 17, i.e. legal nearly everywhere in the world. It's wrong for a married man to flirt with another woman, especially a much younger woman, but the reaction has been as hyperbolic as if he had been propositioning a five-year-old. People need to calm down, wait for any court case as @Colif says, and in the meantime assume he is innocent until proven guilty.

 

[CodeCrafter]

I just read the June 2024 PC Gamer article and found it fascinating! The insights into the upcoming game releases and tech advancements were spot on. What did everyone think about the feature on AI in gaming? I think it's going to revolutionize our gameplay experiences. Would love to hear your thoughts!

 

[Brian Boru]

I just read the June 2024 PC Gamer article and found it fascinating

Which one?

Would love to hear your thoughts on it!

 

[Hveðrungr]

Which one?

Would love to hear your thoughts on it!

I think @CodeCrafter just passed the Turing Test

 

[Zloth]

To be fair that is an extremely old joke.

It is? Oh wow!!! That must mean it's too OLD for me to know! Which clearly means I'm younger than Jody! I've probably just been screwing up the subtraction to figure my age out. A simple mistake, could happen to anyone.

 

[Zloth]

Oooooo!!!

Look out, Shadowplay: Steam now has a built-in 'Game Recording' feature that will automatically record gameplay videos you can clip, share, and export

The new system is currently in beta, but it looks very good.

www.pcgamer.com

(Still wanted: an AI feature to hack out the bits where I'm just staring at the screen, trying to figure out what to do next - especially in turn based games.)

Edit:
I did one using Expeditions: Rome.

View: https://youtu.be/7F3f-fbOu1k

You can link to videos via Steam, but they have to be under 60 seconds, which this sure isn't. There's no way to put these into the videos section for a game yet, either - you have to upload to YouTube and link that way. I'm not certain, but the video seems slightly muddier than what I get using Shadowplay.

It sure is convenient, though. Control-F12 to leave yourself a little mark then, when your session is over (assuming that's less than 2 hours, or whatever you set up), slice out the parts you want to keep and save them as MP4 files.

 

[ZedClampet]

After 1,070 deaths, almost 100 hours, and one therapy session, streamer Kai Cenat finally beats Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

Tune into The Truman Show.

www.pcgamer.com

"Kai Cenat got into one of FromSoftware's Elden Ring rather recently, with the popular streamer beating the base game early last month after 1,700 deaths and a 24-hour battle with Malenia. And now, after 1,070 deaths and just under 100 hours, he's gone and done it again, beating the DLC in what could be boiled down to an emotional Truman Show-like stream."

This is why I can't play these games. If I die more than twice, I call it a day.

 

[BeardyHat]

This is why I can't play these games. If I die more than twice, I call it a day.

Honestly, that's kind of the charm. We reached a boss in Lies of P that I couldn't beat, couldn't fathom actually besting, but we'd fire up the game, give it a few tries and then put it back down until I was ready to try again.

Yesterday I actually killed the boss, on probably my 9th or 10th try. It's nice to have something to work towards, which is actually my problem with Elden Ring, because a boss can be kicking your ass, but due to it not being linear, you're unsure if you should keep beating your head against the wall or move on and come back later.

 

[Brian Boru]

This is why I can't play these games. If I die more than twice, I call it a day.

But what about Farm Sim? If you haven't been gored by a bull, rolled over by a tractor, ravaged by a sheep and ingested by a combine harvester—well, you're just not playing it right.

fire up the game, give it a few tries and then put it back down until I was ready to try again

That depends very much on how much progress is lost at death. If it's consolized so you have to repeat 10 minutes of been-there every time, then life's too short. But otherwise yeah, it can be fun to try some new approach.

unsure if you should keep beating your head against the wall

This should help:

Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results – Quote Investigator®

quoteinvestigator.com

 

[neogunhero]

It's nice to have something to work towards, which is actually my problem with Elden Ring, because a boss can be kicking your ass, but due to it not being linear, you're unsure if you should keep beating your head against the wall or move on and come back later.

