I am posting this thread from a laptop PC and the Google Chrome on this laptop is working fine, so here's the rub:

The Google Chrome program on my Desktop PC is acting slow, and its not because the internet is being slow with it because connected my internet on this laptop and its working fine as is.

I also noticed that its google chrome and google chrome alone on my Desktop PC because I have Mozilla Firefox installed on my PC (an older version) and its working relatively fine and fast, so its only Google Chrome that's slow.

I tried simply restarting my whole computer and its still slow. I tried clear browser cache and cookies from the last 24 hours and its still slow.

So I am at a crossroads where I have to either simply just wait it out to see if this whole thing resolves by itself, and things like that happened before, a program in the background most likely that is making Google Chrome slow. Or uninstall the whole thing and download a clean, new version of Google Chrome. But I lose all my bookmarks and cache data in the process.

So I am just here hoping anyone can give me any advice. Me I am gonna wait for my brother to contact me since he's more into to this kind of software stuff better then me.

For any further info I am using a Windows 7 Desktop.

So we have a few people on here who might trot out this term a bit too often.

But the response fascinates me. It doesn't come to a discussion on whether the words that 'racist' was applied to was actually racist. Or different interpretations of the word racist.

No, it becomes an all out brawl on shutting down the opposition without thinking about their position. Usually in that same discussion, someone points out how the word shuts down conversations (which is correct) while simultaneously shutting down the person who uses the word racist. And the latter learns absolutely nothing other than everybody is a hypocrite.

PS. I think this site is actually much better with trigger words like racist. There are many worse places out there. But it still happens.

Also, discussion on what you think is/not racist would interest me.

(Edit: Using this post as a jumping off point)

Specter Von Baren:
Hhm. So this is the thread that got Saelune suspended. Hopefully this means they'll think about how they've been acting and shape up and be civil again.

"And they called [Obama] a muslim, a terrorist, they insulted his wife, his daughters ...
And now they want civility?

Okay sure you can have civility if you hop in a time machine, and change the past, so that you deserve civility because until then ... civility is not on the table."

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/9vvfyw/when_the_us_had_a_president_who_wouldnt_let_a/e9fk5hj/?context=3

Not my reddit post, but a point I agree with.

Civility is a tool of oppression. Civility is what those in power demand of those not in power, for civility helps them stay in power. Civility keeps people from calling out others for their misdeads. Civility worse yet, being used to oppress by people who neglect their own civility.

What civility is there in white supremacy? None. What civility is there in rape? None. What civility is there in murdering a black man who gun nuts could have used as a champion for the 'Good guy with gun' mentality but instead was shot dead, while white mass shooters are treated with the civility of being taken alive? None for those who deserve it anyways.

Civility is why I get punished here while Donald Trump and Republicans and all other right-wingers abuse and oppress me and people like me, and people unlike me, and hell even you. That is the real irony is that Republicans are even oppressing their own, yet their own praise them for the honor to be shat upon by their glorious bigot fascist leader.

It is not civility we should be demanding, but decency, compassion, empathy, and justice. But when 'civility' comes knocking, they want you to put your head down, get in line, while the police out you in local newspapers. Indecent civility is no civility at all.

The Stonewall Riots were not civil, but they were effective.

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

When gay rights activists were civil, they were ignored. Because civility is a tool of oppression. A quiet problem is no problem at all.

When LGBT people decided enough with civility, cause all it gets us is handcuffs and abuse, then it became loud and proud and...effective. We're here, we're queer, get used to it. No please, no thank you. A bold, uncivil statement of existence that those 'civil and fair' hetero bigots despised for now making them be aware that we exist.

A war, ironically called the 'Civil War' was even less civil than that! A war for the very humanity of a huge chunk of the American population, well, as far as one side was concerned, for the other side, the CONFEDERATES, did not even view Africans as people, but as property, as cattle. What civility is there in that? None. Ironic now that the two sides that opposed each other, the Republicans and the Confederates, are now the same damn side. Though if you look at the sides of the states, you will notice a pattern.

