No thanks; I’m good. Still feeling the sting over buying my 4080 Super last spring. Also it’s doing me just fine for my work and for games.

Good on them! Hell yeah.

Considering the amount of gambling, exploitative practices, dark patterns, etc that exists in modern live-service games - saying that comes across as rather disingenuous.

It is good to hear this particular live-service game is bucking some of the recent trends, but I think it is safe to say these types of games, in general, have done damage to the industry and the wallets and minds of players. Enjoy yourselves, but be cautious and don’t let your guard down because these companies will screw you if they think they can. We have seen it so many times.

Nah, fuck them. They thought they could get away with this predatory debt-trap system that was marketed at children and they are clearly salty that they got caught. Not to mention the whole idea of not even owning your own PC or the data within which would set a bad precedent for everyone everywhere.

There are so many competitors in the industry NZXT operates in; it would be very easy to avoid ever buying their stuff again. And I intend to do just that. Get bankrupted, you pieces of shit.

And they are using paid influencers to promote said debt trap to those that don’t know any better, particularly children.

Probably the most insidious part of this to me. Seeing those clips of “influencers” pushing the idea of convincing your parents to get you a rental PC. Disgusting.

Elite: Dangerous, Tiny Glade, BG3

Thankfully there is a very simple, no-effort solution to this: Don’t play their trash.

I already don’t play their excruciatingly mediocre games and this just reinforces my avoidance is justified.

Also good gods they’ve been milking this tired franchise for almost 2 decades now.

Prostagma?

Same. I’m still pissed that 2020 was left in the state it is in with tons of its own bugs and missing features that were promised. I remember talking to a friend and saying that MSFS2020 was a cool flight sim but still had the vibe of an early-access game at times… and then they drop an announcement for 2024.

Turns out that a massive Earth-scale game that requires streaming of gigabytes worth of data every play session for each user and has next to no local storage is a really awful idea.

X-plane 12 is looking better and better.

It was barely even alive for it to die in the first place 👀

Agreed. TES just hasn’t had good world design and lore since Morrowind. If I remember correctly, he also wrote much of the books in the TES universe which are still used in Skyrim.

ESO might be an exception. I don’t think it has the best writing but it does have much more interesting lore and world design than Oblivion and Skyrim.

Agreed. Modding doesn’t “fix” Skyrim either. It adds surface-level content and tweaks but the fundamental bones of the game are still there and they are heavily flawed. One of the few exceptions I can think of are things like Skywind but that’s only because it removes Skyrim’s story entirely, overhauls many of its mechanics, and uses the world/lore/story of one of Bethesda’s better games.

And in the case of Starfield - it’s entirely beyond salvaging with mods. Mods will not be able to fix the biggest problems with that game because they are literally the very way the game was made. To fix them would require basically remaking the entire game from scratch.

They can take as long as they want. After Starfield, I have zero confidence that TES6 will be any good. Bethesda has some serious issues they need to sort out with their production pipelines and methodology and they need to rethink how they approach story-driven open world experiences.

Every time I see a Starfield video and see the camera turbozoom in on a character as they deliver a forced, robotic line with terrifying facial animations - I get teleported right back to 2006. It is very obvious this studio does not know what they are doing and has learned little from their previous releases and from other contemporary games.

Reminder to never believe a damn word that comes out of this man’s mouth. https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/

Amount of people surprised by this:

Reminder #891,814 to stop using Chrome and Chromium browsers and to stop supporting Google’s web monopoly.

With all the studio buyouts, closures, layoffs, etc to pile on top of all the usual greedy macrotransaction crap - it’s really hard to give a shit about games right now. Seriously, the only upcoming game I’m even remotely interested in is Tiny Glade.

I wish I could make useless trash and be given unfathomable amounts of money by infinitely gullible investors.

In this day and age, a bunch of processor and camera specs does nothing for me. I want to see what they plan to do with the UI and OS as a whole. Will it just be a lazy Android skin or will they go the extra mile and make it look and feel like a Windows phone of old?

Potentially yes as at least the Bethesda NPC will say lore-accurate lines.

Or line.

For basic behaviour and pathfinding, yes. But aesthetics, outfits, dialogue, backgrounds, etc etc was all made by humans. The reason why NPC’s can feel so immersive and part of the worlds they exist in is because they’re made and written by the same people that made the rest of the game.

NPC’s with awkward AI-gen voicelines spouting hallucinated nonsense that has nothing to do with the game or the player’s actions is going to be an absolute dumpster fire.

The important part that you should know (and should already be using):

Remember, you can always opt out of sending any technical or usage data to Firefox. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to adjust your settings.

W11 is such a great example of how out-of-touch Microsoft’s management and shareholders are. Its market share is tiny compared to W10 and is actively decreasing and they think pulling stunts like this is going to be beneficial in some way. Like even if you follow the usual routine of enshittification, they’ve missed the entire part where they expand their userbase first before making things worse.

MS needs a leadership shakeup so badly.

I am so very tired of every company nonsensically shoehorning “AI” into their software to appease shareholders and investors. Discord shut down their AI chatbot in less than a year – take notes from that.

I usually get around 1 spam call per day, but sometimes I can get as much as 12 per day. I legitimately wonder why I even have a phone plan at this point and I know I’m not the only one who has considered that.

Nearly every single major tech company will monitor and record every single interaction you have with any of their services and products now. Just do a Google data takeout and see just what kind of data they keep on you.

This is the norm now and everyone should be aware of this and expect it and more of it.

I completely trust them to handle this with responsibility, integrity, and honesty. Just like how I trust them to handle the ever-growing mass of trash, scams, fraud, fakes, etc that are completely choking the life out of their platform.

Oh wait.