You articulated my problem with Elden Ring perfectly. I generally like the Souls games, but have never beat one, though I did get really far into DS3. Elden Ring suffered, to me, from having too big of an open world for exactly the reason you said. You give me an open world game, I’m gonna find out how to get into places you’re not meant to be in at the beginning of the game. I explored so much of the map just by sprinting past hordes of enemies on my horse. It gets to the point where I’ve discovered so many area where the enemies are entirely out of my reach, then I get slightly discouraged to even try, not sure if I’m going the right way or not. People will say Elden Ring allows you to approach it any way you want, but in my experience I was in areas getting one shotted whereas I’m dealing the most minuscule amounts of damage in comparison. I haven’t gone back to it much at all since launch and haven’t felt the want to. Great game, not knocking it at all, just don’t think it’s right for me.

 

[BeardyHat]

You articulated my problem with Elden Ring perfectly. I generally like the Souls games, but have never beat one, though I did get really far into DS3. Elden Ring suffered, to me, from having too big of an open world for exactly the reason you said. You give me an open world game, I’m gonna find out how to get into places you’re not meant to be in at the beginning of the game. I explored so much of the map just by sprinting past hordes of enemies on my horse. It gets to the point where I’ve discovered so many area where the enemies are entirely out of my reach, then I get slightly discouraged to even try, not sure if I’m going the right way or not. People will say Elden Ring allows you to approach it any way you want, but in my experience I was in areas getting one shotted whereas I’m dealing the most minuscule amounts of damage in comparison. I haven’t gone back to it much at all since launch and haven’t felt the want to. Great game, not knocking it at all, just don’t think it’s right for me.

Yeah, exactly.

I love to explore, though I generally will fight everything and I do love an open world game, but there's something clashy about having From gameplay in an open world. I love their generally guided experiences and even in something like Dark Souls 2 or 3, where you have options about where to go, your options are very limited, so you know if you're running up against the wall, it might be worth it to try that other area you discovered.

Elden Ring is good, I do like it, but it can feel amorphous, which is ultimately overwhelming and makes me not want to play. Also, the bosses are often kind of bullshit in comparison to other From games, so that's frustrating too. I do want to go back to it and I probably will once I finally finish Lies of P here pretty soon.

 

[Hveðrungr]

This is why I can't play these games. If I die more than twice, I call it a day.

My extremely unpopular, perhaps unique opinion: why would I want to play a game where I die frequently? The desire to die is suicidal ideation. Imo anyone who wants to play a game where they will die frequently should be in a psych ward on suicide watch. No one else agrees with this though, or even seems to understand the sentiment lol.

 

[neogunhero]

No one else agrees with this though, or even seems to understand the sentiment lol.

I completely understand the sentiment. However, stop me if you me heard this one before, but the purpose is to overcome the challenge no matter how hard or impossible it may seem. It’s just like that Getting Over It Game. You will lose tons of progress and probably throw your keyboard clean through your monitor, but once you finally do overcome a major hurdle (literally), it’s a massive sense of accomplishment which overrides any feelings of anger you may have had before. I think that’s why people enjoy such difficult games, not because they are gluttons for punishment.

 

[BeardyHat]

I completely understand the sentiment. However, stop me if you me heard this one before, but the purpose is to overcome the challenge no matter how hard or impossible it may seem. It’s just like that Getting Over It Game. You will lose tons of progress and probably throw your keyboard clean through your monitor, but once you finally do overcome a major hurdle (literally), it’s a massive sense of accomplishment which overrides any feelings of anger you may have had before. I think that’s why people enjoy such difficult games, not because they are gluttons for punishment.

On the contrary, I don't think you really lose much in From games or From-style games.

The perception is certainly that it's punishing and you lose progress and you do lose a bit, but it's all very modest. The boss that I found extremely challenging in Lies of P, I simply started outside her boss door every time I died, where I could pick-up my Ergo (Souls) and run in to try again immediately. Even the areas before and after, they seem long and arduous, but once you understand enemy placements in them, they often take seconds to get back to where you died and could likely be ran through in a minute or less if there were no enemies.