What civility did Hitler show the world? None. Should people have been civil to him? I mean, he was the legal ruler of Germany, and you never dare speak ill of those in power, you must be civil! But Hitler was not civil. He like so many others, dehumanized, reduced. I guess you don't need to be civil to people when you don't view them as people, hm.

Anyways, here is hundreds of instances of Trump being uncivil.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/28/upshot/donald-trump-twitter-insults.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article?ion=Footer

Civility is a tool of oppression. Chains meant to keep the oppressed bogged down. 'Do as I say, not as I do'.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elizabeth-warren-dives-in-11546298426

Trump may die before 2020. He may become too ill to run. He may say screw it or even end up in jail!

So, less about him, what do you think of her? What positions do you think she really will fight for? What challenges do you think she faces?

My thoughts: She is younger than Bernie and has positions on major issues similar to his.

Your thoughts?

This thread is just about giving ideas that are contrary to commonly held beliefs. Nothing really too serious. Just present how you view things differently.

Something that have been a thorn in my side for the longest period of time. The idea that Goku is a bad person. A lot of people cite his bad parenting, his self centered ways, and his lust for fighting above all else as reasons why he's a bad person. I think they are completely wrong.

I think the entire reality around Goku are bad people, and they try to spin it onto Goku.

A few things to get in order. First, He has had a Brain Injury that was severe enough to change his personality (scroll to number 1). Two, The Flying Nimbus Cloud. You literally can not ride it if you don't have a pure heart. And for those who think that since he grew up, he might have become a jerk... Number three: The Spirit Bomb. An attack that can only be used by someone with a Pure Heart. Which also answers the question why no one else uses the technique.

After his Adoptive Grandfather dies, the next person he meets is Bulma... a woman who tries to shoot him, steal his only keepsake of his Grandfather (the only person who he loved and took care of him out of the kindness of his heart), and then manipulates Goku into coming along to get the dragon balls because she knew she couldn't take it away from him.

From that point on, everyone Goku meets tries to kill him or trick him... or have him fight people who have no issue killing him for their own benefit. The only person that takes him in for any amount of time is Master Roshi. Master Roshi, however, took this as a chance to get a young boy to bring him a hot woman to ogle.

No one tries to teach Goku about the world. About education. I don't even rightly know how he knows how to read. No one actually teaches him about the world around him, they just yell at him when he doesn't know what they had to learn themselves with families and people who cared about them. People only seem to care about him when they need saving.

Goku is a bad father? He doesn't know what family is really. He doesn't even know what a healthy relationship is. Everyone he is friends with has tried to either kill him or use him. There is no exception to this. Even Trunks took out his sword and tested him to see if he could trust the fate of the world on his shoulders.

And Let's be real, if Goku wasn't as strong as Trunks needed him to be, he would have cut Goku up.

Sure, people like Goku. But no one cares about Goku. In terms of his actual well being. People yell that he should be a better father. We're talking about the boy who thought Marriage was a type of food, and that didn't stop his eventual wife from saying "...Oh shit, cut my weird little girl dreams, this boy needs far more help than I thought".

Also, that doesn't stop her from yelling at him to get a job. Doing what? He was trained for what? A Lawyer? A Doctor? A police officer? No one taught him how to be a human, yet everyone gets on his case that he's not like us.

That's the entire world failing Goku. Not the other way around.

Anyway, that's my Devil's Advocate. You got any?

Merry Christmas, US federal employees! Just what you needed to enjoy the festive season.

For those not aware of the details, the Senate has refused to fund a border wall, and Trump won't pass the budget, so the government can't pay for a load of its work. This is not a particularly big shutdown - only a modest proportion of the US bureaucracy is currently on indefinite leave.

Apparently there were frantic negotiations to prevent it, and when it became evident Trump wouldn't get the votes, he looked like he would accept a temporary extension. However, various conservative talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh started complaining about the idea of Trump conceding, and so naturally he bowed to these rabid morons who broadcast to his base.

