Samuel Corbin

Number one rule in life: never forget anything.

@saermer The server costs are absolutely nowhere near the price of the sub. Not even remotely close. The money overwhelmingly goes to continued development.

Potentially a hot take; not having to pay a monthly sub for an MMO is nice, but I also very much understand why it’s needed in most games that require the server maintenance that an MMO does

@WayfireGames @thomasmahler I worked with a server eng who discovered during a playtest that he had misunderstood the genre of the game he had been working on for several months. He mostly worked on orchestration, login, etc, so in fairness it didn't actually affect him much outside playtests.

@samueldcorbin @thomasmahler For me it was leading art teams. I thought it was a given that every artist would just research and become familiar with the lore, art style, patterns and concepts unique to an IP to inform their work. Unfortunately no.

It's obvious that a lot of developers are experiencing a bit of a culture shock right now. For the past twenty years, specialization was usually the winning strategy. Games grew larger and more expensive every year. Teams went from dozens of developers to hundreds, sometimes thousands. If you were one of the best character artists, animators, environment artists, technical artists, UI designers or quest designers in the business, you were in a very secure position since the system rewarded specialization. The downside is that many people became experts at one small piece of game development without ever having to understand how a great game is actually made. They knew how to make a wheel, but they didn't necessarily know how to build a car. For years now, the best way to learn game development was to try and make a complete game yourself. Not because you'll outperform a team of specialists, but because you'll learn how every piece connects to every other piece. You'll learn design, production, programming, art, user experience, playtesting, marketing and all the countless tradeoffs that go into making a game actually work. Basically: You learn how the sausage gets made. The indie scene has traditionally worked the same way. Most indie teams simply don't have the luxury of hiring an army of specialists. Everyone wears multiple hats. Everyone playtests. Everyone understands at least some part of every discipline because if they don't, the project falls apart. And I think we're now watching those worlds collide. Lots of indie projects get made within reasonable development budgets showing a huge ROI - Meanwhile, how many monster-budget AAA games have we seen in recent years that didn't even return their investment at all? The developers who learned how to build entire products rather than individual components have become incredibly efficient. New tools, including AI, are amplifying that advantage because they allow smaller teams to execute at a level that previously required an army of people. That said, I don't think specialists are going away. Great specialists will always be valuable. But I do think we're entering an era where understanding how to build an entire product is becoming more valuable than understanding a tiny piece of one.

@WayfireGames @thomasmahler I've seen it happen in teams as small as a dozen people - though often it's the people coming from AAA. It really comes out when you listen to them playtesting.

@thomasmahler One of my biggest eye openers working in AAA is how little everyone understands a game or IP as a whole.

@AJustFate4Fools You say this as though they had always been backwards compatible before, but they weren't. It was a gimmick occasionally used to sell consoles. Many consoles did not have it, it often required accessories, and it usually only goes back one generation.

the surge in demand/disgusting level of acceptance for video game remakes can be directly traced back to the fact that consoles stopped making games backwards compatible at the beginning of the eighth generation. If backwards compatibility had been a standard, remakes would not

@dmawlf @APRILIVY2005 Yes, that is exactly the sense in which it is less convenient.

@APRILIVY2005 I think you're describing a symptom and not the actual problem, personally. Things *can* be just as convenient on Linux. However, it's your responsibility to figure out how that works and implement it in most cases.

As much as I love Linux, I don't think a lot of people who shill it understand that many tasks are simply more convenient on other operating systems

The fundamental problem with railjack is that it promises to be a cool co-op thing, but then doesn't really live up to that. It looks like it's going to be Jump Ship, but it can't really require too much coordination because that would make it too inaccessible. So it mostly just boils down to simplified combat without Warframe's normal movement. There's some novelty in switching to the forward gun, having to make ammo occasionally, boarding ships (almost never worth doing), but it all wears thin pretty fast. It's a mode filled with cool ideas that don't really fit together into a greater whole. And they haven't been able to fix that. The only real additions we've got are just bolting regular missions onto it. And even that feels clunky, not the "seamless" dream that was originally a big part of railjack, which they seem to have completely given up on. Hopefully this is the start of some more investment in it though.

Wait I'm hearing alot of Warframe Players DO NOT like railjack how come? its been one of the top modes I like playing.

I wonder if some of it is the relative isolation. When Gen X imagines being in a mall at night, I think they tend to reflexively imagine it as a social experience - they're there with friends. And when Gen Z imagines it, they tend to imagine themselves there alone. In a space where the normal script isn't available, where you don't know what will happen, if you're there with other people then there are obvious positives outcomes: social norms break down, and sure maybe you get Lord of the Flies, but also maybe you get confessions, forbidden friendships, etc. But when you're alone, all the unexpected things that might happen are mostly bad.

