V17's recent activity

  1. Comment on What video game mods do you play, or have played in the past? in ~games

    V17
    Link
    STALKER has an incredible modding community that kept the games alive through the whole time until STALKER 2, and even nowadays many fans prefer playing mods of the original games to the sequel...

    STALKER has an incredible modding community that kept the games alive through the whole time until STALKER 2, and even nowadays many fans prefer playing mods of the original games to the sequel (at least until it's actually finished, which is going to still take some patching).

    There are not really any other games with similar gameplay features and atmosphere, which I assume is what motivated fans to work on various mods for so long. Also the fact that the development team has been quite friendly and allowed fans to release standalone mods based on leaked source code that do not require the original games to play. A lot of the development is happening in Russia, but with the rise of LLMs, DeepL etc. many of the mods finally got usable translations in to english.

    I think there are basically four classes of mods.

    • Sandbox mods. The most famous one currently is STALKER Anomaly: GAMMA, which is a huge modpack for a mod based on a different mod, and it transforms STALKER into a scavenging survival milsim in tune of singleplayer Tarkov, but with mutants and anomalies and artifacts. Excellent graphics and sound, good gameplay, new content, difficult, but story is mostly just a fanfiction retelling of the originals. This is quite far from the OG STALKER experience, it provides neither the story nor the atmosphere and gameplay that made the games famous, but it's excellent as its own thing and is surely one of the best free games ever.
    • Sort of "new game plus" mods like Autumn Aurora or Radiophobia that modernize the original game (usually Shadow of Chernobyl) and bring new features, quests, npcs, graphics and often increase the difficulty. Perhaps not best for a first playthrough, but some of them are surprisingly polished and truly expand on the original game in a tasteful way.
    • Story mods. Those often use older engine versions and seem to more often contain bugs, they're usually made by Russians and Ukrainians. They're generally more linear than the original games, but some of the stories are really interesting and well presented. Spatial Anomaly is a nice polished one that's not too long and contains all new maps. Golden Sphere is famous for being inspired by the Roadside Picnic book and being a bit crazy - but it's good crazy, less polished but interesting and full of new content and new features. True Stalker made a splash last year I think for being an incredibly polished and good looking standalone story mod that felt like an older commercial release, but honestly the gameplay and story kind of suck. Still impressive technically though.
    • "Soup" mods, basically all out crazy everything and the kitchen sink mods. This is probably only interesting for STALKER mod veterans, chaotic, difficult, complex and not realy respecting the original games.

    I have experienced GAMMA and the mentioned story mods and they were all some of the more memorable videogames I've ever played.

    3 votes
  2. Comment on I hate the new internet. I hate the new tech world. I hate it all. I want out, and I can't be the only one. in ~tech

    V17
    Link Parent
    I don't know man, there was Ultima Underworld almost a decade before that, any many others. I think one could argue that the average quality of games increased but the most successful 1% of games...

    Before these the games actually were simpler, I agree on that.

    I don't know man, there was Ultima Underworld almost a decade before that, any many others. I think one could argue that the average quality of games increased but the most successful 1% of games was better then than now. But yeah, I think the years 98 - 01 or so were insane with the quality of releases and way above average in the whole gaming timeline. Thief and Deus Ex still hold up perfectly well and none of the sequels or games inspired by them really did better imo, I played both for the first time relatively recently. And as you say, Baldur's Gate puts probably 99% of all RPGs to shame to this day, it's insane how good it is (also played it recently).

    But there are times when I repeatedly think "holy fuck, I'm so glad we're living in the future". For example I remember how terrible of an ordeal it was to copy data from my PC to my phone of vice versa. Here's a phone, it has a wireless connection (bluetooth) and a cable connection. Why the hell does the proprietary cable cost (the equivalent of) 20€? Why the hell do none of my 3 bluetooth USB (probably version 1.1) dongles seem to work with the Nokia management app? When I finally get the cable, why the hell can't I share my PC's internet connection through it to use it without paying for insanely overpriced data?

