1. The msrp is good, maybe too good, we just need to wait and see the actual prices and availability.

2. I dont care about frame generation but it might be a decent last resort for when the gpus are old. Having a small latency, some visual fuckery and a “playable” game is preferable over not being able to play the game.

3. The biggest advantage of dlss 4.0 is their new ray reconstruction(transformer model) that will improve image quality but this feature is coming out on older gpus too.

4. We need to wait for benchmarks. Any card can be good or bad, it just depends on its price and performance. If the 5070 is 20% faster than a 4070super but also costs 20% more, then it isnt really that relevant, is it? I expect we will see something like that.

But they did shut down the dota 2 gambling. I dont know why cs is different.

Valve cracked down on dota gambling many years ago and since then, i dont think it is a thing anymore. However, normal gambling(for dota games or conventional sports) is the primary sponsor of most dota tournaments/teams.

Yes but even with 25% VAT, it should have been 875 USD. And in other countries, it is 800€ (830 USD). Amazon.de sells it for 800€(sold by Amazon) and even delivers it to Sweden(for 15€). Amazon.se doesnt have the ps5 pro for some reason.

I think Sony was willing to take a small loss in Eurozone, so that it can have a nice round price(800€).

Meanwhile in Sweden, it is 944 USD.

Modern gacha games are more exploitative and effective. But there is a reason why almost all conventional games have “rpg elements” nowadays. I am an old gamer and i remember when this happened.

Game devs realized that if they have “number goes up” mechanics in their games, those games will be more popular and they will sell more. Thats how all games, including multiplayer competitive games, started adding temporary progression(session based, ie buying items between rounds in counterstrike) and then permanent progression(unlocking attachments and prestiging in call of duty).

Quake and unreal didnt have any progression, yet they were very popular multiplayer games. Many people blamed the lack of “parallel progression” systems in starcraft 2, for its failure(sc2 eventually added more parallel progression). Mechabellum, an autobattler(the modern equivalent of an rts), has like 3 different numbers that go up, on top of unlocking unit abilities and skins.

The mobile game market is very competitive and game development is extremely fast and iterative. So they leapfrogged ahead of conventional gaming when it comes to all kinds of user metric manipulation(addictiveness, engagement, etc). Dont hate the player, hate the game.

Funnily enough, the most popular mobile games atm are by Hoyoverse and they arent even that exploitative. They are AAA games, with decent story, graphics, gameplay and the gacha is just there for the more vulnerable/rich people. IMO playing them as f2p is not only viable but actually more enjoyable(ie challenging instead of rolfstomping everything).

If only there were more conventional games as a service that could pump the amount and quality of content that Hoyoverse creates for their games. But Hoyoverse is a private company, probably funded by the chinese government, so they can afford to reinvest all those billions back into the game development, unlike other games. And it shows.

So ultimately, gacha is kinda like real life gambling. I am kinda ok with it, as long as it isnt promoted and its profits go to a good place(funding education or creating decent games).

World of Warcraft and Diablo are gacha. Every time you play, you are “pulling” and hoping for a good drop(item). What modern gacha games did, is take that gameplay/psychological feature and directly monetize it(instead of indirectly monetizing it through a subscription/1 time payment).

But both are gambling. I am ok with having age restrictions but we need to be honest with ourselves. And what is “fun” is whatever makes neurons activate. Gambling(ie rpg elements) has always been a core mechanic for many games.

What keeps them engaged with Destiny 2 despite its apparent lack of a clear path forward?

There is no alternative. The First Descendant is p2w. Once Human has different structure and resets your progress every season. Warframe is pretty different and similar to First Descendant. Overwatch basically cancelled its pve. Darktide is clunky.

And none of these games have the polish and shooting satisfaction that Destiny has. If people want a pve game, with long term progression that has enjoyable shooting, Destiny is all there is. What keeps them playing? Copium.