One big difference that I think you see in a lot of "liminal space" discussion is that liminal spaces for Gen Z, and to a certain extent Millennials, seem to be overwhelmingly negative. Liminality is treated as unnerving, creepy, weird, wrong, etc. Liminal spaces are primarily about decay, disuse, abandonment. (The only popular exception I can think of is the tiled pool stuff, but apparently a lot of Gen Z find those unnerving too.) Look at Gen X liminality though, and it is, if anything, broadly positive. Imagine the Gen X view of that mall picture: You're in the mall at night. It's exciting! What are you going to do? You're in a true liminal state: there are no rules; there's no script for this setting. This is where people are going to open up, maybe talk more earnestly together. Maybe they'll kiss. Anything is possible. Some of it might be creepy, and there's an unease that comes with the liminality, but the fundamental feeling is positive. This is true even if the mall is shutting down. There's a melancholy, sure, but that comes later. That's the thing you reflect on in the quiet, at the end of the night, not the first thing you feel. That Gen X liminality seems to have largely disappeared. We still had some of it as Millennials, but less. And Gen Z seems to have almost kind of it - every liminal space is just a haunted house.

Malls are not dying in Europe, but I have a distinct memory of walking through a dying mall. It was my 13th or 14th birthday, and my parents took me to my favorite mall for pizza and to look at the video game/DVD store. However, what we did not know was that the mall was filing for bankruptcy and was days away from closing. I remember immediately feeling like something was weird in the parking lot. Utterly empty. Our footsteps echoed off the concrete, even water dripping off pipes was audible due to the lack of engine noise. There were barely any people. You had entire hallways of closed stores, utterly devoid of humanity. There wasn't even any music. Just rows and rows of shuttered stores, plain white brick and still dirty floor tiles. Seeing my favorite place, utterly devoid of life, only the husk and fading memory of it remaining, really stuck with me. It felt like I was watching a terminally ill friend slowly dying in a hospital bed. Generation Z has witnessed a lot of things they loved as children dying. Blockbuster and Toys R Us spring to mind. And liminal spaces, representations of locations that should be bustling with life, but are eerily empty, speak to us in a way they do not to other generations.

@Jonathan_Blow Also a big reason small and medium companies die.

One of the main reasons big companies die is because the political processes, that were put in place to enable a bunch of people to work together, become a factory of reasons why they can’t do anything good, and have to do things that are lame. The company evolves into a thing that preemptively shoots down its future prosperity.

@AssassinedW @NahtotheNah You really think Albrecht and Loid's relationship is not supposed to be gay? But sure - there are also explicitly trans characters, gay characters, nonbinary they/them warframes, and every member of the Hex and Triad is bisexual and will hit on you regardless of gender.

@samueldcorbin @NahtotheNah Dear God human emotion is gay to you? That's not sexuality it's literally the fact that human touch is so foreign to the indifference it stops them cold. It's also why the Murmur are just hands and legs. It doesn't understand us. It hasn't REVOLVED around a Gay couple...

If you're a supposed Warframe veteran, the Pride event is literally nothing new. And if supposedly you love the game, but this event is what makes you decide to quit? Then yeah, good riddance, come back when you grow up. It adds cosmetics that are free and optional, you literally aren't forced to get it, and if you do, it costs you nothing. Again, grow up.

@DNAlienPrime @electrolemon It's a movie about an extremely popular internet meme from 5 or 6 years ago.

@electrolemon Im fairly tapped in to movies (I have amc a list, i go to at least one movie a week... I love boosters was great), and I hadn't even heard about this movie before this weekend. How is it popping off like this? So many of the showings at my theater were Backrooms. Whats going on??

a big chunk of my timeline is people complain about poor theatre etiquette during backrooms and another big chunk of my timeline is people sharing videos and photos they took of the movie in the theater

@AssassinedW @NahtotheNah Have you played the game? There are LGBT characters absolutely everywhere. The story has revolved around a gay couple for years and one of the main hubs is built around a giant statue of one of them gently caressing the face of the other.

@NahtotheNah If it bothers people that much. Don't play during the month? Idk what to tell them. Aside from the shop I really don't know where it's in your face at.

@nazzobetweeting @bigstormpicture @fostorm A popular style of kettle in Japan keeps the water at temp so you don't have to wait for it to boil at all, which solves this problem. (I have one - they are great!)

