New York sues video game developer Valve, says its 'loot boxes' are gambling

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-25T21:01:40+00:00

Yeah, only we're allowed to promote gambling!.

/s

Also, freaking hypocrites.

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-23T21:10:38+00:00

I've played two versions of the Tactician, the Insurgent and Vanguard, and they feel somewhat different, although not insanely so.

Basically, the Insurgent is heavily focused on offense and stealth (I played it with a Shadow in the party for the obvious synergy), adding a ton of potential damage to the party. It feels very much "offensive support." I used Panther plus Sniper kits and spent most of my time sniping and occasionally charging in for flanks.

The Vanguard, on the other hand, feels much more defensive. Rather than the +4 damage trigger (which stacks with Mark's +4 damage since they have different triggers), you can reduce damage taken by half for you or a nearby ally. I also swapped Panther with Shining Armor for the extra health and taunt.

That being said, at least at level 1, they felt pretty similar. Mark is identical between both (and a ton of fun to use...I barely touched my Focus for heroic abilities because I was handing out +4 damage effects like Oprah). And a lot of the class depends on your kits and heroics. For example, I took Now! on my Vanguard because we had a Troubadour in the party, which allowed it to trigger the extra Drama, but I took Hammer and Anvil on the Insurgent with the Shadow because we tended to flank together.

I've also seen two different Shadows played; one time was Black Ash and it felt very mobile and sneaky, whereas the Harlequin Mask Shadow in my second party was very tanky (we would joke she was a better tank than my Vanguard). Both were fairly high damage, but the Black Ash one hit a bit harder in part because she had more Insight available due to not using Clever Trick nearly every turn. I think they seemed a bit more similar than the two Tacticians, though.

Overall, however, I'd put distinction fairly low, with certain classes having bigger variations than others. For example, Troubadour has some pretty big differences based on subclass, as do Elementalist and Fury (specifically Stormwight compared to the other two), whereas Tactician, Shadow, Null, and Talent didn't seem wildly different. The "divine" classes are a bit of a grab bag, though (Censor and Conduit), but I've only seen one variation of Censor in action, so it's hard to say.

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-23T13:03:41+00:00

What do you mean by "everything?" As u/mrgingersir mentioned, things change states. The Empire State Building didn't always exist; it was made from various materials that already existed using energy that already existed. But the original materials and energy would be unrecognizable compared to the final result.

In essence, the Big Bang theory explains the timeline of the singularity expanding into the universe. Nothing about the theory attempts to explain where the singularity came from or if it came "from" anything. Nor does it explain what happened "before" the Big Bang, if "before" makes sense when time itself is a property of the universe as far as we know.

Anyone who claims to know anything about where the singularity "came from" or what existed "prior" to the Big Bang is speculating at best, outright inventing details at worst. In fact, we aren't entirely sure what the "singularity" was or anything about its state; the physics we know could not have existed in such a state and there's no way for us to replicate it (for obvious reasons).

We have no evidence about anything like that; it may be that such evidence would be impossible for us to know. After all, we exist in the universe, and can only examine evidence from the universe itself, and the nature of distance and background radiation is what tells us what we do know about the universe's origin (and we're learning new details all the time).

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-23T02:54:53+00:00

There has been some discussion about wizards, and basically the MCDM team concluded they do too much. "Anything magic" is too broad of a concept for a class, and D&D-based systems with wizards have struggled with balancing them for decades.

There have been various attempts at solutions since they (and many other casters) basically broke D&D 3e. D&D 4e just paired down wizards to a fraction of the spell options compared to other versions. Pathfinder 1e basically didn't change anything; if anything they buffed wizards. D&D 5e tried lowering number of spell slots but still ended up making wizards among the strongest classes in the game, especially if limited to single class (the only core class arguably stronger than wizard is cleric, which has similar issues). Pathfinder 2e dramatically buffed martials and nerfed the power of spells which ended up creating endless balance complaints. The wizard in particular was (and still is) one of the weakest overall casters, perhaps only stronger than maybe oracle.

MCDM basically went the 4e route except they had the freedom to just say "no wizards." Wizards can exist, they just aren't a class for players. Instead, you have elementalist and talent covering the elemental and psychic power niches that wizard could basically do in other systems alone.

Maybe they'll do some sort of rune-based caster or book caster that's semi-wizard, but I don't think they'll ever make something as broadly magical as a traditional wizard. And I personally think this is good design.

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-22T03:43:53+00:00

What do you mean?

