Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm usually pretty generous to game developers in terms of "game development is like...hard", but I do think KSP 2 has been released with wrong presentation and wrong price point, and suspect it's a case of publishers wanting to push it out to get as much ROI now as they can.

What they released is a neat alpha. A showcase of their ground-up rebuild of KSP with a the physics system built to be expanded upon for features KSP's original
couldn't reliably deliver. They reportedly have in-progress work on the other features that they cut out of the EA build for not being stable/finished yet. So this is them only putting out the core MVP they have. And if it was presented face-forward as that and priced appropriately, it'd be neat.

What it's priced at is a fully functional AAA game. What it's presented at is Early Access to the new KSP. They give the impression and expectation it's more than it currently is, and rightfully so for that price.

The thing in particular I'm liking about Long War for XCOM 2 is how it has a formal squad system to encourage you to keep the same troops as part of set squads on a rotation, which fits for military, and more-so how you have to send troops to infiltrate ahead of a mission and the longer you have them infiltrating the easier the mission will be and the less enemies you'll face.

So what I'm imagining is where you get a report of 'strange activity' and have to send a cell to investigate. The cell spends time investigating, discover whatever the horrible monstrous thing happening is, then does the tactical mission to put a stop to it. Thinking on it more, it could even be a mini choose your own adventure for the infiltration phase, where you go through a series of events as the investigation progresses and could even avoid the tactical mission entirely with the right (or wrong) outcomes of those events.

Like, one event chain could be a young man in a remote town is caught robbing a corner shop. The CCTV shows them demonstrating unusual levels of physical strength, and when the police arrested them they fought back and took several bullets to eventually stop. Upon autopsy, fully formed eyeballs were found inside their arm and leg muscles. You need to send a cell to investigate.

After some time, the cell reports back that they've traced the incident back to a pharmacutical trial being ran. You can spend some resources to help them get an inside contact at the company running the trial and fake IDs. This helps them follow the trail, and so they discover the head of the company is using a Lovecraftian Entity to develop experimental pharmacuticals to make money. You have the choice of how to put a stop to this. If you choose to assassinate the company head, then the rest of the cult will scatter and the problem will be neutralized. If you choose a full-on assault you can kill all the cultists and much greater reduce the Eldritch Level of that region. But a full-on assault is riskier to your agents lives since you need to go through the tactical gameplay.

You choose to order the assassination. The best marksman of the cell attempts to snipe the company head. However, they fail the skill roll and the company head survives. Now you have no choice but to either pull-out and fail the investigation or launch a full-on assault. The cult is now suspiscious and so defences are higher than they would have been if you ordered a full on assault, but you can spend more of a resource to aid the cell so they start the assault better equipped or in a better tactical position. Or you can spend a large amount of resources to arrange for a 'tragic accident' to hit the company headquarters.

You don't have the resources to spare, so you send the cell in at normal preparedness. You fail the tactical gameplay and all but one of the cell are wiped out, who you manage to evac. You now have to choose between abandoning the infiltration and taking the increase to Eldicth Level of the region, or pay the resources for that tragic accident. You use what little resources you have left to pay for the tragic accident. An pop-up tells you how a military training exercise went wrong and a military drone struck the headquarters of the company. This lowers the Eldritcc Level of the region, but increases the Instability of the region. Higher instability means higher level Incidents are more likely to happen in that region in the future.

You already lost Western Europe to maxed out Eldritch Level. Paris isn't euclidian anymore. Fail a couple more missions and the global Eldritch Level will reach a peak and Cthulhu will wake up.

Finally beat Malenia last night, which was the last thing I wanted to do before starting the end-game. I'll admit, I cheesed the heck out of it by respec'ing into a Mohgywn's Sacred Spear build and spamming the Skill alongside a Mimic Tear. Still took like ten tries to get it right.