    Nowadays all of those things work immediately with a couple taps on the screen and the biggest hassle is that there are USB cables that are only for charging and not for data connections and some are not properly marked as such. There are many things that I'm pissed off about with modern phones, down to some very basic stuff like: Android downloads app updates in the background automatically and when they're downloaded, it just fucking shuts down whatever app it updates and doesn't give shit if you're using it at that very moment. And this is completely normalized and nobody cares. But there's also so much stuff where in the past I thought "why the hell doesn't this obvious thing work or even exist?" that just works flawlessly now.

    1 vote
  3. Comment on I hate the new internet. I hate the new tech world. I hate it all. I want out, and I can't be the only one. in ~tech

    V17
    Link Parent
    Eh, it depends on what you're seeking. Firstly there was a time inbetween when reddit wasn't just for libertarian techbros and subreddits already existed, and secondly there is one big difference...

    To give you a specific example: You mentioned reddit, and well, I was on reddit in its early days. and a lot of stuff was way worse. It was populated almost entirely by tech-bros and there were no subreddits, just one feed. There were fewer bots, true, but there was just as much political propaganda. But instead of being obnoxiously progressive, it was obnoxiously libertarian, with Ron Paul being pushed in your face 24/7. Nowadays the big subs suck, but I can find smaller subreddits that are pretty cool and have great subcommunities with various interests. Back then if you weren't a libertarian tech-bro, there was nothing for you there. Also, the website was incredibly unstable - slow and constantly going down. Also moderation was way worse. It was pretty much "everything goes", including open racism, sexualization of children and so on.

    Eh, it depends on what you're seeking. Firstly there was a time inbetween when reddit wasn't just for libertarian techbros and subreddits already existed, and secondly there is one big difference between the era you describe and todays era: while it used to be culturally much more homogenous and much edgier, it was also, on average, considerably smarter. And thanks to the homogenity there was way less infighting (until the "internet feminism" era, around 2012, which understandably created a big rift) and a bit more sense of community.

    Personally I can deal with a lot of shit if what I get is a community of smart people who occassionally share interesting ideas instead of the painfully average that you get on most of Reddit now.

    Also I disagree with the moderation being worse at that time (though it is a bit of a false dichotomy, both types of moderation can be bad). Maybe it's selfish, but I don't care about edgy shit not being removed as much, I can just ignore it or leave. But locking discussions, heavy handed autofilters, bans for participating in "problematic" subreddits when you just went there once through /r/all to argue with their users because you didn't notice what sub that is, that's somebody else making the decision of what you can or cannot access for you, and it also creates a significant chilling effect because everybody is aware all the time that it can happen for unpredictable reasons. And the moderation goes way beyond what's reasonable, I've had comments or posts removed by mods and was blocked by users for things I say on Tildes multiple times.

    5 votes
  4. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    V17
    Link Parent
    No problem, the original audio is the beginning of this live recording. The original is cleaner, after direct comparison it's clear that some distortion is left in the declipped version, but I...

    No problem, the original audio is the beginning of this live recording. The original is cleaner, after direct comparison it's clear that some distortion is left in the declipped version, but I don't hear any artifacts otherwise.

    I basically only do python because its easy, I don't need speed, and I don't have the time or want to put in the effort to learn something else... but how much of the speed issue is just because of python?

    Most of it. I use libraries written in C for the heaviest stuff of course (fast fourier transforms), but the overall algorithm is a python loop and afaik even just sending the data between the python interpreter and the C libraries or doing conversions between python internal types and numpy C types can slow the whole thing down by a ton. Based purely on reading stuff online and no experience on my own I think it could be sped up by an order of magnitude by going with a fast compiled language with simpler data types, fewer allocations etc.

    Using C libraries for the numerical computation also doesn't allow me to do some optimizations: the algorithm uses short time fourier transform, meaning it divides the audio signal into small overlapping chunks (about 200 ms long) and applies the fourier transform on them individually instead of on the whole signal at once. In many lightly clipped real signals I could probably find some 200 ms chunks that do not contain any clipping and simply not process them at all. But since all of this is happening in a C library I'd have to fork it, write it in C and recompile it, which is not happening.

    Since the algorithm isn't suitable for realtime (stream) processing anyway, I don't think it's a huge problem. But I might try rewriting it in Julia later, that could be a good compromise between speed and not having to learn C++ with its complexity or Rust with likely non-ideal math libraries.

