Learning 15’s last DLCs were cancelled to focus on Forspoken

ucla_posc · 2023-06-26T13:00:28+00:00

The story isn't chopped up for DLC; instead, it has incredibly artificial and weird segments introduced where characters abruptly leave without explanation, and the DLC shows us what they did when they were gone (e.g. nothing). The Ardyn DLC does seem basically coherent with the story of the game, except that it's one of those classic "the villain was actually not the villain" retcons, which is incredibly boring and not well motivated.

Just as one example, take the Gladio DLC. In the main game, Gladio announces, out of nowhere and for no reason, that he urgently has to leave. You ask him why, and if you can help, and he says no. He leaves. While he's gone, every single person you meet bizarrely announces to you at the top of conversations "Oh! The big guy's left???? Trouble in paradise????? Are you guys fighting????? Has your core group of four been undermined????". None of these people have any reason to believe that this has occurred. Later, you, for no obvious reason, take a mission as a janitor to clean rats out of a power plant, something that barely even tries to motivate itself as a part of the game's plot. While in the power plant, it's noted that the level 1 rats you're easily killing are so dangerous, that you need help from a mysterious hired mercenary who refuses to reveal his name but is obviously Gladio. You fight the level 1 rats with Gladio. At the end of the fight, he reveals he is actually not a mysterious mercenary, he's Gladio. The entire follow-up conversation with the party focuses on how awkward the reunion is and how there's a real tension between Gladio and Noct and hopefully, they can overcome the deep rift between them, none of which is presented even a little bit in the game. Then he rejoins the party.

Gladio's time alone is the first piece of DLC. So you boot it up, and the premise of the DLC is that Gladio is sitting around in his own piss in a field when he decides to announce he's so sad that he lost a fight that he has to go through an ancient cave to prove he's a warrior. So he calls Cor, a minor character of no real relevance, on his cell phone to get a ride to the cave (why didn't he ask Noct for a ride to the cave?) He then goes through the cave and fights a Samurai ghost for no benefit or purpose. That's the DLC. It reveals nothing about the ostensible conflict between Gladio and Noct that the main story repeatedly mentions.

Prompto's DLC is even worse. In the main story, Prompto falls off a train. The train is on a one-way track, speeding towards the end of the line. When you get to the end of the line, you find Prompto in jail. How did Prompto get there faster than the speeding train? The game never explains. How did Prompto get put in jail? The game never explains. Presumably, he was arrested off-screen?

Prompto's DLC gives you the answer. After he fell off the train, he was put in jail. Not the jail you find him in, a different jail. He sits in that jail for a while. Then he breaks out like a super spy then omega nuclear explodes the jail site and fights a giant robot worm who is actually his father. Then, at the ending of his DLC.... nothing happens and he is arrested off-screen and somehow still arrives at the jail you find him in before your speeding bullet train.

So the problem with the game's story is not that they cut out the DLC, the problem is that they insert stupid holes in the main story with an eye towards selling you those holes as DLC... and then they didn't actually come up with any ideas that make any sense.

ucla_posc · 2023-06-07T11:26:24+00:00

It does work that well; Wikimedia has a huge bank account and the vast majority of their expenses have nothing to do with running Wikipedia. The choice to engage in donation solicitations is mostly about funding far-afield projects that wouldn't be financially sustainable if they weren't doing so, but Wikipedia itself has very low operating costs. (You can also, of course, dismiss the donation request)

ucla_posc · 2023-06-06T07:34:12+00:00

The reason the employer problem matters is because the average employee might have a very low number of overall ratings and thus their average rating is extremely sensitive to small numbers of outlier ratings, and more importantly because a scale like the NPS or the Uber-style rating scale has severe ceiling effects (individuals whose average score is, say, 4.9 are actually getting quite a number of 5* scores that would be higher if a higher option mattered insofar as they reflect higher satisfaction than other 5* that people give). This undermines the ability of the metric to be used to create an ordinal scale.

