Yeah, I’m pretty sure we’re closely aligned on this stuff – though I’m more of a “fuckit, I’mma beta test this shit” type.

The ability to release a ‘new’ game, which has done that fundamental rework of underlying mechanics, is one of the things we lose when we see an extended EA approach – I totally get that its a bunch of work to refine those systems, and its a right pain to try and backport it after you’ve done a bunch of the other bits. Which is why I’d be supportive of a small shop that released a game for $20-30 every couple years, which was just iteratively improving on those back end components., rather than paying $20 once and getting 5 years of very slow, relatively inconsequential content drops.

I still have some hope for Light No Fire, though that’s largely based on hoping that Hello Games learned a bunch of lessons in regards to world building / plot progression type stuff from No Man’s Sky. If it turns out to essentially just be a reskinned NMS on a single world, that’ll be real unfortunate.

To each their own.

I find the sea battles got boring really quick. I think the game devs knew the sea battles would get boring fast, which is why they have such extensive options for fast travel in the game – to avoid the ‘focal point’ of sea battles/sea travel… they implemented systems to avoid what they try and promote as a key feature of their offering. It feels sorta like selling an FPS based on its first person shooter gameplay, but then implementing a bunch of features like AI bot control, mission spectator mode, etc, to make it so players don’t have to do any FPS gameplay… because you’ve made it so boring you know no one is gonna stick around if they gotta play your game the way its marketed.

There are, though many have focused a bit more on flying ships. For example: Lost Skies, Forever Skies. Though I didn’t say ‘vehicular’ stuff in my comment, because it’s more the broader category of open world survival crafting that’s saturated with half complete/abandoned early access games. Vehicular combat in Windrose is just a ‘niche’ gimmick they’re trying to use to differentiate their offering a bit, and to distract from the weakness of the games play loops in other areas. Even the vehicular combat is pretty routine/mundane after one or two sea battles, as Windrose basically uses the same mechs for all its sea battles currently, with level gating being the only thing impeding progression – eg. You fight a level 2 boat, it’s the same as fighting a level 13 boat, things just hit harder and you need more hp. I mean, it doesn’t take much to pause and think “Hey, this is a game about pirates/piracy, why aren’t there merchant ships to pirate, in a pirate game?” or “If sea travel/open seas combat is meant to be a focal point in the game, why is 95% of travel done via fast travel points, avoiding open sea travel/combat?” (its likely because they realised how boring/monotonous that sea combat would get for players as they progressed, but rather than address that weakness, they put in a “quality of life” benefit to try and mask it). Even in terms of coop play, it’s more that you each get your own boat – a missed opportunity in my view, to have deeper gameplay of having players actually play different functional roles on a single boat, working together as a unit on the high seas.

Just to disambiguate a bit too, EA in the context I used it was about Early Access, not Electronic Arts. I’m not totally sure if that was miscommunicated, as your comment sorta works even with the distinction, but it’s a bit confusing when I read your response and you use EA to ref the company.

As for things getting supported etc, it’s a double edged sword. I still view Valheim as being a gold standard for many Open World Survival Crafting gameplay options/features, but it’s been in EA now for like 5+ years, with very little progress made generally speaking – they’ve added a bit more content, and made some minor mech tweaks, from a player perspective. They haven’t moved on to a “Valheim 2” where they could make bigger changes/progress in the genre. Other developers have so far failed to meet certain ‘standards’ that Valheim set for the genre, and without that studio pushing things forward, the genre feels like its stagnating with sub-standard offerings that chase weird ‘niches’/gimmicks to hide their failings. Like think about proc gen as a game feature in owsc games, and how it enriches the exploration/replayability of the game – Valheims implementation of it is ‘ok’, but it’s not really that random or flexible, in that what they did was generate a large map (4x larger than playable space), and then their ‘proc gen’ just plops down a pin somewhere as the start spot, and then randomizes the biomes on the pre-determined landmasses surrounding. Improving that, and getting truly randomised land masses, as well as the option for players to select world sliders for ‘continents’ or ‘archipelago’ or ‘pangea’, or ‘land locked lakes’ type configurations, is a logical step forward. Such things are pretty much missing though, even 5 years on. We instead get other studios devolving on the randomness of worlds (Enshrouded for example, with its static world / highly guided progression), or we get these infinitely repetitive and meaningless ‘island’ setups like in Everwind. Or we get some frankenstein between the two, like Windrose. None of these approaches is improving on replayability or exploration gameplay – they’re regressing. I’d be more than happy to pay a single AA studio $20-30 per year if they were making clear progress / making games with new/cool/progressively better gameplay and features.

