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Sartre outlines a somewhat general theory that could be relevant to your line of questioning in Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Specifically, chapter 3 should be the interesting part. If you don't have access to the book I could write a short summary at the end of the week, as I've only eyed it superficially before.

By "efficiency", do we mean efficiency in production or efficiency in allocation? Both? It seems to me that there's some value in not conflating them and instead considering them independently.

That horse archery clip is hilarious. You'd think people who work in games journalism have enough experience with games to intuitively understand after the first, or even second, time that you can't fire your bow to the right while on horseback. Yet they keep trying to hit things.

But there has to be a catch, right?
No catch!

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I guess that depends on how you define a catch. You have to subscribe to the newsletter after all.

Lord Milky said:

There were plenty of native tribes after the British left. The decline of culture is mainly due to the influx of settlers which in turn caused population growth , shrinking territory and racial tensions. I'm not saying the British were completely innocent but let's not forget , the drastic decline happened after their departure. Your source sounds incredibly biased. The French also had a major foothold in the Americas causing war amongst tribes , disease etc

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Could you point out the biased premises so I could address them? The pope was generally quite lenient towards the natives, and the French were on better terms with the natives a lot of the time than the British (for example, there's to my knowledge no British equivalent to the Cajuns).

Of course, natives at different points in time would ally any European power they could against their traditional enemies, I'm not disputing that. The only thing I am trying to show is that, in the Americas, the Spanish were less destructive for the native populations than the non-Catholics (primarily British).

wormydowg said:

The big empires like the Greeks, Romans, Mongols, Ottoman, and British, just kinda let culture do it's thing. The last 2 empires were real jerks tho, ottomans wanted to unite all these different cultures under one religion, and the British we're trying to drain areas of their wealth.

Only the 16th century Spanish have managed to completely destroy cultures, and while they have done their fair share of destruction, it was actually forcing interracial marriage between native Americans and Spanish millitary  that did the most damage to existing culture.

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The reason North America is basically racially homogeneous is partly because the British systematically killed off the local populations. The Catholics, especially Spain, were much more lenient on natives in the New World. The pope even considered them to be essentially like children (which implies that they were seen as idiotic humans, but the British didn't view the natives as human at all).

Diego de Landa was even called back to Spain to be tried for conducting an unlawful inquisition and torturing natives. This is vastly different from how the British treated natives in North America.

Of course, disease killing something like 80% of the population (I took this number from Dan Carlin's history podcast, not sure what his source is) completely crippled civilizations, but the Catholics intermarrying with the locals is why you have any native culture at all in South America, and also the reason why pretty much everyone is mixed today.

There are several competing conceptions of what constitutes a lie. The conventional definition requires you to believe that your statement is false in order for it to be a lie though (usually with an express intention to deceive). Generally then, truthfulness (concerns belief) and falsity (concerns validity) of a statement are two separate phenomena.

This article, specifically section 1.2, does a fairly good job of discussing the issue.

Bjorn The Raider said:

But I must say TW doesn't really seem good from outside when it comes to the communication.

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They've never been very good at that. All things considered, this is a pretty small thing to worry over, especially since the contradiction came quite soon after the initial statement (it would have been much worse if you could have pre-purchased the game with the understanding you'd get early access and then the game releases without going through early access). They just need to make a more definitive and less ambiguous statement.

onarum said:

Akesh the Cursed said:

Auldman said:

I don't mind paying $40 for this game in EA

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Lol! If this goes more than $20 I will be very disappointed. The game has been in development for how many years and it now decides to go in to early access? I am one of the few people here defending TW when it comes to needing more time on game development but I do not support early access games. This may be an exception if it is fairly priced but if they want $40 I will just wait for the full development or may just pass altogether, which would not be easy for me.

Edit: I would love to participate in a beta if that is a possibility.

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....What? you people do realize that you'd be basically buying the game early and having access to it right? you're not just paying for beta access, and you want the full game to cost you 20 dollars?

This will be a full price game friend, 60 USD minimum, do you really think they'd spend all this time and money, develop an entirely new engine, and then charge 15 bucks for it? you can't possibly be that delusional right?

At most you'd get a 15% discount by buying it while on early access, but that's it, of course I'm talking about Early Access specifically, if they decide to do their own open/closed beta test I doubt they'll charge anything for it.

