we are so tolerant and super chill

No we’re not, fuck off.

But according to some Europeans on the internet, its apparantly just… not a thing in their country?

It used to be a thing in my country… back when it was under a fascist dictatorship.

Only online “games” this maybe wouldn’t apply to would have to be peer to peer, serverless, and probably open source to be safe… and, even then, you’d have to provide a sufficient amount of players to replay them a decade on, as, lacking any actual game, they’re useless without other players.

As for offline games, sure, publishers might attempt to use them in the same way, but it’s much more expensive since a minimum amount of game must actually exist in order for players to fall for it, and they can’t fake it using other players. Asset flips are obviously a thing, but easily detected and avoided. And, most importantly, even those will remain equally playable or unplayable in a few decades, while an online “game” will be unplayable the instant it doesn’t have enough players.

Obligatory Tim Minchin (yeah, it’s twelve minutes, plus whatever else you spend going down a Tim Minchin rabbit hole, but it’s worth it).

I’m not sure what you mean by

get your customers to make the content for you for free

I mean that (besides always-online DRM, and scamming your victims with subscriptions and microtransactions) the main reason for perpetrating an online multiplayer computer game is that you can get away with not writing a story, or lore, or quests, or puzzles, or NPCs, or AI, or any actual gameplay, or anything even remotely resembling a proper game through the magic of scamming your customers (or rather victims) into paying you for the privilege of filling in the gaps and acting as NPCs, and gameplay, and whatnot.

You get away with selling the rotting carcass of what could have been a game, and scamming your customers into believing it’s still alive just because it’s (temporarily) crawling with maggots.

I can get any old single player game and, provided I can replicate its environment, play it and enjoy it just as much as I could have when it came out, or even more.

Even if it was possible to enjoy an online game, on the other hand, it will have been stillborn to start with, a mere shell of a game, an insult to real games, a sad parody only resembling a game as long as there’s enough victims trapped in the scam; the second they start leaving (supposing the scammers don’t turn the servers off before that, to drive their victims to their latest shiny defecation) it’ll go back to being the empty unplayable shell it’s always been, utterly devoid of enjoyability or replayability.

The very concept is insulting, revolting, and a clear intentional predatory attack on computer game players and the very concept of computer games.

Online computer games are not games. They’re a cheap (as long as you can afford the initial investment), fast, and easy way of extracting as much wealth as possible from their customers using the least effort.

The companies making them don’t care about computer games, or about whatever setting they’re raping and tearing apart in order to promote their crap, or about their customers. They just care about extracting as much wealth as possible from them, and moving on to their next scam.

And if left unchecked they’ll destroy the very concept of computer games as an art form, or even as an industry, and they won’t care, because they’ll have already extracted everything they could.

Why the hate for multiplayer?

Extremely lazy and scammy way to get your customers to make the content for you for free (and as a result what little content there is is absolute garbage).

Just an excuse to implement always-online DRM.

Either subscription based or ridden with pay to win microtransactions, or both. In any case, evidently not worth a fraction of what you end up paying for it, and therefore a scam.

Extremely hostile and unenjoyable experience.

Nothing wrong with being a masochist, but I ain’t one.

I play games to get away from people, not to get an overdose of the damn fuckers. If I for some self destructive reason wanted that I could just go outside.

And, in this particular case, means the game is being sold as a successor to something it’s the opposite of, making it extremely offensive and even more of a scam than most multiplayer games.

Well, at least it’ll probably be better than Starfield.

Get ready for a large file transfer…

Quite a lot of media we consume also needs to be swear-free

No it doesn’t.

It’s no coincidence “unalive” and “grape” have become a thing on TikTok and elsewhere

Fuck TikTok, and fuck any imbecile who uses those words unironically.

There’s a surprising amount of censorship around us.

And it’s our moral duty to fight it and to ridicule and oppose anyone who doesn’t.

it’s generally frowned upon to curse

No it’s not.

Again, the theocratic kleptocracy of Magastan isn’t an example of how the civilised world works.

Where I’m from, for instance, “I shit on God” is practically an interjection, like “fuck” in English (though the usage seems to be waning as the country becomes more secular), and calling each other “son — or daughter — of a whore” is considered a term of endearment.

it’s not cannibalism because the bread and wine still keep all their properties after turning into Jesus 🤓

You could make a perfectly cromulent meringue out of human blood, and it’d have all the properties of a meringue made out of eggs (no, seriously, blood is effectively a one to one culinary equivalent of eggs, except for the taste and allergens)… but it’d still be made out of human blood. 🤷‍♂️

using profanity in most places gets you in trouble

Most places in the theocratic kleptocracy of Magastan, I assume; a few places (or circumstances) in the civilised world, which in most cases can be avoided due to them being excessively silly.

In any case, though, that’s not the fucking point.

If you don’t want to use a word, don’t fucking use it. Use a fucking synonym, or euphemism, or metaphor, or insinuation, or whatever.

Using most of the word but censoring one of the letters, however, is so utterly stupid and hypocritical that it’s insulting both to the readers and the writer. You’re still using the word, just with an intentional typo. You’re not lying to anyone except yourself.

lighten the fuck up

No, I don’t think I will.

Abject wilful idiocy irks me. 🤷‍♂️

Also, I was in the toilet and had time to type.

It’s the opposite of cool. Cringey as fuck, is what it is.

If you don’t want to use a word, fucking don’t. Use a fucking synonym, for fuck’s sake, or phrase it differently.

But don’t go making your bullshit harder to read just so you can justify to yourself using a word that makes you feel uncomfortable because you’re too damaged to function properly in society. Doing that you’re being the worst kind of hypocrite, because you’re only lying to yourself.

Cool…? Fucking pathetic is the word you’re looking for.

Morrowind.

… and it was just the beginning.

It’s a real shame later Elder Scrolls games mostly lost that otherworldly feel.

Back when disk compressors (Stacker, DoubleSpace, and such) were a thing I was cleaning my 85MB hard drive to make space for some games, found some massive file I wasn’t using, and promptly deleted it, which did indeed free a lot of space.

Way too much, in fact.

Turns out DriveSpace or whatever Stacker clone Microsoft had built into DOS somehow exposed the file in which it stored the compressed file system within the compressed system itself, allowing the user to delete it if they were stupid enough. So, when I deleted it, hilarity ensued.

In the end I think I was somehow able to recover the drive by booting from a floppy and using undelete or something like that, but it was a learning experience to say the least.

Damn, I miss those good old times.

Pomegranates are one of the oldest cultivated fruits, so they’re somewhat plausible, but I’m fairly certain humans made oranges (and most other citruses, through selection and grafting… though I guess it could have been a mandarin, pomelo, or citron, which seem to be the three we started with) and bananas (through selection and cloning), so it couldn’t have been those.

Apples, on the other hand, seem to have existed long before humans, so they’re definitely a possibility.

It was probably some kind of nut, though.

Yeah, I suspect he’s holding the map upside down intentionally, and that guy was far from his first victim.

Nope. It’s cut. There’s fucking to death a couple panels from these. Someone else posted a link elsewhere in the replies.

It’s not the shire that worries me, it’s where the fuck the rces in Worcester is going…