Also there’s already a ton of depth on the game

I think I’m too jaded in this regard. Reading the wiki I don’t really see depth. Sure, there are activities with fun names, but they are all the same (you start the activity, you walk to finish it, you get random rewards). And all the items seem to be either for selling, basic crafting or just giving you a boost percentage for the activities you’re already doing.

What the activities are missing are risk/reward, decision making, surprises, etc. Or as you’d say in game design “meaningful choices”.

Sure, you have the choice on what skill you work on, but besides skill go up, items to make the activity faster and gold (not sure what it’s for, besides buying mats/items again?) that seems to be it.

I guess combat could help if there’s actual resource investment and risk there. Like are you going to tackle this level 10 monster for higher rewards, with more likelihood to either fail (or spend extra resources on healing potions or whatever)? Or play it save and go against weaker monsters? There should also be extra gold sinks to work for / use the money you accumulated, be it limited use items, cosmetics and so on. And of course ways to play the game differently from other players, like classes, masteries, skill trees or whatever (and no, clicking an activity that says “Sandcastle Building” vs clicking “Ship repair” aren’t really choices).

Just from someone who values gameplay a lot, I don’t see much difference in playing the game for an hour or 100 hours, in the end it keeps boiling down to the same actions with no depth attached. Personally I didn’t see the game value of it, compared to a step tracker (just that the step tracker doesn’t stop counting when it’s “full”, I didn’t like the step mechanic either where you get bonus steps only. If I’ve done my walking for the day I want to spend the steps, not select an activity and I get double steps for it next time I walk).

Ah yeah, I’m not a big mobile game fan and heavily play PC games. I just missed the draw of it, but had wrong expectations probably. In my head it was more of a sandbox combat game with gathering/crafting, so I kept trying to get to the actual game part :)

While I’m not motivated at all by just achievements or grinding for grinding sake (incremental games are a slight exception there, but progress is much faster / you do have some goals dangled in front of your face). You’re probably aiming more for a classic fitness tracker, but instead of step counts, graphs and so on you present it in game form. Which is valid, but just not what I was after.

As it gets brought up in this thread: When it came out I actually liked Pokemon GO, because the gameplay was interesting. Originally it only showed Pokemon near you and how far they are away (with 1, 2 or 3 foot steps). Which meant you wandered around and actually met people back in the city, grouped up to search or they knew where it was. That all got dumbed down until everyone was just sitting at the same spot and farming unfortunately :-/

I tried it out a while ago and didn’t mesh with it at all. Like the options I had was gather things, minor crafting and traveling. But zero goals or combat (as far as I could tell at the beginning). So after going around, gathering and crafting a bit I got bored and gave up.

Hell, I even traveled around to just find if there are any encounters or places with more happening and I didn’t find anything.

So it felt meaningless to grind with nothing to grind for.

There’s an easy mod to uncap fps, it works. There’s a mod for ultra wide, it works.

It’s not an engine limitation, you can already play like this with mods. But you can’t play online because of changing the files…

No ultrawide support, no DLSS, no removed fps cap, no precompiled shaders to remove the stutter, …

From makes good games, but when it comes to technology they either suck or are just lazy as hell.

The biggest joke is that ultrawide already renders the full screen width, they just put black bars on top to not give the player an advantage, lol.

No, it’s not. Most people, even in the US, can easily use the range. You don’t go to a cross country roadtrip every day.

You drive to work, go grocery shopping, drive home and that’s usually it. A range of 400km+ with new EVs is easily enough. Or do you drive to the gas station every 2 days with your current car?

And even if you go on a roadtrip, after driving for 4 hours you might want to take a break anyway.

You do realize there is no data available for the future? We aren’t there yet.

You do realize most people charge at home? It doesn’t matter how long it takes when the car is just sitting there (you’ll even save time compared to driving to the gas station).

Manufacturers also give 7+ years warranty on batteries by now, but even after 10 years a battery doesn’t just break, you only lose a few percent of range (if this wasn’t already calculated into the buffer, depends on the car).

You do know EV sales stall because of that, right?

In what fantasy world are you living? EVs just hit an all-times sales record last year. This is for the US, but it’s similar all over the world:

Right now I could buy an EV with 520km range for 36k€. It’s rapidly getting better.

Are we? There’s still plenty of space for solar and wind. Including large battery installations for cities. It doesn’t really feel like we’re hitting a limit there anytime soon.

Skyrim has only been out for 13 years. It’s not that old :)

The issue is that the mount is only available in this way. So if you want it you have to buy the “bundle”, making it a $65 purchase either way.