  5. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    V17
    Link Parent
    Sure, I implemented a subset of this one: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.00628 Here's a decent comparison of existing methods by the same author: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.07663 I still don't...

    Sure, I implemented a subset of this one: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.00628
    Here's a decent comparison of existing methods by the same author: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.07663

    I still don't understand some specifics of the math involved, but the gist is that some time ago someone discovered that an unclipped audio signal has a high value of a criterion called sparsity and a clipped signal doesn't. Practically what this usually means is that you are seeking to gradually change the signal so that you increase/decrease a metric computed from the coefficients that you get by converting the signal into frequency domain by fourier transform, while applying some additional constraints on them (like "parts of the audio that are not clipped have to stay the same"). And there are various optimization algorithms to do that.

    Different papers use different metrics, different constraints and different algorithms. This one is interesting because it adds some frequency bias - in real audio signals there's pretty much always more energy in the low frequencies than in the high frequencies, so it reconstructs the audio with this assumption, reducing audible distortion considerably more than an unbiased algorithm.

    3 votes
  6. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    V17
    Link
    3 weeks ago I posted about implementing an audio declipper algorithm. It's not done yet, but it works and animating the process looks pretty damn cool. Single threaded version in Python + NumPy is...
    • Exemplary

    3 weeks ago I posted about implementing an audio declipper algorithm.

    It's not done yet, but it works and animating the process looks pretty damn cool.

    Single threaded version in Python + NumPy is marginally slower than the original Octave implementation released with the paper, but I added parallel processing, which helps a lot. Though on my 10 years old i7 CPU it's still about 3x slower than realtime, and that's for a mono single channel: declipping 1 minute of stereo audio takes about 6 minutes. There is some space for optimization, we'll see how lazy I am about it, but considering that the algorithm is better than most if not all commercial tools, I think it's good enough.

    Now onwards to 1. some cleanup (in progress), 2. a GUI, 3. packaging and release.

    5 votes
  7. Comment on Nvidia’s $589 billion DeepSeek rout is largest in market history in ~finance

    V17
    Link Parent
    Because till now it seemed like unless you are backed by absurd money there's no sense in even trying to compete with companies like Microsoft, Google or Meta, and if you want top of the line...

    Because till now it seemed like unless you are backed by absurd money there's no sense in even trying to compete with companies like Microsoft, Google or Meta, and if you want top of the line capabilities, you have no other option but give them money and hope they don't change the product or the pricing model.

    This to some degree democratizes AI research and use, so considerably more subjects will be able to afford something similar to what the giants are doing. But they're still going to need more hardware than they have now - right now many AI-adjacent have nothing, because even training open models is usually done on rented servers instead of in house.

    I also don't see any indication that we're getting close to the point where throwing more hardware at the problem (together with research, of course) stops making the solution better. The big companies are going to keep doing it despite the change in efficiency.

    3 votes
  8. Comment on The leading AI models are now very good historians in ~humanities.history

    V17
    Link Parent
    I have the standard 20 USD subscription and can upload files, image recognition works. That is in the web version from my computer. I think it wasn't present during the preview phase and possibly...

    I’m curious about what model was used. The author says it was o1, but as far as I can tell there’s no way to upload images to that one. Either this was a mistake and it’s actually 4o, or there’s some way to do it that I’m unaware of.

    I have the standard 20 USD subscription and can upload files, image recognition works. That is in the web version from my computer. I think it wasn't present during the preview phase and possibly during launch, but it's there now.

    4 votes
  9. Comment on ”Whiplash” gets jazz all wrong in ~music

    V17
    Link Parent
    I have not encountered this specifically, but I do have a friend who thought that the point of Whiplash was that to be brilliant at something, you have to be rally hard at yourself and Fletcher...

    the layperson may well assume that this is how a typical jazz program is really run.

    I have not encountered this specifically, but I do have a friend who thought that the point of Whiplash was that to be brilliant at something, you have to be rally hard at yourself and Fletcher brought out the best in him. I think this is maybe a bit more likely - people likely intuitively assume that a normal music experience is not like this, but that if you want to be at the top, this is the way to go.

