#oneaday Day 182: Unpopular gaming opinions

As a veritable old fart of video games, I am, of course, fairly set in my ways, as older folks are wont to be. And as such, I have come to hold certain opinions that appear to deviate from “the norm” among younger folks. You are not “wrong” to think differently to what I am about to describe below, but know that you are not going to convince me to change my viewpoint, because I have felt this way about all these things for years now.

So why am I writing this? I dunno. Something to write about, innit? Plus there might be some of you out there who actually agree with some of these. It doesn’t really matter. Let’s just start, shall we?

Games don’t “need” updates for months or years after their release

Baldur’s Gate 3 happened to drift across some form of feed that I was looking at the other day, and the thumbnail image that came with it proudly boasted something along the lines of “Community update 30”.

Now, whether this was just the 30th blog post for the community or the 30th actual update for the game I don’t actually know, but both are equally offputting to me. I haven’t even considered touching Baldur’s Gate 3 yet because it launched unfinished and apparently is still getting bits and pieces bolted onto it after the fact.

I hear it’s very good. I believe that it’s very good, as Larian has a good track record. But I have precisely zero desire to play it until it’s finished, because when a game as big as this gets significant updates after I’ve already ploughed a significant number of hours into it, I feel a bit hard done by. Worse, if I’ve already finished it by the time a significant update shows up, I feel very hard done by, because I should just have waited to play it.

Unfortunately, regular updates to games are expected by a certain class of The Gamers™, particularly those on PC. Look at the Steam reviews for any game that hasn’t had an update for a month or two and you’ll see people complaining about “devs abandoning the game” and it being a “dead game”.

No. Sometimes it’s just finished, and sometimes the devs would like either 1) a break or 2) to go and work on something else. I am, sadly, in the minority on this, but few things make me lose interest in a game faster than if it launches with a “roadmap”. Just delay the thing a few months and finish the fucking thing. Then I will play it.

DLC is worthless

As an extension to the above, if a game releases and then immediately announces that it is getting a bunch of DLC, I will also immediately lose interest. Not only does it make me feel like stuff has been cut out of the base game to make the DLC — and don’t throw the “well actually it’s developed at a different rate to the main game” argument at me, that is an easy problem to solve — but I am struggling to think of a piece of DLC that I have genuinely thought was actually worth the money.

I remember being particularly disappointed with the DLC chapters for stuff like Dragon Age and Mass Effect back in the day, and I haven’t seen much to change my opinion ever since those days. And, at the other end of the spectrum, you have games like Stellaris, where there is now so much DLC that it’s impossible to know what the “best” way to get started with the game is. So I just… don’t.

Mods are vandalism

“You should play games on PC!” the PC gamers say. “Because of mods!”

Fuck mods. I hate mods. A significant portion of them are outright vandalism to both the artistic and mechanical design of the teams that worked on a game. I saw someone on Bluesky earlier sharing an image of someone who had installed a “QoL” (“Quality of Life”) mod to STALKER 2 to remove all encumbrance mechanics from the game. STALKER 2 is a game about survival in difficult circumstances, and the encumbrance mechanics force you to determine whether you really need to carry various things around with you. By removing it, you’re stripping out part of the game.

Likewise, graphical mods can get in the bin, too. Games are designed with both a particular artistic vision in mind and are a reflection of the era in which they were designed, and I don’t really give a toss if you can add ray-tracing to something that didn’t have it before, or if you can make a game look like Generic Photorealistic Open World Game #927.

And I’m sure I don’t need to say anything about nude mods. I say this as someone who enjoys a good sexy game.

“But I need 357 mods to make Skyrim fun!” Then Skyrim isn’t a very good game, is it? Maybe play something else.

My only begrudging exception to this is in the case of games where extensibility is designed to be part of the game — stuff like Doom/Quake/Duke/whatever levels are fine with me, because those games were designed to be extendible. Although I must confess, when I play any of those games, I tend to stick to their official campaigns. And in some cases, mods for a game specifically designed to be mod-friendly inevitably remain perpetually unfinished and not as good as the stuff built-in to the game: most stuff for the excellent driving sim BeamNG.drive falls into this category, to name just one example.

I don’t want to join your Discord

I use Discord when I absolutely have to, for work and for the few groups of friends who are only reachable there. But I do not want to join a fucking Discord for every single game I play, and I don’t want to be bugged to join your Discord on the title screen for your game. Go away, leave me alone, and if I decide I want to engage in the official community for your game, I will seek out your Discord myself.

I absolutely do not want to have to join your Discord to read documentation or download helpful files. Host that shit on your website like a normal person.