They're billed as punishingly difficult and they certainly are challenging, but I disagree with the idea that they're punishing. Even if you don't recover the currency you lose on death, you generally make it back rapidly, especially as you progress to later areas in the game.

 

[Hveðrungr]

@neogunhero I like overcoming difficult challenges. I play lots of difficult games, and I like to play them at a challenging level. But I don't want those challenges to result in my *death*.

If there were a game in which every time you fail your character was pinned down and violently raped, or tortured, etc, we would consider those who enthusiastically played it, watching themselves be raped or tortured over and over and over, to be seriously disturbed and in need of psychiatric help—and the devs who made such an abomination would be considered deeply disturbed too, and the game might even be banned.

But when a game subjects you to death, which is even worse than being raped or tortured (if it were better, we would insist on mandatory euthanasia for all rape and torture victims), for some reason we say that's a great game by great devs, and admire those who enthusiastically watch themselves die over and over and over. It's sick.

The level of challenge a game has is not related to whether the game simulates your death in the process of overcoming its challenge. Take my beloved Mini Metro, which I am very good at and which is challenging. When I eventually lose a game of Mini Metro, which is the inevitable end of every game of it, all that happens is that the network is overloaded and the passengers can't get where they want to go. What does not happen is that the game generates an avatar of me, the network controller, and simulates my death on-screen as a punishment for overloading the network. Nor does it show me being raped, or tortured, or anything else unpleasant. I am able to learn from my mistakes and overcome the challenge without needing to have the experience of death inflicted on me. And I am glad of that, because I don't want to die, unlike the people who want to die so much that they enjoy watching a depiction of their death happen hundreds and thousands of times.

Or when I play an RPG, if I find that I am about to die in a fight, or if I accidentally fall off a platform, I will pause the game before my character dies (e.g. just before the killing blow or before I hit the ground) so that I can reload a save and try again without me dying. Yet in “games” like Dark Souls or whatever the new one is called, players are supposed to joyously relish their own death without being able to avoid such a horrific experience?!

It's deranged, but no one seems to see it except me lol. This must be how the “no internal monologue” people feel when they hear about internal monologues and think everyone else is literally crazy lmao. Perhaps it's related to how vividly I get immersed in media, as discussed previously.

 

[Brian Boru]

It's sick

No, you're thinking about it out of context—and very eloquently, may I say

We have ~a century of movies & TV shows & books where protagonists and other important characters kill and are killed. We do not have the same re rape and torture, or at least only to a vastly lesser degree.

So killing and dying is culturally acceptable—but inflicting grave injustices is not.

 

[BeardyHat]

No, you're thinking about it out of context—and very eloquently, may I say

We have ~a century of movies & TV shows & books where protagonists and other important characters kill and are killed. We do not have the same re rape and torture, or at least only to a vastly lesser degree.

So killing and dying is culturally acceptable—but inflicting grave injustices is not.

Well, there's also the fact that generally most games don't show you torn limb from limb or anything (unless you're playing Resident Evil) and even in Dark Souls where you die constantly, your character simply falls down and it says, "You Died." I wouldn't exactly call that gruesome.

To call such things psychopathic is...a stretch, to say the least.

I think there's more of an argument there for something like a Resident Evil or (from what I've heard) the new Tomb Raider games.

 

[Zloth]

Or when I play an RPG, if I find that I am about to die in a fight, or if I accidentally fall off a platform, I will pause the game before my character dies (e.g. just before the killing blow or before I hit the ground) so that I can reload a save and try again without me dying. Yet in “games” like Dark Souls or whatever the new one is called, players are supposed to joyously relish their own death without being able to avoid such a horrific experience?!

Hmmm, there's a quest in Planescape: Torment that's going to be trouble for you. You solve it by dying and being reborn.