    Which, to be fair, may be just as bad for shaping their expectations.

    I think that personal biases may be the key to recognizing the pathology. This friend of mine is a doctor with an obviously unhealthy relationship to herself who also sees hard work and suppressing one's needs as the way to be good in her own life, so in a way it's obvious that she interprets the movie like this.

    And honestly, I think that if the authors decided to more obviously tell us that what we're seeing is wrong, it would have made for a worse movie. I do wish they were more realistic about actually playing jazz.

    3 votes
  10. Comment on Did Donald Trump's executive order just make everyone in the US female? in ~society

    V17
    Link Parent
    Why are you asking me that? I said* that part of the reason why I dislike people making fun of (/being outraged at) exaggerated things that likely aren't true is that it takes away attention and...

    Why are you asking me that? I said* that part of the reason why I dislike people making fun of (/being outraged at) exaggerated things that likely aren't true is that it takes away attention and media space from the real issues, like the fact that the executive order effectively bans the existence of intersex people.

    * in the toplevel parent of this comment chain, but I don't think I even lightly imply anything else in the other comments

    1 vote
  11. Comment on Did Donald Trump's executive order just make everyone in the US female? in ~society

    V17
    Link Parent
    I don't want to take away laughing at dumb shit from anyone, but specifically with regards to Trump et al I think there has been a trend of flooding the press and social media with every little...

    I don't want to take away laughing at dumb shit from anyone, but specifically with regards to Trump et al I think there has been a trend of flooding the press and social media with every little dumb thing he does or says interpreted in the worst possible way, and it made many normal people (not political opponents) mentally check out and not care about the big things either.

    Similar to JD Vance couch fucking, which was worse because it was completely made up. I'd say that 90% of mentions of JD Vance I've seen on reddit involved couch fucking and almost none involved things that are actually interesting - discussing his positions, what to expect of him or how he shifted from being somewhat reasonable in the time of Hilbilly Elegy to what he is now. I don't think people are so dumb that couch fucking is the best they are able to talk about, I think part of it is the culture of encouraging it.

    4 votes
  12. Comment on Did Donald Trump's executive order just make everyone in the US female? in ~society

    V17
    Link Parent
    I don't think we are in disagreement over the consequences of this and stupidity/maliciousness of its intention. The thing I disagree with is this interpretation of "Trump is so dumb he just made...

    I don't think we are in disagreement over the consequences of this and stupidity/maliciousness of its intention.

    The thing I disagree with is this interpretation of "Trump is so dumb he just made the whole US legally female". I don't think it's true and I believe that people's capacity to follow issues (or to form outrage) is a zero sum game: focusing on this (and that is not necessarily a problem on Tildes, but I saw it all over reddit and instagram) takes away energy to care about the actual problem or plenty other issues. Plus it gives ammunition to anyone who disagrees because it seems like a disingenuous interpretation, which shifts the arguments from the actual problem to the problem of whether the interpretation is made in bad faith or not. I've seen both happen plenty of times.

    7 votes
  13. Comment on Did Donald Trump's executive order just make everyone in the US female? in ~society

    V17
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I agree and I hope people do it. I am by no means saying that the executive order is right, in formulation or in its probable intention. I am saying that interpreting it as "Trump is so dumb that...

    And I think this point actually does matter -- an executive order is a legal document; if the terminology is incorrect (or nonsensical), then that will be a possible avenue for challenging its legality.

    I agree and I hope people do it. I am by no means saying that the executive order is right, in formulation or in its probable intention. I am saying that interpreting it as "Trump is so dumb that he made all of US legally women" is in my opinion disingenuous and doesn't help the fight in any way either. I think the two interpretations, "producing reproductive cells at conception" vs "producing reproductive cells at some point", are equally probable without context and the second one is more probably with context. But the important part is that both are a problem.

    2 votes
  14. Comment on Did Donald Trump's executive order just make everyone in the US female? in ~society

    V17
    Link
    I'm going to take the risk of just sounding like a contrarian: this seems like people are intentionally interpreting the slightly unclear statement in the worst possible way and ignoring both...

