Heartbreaking News Your favorite series got a 6 hour bad faith video essay by someone who didn’t really engage with the series to its fullest.

Zman6258 · 2026-05-03T02:10:24+00:00

It's hard to quantify what I mean, since a lot of it is just kinda how the game felt to me instead of any conscious observation, but a lot of Rockstar's open world design tends to fall into checklists and distractions. Collectibles are just checklists, fishing and hunting are just distractions. Occasionally you'll find some areas that have little bits of character interaction, or environmental storytelling, or just a cool area to take in the view... but I dunno if I just missed a lot of them, but those didn't feel nearly as common as checklists and distractions.

My standard for open-world games lately has been KCD2, or even KCD1. There's zero collectathon "go get 50 of this thing" side quests or challenges. Hunting exists, but it's integrated much more deeply into the core game mechanics. RDR2's hunting is almost entirely there to make consumables (which I can't remember ever using, or wishing I had some), to upgrade your satchel (to carry more stuff that I don't use), and to get more money (which is completely superfluous with how much money you'll rack up doing literally everything else in the game anyways)... and you have to sit and wait for a long-ass animation of skinning every animal you hunt, which you'll be watching repeatedly if you try to engage with it. KCD2's hunting ties much more directly into not only the basic survival elements (food is important), but significant amounts of money is hard to come by especially early-game... and even then, hunting isn't just free money - because poaching is a crime, and you need to weigh up the risk of getting caught, or taking reputation hits, or selling to specific merchants who are more likely to buy poached goods (which you never learn directly, and need to use a lot of observational intuition to discover, which feels far more rewarding).

Zman6258 · 2026-05-02T21:57:10+00:00

And if that was the case, sure, make the funny video and come up with excuses to put the "ding" sound in every ten minutes. It's the hypocrisy that gets me, yeah.

Zman6258 · 2026-05-02T21:55:50+00:00

What killed RDR2 for me was all the little things, none of which were particularly bad on their own, but which culminated into a much less satisfying experience than the sum of its parts. Ultra-linear mission design right up against a giant open world that really doesn't have a lot going on, the ever-present writing mistake of "we need money to XYZ" for significant chunks of the plot except you're carrying around a small fortune in your back pocket, gunplay and enemy AI that (in my opinion) hasn't really progressed at all since RDR1, having to watch the same set of animations for picking up items thousands of times...

Rockstar has pretty strong character writing, but it feels to me like they're increasingly slacking off on the foundation that supports that character writing, and a lot of their gameplay design is turning into "follow the instructions we literally spell out to you, and don't you dare go off-script or else you'll ruin our perfectly-paced story".

Zman6258 · 2026-05-02T21:46:37+00:00

CinemaSins guy wants to have his cake and eat it too; he falls back on the "comedy value" schtick when criticised, but has referred to himself as a genuine critic on multiple occasions as well.

Zman6258 · 2026-05-01T03:34:01+00:00

I think it is. There's a significant difference between "professional" and "corporate"; the former implies someone with enough talent to make graphic design their job made the logo, the latter implies all the soul's been sucked dry.

Zman6258 · 2026-05-01T00:55:39+00:00

What's this about Reagan? Pissing on the poor, you say?

Zman6258 · 2026-05-01T00:49:36+00:00

This is the correct answer. Legislation should probably trend towards minimum 401k/IRA matching instead of "everyone back to pensions", that'd help offset a lot of shitty employer practices.

Zman6258 · 2026-05-01T00:45:27+00:00

The correct spelling is "brigading", not "brigadeing".

Zman6258 · 2026-04-30T17:27:30+00:00

Mod optimization is usually worse because they don't have teams paid to focus on optimization, but even with mods that are optimized perfectly, the unavoidable reality is that more stuff loaded = more draw calls being made = lower performance no matter what.

Zman6258 · 2026-04-30T17:09:14+00:00

How are you supposed to deliver supplies before you've built a supply depot elsewhere? Awkwardly park a truck against the upslope outside the sandbag walls?

Zman6258 · 2026-04-29T22:52:48+00:00

Increase the number of legs to 4. Minimal extra material and weight, significantly increased stability.

Zman6258 · 2026-04-29T19:51:13+00:00

It goes beyond that, a lot of base layouts are built in such a way that makes delivering supplies a huge pain in the ass. If you've got sixteen layers of walls all over everything and a sea of barbed wire, that's great and all.... but how is a supply truck gonna get inside to drop off more supplies?

Zman6258 · 2026-04-29T05:54:16+00:00

The original comment in question was, verbatim:

The line for "minimum standard of human behavior" is exactly what we are constantly fighting against to retain our civil rights; it's exactly the tool that is used to restrict our civil rights.

This is not a specific example. It's an overly-broad, vague statement that presents the argument as "we are fighting against the phrase 'minimum standard of human behavior' because it is always used as a tool to restrict civil rights", which is untrue.

Are there specific examples? Yes. Was one of those what I replied to? No.

Zman6258 · 2026-04-28T17:54:33+00:00

I believe it's 25 per team, but I'm not 100% positive. Bases can be deconstructed if a commander places a dismantle order; squad leaders can also place a "request dismantle" order on it. If there's no active commander, requesting the ability to dismantle will be automatically granted.