Boy I can already see children *****ing in the steam forums about the final price of this game..

As for me I'll pay whatever it is they charge for it, because I know it'll be worth it.

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Yet isn't that literally what they did for the original M&B? I recall paying something like 15€ for beta while the actual released product was ~20€ unless I'm mistaken.

Of course, circumstances are different and Bannerlord is a game of much larger scale, but I think it's a little bit of an overreaction to call someone delusional in this case while then proceeding to make the statement that you know it will be worth whatever they decide to charge you when the game isn't even close to release.

Warband has aged somewhat poorly in the visual department, so even if the graphics look a little bit "potato 2013", I'm quite happy with the upgrade.

rysborn said:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/300908109, start at 1 hour 5 minutes exactly, should be it, for those who can't watch it live

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Man, the girl interviewing him doesn't seem very insightful with regards to the subject.

Serious question: does wind energy still have to be subsidized to be economical, or is that just a reality of the 90s?

Beny said:

It's the youth's way of documenting how strong a relationship is. Every consecutive day that you send or receive a snapchat from someone contributes towards a "streak", which is represented by a fire because our friendship is mad fire yo. I currently have acquired one of these magical "streaks" so will document it here for scientific reference.

Spoiler

The future is weird.

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What do the smileys next to some people mean?

I think it's necessary to speak of this in broad terms because we have so little information of what the final product will be like. All of my posts should be read with a "in principle" caveat in mind as we can't really assume much from the little information we have been shown.

But I think the worry persists even if there is tiered system for castles as long as castles can be upgraded along these trees. If each village can have a castle, the player can reach a stage where every settlement has a castle of enormous proportions. We have no idea if the sizes of tier 3 castles are similar across the board, and we also don't know what the in-game timeframe for the upgrading of castles is. There's no word on razing of castles or other mechanics to naturally limit castle growth that I'm aware of, so it seems prudent not to assume them.

Rabies said:

If it's possible, it's realistic.

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I think it would be more proper to format it as: "if it's plausible, it's realistic". It's possible to board a spaceship and travel to the moon, but it wouldn't be plausible to implement that into the world of Calradia.
If grand castles were rare during the periods the game draws inspiration from, there's no reason to allege that the same reasons for generally building smaller castles would not exist within the game.

At least the original M&B aspired to be a game without certain "fantasy-inspired" elements when it came to things such as trade goods, equipment, buildings etc. The game did not draw inspiration from only one point in history though, but rather mixed things in from a width of a few centuries.

I think we've established that immersion is quite important in games of the genre. If the game cannot convince you to suspend your disbelief, is that game not doing a poor job? Would there be a drawback to scaling back the forts that compensates for this loss of immersion?

Innocent Flower said:

I think you're looking too much into it.

Some people like immersion or get fascinated by cool things. They want things they can believe in. Logically designed things are smart, and some people think smart things are good things. From their perspective, How could it possibly hurt the game if something looked realistic rather than fantastic; It'd improve their game and wouldn't hurt anyone who doesn't really care for such details.

Other people really want to hunker down with the "It's a game!" stance. The pro-real people might not (and usually aren't) proposing something that'd harm or even effect the gameplay, but maybe "smart things are good things" offends them. 
Maybe they really like more fantasy designs, but the focus of posts seems to be on not-wanting realism rather than specifically wanting something unrealistic.

Most people think the bigger than neccessary castles look cool. I think they look cool. I just think they'd be better off if they looked more realistically sized, where they'd still look really cool. 

I can totally understand wanting to go into an artistic style of awesome-overdrive and rule-of-cooling everything. However, I don't think that's right for bannerlord.

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I don't think it was a very deep analysis. Suspension of disbelief is a very basic concept, and it's a cornerstone for the broader RPG genre. It's easier to suspend your disbelief in Ratchet & Clank than in Kingdom Come if you have a degree in history because you know Ratchet & Clank isn't aspiring to be set in a specific universe you have priviledged information of.

Re: realism and historical accuracy in video game design.

This discussion resurfaces every time a new medieval-inspired fantasy game is announced. The two sides almost always seem to talk past each other.

There is a sense in which a hyper-realistic realistic game would be boring, because it would involve so much tedium. For example, if you want to convey the character renting a room at an inn, sitting down to eat and drink, and then changing clothes before going to bed it would not necessarily make for riveting gameplay to have the player spend several minutes to manually go through the motions. In cases such as these, unless we're talking about sim-level games, I think people would largely agree some degree of abstraction is permissible.

