PrimeJunta

I'd rather not have attributes at all.

You make yourself a mod that removes resting limitations. It wouldn't be the same because it would cost money and loading time. As it is, there's more than enough camping supplies to be found that I've never needed to backtrack for them yet. Yet they're not so common that I can thoughtlessly blast away at every xaurip with my biggest guns. The rest system is great, one of the major improvements over the IE games.

Murder backer NPC's for their hats.

If Obsidian removes resting limitations and thereby the strategic dimension of dungeon-delving, I'm going to throw the mother of all hissy fits.

I am shocked to notice that Finland is ahead of both Italy and Spain for owners. Shocked! And who gets the localization? I demand Ikuisuuden Pylväät! And a ranger companion named Kyösti! With a bear named Juuso! My whims must be catered to! Finland Stronk!

Nuclear psionics, man.

@barakav If you're prophesying, here are a few more. People will continue to tweet opinions. People will continue to be outraged by these opinions. P:E will continue to be patched, tweaked, and adjusted. People will be outraged by some of the changes. People will continue to express their outrage here and on Twitter. Capitalism will continue to suck until the people wake up and replace it with something better.

Shadowrun Returns is actually 3D with a fixed camera angle. I like it. A free-moving camera adds nothing of value to a tactical party-based game though, whether it's RT or TB. It's just a distraction from what really matters. Level design has to take this into account ofc.

@Creslin321 I'm a big believer in stable and democratic political institutions. They're by no means invulnerable to corruption or subversion, but they can serve as a counterweight to the raw market power wielded by big economic players. The main problem right now is that capital is far freer to move than people. This means that any market player that's big enough can escape pretty much any attempt at counterbalancing it simply by making jurisdictions compete against each other in a race to the bottom, and then picking the most advantageous one, like the Cayman Islands, Delaware, or City of London. This is a post-Reagan phenomenon. Before him, capital movements were much more restricted, which meant that even multinational giant corporations had to come to terms with the rules in the countries in which they worked. Tax havens existed but they were penny-ante stuff, not a central feature of the global economic system. And, of course, these corporations were free to be as rapacious as they like outside the stable democracies of Western Europe and the US (and they were). This situation makes it extremely difficult to reform political institutions anywhere, simply because the powers that do not want to see them reformed command such immense economic power, and can easily shift it wherever they feel it's most convenient. After all, the prize is so much better if you get to write the rules of the game.

@Creslin321: IMO the most successful social-political-economic system we've had was the one that existed in the US and Western Europe and eventually a few other places between about 1950 and about 1980. That was thirty solid years of massive and broad-based economic and social progress. For a while it looked like we really could eliminate -- or as good as -- want, deprivation, and injustice. I was old enough to remember how it went off the rails: the giddy binge on free-market distillate during Reagan, followed by the boom-and-bust cycles of the 90's and early noughties, then the crash of 2008 and the persistent malaise since then. The usual forces of history reasserted themselves and we've slid back to the standard order for human societies -- a kind of feudalism where about 1% of the population controls most of the resources, and the rest make do with what crumbs fall off their table. From where I'm at that sucks and we really ought to think of something better.

Pretty sure he said that it was due to it's history, not the nature of capitalism itself. Well yes I did, but what is "the nature of capitalism itself?" Capitalism is a particular system of economic relations that arose from and continues to evolve in a particular set of historical circumstances. You can't detach it from those. You can, of course, imagine some utopian capitalism divorced from these considerations, consisting of people who never cheat, lie, steal, conceal information, abuse a dominant market position or other forms of power to nip competition in the bud, use their resources to subvert existing political institutions to fit their agendas or create new political institutions from scratch and so on, but that's not a particularly productive use of your time IMO. This is one reason I'm not big on endgames, as I mentioned earlier. I don't really care for utopian Communism either for that matter.

No, Capitalism - by definition - is a system of free market enterprise based on impartial competition. You're thinking of Cronyism. Oh? In that case, capitalism doesn't exist, and never has.

The market or fair competition != capitalism. Capitalism is a crooked game which makes sure the same players always win the "competition."

I do. Anecdotal, I know. I'm not saying there's no sexism in the tech fields in Finland; I do think there's a good deal less of it here than, say, the Silicon Valley, 'sall.

The numbers are different in Finland. Teachers OTOH are paid pretty well. It's true that it's capitalism, though. Capitalism carries a huge patriarchal deadweight due to its history. All of its structures were set up when women had virtually no rights at all, and they've had to fight these structures for the rights they have now every step of the way. This is one (but by no means the only or even the primary) reason I'd like to see capitalism replaced by something better sooner rather than later. But that's a tangent for which this is neither the time nor the place. ☭

I have. Their explanations aren't that strong IMO. A relatively small part of the gap can be explained by things like childbirth. The major cause though is that professions where women are in the majority are lower-paid than professions requiring a similar level of skill and/or study where men are in the majority. Construction workers are paid more than nurses, for example, and nursing is every bit as demanding as construction work.

