I guess we’re all too busy watching number go up to actually manage anything. For them it’s their stock prices, for me it’s my seed ratio!

They also care about ruining trans people’s lives in any way possible. I’m sure there are plenty of transphobes who simply haven’t thought the bathroom thing through, but don’t forget the other reason they’d be happy to put passing trans men in women’s bathrooms: it forces them into an impossible decision. When an angry mob drags a trans man out of the women’s toilet, you think they’re going to listen to protestations of being AFAB? If anything, that’d just rile them up further. So a when someone is faced with the decision of choosing either the room they’re least likely to be noticed in, or the one the law technically assigned to them, they may instead choose to stay home. They may even start considering detransitioning. This is a feature, not a bug.

They do often talk about “it needs to be new,” but for the most part the things they release don’t actually follow that philosophy. Artifact was trying to follow the likes of Hearthstone. CS2 is a glowup of CS:GO. DOTA2, League. Deadlock is the closest they’ve come to something genuinely innovative in at least a decade, but even that is still following on the heels of MOBA/FPS hybrids like OW and Paladins, just taking more elements from MOBAs.

And the “not caring about money” thing wasn’t true in 2008. They were probably getting to that point around 2012, as Steam began to turn into a money printer and their microtransaction games took off, but that wouldn’t have been until after HL3 had been cancelled at least once. At some point Valve talked about the difficulties in selling Portal 2 (I think it might have been in the dev commentary? Idk it’s been years) and one of the points they bring up was how even a huge success like that game wasn’t living up to their other titles. They tried to implement microtransactions with the co-op mode, but they learned lessons about how that model only worked in bigger multiplayer games. One of the big stories they tell in both the HL1 and HL2 documentaries were the troubles they ran into with funding, and I guarantee they were not looking to repeat those experiences by continuing work on a game that had far less potential for return on investment. Again, that might have changed by 2012, but by then the momentum was already gone.

I’m not sure I believe that Valve ran out of ideas for HL3. That’s clearly the image they want to project, and maybe even what they tell themselves, but judging from the ideas they did have for Episode 3 they showcased in that documentary, there was more than enough to justify releasing a game. Certainly there was as much or more new stuff than there was for either EP1 or 2. I think it’s much more likely they simply decided their other projects at the time–CS:GO, DOTA 2, even TF2–had way more moneymaking potential. And I mean, they were right! They made a ton of money off of lootboxes and cosmetics for their multiplayer titles. I don’t think Steam had totally taken over the market yet, so they were hedging their bets on multiplayer microtransactions.

I dunno. The whole “it needs to be new” philosophy they constantly espouse to hasn’t really been true at least as far back as Portal 2. Even Alyx wasn’t particularly revolutionary as far as VR titles go. Maybe doing that type of design was new to Valve, but the only standout features that distinguishes Alyx from other games are the graphics and the (genuinely very good) grabbity glove object pickup system. Pretty much everything else is several steps behind other VR shooter games in the name of Accessibility™, from movement to weapon selection to the painfully dumb AI.

They didn’t run out of ideas. The movement FPS genre is alive and well for a reason, even today: there’s lots to be done. They just lost interest in it themselves, and I believe the reason for that is primarily monetary.

If it were that simple they would have done it by now

Next week: Trump claims to be an Eldritch being that coalesced out of Jesus’s anger while up on the cross over 2000 years ago

… It took me a minute to realize this was meant as “yeah that’s why we’re friends,” not “what gave you the impression we were friends, go away”

I see you posting this constantly. You’re a woman. Whether you’re allowed to live your day-to-day as one is a different thing. Would it be more accurate to say you wish you could present as femme?

I love chonky flapjack so dang much

Gonna have to double check the next phone I buy has a screen first

Go big or go home. “Russia starts using nukes and us government blames ukrainians for it”

I mean the version of him in this pic was strong enough to straight up kill Spidey. It just varies from story to story

At the point where we’re making lab-grown dinosaur meat, I suspect the cool factor is way more important than silly things like efficiency. T-Rex meat all the way babyyy

I don’t understand how someone can look at things and go "yeah no need to look any deeper, I know enough already

I swear some people never grow out of the “I’m a big kid now!” mindset. Just like how little kids always seem to think <age they currently are> is the age where now they suddenly deserve respect, lots of adults go “well now I’m an adult, so that means I know everything. It’d be embarrassing if I didn’t!”

Pride is a hell of a drug.

It’s a hard truth, but sometimes adding catgirls to a joke makes it funnier somehow…

see what’d i say? at LEAST 4 people couldnt handle the truth

Wait, was that a bug? I always figured it was just based on how insanely difficult it is to keep cities clean as they grow massive. You can still easily hold on to those cities, even very distant ones, by recruiting lots of peasant units to garrison the cities. The security bonus is based on the number of men you have garrisoned versus the number of civilians, and since peasants are the largest units by manpower, they grant the biggest bonus. You wind up with two rows of peasants that are only useful as bait in an actual battle, but give plenty of security bonus to offset the max squalor penalty.

Edit, actually it gets even easier if you keep recruiting peasants as a sort of population control even after the garrison is full. Send excess peasant units to your most recently conquered cities to maintain control and free up militarily useful units from just standing guard, and for certain cities with super slow population growth you can disband the units as they arrive in order to boost the civilian numbers. It’s a makeshift, but effective way to transfer population from overcrowded cities to the empty ones.

Literally none. DEI straight up means treating everyone the same. They’re working on giving it some fucked up negative connotations the same way they have with “woke” and “critical race theory,” but if you look at the history and reality of where those words come from and what they mean, it becomes clear they’re playing with language, trying to avoid looking racist to the general public while still implementing racist policy.

If by “this,” you mean the reference towards Tubman, then you’re wrong. Talking about the accomplishments of anyone who isn’t a straight white Christian man IS promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion! DEI is a good thing! Opposing it is explicitly racist!

That opinion is “this group of people is worth less than another group,” so yes she’s a bad person

Ehh. The broad strokes had the potential to be interesting, but the presentation and details are awful. Actually watching the prequels is such a chore, with 75% of the time spent thinking “why,” 24% “ooh pretty” (though a lot of the CGI hasn’t aged well), and maybe 1% is an actual “hmm yes interesting.”

Palpatine and populism had a chance to be interesting, but it’s mostly done completely off screen, with lots of assumptions needing to be made by a viewer who needs to already have an understanding that this is the future Emperor. The closest we ever get to seeing the true corruption of the Senate is Palpatine’s speech denouncing the Jedi, and even that winds up being carried hard solely by Palpatine’s actor.

They completely ignore the moral, logistical, and spiritual questions raised by usage of a clone army. Coverage in EU and Disney doesn’t count in a discussion of the prequels, but even there it’s rarely explored. You’d think the whole point of clones vs robots would be to raise interesting questions by way of contrasting the two, but no, it’s just so you don’t have to feel bad watching the armies blow each other up.

Anakin and Padme. Good God.

There’s so much more but honestly I don’t want to write more of an essay. Apologies for the YouTube link, but this is a video I really like about what made the Jedi so special in the originals. I think most of the problems in the prequels parallel their mishandling of the Jedi–a superficial understanding that Thing Is Cool, but then missing the point thanks to a formulaic, blunt, needs-to-be-marketable approach to making the movies.

I dunno, they’re more bearable than the sequels. I can even enjoy watching them; I grew up on them and can put on the nostalgia goggles to get through them, but under any examination they completely fall apart.