Topic: The PlayStation Fan Thread

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@Dezzy One party has control of influence, media, communications, education, police, the legal system, finance, much of the medical system, agriculture, science, and thus public group think. The other party has control of the military and commodity industries, traditional manufacturing/heavy industry, and the dominant (but impotent) religion(s). That, politically, is the core imbalance. It's more or less one party rule, like any authoritarian country. We just make a show of it where China doesn't, like post-Glasnost CCCP. The second party gains its power not as an opposition party, but by whichever can put up a political-theater show of minimal opposition while actually acting in step with the primary party, with the actual opposition members able to, at best, stall the primary party for a few years without making actual changes long term. You can see the schism clearly with "Net Neutrality". Party A works in service of big media, big data, tech corps. Party B works in service of big telecom/utility. Neither party represents the public, nor differing ideas, they're each just under retainer for opposing corporations. That's why every election they trot out "the issues", the repeating, unresolvable pre-selected list of hot button topics to create visible differences between parties and candidates. It's easy for them to take polarizing stands on those social controversies without needing to demonstrate actual policy intent differences, because there effectively are none.

That's at the actual governmental/political level. The problematic portion is among the public, where unlike the politicians, there really are two, I'd say three dramatically different cultures, with dramatically different personality types between them, with entirely incompatible objectives, effectively entirely different civilizations that aren't cleanly divided by geography but by way of life. Once they figure out that fighting each other via elections of pre-selected monoparty candidates is a placebo, eventually they'll start fighting each other for real.

The real politics are like console wars between XBox and PS. They're more or less the same machine with a few differences, but people fervently defend "their side" without recognizing there aren't actually two sides, it's just a different implementation of the same thing. There's two or three VERY different factions of public culture and goals, increasingly violently at war with each other, in an increasingly scorched-earth battle. But that's entirely disconnected from the actual politics of which there's almost no difference at all. That is the part that will fuel crisis: The politics aren't actually representing the divide, they just opportunistically flame it for short term gain and influence. Like a news article by Liam or Damo.

My favorite political word of the past decade or so is "managed decline." When your leaders set a goal of reducing your status, influence, and wealth as their actual long term policy intent, doesn't that make them hostile enemies?.......I mean even King George did better than that....and that still didn't end well for him....

For now it's "skirmish battles" like the ridiculous censorship and "beams of light" and the Mr. Game & Watch "scandal", while RDR2 has full on brothels with full nudity and displays of actual sex acts, and GTAV has strip clubs with virtual lap dances as save points. Heaven forbid a nipple is visible in a Japanese game. (But we're ok with #mariosnipples.) That's a culture war with an odd anti-Japanese bent for some unknown reason. Do we have to put the black drapes up now? Never know when a Zero might close in on southern Indiana? Good thing I save all my rubber bands and aluminum foil!

@diwdiws If you can find this year's E3 EA show, they had a few Bioware people at a roundtable and talked a bit more about story and highlighting that it's still an RPG, with NPC,s questing, you can play solo and it's still your story, but there's other people there in a shared world, etc. They played up heavily that it's a shared world but it's your game still. I don't believe them still, but they tried to sell that. All I see is still Destiny with mechs....but I'll hold out hope.

RDR2: You can't change the controls to traditional FPS layout. That's one of the complaints. "Traditional FPS" keeps all the weird controls and just swaps run/crouch so run is on L3 and crouch is on X. And you just can't fix that weird "aim to interact/talk" thing that dosn't work. Even if you remap your controller externally, that's still ungainly.

@Octane Yeah, the aiming thing is just so awful. @Ralizah basically you use L2 to aim your weapon. However to interact with objects including talk to NPCs, you also have to aim at them. The idea behind this sounded cool (kind of like how FFXIII-Versus sounded cool....on paper.) In real life you don't bump your chest against everyone to talk to them like in video games. You look and talk from a distance. So in RDR2, the idea was you look at people/objects to talk/interact from a distance like Z-Targeting in Ocarina. Except it doesn't lock on, it has x-ray vision, and ocarina didn't have you draw your bow when you Z-target. It's "smart" context sensitive. My two bad experiences (from the XBox thread) are: A sidequest of a broken down wagon that lost its other horse. The quest giver is talking to me. I approach. I go to aim to "talk" to him. He's still talking so I can't aim yet. So he's done and I hit R2 to aim....the game decides what I really wanted to do was draw my gun and point it at his head. He freaks out gets on his other horse and flees, ending the quest opportunity maybe forever. In the inverse, one quest has an NPC taken hostage in a chokehold. I go to aim my gun. Instead the game brings up the interact menu. It then wants me to hit R2 (the fire button!) to activate gun aiming, within which, if I hit R2 again, I fire.

The other situation was a gallows hanging (not story, just something you can stumble into.) The man hangs, the crowd leaves, the widow remains. I aim at her...but I can't interact with her. I aim at the deputy on the platform and I get the "praise/scold" dialog options. Weird. I aim at the hung man, and again get "praise/scold". Really weird. I do "study", and it now tells me the hung man is a cat. I then "study" the deputy. He is apparently also a cat. (Red Dead Red-nyamption? Arthpurr? Pawsible glitch?) After a while I realize that the "aim" feature doesn't respect visible occlusions, and since at that moment neither the deputy nor hung man had an "interact" hook tied to them, the aiming just found the next line of sight object nearby, and focused on a cat roaming in the grass behind the gallows platform where the wall blocked my view of it.

Meanwhile most of the time when I "aim" to talk from a distance, greet/provoke is grayed out until I bump chests with the target anyway.....a totally wasted mechanic that causes some problems. "Aim, then hit fire to actually aim, then hit fire again to actually fire" kind of makes hostage situations troublesome.