I want your game to end

It’s all very well offering “potentially limitless replayability”, but I do actually want to be able to finish your game. If I can’t finish your game, I almost certainly won’t start it, because the way my brain works means that I will get annoyed by the fact I’m playing something that doesn’t have a “point”.

This is one of numerous reasons I think idle games and incremental games are dumb. Sure, numbers get big to a point that they become largely meaningless… but that’s it. There’s no sense of having achieved anything there. And I strongly suspect that a significant number of idle game fans have no idea that the genre largely stems from a pisstake at the expense of people who grind their way through mobile games with no conclusion.

Anyway, that’ll do for now, because I’m sure I’ve pissed someone off with at least one of the above. As noted at the beginning, though, I don’t care. I am an old man, I have things I like and things I dislike. And all of the above can get in the bin. A good evening to you!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 74: Flashbacks

Yesterday, we updated the rules on a Discord server I help run. The rules did not change from what they were before; they were simply expanded and clarified in a way that allows any of us on the moderation team to easily step in if things look like getting out of hand.

And you know, people absolutely lost their shit over it to a frankly baffling degree. We had people claiming that the server had been “destroyed”, that they were no longer able to express themselves fully, that mods were “power hungry”… if you’ve been on the Internet any length of time all this will be familiar, I’m sure, particularly if you were ever part of forum culture.

I have found the whole experience baffling and extremely frustrating. The new rules amount to “don’t be a hateful bigot”, “don’t be mean to other people” and “please use the channels as they are designed to be used”. Bizarrely, it’s that last one that got people most upset, because apparently asking people to keep off-topic discussions to the off-topic channel is something approaching a fascist dictatorship.

All this gave me exceedingly unpleasant flashbacks of “behaviour management” when I was working as a teacher. A classroom full of screaming children and a Discord server full of crying adults who are very much old enough to know better are remarkably similar. And it all comes down to people, regardless of age, having a great amount of difficulty with someone who isn’t them laying down boundaries.

In both cases, kids and adults, they feel they’re not able to behave as they please. In both cases, the rules are in place to help keep things somewhat more orderly: so that lessons can be taught in the classroom, and so that people who came to the Discord server to get specific information can find that information in the latter case.

No-one has quite gone as far as throwing out the “but my free speech!” card as yet but some people came remarkably close earlier. And I suspect we will continue to have some unrest for a few days.

I don’t get it. I’ve always been quite happy to follow the rules when I’ve been invited into someone’s house, be it real or virtual. I’m still mortified about one time, aged 12, when I used the word “bog” to refer to the toilet at a friend’s house, only to be admonished that “we don’t use that word in this house” (or at least not in front of his mother anyway). If someone asks me to behave myself online, I behave myself. It’s really not all that difficult.

I suspect much of it stems from the people in question never having had those boundaries set in the past, and not knowing what to do when they are set — even if they were already following the rules anyway. I suppose it’s easy to feel a weird sort of guilt when you’re involved in a community and that community feels the need to lay down the law, even if you know you had nothing to do with it.

But honestly, come on now. If you have difficulty with rules that amount to “don’t be a dick” and “use this server for its stated purpose”, that’s an issue with you, not the rules.

2306: Happy Birthday, Discord

Back in the early days of “going online” — after the days of Bulletin Board Systems but before the widespread Internet we know today — our family used CompuServe to get at information online.

For a teenager like I was at the time, it was very exciting. For the first time, I was able to “meet” and communicate with people from all over the world, discuss common interests and even exchange files.

One of my favourite features of CompuServe was an area it rather grandiosely referred to as the “CB Simulator”, after the units used by ham radio operators to communicate with other enthusiasts over the radio waves. In reality, it was simply what we now know today as a chatroom, but it was a revelation to the young me, who had always had a bit of difficulty finding new people to talk to, particularly those who were into the same things.

In the CB Simulator, I could talk to people without fear of them, say, judging me for my appearance, or my mannerisms that clearly indicated I was uncomfortable with talking to strangers, or how I tended to go the colour of beetroot when talking to girls I liked. No; in the CB Simulator, I was able to communicate in the way I had always felt most comfortable: through the written word.

A few years later, when “the Internet” started to become more of a thing and self-contained, fenced-off communities like CompuServe and AOL were starting to become less of a thing, I looked into Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. There, I found a similar experience to that which I’d had in CompuServe’s CB Simulator: the ability to communicate and express myself through text to people from all over the world. And now, I could “emote” too, which in turn led to my first experiences with online roleplaying through a group that “simulated” Star Trek missions through text chat.

I was kind of sad when chatrooms fell out of favour with the rise of what we now know as social media, but for those of you, like me, who always used to enjoy the real-time nature of talking in chatrooms, may I introduce you to the wonderful service that is Discord, which is now celebrating its first birthday.