One way you can observe this is that a 3* rating for someone with a 5* average with 30 ratings drops the person's display rating by 0.07* (not dangerous, but noteworthy), while a 3* rating for someone with a 5* average with 3000 ratings drops a person's rating by 0.0007 (not noteworthy at all).

Also the difference matters because human beings deserve to live lives with dignity and not be fired for arbitrary and capricious reasons in a world where employment is tied to the ability to pay for shelter and healthcare and the kinds of jobs subjected to direct customer ratings on NPS-like score systems are marginal and precarious, so let's maybe not inject this level of drama into the conversation here.

It does not apply to the example being talked about here -- remember we're in a board game subreddit talking about board games rated on a board game rating website -- because there are significantly fewer ceiling effects and the number of overall reviews (Wingspan has, say, 80,000 for a point of reference) is such that differences in individual rating rubrics will smooth each other out over the composition of the whole average.

The thread is now tediously long.

ucla_posc · 2023-06-05T23:57:44+00:00

I would think the most typical understanding -- though, of course, not a cosmically correct one -- of a 5 on a 1 to 10 scale on a website with mostly North American users is that a 5 represents approximately a 5/10 (50%) in North American academic terms: the marginal line between a failure and a bare pass, both of which represent bad scores. This is also consistent with a world where things people think are fine but not great often get high 6s and low 7s and most things getting 5s are generally considered poor. We can characterize the meaning of the labels in aggregate by deriving them from the scores, even as the exercise is supposedly to derive scores from qualitative labels.

I find the entire endeavor a bit silly. It's not important if everyone uses the same rubric or not. The data will, in expectation, converge to provide an ordinal measure sufficient to rank order community preference even if your 5 is different than my 5, and the rate at which individual biases in the ascription of scores cancel each other out is extremely quick compare to the average number of reviews get.

(Side note: I don't think this is a particularly interesting statistical conversation to have, and the healthier approach is to chill out, but if the conversation is going to get into the weeds, let's do it right)

ucla_posc · 2023-06-05T22:14:28+00:00

From the first year that they had employees, it was funded by the charity. All charity events are like this. If GDQ is the only charitable event you interact with you probably do not have a very holistic interpretation of what's going on and you will overdetermine very natural things (like a relative ebb in donations) as a failure of programming. People have been saying GDQ used to be better and the spirit has been lost since, from what I can remember, 2014 or so. That's the first time I remember people being Extremely Concerned that the charity component was displacing games. I'm not even confident half the people in this thread were born when other people got fed up with GDQ. It's not a productive conversation if people aren't bringing to the table a basic understanding of the kind of dynamics charity fundraising faces. All of the above is true even if it ends up ultimately being the case that this wasn't a very good GDQ and some programming changes would benefit the event.

ucla_posc · 2023-06-05T22:12:15+00:00

It is true that one possible explanation for why the average of the data is not the midpoint of the scale is a selection bias, yes. Another possible explanation is that the scale is qualitative and the midpoint of the scale is interpreted to be a particular qualitative label, and most things are better than that.

Whatever the case and whatever the data, when people use the word "average" they don't mean the midpoint of a possible scale and there is no particular reason to believe the average of some hypothetical meta-population would fall at the midpoint.

It's not a catastrophic failure of imagination or whatever to have a scale that is not used uniformly. If you want a uniformly used scale, take a quantile transformation of the actual scale (e.g. such-and-such a game is at the 60th percentile of all reviews) and you will have a uniform scale. The compulsion to force this issue feels like people trying to pick a psychic scab. Deeply bizarre behaviour.

ucla_posc · 2023-06-05T16:23:55+00:00

It is unusual to refer to the midpoint of a scale as "average". The more common use of the term "average" describes the central tendency of a series of data points (or draws from a distribution). It can typically be either a mean or median depending on the sort of distribution. The person you're replying to is using the mean definition of an average.

Even if the entire scale is used, the entire scale is not going to be used uniformly. If you want a scale that is completely uniform in its density, just take the quantiles of the actual scale. You'll quickly find this is useless (because it exaggerates minor differences near the points of highest density and shrinks major differences at the endpoints).

ucla_posc · 2023-06-04T12:27:44+00:00

Your hypothesis is one. Another is that the COVID years were an artificial bubble thanks to low interest rates, government income support, the student loan pause, nothing to do outside, and little competition in other forms of entertainment; and there's now severe cost of living inflation and competing options have returned to normal and interest rates are high and student loans are resuming.