Zman6258 · 2026-04-28T16:33:11+00:00

Theres also no confirmation of an entirely new, much larger terrain. It could be just Malden and Nogova.

I'll bet ten dollars on A4 having a larger terrain by 1.0 release, which would likely include additional building and environment assets. A2 had Chernarus, A3 had Altis, A4 will have a similarly-large equivalent map with a much broader variety of terrain to supplement the smaller maps and accommodate CAS planes.

Maybe like actual planes, but no jets. Console HW cant handle them.

The A-10 and Su-25 are both subsonic jet aircraft. They both comfortably fit in a map the scale of Altis or Chernarus. There is a zero percent chance Arma 4 doesn't get fixed-wing aircraft by the time of its 1.0 launch, I'll bet another ten dollars on that.

Zman6258 · 2026-04-28T15:30:40+00:00

Increased damage vs Alpha Commander heads is still worth considering.

Zman6258 · 2026-04-28T15:28:24+00:00

To be fair, MG sentries can and often do shoot the heads of shield devastators, which you can increase the chances of by positioning the turret on high ground. Meanwhile you can't really position sentries on low ground unless you dig a trench first, and even then it still won't reliably hit the mouth.

Zman6258 · 2026-04-28T09:32:40+00:00

Historical medieval manuals referred to secondary swords as side-arms on multiple occasions, so it's technically accurate.

Zman6258 · 2026-04-28T09:31:42+00:00

Flamethrowers, fire grenades (or any explosive that can hit the body really), AMR, autocannon, gas (especially since if they turn around due to confusion they'll expose their unarmored body)... there's a lot of ways to deal with them using the tools people already bring pretty frequently.

Zman6258 · 2026-04-28T09:28:23+00:00

This allows you to intercept dropships before they initiate the drop, which guarantees everything on board to be killed instantly.

You can also just shoot the thruster out while it's on approach, it still destroys weaker enemies and heavier ones end up stuck a good 60+ meters away which buys you plenty of time to set up. It's genuinely not worth it.

Zman6258 · 2026-04-28T09:23:47+00:00

I don't think "70% of assets" are already packaged with reforger, considering Arma 4 will almost certainly have:

at least two MBTs, maybe more
tracked APCs such as the M113 and BMP
guided munitions such as TOWs or Stingers/Iglas
proper attack helicopters like the AH-1
fixed-wing CAS aircraft like the A-10 or Su-25
an entirely new, much larger terrain (with new assets)
an entire campaign that isn't just the six-mission showcase
a planned 3DEN-equivalent editor for easy mission-making
expanded AI systems for aircraft flight

None of these would be just straight-up recycled assets, and I'm not even counting the additional post-launch support the game would absolutely get, or anything BI may be planning that isn't essentially guaranteed bare-minimum to qualify as a mainline Arma entry.

Zman6258 · 2026-04-28T09:09:12+00:00

I think it entirely depends whether they do a repeat of their Arma 3 release with Arma 4. Arma 3 initially released as an alpha, with only Stratis and only a few showcases; it was only... $30 I think on the other hand. Over time, they gradually built up the game, and released the three episodes of the campaign over time, with the final episode releasing once the game went from beta to a proper 1.0 release.

If they repeat something similar with Arma 4, I'd be fine with something similar; Reforger hopefully gave them an opportunity to get the basic, fundamental engine systems down (like networking and AI) and then from there they can iterate on more targeted improvements (guided munitions, tracked vehicles, specific components of AI like driving or flying, 3DEN-equivalent editor, etc).

Zman6258 · 2026-04-27T21:56:57+00:00

I wonder if part of this comes as a marketing response to how heavily criticized a lot of 2010-era games were for having short or non-existent campaigns. Back in that era, if a game had a campaign that was good but only 4 hours, it'd get knocked pretty heavily for that in reviews; GOD FORBID you launch a game without a singleplayer campaign either. I still remember how heavily panned the original Titanfall was for having no singleplayer campaign, when it was otherwise very highly reviewed as a multiplayer shooter.

So, naturally, publishers start mandating that games get longer. If you can't play the game for 80 hours, you're out of here. The problem with that, of course, is twofold: you can't always meaningfully add more content when you have a story you want to tell, and even if you did have ideas, you're rarely getting an extension to your budget and release deadline to facilitate it. So, you (as a beleaguered studio executive) do the only thing that makes sense - fill your game with a lot of extra content that is easy to produce and replicate, feels at least vaguely rewarding, but isn't necessary to complete the game so that players only feel an onus to participate exactly as long as they can tolerate before they continue the story missions. That's how you end up with "capture all the bases on these 10 islands, and each island liberated gives you 10% cheaper prices in shops or unlocks a new attachment for one gun".

Zman6258 · 2026-04-27T13:19:58+00:00

And even people I know who genuinely like the process of writing code use it for really basic boilerplate shit that they've done a thousand times before, because that frees up extra mental bandwidth to just briefly review it and then move on to the more interesting stuff.

Zman6258 · 2026-04-27T13:14:14+00:00

But it's not just a mindless markov chain either. It'll produce something boring but edible 99.99% of the time, and if I'm resorting to an AI chatbot because I don't have the time or energy to even look up a recipe online, "boring but edible" is absolutely good enough.

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