*Sigh* (English is not my native so I guess sorry for the grammar and typos)
I feel sad, the gaming now is totally sick, intoxicated with this "malpractice", because well, greediness.
After big debate on the forum of Hearthstone and the most recent Magic the Gathering Arena. I wanted to come on neutral ground and tell my opinion.
Loot box, microtransaction for skin or simple pay to skip (experience potion, more stash, etc..) is a bad thing.

Loot box (or booster pack for CCG), you can't directly buy what you want or the price for individual items is ridiculously overprice, some stuff are arbitrarily more rare for some reason, and often, loot boxes are filled with a lot of "useless" junk that barely few people care (like spray, icon or even flag in Heroes of the Storm for example). Just so you think the rare stuff is more interesting (gambling mechanic).
Like in HotS if you buy one character with gems it's like 5$, I have seen some skin with 20$ attached to it, wtf?

Micro for skin, well I think this one is hard, and some psychology and philosophy may get into, but for me, paying for a skin can give you an advantage that some other players don't have. Not everyone as the same kind of vision, if you have a different skin than the "normal one" you may blend better or may be harder to see for some players.
And why back then in a game like says Quake 3 arena, everyone had access to the 4 or 5 pages of 16 skins, now we have to buy them individually?

And the last one, which for me is the worst of all, the Pay to Skip.
No matter the form it takes, I despise all kind of P2Skip a game can offer, even worst when it's already a P2Play like WoW where you can pay 60$ to have a max level character.
Because of if the method of P2Skip exist it means the original game and the method to attain a certain aspect of game has been artificially slowed down, either by time gate, loot box randomness, restriction of daily quest or similar.
I just rage, because no matter what, paying for skipping is NEVER a good thing, because, all you do, is throwing money out of the window (in a way). You don't give money to buy more content, or to have access to thing you couldn't before, you pay to access them faster, because you made them slower so I could lose my patience and pay you to skip ahead.

Let now talk about the fact of paying for a virtual currencies, I think I have never seen a game that offers good well rounded virtual currencies, its always Pay 500 gems for 5$, 1100 gems for 10$ and such, but in the shop, almost no items cost exactly 500 or 1100, they have cost like 750 or 1300, so you are stuck with a portion of the amount you paid in virtual currency that you can't spend. So instead of paying says 7,50$ for an item, you paid 10$, because they made this artificially, again, not having something at 2,50$ so you gave them more than you would have.

So people say, let other people do what they want with their money, but the problem is, if you buy the skin at 5$ or the pay to get more boosters in Hearthstone, you say to the design that its correct to do it and thus making my own enjoyment of the game of not having P2skip worst. So no, you do have an indirect impact on me.

Now I am sad because more and more games are getting through this route of giving more and more granular content and trying to squeeze from us more money by using "morally grey" mechanics and design choices like more grindy games and gambling mechanic.

Honourable mentions to basically 99% of the mobile games which either use one or a lot of these practices.

I listened to Mogworld a couple of years ago and recently finished Differently Morphous.

I thought Differently Morphous was pretty good. It was silly and lighthearted, but still managed to have a twist to the whodunnit that works fantastically in retrospect. I was actually quite surprised how well everything came together in the end.

Anybody else read any of Yahtzee's stuff?

Since 2018 is pretty much over(thank god), pretty much all the GOTY/Top 10 lists are out by this point and a new year is quickly approaching, I'm gonna go ahead and ask: What games are you planning on playing this coming year?

They don't have to be games being released in 2019. Backlogged games or games you just haven't gotten around to picking up yet are also fair game.

For me, the list goes something like this:

-Horizon Zero Dawn

I got it for Christmas 2017, haven't played it yet.

-Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Because Ancient Fucking Greece, not to mention I rather liked Origins so why not?

-Mutant Year Zero.

Sure, it's furry XCOM, but I liked XCOM, furries don't bug me and the game is getting good reviews.
'
-Gris

It's apparently really atmospheric and such. Also, it's 4 hours long, which is really nice in an era where every game has to be a 60+ hour open world game because reasons.

-Outer Worlds

Assuming it's good, of course. I liked FO:NV and Alpha Protocol so there's a decent chance.

