Modern gacha games are more exploitative and effective. But there is a reason why almost all conventional games have “rpg elements” nowadays. I am an old gamer and i remember when this happened.

Game devs realized that if they have “number goes up” mechanics in their games, those games will be more popular and they will sell more. Thats how all games, including multiplayer competitive games, started adding temporary progression(session based, ie buying items between rounds in counterstrike) and then permanent progression(unlocking attachments and prestiging in call of duty).

Quake and unreal didnt have any progression, yet they were very popular multiplayer games. Many people blamed the lack of “parallel progression” systems in starcraft 2, for its failure(sc2 eventually added more parallel progression). Mechabellum, an autobattler(the modern equivalent of an rts), has like 3 different numbers that go up, on top of unlocking unit abilities and skins.

The mobile game market is very competitive and game development is extremely fast and iterative. So they leapfrogged ahead of conventional gaming when it comes to all kinds of user metric manipulation(addictiveness, engagement, etc). Dont hate the player, hate the game.

Funnily enough, the most popular mobile games atm are by Hoyoverse and they arent even that exploitative. They are AAA games, with decent story, graphics, gameplay and the gacha is just there for the more vulnerable/rich people. IMO playing them as f2p is not only viable but actually more enjoyable(ie challenging instead of rolfstomping everything).

If only there were more conventional games as a service that could pump the amount and quality of content that Hoyoverse creates for their games. But Hoyoverse is a private company, probably funded by the chinese government, so they can afford to reinvest all those billions back into the game development, unlike other games. And it shows.

So ultimately, gacha is kinda like real life gambling. I am kinda ok with it, as long as it isnt promoted and its profits go to a good place(funding education or creating decent games).

World of Warcraft and Diablo are gacha. Every time you play, you are “pulling” and hoping for a good drop(item). What modern gacha games did, is take that gameplay/psychological feature and directly monetize it(instead of indirectly monetizing it through a subscription/1 time payment).

But both are gambling. I am ok with having age restrictions but we need to be honest with ourselves. And what is “fun” is whatever makes neurons activate. Gambling(ie rpg elements) has always been a core mechanic for many games.

What keeps them engaged with Destiny 2 despite its apparent lack of a clear path forward?

There is no alternative. The First Descendant is p2w. Once Human has different structure and resets your progress every season. Warframe is pretty different and similar to First Descendant. Overwatch basically cancelled its pve. Darktide is clunky.

And none of these games have the polish and shooting satisfaction that Destiny has. If people want a pve game, with long term progression that has enjoyable shooting, Destiny is all there is. What keeps them playing? Copium.

Slowly but steadily Destiny will die. And thats when Marathon will come out. But Marathon is very different, so i am not even so sure that most Destiny players will migrate to that.

I am not even playing Destiny. Destiny is the game that i want to love so much but always shits on me, so i gave up. It seems to me that the easiest thing in the world, is to keep Destiny going and address its minor issues. But somehow Bungie doesnt think so.

You might be right, though the ears arent floppy.

It kinda looks like a basenji, with relaxed tail. Their tails are usually curled, but when they relax, it can uncurl.

Maybe it is a basenji mix, hence the uncurled tail and kinda off whitebrown colour.

Be aware that basenjis are not normal dogs, they are more like cats. And also there are a billion stray dogs that need companions, no need to breed extra.

With geforce now(and other similar cloud gaming services), you can play all kinds of AAA games in your browser, including diablo 4.

Greeks living in current western Turkey were called Ionians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionians

They were mostly athenean settlers, which is why when Persia conquered them, they asked Athens for help. Athens helped them but the ionian revolt failed and Persia was super pissed. The persian emperor had his servant reminding him daily to “remember the athenians”.

This is the main reason behind the persian invasion of mainland Greece. The persians burnt Athens to the ground, which eventually led to Alexander the OK burning Persepolis(Persian Empire’s Capital) to the ground(a couple centuries later).

Since turks came from the East, Ionians were kinda the first greeks they met, so they decided that all greeks are Ionians(Yunans). Or other non greeks in the East were already calling greeks “yunans” and turks just adopted that terminology too. Especially since that term had been mostly depreciated by the time the turks arrived to the neighbourhood.

Most of Sicily was a greek and Syracuse was a greek colony. In fact Archimedes helped defend it against the romans. Most of southern Italy was greek, before Rome became big(and conquered other italians, greeks and carthaginians).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Graecia

And even after the romans conquered “everything”, greek culture was still dominant since the romans were greekaboos(and greek culture was everywhere because of Alexander the OK).

It’s also available on hbo max.

Actually Halo Infinite might come out on ps5. Microsoft is publishing a lot of their games to Playstation atm. Sea of Thieves, Hi-fi rush, Grounded, Pentiment are all out on ps5.

