LGBBQ !g*mers harass developer for not adding same-s*x relationships... even though he said he'd do it in the fricking future

And the advantage that their manchild audience have already sunk thousands of dollars and hours into the hobby, often with entire rooms of their home dedicated to that shit.

Their whines carry about as much weight as when gambling addicts cry that the slots are rigged. You know they'll never stop.

Yeah Soulash 2 is an extremely neurodivergent game that won't hold the attention of most Subway Surfer zoomies. Although you have to remember a big chunk of the neurodivergent g*mer playerbase does indeed care about shit like this in their bibeo games (just see Caves of Qud). Thankfully a the other part is either full blown chud or just grillpillers that like their spreadsheets and character lists.

Rockstar was paying people to protest their game to generate controversy and sales back in the early 2000s. Now there's 0 need to pay anyone, if you pick a side in this meaningless culture war you will have a viral advertising campaign at your beck and call.

Ye anti-modding measures are the fricking worst.

And others gave it equally positive reviews. Nothing really happened, yet all these companies quake in their boots whenever some loud cute twink complains on the internet.

Chuds are endangered. Stop trying to make them trans or femboys. They'll go extinct.

Yeah I was playing some Qud last year and thought that the Templar descriptions were kind of bizzare but also oddly added a lot of tragedy to their cause - they basically have nothing but their creed since presumably no one'd want to take in a Putus defectee (the only one you meet had to eke out an existence as a lone bounty hunter) and even if they wanted to defect, they'd have to bear the burden of being an actual inbred freak without even having a religious narrative that portays it as a sign of 'nobility'.

Another detail in modern Qud I found funny was how they changed the jungle savages' names from something like 'Savage' to 'Hunter' and so on. As if "tribal group of r-slurs tricked into worshipping robots" isn't already a massive reference to irl cargo cults.

Did you ever notice that the Bey Lah quests are quite silly when you realize what they're trying to parody as well?

Aw, poor lil Qudbro. Never played it, but I thought I'd cheer you up.

I don't think that making a DF-type game's all that hard though since we should bear in mind that Tarn Adams isn't actually a 'good' programmer. He's just a highly persistent and neurodivergent one. He's basically gotten where he's at by needlessly sacrificing his life to bang rocks together instead of bothering with any semblance of 'game design'.

I can definitely see where you're coming from here. Honestly, having seen many of his talks and posts online I think his real innovations is creating a system where multiple procedurally generated moving parts can be strung together in a way that can usually give the semblance of a coherent story with it's unique background lore. It's very likely the codebase he and his brother started from is a completely unoptimized shitshow that hampers the game even today.

I think that in all honesty the problem with simulation games isn't that they're hard to make, it's that they're hard to make fun.

Tarn goes into a lot of detail about this in his talks and he basically admits to that being the major struggle. In most games with procedurally generated content the world is mostly static waiting for the player to act on it, and this results in the player just walking through pre-made set pieces which have characters and events randomly adlibbed in. His solution was creating a game where the player is sort of in media res in an already existing conflict between multiple factions and characters acting autonomously to carry out their personal objectives, so the player would feel like the world they're playing in is living, changing one. What I took away is that in order for a game to be more reactive and immersive, the player has to lose some of that godlike omnipotence commonly seen in sandboxes, as the limits on the player's agency allows for more reactivity from the game. Also, I think Rimworld's devs took a neat approach to this by using the storyteller system to give that sense of urgency and novelty for players.

For instance even a simple 'felon on the run simulator' would need quite a lot of assets and background logic to make it entertaining. You'd want to have procgen cities/towns with npcs that aren't completely boring to talk to, highly intelligent cops that're capable of arresting you, mistaking you for a bystander, etc. You'll then want a stealth system and a way to make 'money', and so on. The biggest issue would be putting enough in that the game can create entertaining situations without making it seem like you've already seen everything after you've seen everything once.

I think the fundamental "fun" part of these games is what Gabe Newell is sperging out on in this interview: Fun is not about realism, it's about reinforcement. Some of the most memorable moments in games IMO are when the game recognizes even fairly minor actions and reacts to them (i.e. things like the original Deus Ex chastising you if you went into the women's bathroom during the initial part of the game). I think too many simulation games, Dwarf Fortress included, are designed in a way where the player is constantly fighting a barrage of meaningless stats and stat changes that only occasionally come together to form a somewhat interest narrative.

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