How the hell do you accidentally remove fog of war from a strategy game?

That is moronic to a level I didn’t expect from this, I can see why he left the negative review.

Kind of a stupid decision to call something pre-currency and pre-codified laws “anarcho communist”.

It’d be like calling something born before animal life “vegan” because it doesn’t eat animals.

Technically correct, maybe, but very much missing the point of the label.

they’re just screwing us out of possible remakes

Bro don’t make me like them T~T

Ayyy I know that reference. Good story that one.

Removed by mod

The people who made the casting choice were told by Disney they couldn’t cast either, it was that or get replaced by someone else who would play ball.

It’s ridiculous to expect them to remove themselves from a multimillion dollar project that would get done anyway with or without them.

Eh, they weren’t happy about it but were caught between a rock and a hard place, I can sympathise.

The only one of these that is remotely acceptable, to me, is Tilda Swindon, because they explicitly detached themselves from the character to avoid getting shat on by the CCP for casting a Tibetan and from Americans for casting a Chinese person.

The others are all crap, IMO.

Every time a character is <color>washed we lose the chance to be exposed to global actors that would fit their profile.

Because it’s pressvertising.

Veilguard has had a year (at least) of relentless, shameless astroturfing, ever since BG3 got GOTY, because EA knows it’s not gonna be even close to competing with it and they (rightly) fear Veilguard will get shat on, especially since Bioware is on a 2 games abject failure streak with Andromeda and Anthem both failing horribly and Inquisition having at best a mixed reception with how buggy and repetitive it was at launch.

As a rule of thumb: if an article comes out before a game’s actual release, it’s positive about an aspect the game or franchise is known to be lacking in, and it sounds like John Oliver’s parody of a corporate shill? It’s pressvertising.

It’s access-for-coverage, a trading of favours that stays undisclosed because technically no money changed hands; however, in the past we’ve seen what happens to outlets that don’t kiss the ring and use the access to actually speak negatively of the product, or even neutrally, so we know there is an implicit (and explicit if you know the history of these dealings) pressure to be positive at any cost.

So in short: it’s a bad article pretending to analyse the content they have early access to when really they’re just advertising the game uncritically. It’s literally just source-washed marketing material.

Here’s to a multi-year long process to port the campaigns from BG1 and 2 into 3.

I mean, would you? It looks like the most generic checklist driven product I’ve seen yet.

It’s so spineless it may be more lobster than game.

If anyone’s got a code they’re not using I’d happily take it off their hands 😇

Henry and Hans are going on a lads holiday. Awesome.

In reality you should be able to get an anonymized reference number to show your vote was tabulated correctly though.

The reason there is no such thing in elections, is to prevent vote buying/extortion.

In Italy it’s such an extreme problem that any ballot where the party is not marked with a cross on the party logo and (if present) a block capital name next to it on the provided line, is automatically discounted, because stuff like writing a name a specific way or using crosses, checks, dots, or other symbols was used to track vote buying/voter intimidation in mafia controlled territories.

Some vote counters and polling station overseers would be on the take and keep track of if the votes they expected to see showed up when counting ballots and report back.

If you were able in any way to prove something beyond the equivalent of an “I voted” sticker it would immediately be used to ensure people voted a certain way or to exact some sort of backlash on those who didn’t.

LMAO way to assume shit about me.

I only go by steam reviews and gameplay videos/demos, if the games aren’t recommended by someone I know personally.

Game journalism has always been essentially marketing, the publications are way too tied to the industry and way too dependent on advertising from the same companies and products they’re supposed to be criticising, hence why big titles that get less than an 8 are equivalent to normal games getting a 2 or a 3.

Good games will rise to the top organically, some might get lost in the shuffle but it won’t be the perennially 2 weeks late big budget crap apologists at whatever game “”“news”“” publication you care to name to fix that.

That’s all mainstream reviews have been for AAA games for the last decade+ anyway.

Probably, but there’s clearly not a lot of interest at present, and anyone running one such instance would absolutely incur scrutiny nonetheless.

It’d probably be simpler to send the information to a trusted moderator on some specialized community through some dead drop, rather than going through the hassle of making a whole system for throwaway accounts, at that.

I’m not suggesting you host a normal instance, I’m suggesting making a fork that makes the instance logless and allows anonymous burners.

The important thing is to be a black hole for investigating origins of posts, right?

A logless instance that does not keep track of accesses/ips/etc would mean that even in the case of a subpoena there’s nothing to turn over, and the ability to make burners with just an id and a password would ensure nothing is trackable.

You will need to make some adjustments to prevent botting but other than that this takes care of cross referencing, in my book.

Basically the same stuff that companies like mullvad do for their VPN hosting.

Why not simply set up an instance yourself with the features you’d like to see?

Anon identities may not work in the strictest sense but I’m sure something like throwaway accounts made without email addresses or something along those lines would be doable.

Can’t have clever satire reinforced by mechanics, people might be too stupid to get it!

I fucking hate that we successfully fought the right’s obsession with media being meant to be emulated only to get the left’s version of the same.