But, yea, what we get ain’t that, be it triple A or double. But $30 now and then, is less painful a trade to get half-ass junk, than $80 + all that paid DLC you mentioned, which is still sorta half-ass junk.

You defended America in another comment, when an American was tryin to take the moral high ground against Canada. Sorry if I misread that.

The general point regarding risk/defensiveness, and that it doesn’t include lashing out / attacking others, remains though.

*I should clarify – you defended America by seemingly citing hyperbolic claims that are pushed by america-centric right wing sources in regards to Canada’s systems. Wasn’t just that you were taking Americas side.

Risk levels may determine the appropriate level of defensiveness, but the general principle I stated remains valid.

For example, where I live, there have been lots of known cases of women drugging men and stealing from them. There’s one woman who’s done it and killed a few guys, including a few well known small business people – she’s still out, “dating”, while she awaits trial I believe. So I’d be ‘fine’ with guys around here being more cautious on that front, as there’s more risk there.

But again, prejudging every individual as an imminent threat and treating them as such can go too far, and lead to more toxic relationships/interactions. Having a defensive posture doesn’t mean lashing out at others / treating others poorly in advance “just in case” they turn out to be a threat. I realise this is likely a strange concept for you, seeing as you seem to have identified as an American in another post – and you all are very keen these days on the idea of things like “Genocide all palestinians” and “Destroy all of southern lebanon” based on “some people there might be violent towards us”. You’re so keen on it, you guys even side with Russia now against Ukraine, because “NATO and the USA were potentially violent towards Russia, so it’s fair for them to try and destroy that whole country!”

America’s a shit hole these days, you really don’t want to try and go toe to toe with any other western country on moral grounds while you’re lead by a convicted criminal and alleged child rapist, nor while your country is openly committing and boasting about committing war crimes. If you can’t see this, it’s likely because you still believe in american exceptionalism, even with regards to those child raping leaders of yours – which is an utterly absurd stance to have, given the data. You guys literally elected a bunch of people who idolize hitler and other fascists who sided with hitler – JD Vance literally promoted/supported such works written by Posobiec, even before you idiots elected him into office. You have your “elite” business leaders literally doing nazi salutes on the world stage. Hegseth literally called all your generals into a meeting to tell them to ignore the rules of engagement (ie. Commit warcrimes) or be fired.

To some extent I’d agree – but I also think some topics are such that any attempt to condense them into a pithy online statement, won’t be able to present them with sufficient nuance for people to understand it beyond the rage bait. S’why I try to both support the general sentiment, but also offer a bit more potential context based on my understanding of it, for what it’s worth at least. I’m ok with you disagreeing with my stance of it being ok to be a bit prejudice / defensive based on aggregate threats – most times, I’ve noticed that where people stand on that seems to boil down at least in part to their subjective experiences, and you can’t really argue against that.

The broader issue of the rage-bait era, I think, is the wide-scale reduction in longer-format media. People don’t tend to read books, let alone comments longer than 1 - 2 sentences in length. Even when they do read a longer comment, they’ll often just cherry pick specific threads/nuggets to respond to, often taking them out of context, to try and engage – so even in engaging with content, their mindsets are still driven based on the short-form media nuggets they’ve been raised on.

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Yawn. Troll more. All I said is what I said – it’s fine to have reservations/a defensive posture if you perceive a risk. It’s wrong to overtly treat individuals as imminent threats based on those reservations. This applies to all genders – however, often when it’s expressed “for women”, they deny the legitimacy of other cases of the same principle. All I’m saying is its a fair/natural stance, for everyone to take. Women are not alone when it comes to it being ‘ok’ to be a little bit prejudice towards others, but that also needs to be tempered, especially when it comes to individual interactions, so as not to become something more toxic, like racist/misogynist/misandrist.

I’m ok with women expressing this sort of sentiment, so long as they’re also ok with guys making generalisations about women in the same vein – ie “There are enough of ‘this type’ of character out there, that you gotta be defensive and assume any could be”.

Saying all men are dangerous is fair, it’s also fair to say all women exploit men for financial gain. I don’t know many men who’ve dated for a while, who haven’t come across women clearly just seeking free meals, gifts etc; ones who’ll judge you based solely on income.

