Me: Vaccinated, New Ace Combat Game is in works, and GTA Modding fiasco

 A bit too late because of the absence for a few days and suffered through weakness yesterday.

Me, getting vaccinated because of Covid-19

I'm not really afraid of getting vaccinated since that... you know, my old days in school where there is "tetanus" shit going on, and kids like us get vaccinated? Well, that's me, in Indonesia.

Truth to be told, since this is about Covid-19, the government want to build a defense for a better citizen life, so I took part. The vaccine? The AstraZeneca one from UK, different and... from what my sis and her friend say, is more powerful than Sinovac and internationally-approved. Hours after vaccination I don't feel anything bad in general, but the next day, I feel like I was taking up a disease or smth. Headache, followed by pain on where the syringe injection took place - upper left arm. It's still paining, even today since this writing. Eat up a cocktail of vitamins from free health package that given on my early arrival, plus a flu medicine that contains paracetamol. Today, I feel fine, apart from the pain that came from the upper left arm. Well, I have to get used to it for a few days.

My sis fell sick after vaccination on day one and she still is. I hope she'll recover.

New Ace Combat Game

It was about... 5 days ago since this writing, and before I was vaccinated. Channels I subbed that dedicated to Ace Combat, as well as KoTS Discord server, posted an announcement saying that a new Ace Combat game is in works. Plus, Project Aces (PA) released a new set of DLCs to celebrate the 25th anniversary and a mention saying "over 3 million copies sold worldwide" (which is a good sign, I guess; devs can reap the rewards for making an arcade-flight-action game like this). Brand director, Kazutoki Kono, said that his team is cooperating with ILCA to make this new game, but... it's not Ace Combat 8 (not yet, at least), but something else, but still in terms of this Ace Combat franchise.

AFAICT (as far as I can tell), announcements I can hear are in English, and Zaptroxix? That channel seemed to be the first to translate the video into Indonesian.



Few days prior to this I discussed to the guys in Discord, said that it probably will be like Infinity, where people claimed to be paying for "fuel" just for the heck of it.

If the next Ace Combat game is like Infinity (which I personally don't taste it since I don't have PS3), then nope, I won't be paying a single penny just for a flight that consumes... what, a fuel fraction?

GTA Modding Fiasco

Let's be honest, who loves game modding? Every game now can be modded, including GTA games. I personally can't ignore this fact because I used to be one of them, and now I rarely make mods for fun. Take, for example, my skin mods for Ace Combat 7 today, of which I pulled the uploads because I have the latest updated one and I'm still not in a mood to publish it. I also made mods for GTA games back in the day, but well... times have passed on and changed.

Now, there's an issue that'd been running since Take-Two (T2) issued DMCA takedowns on large-sized mods such as total conversions or mod packages. Now, the issue's gotten big with the new EULA (or smth similar) stating that "mods that alter storyline are now prohibited". That point, I'd say, "hold on for a second." Modding multiplayer? Okay, that's a bannable offense. Fair play. Modding singleplayer?


I see no harm in modding GTA only for singleplayer (SP) and not multiplayer (MP), but T2 seemed to take this matter too far AFTER the release of new DLCs that players anticipated AND the announcement of GTA trilogy games to be "remastered" or smth. Badger Goodger discussed this 2 weeks ago and GTA Series Videos described it in detail regarding this issue recently.

So, my question to you is, what's your POV on modding a game? What's the harm in it? Is it safe? Is it a bannable offense?

Personal opinion says that modding is a part of creativity being put on a videogame. It's like an art, which can be depicted in so many ways around. I'm not into GTA modding anymore since... you know, my parents are watching what I'm playing and they seem to don't like me playing GTA games just for doing whatever I want. But this kind of restriction is way too much to get people caught in legal troubles (hell, even I at some point do). I don't get why GTA is the only one that caused so many troubles, like OpenIV almost get closed for porting game maps (if the guys there did that, then how can we use file replacement feature in GTA IV and GTA V? TBH, there's no SparkV, AFAICT), Hot Coffee scandal by PatrickW (yeah, there's a mention on that in one of Vadim M's videos)...

If you want to compare GTA with others like Battlefield 2 and some others that I know, like Cold Waters, Project Wingman, Ace Combat 7, Ultimate Ninja STORM 4 and its precursors, and Fallout 4 (though there are a few restrictions regarding it), there are no problems. The only recent problem I heard before this is about the mod-hosting website that changes the policy overtime, which made modders of Fallout 4 react over it. Yep, the Nexus Mods fiasco. People started to pull out their mods or abandon the modding entirely just because Nexus Mods announced a new feature called "mod collection", archiving old, obsolete mods for convenience.

Idk about you, but at this point, my guts tell me that this is way too much. It feels like the "freedom of speech" was taken away by corporate people who want to invest their money on something else, if you get my point. This "freedom of speech" is a way that we express our sympathy and love on a particular something, like for instance, a game that we own. At this point, people who mod GTA games protested over it and I can't disagree with that.

Conclusion

Well, it's good news and bad news mixed into one, if you have a liking in GTA and Ace Combat games in particular, like the one I heard of: SkylineGTRFreak. We have a new AC game in the works (along with JASDF skin pack to be released at the end of August, yay!) and T2 started to complicate things on modding GTA games. Don't ask about me.

I hope there's a light shining in the darkness of all of this "fiasco" I heard of. I really hope for it. The world's full of quirks, and Covid-19 made people think differently. I'm sure of it.

Comments