Slowly but steadily Destiny will die. And thats when Marathon will come out. But Marathon is very different, so i am not even so sure that most Destiny players will migrate to that.

I am not even playing Destiny. Destiny is the game that i want to love so much but always shits on me, so i gave up. It seems to me that the easiest thing in the world, is to keep Destiny going and address its minor issues. But somehow Bungie doesnt think so.

With geforce now(and other similar cloud gaming services), you can play all kinds of AAA games in your browser, including diablo 4.

Normal memory isnt supposed to be 100% reliable. Thats why you have ECC memory, which is used on mission critical computers(servers). It’s more expensive and more reliable but normal memory is reliable enough for most consumer uses and cheaper, thats why it is the default.

Normal DDR5 modules have something like a “light ecc” function built in but there are actual DDR5 ECC modules that are obviously better.

PS Your motherboard needs to support ECC memory in order to use ECC memory modules.

1. Lego horizon Adventures looks neat, hopefully it has more depth than other lego games but i dont expect much. At least it looks pretty. Atm it isnt on steam, but it is announced that it will be.

2. I am very hyped for Space Marine 2. This might be the best warhammer 40k game ever.

3. I am optimistic for Star Wars Outlaws by the division devs(i liked division 1 and 2). But it isnt even on steam, so it will fail.

4. Civilization 7 is definitely one of the most anticipated games ever.

5. And hopefully Battle Aces will revive the rts genre.

Actually Halo Infinite might come out on ps5. Microsoft is publishing a lot of their games to Playstation atm. Sea of Thieves, Hi-fi rush, Grounded, Pentiment are all out on ps5.

Sea of Thieves was one of the big xbox exclusive games, developed by Rare, which is owned by Microsoft since 2002 and all the games they have made in the last 15+ years have been xbox exclusive.

It is free. But they can gather data, get you into their ecosystem, hopefully making it more likely you buy a playstation or other playstation published games. Eventually maybe they want to have cross progress between pc and playstation or have playstation achievements on pc, maybe their own steam like client.

Ultimately these countries are probably responsible for less than 5% of their total sales. Most of them are either tiny or poor or both. It does have countries like Egypt, Albania, Serbia, Morocco and Algeria but most of the banned countries are irrelevant in terms of sales.

They have inferior ray tracing performance for their price and fsr has inferior image quality/performance in comparison to dlss. Even intel’s xess is superior to fsr. And thats on top of amd cards using more power per frame rendered while offering extremely marginal rasterization performance/price improvement over nvidia.

So in the end, people would rather pay 10% more and get an nvidia card. And thats without taking into account the perceived brand value.

Amd gpus are in their bulldozer days. They need a zen like pump in their architecture or a significant price cut. People shit on nvidia for selling neutered overpriced cards but amd deliberately prices its own cards barely cheaper than nvidia’s.

Imagine if the 7800xt was 400€. We wouldnt be having this conversation. Are you telling me that amd’s margins are so narrow that they cant do that? Then either nvidia isnt scamming us or they have brilliantly created something that has lower cost than amd’s cards, while offering similar performance. I am not sure which scenario is better for AMD.

The 3 phones you linked from gsmarena vary A LOT in price. First you need to establish your budget. Zenfone 10 is basically last year’s flagship, though IMO the screen is too small to be usable for me.

The xiaomi redmi note 13 pro is one of the best value for money phones but it has a “value” soc(system on a chip), which is fine for most every day use but it isnt anywhere near current flagship levels of performance(less performance headroom for future apps). Xiaomi’s sub-brand “poco” has phones that offer insane soc but you are sacrificing some other niceties(cameras, etc). Poco f6(and f6 pro) are about to come out.

IMO Oneplus usually aint worth it. It is basically rebranded oppo phones, you might as well get a xiaomi. Budget oneplus phones offer mediocre value with slow soc. However, oneplus flagships from previous years can often be find on sale, in which case they might be worth it. Sony old flagships also can be found at steep discount.