    I'm going to take the risk of just sounding like a contrarian: this seems like people are intentionally interpreting the slightly unclear statement in the worst possible way and ignoring both realistic other options and some scientific terminology in order to make Trump sound stupid (well, more than he is). Instead of focusing on the parts that are actually important - "banning" trans people and intersex people. I don't think this is the way to go.

    This is why I think that:

    "'Female' means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. 'Male' means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell."

    Imo this can very clearly be interpreted as "belongs, at conception, to the sex that [eventually] produces the xxxx reproductive cell" and I don't even think it's in any way improbable. I think they just arrived at this unclear formulation because of their need to emphasize "sex is decided at conception and cannot be changed", so they added a time quantifier that makes it seem like they're also saying that we produce reproductive cells at conception.

    And to explain the scientific terminology part of my argument, saying that everyone starts developing female organs and therefore we are all female at first is imo inaccurate. As far as I know we develop parts of male reproductive organs as well and it is more precise to say that we seem to be mostly sexless than that we are female. In any case, outside of chromozome disorders, our sex is decided at that point. Again, not defending the overall message, I think it's stupid and wrong, but I also think that people are deliberatly trying to make it seem dumber than it is.

    9 votes
  15. Comment on US President Donald Trump’s executive orders already face pushback, legal challenges in ~society

    V17
    Link Parent
    I wouldn't word it as negatively as you did, but from across the pond it definitely seems like the 2016 election was viewed as an anomaly that needs to be resisted and never repeated again,...

    I hope I'm way off base on this, but the general sense I get is that people and institutions are preparing for a more fascist America in the future and choosing to fall in line (or blend in) rather than speak up and risk retribution.

    I wouldn't word it as negatively as you did, but from across the pond it definitely seems like the 2016 election was viewed as an anomaly that needs to be resisted and never repeated again, whereas nowadays people whose job it is to follow similar changes in society (imo 100% correctly) realized that Trump is a part of a larger political and social shift that is not going away because it's not dependent on Trump anymore and they need to adapt, just like they probably needed to adapt to the previous status quo.

    I only hope that democrats find a way to adapt to this as well, and soon, so that they really become competitive again and somewhat tame the cultural shift.

  16. Comment on US President Donald Trump pardons Silk Road dark web market creator Ross Ulbricht in ~society

    V17
    Link
    Man, tiger king Joe Exotic must be incredibly frustrated these days.

    Man, tiger king Joe Exotic must be incredibly frustrated these days.

    4 votes
  17. Comment on Lynchian recommendation request in ~arts

    V17
    Link
    When talking about "lynchian", many people focus on the mysterious, surreal or sinister aspects, but one thing that I loved about Twin Peaks was the ridiculous sense of humor. The first two...

    When talking about "lynchian", many people focus on the mysterious, surreal or sinister aspects, but one thing that I loved about Twin Peaks was the ridiculous sense of humor. The first two seasons are at some points a straight up parody of soap operas, and while the third season dropped that, the occasional funny bits are that much better. So it's not just a juxtaposition of the mundane with something weird or frightening and confusing, it's a strange sense of humor as well, which seems much less common.

    Do any of the works mentioned in this thread fulfill this aspect?

    3 votes
  18. Comment on Buying a game from a director that you really have problems with (Kingdom Come) in ~games

    V17
    Link Parent
    So, not specifically teeming with dark skinned people, but there was a lot of really dumb shit said at that time. A funny one was somebody using a painting of Queen of Saba as a proof that there...

    stick it to an imagined enemy that thinks that a game set in rural, medieval bohemia should be teeming with dark skinned people (I very much doubt that there was anyone who even has this opinion).

    So, not specifically teeming with dark skinned people, but there was a lot of really dumb shit said at that time. A funny one was somebody using a painting of Queen of Saba as a proof that there were peope of color living here - Queen of Saba was indeed known here, but not exactly as a real person. She is to this day used in an idiom representing something entirely improbable - if you hear a statement that you consider ridiculous and obviously made up, you reply "yeah, and I'm the queen of Saba". Most of it were slapfights on twitter or people badmouthing the game on forums like Resetera, the following is from a review by Eurogamer, which is the only one I remembered off the top of my head:

    But there's also a big problem. There are no people of colour in the game beyond people from the Cuman tribe, a Turkic people from the Eurasian Steppe. The question is, should there be? The game's makers say they've done years of research and found no conclusive proof there should be, but a historian I spoke to, who specialises in the area, disagrees.