-Kentucky Route Zero Act V.

Yeah, I'm being super optimistic here and assuming just because it was scheduled for a "Early 2018" release it might actually drop in 2019. 4/5 acts are done and I kinda want to see the whole thing completed.

-God of War.

It's apparently really good and I've been avoiding Spoilers(other then Kratos kills a bunch of dudes, some of whom are Gods).

-Red Dead Redemption.

I'm not playing 2 until I play the first one, for numerous reasons. I know the newer game is a prequel but apparently a fair number of RDR characters are shown in RDR2 at an earlier point in their lives(including John Marston).

Edited:

-Either Pillers of Eternity or Divinity:Original Sin. Both are apparently good but different from each other. Both have an apparently even better sequel as well.

And I'm sure a couple games will take me totally off guard and I'll have to grab those as well, because it happens every year(Return of the Obra What? What is this thing? Wait, it's actually good?).

So after all that has happened in 2018 in the AAA gaming space, I thought I would start a discussion.

For years we've all heard about how the gaming bubble is going to burst. That as AAA games become more and more expensive to make stacked on top of the seedy practice of adding in extra charges around these games, at some point the market was just going to collapse.

It started with DLC, then it became day one DLC, then DLC on the disc that you already paid for, then microtransactions started, all boiling up to lootboxes. Each of these practices for extra monetization caused the games to loose an aspect of their initial quality. From DLC selling us the "real" ending, to selling us extra fighters on a roster artificially limited in order to sell us the characters on the disc for an extra price. Once AAA-gaming really started to dig deep into the Microtransaction and lootbox department, balancing of the entire game got fuck-a-doodled.

But now AAA gaming has gone even further off the rail I think. AS the backlash of the lootboxes finally reached a massive head with Star Wars Battlefront 2, to the point that governments started telling publishers to fuck off with that gambling bullshit, I feel like publishers tried to cut back on costs as well as look at other ways they could still have their microtransactions without losing too much of the billions of dollars in revenue that they've seen over the last few years.

The result are incredibly unbalanced games, or shit cheaply made games that they've tried to sell us as AAA-experiences.

Fallout 76 - an asset flip where the only thing that works is the incredibly overpriced cash shop.

Red Dead Redemption 2 - regardless of the "quality" of the single player experience, the multiplayer is the mode that people are going to play for any real bulk of time and that economy is fuck skittles. Designed to sell you gold bars so you can have something as basic as fast travel. This is only slightly better than selling save slots.

Not to mention publishers are now pushing things into areas we don't want nor do we care about. Look at Blizzard and how much everyone loved that after 6 fucking years the latest Diablo game is nothing more than a reskin of a knock off Diablo game on mobile phones of all things.

With all this in mind, are we finally facing the AAA-gaming industry reset that we've all been speculating for years? Can AAA gaming recover from this shitstorm that they've landed in?

It seems like every year, we are getting fewer and fewer AAA releases that don't come with shady business baggage. Looking forward to 2019 how many AAA games can you predict wont have some microtransactional bullshit tacked on?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTVLc2K7n0c

Essentially Razorfist claims the FBI as of recent times is inexorably corrupt and far outlived its original mandate and purpose and long overdue for dissolution. And of course he shows me a bunch of images of website articles (without showing which website it is exactly or linking his sources, and said article list itself as an opinion.)

But still I want to know what other people have to say about this topic of whether the FBI today is corrupt and what not?

In a controversial memo, The Trump Administration is debating the legal status of transgender individuals, arguing that a person's assigned or biological gender should only be taken into consideration.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/us/politics/transgender-trump-administration-sex-definition.html

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a government wide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual?s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined ?on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.?

This led to the creation of the hashtag #WontBeErased used mainly to combat against the administration's policy against transgender individuals

However, Good Old Games tweeted about the event.

