Dark Arc

Yeah for me, it’s the variety of tales that you author. Every game feels a bit like a new adventure, after a while similar to ones you’ve been on before, but still new.

ARC has those elements, but something feels off so far for me…

Also typically the progression is in terms of variety (Roguelike) instead of straight power (Roguelite). That keeps things fair because even a new player, if they trade the aim, can pose a real threat to a seasoned player of similar FPS skill. ARC seems like it’s decided to go for a sort of Roguelite experience and that seems risky.

I haven’t played Marathon, but I did get into the ARC test. This will mostly be some ramblings…

I’m still waiting to play ARC with some friends. I only did some solo stuff.

I’m coming from this as a big Hunt Showdown player (1,200+ hours) and someone that’s played a bit of Forever Winter (~20). I still like Hunt better; I think it’s the only extraction shooter that didn’t take a ton of influence from Tarkov.

I wasn’t crazy about the marathon art style, but I’m not ready to pass judgement on it until I’ve been in the world.

ARC’s art style I found beautiful but also perhaps too sparse. There were so many wide open spaces … I just don’t see that being a good thing for an extraction shooter. The world felt vast and empty … I prefer Hunt’s more cluttered and dense design.

ARC does seem to have a lot of potential in like how it’s designed its AI, Hunt’s is very primitive in a lot of ways and kind of secondary. I think the AI is going to be a bigger deal in ARC.

Third person also feels worse to me than first person. I hope they add a first person mode to ARC, but I kind of doubt they will.

I definitely agree that ARC felt like it was being set up to tell a story and felt very cinematic at times.

The UI also felt like the best extraction shooter UI I’ve ever encountered.

I’m concerned about the long term health of ARC. The progression system seems like it will certainly lead to established players dominating newer players. The lack of a primary objective that’s shared by all the teams on the map … I’m not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, it may lead to a more relaxed experience, on the other hand, it doesn’t curate players towards each other like Hunt does; it seems looting and crafting are the primary motivators instead.

The fights that I did get into, they lacked the complex environment and buildings in Hunt so I didn’t find them nearly as engaging, they were much more straight forward gunfights than leveraging the map to use it to my advantage. I think that aspect will ultimately hurt the game as it makes it feel like a bit of a generic shooter.

Overall ARC felt very middle of the road from what I’ve played of it so far. I had a similar feeling about The Finals. Embark seems like a talented studio and I wish them the best as they go up against Bungie and Crytek.

Something to implement signing given the key to sign with could almost certainly be created.

I think the biggest reason this stuff hasn’t really happened is … there’s not much motivation and Apple will likely respond to such efforts unkindly so you might need to be a bit of a curious masochist (or at least in strange circumstances) to attempt such an effort 😅

You don’t really; a cross compilation with a compiler that can generate the ARM instructions for Apple’s ARM CPUs should largely just work.

However, it’s impossible to test the produced app without using an iPhone or MacOS’s tools to simulate running on an iPhone. You also are just going to have way less of an uphill battle using Apple’s tools and you’re likely to get better optimized binaries.

You also don’t have to build iOS apps with Swift; C++ and things like Qt can be used.

For MacOS you’re right, for iOS OP is right; you’re being a dick about it though, so maybe that’s the issue.

And games are more expensive than ever for studios to make and push to the market. Given that, I’m not surprised we have loot crates, micro transactions, and predatory dlc. A AAA game should have a baseline price closer to $200.

Yeah … then there are people the won’t buy games for more than $20 (not necessarily because they can’t afford it but because “it’s just a game”) … which is just kinda crazy to me (and disrespectful to the amount of work that went into the game).

Anything with a server software you can host can be played on LAN (okay probably not some things because they’re being weird but in general this is true).

That means counter strike, Minecraft, supertuxkart, xonotic, enshrouded, pal world, etc

Nutritionally, it’s terrible either way.

I think your body would have a better time with it spread out over the course of the entire day. However you’re still absorbing an insane amount of sugar in a single day.

There’s a chance all at once would result in more of it being pooped out and thus be better … but it’s so close to just eating sugar I expect you’d absorb it and then your body would go into overdrive producing insulin.

Fine every now and then, but regularly it would be insanely bad no matter which way you do it.

I don’t know for sure what we learned, but I remember my Spanish teacher talking about a girl from Spain that came to her class and didn’t do her work.

