World of Warcraft and Diablo are gacha.

The original versions of the game wouldn’t allow you to simply spend real money for in game benefits.

That’s since changed, as in game marketplaces have given users the ability to buy up their level, their gear, and their various grindable ranks.

But this is a relatively new iteration of the franchise. They also don’t use the “stars” power curve, wherein characters need to spend exponentially more in game currency to achieve linear power scale.

Without spending money, a lot of these games simply become boring and deeply repetitive over time.

The system for farming “free” in game currency feels more like a chore than entertainment. The benefits of each upgrade is more marginal while the adversaries progress rapidly.

There’s a “git good” angle to this kind of game, as it drifts from an FF-on-easy-mode to Dark-Souls-on-Legendary. But if I want that experience, why not just buy a copy of a Souls game?

Certainly Eldin Ring is worth a few hundred hours, has a much richer experience, and won’t immolate my wallet inside a month.

It sucks, but in a world we’ve chosen to litter with landmines, it’s a relatively harmless experience.

I would be more worried about the kid winning and internalizing the feeling of instant gratification.

Curious to see what that would do to the industry as a whole. But this is not entirely our of line with what countries like Korea, China, and Japan have already been fiddling with.

It’s the same formula in damned near every game now. Pay2Win has made even the most chill JRPG a wall of ads and notifications to spend more money.

Two sticks you can rub together.

Yes.

handing my friend a screwdriver

“You can use this for simple crafts and home repairs”

Me, backing away from the screwdriver in terror

“Nice try, but I know what that is. They use that thing to build the Space Shuttle.”

Levels of white-on-white racism not seen since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Talking about “Other Product” in the “Product” sub and getting banned is a tale as old as time. So obvious that the mod community is overrun with corporate accounts and their influencer subcontractors.

Even if you don’t like the BG3 campaign…

That’s crazy. The campaign was one of the best computerized D&D adventures I’ve seen published to date.

Neverwinter 1 & 2 lived on for a long time because of this.

I enjoyed the Neverwinter toolkit, but the graphics were still so blocky and clunky. There’s a polish to BG3 that, I think, will draw in a bigger audience.

Also, a big beautiful modding toolkit can have so many knock-on effects. Half-Life gave us a rich basket of spin-offs, from Team Fortress to Counterstrike. Starcraft and Warcraft popularized us a slew of new game styles, like Tower Defense and DOTA. Fingers crossed that we get something similar from BG3.

Same way they did it for the Mario live action movie 30 years ago, I imagine. Get Tim Burton on it and I’m sure he’ll give you some advice.

Personal complaints aside, the new Mario movie was reasonably good for adults and great for kids.

It was mid, until Jack Black’s Bowser hit the screen, and then it was top notch. He absolutely carried that film.

They also deserve better games than Minecraft IMO

One of the more pure-to-form sandbox games of the last generation? I’ll spot you all the shitty DLC and cosmetics have soured it considerably. But the baseline game is genuinely good. Same with classics like Fortnight.

They were quality products that got deluged with marketing gimmicks. But there are plenty of people running “Vanilla” Minecraft servers who are having a ton of fun.

Its proof-of-concept. They’re trying to get a movie out that’s entirely tied to the brand, without spending a meaningful amount of money on scripting, art direction, location scouting, or talent. This is the future of AI Movies in a nutshell.

Wait, is Sorbo in this?

I’m not really looking forward to the inevitably Obama hagiography, but releasing a movie like that right now would at least be timely. Reaganism might still rule our world, but Reagan - as a personality - hasn’t been relevant in decades.

Left out of this scene is Reagan’s “Make America Great Again” remark, no doubt to avoid drawing parallels between its protagonist and Donald Trump, and it’s the first of innumerable instances in which McNamara and screenwriter Howard Klausner warp history for one-note lionization.

Which is a shame, because Trump really is the modern incarnation of The Gipper. He cribbed from Ronnie’s playbook extensively and won with similar constituencies in a comparable upset campaign. Where Trump really failed was in his lack of an Evil Empire motivate the country against. Instead, he got a killer virus, which his own brand of cynical bumbling fascism was ill-disposed to confront. If Reagan had been held to Trump-esque standards for the AIDS epidemic, I wonder if he’d have suffered the same fate to Mondale in 1984. But AIDS was a disease for minorities, rather than rich old white men. So Reagan got to be the hero standing at the end of Cold War history, rather than the plague bringer that decimated the domestic economy.

Nonsensicality abounds, never more so than in Petrovich’s explanation for Reagan’s success: “People will not give their lives for power or a state or even ideology. People give their lives for one another, for the freedom to live those lives as they choose, and for God. We took that away. The Crusader gave it back to them.”

A bit of a shock to hear this, given the steady slide church attendance takes with the Gen X, Millennial, and Zoomer cohorts.

Considering its ceaseless hero worship, it’s unsurprising that Reagan concludes with an Alzheimer’s-afflicted Reagan riding off into the sunset. Yet for all the effort it expends trying to sell the late president as the embodiment of American virtue, McNamara’s film is so ungainly and transparent that it plays like embarrassing propaganda.

I can’t think of a more perfect ending to a movie about one of America’s premiere propagandists. But it feels like a message totally out of time with the modern audience. A “Hopey Changey” conservative throwback to a period of political optimism and a utopian vision of a single all-encompassing (fascist) movement that could sweep the nation.

If the movie falls to deliver, perhaps that’s less the fault of the producer and the director than the man they sought to embody in their work.

everyone from WotC they worked with has now been laid off despite the huge success of BG3

Yesh. That’s ugly.

In March, Vincke announced the studio’s plans to end its partnership with Wizards of the Coast, meaning Larian won’t be making DLC or a sequel to their critical success. Several months after this announcement, Vincke says the folks at Larian have no regrets about the decision.

Genuinely sad to hear, as WotC has a ton of rich properties that a studio like Larian could have brought to vivid life. Would love to have a Larian treatment of the MtG Multiverse or a rendition of the Dragonlance series or setting.

Excited to see what they do next, but its a shame to see these companies part ways.

J6 was largely the product of the DCPD thinking all those Blue Lives bumper sticker folks weren’t going to start cracking heads the moment they decided the police had Gone Woke. You had cops lowering barricades, opening doors, ushering J6ers inside, and even taking selfies shortly before things to heated. Not a coincidence that many of the rioters were, themselves, current or former police or military personal.

Some of those who work forces…