That said, it’s prejudice in either case to assume that an individual of either gender is either of those things just because you’ve acknowledged the risk is there. Like if your store is constantly robbed by one specific ethnic demographic, it’s human nature to be suspicious of any member of that demographic when they come in – but you’d cross into racism if you explicitly treated them like thieves prior to them being shown as a thief at an individual level.

Windrose is ‘ok’, but it’s not all that great at this point. A lower price point, good looking, openworld survival crafting game is just one of those markets at the moment with a bunch of interest / hungry consumers. It’s getting slowly oversaturated with lackluster entries, which will likely reduce interest over time though. Windrose is one such entry at this point, and as we’ve seen with many EA entries, there’s a really good chance it won’t progress/change much at all.

Triple A developers aren’t releasing anything more polished / functional, but they price theirs at like $60-80 these days, which kills any interest – heck, it likely helps out these indie studios a ton, as people look at that $80 price tag, see the $20-30 price tag indie games, realise there’s basically no difference in the junk they’re likely getting – but it’s far less painful to buy glitchy half-baked shit at $30.

Honestly, in some ways the right-wing theorist types’ framing of birth control / birth rates is kind of interesting – even if the way they tend to go about implementing legislation to address the issue is largely misguided.

One of their core arguments is that politicians should be benefiting locals / existing members of the country, rather than relying on an endless stream of immigrants to supply workers – doing the latter, you’re exposed to more risk and more cultural divergence amongst the population, as well as a general cheapening of labour due to an endless supply of people. A “strong nation” should have a people who are thriving, and one sign of people thriving is locals having kids / a self-sustaining population base. It’s hard to argue your nation is ‘strong’, if it’d effectively die off without constantly pumping additional people in from other nations.

Almost every western nation fails on this front. Programs that are designed to help locals have kids are generally less materially supported by left leaning parties, as left leaning parties try to garner favour amongst recent immigrant demographics – the focus is on “people who have nothing / just moved here” vs “people who inherited a bit of money from previous local generations, and have grown up here”. Wealth tax arguments, for example, are viewed as taxing people who’ve been in the country for a generation or more, and transferring their generational wealth to newer immigrants, by having taxes support programs that disproportionately benefit people without that historic/local nestegg: eg. affordable childcare is most useful for families with two working parents, no ties to other parents/social groups for afterschool care, and no grandparent support locally. Even then, those programs are often half-assed when it comes to implementation, as left leaning parties are more intent on bringing in more immigrants, rather than supporting the immigrants who’ve already arrived with young kids. Like in Canada, population growth is 100% determined by immigration – every locally born demographic, aside from First Nations, is shrinking based on local birth rates. So if you’re a business, or a political party, that wants to ‘grow’ with the economy/population, your primary growth demo is to target new immigrants (or FN, but FN has additional legal hurdles in many cases) – generally to the detriment of local interests.

Like there are right leaning theorists pushin stuff like – if having birth control / women’s rights results in a nation that cannot sustain its local population / would die off without external infusions of people, then having birth control / women’s rights is detrimental / counter-productive to the overall health and sustainability of a nation. Women on aggregate can’t be given these rights/benefits, because if they get them, they basically kill the nation through local attrition on a generational scale. If giving them those rights had resulted in increased birth rates / prosperity within the country’s local population, that’d be a different story – but it’s not how it plays out in reality, and we can see that in most western countries.

I dunno, I find it a kinda interesting argument to think about, though the conclusions and implementation of it in practice are pretty stupid. Especially in an individualistic nation/system.

Yes yes, Mr .ML propagandist, tell me more about how the people who I work with, who grew up in Communist states, describe their experiences and reasons for fleeing those states are totally wrong, and that I should tow the .ML bootlicker line. Shitheels online are far more worthwhile a news source than actual people I know / interact with regularly, who lived in those countries! I can do my own online research, just like all those American dimwits who are shunning vaccines because facebook is true and doctors are fakenews!

Mmmm tastey communist boot! Comes in one size, only left shoe, because communism in practice is so wonderfully functional! And all stats produced by communist leader are true and trustworthy! All hail .ML!

Practically, there’s little they can do to win back the USA’s soft power at this point – bridges take seconds to burn, generations to build.

