Quoting: rambo919The function of any game psychologically is to play out scenarios, a form of learning without risk. Anything you do in a game is an expression of what you would do IRL if given the opportunity and resources, it's just that most seem to not notice this about themselves.

Nonsense. I play tabletop RPGs, and morality aside, I play many characters whose personal styles and interests are vastly different from my own. I wouldn't want to live their lives, because faced with a choice between what they like (that I'm just interested in enough to dip into for a couple hours every other week) and what I like, their stuff would at best be way too far down my list of interests to make it my actual real-life priority.

In Stellaris, I have a playthrough in which I am a devouring swarm literally eating all other life--I just wouldn't be that interested in doing that even if it were consequence-free. Kind of a one-dimensional existence. In Civ V, I regularly push religion . . . I don't even like religion, but in Civ V if you can get your hands on stuff like mosques and pagodas it turbocharges your happiness and culture production.

There is a huge step from "everyone has a bit of hostility in them" to "everyone would actually want to be a mass murderer". Most people also have a bunch of other stuff in them.

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I feel like playing this could give me interesting ideas for foes when running my tabletop fantasy game. Whatever it's like as a game, the art and ideas are pretty interesting and frightening.

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Quoting: rambo919

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: rambo919Now it's all relativistic drivel all the way down dressed

Relativistic? The game is traveling near lightspeed, making all the graphics look foreshortened?!

I meant how everyone is obsessed with making everything political.... now the current fad is no civilization is actually inherently distinct from any other.... you can take up a new civ with every age as if changing your clothes.... it's stupid.

History has become "who's line is it anyway".

Mm, that feature seems kind of weird to me too. But it's not mandatory, so if I prefer to play through as a civilization, I can still do that. I don't see that being a big problem, gameplay-wise. Similarly with the leader mix-and-match thing where you could have like Augustus Caesar leading the Mongols . . . if you don't want to be bizarre, you don't do that. They're not issues like, are these "towns" going to work well or be boring? If those suck, you have no way around them.

On the political thing, though . . . it's been my experience that to the contrary, everyone seems to be obsessed with making everything apolitical. And certainly a game that is about the sweep of human history is going to be political--history is made of politics. Every technology, let alone every civic, represents a value judgment about what that thing does to society . . . that's politics.

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I feel like the art style and stuff like animations of people looking like cartoon cinders after you blow them away would be amusing for five minutes or so, but at a certain point . . . it's just an FPS, and is there anything about the gameplay that makes it good?

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Quoting: FergleFergleson

Linux via Steam

I hope that doesn't just mean they're going to leave it to Proton to handle. Not that Proton hasn't been great, but it too often seems to mean that they will happily sell to the Linux/Steamdeck crowd without ever committing to supporting the product there.

Looking at more of the sentence,

PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, and Mac and Linux via Steam

it's pretty clearly just a reference to what store it's available on.

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Quoting: rambo919Now it's all relativistic drivel all the way down dressed

Relativistic? The game is traveling near lightspeed, making all the graphics look foreshortened?!

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So Microsoft is trying to tell us to wipe our drives clean of Windows. Seen that way, sort of a public service announcement!

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So you're a spider and you're . . . baking cookies? Cute.

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One detail I noticed from the trailer is it seemed like there was some kind of river travel.

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Quoting: dziadulewicz

Quoting: kaimanCanonical seems to be quite infected by the "not invented here" syndrome.

This has been proven a false claim so many times but still ppl try to use it against Ubuntu or whatever.

I think there is a real beef to be made about the way Canonical operates with respect to the open source ecosystem, although "not invented here" isn't exactly, or mostly, it. People reach for that because it's kind of close and there isn't really a term for what Canonical does.
The thing is that Canonical typically seems to control their open source projects very tightly, making it difficult for anyone else to get involved, contribute, have influence or in some cases even use the stuff they're making. There's nothing about them that's not technically open source, but if you want to add a feature that isn't part of Canonical's road map, you're gonna have to fork it, and I seem to recall they insist on contributors handing over copyright and stuff. So then nobody outside Canonical contributes and it makes the projects not as good and reduces mindshare.

And it tends to make people forget that the Canonical project was first (in cases where it was), because it didn't have a community so nobody noticed it much before they actually released it for general use or got into some kind of difficulty with whatever other project was doing the same stuff.

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