Something I’ve kinda come to accept about Gearbox is that Pitchford is an ass and sometimes they farm out products when they shouldn’t (ACM bring the biggest example), but most of the devs actually working on the games really do care about the product and want it to be good.

The multi-player maybe. But they’ve consistently delivered excellent single-player experiences with their flagship titles. GTA 3, VC, SA, IV, and V were all amazing. RDR1 was spectacular, and RDR2 may be the most impressive game I’ve ever played.

At this point, I trust Tockstar to deliver a good single-player game. I don’t really expect much in the way of the quality DLC we got with GTAIV and RDR, but I think the base game will easily be enough for me to justify a purchase.

I’m still gonna wait and see, of course. They’re not getting a pre-order out of me.

Let’s say you design a revolutionary widget of some kind, but don’t have the means to to produce it at scale. How do you get it to market? You parter with a larger company. For a share of the proceeds, you have them produce the item. Without a patent, when you go to the manufacturer and show them the design, they can just start making it themselves and tell you to beat sand.

Also, patents require competitive companies to alter a product design in order to sell it. If everyone could just copy the same product, there would be further incentive to monopolize the means of production to produce the single product at a larger scale, since the only differentiation between products would be the price. Patents allow competition through limited-term protection of their innovations.

Is the patent system abused by large companies? Absolutely. But removing patents won’t make them.good actors. It’ll just remove any limitations on their theft.

I haven’t, and I really should. Like, REALLY should. I was college roommates with and took part in the wedding of someone high enough at Gearbox that I can’t say their role without doxxing myself, and we’ve stayed really close.

Yes. The out of left field had more to do with what was expected going in. We all expected silly D&D and fart jokes. We didn’t expect a legitimately touching examination of grief and denial to bring depth to a silly character.

BL2 was great. Some of its DLC was even better. Assault on Dragon Keep is one of the best looter shooters ever made. The gameplay was a blast. The jokes were funny…And out of left field it broke your fucking heart by secretly being about a young, traumatized girl’s grief.

I have trouble finding time to game these days. Easy modes let me experience the games more quickly. It’s not always the “best” way to experience a game, but I don’t have more than 1 or 2 hours a week on average to play games these days.

American here:

I’d appreciate help from the rest of the world.

Please embargo us. We need our economy to be in ruins next November, with Trump and his goons as the culprits. Heck - if you can fuck our economy by January, we may even be able to primary some current Republicans so thet Trump is fucked by the midterms no matter which party wins.

That’s so close it should’ve just announced the day it released and blown all our minds.

That tiger in SoM is so awful.

The alchemy system is really unique.

It’s also a very long campaign with several points that feel like they’re coming up on the ending, only for a lot more game and story to come afterward.

I never finished the 1st one because I found the complete lack of connection between the stories frustrating. I get that they wanted you to be able to play with any combination of the 8 characters, but the story suffered heavily.

It was just 8 separate games played at once with the same mechanics, and the lack of any real overarching story meant the narative scope of everything felt small.

And I don’t give cash to anonymous people online. I only use cash in-person for immediate services or products.

If it was used as an actual currency instead of an investment vehicle for speculators, that would help.

It also has zero protection from scams and fraud.

Americans can’t sign it, but the law would absolutely benefit American gamers.

If they have to do the legwork to leave the games in a playable state or pass it to the community, American gamers will be able to participate.

I am a scuba instructor and professional underwater photographer. I’m also obese.

Scuba is not a sport that makes one fit - especially as you get better at it and improve buoyancy skills to the point you aren’t even having to swim most of the time. When I dive, I’m essentially just existing underwater, not even supporting my own body weight.

You want to hear about a game to play?

Clair Obscur. Made from former Ubisoft team members in what sounds like a healthy development culture and it’s a godamnned masterpiece at every level. Visuals, art direction, story, characters, mechanics, music - it’s all stellar.

Buying studios wasn’t stupid.

Doing it and putting all their products on a subscription service is.

They know they’ve destroyed the planet, so why bother planning for a future they’ve already prevented.

And you can turn off some of the survival elements that some people find annoying. For instance, having to spend half your time early on hunting a specific type of fish for freshwater.

Windows was wildly popular prior to Doom. Doom for Windows 95 was a showcase for DirectX, not Windows.