Sea of Thieves was one of the big xbox exclusive games, developed by Rare, which is owned by Microsoft since 2002 and all the games they have made in the last 15+ years have been xbox exclusive.

I mean germanic people/vikings raided/ruled southern Europe. The Mediterranean Sea was hugely important for trade and civilization, throughout the ages. Athens was a french duchy for a couple centuries, ruled by francs. Alps is not as isolating as, the Sahara desert. You have navigable rivers like Danube and southern France with access to the Mediterranean sea.

Does your average norwegian have some greek dna? Maybe not. But ultimately everyone fucked everyone and people fucked people near them. And the Mediterranean Sea facilitated a lot of fucking, trading and conquering between the countries that had access to it.

It’s like saying “the mongols never conquered Greece, therefore greeks dont have mongol dna”. The mongols fucked with turkic people and turkic(turks) people fucked with greek people. So i am sure greeks have some mongol dna.

There is this funny video of turkish youtubers who did dna tests

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TStTmMCtgBk

And many of them have majority greek dna or a big part of greek dna.

The greeks had colonies everywhere. Odessa and Marseille started as greek colonies. They copied the phoenician model of “where there is sea, we can colonize, reinforce, conquer and trade with”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_colonisation

And then Alexander the OK conquered the “entire” world. After his death, his empire was split into multiple hellenic(ie greek) kingdoms. Greek became the lingua franca, since the ruling class was greek, and greek culture was spread everywhere. Thats why the New Testament was written in greek.

Hanukkah is actually the celebration of the uprising of the jews against their greek rulers. If you are somewhat familiar with the history of the era, you might have heard about the Seleucids or the Ptolemies. Those were greek kingdoms. Cleopatra was a Ptolemy and she was the first in her dynasty who bothered to learn egyptian. All previous Ptolemy rulers only spoke greek, their court was greeks and some hellenized(greekified) jews and egyptians. The Ptolemies were extremely incestuous.

Then the romans came and conquered most of that. Some other greek kingdoms were taken back by their local population. Funnily enough, the last independent “greek” kingdom that survived was the most remote one, the Indo-Greek Kingdom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Greek_Kingdom

An indogreek kingdom that fought chinese raiders. Thats an interesting crossover.

Bullets dont create holes. Once inside, they spin and/or deform, causing a lot more damage than a bullet sized hole. Apparently, when your brain is fucked this much, it is over. Of course it doesnt always work perfectly but more often than not, it does. It is by far the most effective way of killing yourself.

The reason death sentences arent done using guns because aiming and shooting at people is hard and has psychological repercussions for the shooters. Even when executions were done by bullet, you had a lot of shooters so that noone had to bare the killing responsibility.

If you dont know how to hang yourself(it’s actually kinda hard), your death will be extremely painful and it will take a long time. Shooting yourself is one of the most effective, immediate and painless ways of killing yourself.

In case you are wondering, this is swedish for “final station”/“terminal”.

Geforce now is amazing. Much better image quality(video stream), on top of running on pc(so better graphics and fps). It is obviously more expensive(and doesnt come with any free games) but you do get what you pay for.

The microsoft cloud is “almost kinda working”/“this is neat” while geforce now “wow, i guess cloud gaming is the future”. Now if only nvidia could persuade sony and japanese devs to release their games on geforce now(though dragons dogma 2 was, which was surprising).

I have to note that sometimes, the loading times on geforce now can be long, this is not normal and varies. Sometimes load times are normal, sometimes are fucky. I think geforce now has become more popular lately and this has caused some issues. Also if a game is really cpu dependent(like dragons dogma 2), the geforce now cpus arent that great.

Another issue is that since games often use weird launchers and drm, this can cause issues. But eventually these issues are resolved.

It is only using latin letters and it is 1 to 1 for the most part. But it isnt defined somewhere, there are different variations for some letters and the Greek alphabet is slightly different than the Latin one.

For example the letter Greek letter “χ”(similar sound to English “h”) can be written as “x” or “h”. Χ looks like x but sounds like h, so either works.

It is actually a thing, called greeklish. It used to be more common/popular during the earlier days of computing/internet due to limited support of the Greek alphabet. It remained popular even later on and even today but i feel it is getting less popular nowadays.

Google translate supports greeklish, you can select Greek and type greeklish and it will work.

Yeah, the lack of microtransactions and theme are its strong points. It even has some light story stuff.

But if you want to play a game of that style, you might be better off playing Star Rail(from the dev that made Genshin Impact), which is a f2p game with tons of microtransactions but you can really enjoy it without spending a dime. And Star Rail’s design and production values are unrivaled.

I havent played the game but from what i understand it seems like your typical mobile gacha game, where you collect characters and they autofight enemies. Except it isnt f2p and doesnt have any microtransactions. It is just a paid game, with all the trappings, design and progression of a f2p mobile game.