Many in the trans community did not take the soon to be deleted tweet well, leading to the doxing of several GOG and CD Projekt Red Employees.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7elEDuz8zg

In my opinion, while GOG probably made the tweet by accident not realizing the meaning behind the hashtag, the tweet may have been poorly timed. GOG deleted the tweet but many of its most vocal critics are spending time doxing employees that may or may not have had anything to do with it.

I do not believe CD Projekt Red, GOG or any of its employees or affiliates are transphobic and many are spending too much time attacking the symptom and not the disease.

I have no issue in those who oppose the Trump Administration's policy on transgender individuals but it seems to me its most vocal opponents are spending too much time on a game developer that has little to nothing to do with it.

UPDATE:

GOG has issued a statement apologizing for said tweet.

Once arrested on suspicion of second degree murder, James Fields, the 20 year old male who purposefully drove his car into a crowd of counter protesters, has been found guilty of first degree murder for the death of Heather Heyer. As well as five counts of aggravated malicious wounding, three counts of malicious wounding, and one count of leaving the scene of a crash.

More importantly, the jury rejected arguments by lawyers for Fields that he acted in self-defense during the events. Also that she totally didn't die of a heart attack or something dumb like that.

The jury will continue monday with the sentencing, which will be anywhere from 20 years to life for the murder charge plus whatever they throw on for the other accounts of wounding and assault.

https://www.whsv.com/content/news/502204161.html

So, it's been a long strange trip since this all happened back in August. We've seen a lot, done a lot, and faced a lot since then.

Has what we've seen since change your opinion on the event?

Do you think it's a fair result?

This thread is just about giving ideas that are contrary to commonly held beliefs. Nothing really too serious. Just present how you view things differently.

Something that have been a thorn in my side for the longest period of time. The idea that Goku is a bad person. A lot of people cite his bad parenting, his self centered ways, and his lust for fighting above all else as reasons why he's a bad person. I think they are completely wrong.

I think the entire reality around Goku are bad people, and they try to spin it onto Goku.

A few things to get in order. First, He has had a Brain Injury that was severe enough to change his personality (scroll to number 1). Two, The Flying Nimbus Cloud. You literally can not ride it if you don't have a pure heart. And for those who think that since he grew up, he might have become a jerk... Number three: The Spirit Bomb. An attack that can only be used by someone with a Pure Heart. Which also answers the question why no one else uses the technique.

After his Adoptive Grandfather dies, the next person he meets is Bulma... a woman who tries to shoot him, steal his only keepsake of his Grandfather (the only person who he loved and took care of him out of the kindness of his heart), and then manipulates Goku into coming along to get the dragon balls because she knew she couldn't take it away from him.

From that point on, everyone Goku meets tries to kill him or trick him... or have him fight people who have no issue killing him for their own benefit. The only person that takes him in for any amount of time is Master Roshi. Master Roshi, however, took this as a chance to get a young boy to bring him a hot woman to ogle.

No one tries to teach Goku about the world. About education. I don't even rightly know how he knows how to read. No one actually teaches him about the world around him, they just yell at him when he doesn't know what they had to learn themselves with families and people who cared about them. People only seem to care about him when they need saving.

Goku is a bad father? He doesn't know what family is really. He doesn't even know what a healthy relationship is. Everyone he is friends with has tried to either kill him or use him. There is no exception to this. Even Trunks took out his sword and tested him to see if he could trust the fate of the world on his shoulders.

And Let's be real, if Goku wasn't as strong as Trunks needed him to be, he would have cut Goku up.

Sure, people like Goku. But no one cares about Goku. In terms of his actual well being. People yell that he should be a better father. We're talking about the boy who thought Marriage was a type of food, and that didn't stop his eventual wife from saying "...Oh shit, cut my weird little girl dreams, this boy needs far more help than I thought".

Also, that doesn't stop her from yelling at him to get a job. Doing what? He was trained for what? A Lawyer? A Doctor? A police officer? No one taught him how to be a human, yet everyone gets on his case that he's not like us.

That's the entire world failing Goku. Not the other way around.

Anyway, that's my Devil's Advocate. You got any?