 

[Pifanjr]

When I eventually lose a game of Mini Metro, which is the inevitable end of every game of it, all that happens is that the network is overloaded and the passengers can't get where they want to go.

You say that as if waiting for hours for your public transportation as it keeps being delayed isn't a special kind of torture in its own way.

 

[ZedClampet]

I like a good challenge, but dying 1700 times is just wasting my time. Challenge is the purpose to most games. Brutal time wasting is the purpose to Elden Ring.

You know, there can also be games with great challenge that don't kill you at all. Satisfactory is one example.

*****

The Dr Disrespect fallout continues as YouTube, 2K Games, Turtle Beach, the NFL, and others cut ties with the disgraced streamer

Guy "Dr Disrespect" Beahm admitted earlier this week that he was banned from Twitch for life over inappropriate conversations with a minor.

www.pcgamer.com

Dr Disrespect, who thinks he's going to make a comeback, won't be doing it on Youtube. He would have to make his own streaming website unless there's someone other than Twitch and Youtube that I don't know about. If there is, they'd just ban him anyway. You simply don't survive this sort of thing in 2024. The world has zero tolerance for it. I mean, so far as I know, simple flirting with a 17-year-old isn't actually illegal, but look at the reaction to this.

 

[Colif]

You know, there can also be games with great challenge that don't kill you at all. Satisfactory is one example.

many puzzle games don't either. Dying that many times would make me stop too... I generally don't like dying in games already, I don't need to play that sort of game. Souls games are hard... what a surprise.

Dr Disrespect, who thinks he's going to make a comeback, won't be doing it on Youtube. He would have to make his own streaming website unless there's someone other than Twitch and Youtube that I don't know about. If there is, they'd just ban him anyway. You simply don't survive this sort of thing in 2024. The world has zero tolerance for it. I mean, so far as I know, simple flirting with a 17-year-old isn't actually illegal, but look at the reaction to this.

moral panic is something that seems to happen a lot in your country.
I am just ignoring it still as its not really important... drama.

 

[BeardyHat]

many puzzle games don't either. Dying that many times would make me stop too... I generally don't like dying in games already, I don't need to play that sort of game. Souls games are hard... what a surprise.


moral panic is something that seems to happen a lot in your country.
I am just ignoring it still as its not really important... drama.

I'd so much rather die 1000 times than try and figure out a puzzle game; those are the types of games that really make me frustrated and I eventually hit a critical friction point with them and just stop. But different strokes, as it goes.

Moral panic is a social media thing. I've never really been on it (though I guess Youtube is considered social media?), but when you're away from it, you don't think about it. Most people I know in real life also don't think about this stuff; everyone is too busy with their own life to care about who's being canceled today for whatever reason.

 

[neogunhero]

@neogunhero I like overcoming difficult challenges. I play lots of difficult games, and I like to play them at a challenging level. But I don't want those challenges to result in my *death*.

I don’t think it’s as “deranged” as you may make it out to be. I think everyone gets the same satisfaction of overcoming these challenges in games, regardless of what the actual game is or what you’re doing in it. Blazing through levels of Tetris, making the most efficient transportation system in Mini Metro, finally beating a boss that’s been kicking your ass in Elden Ring, I think all of those gamers will have the same kind of satisfaction and accomplishment no matter the game. Where I have to respectfully disagree with you is you saying people get enjoyment out of watching their character die.

I highly doubt anyone who plays Souls games get any kind of satisfaction or enjoyment out of watching their character die. I have played many modern FromSoft games, all very similar in the fact that you will die a lot, but never thought “ah yeah that’s the stuff” whenever I die. I take it as a brutal reality check that I need to get good and do better on my next try. It’s the same as trying to beat a level in any other game that you are having trouble with. “I keep failing at this one part, so I need to think of a different strategy/approach, focus more and really sharpen my skills to beat it”. Any game that has any level of challenge will make you think this same way if you keep failing at it.

Different strokes for different folks.