It would help if you identified which religion. There absolutely is a vibrant queer pagan community, but it sounds like that’s not what you’re talking about.

Maybe, but if it does ever happen, we’re still very much in the embryo stage. Like, behind VR or at the level of 1990’s-era game streaming services.

What was most telling to me was even Hasbro seemingly chose not to chase the fad with Magic: the Gathering. Depressingly, it was presumably because even NFTs would be more friendly to players than their tightly-controlled market.

For specifics, I’d like to see consistent, transparent censorship standards, and Steam Workshop files made publicly available.

Steam’s censorship issues are only going to be more of a problem as the Japanese PC market continues its explosive growth. The platform’s inconsistency is surely frustrating Japanese developers, and the lack of transparency is giving fuel to a (not unearned) narrative that its content reviewers are arbitrary and xenophobic.

The Workshop matter is far smaller in comparison, but Steam is gatekeeping crowdsourced work product.

It’s 2024. National defense infrastructure isn’t just oil and steel anymore, it’s silicon.

This succinctly covers my view on it as well. I think it’ll be more of a problem a few years down the road as statist admin culture begins to influence the mods of more instances, but for now I treat it on an instance-by-instance, user-by-user basis. I wouldn’t be surprised if majority of community leaders and users in general went to lemmy.ml simply because it was one of the larger instances last year and didn’t think much more of it than that.

If I have a choice, though, I’ll still try to grow a community on one of the smaller instances simply because it’s still one of the largest ones, and that’s better for the health of the network.

Kind of a cheating answer: Lost Odyssey. Sakaguchi brought on a novelist for the game, and a big chunk of it is already in novel form. It’s great stuff, too. Easily the highlights of the game for me.

Yeah, the new TV series is making me think there would be some good possibilities for novels.

Still playing Yakuza 0, but I haven’t touched the main story since Tuesday. First, the cabaret club opened up and that was interesting. Then while poking around looking for business partners, I stumbled on the mahjong club and tried it.

Boy, did I ever fall into a damn rabbit hole with mahjong. I’ve been hungrily studying basic strategy, and I even grabbed Mahjong Soul to play on my phone. I always liked canasta, and it’s a lot like that, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but still. Prob playing more tonight!

It’s 75% off on Steam right now so I’m strongly considering it. I love this studio and I haven’t seen/heard anything yet about the game that would turn me off.

New patch out too!

I’m still trying to get my Warcraft partner to try Guild Wars 2. I had so much fun in it a while back.

Last week I finished Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s DLC (finished the base game recently, too). Not my favorite RPGs, but I found a number of things to like.

Now I’m trying Yakuza 0 again. I think I’m a little more than halfway through it? Feels like it’s not a good sign that I’m way more interested in playing shogi or messing around with the real estate minigame than the combat. I put it on Easy and am not gonna worry about it. The cutscenes are phenomenal, though. In any case, good chance I’m just skipping ahead to Like a Dragon 7 after I’m done with this one.

Part of the concern is deceptive/astroturfed content developed as advertising showing up in Lemmy communities. While those same actors could theoretically be based on lemm.ee, that’s a lot more work than simply scaling up operations when you’re doing it on Threads anyway.

I finished Xenoblade Chronicles 3 last week. I thought it was good, not great, having enjoyed the first half of the game a lot more than the second. Really enjoyed the little Xenogears references. I wasn’t intending to move right on to the Future Redeemed DLC, but I heard something interesting things about it and decided to give it a shot. Really glad I did; nine hours in I’m already finding it dramatically more enjoyable than the base game.

Before starting that DLC, I was nibbling at Unicorn Overlord and Super Mario Bros. Wonder. I’m running hot and cold on UO, a lot of that having to do with the item management. This might be the most customizable strategy RPG I’ve ever played, depth and breadth, and the UI/UX is absolutely not up to the task. I ended up dropping Darkest Dungeon for very similar reasons a while back, and I’m hoping that’s not where I end up with UO. It’s such a pretty game and the strategy is genuinely interesting. Not much to say about Wonder; it’s a very impressive, refined product and I’m sure I’ll keep coming back to it.

I haven’t seen anyone talk about this one in quite a while. Gorgeous soundtrack.

My first experience with XCOM was with Enemy Unknown, although I’d heard whispers about the earlier games for years. My campaign was a wild experience and it fully sold me on the concept of permadeath.

I had a mid-game mission go terribly; I lost half my squad (Cyberdiscs, ugh) including my most senior officer. By this point in the game, I’d developed a taste for the randomness, and I started inventing narratives in my head for my troops. When it came time to recruit replacements, my newest assault Rookie was a British woman named Sarah Jones. Between the way her first mission played out and my growing confidence in being more aggressive with my troops (especially the new recruits), my headcanon set her as this plucky, reckless newbie. A couple missions later, when the game assigned her the nickname “Geronimo,” the narrative was set in stone. This was how I was going to play the character.

Rookie Jones became Colonel Jones, making it all the way to the last mission, becoming the star of my run. By the end, she became a little bit tempered by experience, but she was still Geronimo. Looking back, savescumming would have robbed me of that experience (a trap I’d sadly fall into with XCOM 2). I still think about Sarah Jones from time to time.

Was my first thought. /r/friends doesn’t work on the mobile site now and that’s the only thing I ever go to back to Reddit for anymore. That’s one content stream I can’t duplicate anywhere else.

The space elements were a big part of the marketing. I knew better than to expect atmospheric flight or anything but simple space combat, but intra-system travel being only done in menus and the space sections being put in small lightboxes with planet renderings was rather shocking. That’s 20th-century stuff. It’s especially bizarre given how much of the Bethesda magic has leaned on roads in the past, and there aren’t any roads outside of cities. Even the cargo runs are 100% in menus, without talking to a single person.

Us space sim types would tell you it took a few steps back as far as genre standards go. And I wasn’t even expecting much on that side of it.

Starfield only getting one nomination–and in a category it has no chance of winning–is not at all what I would have expected going into this year.

I don’t know if that speaks to how nuts this year has been for new releases or to how much Starfield fell short, in light of the fact that its player counts on Steam are starting to fall below Skyrim.