Apparently the girl wasn’t doing well in Spanish class and later accused the teacher of teaching “gutter Mexican.”

Which … honestly didn’t hit me as the flex my Spanish teacher seemed to be making it out to be.

0% have authority to stand against. Roughly 28% or something voted against.

The filibuster is a thing and that regularly prevents anything from getting done without 60 votes.

Obama in his book (A Promised Land) talks about this and how his biggest regret is not ending the filibuster as his first action because it proceeded to cripple his entire administration and agenda for the majority of his presidency.

sufficient majority

It’s a complicated issue in the United States because of the history. Lots of countries did slavery, but at the point the United States did it, science was starting to spark into its modern form and one idea that “seemed good at the time” was pursuing superior genes.

That … went really really really sideways and basically became a justification for continued slavery on the premise that white people were just better and they were doing the inferior black people a favor. Basically while the rest of the world was going “maybe slavery isn’t good” the US was like “slavery is the humane thing to do, because science!”

Even after shit like that gets disproven people still tend to believe some amount of it (look at the antivax movement). So, even after the slaves were freed, they and their children were looked down upon by the culture. Many black people remained uneducated, financially bankrupt, etc. The culture especially in the south fought really hard to keep it that way for a looonnngggggg time.

That kind of formed a counter culture of its own, the “gang” culture. Which isn’t all that different from the counter culture you see that came from prohibition and the moonshiners and such … basically outlaws fighting the man, looked down upon, etc

So basically there are several main US cultures, Northern East White, Midwestern White, West Coast White, Southern White, Black, and the Appalachian White/redneck culture that descends from a mix of the moonshine runners, rural farmers, coal miners, and white southern culture.

Black people of course have multiple cultures even within the US but it’s all kind of lumped into this messy “black culture” thing. Some black people I’ve met love the black gangster with the gold chains imagery and hold it up as something great and the “true black culture”, others see it as ridiculous and trashy.

Calling these other cultures white is also intellectually dishonest as the entire US is a melting pot and the cultures of those regions were not formed by a single skin color … but I’m using “white” for the purposes of the contrast …

Anyways, black people just kind of stand out so they’re an easy target… and they have been targeted for a very long time fueled (at least in part) by that long ruled scientifically ridiculous idea that they’re inferior.

Add in the extra spice that the Appalachian subculture is angry about being tied in with the other white cultures despite being screwed over by the government a lot (not to the extent black people were, but still badly) … and you’ve basically got the mess that is America in 2025.

There’s a mix of justifiably mad people on both sides, outright racists, and people that serve to benefit from the conflict never ending politically.

(Perspective of a white guy originally from Appalachia that has seen a fair bit of the country and world now … and largely no longer agrees with the Appalachians politically … but is trying his best to explain a very complicated and touchy subject without writing a novel or making a bunch of people angry … your collective grace is appreciated)

Obama did it (kind of); he moved the party line to be policy oriented instead of stunts and cutthroat politics.

At the same time, he never gained a sufficient majority to enact his platform (in truth we’re lucky we got the affordable care act). Biden ran into similar issues with what was technically a majority but that had weak votes (e.g. Manchin).

Honestly the problem is the Senate; Democrats just can’t get past the threshold that would let them actually govern. So we get Democratic presidents that appear ineffective … when really we just have a Senate that’s broadly ineffective at doing anything that isn’t center right.

A Promised Land by Obama is an extremely good book if you want to understand the modern democratic party. Obama did a lot to get the spark back but also was in a very difficult position.

Yeah, second hand opinions can be a thing and it’s the main reason I still argue online … but gosh can it be exhausting arguing with a wall.

I’ve always had this opinion… I never got the hype…

But I have such a soft spot for how beautiful the console is from a design and hardware standpoint. That boxy gray box is such beauty.

Agree to disagree lol

An even deeper mind fuck is that the you that’s reading this this second, might have just come into existence with all the memories you have now. There’s no way to know how volatile truth and consciousness really is in our universe.

I use Kopia to B2, then on a monthly basis I copy the current Kopia repo to an external drive that’s otherwise kept offline in my house.

They even sued a guy who spent 6 years writting, casting, shooting, and producing a full length live action Zelda movie. They released it online for about a week before it got taken down. Never to be downloaded by anyone who didn’t grab it right away.

Man that would be soul crushing …