    A citation follows, one that basically says "it would not be 100% out of the question in some parts of the country", which is I assume why there is supposedly a black guy in Kuttenberg in the sequel, and apart from seemingly assuming that the question "should we include something that was likely extremely rare in a game that we want to represent a historical period?" is somehow racist, the reasoning has no relevance in the relatively rural part of the first game. And as further "proof" it's followed by a link to a collection of Vávra's tweets on the Resetera forums, which is an obviously biased source (not that the collection contains made up stuff - I haven't checked that -, but you can distort somebody's image by what you don't include). Also, historical research was not done by Vávra but by hired historians.

    It also says the following regarding the attitude towards women, which I also think is crazy because imo if anything, the game slightly whitewashes the treatment of women in that time period so that it avoids looking like it's promoting truly medieval customs (but I admit I'm also very tired of media that constantly tell me what I should think about the subject they depict, so I'm against the whole idea presented by the reviewer):

    All of which means that a shadow lingers over Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Instead of challenging the Dark Age it reinterprets 615 years later, the game seems to delight in it. Instead of seeing notes in the margin of a history book, we get what feels like a glossy pamphlet advertising an escape into an oddly romanticised past. And it's that, ultimately, which makes me too uneasy about Warhorse's work to be able to recommend it.

    3 votes
  19. Comment on Buying a game from a director that you really have problems with (Kingdom Come) in ~games

    V17
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    To be fair, Burzum is good music, and unfortunately some of the other NS-related bands also make great blackmetal. Vávra is most of all a contrarian who hates when people tell him what to do and...

    To be fair, Burzum is good music, and unfortunately some of the other NS-related bands also make great blackmetal.

    Vávra is most of all a contrarian who hates when people tell him what to do and think. Him wearing a Burzum t-shirt is not in any way condoning norwegian neonazis, it was either that he doesn't care about Varg's political opinions (he's also anticapitalist, among other things, which Vávra certainly isn't) or that he likes to provoke - whether this is bad enough on its own is of course up to you. I also don't think Burzum is necessarily the favorite music of his, or that he even mostly listens to black metal. Varg Vikernes has been out of jail for 15 years btw, and "only" murdered his ex-bandmate, though he did burn some churches, lol. Basically a model citizen. Blackmetal musicians are often insufferable people.

    Regarding Gamergate: I don't "support" gamergate, but I did follow it and I don't see it as strictly as you do. I understand if you're not interested in this, but in case you are, I think that Knowyourmeme of all places offers a more charitable and reasonably accurate explanation of the movement. I do not ever condone any of the harassment that happened, but for me personally Gamergate served as a wake up call, realizing that most US/anglosphere gaming media is untrustworthy and basically useless, with a weird incestuous relationship between some of the institutions. And in my opinion many people who weren't gamergaters had this realization, which led to the rapid rise of youtube game reviewers that are often regarded as more useful and certainly more trustworthy than more traditional media even in the mainstream gaming community.

    Our gaming media is different and it did not (and probably does not - I used to make pocket money reviewing videogames nearly 20 years ago, but I don't follow it anymore) have specifically the problems that I see in US media and that GG tried to highlight, so this was probably a shock for Vávra just as it was for me. And when the same gaming media started to seriously bash his game for not including black people (this is not just a meme, this happened and it was idiotic), I understand how that did not exactly help.

    Again, I'm certainly not saying that he's a good person, I wouldn't want to work under him, but I do think that most judgements of his personality are out of line because of lack of context.

    edit: Oh, and regarding him vs. Rowling: this is hard to describe, but the way he writes in Czech feels more like pissed off boomer rants to blow off steam than someone actually trying to influence the society and politics. There are a few exceptions, which are separate from his FB rants, notably him together with a few journalists and other activists proposing regulations of censorship on social media - which iirc doesn't necessarily say that everything should be allowed, but that the situation where a private company is possibly more influential than traditional mass media and yet can do whatever the fuck it wants regarding bans, limiting visibility etc., is not right and should be given some rules. He also still writes in Czech and therefore has very limited reach. 61k followers in a country of 11M is not nothing, but it's not huge either. Visegrádský Jezdec, a citizen activist informing mostly about geopolitics-related news from a very pro-western and pro-democratic point of view, basically the opposite of Vávra, who doesn't have the benefit of being a gaming a celebrity and is just a random nurse in his private life, has 86k followers, for example.