Nothing phones are pretty but their value is low, especially in terms of performance.

IMO, if you dont mind buying a chinese android phone, with 2-3 years of support, xiaomi is usually the best option. Redmi note 13 pro is a good choice, poco x6 and especially x6 pro and upcoming poco f6/f6 pro are also great(if you really care about performance). I dont think i would recommend an expensive xiaomi phone because you can basically get a samsung flagship at that price.

I think the 7 year support offered to google and samsung current flagships is very important. Xiaomi phones reach end of life after 2 or 3 years. Which means that if there is a security hole discovered later on, they will remain unpatched. Considering the amount of banking and stuff people do with their phones nowadays, this point deserves consideration.

So while i have absolute confidence in the performance of xiaomi phones like poco x6 pro or poco f5(and newer) for the long term, the software support landscape has changed a lot this year. And the old norm of 2-3 years software support might not be cutting it anymore.

Also xiaomi has xda forum

https://xdaforums.com/c/xiaomi.12005/

PS Be careful with the snapdragon names. Poco f5 has snapdragon 7+ gen2, while poco x6 has snapdragon 7s gen2. The performance difference between these 2 almost identically named socs is immense. The upcoming snapdragon 8s gen3 is also nothing like snapdragon 8 gen3, it is basically an overclocked 7+ gen 3. Which is still amazing but not 8 gen3 amazing. The “s” stands for “slow”.

It is one of the most underrated games of all time IMO. It is what mass effect was for shooters, but for xcom style tactical games. It may not be for everyone but if you are in a mood for some marvel stuff and you like xcom, it is perfect.

There is A LOT of dialogue and while you can ignore some ambient dialogue, you cant skip direct dialogue. It is a “vibe” game and i think reviewers who are in a race to finish games, didnt like the vibe. But the characters and dialogue are surprisingly decent, marvel style stuff.

It is a very impressive game, in its artstyle and mechanics. You can see why they had high sales expectations. They have put a lot of thought and effort into it. And despite having cards, it feels less rng than xcom. Especially later on, you can manage rng better, you have more options.

I am not even a marvel fan, i think most of their movies are 6-7 out of 10 but i enjoyed learning about the characters and their in game renditions were fun(and moderately movie accurate). Xcom 2 is a top 10 game of all time for me. Midnight suns doesnt have the insane rng highs/lows and environmental spookiness(fog of war, etc) of xcom but midnight suns’ production values, characters and story might make it a better game.

PS You can have insane rng in midnight suns with pushing people off cliffs/into holes but thats a mechanic that i mostly avoided.

Geforce now is amazing. Much better image quality(video stream), on top of running on pc(so better graphics and fps). It is obviously more expensive(and doesnt come with any free games) but you do get what you pay for.

The microsoft cloud is “almost kinda working”/“this is neat” while geforce now “wow, i guess cloud gaming is the future”. Now if only nvidia could persuade sony and japanese devs to release their games on geforce now(though dragons dogma 2 was, which was surprising).

I have to note that sometimes, the loading times on geforce now can be long, this is not normal and varies. Sometimes load times are normal, sometimes are fucky. I think geforce now has become more popular lately and this has caused some issues. Also if a game is really cpu dependent(like dragons dogma 2), the geforce now cpus arent that great.

Another issue is that since games often use weird launchers and drm, this can cause issues. But eventually these issues are resolved.

God of War? Elder Ring? Baldur’s Gate? Spiderman? Last of Us? Super Mario? Zelda? Red Dead Redemption? Cyberpunk?

They just need to make a more interesting gameplay loop. The arena shooter genre is dead, even if this isnt an old school arena shooter, it is somewhat similar. People hate copycats but the reality is that some gameplay loops are better than others. Battle royales and loot extraction gameplay loops are more popular because they are more fun.

The control scheme and lack of coop are fundamental to the design and story telling of the game. The only game i have played that tells a story through actual gameplay. Playing it solo and with a controller are a must.