It's not disdain. It's reality. Democracy and other forms of representative government are morally good and praised on the basis that government of the people will be less inclined to oppress or mistreat that people.
But democracy isn't perfect. It can be slow and unresponsive. Leaders' political goals and the people's ignorance or fear can obstruct decisive action. This reality is something I think is recognized by the council which is why Spectres are given such autonomy; it's akin to giving a political leader emergency powers that, instead of having up-front limits, it has after-the-fact checks and balances. It's just shaped a different way here.
Put another way, autocracies can be far more efficient and responsive but, day-to-day, we have an aversion to them due to history's lessons of how easily they turn against their own people.
@OrionMD: First, it was all over the news. And second, extremists and anarchists exist on both sides of the political spectrum. The modern difference seems to be that left-wing extremists fight against perceived police overreach and a lack of accountability in government, whereas right-wing extremists are fighting against our representative democratic government.
And this is hardly a new phenomenon. It's the common thread of world history that progressive forces demand accountable, representative government whereas conservative forces often seek to undermine it in favor of one-party rule. This can be clearly seen over the past couple decades as Republican leaders continually treat Democrats as illegitimate, culminating in the success of Trump's "Big Lie" about Biden's victory and Republicans' general unwillingness to stand against it.
@EricDWright: Yes. Trump downplayed the threat of COVID because he feared the political cost of shutting down business. That's what happens when a political party and political leaders prioritize specific platform positions (pro-business) over the general welfare of the country. A real leader would have instantly called for unity and began to prepare people for the struggle. Instead he divided us through gaslighting and history will not be kind to him for that.
The council's downplaying of the Reaper threat is a fairly good analog, as @Sepewrath highlights. They didn't have much information to act on and instead of preparing for the worst, they insisted the threat wasn't real. They even disregarded Shepard's first-hand experiences because of the political inconvenience of it. And just like the military took Shepard seriously, the scientific and medical community took Fauci seriously despite Trump's dismissiveness.
I enjoyed the story line well enough, and as always the CG cutscenes were great, but overall I was disappointed with Diablo 3. So my collecting of loot was pretty well limited to what I thought other future characters could use (never mind the incredible violation of the fourth wall) and I ended up not playing enough characters to even use the loot.
The game is horribly repetitive with practically no replay value. Compare it to a game like Skyrim, which I'm now playing for the umpteenth time, and I STILL discover quests and dungeons I haven't found before.
Instead D3's replay value is supposed to come from... what? Doing the same levels over and over with a lame and tired carrot-on-a-stick equipment progression? It's not even an MMO where that strategy can be bearable on account of constant competition between players and the introduction of the next big dungeon.
D3 isn't that much different in scope than D2, but the bar has been raised since then. An RPG that lacks diversity, choices, and replayability, is going to be a major let down in this gamer's opinion. Especially when you compare D3 to even release-day WoW and all the progression paths and side-quests you had to choose from there.
IF you want to trade between cities, great, go online. But it shouldn't be a requirement. I can still put in SimCity 4 and play it today. Will I be able to play this in 10 years? Hell no. There's no way EA will keep their servers online that long. They should have followed the Cities XL model.
SimCity isn't an MMO. There's no reason to have to be online.
All this DRM is doing is giving the publisher the right to determine when you can no longer play. But hey, who can blame them? It's a great marketing strategy. Shut down the servers shortly after the sequel is released and they push people to spending more money. Modern publishers don't want to sell games a person can play for a decade.
Between always requiring a connection and the piece of crap that's "Origin", they're losing a lot of potential customers. I've played SimCity since the original (and minus "Societies") and have been waiting for this, but no. Hell no. They just had to do stupid things to screw this up, so they won't get my money.
They just don't understand how the world works. If someone is willing to pay for a game they'll pay for the game. If they aren't willing to pay they'll either pirate or play something else--either way there's no loss there to the publisher.
In the meantime people who were willing to pay might not because of all the BS DRM, Origin's TOS, and other bullshit moves they make.
The only games I'll ever buy that requires a constant connection to developer/publisher-run servers are MMOs. Otherwise you're not buying a game. You're renting it for however long it takes for them to shut their servers down, then you have nothing.
A "Beautiful Disaster" indeed. A beautiful looking game destroyed by EA's fixation on multiplayer (have fun playing when they shut down the servers) and the requirement of their Origin software (enjoy EA monitoring all the apps you run).
So I think every example game of every type, I've played at least one of. Minecraft, Portal, Mass Effect, Half-Life 2, World of Warcraft, even the more obscure X3 and EVE Online, I'm all over the board.
Rikaelus' comments