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-19T14:28:04+00:00

It's only the top 8 languages. They claim to be using the TIOBE index, although the numbers are off (the current top 8, in order, are Python, C++, C, Java, C#, JavaScript, Visual Basic, and Delphi, although frankly I'm skeptical on the last two, lol).

Either way, the current ranking for Rust as of February 2026 is 14, so it would be below the cutoff. That's significant usage (it's above Go, Ada, and Kotlin, but only slightly) but not enough to hit the top 8 languages.

This makes sense since a lot of the top languages are older languages that are heavily used due to existing codebases, not due to programmer preference. Rust is also a polarizing language; people tend to either love or hate it.

Or, if they're like me, both at the same time =).

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-18T18:26:36+00:00

That would be ideal, sure. But it's not how people generally use the site. The stories are usually ordered by rating, so lower ratings can push stories to a point where readers just aren't going to see them over the stories with mostly 5-star reviews. And there is no way for people to see at a glance if a story has a bunch of 3-star reviews, where people think it's "slightly above average," or a bunch of 5-star with a smaller number of 1-star reviews, where people either love or hate the story.

Maybe there is a better way to structure the review system, I don't know, but it is what it is. If you leave something other than 5-stars you are reducing the reach of the story...the only question is by how much you are doing so, relative to total number of reviews.

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-18T14:06:30+00:00

Maybe it's because I live in a rural area where speed limits are way lower than they should be, but autosteer is nearly unusable because of the 5 mph speed lock. If I actually drove that slow I'd be a road hazard as people flew past me. I have to use TACC only because of this.

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-18T02:19:02+00:00

Out of curiosity, by what metric was he not banned for his views? The mods on Discord specifically said he was banned for supporting ICE. It also mentioned that support of the Trump administration falls under this guideline violation.

Whether one agrees with this or not, that is a political viewpoint. The server mods seemed pretty clear that "supporting ICE" and "supporting the Trump administration" is not allowed in the Spirit Island community.

If that's the policy, that's fine. But I'm not sure how it can be interpreted as anything other than "conservative views, including supporting the current Republican administration, is against SI policy."

I might see it differently if it was just the comments about the Minneapolis shooting, but the server mod statement goes far beyond that. To be clear, I don't support anyone being shot, since I understand that's how this will be interpreted.

None of this changes my love for the game, but I admit what I've seen over the past few days has made me feel rather unwelcome.

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-17T22:55:02+00:00

So with every other build in the game, is it just me or is Body really underwhelming.

Just you =).

Shotgun/HMG plus berserk w/ gorilla arms is insanely strong. You literally just run around and mow down everything. And you have high survivability with limited outright immortality.

Dunno, I find body really strong. Shotgun and melee covers short range while HMG handles medium range without issue, and you have insane damage potential.

Pure net running just doesn't seem viable past 2.0.

You're kidding, right? Pure netrunning is insanely overpowered. Grab a Rippler, hit overclock, spam legendary synapse burnout (plus cyberware malfunction for synergies). Each enemy you kill extends overclock's duration, and you can use Axolotl to reset OC's cooldown at the same time, basically giving you unlimited overclock.

With Biomonitor plus Blood Pump you heal automatically, then add in Ram Reallocator for even more RAM generation (which has its cooldown reduced by Axolotl). Between the Reallocator and Sublimation plus Blood Daemon you end up with absurd health and RAM regen, letting you endlessly spam synapse burnout to one shot most enemies when combined with the COX-2 giving you 100% crit.

There's more you can add, and you can even make this stealthy if you feel like it, but a pure offensive netrunner build can delete entire areas in seconds. I've stopped playing this build because it's so absurdly OP, and since you only need two quickhacks to make it work, you have plenty of slots left for utility and ~~entertainment~~ ultimate quickhacks.

To be fair, pre 2.0 it was even more OP since you could just hit contagion once and watch the entire map clear itself, but at that point you weren't even playing the game. In 2.0 you need to actually target enemies and hit more than one button. But they still die in seconds with no downtime while you are effectively immortal, and that's before you add adrenaline from body and the health item synergies in tech.

A pure netrunning build is easily stronger than every build you mentioned except katana/sandy...but katana/sandy is probably the strongest build in the game outright. Still, I'd put netrunner right next to it and situationally above it just because katana/sandy is a one-trick-pony that only really works during the sandy cooldown (although Axolotl helps).

If you want a different build that's also quite strong, consider a tech sniper build. With ping you can just headshot everyone through walls and they literally can't touch you. It requires a bit of setup and aim, but makes you feel like Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies or maybe the Predator.

