MudMan
@MudMan@kbin.social
- Comment on Good gaming experiences with no HUD? 11 months ago:
No worries. Paradoxically I feel like a pedant now for using the big word.
Anyway, that question is weirdly different from the "no HUD" one, I agree. Some of the games that make me look more at the world instead of at the pointers and indicators are full of HUD stuff. Somebody mentioned Zelda, which is fine. PUBG is a weird example, because yeah, it looks like a (messy, cheap, poorly designed) HUD, but the whole proximity audio and high stakes gameplay makes you stare at things like a hawk. We take it for granted because Battle Royale games became such a huge deal, but that was a neat trick.
- Comment on Good gaming experiences with no HUD? 11 months ago:
Immersion is a bit overused and misunderstood.
It maybe works better as "suspension of disbelief", like in other fiction. You sustain it and you can go very abstract. You break it and things get weird.
- Comment on Good gaming experiences with no HUD? 11 months ago:
Dead Space, which has come up a lot, does have a hud, it's just all diegetic. Whether that fits or not is up for debate.
For true zero hud stuff the first one I think of is Inside, for instance. If you're going for immersion that counts, but of course it's a very light, focused game. Journey and Flower are in that space, too. So is Mirror's Edge, technically, but it feels more intricate due to being first person, for some reason.
There's a bunch of minimal HUD games from that period, too. There's a thing here and there, but not a full HUD. There's the Portal games, which technically show which portals are up on the reticle, but nothing else. There's the Metro series, which will pop up some HUD but mostly relies on other visual cues. There's The Order 1886, which at the time was one of the standard bearers for minimal HUDs but I think now it's just slightly lighter than average, because that game is super underrated in how ahead of its time it was in terms of setting triple-A standards.
Does The Witness count as diegetic HUD or just no HUD? It's borderline. I think the Talos Principle has some light HUD elements, but they may be optional.
And hey, let me call out the times when a super dense HUD is actually immersion-creating, especially when it comes to representing tech or machinery. There's Metroid Prime, making the HUD part of the suit and placing you inside it. There's Armored Core, where the mech stuff is such a part of the fiction. There's the new Robocop, which I don't like but does a lot with its HUD. HUDs can be cool and immersive.
- Comment on When is it okay to drop out of college? 11 months ago:
But I stumbled upon those, I didn't plan on acquiring them.
That's why college kids don't plan on what to make of their lives after college. They're kids! If they knew, they wouldn't need to be there. It took me a degree and a half, a number of failed creative projects and taking a job out of necessity to end up back in a completely different, adjacent career, eventually in multiple different countries. I could have predicted none of that when I started my first degree. For one, I didn't know what I didn't know, that was the entire point of university. For another, I didn't know half of the options I ended up taking even existed or were available to me. Many weren't, in fact, until a particular set of circumstances lined up.
But I'm sure glad that in the meantime I learned crucial things that made me more capable of taking advantage of those circumstances when they came by.
There's this girl I remember from that time. I was a bit older than my classmates, owing to that whole changing tracks thing, so a few gave me more credit than I deserved in some areas. This girl once walks up to me and asks me if I'll read some stuff she wrote. I didn't know how to say no, so I said yes. And it was terrible. No style, no flow, no command of language. It's a high school essay at best, corny and florid in all the wrong ways. I weaseled my way out of giving her feedback and mentally discounted her as a writer.
She's now a professional journalist involved in many high profile activist movements. I've read her stuff. It's great. Turns out the reason she was bad at it back then is she was twenty and had many years of getting good at that crap ahead of her. That's fine. It's fine to figure yourself out and learn to do things as an adult. That's supposed to be the point of higher education when it's universally accessible.
Anyway, I don't think you're wrong, for the record. I think you're right in your context. If public university wasn't basically free around here that would have been a very expensive approach to learning creative writing and figuring yourself out. At most all I'm contributing is I'm glad we do it that way over here. I spent ten years, give or take, doing that stuff and I spent between sixty and six hundred bucks a year doing it. And that's because I didn't qualify for any grants or government student aid. For some of my classmates it was free, or they even got some help for books and housing. I go to vote every time (and pay taxes) thinking that contributing to keeping that up is the most important thing I do in life.