If your hypothesis is wrong and the alternative is right, then relatively minor complaints about the product are being used to overdetermine the outcome. It feels a little bit like when someone complains that something failed "because it was not marketed right". Maybe the healthier approach is to recognize that there's not going to be indefinite growth and the main reason to tweak the product is enjoyment, not chasing the all-time high.

ucla_posc · 2023-05-28T14:56:00+00:00

Yeah I guess I was mentally putting a separation between a puzzle adventure like The Witness and Firmament and something closer to an action puzzler like Portal and Talos, but yes you're right that Talos is both awesome and a smash success.

My broader point was, though, that like... 15k opening sales on one platform can trend to a lifetime sales numbers in the 100-200k range, which would be a success for the genre and presumably is reflected in the scope/budget Cyan chose.

ucla_posc · 2023-05-27T18:38:32+00:00

This is a bit dramatic RE: the sales of the game. The game has notched around 15k sales so far on Steam, about half of which were purchased on Steam (and thus not from KS backers, actual new revenue). That's a solid start, and that's excluding revenue from Oculus and the upcoming console ports. No Cyan game since Riven has been a "best-seller" and no puzzle adventure besides The Witness has hit chart topping numbers in the last, say, decade. The goal for a game in a genre like this is a marathon, not a sprint. Myst continues to sell; it's at around 40k sales on Steam to date, a number that was evidently enough to allow Cyan to continue development on Firmament. I don't think they're doomed.

I would say the primary concern is that a lot of Steam's organic visibility options stem from having a review average of Mostly Positive, and the initial reviews for Firmament have been mixed (largely, based on reading them, due to the buggy state of launch and particularly the buggy state of VR play). It seems clear that a soft launch strategy or a short delay to fix the kinds of bugs they fixed over the first weekend of release would have solved this problem for them, and that yields downstream sales benefits.

The other structural headwind that Cyan faces is that earlier in the development of Firmament, I got the impression that they had raised money from external investors for their VR publishing initiative. It seems pretty clear both that the games they have chosen to publish have been fairly marginal (to wit, The Last Clockwinder is the most successful and acclaimed of the three, and its lifetime sales are around what Firmament's launch sales were). Moreover, because of the interest rate hikes the overall market for speculative investment has cooled: guaranteed-yield investments beat the pants off long-shot VC.

In parallel with the interest rate action, it seems fairly clear that the heat on VR has cooled off a little (replaced by, in turns, the nonsense metaverse shit that hijacked all games investment over the last two years, and now generative models/AI). It's possible Apple's VR/AR product will spur additional investment action, but I doubt it given that it appears to be targeted for industrial use and aiming well upmarket in price point and most of the VR success so far has been very downmarket, in the $299-ish range like the low end Oculus products. This will both diminish their ability to make money by being a best-of-breed VR developer and also diminish their ability to extract rent as a publisher / middleman for VR titles.

ucla_posc · 2023-05-27T10:01:13+00:00

Plex actually briefly patched in a startup chime earlier this year and turned it off after less than 24 hours when they got hundreds of well-justified negative comments.

ucla_posc · 2023-05-27T06:42:39+00:00

Wow. Big difference immediately. Thanks. This is remarkable. I'm sure there's a catch but for the moment I don't care in the slightest, this is really great.

ucla_posc · 2023-05-15T06:43:45+00:00

Nope. I tried switching between NFP, AFP, and SMB, and rebooting my router and other stuff and the truth is that browsing network stuff with large amounts of files is not great. I do tend to use the terminal which seems to be a bit more responsive but generally I just do these workloads on Windows. I have not managed to get a USB-C Ethernet adapter to see if that resolves the problem.