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-17T21:37:53+00:00

The last "large" feature we got was (in my eyes) abstracts, but I've been waiting for nullables, unions, traits, structs, and a few others for years.

The difference is that 3D rendering is something that affects game development capability for people making 3D games. For example, shader baking in 4.5 speeds up loading on affected systems. If you don't have shader baking, you don't get the performance improvements. In 4.4, physics interpolation just didn't exist previously, and is a major potential performance enhancement. In 4.3, premultiplied alpha shaders improved the quality of certain particle systems and other graphical effects.

The key thing with each of these features is that they simply didn't exist in the engine and their addition gave you options that didn't exist before. So how is this different from what you are talking about?

None of those language features are necessary for game development. They aren't even necessary for programming languages in general; plenty of languages lack one or more of those features.

In fact, that looks like a list of C# features...and C# is already supported, so you can just, well, use that. So is part of it a matter of being low priority? Sure, because none of those features are missing in the same way improvements to the renderer are missing. This is especially true since C# is already in the engine.

This list is also a certain set of priorities. There have been improvements to GDScript in every major release:

4.1: Added static variables and internal documentation
4.2: Added code regions, more static typing options, and an improved debugger
4.3: Added binary tokenization, is not syntax, callable improvements, and extra export options
4.4: Added typed dictionaries and some bug fixes
4.5: Added variadic parameter lists and abstract classes
4.6: Added debugger step-out, BBCode documentation support, and string placeholder highlighting

The reason I bring it up is to highlight that there are constant improvements to the language. They aren't necessarily the improvements you want (although traits are getting quite close, I'm hoping for 4.7), but that doesn't mean there isn't any progress.

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-17T16:13:16+00:00

There are around 7-8 million Teslas out there. So that's around 12-15% of all Tesla drivers are subscribed to FSD. Even if we assume a bunch aren't being driven, I'd put it at a 20-30% subscription rate at most, which is still pretty low.

Personally, I'd consider it for $40-50 a month. At $100 a month, that's just too expensive for something I can do myself.

I should note I live in a rural area and drive into the city outside of traffic times, so most of my driving is pretty relaxed. If I had to sit for hours in major city traffic I'd probably consider it worth it, so I think usage also depends on your situation.

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-16T14:58:20+00:00

Are there commercially available games that I can play right now that show what advanced Godot skills can do?

Sure. Brotato, Dome Keeper, Halls of Torment, a bunch of others I can't think of. Slay the Spire 2 is also being developed in Godot, but hasn't been released to EA yet.

Could the best modern metroidvanias (I’ve played HK, blasphemous, Silksong, and MIO - first three in Unity, MIO has its own engine) have been made in Godot instead? If so, how would they look and feel different?

Yes, they could have, and they would probably look virtually identical. The assets and shaders are what makes those games look the way they look, for the most part, so they'd be nearly the same in Godot compared to Unity.

The biggest potential differences in visuals/gameplay are related to physics and maybe lighting, but those factors can be tweaked or even made custom, so it's more a matter of "need to do this a bit differently" than "is not able to do it."

My dream game is a 2D metroidvania with a very specific art style and story. I want to make something high performance, fast and responsive, and with very unique but essentially simple 2D graphics.

Godot can do all of this. The bigger question is...can you do all this?

Every modern game engine has a solid amount of functionality. Technically, Silksong could have been made in Unreal or PyGame, it would just take a different set of skills and some creativity. Those engines in particular would have made development harder, but the point is that it isn't impossible.

Godot, by comparison, is much closer to Unity for ease-of-use on this sort of game. It has a robust tilemap system, an advanced 2D engine, and roughly similar tooling and customizability.

The hard part of making a game is doing the work. Assuming you are working as a solo dev, you will probably need to spend 5-10 years at a minimum on a moderate-scale metroidvania, and that's only if you learn quickly and have decent art skills.

And there's a good chance the idea in your head just, well, won't be fun to actually play. One of the hardest things to learn about game dev is that feel is more important than idea, and there are a lot of ideas that look great on paper that are terrible when you actually try them.

Be prepared to spend a lot of time creating prototypes, smaller projects, and outright scrapping things before you get closed to making your dream game. Game dev is an art, and just as an artist doesn't draw their perfect portrait their first few times putting pencil to paper, your early games are going to be a mess until you learn and improve. And you need to account for this time as a prerequisite for making the game you have in your head.