I got out of the cycle when I finally realized how many cheaters there are. Worthless to play an extraction shooter under those circumstances. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LfGcDB7Ek

What has that to do with this argument? The lay-offs in the last six months were mostly due to massive overhiring while money lending was cheap. Now interest rates are up and those companies are trying to keep their profits up (or become profitable in the first place).

And the thing is: They hired so many people, even with the lay-offs the headcount is still higher than it was a few years ago.

That’s simply not true, projects are usually done in stages. You got pre-production, production, testing, launch, post-production, …

So take an employee who mainly works in pre-production. Based on what you said they’d be laid off after everything is done and production starts, right? But that’s not how it works. Those people immediately start with the pre-production work of either the next project, or the DLCs for the current one.

There’s always more to do, after launch of a game you can’t have your developers sit around idle, you need the next project already prepared and ready to go. That’s why game DLCs sometimes release only months after launch, they have been worked on for a while.

Yep, even “efficiency” cores are a scam. They were forced to go that way because their current process simply can’t support all full cores without drawing 300W+ and taking too much space.

Cut down E-Cores aren’t even efficient power wise, just space efficient so they could fit them on the die.

Besides power consumption my trust for Intel is down the gutter with half a dozen security issues. Which were patched with performance degradation. So they fucked up, patched it in software, now your hardware runs slower than when you bought it.

Well, my new workplace selected it and paid for it, I just have to use it.

Personally I’d have gone with the AMD CPU, at home I rock a 5800X3D :)

Intel’s power consumption is off the charts unfortunately. Those e-cores didn’t help at all.

Absolutely not. I finally got a 4K 120hz OLED TV which needs a HDMI 2.1 cable. Ordered a certified one and I couldn’t get 120hz to run whatever way I tried. I managed to force it one time and the TV screen black screened every two seconds. After doing everything else (reinstall GPU drivers, messing with settings) I finally ordered a different HDMI cable.

Plugged it in, set 120hz, it worked. Both cables are certified, but one was trash.

Even with the new cable I sometimes get a short black screen now, but I have no clue if it’s the cable’s fault or the TV. HDMI cables are a total mess when you actually want to use the full bandwidth :-/

I switched to 4K 60hz for now as I don’t really game on the TV anyway, it also allows me to use TrueMotion again (which seemingly doesn’t run at 120hz). Either way I get anxious about HDMI cables now, lol.

ThinkPad for laptop (user repairability, third party parts, open schematics)

My fully decked out ThinkPad T16 Gen 1 I got for work last year is a piece of shit. Lenovo keeps messing up the BIOS (sometimes it took up to 2 minutes to reach the Windows loading screen), it sometimes has trouble with the Lenovo Monitor (which has a docking station with USB-C), or a colleague who had the same model it refused to charge.

Don’t get me started on thermals, that thing either sounds like a jet engine or throttles down to 1.4 GHz on a damn 6 core CPU. That’s partly Intel’s fault too of course (The AMD counterpart would likely run cooler/faster).

I always thought ThinkPads are awesome, now that I actually use a $3000 one I’d never buy one myself.

No exception was provided for this last time I looked through the subscriber agreement. I’m not real keen on reading through it again. Can you share the relevant portion?

Ah, it’s unfortunately not in the contract. They do it (See for example this answer where another family member got the account after their little brother died), but it looks like it’s not a guarantee.

As for the big red button at Valve, I can only find snippets of information. The only “official” one: https://imgur.com/4sa1Ln6 Most information is just from interviews or private messages, claiming there is an inner senior circle at Valve and they do have a contingency plan.

Well, physical media breaks, discs get scratched and you might no longer find the updates.

If you want to preserve your games nowadays your best option is buying from GOG and backing up your installers (it’s DRM free and with no launcher). But it’s a massive hassle compared to just using Steam and having auto updates. The GOG launcher that does updates for you exists, but it’s a bit meh.

Anything that’s delisted will, outside of piracy, die when the account holders die.

Not totally true, it’s allowed to bequeath your account to someone through your will. At least for your Steam account. Of course you have to take care to do that before you die…

Valve isn’t going broke anytime soon, they get around a 30% cut of every game sold and on top of that they also get a cut from all the steam market transactions. Valve is a privately owned company, which means no shareholders who want constant growth for any price, so for a company worth around 7.7 billion USD in 2022 I’m really not afraid Steam will go away anytime soon.

And even if Steam has to shut down, Gaben at least made the promise to give you downloads for all your purchased games. You can decide how much that’s worth.