Doom was on more systems than Windows 95, yes, but that’s a little misleading. First off, it was released several years before Window’s 95. Secondly, people upgraded computers less often back then, and Windows 95 wasn’t packaged with most systems and wasn’t distributed online. You had to actively decide to go to a store and buy it.

Third, the vast majority of Doom copies were the shareware version of the first campaign. It was tiny and free. People would bring their floppy to a friend’s house, or they’d post it on a bbs for download.

The port to Windows 95 was a technical showcase of the advantages of using DirectX. It showed that Windows had integrated features that could be used to enhance games with minimal development cost, and that games could be run without having to exit Windows to DOS, which was a huge hassle required for most games at the time.

Yeah, but they were also still making new standalone gaming boxes with a dedicated OS, and they didn’t have the Xbox division take the lead on game mode.

Linux and Mac gaming also weren’t a threat, and the solution to a bloated Windows installation was more horsepower, which was relatively cheap.

Now the market is completely changed. The Xbox Series S and X have had their lunch eaten by Playstion and Switch. Linux gaming is exploding because of the Steam Deck, while more-powerful Windows handhelds are performing worse with worse batteries than the Deck because of Windows bloat.

Mid-range GPUs cost more than an entire high-end gaming rig from 5 years ago, so high-end gaming PCs are rarer than ever.

Microsoft has to do something. And what they’ve chosen, for now, is to partner with Asus to launch a true Xbox-branded competitor to the Deck. To do that, they have to actually be competitive. There’s 2 keys to that. One is Gamepass, and the other is moving Windows out of the way of the game experience.

I think this time actually does have the potential to be different. They’re co-launching an Xbox-branded handheld PC designed to go head-to-head with the Steam Deck while downplaying the future of dedicated consoles.

Microsoft’s gaming division is going all-in on PC, so it matters more than ever.

I’m really curious to see what kind of performance gains the Xbox-mode or whatever they’re calling it is going to provide. I don’t know if it’ll reach SteamOS levels, but it does legitimately look like they’re taking the bloat’s hit on gaming seriously with the Xbox-branded ROG Ally.

The reality is that mostly people aren’t going to leave Windows, so if Valve and Linux force Windows to improve it’s still a win.

I miss Sierra.

Roger Wilco

Like it or not (I do not), the most important determining factor in American elections is people’s feelings about the economy. The horrors being done by our government are easy to turn a blind eye to. But the cost of living is something that can’t be avoided or suppressed.

Economic ruin is how we beat these motherfuckers.

As I’ve grown older and busier, I now prefer shorter games. Even when I intentionally try to play games, I may get 2-3 hours a week most weeks. A 100-hour campaign takes me a year to play through.

Looten Plunder is President of the United States.

They had word of mouth AND the difficulty of getting a film made and distributed. That meant very few movies existed. It’s easier to stand out in a small crowd.

Now anybody with a phone can film and distribute. Marketing is more important for getting your idea in front of people than anything else these days.

I know the source and the idiom. I just don’t know why it’s picked up in popularity recently.

I also don’t know why its use as an idiom doesn’t quite align with the story. It’s usually used to describe a situation where the threat of destruction isn’t random. For example, in the OP, the danger is the end of support for Win 10, not randomness.

I’ve been seeing it a lot more recently, too. IRL even.

Did it get used by sometime famous recently or something?

But at least that’s honest. They’re saying, “This is the real product” instead of “The real product is coming later if you give us money now.”

Until they shut it down, Buzzfeed News had become one of the better news organizations.

There’s a point in the third game that determines the fate of 2 different species that can play out very differently based upon actions you’ve made across the series. And the “best” version depends on your completing the loyalty quests of multiple characters in ME2 before a certain trigger point.

Mass Effect trilogy.

And without the fake frame bullshit they’re using to pad their numbers, its capabilities scale linearly with the 4090. The 5090 just has more cores, Ram, and power.

If the 4000-series had had cards with the memory and core count of the 5090, they’d be just as good as the 50-series.

It’s to make development easier.

With ray-tracing it becomes much easier to light environments in game. You don’t have to have devs adding artificial light sources or painting environments as of they’re lit.

Steam games are also 100% a license, and Steam has both removed the ability to download previously-purchased games and removed games from people’s libraries in the past.

And my main route to Steam AND Gamepass is my ROG Ally, since it’s basically a Deck that runs Windows, so it has greater game and marketplace compatibility.