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Exactly this. I started playing from the blue box back in the late 70s or very early 80s, and I have always been a huge fan of RPGs since. I got into it because I was really into fantasy novels (picked up the addiction from my mom), and those little lead figures of orcs and skeletons with swords were irresistible to me. I even had drinks with Gygax during a con at one point and we talked about the game and his hopes and vision for it all night.
I wasn’t particularly happy when WotC took over the IP. Companies like TSR and White Wolf just brought so much passion to the games they wrote and you never got the sense of there being corporate bullshit. I never met Richard Garriott, but I got the same vibe from the Ultima games.
Anyway, yes, the problem is the corporatization of what’s essentially art (for want of a better word). Yes, of course the content creators want and need to get paid, but I’d much rather have a grey beard hippie looking guy who says “You know what would be really cool?” than some American Psycho looking guy trying to milk another couple of million bucks out of a franchise by including products like Coca Cola in tavern menus.
I really don’t get to play much anymore, but it’s always a little disheartening to watch this kind of thing happen.
I have been more excited about this game coming out than any other one in recent memory. The first game, while not being a great technological achievement, captured the vibe of the ttrpg really well and it’s one of only a handful of games that I not only completed but did so multiple times. The haunted hotel to this day remains the scariest game component I’ve played, and I’m a regular player of horror games.
I was so disappointed when they bogged down and went into development hell. I finally wrote them off because I’ve seen that happen enough times that I figured they just would never ship.
I was excited by the news that another company was taking it over, but the game narrative changed so dramatically that it’s really turned me off. I’ll do a wait and see on it once the reviews start coming out, I suppose, but it’s not something I’m excited about anymore.
Okay - I’m a manager at a FAANG.
Most of the immigration issues we deal with are handled by HE or a company we outsource to - I have some direct involvement in terms of writing out roles and duties, but generally they keep us away from the actual mechanics of things. However, for us, it’s handled at the company level. I know that they’ve tightened up on the perm residency and H1Bs, but I think it’s something your employer should be solving, not you.
Second, things are tough all over these days, but the gaming industry as an industry has always had a terrible reputation for long hours and (comparatively) low pay. The attitude seems to be to get in younger people and burn them out. I’m very sympathetic to your desire to make a move.
The best thing you can do is find someone who can write you a recommendation for an open position at their company, but as you know you’ll have to take your immigration status into account. All of the companies I’m familiar with don’t take immigration status into account when hiring - it’s specifically forbidden by policy - but if you have to grit your teeth and deal with your current position for another six months or whatever, it’s probably better than starting from scratch.
If they work on the steam deck, I’m going for it. University lan parties in the computer labs with smuggled in beers while playing Warcraft were fantastic.
That is, until they figured out that the one winning strategy was to play Orcs and get blood ogres asap, then just swarm with them. After that, the entire game hinged on the fastest clicks and where you landed for your starting base.
It’s been way too long since I played D1 to give specific advice, but as a general rule you absolutely cannot spec as a generalist, especially in older games. Instead (and forgive me if I get any of these details wrong, it’s the general idea that I’m going for) you want to go pretty much all in on a strategy like Whirlwind with both talents and gear.
Also just to mention - you can pick up a franchise like Diablo pretty much anywhere. I loved D1 when it came out, and the same with D2, but anything I still get out of them is nostalgia. I enjoy D3 and haven’t yet picked up D4, but I will once the game starts to settle down on the steam deck or switch. In any case, although there’s sort of a plot line that ties them all together, it’s not like reading Return o the King without having read Fellowship. Like Elder Scrolls, they’re stand alone games where you get some lore tie-in but it’s not necessary for enjoyment at all.
I’m pointing that out because class/spec balance issues have been mostly sorted out by now. You can dial in the level of twitch-click challenge based on game settings, but my jam has always been exploration and discovery rather than figuring out the exact sequence of key taps to kill a boss.
It has been absolutely forever since I played D1, but I seem to remember devs saying that it can be completed by any class.
I don’t remember if there’s a respec option built into the game or available as a cheat, but how you spec really changes your capabilities in dealing with swarms or single bosses. I want to say I finished D1 woth most if not all the classes, but 1 and 2 are now fused in my mind so I really couldn’t say what a game breaking build or strategy is. I do know that if you do a bad build, it can catch up with you but it can be towards the endgame when you finally notice it.
Morrowind was like that too.
Honestly, it’s even stupider than that. Everyone who works for me or that o work with is a professional making 6 figures, ranging into the mid-six range. They’re great at their jobs, and prior to Covid we had all kinds of flexibility for who worked where. Now it’s a one size fits all, and I’d honestly be shocked if the company wasn’t losing more money in policing and attrition than it was gaining in some hypothetical bonus of being in the office.