@bigstormpicture @fostorm why isn’t this an issue in japan, which uses 100v, even less than the US? i’m not sure i really believe this argument whenever i hear it

things i, an american, have learned from europeans on twitter about my own country that are news to me: -we don’t go outside -we don’t have humidity -the whole country is a desert -we don’t have bakeries -we don’t have passports -we say “parsta” -we don’t have produce in our grocery stores -we don’t have bread -we can’t hang our clothes outside to dry -there is more biodiversity in belgium than the entire US (lol) -we can’t walk outside what am i missing ?

@thisistheflock @LoptrBayo It's worth saying that Warframe is not really a campaign+endgame kind of game. There are certain activities locked behind certain story missions, but the game as a whole is more buffet-style.

@LoptrBayo *sagenod* gotcha gotcha. How long does it take for the main campaign before you go through the end game content?

Also, to everyone talking about how Warframe *went* woke Friendly reminder that this tweet was made by Warframe’s lead writer

There are nonbinary warframes, trans NPCs, tons of bi NPCs and even a dating sim with a bunch of main characters who are all bi, the central characters of the story for the last few years are a gay couple, and one of the main hubs is built around a giant statue of one of them gently caressing the other's face.

@flatspritehits @GauntYeti Yeah, I'm just tired of corps doing this shit every year, and I've been out of the game for about a decade so I'm starting fresh since everyone's like, "this company doesn't larp. Its legitimate rep." So I'm getting back in to at least try it out. It plays like tens years back.

U can tell these people are larpers cuz if they actually gave a fuck abt warframe they’d be locked in on the free color palette instead of homophobia

@Faine44 @MarcusCVance Dude, the main story of the game has revolved around a gay couple for the past several years, and one of the main hubs is built around a giant statue of one of them gently caressing the face of the other.

@MarcusCVance The ignored the overt gayness of the game because it wasn't being forced on them, they chose it. But now that it's being shoved in their faces, unnecessarily, they're revolting to counter. Valid.

All these "omg Warframe does Pride I'm going to Uninstall" posts need to include Mastery rank pics. I have a theory.

@L771834 @cmuratori Technically, "impersonal" usually refers to a different thing where the subject isn't a patient, but has no role at all - it's just an expletive. Like weather verbs (It rained.) They look similar in English because our expletive and our neuter 3rd person pronoun sound the same.

@samueldcorbin @cmuratori Technically correct, the best kind of correct. It's an impersonal sentence, which do have that "it happened by itself" connotation, like a force of nature

[1/2] I don't normally make commentary videos, but after seeing the entirety of Eric Schmidt's University of Arizona commencement speech, I felt like there was a lot more going on than just "CEO mentions AI, gets booed". So I made a video to explain what upset me about it.

@eshaanissar @cmuratori I don't either? I'm not sure what you mean.

@samueldcorbin @cmuratori I don't think he's making the point that 'it happened' is a verb.

What you're sensing here is that "happened" is an unaccusative, which is related to passive voice. Passive voice is a construction that lets you take the patient or theme of an verb (the thing you're doing something to) that would normally appear in the syntactic object (John threw THE BALL.) and promote it to the subject (THE BALL was thrown.) - and the agent (the doer of the action) which is usually in the subject (JOHN threw the ball.) either isn't mentioned (The ball was thrown.) or has to appear in an adjunct (in English a "by" phrase - The ball was thrown BY JOHN.). You can tell whether you're seeing passive voice in English because you'll see an auxiliary "be" or "get" added to the sentence (The ball WAS thrown.). That's how English marks passive voice. Unaccusatives like "happen" are verbs that don't have agents to begin with. You don't have to passivize them - in fact you can't! ("It was happened." "The party was happened." "John was happened." - try as you might, you just can't find a way to make an actual passive. It's almost like they're "pre-passivized". (You might have the intuition that this is true of all intransitive verbs, that you can't passivize them, but it isn't! There are languages, like Dutch, that do let you passivize some intransitive verbs - but not unaccusatives!)

@samueldcorbin @la_ledda @cmuratori There might be some nuance here. "It" as a subject, may make the sentence grammatically "active," according to the most literal definition. However, the usage of "it" as the subject in this context, places the sentence in a "functionally" passive voice, in my opinion.

Yes, absolutely. It is definitely passive! It is just that "passive voice" is not a synonym for "kinda sorta passive" - it's a specific thing. The "voice" there is grammatical voice, not some kind of poetic or archaic of use of "voice" to mean general "manner of speaking" or something (notably, you can't use this hypothetical "voice" with any other adjectives either - you can't really say "I think it's strange that he was using timid voice here"; no one says that!)

@samueldcorbin @la_ledda @cmuratori Well, couldn't you agree that "it happened," is a very passive way of acknowledging what happened, without taking responsibility? Even if what he said isn't technically "passive voice," according to grammar experts, the words he said still indicate passivity in their own merit.