A starting point would be to hold the various people from the previous administration accountable for what’s gone on. That’s practically impossible, as we’ve seen them unable to hold people like Trump accountable for a literal attempted insurrection/coup the last time he was defeated at the polls. Putting people like Hegseth in front of the Hague, to answer for his war crimes in regards to killing civilians near venezuela, for example, would be a step in regaining trust from the international community (basically “We committed international crimes, and we’ll allow the international community to determine the punishment”). The USA would never do that, and has never done that historically. The democrats would never sign off on it, no matter how nazi-like the republicans may get – and the American people, even now, view themselves as exceptional/special to the point that they feel no ‘real’ accountability for the shit their government is doing.

Trade relations/integrations are screwed, as every western partner of the USA now knows/sees very clearly that the USA is just “one election cycle away” from using those very integrations to attack and destabilize their “allies”. The USA spent decades/generations building up that trust, it’ll take decades/generations of similar effort to try and rebuild it. I don’t imagine it’ll happen in my life time.

Electing Trump once may’ve been an outlier, but Americans re-elected him even as he was being transparent in his intentions to become a dictator and to dramatically re-orient America’s international position - the current administration people published project 2025, and numerous other “pro fascism” essays/books prior to the 2025 election. Vance, their VP, literally lauds people like Posobiecs work, wherein he calls for democrats to be hunted/targeted/killed. The Americans voted in favour of fucking over western allies, voted in favour of alienating the EU, Canada, Mexico, etc. They voted in favour of a guy wanting to be buddies with Putin, Kim Jong, and any other ruthless dictator he met / exchanged love letters with. They voted for a literal convicted criminal, who any person with an IQ above room temperature would realise would conduct themselves like a criminal in office – no one is shocked that he openly takes bribes and there’s overt corruption going on, because America quite explicitly voted for those things. Why would the world forgive and forget that?

To quote/paraphrase the previous person thought to be the bottom of the barrel of American leaders: “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice… uh… well you can’t get fooled again, right?”. Part of that sentiment, is that if you do it the second time, knowing how things went the last time around, you’re basically accepting the result of being made a fool – you’re not getting ‘fooled’, but instead you are accepting your role as a fool by trusting the same untrustworthy group again, you’re complicit in your poor treatment. Other countries cannot trust the states again, because we’ve all been shown the states is untrustworthy, and that they’re intent on harming our people/countries. We cannot go back to ‘trusting’ the states, unless we want to do harm to our own citizens/interests.

Besides, there’s still a few more years of insults and bullshit to come from the USA. We haven’t even hit the bottom for this massive betrayal of western allies. It’s a bit early to be pretending like they have a hope of digging themselves out of this pit, while they’re still actively digging deeper.

My take on it is that socialism is still fundamentally a capitalist approach to resource distribution, while Communism does away with most private property. Some people like to try and dress it up more with ideals, but that’s the basic difference in practice – it doesn’t make sense in this context, from my pov, to talk about the imaginary “ideal” of communism, rather than the realistic implementations of it that have occurred.

So, like under communism everything is basically state owned. People who’ve lived under communism will hear things like “state owned grocery stores” and think “Oh shit, I’ve lived this – you get food stamps/allocations of food assigned by the govt, and that’s what you’re allowed to ‘buy’/‘eat’. And the govt workers will get better stamps/allocations, cause it’ll be inevitably corrupt. This is bad!”. (I’ve heard this very sentiment from people who fled communist states, when topics like Mamdani’s govt run stores comes up). Applied communism isn’t some idyllic fairytale, it’s more “The state has declared the university system too elitist, so we’re forcing you all to do back breaking labour in the fields. Refusal means firing squad”.

Under a socialist approach, you get things like private stores, honoring things like food stamps that are provided to people in need, but most of the transactions are done without government involvement. The talk of setting up government run grocery stores, is viewed more as “We want to provide a baseline that can sell food at cost, but we still want private stores too, especially for more luxury/foreign goods and other options/competition in the market. Having a market option that is providing cheap generic products should have a stabilizing effect on food prices, and downward pressure on cost of living in general for folks”. To provide these services, socialist regimes typically have higher tax rates on private citizens – but those taxes are still fundamentally driven by a capitalist system of private property and individual choice/freedom.

Any westerner who’s paid attention to the media a bit, has seen / knows of things like Israel flattening cities and genociding palestinians, and have seen things like the USA’s attacks on civilian infrastructure. Heck, the US started off their ‘operation’ by blowing up a girls school, and is routinely threatening to “blow up all the bridges and power plants” – they also joked/bragged about killing fishermen/war crimes at their state of the union.

