All the random bullshit they kept adding and the emphasis on hats are what made me stop playing it around that time. Definitely want to give this a shot
I've been loading up my Jellyfin server with their shows for a while and I've been meaning to grab a subscription purely to support. Great people and great content.
I've always gravitated toward various Arch-based distros. Installed vanilla from scratch a decade ago for a college workstation, sunk a lot of time into tinkering the steam deck's SteamOS, and my desktop's been running CachyOS for just about a year now - the latter's been so smooth that I opted to wipe my Deck and install their handheld edition just because, and that's been pretty solid too.
I haven't really distro-hopped enough to say much else, but Cachy's been my go-to since I first set it up and it'd take a lot to move me off if it. All the Arch benefits with some extra bells and whistles.
Let's be real, our government supports and contributes to this kind of shit in other countries too. It's only ever a "problem" to them if there's a possibility of the left and/or non-white folks rising up.
I wasn't the biggest fan of Gaiden (the Daidoji in general are imo one of the worst plot devices they've ever introduced), but 7 was phenomenal for sure. 3, 4, and 5 are admittedly all over the place and products of the time, but each has their merits.
Never go for Y5's platinum completion though. Worst mistake of my life.
It's sad how much this franchise has fallen off since Nagoshi left. The demo may have been some of the worst combat and visuals I've experienced in this series, and I've 100%'d every single game. A clunky mess in an oversaturated world with 3 movesets that all feel like amateur modpacks. Plus Rikiya's recast is extremely jarring especially next to Mikio, they brought back the annoying friendship thing from IW/Pirates and made it worse, so many issues already.
It's actually wild how they went from Lost Judgment to this. Like Y6 and K2 were rough but they were working out the kinks of the new engine. LJ was phenomenal. All downhill from there
And that's just the demo experience, let alone how the full game recast Hamazaki with a known sex pest (should've kept the original model but with a new VA, since the old VA was actually even worse in that regard).
C-suite drove that game into the ground with dogshit decisions for the past 3-4 years, and that's just the game itself- the way that studio treats their devs is abysmal.
I absolutely swear by these things, and the upcoming Steam Controller is the only thing that'll make me shelve it. I've got 3 of them lying around at this point.
Honestly. A centrist Demsoc is nothing to be too excited for, but by the standards this country's always dealt with, it's good to see some legitimate progress.
Take the wins where we can, openly and vocally critique as necessary, and use him as a springboard for a real leftist movement.
The live-service games that live on do so because of a constant investment and commitment to the game and the community it harbours. The moment people think the writing's on the walls, they jump ship.
This especially. Just as an example, I sunk way too much time into Destiny 2, and recently picked up Warframe after putting D2 away last year, and the difference between the studios behind them both is night and day. The former feels like an abusive relationship, built on constant FOMO, removing content, and constantly skirting around the community's numerous issues with the game's systems and sandbox (and that's all on top of Bungie/Sony execs treating the actual devs like garbage).
The latter feels like a game where the players are genuinely treated as the game's lifeblood and rather than nickel and dime them for every last thing, the devs give them what they want, and the devs get to make what they want to make. Not to mention literally everything in the game minus community-created cosmetics can be earned without spending anything at all.
These sorts of comparisons are all over the place. PoE2 compared to Diablo 4 or post-Krafton Last Epoch for example. You can't just pump out a live service game and hope shit sticks, you need to foster a community around it.
The only ones I play these days are Warframe and occasionally PoE2, both relatively smaller dev teams with large publisher backing but mostly left to their own devices to do whatever the fuck they want. Coming from the predatory FOMO hell that was Destiny 2, getting into similar games but ones that actually respect the players is refreshing.
I have zero interest in throwaway AAA slop in general, let alone with all the usual live service shit tacked on.
The amount of genuinely good and successful live service games is so minimal that it's actual insanity seeing AAA execs trying to reinvent the wheel and failing every time.
A family friend of ours knew the guy. He was even more batshit insane than the stories make him seem.