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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12608 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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I played the Pragmata demo and found it fine. Fun gimmick with the combat hacking thing but I feel like it'd get tiresome over 20 hours so I didn't buy it, but the demo was perfectly entertaining.

The game industry doesn't like any of these things. They like predictable fiscal outcomes, safe products, and the industry itself is staffed by people who despise their (mostly male) audience and have seen games as an opportunity for social engineering for years.

Sheer expense of a new game is definitely a part of this. The economics of doing anything AA or above seem to be straight up 'you hit okay sales or you're looking at a serious possibility of bankruptcy' whereas in previous eras there seemed to be a lot more scope for shovelware without absolutely annihilating yourself if something missed. This may also tie into the death of tie-in games and whatnot, which seem to have steeply declined in recent years where studios would put out solid 6.5/10 mediocrities loosely based on popular movies or TV series. From an outsider POV it does seem somewhat insane that the pursuit of graphical fidelity seems to be forcing such insane expenditure on new releases.

Fun gimmick with the combat hacking thing but I feel like it'd get tiresome over 20 hours so I didn't buy it, but the demo was perfectly entertaining.

I'm between 5 and 10 hours in the full game, I think, and so far it's still holding up for me. They still regularly add additional game mechanics to both sides of the combat to keep it fresh. Either side of the combat on their own would make for a ridiculously easy game but but that you're forced the juggle them still works for me, and when I think I've got it all down they add something else to juggle (danger squares in the hacking, enemies you have to clear another layer of defense before attacking, etc...)

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