For me, with the Switch 1, I was worried about wanting to play a game but oh no it’s back at home. Happened a bunch of times with my 3DS.

But then I bought a case that had card slots in it, and that concern wasn’t much of a concern anymore. Then the pandemic happened, and I never really left home anyway, which meant it mattered even less. So now I have a few digital games that are super annoying to share.

Maybe they could add a setting to automatically start up the game in the background after an update. Since shader compilation happens right at startup, that could get the job done.

I played BL2 at launch and don’t regret it. But I only just picked BL3 up again over the last couple of months. It wasn’t only the loading screen, but I will say I don’t think the writing shines quite as much as it did in BL2.

Thank you for that info! I do most of my PC gaming on a very underpowered Linux box. Gonna need to check that setting.

Maybe if there were any variation at all in the dance. Or a cycle of two or three different dances he goes through. Maybe give him a hat at random intervals. But no, just the same nonsense, over and over, for five minutes every time you start the game.

I honestly feel like it would be better if Steam would compile the shaders in the background after the download finishes and before it tells me that the game is ready to play. That seems like a thing they could totally do.

They could even precompile shaders for known setups (the Steam Deck, the last three generations of Nvidia and AMD, that sort of thing) and just add that to the download for people with those devices. It would improve the experience for a lot of people.

Woof. I want to play BL4, I’ve always been a huge fan of the series, but like…I distinctly remember BL3 and watching Claptrap do that stupid Vanna White thing across the screen for ages after every update. I kind of want that time back.

I don’t know, Valve is financially motivated to make every game they sell a hit. This isn’t like YouTube, where they want people to keep churning out content without remuneration; Valve only gets paid when video game companies sell their game.

And as a software engineer myself, I can totally see how this bug could’ve happened. There are so many ways, in fact; they released on 2024-12-12, maybe the bug was that they also released at 12:12, and some ancient code in the emailer got set up to treat any repeating string of four 12’s as a signal that this is only a test and shouldn’t actually be sent (probably in an attempt to diagnose and fix another bug), but that if statement was never removed from the codebase before it shipped.

Or maybe there’s a weird overflow error that happens when an email is supposed to go to exactly a certain number of customers. It’s kind of close to a number divisible by 64 (138,688); maybe it’s just sloppy binary unit choce?

Or maybe it was at the end of the email fanout for the day and the server crashed without warning, and lost some games without notifying anyone. That would only have to happen once a year over that decade and it would add up to all 100 games.

The point is, I don’t see any evidence of malice here, so I have to assume stupidity. Or at least a SWE going too quickly and not checking their work.

Probably not if you lived on Pandora.

I think he thinks he’s Jack in The Pre-Sequel, but really he’s Jack in Borderlands 2.

Sounds awesome. Does anyone know where I could find a decomp?

Bedrock Edition is fine. It’s basically at feature parity with Java now. The mod scene is almost non-existent, but for vanilla it’s fine. If that’s where your friends are playing, you’ll have a great time.

My math was assuming that most users do charge every night, and again during the day 2-3 times a month. 365 + (12x3) = 401. So it seems like we have both ends of standard usage. They’ve basically just said that this battery will only last one year of standard usage before they intentionally hobble it.

If that’s for safety reasons, they need to stop putting unsafe hardware into their handsets.

400 cycles? So, a year? One year.

Yeah, I guess that’s pretty subjective overall. In any case, they’re not so great now.

Ok, I’m not familiar enough with any of those to know what that means in this context. But in any case, weren’t his contributions to those games all ages ago? M&M in particular came out almost 30 years ago, right?

WotC was already pretty awful before the Hasbro acquisition, as I recall.

People have been complaining about WotC’s executive meddling in D&D and MTG for as long as I can remember, since before the 1999 Hasbro purchase. D&D 3e, mostly written after WotC acquired TSR but published shortly after Hasbro acquired WotC, was panned so badly that they dropped 3.5 just a couple years later. And 4e (including the first OGL fiasco) happened when Hasbro didn’t care about WotC because they were all-in on the Michael Bay Transformers movie. In fact, up until Stranger Things and Critical Role, Hasbro seems to have considered WotC the “Magic: The Gathering Money Printer” and done most of their meddling on that side of the house.

How much do we actually know about what Crawford is like outside of the WotC machine? He might be perfectly competent but held back by executive mismanagement.