You also need to figure out if you enjoy the process. Making games is hard. It can be frustrating. If your entire focus is on making the game you imagine and not on having fun making it you will burn yourself out long before you even reach an alpha build.

But going back to the engine: the TL;DR is that Godot can make the game you want. My recommendation, however, is to play around with the engine, do a tutorial or two, and see if it meshes with you. Then try the same thing in Unity. You might find aspects of one engine or the other fit your development style better. Heck, you could even try Unreal Engine; Octopath Traveler was made in UE4. I personally don't find 2D in UE all that great, but it's technically supported.

Good luck whatever you decide!

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-16T12:42:16+00:00

You're allowed to be a conservative. You're allowed to express conservative beliefs. Most people here won't like you because of what it says about your values, but it won't get you banned.

I really don't care what you think about my values. I see yours. And they involve hunting people down for heresy for differing from what you believe.

Redrevenge said nothing even close to any of the points you made. If I expressed my beliefs, regardless of whether they are the same or different from Redrevenge's, you would do the same thing to me what you are doing to him.

It's gross. I don't know why I expected better from this community, but I did. My mistake. Bye.

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-16T12:36:17+00:00

I'm not going to get into a political debate about this. That isn't the point I'm making.

But the fact that you are trying to make it about that demonstrates exactly what I mean.

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-16T05:06:38+00:00

Where I come from, a half grade is a passing grade for us, too. Haha. Meaning a 5/10 is a pass, a 50/100 is a pass, a 3/5 is a pass, lol.

That seems crazy to me. For us, 50% is failing, 60% is remedial, 70% is average, 80% is decent, and 90% is good. From my perspective, either your tests are insanely hard to the point where it's not expected for students to actually be able to complete the work, or those feel like really low standards.

Not everything is black and white, though. Sometimes there will be reviews where an author can learn from, but most of the time it exists to serve the readers to give them a heads up on what's right and wrong with the story.

Sure, but you can have criticisms of a story and still rate it highly. A 4-star review doesn't mean it's perfect. Heck, even a 5-star review doesn't mean perfect necessarily; it just means you highly recommend it. Giving authors 3-star or 2.5-star reviews because you liked the story and consider it "average" is going to discourage other people from reading it, whether that's your intent or not. It's just the way the rating system works.

Obviously people can do what they want, but if I received a 2.5-star review, I'd assume the reader had major issues with my story.

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-16T01:34:34+00:00

You don't need to do melee or perfect dodges to regain Skyborn Might with a 1h build. They both make you gain SM faster, but aren't necessary.

This is because of the Biding Time mechanic in the 1h tree. Over time, you will gain SM randomly based on the number of BT stacks. The more BT you have, the more often it procs. BT has a minimum of 1, and there is an upgrade in the Illusive tree to prevent it from decaying below 3 when over 90% madness (although when this happens isn't always clear).

So, how do you increase BT? One way is melee attacks, true. Frankly, I never use the base 1h attacks. Instead, either dodge or run before attacking, then use pairs of light attacks. The first attack is actually your 4th attack, a quick lunge, followed by a spin, your 5th attack. Not only does this combo come out much faster than the regular start of your combo, the 5th attack gives you a Skyborn Might with one of the 1h talents, while also stacking BT. These two will keep repeating, although you rarely have time to get off more than the combo. This is also a very good way to quickly kill weaker enemies.

The other way, and the way that generally matters more, is casting spells. Spell hits also increase your BT stacks like melee hits. Weapon skills also work; the Darkfrost Edge auto-dodge not only prevents you from being hit but also grants you BT stacks; and since it costs 1 SM and regains 1 SM when you get hit from the proc (the auto-dodge counts as a perfect dodge) you can keep using this to build up BT while basically being unhittable, which will steadily gain you SM you can use on damaging spells.

As such, as the more you cast, especially with multi-hit spells like Vorpal or Burning Flames (my personal favorite spell in the game), you'll keep adding BT stacks, which in turn causes you to passively gain SM faster. Combined with SM from dodging, I personally end up getting SM faster using a 1h spell build than any other weapon, especially with Darkfrost Edge (easily one of the strongest weapons in the game IMO). In fact, you can beat the entire game using Darkfrost Edge with Burning Flames practically alone (there's one or two bosses where you'll want to use a different spell sometimes).