The other concern in favour of dismissing realism and historical accuracy seems to be that researching and creating believable and accurate representations of real objects consumes much of the developer resources that could be spent elsewhere. Again, I think it is intuitively agreeable that major mechanics need to be fluid and working so that the game has some semblance of completion before resources are spent on other things. This is of course not relevant in the case where the studio employs people specifically to deal with aesthetics or research.

However, in order for a game to be immersive, which constitutes a significant part of the experience when it comes to games as a medium, the game ought to give you the opportunity to suspend your disbelief. For example, I can accept that there are dragons in Skyrim because they're basically timelords from another dimension. However, I can't really understand how my horse is capable of traversing mountains at above 90 degree angles. This is not believable, because the game doesn't offer you a reasonable explanation. There are basic physics in the world of Skyrim, and they seem to apply to all races, and nowhere is it suggested otherwise.

Furthermore, there are certain "hinge propositions", on which our understanding of the world relies on. Things we just take for granted, like Newtonian or Einsteinian physics and everything else assumes this. Video game universes usually accept these propositions, although we might ask if we should presuppose that they do, as sometimes these presumptions can be false. For instance, Hesiod tells us that it takes ten days for an anvil to fall from heaven to Earth, and the same time for it to fall through the Earth to the underworld. We might assume that this means Earth is equidistant from heaven and the underworld, but the ancient Greeks had a very different understanding of physics and some phenomena were thought to simply be dependent on where they happen in the world. Maybe the anvil falls faster in Tennessee than it does in Greece just because Tennessee is not Greece, so we can't draw the aforementioned conclusion.

However, it doesn't seem reasonable to forego fundamental assumptions about the world when we play video games, and you don't really have to play long before understanding that barring technical/mechanical limitations, pretty much ever single game is based on a contemporary understanding of physics.

This argument of believability extends into, in this case, the concept of castles. The information we have is something along the lines of: small centers of population, but infinite amount of people. So you might ask how do they feed this many people? There's only one season in the game, but you can clearly see fields and similar being represented in the game. Is this a reasonable abstraction? Perhaps, but everything still points towards individual objects being accurate representations of the real world. What I mean is that humans look human, they eat the same food we do and exhibit similar behaviour to real humans. Why, then, is there a disconnect when it comes to the representation of castles?
I think nobody would have difficulty to accept inaccurate descriptions of castles if the game didn't take itself seriously and didn't aspire to create accurate representations of reality.

This leads us to the following point which is that in the games industry "realism" is often used as a catch-all term, similar to RPG. It's also pointed to as a scapegoat for many poor design decisions. The developers might have a specific vision for their product which is to some degree objectively disagreeable, and they might try to legitimize this vision to their customer basis through vaguely formulated expressions of realism or historical accuracy. This creates a lot of confusion in regards to what realism in games really means and is probably a source for many disagreements over whether or not games can gain something from being realistic.

I always thought Densetsu looked familiar, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

The other day, my friend was telling me about his first time trying heroin, and then it hit me.

They also still haven't uploaded the latest version to GoG, even though it's like half a year old.

Moose! said:

Untitled. said:

If you don't require first-hand empirical proof, aren't you then operating on faith?

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Of course not. I have never personally been to Africa, but there is plenty of empirical evidence to support my belief that African children exist, even if I haven't been out there collecting that data personally.

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Right, but it's no longer first-hand empirical evidence, which would only require you to trust your senses. Now you need to trust the first-hand accounts of other people.

Moose! said:

Untitled. said:

Or are the temporary standards of the scientific community good enough to trump this?

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I think there is plenty of evidence that the temporary, ever-evolving standards of the scientific community is, if not good enough, the best game in town. The standards being temporary is a feature, not a bug.

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I don't think this is fully relevant to my argument. To my knowledge, no matter how much progress the scientific community makes (although I guess the word progress can be a bit misleading in certain circumstances), there is not yet any clear way of dealing with Cartesian doubt or metaphysical phenomena (obviously, due to their nature).

Besides, said evidence is only evidence within the current scientific paradigm. That does not necessarily make it wrong/bad/useless, but it's a bit difficult to argue against a method which validates itself, while we are only able to argue within the constraints of that method.