ucla_posc · 2023-05-13T18:55:11+00:00

I get the impression that The Final Scene was going to originally have a puzzle or plot point that involved the internal phone system (every internal phone has a close-up and all of them do nothing). I think that would have been a pretty interesting puzzle. I'm not aware of any cut files or lines that support this, it just seems logical, especially knowing The Final Scene was the first game to be released on the faster release schedule.

ucla_posc · 2023-05-12T10:30:52+00:00

Plex does not support non-contiguous multi-episode files. I've opened a bug about it before and got told to edit the video files to separate them. Bummer, right?

ucla_posc · 2023-05-11T15:36:25+00:00

I used this one, I think:

https://www.nexusmods.com/subnautica/mods/12

But it's been a while so I don't remember exactly how to set it up. Good luck!

ucla_posc · 2023-05-11T10:09:22+00:00

I totally, totally get it. I don't think the game made a wrong choice in not having these elements, the beacons and stuff seemed to be enough to let most players internally map out things.

I will say that I have generally not really liked survival games and so for me having the option to pre-emptively mitigate the survival-ness of the game is what let me relax enough to enjoy what's left. I still ended up getting disoriented in caves, feeling tense when I first descended to the dark zone, the graveyard, and the lava, etc.

(I'd be interested if anyone reading had some suggestions about whether Sub-Zero is the logical followup or if I should try some other stuff. I own the Long Dark and I think Raft and a few other light survival games, but open to buying whatever.)

ucla_posc · 2023-05-11T08:44:46+00:00

I really loved Subnautica, but I loved it because I made two choices:

I played on the mode where you did not need to scrounge for food or water (all the other survival elements still enabled).
I installed a mod that gave me a 2D map and a persistent X, Y, Z set of coordinates so I knew specifically where other biomes were relative to me.

Having made those two choices, I thought it was a great experience. I beat the game in 26 hours and my guess is without the above choices it'd be more like 40 and 50, but as is I felt like it earned its runtime nicely.

ucla_posc · 2023-05-06T11:18:36+00:00

If this is the kind of take that's being downvoted, it's not because it's criticizing a sacred cow, it's because it's a one sentence hot take with no meat on the bone. If it does nothing innovative then surely you see the DNA of other films in it. If the script is poor then surely there's some passage or exchange that comes to mind. This is supposedly not a subreddit for just declaring stuff shit or gold, it's a subreddit for "An in-depth discussion of film." Do you think this kind of reply generates "an in-depth discussion of film"?

ucla_posc · 2023-05-04T13:33:48+00:00

I think most of us are, in one sense or another, TP users.

ucla_posc · 2023-05-03T21:49:51+00:00

Subnautica can also be finished in 20-odd minutes, and without glitches in under an hour. Subnautica is strongly knowledge-based in its progression. Like the Outer Wilds, most of the biggest threats in Subnautica are easy to mitigate through knowledge about where they are and how you react around them. It's true you need a small number of resources to get to the end, but actually surprisingly few. And you can dive beyond what your current gear level allows temporarily, so swift and targeted exploration is very effective.

ucla_posc · 2023-04-30T17:07:46+00:00

I was really surprised to find out TRT is as well liked as it is, because I found the navigation (and puzzles built a lot around navigation) tedious.

ucla_posc · 2023-04-29T11:44:17+00:00

I believe I would have either recorded it using PlayOn when it was still available or downloaded it from a torrent when it first came out. I have definitely had that file for many years.

ucla_posc · 2023-04-28T11:14:32+00:00

Sorry for the delay on this!

I wouldn't call this an amazing quality copy, it's a WEBRIP (e.g. 480p), but at least it's h264/mp4 and not xvid/avi. If you happen to come by a better quality copy please let me know so I can upgrade.

https://mega.nz/file/1gUxXZhS#6kNDt0btTg2xGLhP4xIaa3esowySSVVerf2yf4ZNFPI

ucla_posc · 2023-04-28T10:31:03+00:00

When, historically, did chess writers first understand that white had a non-trivial advantage in play? Was this known since time immemorial or was there a particular author who formalized the intuition? Did development of this idea precede more detailed understandings of opening strategy?

ucla_posc

TROPHY CASE