They have low Health though and respond well to debuffs. My anti-shade Rx is Fan of Flames as opener, then Holy Radiance (DD and +5 ACC), any DEFL debuff I have available (Curse of Blackened Sight, Eyestrike), and then murder them. They go down in a couple of hits once you've got the defenses down. They are among the hardes early-game enemies though, no question about that. I got TPW'ed lots of times before I figured out how to beat them.

@Luj1, you do realize the tweet in question was almost certainly a fake? YHBT

Western Europe is somewhat more progressive than some parts of the US for sure, but egads the battle isn't won here either. Finland's among the top of the pack when it comes to gender equality -- I think it was recently rated by someone as the best country to work in if you're a woman --, and even here most corporate CEO's are men and a woman earns 80 cents to a man's euro on average. In the tech field at least though there's way less sexism here I think. I work in my company's dev team, which is very nearly 50-50 male/female, and we have not done any "diversity hiring," rather than simply picking the best candidate for the job every time. It's also changing quite quickly: we're seeing a lot more qualified women applying for positions now than ten years ago.

@Stun Speaking as someone who was also here for the boobplate controversy, IMO you're misrepresenting our side of the argument somewhat. While there may have been someone there who was, in fact, offended by the idea of boobplate, most of us -- myself included -- disliked it for other reasons. I certainly don't remember being offended by it. Mildly annoyed, perhaps, mostly because it's so very tired and cliché.

@Hatred I think that's kind of unavoidable in a game with lots of side content and no level scaling. If the side content doesn't give any tangible rewards it becomes just tedious, and if it does, you're overleveled for the critical path content. I believe Josh originally wanted to lightly level-scale the later critical path content à la BG2, but that went down like a lead balloon so he didn't. So here we are, completionists break the game.

Yes, I am, and it was a mistake to propose the thought experiment to start with. This is a complex issue and can't really be illustrated with anecdotal evidence. It needs systemic analysis, and such an analysis would be a pretty big undertaking. And I'm actually a little bummed that Sarkeesian chose not to do that systemic analysis with the resources made available to her, but instead did a quite a lot of cherry-picking when making her case. Her argument would have been much stronger if she had done otherwise. Does it matter if some female NPC's are submissive? Of course not. It does, however, matter if female NPC's are usually or by default cast into a few predefined roles: waifus, woman-in-the-fridge vengeance plot drivers, background decoration, or objects to be rescued. Which is, unfortunately, where most of 'em have ended up, until the past couple of years at least. I could easily list a bunch of standout women characters in games too, but they stand out precisely because they're the exceptions. Perhaps a better thought experiment would have been, of the games you've played which feature men and women as characters, how often are the men portrayed as someone you'd want to be? How often are the women portrayed as something you'd want to possess?

@Emerwyn This is much too crazy a place for a dissertation on the topic, but unfortunately that's what's needed. Because... well, you're wrong. The gender imbalance exists everywhere, it's much worse in science/engineering/technology than most other fields, and it's especially bad in gaming. And it is not due to differences in ability. For example, one simple experiment has been repeated many times over and always yields the same results: you send CV's with randomized male and female names (or "black" and "white" names) to a bunch of potential employers, and then you tally up who gets invited to interviews. Guess what? The white males win, every time. Even when whoever is vetting the CV's is herself a woman, and/or nonwhite. Two things though: I should have given more thought to my quick thought-experiment. You really ought to look at more than just the gender of the protagonist. Who are the NPC's? Who are the main supporting characters? What's their role? Etc. etc. And: you took games only from the last year, which in fact reflects much of the change I'm referencing. If you took a ten-year perspective, the picture would be very different already with the limited "protagonist test" I proposed. What's more, I was asking you to look at the default -- many of the games indeed allow you to select the race and gender, but what's the default option? Defaults say a lot about the unconscious biases at work here.

Haha it's funny you should mention this, because the last Norwegian I met actually was originally from Sri Lanka. We were sitting on the plane from Aarhus to Copenhagen...

@Creslin The genres you've played may be less problematic than the ones I've played (I've never played an MMO or MOBA for example). May be; I suspect that if you did a finer tally of tropes a similar pattern would emerge. E.g. in the MOBA's, how's the armor and clothing design? One fantasy game trope that sticks out is the boobplate/chainmail bikini. How is it in the games you play? If, in general, women wear boobplate or chainmail bikinis where men wear full plate, why do you think that is? From where I'm at, it looks pretty obvious -- it's because the players are mostly male and want to look at boobs, so the clothing design caters to them. The main point I'm making is that the culture has shifted fast, where it counts: among the people actually making the games. There are a few holdouts, but pretty soon now that's what they'll be and it'll be perfectly fine. I've nothing against a studio making only games catering to white males, as long as they're just one studio among many catering to different groups of people. IMO gaming is richer for having characters like Kana Rua, Sagani, Pallegina, and is0bel rather than the almost all-white cast of BG1+2. (I believe Yoshimo is the only nonwhite companion character in them, and we all know what his story is. Unless you count Viconia, and if you do, the drow are not exactly an example you would want to trot out if arguing that dark-skinned people get fairly represented...)