*Sigh* (English is not my native so I guess sorry for the grammar and typos)
I feel sad, the gaming now is totally sick, intoxicated with this "malpractice", because well, greediness.
After big debate on the forum of Hearthstone and the most recent Magic the Gathering Arena. I wanted to come on neutral ground and tell my opinion.
Loot box, microtransaction for skin or simple pay to skip (experience potion, more stash, etc..) is a bad thing.

Loot box (or booster pack for CCG), you can't directly buy what you want or the price for individual items is ridiculously overprice, some stuff are arbitrarily more rare for some reason, and often, loot boxes are filled with a lot of "useless" junk that barely few people care (like spray, icon or even flag in Heroes of the Storm for example). Just so you think the rare stuff is more interesting (gambling mechanic).
Like in HotS if you buy one character with gems it's like 5$, I have seen some skin with 20$ attached to it, wtf?

Micro for skin, well I think this one is hard, and some psychology and philosophy may get into, but for me, paying for a skin can give you an advantage that some other players don't have. Not everyone as the same kind of vision, if you have a different skin than the "normal one" you may blend better or may be harder to see for some players.
And why back then in a game like says Quake 3 arena, everyone had access to the 4 or 5 pages of 16 skins, now we have to buy them individually?

And the last one, which for me is the worst of all, the Pay to Skip.
No matter the form it takes, I despise all kind of P2Skip a game can offer, even worst when it's already a P2Play like WoW where you can pay 60$ to have a max level character.
Because of if the method of P2Skip exist it means the original game and the method to attain a certain aspect of game has been artificially slowed down, either by time gate, loot box randomness, restriction of daily quest or similar.
I just rage, because no matter what, paying for skipping is NEVER a good thing, because, all you do, is throwing money out of the window (in a way). You don't give money to buy more content, or to have access to thing you couldn't before, you pay to access them faster, because you made them slower so I could lose my patience and pay you to skip ahead.

Let now talk about the fact of paying for a virtual currencies, I think I have never seen a game that offers good well rounded virtual currencies, its always Pay 500 gems for 5$, 1100 gems for 10$ and such, but in the shop, almost no items cost exactly 500 or 1100, they have cost like 750 or 1300, so you are stuck with a portion of the amount you paid in virtual currency that you can't spend. So instead of paying says 7,50$ for an item, you paid 10$, because they made this artificially, again, not having something at 2,50$ so you gave them more than you would have.

So people say, let other people do what they want with their money, but the problem is, if you buy the skin at 5$ or the pay to get more boosters in Hearthstone, you say to the design that its correct to do it and thus making my own enjoyment of the game of not having P2skip worst. So no, you do have an indirect impact on me.

Now I am sad because more and more games are getting through this route of giving more and more granular content and trying to squeeze from us more money by using "morally grey" mechanics and design choices like more grindy games and gambling mechanic.

Honourable mentions to basically 99% of the mobile games which either use one or a lot of these practices.

Merry Christmas, US federal employees! Just what you needed to enjoy the festive season.

For those not aware of the details, the Senate has refused to fund a border wall, and Trump won't pass the budget, so the government can't pay for a load of its work. This is not a particularly big shutdown - only a modest proportion of the US bureaucracy is currently on indefinite leave.

Apparently there were frantic negotiations to prevent it, and when it became evident Trump wouldn't get the votes, he looked like he would accept a temporary extension. However, various conservative talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh started complaining about the idea of Trump conceding, and so naturally he bowed to these rabid morons who broadcast to his base.

Since 2018 is pretty much over(thank god), pretty much all the GOTY/Top 10 lists are out by this point and a new year is quickly approaching, I'm gonna go ahead and ask: What games are you planning on playing this coming year?

They don't have to be games being released in 2019. Backlogged games or games you just haven't gotten around to picking up yet are also fair game.

For me, the list goes something like this:

-Horizon Zero Dawn

I got it for Christmas 2017, haven't played it yet.

-Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Because Ancient Fucking Greece, not to mention I rather liked Origins so why not?

-Mutant Year Zero.