Time to start end game and probably kill all the rest of my favourite characters, I guess xD

EDIT: Aaand took a few tries but compared to all the optional bosses, a Lvl 150 Dex Build with Godslayer's Greatsword and wrecks the endgame. Ultimate Waifu Ending unlocked, Praise the Moon!
Lvl 150
44 Vigor
20 Mind
25 Endurance
20 Strength
80 Dexterity
10 Intelligence
20 Faith
10 Arcane
Started as a Wretch with No Heirloom.

I apparently count as queer according to some because I'm asexual, so my queer experience is mostly defined by a lack of experience xD Cuddling is fucking awesome though.

Plus Sister having had a child has shut down the "but I want graaandchiiildddreen" from my mother. So that's nice. Because...no, not happening. Eww. Still get the occassional "but you'd be such a good father" or "maybe you'll meet someone with kids!" but like...I like being an Uncle. You get to give him back. Can't do that with your own kid...

(Well I guess technically you can but... xD)

Evolution is also statistical and a great compressor of information, so it's also possible any differences in a species with already strong selective pressures for males and females to be able to do similar tasks would be minor. Excessive variation takes more energy, if it's not worth the energy for reproductive advantage it won't get selected for. Meaning the outcome for the evolutionary process could very well be:
a) Reduced to the minimum needed to produce a reproductive benefit.
b) Emergent in large groups but rather poor for understanding individuals who are still likely to run the whole gambit of human variation.

It's like, the average woman could be one standard deviation worse than the average man at throwing rocks but...well, that doesn't tell you much about how good I am at throwing rocks as an individual*. Which puts it more in the category of "huh, interesting" rather than any kind of modern societally defining information. And when working with a limited sample size of "people near you who you can find to throw some rocks", you wouldn't want to exclude all the woman on that basis either, since you're still gonna find a good chunk of higher-than average rock throwers. And outside of people who've spent their whole life pushing themselves to the far far end of that bell curve of rock throwing, it's probably not gonna be a very big difference in the size of the two groups.

* I'm very bad at it, my dominant arm is hyper-extended so an overarm throw tends to result in a pop-out.

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Another issue with researching gender identity and brains I can see is that consciousness and self-perception isn't exactly something we've found a "spot" for in the brain as far as I know, it's appears to be one of those 'emergent propeties' where it's just a result of a bunch of unrelated stuff happening to mix together in a way that produces it. So even if there is something in the structure that creates that mixing that produces a perception of oneself as a different gender to their biological sex, it's not like that's something you can point at in the brain and say "it's this". So whilst discussing the potential for a link is philosophically interesting and may be an exploratory method to help 'confused' cisgendered people get that foot into 'groking' it by bringing up the potential (so long as framed to not lead to the 'problem to be fixed' misconclusion), it's not exactly easy to research beyond "huh there's this statistical correlation but it's not a guaranteed thing" which...again, falls into the "huh interesting" category of facts.

Statistics are hard, large scale emergent properties are useless to individuals, you'll never know if anybody but you is truly conscious, and we all die cold and alone. At least that's what I tell myself every night

I...wasn't saying that as a reason to give puberty blockers? Aren't they pretty much used to stop the wrong puberty kicking in whilst preparing for the transitional hormones?

And again, it was not really on-topic and more a general observation on medicine. If a child can't consent for surgery they can't consent for medication either for the same reasons, either parents or doctors are imposing on the child for their best interest as a consequence of that.

Okay, actually doing some googling and that seems like more recent info, with the "female by default" model being the one believed in prior, and the old view hasn't been pushed out by the new one yet in social awareness so still gets repeated. I'm rather out of date on the latest literature then xD

Either way I'm not really thinking about genital development but brain development, if there's some underlying architectural 'XX' and 'XY' structure of the brain and how it expects the body it's piloting to be and if that could misalign with body development. If we start off as a 'blank' template that is later specialised, doesn't really change that concept...

tbh I'm more just thinking of a simplified model that could be used as a starting point to help cis people who are in that "I don't really get trans" category and "you don't need to get it, just accept it" doesn't work get their heads around it as a "thing that can happen".