Originally designed as a free, lightweight alternative to Skype and Teamspeak, Discord has been actively developed over the last year to become one of the best — arguably the best — real-time chat application out there, particularly if you’re a gamer.

For the unfamiliar, it works in a slightly different way to instant messaging services such as Skype and its earlier counterparts AIM, MSN and Yahoo Messenger. Instead of focusing on private chats with individuals on your friends list, Discord is instead server-based, much like IRC was. Within that server — again like IRC — there are channels for whatever purposes the server admins desire. Anyone who is a member of that server — and servers can be public or private — can hop in to a channel and text chat. There’s voice chat facilities, too, which have very good, reliable, clear voice quality and connections, making it an ideal solution for “party chat” on PC, or even using alongside games that don’t normally offer voice communication: the Splatoon community, for example, use it quite a bit, since that game has no means of direct communication whatsoever.

Mostly the thing that excites me about Discord is how much it feels like those old IRC servers, only with a more modern coat of paint. Inline image posts, markdown formatting, animated GIFs and link previews are all a natural evolution of the purely text-based chat that IRC offered, and Discord’s cross-platform nature — it works via the Web, on PC or Mac desktop clients or even on mobile — makes it an ideal means for keeping in touch with groups of friends or specialised communities.

I’m very happy that Discord has been such a success since it originally launched, and hope it continues to be A Thing for many years to come yet. It’s been a great way for me to interact with friends from elsewhere on the Internet in new, more immediate ways than services like Twitter offer, and, depending on the server, it can be a nice quiet safe haven away from the noise of more public social media channels.

I’m a member of several different Discord servers, but the one on which I’m most active is probably the one I’m an admin of. If you’d like to stop by and say hi — the server is largely focused on video games, anime, lewds and general shitposting, but everyone there is just happy to have a good chinwag — then you can do so by following this link.

Happy birthday, Discord, and happy chatting to those of you who choose to come and join us!

2014: Making Connections

Although I’m not pretending to have any real understanding of social interactions in general — in fact, as I often mention, I go through life feeling like I really do’t know what to do in a lot of “everyday” social situations — I find the way little communities and cliques develop to be fascinating, both to observe from the outside, and to be a part of from within.

I have a few examples in mind. First, and most prominent, is Twitter. I’ve drifted from group to group a bit since I originally joined Twitter a number of years back. Originally, my use of Twitter was primarily to have a means of talking to my online friends with whom I used to interact on 1up.com. After “The Great Exodus”, when 1up’s specialised forums were mashed together into a NeoGAF-style monstrosity of just “Games” and “Not Games”, a significant proportion of the community left the site’s forums, and many of them found themselves on Twitter. Over time, people changed, moved and became involved in different things. Some gave up on Twitter altogether; others started using it for professional purposes; others still “rebranded” themselves.

I fell somewhat into the latter category. After suffering a fairly serious instance of doxxing and harassment back in 2013 — see, it’s not just women it happens to, contrary to what the media would have you believe — I left Twitter, initially intending not to return, but after realising what a pile of crap Facebook is for actually interacting with people in a meaningful manner, I returned. After realising that the interminable social justice yelling on Twitter was setting off my depression and anxiety, I left again. This time when I came back (they always come back) I decided to “reinvent” myself a bit, and follow fewer of the people I felt I “should” be following, and instead focused on people who posted things I found interesting or enjoyable to interact with. Consequently, these days I find myself on the fringes of “anitwitter”, a subculture on the social network that discusses, posts screencaps and generally enthuses about anime and games. I, as you might expect, fit right in.

Elsewhere on the Internet, the Discord server I mentioned the other day (which, dear reader, you’re still welcome to come and join) has been developing slowly but surely, but it’s our Final Fantasy XIV Free Company server that is perhaps the more interesting example. Taking cues from the in-game friend who introduced me to Discord in the first place, I added an “NSFW” (Not Safe for Work) channel to the server. It immediately became the most active channel in the place, though initially people weren’t quite sure what to post in there, i.e. whether or not it was okay to post filth. (It was, though someone stumbled accidentally into it and complained a bit at being confronted with a wall of hentai, so we’ve since made it invite-only — community management at work!)

What’s interesting about the NSFW channel is that the usual boundaries of “politeness” that are up when interacting with other people online in real time — in my experience, anyway; I tend not to hang around with the sort of people who hurl insults and abuse at one another — are nowhere to be seen. I don’t mean that people are rude to one another; quite the opposite, in fact. The NSFW channel is a place where everyone can be open and honest about the things that they like, and where no-one judges one another for the things they talk about and post. (Or, if they do, they keep that to themselves.) It’s pretty refreshing and liberating, actually, and makes it abundantly clear that there should probably be more places for people — particularly, it has to be said, men — to be able to talk about things like sex, fetishes and all that sort of thing without fear of judgement or anything like that. I shan’t go into any further details than that, but suffice to say we’re all having a jolly old time in there.