The UAE whining about civilian targets getting hit, isn’t something the west cares about any more – the west is literally hitting civilian targets at this point, with the US wanting to maximize the “terror” aspects of their military. It’s the whole reason they renamed it to the department of war, and why Hegseth called all his generals in to a meeting last year to say “Let’s commit war crimes, anyone who doesn’t want to is fired! Ignore rules of engagement, we want our ‘war fighters’ to be feared!”. The United States isn’t a force for good, it’s not pretending like it’s bringing freedom/liberty, it’s not trying to improve the quality of life of people in any way shape or form anymore. Like they kidnapped Maduro, left the authoritarian regime intact, so that they could basically steal oil without changing anything else. Having the opposition leader win the Nobel Prize likely also contributed to it, as the diaper-wearing convicted felon that the USA chose as their dictator has such a brittle ego.

The US basically rebranded itself into a very overt global terrorist organisation. Western nations can’t decouple from the USA fast enough to be able to call it out / push back on it, so they all just sorta go along with it. But realistically, if we’re pretending that Israel’s justified in flattening whole cities because of “terrorist elements somewhere in there”, then the same would apply to anyone hosting US assets – especially while the US is actively blowing up civilian targets.

Flyin around some tropical “resorts” with suspiciously young staff, fuckin models to create an army of my progeny, shitposting on twitter… but stock went up, and I made money! I must be doing that working thing! I’m working for like 6 companies full time as their boss! – Elon Musk and other Billionaire shitheads.

Canada doesn’t need nukes – the geographic proximity to the states basically means if nukes are used on the continent, both populations suffer. Just look at the wildfire smoke from Canada that circulates down to new york etc, and imagine that as nuclear fallout.

If Canada wants a deterrent, drones and bio-weapons is likely a better option. It’d be against international conventions perhaps, but Canada’s already declared international rules based order dead – so who cares on that front. You can build up more biotech knowledge by supporting medicare programs / vaccine research (something the states has pulled back on, making them more susceptible to such attacks). You can have a massive, lopsided impact, with a very low cost, easy to deploy/guerrilla setup.

You can’t develop nukes without an overt footprint showing your neighbour what you’re doing, giving them ample opportunity to sabotage/interfere with your actions. You can setup a couple dudes in a shack with a chicken coup and a couple drones fairly easily, by the thousands, all along the border.

A potentially odd thought, but the power and reach of US tech oligarchs is based on US softpower – the same stuff this guy is basically saying is useless. One reason US stocks/companies get lots of investment/support is the belief that US companies have more default in-roads to all western nations – invest in a US tech co, you get access to all western markets. It’s one reason they have the market power they flex. Even Iran had reports of their cisco devices failing during recent US aggression – so even the USA’s enemies had figured US tech was ‘country neutral’, stupidly, and their obvious mistake cost them dearly. Other nation’s will see that as a learning moment.

Western nations have started pulling away from US tech / hegemony. Places like France are eye’ing Linux, the Netherlands central bank declared it reasonable to expect US tech excised from their banking ecosystem in 4 years or so, Canada’s openly declaring US ties a weakness. So investing in a company like Microsoft, may no longer translate into investing in a company with a global reach within the western world – their stock ‘should’ eventually price this in. It’s one reason the tech overlords have directed the US government to challenge any/all pushes for data sovereignty.

And as for the end of nuke dominance and rise of AI drone warfare and all that… he’s an AI hammer salesman, declaring all problems are AI nails… hes clearly biased. We’re seeing drones as a viable option currently, because people are so scared shitless of nuclear conflicts. Just because people are too scared to use the massively destructive weapons, doesn’t mean that the deterrent factor of those weapons is meaningless. It’s why few countries have directly helped ukraine in their conflict with Russia. Hell, the states and Israel are busy justifying a war to try and prevent a country from getting nukes – and they’re beating up a country that only had drone power. While their campaign isn’t going as well as they may claim publicly, I know Iranians who’ve confirmed things like “All the airports are destroyed, and most of our projects/work is closed, so we’re just sitting at home kind of waiting at this point”. Those drones didn’t really help deter anything / protect the people all that much – having nukes likely would’ve, as we see in cases like North Korea and Russia. Even in cases like the USA, where their veering into a fascist dictatorship garnered little comment from western nations, who were afraid of upsetting their nuclear-umbrella.