it’s hard to get a permanent teaching position in China, i’m sure shipping “qualified” teachers to teach the kids XJT won’t be very difficult. Not dystopian at all…

Napoleon was held in British custody.

You could buy any Asus gaming mouse with user replaceable switches and order a bag of Huano silent switches from AE. (if the noise increases or the switch dies just replace the switc+h)

This is not a cheap option, but could potentially endure for a longer time.

Please stick to one metric system within one post :S

I don’t understand what mother would leave their baby behind while panicking. This is a horrible story that is perhaps more horrible that initially assumed.

That will take a long time, right now analyzing one person’s DNA to a point where an insurance company could profit from it costs way more than the extra profits from denying some potentially short-lived clients.

(or an AI based analyzer is already in the works)

Mandatory, It’s Aliens right?

I dislike this.

. The only way you’re going to reasonably-reliably do anti-cheat stuff is going to be to have a trusted system, where the player can’t do anything to their system.

Even then there are possible options. (hdmi splitter etc)

While I know they just wanted to shit on Starfield, but at least I like how they’ve put Oblivion & Morrowind at the top, because I agree those two are by far the best on this list.

As for Starfield, It’s basically Skyrim in space. To me most of the criticisms Starfield gets outside of the -to me- irrelevant technicalities (loading screens, performance) apply to Skyrim as well. I played Skyrim at release and I was super disappointed, now playing Starfield felt largely the same, but a wee bit better. I don’t think the whole RPG progression system makes sense in a scifi rpg shooter, so that part is worse than Skyrim obviously, but at the same time the planets & various biomes make open world exploration more fun to me, though the main story is equally bad & there are a lot of immersion breaking things that make no sense “in space”. For example I love the digipick minigame, but it’s immersion breaking as f. (and then there is that part where I just joined a serious intergalactic organization & after like 1-2 missions they sent me on a diplomatic quest to decide the fate of the galaxy, basically)

Classic WoW exists & you could play Vanilla again if you wanted do. However that’s not really what I’m talking about. For me peak WoW was Legion and Pandaria probably and I still somewhat liked Cataclysm up until the final patch at least.

What is happening now is that if you have no interest in Mythic raiding or Myhtic+ timed dungeons, then there is barely anything else. The cash shop is also increasingly ruining everything, there is also how thanks to WoW tokens my brain just won’t allow me to casually buy something expensive on the AH anymore since gold has a tangible real $ value & then there is the abomination called the Trading Post.

The only Activision game I care about is WoW, but the game changed so much in a niche hardcore direction that even with Microsoft owning them, my hope is very limited about the game, probably I’ll never play again.

The problem is not capitalism, but rather venture capitalism.

Buffer zones are a very trendy topic these days, that’s what I expect they’ll go for before the dust settles.

Given enough exposure to propaganda you can get the working masses to believe whatever you want.

I’ve seen this first hand in Hungary. 20 years ago everyone was pro EU. Kids such as myself were dreaming about eventually becoming part of the US of Europe & while that was never realistic, the adults were also hoping for a better future in the EU. Before Covid we finally -kind of- got that better future, things have improved tremendously, but slowly over time propaganda completely turned the public opinion around. I’m convinced most people really don’t like thinking on their own about issues… Now even my 10-12 year old nephews know & believe that Brussels is the worst city on Earth with all the people being certifiably insane there. These days whenever I hear people talk politics It always starts with ‘EU bad’… (Though I too am reluctant to talk about my views openly nowadays, so no chance of anyone hearing that)

Perhaps Taiwan or even the US should invest more in more targeted western propaganda to counteract the Chinese influence, but this just sounds horrible, I effin hate propaganda.

Imagine if people could buy a background music only -subtitle dialog- edition of Baldur’s Gate 3 for €40. How would the sale distribution go? I think this is a rather interesting thought experiment, I would personally opt to buy the cheaper version for sure, even though I do know the voice acting in BG3 is a landmark in gaming.

I played Morrowind, Oblivion & Skyrim at release. Compared to Starfield they were far more polished to me. Yes crashes & the odd broken quest happened, but overall they were playable, people without an internet connection could buy the games in a shop & then finish them. Also Oblivion had the best graphics for an open world rpg when it came out, while also running pretty well on the shit tier GPUs of the time. In my mind, Starfield is not pretty on ultra, runs like shit on decent hardware even at relatively low settings and the list of broken things is endless.

So far Bethesda is the only company that is clearly cutting the corners of their AAA products.

Starfield is the sloppiest Bethasda game ever, cutting corners to save cost is not how I would describe its development at all.

I agree with what you are saying though. Spending 40% of the budget on voice acting and cinematographic dialog is extremely wasteful. As long as the gameplay is good and graphics are pretty gamers will like the product.

studios targeting genres other than open world action-rpg.

With the corporate culture that’s developed in the industry I don’t think anyone should want that. Indie has the small project space covered & they make far better games than EA or Activision ever could in those genres. Corporate sellouts cannot beat passion, but they can make games so large in scope that small studios just cannot compete with that.

In a good rpg, having a couple of these is fine, but in my opinion in Baldur’s Gate 3 these intentionally undecipherable decisions are overabundant. I’m not saying BG3 is bad, in fact many and perhaps most things are absolutely incredible. I just feel that that presented choice options & some parts of the big plot could have been done better.