Sure, it's furry XCOM, but I liked XCOM, furries don't bug me and the game is getting good reviews.
'
-Gris

It's apparently really atmospheric and such. Also, it's 4 hours long, which is really nice in an era where every game has to be a 60+ hour open world game because reasons.

-Outer Worlds

Assuming it's good, of course. I liked FO:NV and Alpha Protocol so there's a decent chance.

-Kentucky Route Zero Act V.

Yeah, I'm being super optimistic here and assuming just because it was scheduled for a "Early 2018" release it might actually drop in 2019. 4/5 acts are done and I kinda want to see the whole thing completed.

-God of War.

It's apparently really good and I've been avoiding Spoilers(other then Kratos kills a bunch of dudes, some of whom are Gods).

-Red Dead Redemption.

I'm not playing 2 until I play the first one, for numerous reasons. I know the newer game is a prequel but apparently a fair number of RDR characters are shown in RDR2 at an earlier point in their lives(including John Marston).

Edited:

-Either Pillers of Eternity or Divinity:Original Sin. Both are apparently good but different from each other. Both have an apparently even better sequel as well.

And I'm sure a couple games will take me totally off guard and I'll have to grab those as well, because it happens every year(Return of the Obra What? What is this thing? Wait, it's actually good?).

So after all that has happened in 2018 in the AAA gaming space, I thought I would start a discussion.

For years we've all heard about how the gaming bubble is going to burst. That as AAA games become more and more expensive to make stacked on top of the seedy practice of adding in extra charges around these games, at some point the market was just going to collapse.

It started with DLC, then it became day one DLC, then DLC on the disc that you already paid for, then microtransactions started, all boiling up to lootboxes. Each of these practices for extra monetization caused the games to loose an aspect of their initial quality. From DLC selling us the "real" ending, to selling us extra fighters on a roster artificially limited in order to sell us the characters on the disc for an extra price. Once AAA-gaming really started to dig deep into the Microtransaction and lootbox department, balancing of the entire game got fuck-a-doodled.

But now AAA gaming has gone even further off the rail I think. AS the backlash of the lootboxes finally reached a massive head with Star Wars Battlefront 2, to the point that governments started telling publishers to fuck off with that gambling bullshit, I feel like publishers tried to cut back on costs as well as look at other ways they could still have their microtransactions without losing too much of the billions of dollars in revenue that they've seen over the last few years.

The result are incredibly unbalanced games, or shit cheaply made games that they've tried to sell us as AAA-experiences.

Fallout 76 - an asset flip where the only thing that works is the incredibly overpriced cash shop.

Red Dead Redemption 2 - regardless of the "quality" of the single player experience, the multiplayer is the mode that people are going to play for any real bulk of time and that economy is fuck skittles. Designed to sell you gold bars so you can have something as basic as fast travel. This is only slightly better than selling save slots.

Not to mention publishers are now pushing things into areas we don't want nor do we care about. Look at Blizzard and how much everyone loved that after 6 fucking years the latest Diablo game is nothing more than a reskin of a knock off Diablo game on mobile phones of all things.

With all this in mind, are we finally facing the AAA-gaming industry reset that we've all been speculating for years? Can AAA gaming recover from this shitstorm that they've landed in?

It seems like every year, we are getting fewer and fewer AAA releases that don't come with shady business baggage. Looking forward to 2019 how many AAA games can you predict wont have some microtransactional bullshit tacked on?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTVLc2K7n0c

Essentially Razorfist claims the FBI as of recent times is inexorably corrupt and far outlived its original mandate and purpose and long overdue for dissolution. And of course he shows me a bunch of images of website articles (without showing which website it is exactly or linking his sources, and said article list itself as an opinion.)

But still I want to know what other people have to say about this topic of whether the FBI today is corrupt and what not?

I've been watching a lot of sci-fi/space opera media lately and a question popped into my head: What are some alien species you've seen from movies, games, tv, etc. that you'd like to see more of.

Just some examples:
-The Salarians, Elcor, Hanar, Volus and Drell from Mass Effect.
-The Xelayans and Moclans from Seth MacFarlane's The Orville.