CIWS-30

You’re right, and I upvoted you, but one issue is that unless people buy AMD cards anyway, they’ll never have the research funds to ever match, much less beat Nvidia in the future. All things being equal (and they usually are for my needs) I tend to buy AMD over Nvidia to keep them in the race, so that GPU’s don’t turn into a monopoly. As it is, the duopoly we have now (excluding Intel, which I’m not sure will continue making consumer GPU’s in the long run) isn’t great for consumers right now.

The only reason AMD GPU’s are even as good as they are now is due to the research money they got from Ryzen taking the fight to Intel.

Only thing shocking about this is that it took this long. Any drone capable of carrying a weapon was going to get one. I mean, look at Ukraine right now. Consumer drones with soda bottle improvised explosives and cardboard drones. I can see a future where most warfare is drone vs drone, to see who can hit the other’s supply lines / storage first.

The way Russia’s turtling with illegal mines, drones are basically one of the only ways to attack without taking massive losses while also moving slowly and being sitting ducks for artillery.

Sad, because I was a fan of them and bought all their games from Saint’s Row 1 all the way to Gat out of Hell (although not in chronological order) and got Agents of Mayhem for free somewhere, but think they’ve made some bad moves lately.

I think it all started going downhill from Agents of Mayhem, and them screwing up with the reboot of Saint’s Row was probably the nail in the coffin. I wish they’d just made Saint’s Row 5 instead, with wacky time travel shenanigans and a more polished set of superpowers.

At the point where they decided to “reboot” to something old school and grittier (TOO old school, imo) they really didn’t get what their fanbase wanted, and what new players who’d only heard of and experienced Saint’s Row 4 would get excited about.

They could’ve probably taken Saint’s Row up to 6 entries if they’d just iterated on the formula from 4 and possibly Gat out of Hell (I wouldn’t know, I got distracted and didn’t play it after I bought it, ironically). Similar to how United Front Games (the developer of Sleeping Dogs) could’ve probably stayed in business if they’d just made Sleeping Dogs 2 instead of that horrible “free to play” multiplayer asset flip of some of the least interesting elements of Sleeping Dogs 1.

Not shocking, it’s Chicago after all. And it was 3 guys, and if it was reporters without security, they probably had valuable equipment to steal.

Yeah, in the 1920’s to boot. If B-movie (or nowadays just any movie studio) were on here, they’d take what you just wrote, add time travel to it and make it into a movie without giving you credit. And they’d probably find some way to use AI in it too.

Honestly, I mostly don’t agree with the term “Early Access”, if you’re charging money for it, it’s released. If people are paying to play it and it’s in an incomplete, buggy state, then they’re not only beta testing and co-developing a title, they’re PAYING to do so. They’re paying to work, which is even worse than working for free.

I don’t know many, if any games that are really worth doing this for (with exceptions like Larian Studios and Baldur’s Gate 3 and the Divinity Original Sin series) because most games honestly shouldn’t exist. There are way too many games and way too few people to play them. It’s similar to Movies, TV, and Music. Most of the creative media out there should not exist and have no customer base or interest.

They’re not made so people can enjoy them, they’re made because of the creators’ desire to make them. It leads to the atrocious workplace conditions and exploitative labor the entertainment industry at large has, and why it’s so difficult to unionize or get fair wages, hours, or treatment. Even with the actually good games, there’s way too many for people to actually finish in their lifetime. Now add the mediocre and bad games, and it’s exponentially more impossible.

Honestly, Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness was a bad movie (I’m glad I didn’t see it in theatres) but the worst part of it was how they betrayed the storyline of Wandavision, and the character growth and arc of Wanda herself.

Don’t they have a legal obligation to release this game due to financing they took which would force them to pay a huge penalty if they didn’t release it?

Don’t get me wrong, I think they could still salvage this into an okay game, I just don’t have my hopes up that it’ll be a good one.

Last Ubisoft game I bought was Far Cry 6, which was better than I thought it’d be, but it was still not great, and I dropped it after I finished the campaign. I feel like Ubisoft doesn’t know how to make original feeling games anymore. They stopped experimenting, and it shows.

Same. I stay away from #Explore and just keep to my feed of people I actually follow. And I make sure to unfollow those who are too stressful to hear from constantly.

I agree with almost all the of all politics all the time people who constantly post negative things, but it’s too tiring to read them, especially since knowing about it does me no good and I can’t do anything about it anyway. I already vote and donate as much as I can, and I live in a Blue state so anything outside of my area’s just not possible for me to influence.

I’ve found it’s better just to ignore it and focus on positive things that make my life better.

This is also why I stopped going to Mastodon. In addition to negative ragebait politics being almost the only thing that’s trending (and I have too much of that in my life already) there’s no real nuance or tolerance for anything outside the echo chamber.

You DO get called a racist nazi transphobe for stepping outside the box or trying to support people, ideas or places that might not be 100% perfect or pass the strictest ideological purity test. I thought Liberal Twitter was pretty exclusionary and echo-chamber-y, but Mastodon’s a lot worse.