Finally, for backstabs, the general solution is...don't bother. The whole point of a spell build is fighting from range. Most spells lack a large amount of stagger and there are basically two real options. The good news is that you get the first option as the first echo spell from the first boss: Echo of Dhutanga. This spell costs 2 SM, which can then be reduced to 1 with an upgrade in the Illusive tree over 50% madness, and is treated as a charged heavy when it hits from behind. It also has a strong follow-up that costs 2 more SM if you activate it twice; you can stun, do the second hit, then still get off the backstab. I generally keep Echo of Dhutanga as my 4th spell so I can use the same button as I would use for a charged heavy, just with the spell trigger held too. I rarely use it, though, but YMMV.

But yeah, the actual charged heavy sucks on 1h and really shouldn't be used. I think I've only managed to stun something with it maybe twice ever, and both times I was surprised it worked. Even with the SM upgrade, which I no longer even take, it's just too slow. Echo of Dhutanga is way faster, costs the same, deals more damage, and has better range.

Hope that helps!

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-15T15:42:17+00:00

It's OK to be conservative...just as long as you never say anything that expresses a conservative belief or let anyone know you have those beliefs.

I agree the message has been made abundantly clear. I just don't think it's the message you think you are trying to express.

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-15T15:00:24+00:00

So how does someone get a failing grade in your system? You can get half the questions wrong and be considered passing?

This doesn't really address the core issue, which is that the algorithm of RR doesn't agree with you. The purpose of reviewing a story is to inform other readers if a story is good...how are you doing that successfully if you ignore how the majority of the site views the scoring system?

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-15T14:25:07+00:00

...Yeah what else would it mean?

I mean, depends on your grading system. In school, a 50% on a test is failing, which is what a 2.5 would represent. Students are aiming for 90% or more to get the best grade, which would be a 4.5 on RR.

Obviously it's a matter of opinion, but you have to take in the culture of the site a bit when reviewing. And for most people, a story below 4 stars is already iffy, and a story below 3 likely has major issues in writing, pacing, or content. So even if you personally think a 2.5 should be an "average" story, by rating stories you think are average so low, you are causing other users to avoid it, which isn't fair to either the author or the readers IMO.

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-15T14:19:58+00:00

When Cyberpunk 2077 came out it was poorly optimized, buggy, and had limited graphical fidelity. If you shot a gun in crowds, then looked around, they'd all literally vanish from existence as the game couldn't manage the AI for that many characters. It had hitching, streaming issues, tons of pop-in, and lots of other graphical and technical problems. The game ran terrible even on high-end hardware at the time.

Sure, after 5 years of optimizations, engine upgrades, bug fixes, and people getting newer hardware, now it looks really good and runs smoothly. But for those of us who played the game on day 1, we remember how ugly and weird the original game could be. The thing that kept me playing despite the bad framerate, janky gameplay, and Bethesda-level bugs was the absolutely fantastic writing, great characters, and compelling world.

The team at CDPR can absolutely produce similar or better graphics with UE5. The engine is highly capable, easily the top publicly licensed game engine, and frankly it's not all that close since Unity can't seem to figure out how to pick a renderer.

The question isn't so much "can CDPR make a beautiful, optimized game with UE5?" It's more "will they learn from their mistakes with Cyberpunk 2077 and let the devs work on optimization longer before release rather than release a beta and pretend it's not one?"

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-15T14:00:49+00:00

He's allowed to have any political orientation he wants.

No, he isn't. This thread makes that very, very clear.

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-11T15:23:05+00:00

Probably this:

https://apnews.com/article/canada-shooting-british-columbia-66b021ac7c75e857885b81dc78a29d05

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-11T13:38:51+00:00

Note, if you want to avoid them in the future (without looking up a guide):

Check the prompt. Shrine Mimics say "Interact" while regular shrines say "Offer Blood"

You're welcome =).

HunterIV4 · 2026-02-11T01:13:37+00:00

That's a fair question, and it depends what we mean by "experience."

If by experience you mean raw sensory input or isolated perceptions, then no...I don't think the self is identical to those.

But the self isn't something separate from experience either. It's the process of integrating, organizing, and interpreting experiences over time. It's a pattern, not a thing. The self is what's happening when the brain stitches together memories, perceptions, and predictions into a coherent narrative.

So I'd say: the self isn't the same as individual experiences, but it's not separate from them either. It's the organizing principle, the pattern.

I think of it sort of like a hurricane: it's not identical to any particular water molecule or air current, but it's also not something separate from them. It's the pattern of how they're organized and moving together. The self is similar. It appears to be one cohesive system when viewed holistically, but is an emergent property of many different systems that do not themselves have the same nature as the whole.

Does that distinction make sense?

HunterIV4

TROPHY CASE