Anyway, yeah. Online communities. Just as interesting as real communities, I think you’ll agree…

2011: Let’s Talk!

A little while ago, I wrote about chat app Discord and how I thought it was a jolly fine piece of software that had all but replaced Skype and various other solutions for, among other things, in-game voice chat.

Besides high-quality voice chat, Discord is also pretty great for creating text chat servers with custom channels (each of which can have their own permissions set if you so desire) and various other bits and pieces here and there. The app is clearly largely designed with the Final Fantasy XIV community in mind, given its built-in commands to search sites like XIVDB and Gamerescape, but it’s also a flexible, lightweight, easy-to-use and cross-platform chat app that is super-easy to get signed up for and really easy to use.

So I’d like to invite you along to come and chat! I created a server named after my other website MoeGamer, along with a bunch of channels. The server is primarily intended for people to talk about Japanese video games, anime, manga and the like, but there are a selection of other channels for people to talk about what they might be interested in. I’ve had a few people sign up over the course of the day, but not really much participation as yet; understandable, really, since no-one wants to be the first person to say something!

A request, then, dear reader. If you’d like to have a chat with me and hopefully some other like-minded individuals, please do two things for me.

Firstly, join the server here. (You can use Discord via the Web, but I recommend downloading the standalone app for the best and most flexible experience.)

Secondly, participate! Jump into a channel you like the sound of — the invite link I’ve provided will take you to a “welcome” channel that gives you a summary of what all the other channels are all about — and start talking. Even if no-one seems to be saying much to begin with, people who join the server and channels will see the conversation history when they come along for the first time, so if there are some comments, thoughts and even pictures for people to respond to when they sign up, new members will be more inclined to start participating themselves.

I’d love to build this server into a nice little community where we can chat, share stories, share pics and share our thoughts on all things anime, gaming, manga and whatnot. Discord is a great means of doing just that, and I’d love to see more people making use of it and supporting the great work the developers are doing — it’s currently only in alpha, and is already a really well put together piece of software. And who knows? You might even make a few new friends or discover a few new interests in the process.

See you there!

1999: Sowing Discord

I’m always interested to find alternative ways to do things when it comes to technology, particularly if a once-reliable tool has become a messy piece of bloated crap.

Such is my feeling towards Skype, the well-known piece of messaging software that old people think is the only means of talking to people in other countries via the Internet.

Skype used to be great. It used to be simple, efficient, easy to use and easy to understand. It was intuitive and worked well. Then Microsoft got hold of it, and the entire application was redesigned from top to bottom and made almost the exact opposite of all the above adjectives. It’s now a cluttered, inefficient, clunky and unintuitive pile of hot garbage — and, for many users, a hog on system resources, too. It still does the job — just about — but its frustrating aspects far outweigh its benefits for me these days, particularly when all I really use it for is in-game chat for games that don’t directly support voice chat.

I was switched on to an app called Discord by a part-time member of our raid group in Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve never really looked into gaming-centric VOIP solutions like TeamSpeak or Mumble before, largely because they sounded complicated (and sometimes expensive) to set up. But Discord promised to be free, easy to set up and intuitive.

And what do you know? It really is.

Discord works similarly to services like TeamSpeak and Mumble in that you set up “servers”, which are private collections of text and voice channels that can each have their own permissions set. People then join the server’s public channels and, where applicable, are invited to private channels as necessary. From there, it’s a nicely self-contained system that means you can keep all your in-game friends in one easy-to-manage place, and you can make use of voice chat with them without having to dick around with “calling” each other — you just all join the same communal channel.

Best of all, it’s cross-platform, and even works in your web browser if you’re on a public computer or don’t want to download anything. It has game auto-detection systems that let your friends know what you’re playing and if you’re online, and some highly customisable notifications and text-to-speech options for true flexibility. In short, it seems like a really great piece of software that is an ideal solution for those who want a means of chatting with one another both in-game and out of the game, and it’s certainly a lot better than the big bag of dicks Skype has become over the course of the last couple of years or so.

I’m conscious I sound like an advert here, but, well, if you’re looking for something that fits the description I’ve given above, give it a shot. (If, on the other hand, you’re an elderly person looking to talk to your children who live abroad, as the stereotype goes, Skype probably still fits your needs just fine.)

Find out more here.