I skimmed that article, but from what I remember, in 5th Edition you’re only limited to only one bonus action per turn. Meaning that stacking that many bonus actions is probably a bug rather than a feature.

Makes me think of the Privateer / Elite style X spaceship games, but that’s probably because of my personal bias towards games like that.

Everyone else would probably think Porn or the X-games first.

Given how modern AAA games are and Bethesda’s recent track history, it’s not negative to be skeptical, it’s smart.

Especially since despite Microsoft watching over them and helping them to have the most “bug free launch in history” it’s still probably going to be a hot mess for weeks to a month after launch. I want to be pleasantly surprised, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

Plus, the recent release of Baldur’s Gate 3 with no microtransactions or season passes, etc. has gotten peoples’ standards up, and given that Microsoft paid a lot of money to buy Bethesda, we’re aware that they’re going to have to make that money back somehow, and will probably give into the temptation to do some really player unfriendly things to do it.

Bethesda’s been going all in on surprisingly expensive microtransactions for really tiny amounts of content, like in Fallout 4 and 76, and it wouldn’t be shocking for them to continue in that direction. People aren’t being mindlessly negative, they’re looking at current and past trends and making an educated guess about the future.

This is why I just don’t buy during Steam Sales anymore unless I have the time and inclination to play. Now it’s Free Epic Games they give out every week that I don’t play. Except for Orwell this week. That was short and addictive. I DID play that to one ending. I’ll probably do one more playthrough (with a guide) and then stop.

I’ll probably transition my AMD 8350 build over to Linux when Win10 stops being supported. As opposed to my mom’s FX-8370 build, which I’ll probably just have to replace with a new Windows 11 system, as there’s no way I’m expecting her (an elderly woman) to learn anything other than Windows. Especially since she’s reliant on Windows-only apps.

The actual hardware she’s using will probably be converted to a Linux Desktop, but I’ll have to migrate her data to a new mini Windows 11 PC or something.

I’m actually surprised it isn’t available by default, as alternative control schemes like this in isometric RPG’s is as old as Neverwinter Nights 1 back in the early 2000’s.

Larian seems to have great attention to detail, so I wonder if they’ll add it in a patch.

Hope it’s better than the first one. It was too repetitive for me and the pacing was too slow. It spent too much time in Greece, and took way to long to get to Babylon and China Had some serious balance issues as well, to the point where I actually wondered why they allowed certain “class” combinations at all.

I hope this new game doesn’t force you to distribute stat points 1 at a time (almost no one wants to do that) and also allows for cheap or free respecs at any time. It gets boring using the same abilities all the time, no matter how optimal they are. Swapping builds and powers on the fly helps you feel like you’re playing a brand new game.

It’s a lesson that Blizzard learned with Diablo 3 and 4 and even World of Warcraft, which is why those games don’t force you to look up a guide before spending every single stat point, and also allow you to respec easily to try something new and keep you engaged.

Depends on how well written the evil route is. I think most people don’t like evil routes where you’re just a mustache twirling murderer, slaver, torturer, etc.

But if it’s written more like Breaking Bad where you’re doing desperate things for desperate reasons, and /or because of relatable character flaws, then they’re more into it. It’s rare that games actually have a story as deep and well written as Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul, where if you stop and think about it, the Protagonists are obviously the villains of the story, but nuanced portrayals of villainy are what work better, imo.

Someone mentioned Tyranny in this thread (which is basically Pillars of Eternity 1.5 in terms of gameplay) and while it’s not as compelling or as well written as Breaking Bad, it does have a story where you’re the “bad guy” but you don’t really have a choice in the matter. You’re doing bad things to prevent worse things from happening, and you have to do them or else worse things will happen to you.

What I like better than the “evil” route are where people do “good” things but it leads to a bad result, like in Fallout 3, where spoiler alert:

-------------Spoilers------------
You can negotiate to let Ghouls into Tenpenny Tower, only for the Ghouls to turn around and kill all the humans in there, because it turns out the Ghouls were racist against humans, and were total hypocrites.
-----------End Spoilers---------

Similar to a news story in real life I read recently, where a Taco Bell manager with a heart of gold hired the homeless guy sleeping behind the store, and allowed him to sleep in his house, only for the guy to constantly blow up and threaten his co-workers and then “repay” that act of kindness by shooting that manager dead. No good deed goes unpunished, as they say. It’s why I’m careful with my charity nowadays and prefer to let organized groups do it rather than reaching out directly. This is not the only story like this I’ve heard or read about.

I remember reading about how Kodak tried to block digital cameras (even its own) so as not to compromise their own film business, only to be caught unprepared later on when the digital camera revolution came anyway and then took massive losses.

It’s funny how they build the first.

I saw some trailers for this. The “sand surfing” movement looked interesting, but everything else looked just okay to me. If fun traversal is all this has, I’m not sure how well it’ll do. It also seemed like most of the environments were just deserts, and that can get old fast too.

Don’t get me wrong, I sure hope it does well and I’d love to be proven wrong, I’m just skeptical of a lot of new game releases nowadays.