There’s also a complete rehash of the Wikipedia article about the game, its release and reception, and maybe even a slideshow of memes before you get to the “No confirmation” part. And then a list of all the times the developers have said, “yeah, if they want to do another one, we’d take their money.”

Looking through their portfolio, I honestly don’t know how XDA and Android Police maintain their quality levels. Everything else is Taboola-level click farming junk.

Mass layoffs, though. That doesn’t usually presage a great time in a news site’s life.

Aftermath is the only gaming site I really pay attention to anymore. I still have Kotaku and PCGamer in my RSS reader, but I don’t really read any of their articles.

The best explanation I’ve heard is that Game Freak just flat out refuses to ever hire new people.

In college, circa 2005, I played about three hours of WoW during a free weekend. I installed the game (from a CD!), started it up, and played for an afternoon. When I got up to go to the bathroom, I realized that I was at a crossroads: I could either make this game my life for the next indeterminate number of years, or I could leave it behind forever. Those were literally the only two options for me. My brain would accept no third option.

I deleted the game and went out to get pizza. Since then I’ve never picked it up again, and now it’s so big and unwieldy I’m not even tempted anymore. But that was a touch and go situation for those few hours.

A few games have given me similar pulls over the years, but I’ve gotten better about it. Balatro is the most recent one to grab me, since I got it only when it came to mobile. And yeah, it grabbed me pretty hard, but I also know that once I unlock all the Jokers I’m unlikely to go much further in it.

Addictive, yes, but non-extractive. There’s a big huge difference.

• Digital Wellbeing. Enforce the decisions you made about app usage. Honestly it’s kinda saved my sanity, particularly this year.

• Scheduled text messages. This should be in every single messaging app. I schedule reminders for other people, I schedule messages that I think of at ridiculous hours to go out at reasonable times, I even schedule messages so that sometime else reminds me to do something.

Yeah, well, losing two console generations in a row will do that.

You can definitely swipe up on a notification to make it go away without dismissing it.

Honestly, just make this habit: whenever you see a non-actionable notification, before you swipe it away, long press it and hit “turn off notifications.” Then you can go through that app’s list and choose the ones you need—or turn the app’s notification off completely!

For ones you want to show up, but don’t want interrupting you, switch their delivery to Silent and Minimized.

Be ruthless with your notifications. You’ll feel a lot better.

WebKit is really only available on Apple devices in any meaningful way.

I mean, they can rein them in or not. I really don’t care either way, because I’m going to leave most of them off anyway. I turn off the obvious ads, of course, but almost everything else too. Basically, unless it’s something that I can take direct action on or someone I know who is intentionally trying to contact me, it doesn’t get a notification.

That’s…remarkable.

I’m not saying that would be a better experience for players, just that if they wanted it to succeed they should probably have done more marketing.

I’m not entirely oblivious to gaming news, but the literal first I had ever heard of this game was when they announced that it was being shut down. Methinks after eight years of development it could’ve had a few more dollars tossed into the marketing budget.

I think it might have better QOL features, but honestly the gameplay loop in BL2 is better. And I think the engine might be more robust, too.

A couple! “Peer Review” and “Perpetual Testing Initiative.” Both free.

Borderlands 2 is such a good game that one of its DLCs (Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep) is also one of the best games ever made, in its own right.

Man. 2010-2015 were some STRONG years in gaming. Portal 2 and its DLCs, Borderlands 2 and its DLCs, Skyrim, Shadow of Mordor, Hearthstone, The Last Of Us, Pokemon X & Y…

Edit: this comment appears to have lost its parent, so now it just seems like a non sequitur, but you folks are smart.

You’re not wrong. But “joy” isn’t exactly fungible, so it’s not really an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Actually, I want to go even further and say that I think his work actually is worth quite a bit. Not that he is worth that much, or others aren’t (again, I don’t know him), but he has given millions of people hours upon hours of enjoyment, and that’s nothing to shake a stick at.

And what he’s doing with it is also important. I haven’t heard of him dumping millions into Trump’s campaign or the Proud Boys or whatever.

And honestly, even if he did, my real respect is for the work that he did and the business model he used, not for him as a person. I don’t know him at all. I don’t even know his real name. I just meant that this way of doing software professionally should be more common.