The only problem I’ve run into is my own muscle memory difference between the switch and deck layouts. The way they’ve done the radial menus, and especially the turn-based combat, make controller confusion much less of a factor. My thumb still gets confused between A and B more than. anything else, but BG is very forgiving.
As a point of reference Cyberpunk to be pretty tough in the real time parts. Stray is a bit more forgiving and had been my most played deck game before BG.
I can already tell I’m going to play this one through the end though.
For anyone else who is wondering - the game works great on the steam deck. I actually prefer it over my macbook pro because it’s easier to read the screen. I’ve gotten hours logged into the game so far.
It is a perfect update of the franchise. The storylines and writing are top notch, and the technology is blowing me away with how they managed to update everything while keeping the feel.
I’d like to find this out too. My main computer is a Mac, so I will likely just buy it and try it out on there, but I hope it works cleanly on the deck.
I read just a couple of days ago that they’re committed to supporting the deck, but as of now I don’t see the supported icon.
I have had issues with some “works great” games - cyberpunk in particular has an issue with things like text size so I’ll try it with the deck hooked to a monitor and with a keyboard and mouse - but I’m hoping that BG3 will work out of the gate,l (so to speak).
I think Nintendo knows it’s market pretty well. I have both a switch and a steam deck andO have a lot of the same games on each. The deck is obviously the higher power unit. I got it just a short time ago to try to play through my backlog, although to be honest I’ve logged more hours on new purchases like Stray and Dredge. It’s a good system.
The switch outshines it in a couple of places, though. First, they got the form factor - specifically the size and weight - better than steam did. It’s smaller and lighter, and I think the battery lasts longer. More importantly, the games that run on the switch were made for it. There’s no squinting at tiny fonts or trying to figure whether and how to use the trackpad to control the mouse bits. If it’s on the switch, I can be pretty sure it is playable on the switch. I’m still getting used to the issues with scaling down the desktop experience to a deck, but already I’m thinking I won’t be playing a lot of cyberpunk without booking up a mouse, keyboard, and monitor.
In short, the deck and windows handhelds need to perform at the level of a (low end) desktop (because they’re playing desktop games) as well as worry about scaling and transforming the UI. The switch doesn’t have that problem, and the trade off is a more limited (but still extensive) library.
The switch is my first Nintendo device since the NES, and the first party content isn’t what made me finally try it. I like playing games like Diablo on it. I think Nintendo, by owning the entire stack, can serve up a better and more curated experience. If I didn’t have a library of a couple hundred steam games that I’ve never played, I’d probably not have considered getting the deck. I am enjoying it, and some games are phenomenal, but from a performance-that-actually-impacts-the-user perspective, Nintendo might just come out on top.
Apple had to go through a tremendous amount of engineering effort, custom hardware development, and testing to get FaceID to work reliably. This sounds like a software-based system that uses a user’s camera. I’m also not exactly certain what these steps mean without making a lot of assumptions.
The user takes a photo of themselves
Okay? MS had developed an age estimator a decade or so ago. They put up a guess-my-age website that you could upload photographs to. It was relatively accurate (at least in my testing)in that it scored consistently and was usually within a few years of the right answer. I’m sure they’re better now.
The system then checks if there’s a live human face in the frame
So it’s looking at a live video? What’s the picture for, then? Does it confirm the picture is the same person as in the video, in which case why would someone have to upload a picture?
The image is then uploaded to Yoti’s backend server for estimation
Again, fine. Privacy concerns aside, that’s what we’d expect.
But out of gaming devices, how many have a video camera? Obviously phones and tablets do, as do most laptops, but neither my switch nor my steam deck have one, nor does my recently retired gaming pc. Am I su even if I’m playing on another device? Am I going to have to periodically re-authenticate?
I’m not even talking about spoofing here, which given the ubiquity of filters for phone cameras would be trivial.
This strikes me as someone’s project that was sold to management as a good idea and which now needs to find an application.
I’m also going to make the very safe assumption that despite their claims, their real world performance across ethnicities is not going to match up with their confident statements in their application. That’s been a pretty constant issue with this sort of application. They make the same claim about police facial recognition databases despite being repeatedly proven wrong.
The proposal also said, “To the extent that there is any risk, it is easily outweighed by the benefits to consumers and businesses of using this [Facial Age Estimation] method.”
I really, really want to know what the actual harm being prevented is supposed to be such that it outweighs any other concerns. I don’t mean that some ten year old might play Cyberpunk. I mean actual research showing a quantified harm associated with it, along with harm reduction realized by implementing a parental-permission based age verification system.
I clicked thinking it was an Elon Musk thing…