If you’re a fan of tieflings (based on your username), I’m curious, have you read Erin M. Evans’ Brimstone Angels series? The main characters are tieflings, and it’s where the quotes at the beginning of the race entry for tieflings and dragonborn in the 5e Player’s Handbook came from. Highly recommend.

But I don’t think you need to go from the time when arcades were entirely irrelevant, but merely where they were no longer the main driving force. That’s at most the late '90s with gen 5 consoles and many big popular or influential game franchises like Quake, Pokemon, Age of Empires, Fallout, Diablo, and Grand Theft Auto (that’s '96 and '97 alone).

And you need to go up until at least the time when few of the largest games were available without cancerous monetisation strategies, not merely when a few games had started doing it. So you definitely need to go up to at least the launch of the 7th generation consoles in 2007.

To bring it back to the original point of the conversation, that’s not to say that it isn’t worth preserving games that did have those strategies of course. It just doesn’t detract from the sense of a period when the majority of gamers’ experience was much better.

We’ve been complaining since the 90s. I wasn’t joking earlier, “Ubisoft greedy” today is a carbon copy of “Capcom greedy” in 1997

And EA greedy in 2007. Doesn’t mean that what they were doing then was as bad as what is being done today.

But an arcade game is a physical object. The preservation needs of arcade games are very different to games distributed on cartridge or disk, which is why I suggested that a digital library would be focusing on home game consoles, especially those released at a time when home gaming was the main way gaming got experienced (i.e., after arcades were the most popular way).

[24 years is] too short of a blip to consider a golden age

Assuming that “too short” and reference to a “golden age” was meant in refutation to my claim of the 3rd–6th console generations, which lasted from 1983 until 2007. If that’s the claim, I find it absolutely absurd. When we discuss the golden age of TV we’re talking barely one decade, from the mid-to-late oughts to the late 10s.

If you meant something else by that bit, I’m sorry, please disregard the above paragraph. But I don’t know quite what you do mean.

I don’t think we’re talking about arcade games at this point though. We’re talking to a large extent about 3rd–6th generation home gaming consoles. For Nintendo, that’s the NES to GameCube. Sony entered with the PlayStation in the 5th gen, and Xbox came out in 6th.

I think a lot of people would see this (and to a slightly lesser extent the 7th gen) as the high point where games came out in a completed state and you paid once and the just enjoyed the game.

Fwiw the sequel is supposedly going to have Denuvo in it, which is pretty blatantly an executive meddling decision.

But personally, the phrase “the devs should” never bothers me. It’s pretty transparently referring not to individual developers but to the priorities and decisions of the “developer”: the company in charge of development, as distinct from, say, the publisher or the platform.

I honestly find their “historical accuracy” claims kinda comical. Yeah it’s better than most games for sure, but it still only pays lip service to accuracy in a lot of aspects for the sake of the game’s story. Henry has a completely fantastical rise from blacksmith’s apprentice to de facto military commander.

No, I did really enjoy it. I just don’t spend an enormous amount of time gaming, and the time I do spend is most often in completely different genres that I can play with friends while chatting on Discord, like RTS (Age of Empires mostly) and survival crafters (like Raft and DST).

No it’s not. It’s pretty explicitly not, by the guy who is most famous for talking about piracy as a service problem:

Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.

I just read that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 has apparently said it’s gonna use Denuvo. It’s the first time a game that’s been on my radar has used it to my knowledge. I saw some comments where people said they’ll just wait a year until it’s removed and then buy it. Fuck that. You screw me over at release and I’ll just pirate it. I still haven’t finished the first game so waiting until it’s cracked is no issue.

Haha yeah that was exactly my reasoning for switching too. First bought the book December 2022 amidst rumours of the upcoming OGL changes and after they’d already taken the action of ripping out pages upon pages of content from digital content I had bought with no way of getting that stuff I paid for back… Then it just took until around August '23 to actually start playing.

The fact that my players and I can get access to the full content completely free on AoN and in tools like Pathbuilder is also a pretty huge advantage compared to needing to buy physical and digital copies of each individual book completely separately and then additionally pay a subscription fee if you want to use the D&D digital tooling.

And my DnD group recently switched over to Pathfinder 2e

I suppose it’s been a little too long now for me to claim “recently”, but my group’s been playing PF2 for 13 or 14 months now. I’ve been loving it as GM. How has your group been finding it?

I’ve played a bit of Factorio and enjoyed it a little too much, but watching some video clips of Satisfactory a couple of years ago really didn’t grab me. Do you think it’s likely that either watching the game have a very poor sense of what it’s like (for someone already familiar with Factorio), or that the game has gotten a whole heap better over the last 2ish years?

Oh damn I didn’t even think about tabletop games counting! In that case I have to amend my answer to also include Pathfinder 2.

Since it came out in the last week of August, I don’t think I’ve touched any game other than Age of Mythology. It’s just that perfect balance of being an excellent game in its own right and also absolutely nailing the nostalgia for me.

Maccas HQ should take the guy’s franchise off of him, then. They did it near me to a guy whose only crime was supporting the local community more than extracting maximum profit, surely making a political endorsement that HQ doesn’t agree with should be grounds for the same. Right‽

I just want to point out that “the solstice marks the start of the season” is not a universal fact. Here in Aus, we mark the start of summer as 1 December, and so if I were to take my perspective and apply it to the northern hemisphere, I would say that for you, Christmas is about a third of the way through winter.

The difference here is technically referred to as “meteorological” vs “astronomical” seasons. I’ve always thought meteorological seasons make far more sense because they much better reflect reality. Winter is defined by cold weather and short days. The winter solstice is already very cold and it has the shortest day. It is absurd to put the shortest day at the very beginning of winter. If you wanted to have an astronomically-based calendar, the solstice should mark the very midpoint of winter, with the season starting precisely halfway between then and the autumnal equinox.

But also, as the other user mentioned, some places have entirely different season systems. Seasons are, fundamentally, a human creation. The notion that weather patterns change throughout the year is a universal fact, but what we call those changes and how many categories we separate it into is human. Many cultures have their own systems with more or different seasons. Many tropical areas have traditionally only observed “wet” (or monsoon) and “dry” seasons. In ancient Egypt, the flooding of the Nile marked an important seasonal change. And South Asia uses a variety of different 6-season systems, such as the Hindu, Bengali, and Tamil calendars.

I think the issue here is that it wasn’t a case of “somebody corrects you about their gender”. It was “a third unrelated person comes in and rudely yells at you that you should have already known not to use a turn of phrase”.

And !pathfinder@ttrpg.network specifically for Pathfinder.

There used to be pathfinder.social, but it went offline a long time ago, so anything anyone tried to post to it won’t be federated anywhere.

Yup. Clear violation of the rules.

Yeah that’s my thought. It’s an expression. I’ve said things like “c’mon man” to people IRL I know to be women, without complaint. If I was using the word “man” in this kind of way and the person I was saying it to asked me not to, I would of course respect their wishes and stop doing it to them, but I’ve not seen it happen before.

But a third person coming in to whinge when the person I was talking to had no complaint? 🙄

(As a side note, with this specific expression I quite like the alternative of “the ma’am…”. That helps it scan exactly the same as the original phrase.)

They’re known specifically for being pro-Russia, which is what made the comment amusing.