- Comment on When is it okay to drop out of college? 11 months ago:
This take is super depressing, but like I said elsewhere, maybe it makes sense in the US. And that sucks, to be clear.
For what it's worth, I spent maybe a decade in university, bounced around a couple of things before I got my actual degree. I did not do a STEM degree, I still got a lot out of it in both soft and hard skills. Also in relationships, experience and general ability to approach situations and extract information from the world. Frankly, if your time in higher education has to be driven by a securing a specific job or goal then you're in a broken higher education system. If it leaves you in crippling debt you're also in a broken system, but I'm pretty sure you guys know that already.
- Comment on When is it okay to drop out of college? 11 months ago:
I could risk a suggestion, but you seem like you are in the US and frankly what you describe does not line up with my experience of higher education pretty much at all, so I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be useful.
I'll just say that that seems like it sucks, it's not what higher education should be about and you guys should probably get around to fixing it at one point or another.
- Comment on Fallout TV Show - Trailer 11 months ago:
I mean... you may have missed how episodic television works. Ironic horror antologies have been a thing on TV since the 50s.
- Comment on Fallout TV Show - Trailer 11 months ago:
Looks a bit cosplay-y, honestly.
But also I've never been into Bethesda Fallout, so I'm already not as much of a target for this one, I suppose.
- Comment on Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin Flops, Frontier Shares Tank Nearly 20% - IGN 11 months ago:
Those are even after my time. From the outside it looked like them starting to step away from "fantasy races in space", but it didn't intrigue me enough to pay attention and they never really became the core of the videogames because space marines everywhere, so...
- Comment on Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin Flops, Frontier Shares Tank Nearly 20% - IGN 11 months ago:
Honestly, the Orks may be the most intellectually honest faction in that whole mess. They mostly just like to fight and thing everybody else is a dick. And they're right.
But nah, when teenage me came to the idea of haughty, elitist space elves in hoverbikes there was never any other option. But they're not the good guys. Nobody should be the good guys in that. ESPECIALLY not the human factions.
- Comment on Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin Flops, Frontier Shares Tank Nearly 20% - IGN 11 months ago:
If that entire franchise's fanbase needs a sanity check for a reason, it's for that.
I know they look cool and they're easy to paint because of all the flat surfaces, but come on.
It's fine for your dark fantasy setting to have no good guys. It's EXTREMELY not fine for your dark fantasy theocratic racists to become the good guys and for you to do nothing to stop it from happening.
- Comment on Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin Flops, Frontier Shares Tank Nearly 20% - IGN 11 months ago:
There's a bunch more than that, and many just... come and go and often people don't even notice.
I mean, come on, how many people on this thread wouldn't even have known this game existed if Frontier wasn't slightly higher profile than most devs working on these?
The 40K soulslike idea is... probably gonna happen eventually, I dunno. I'm not a big soulslike guy. Hey, maybe Space Marine 2 is good. Looks nice, anyway.
For what it's worth, what I really would like to see is a 40K game that is not about the space theocratic fascists for once. I should go back to play the Dawn of War sequel that nobody remembers happened, either, since that was the last time you got Eldar as a faction. And even then only because it was a throwback game to the first Dawn of War.
- Comment on Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin Flops, Frontier Shares Tank Nearly 20% - IGN 11 months ago:
I thought the community had come around on it after some updates. I wouldn't know, I haven't been into TT Games Workshop stuff in ages.
In any case, the core of the tabletop game has nothing to do with whether a game adaptation is good or not.
- Comment on Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin Flops, Frontier Shares Tank Nearly 20% - IGN 11 months ago:
It reviewed pretty poorly, but that's no guarantee.
I have to say, even with a good game it would suck to release something kinda niche this year, and the Warhammer brand means so little these days, games under that release through a firehose at this point, it's hard to know what's coming up, let alone if it's any good.
- Comment on I’m sick of streaming. Films were better on Blu-ray 11 months ago:
I've pivoted back to 4K BluRays for a while now. The image quality is perceptively better than in most streaming services, it's given me a great fallback to tell Netflix to GTFO with their ongoing price bumps for their 4K tier and I am no longer worried that I'll lose access to them.
Plus there are actually good ways to serve your own multiplexed video out of those now if you care about it that much.