It really is. I would go as far as to call it a clickbait article. The title is intriguing but the only addition to the statement is that that the era is over because every game doesn’t need to release with something new. And that’s essentially the whole article as the rest is just filler.
deleted by creator
I decided to give Vintage Story a try. I was not prepared for what I was about to experience. I can already say it’s not for everyone. It’s like if you took Minecraft survival mode and then turned it into an actual survival mode. One of the first things everyone makes in Minecraft is a pickaxe. It took me about 2 hours to get the first pickaxe and then another 10 hours (though I did a lot of other things before upgrading my pick) to get the next tier of pickaxe. I probably would’ve gotten it quicker if I had only focused on that but I had a lot of other survival needs that had to deal with. But to go over what you need to make your first copper pickaxe.
Obviously you need copper. Copper bits can spawn above ground (and a small hint that everyone mentions. If there’s copper on the ground there’s a small vein of copper right below it in the first layer of sedimentary rock). When you’ve collected enough copper you need to smelt it and cast it. To smelt copper you can’t use wood, you need to use charcoal. How do you get charcoal? You make a charcoal pit and burn wood into charcoal. You need an large amount of wood. How do you get wood? You make an axe. How do you make an axe? You flintknap an axe head and combine it with a stick. Now we can smelt copper but how do we cast it? For that you need to create a pickaxe mold. To create a pickaxe mold you mold clay and then fire it in a pit kiln. A pit kiln is pretty much a hole in the ground that you fill with the clay mold, dry grass, sticks and wood and then let it burn for a whole in game day. When you have a mold you put molten copper into the mold. But you can’t just take molten copper and stick it into the mold. You need a crucible to hold the liquid copper and tongs to hold the hot crucible. A crucible is made the same way a mold, you form it from clay and the fire it for a day. Tongs are probably the easiest part of the part of the process as you need just sticks and rope (which you make from cattails). If this feels like it takes forever it’s because it does. This is why it’s not for everyone but my god did this push the right buttons because unlocking the pickaxe felt like a real milestone.
And in case anyone cares what I did for the next 10 hours, I harvested probably about 1000 tule plants to make a thatch roof. I started a farm and collected different kind of seeds (because you need to rotate crop to keep the soil healthy). I made a cellar because your food will spoil within days if you don’t stick them in the cellar. I collected enough copper to make a copper anvil so I could make more advance copper tools. I prospected the land to find tin and lead veins so I could make other metals than copper. I foolishly believed making leather might be easy so I hunted some animals until I looked up leatherworking and then gave up because I hadn’t found limestone (or it’s equivalent) to start the tanning process. Instead I started to make compost from the leather which I will later use as a fertilizer. Oh and I made a fruitpress to make juice from all the berries I’ve found.
It’s a real survival experience and I’m definitely enjoying the complexity of it all. There’s an in-game survival guide that is pretty informative so I don’t need to go online to understand how something works. The game also has a very customizable gaming experience. You can very much tailor your experience to be a bit less survival or significantly more survival. You can also modify the worldgen to fit your needs which is something that got removed from Minecraft. There’s also a really good modding support. So far I’ve added the Carry On mod that lets me move chests and barrels around because when I expanded my base (to have more space for my stuff) moving my stuff around was a pretty annoying experience. I also have my eye on some other mods but those require starting a new playthrough and I want to get a bit better grasp of some of the mechanics before pulling the trigger on a new playthrough.
TL:DR I absolutely recommend Vintage Story to anyone willing to put in the effort it demands. You will be rewarded for that effort.
I think you’re seriously underestimating how big VISA and Mastercard are. Valve is estimated to be worth around 8 billion, Visa made 4.5 billion in profits Q2 of 2025. VISA makes more money annually than Valve is even worth. Furthermore if we exclude China, Visa and MC make up 90% of all online payments. Steam’s entire business depends on online purchases. Steam would be thoroughly fucked if Visa and MC dropped Valve.
What Visa and MC are doing is despicable and something should be done about them, but Valve is not in a position to do anything but bend over and spread the cheeks.
You literally said this changes from neglect to “a really bad choice”.
which in my opinion changes things drastically from someone making a poor choice with neglect or even an intent to kill, **to someone who just made a really bad choice without the expectation anything bad ** will come out of it.
As for the other argument. If someone leaves their children home alone for a week do you think that action becomes significantly less worse if they stock up the fridge before leaving the children to fend for themselves? I would argue it doesn’t matter because you’re still neglecting them. The same way I don’t think the AC matters because in both cases those children were still strapped into the car for over 2 hours without any supervision.
I don’t get why you’re trying to paint it as not neglect. This is not someone who made a really bad choice, this is someone who decided it’s okay for a 1 year old and a 2 year old to sit in a car for over 2 hours. Her leaving the AC on doesn’t change the fact that it was negligent behavior, deliberate negligent behavior. Even if the AC had worked the entire time the situation for the children would’ve still been insufferable.
It’s probably the latter because the former implies not huffing AI paint and I just don’t believe anyone that high up making such a stupid statement isn’t huffing AI paint.
I’m going to throw a shout out to Environmental Station Alpha because I think it’s an excellent game that flew under the radar of a lot of people when it launched. It makes some bold decisions with the story that some people might not enjoy but the gameplay is solid and the backtracking problem (which most metroidvanias have) is solved by having the level get harder as you progress.
It’s cheap, it’s not at all hardware demanding and it’s very heavily inspired by Metroid. If you enjoy metroidvanias and you haven’t played Environmental Station Alpha you definitely should.
And a secret shoutout to Noita. The dev of Environmental Station Alpha worked on Noita. It’s been pushed into the roguelite category but I would argue it’s the worlds first open world(s) roguelite metroidvania. If that sounds stupid but interesting, prepare to suffer because Noita is not at all easy and that’s deliberate because the central theme of Noita is the pursuit of knowledge (the more you know about Noita the easier it gets).
Shamelessly plugging https://linuxupskillchallenge.org/ because if you’re going to set up an Ubuntu home server you might a well know how to use it.