    10 votes
  20. Comment on Buying a game from a director that you really have problems with (Kingdom Come) in ~games

    V17
    (edited )
    Link
    I'm going to talk specifically about the game and Vávra as a person instead of about the principle. The tl;dr is that I think the situation is not bad enough to warrant a boycott here and it's...
    • Exemplary

    I'm going to talk specifically about the game and Vávra as a person instead of about the principle. The tl;dr is that I think the situation is not bad enough to warrant a boycott here and it's fine to just buy it.

    First thing is the game itself: a lot of stuff is still under NDA, so there's no way to confirm it, but rumors spread in the chud sewers say the following things and talk about the game going woke and Vávra selling out:

    a) There's a black guy from the kingdom of Mali in Kuttenberg, working as a healer. This is historically theoretically plausible, but quite improbable and if the rumors (supported by several screenshots in different situations, plus possibly by the fact that the developers are ignoring any questions regarding this on twitter*) are true, it was a move that they knew was going to piss off actual racists. Vávra himself claimed that they could do what they wanted in the game with no limits from Embracer, so he was likely not pressured to do this (and he's the creative director still afaik).

    b) The game is supposedly not going to be released in the middle east due to an unskippable cutscene that contains acts broadly illegal in most of that region, and the rumor says it's gay sex. This one is at this moment not supported by any leaked screenshots or other substantial materials, I'm mostly including because I think it's funny that both chuds and antichuds are finding stuff to hate.

    c) The reason why there were no Jews and Roma in the first game is that there was no money left to fully flesh them out, add quests to them etc, and the team decided it would not be right to add them just as some passive backdrop - this was stated by a (nowadays ex-) dev years before KCD2 was announced. They are in the second game.

    None of this necessarily says "the game and its authors are progressive", the people and things talked about may still be done badly, but while I don't want to underestimate anyone's knowledge, I noticed that many people think that there truly was some racism involved in making the first game or that the authors try to project their views into it in other ways, and I don't think this is the case.

    Regarding Vavra himself: he often writes idiotic things on social media and he suffers from "being great and very successful in one field and thinking that makes me smart in other fields" syndrome very much.

    But I don't think that's the whole picture. Part of it is just that he's (mentally, by age I think he's Gen X) a boomer who grew up under communism. Communism in Czechoslovakia wasn't murderous like in Cambodia or China (though political murders certainly happened), but what it tried really hard to do was to stifle, bend and break any sort of individuality, creativity, feeling of freedom or competence. We didn't die of famine and intellectuals weren't shot en masse (only rarely), but it's hard to describe how suffocating and often times straight up kafkaesque the regime was for both the society and the individual.

    Due to that, many people of his age and older, especially certain individualities (and that individuality is not "asshole", even though I'd say that one applies to him as well), have a strong allergy to anything leftist that reminds them of methods used by the communists. Forced equity, shaming for wrong language or anything resembling social engineering are those things. And even though I don't suffer from this, I actually empathise with him here - things that seem not only innocent but obviously right in the west really do feel much different and somewhat extreme in the context of our culture (which also suffers from at points quite different social and economical ills than say the US, and yet people often try to import western activism here without taking that into account, which makes the pushback considerably worse).

    Vávra is undoubtedly an overconfident fachidiot, but I don't think he's as crazy-evil as J. K. Rowling or nearly as influential. And as far as I know, the other people in the team either do not share many of his opinions, or simply have no interest in using their positions to influence others and don't ever talk about such things in public - I don't know your views, but for me that's good enough.

    * edit: Vávra replied, lol - I think that this somewhat shows that while Vávra is an asshole, he simply doesn't fit into western ideas of alt-right shitheadedness, which I guess was my pint.

    28 votes