They’re saying this is the introduction of the Elseworlds so it’s a joker but not the one from the previous games. Seems like a cheap way to justify skins and any other DLC they bolt on.

I grabbed Star Trek: Resurgence to fill the gap until Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and was surprised how much I enjoyed it. For those unfamiliar, it’s a Tell Tale- like narrative game where you switch between two characters as you’re presented with Star Trek style situations and moral quandaries.

It’s very firmly in that AA category and is a little rough in some areas, but I felt there was weight to some of my choices. There’s a decent amount of action and mini games that don’t feel too awful. A solid 7.5/10 for me.

I’m looking forward to trying Palworld based on the streams I’ve seen and will be playing Brotato on the side once it hits Game Pass.

The DuckDuckGo browser has this baked in as ‘Cookie Pop-up Protection’. It doesn’t quite get rid of them all, and doesn’t let you set a default for what you want (it’ll basically pick the most privacy-forward option) but I’ve found it works pretty well.

These are just a few random quotes I found with a minute of Googling but there are many more out there. I think people were expecting exceptional and had huge expectations because Bethesda and Microsoft were very much pushing the hype train a lot. They set up the game as one thing and what was delivered was a pale shadow of it. I agree you can’t expect for the success of Skyrim, but it was 100% presented to the world like it would be. There are many parts of the game that fall short of what Skyrim did 13 years ago and what other Bethesda RPGs were doing decades ago in terms of quest design and dialogue.

“We’ve always wanted to play the game we’re making and no-one else has quite pulled it off in what we’re doing. And we feel that once we started putting some pieces in place and playing parts of it, there’s something really… I don’t want to say too much but… pretty incredible there.”

“It’s very big, yeah. People are still playing Skyrim and we have learned from that. We spent more time building [Starfield] to be played for a long time, if you so chose that you just wanted to keep playing it. It’s got some more hooks in it for that, that we added later to a game like Skyrim… while still making sure that somebody who just wants to play it, and go through the main quests and “win”, or feel they’ve accomplished something large is doable.”

“And it has large scale goals and storytelling, but that minute-to-minute feels rewarding for you. And if you just want to pass the time and go watch the sunset and pick flowers it’s rewarding in that way too. The quiet moments feel really really good.”

Always listening is somewhat preferable to ‘Has such an accurate profile on you from the data that is available that these instances happen by pure coincidence’. That’s way scarier and just as intrusive. At least with a listening device you can get rid of it.

Sad thing is, it’s likely both.

For me, it was a lot of small moments that added up quickly. (By a few hours, I gave it at least 10 or so). One big one was I’d chosen the talent where you get a house on a planet but with a mortgage. I thought this would be a cool way to give me an economic incentive to explore more etc.

I get to New Atlantis and follow the quest for this and I find out the ‘mortgage’ has no penalties, isn’t paid in installments, and can only be purchased in a lump-sum. So, it was a talent that gave me the ability to purchase a house and be able to essentially rent it on a per day basis until the full amount was paid. When I finally do get there the house is empty, and not all that fun to be in. No special quests etc tied to it.

Another moment that soured it for me, and this is a minor quibble but again they added up, was visiting The Eye for the first time. There was this big pile of trash in a corridor used as the block to the door to prevent further exploration. It just entirely took me out of my immersion in what should have been an epic moment. So much so I actually took a screenshot of it at the time.

A lot of folks are likely happy to look past those things but they all added up + reviews from folks further along in the story and gameplay giving a bad impression made me move onto something new. Super happy other folks were able to find enjoyment, just wasn’t for me.

I also didn’t resonate with any of the companions to a degree where I found them actively annoying to be around. I know some would say ‘just don’t loot’ but their constant calling out people who like to loot was annoying too.

Whereas with Outer Worlds I immediately loved Pravati (and most of the other companions too). Starfield I felt like I was talking to puppets only there because I was playing the game. Outer Worlds I felt a connection to their stories as much as my own.

That said, many systems in Outer Worlds were underdeveloped and parts of the game felt empty. It was a game of high highs but also low lows. It did make me excited for the sequel to build on that foundation though.

Genuinely curious, but what systems did you feel added more substance to Starfield? Dialogue choices and completing quests in various ways really made Outer Worlds shine for me, particularly in the DLCs.

6.5/7 is fine if you’re not paying $70 for the base game. It might be worth it now the costs have come down, but paying a premium price for a mid game justifies some of the shit people gave it.

That said, I played on Game Pass, big fan of the genre, and could only make it a few hours in. Just wasn’t for me. But then I really enjoyed The Outer Worlds and people shit on that too.

Tbh most employees at a company this size become risk mitigation more than anything else. Once you’ve reached a certain level of success, you’re looking at what doesn’t move the needle as much as what makes it move positively. There could be a feature that is a major QoL improvement, but because in a test segment it performed 1% worse than base then it won’t be implemented.

Spotify, I believe, still works in the tribe and guild model that they created.

Chapter = people with the same skill set, squad = a group of people from different chapters focused on a single project, tribe = a group of squads focused on a large business goal, guild = a collective of folks who have a shared interest like Data Privacy.

Suffice to say, Agile is an imperfect tool and as you try to scale it, you need an increasing number of people to support it and make it run. Coders and Designers are likely just a fraction of their head count.

I’ve worked places that don’t have that support structure in place and they’ve stagnated for years struggling to get the most basic of decisions made. Decisions is what it is about too. Rarely do you get actual leadership from the c-level and especially from a CEO. So you end up with a lot of cooks trying to work out why the broth doesn’t taste quite right and lacking confidence to just add a bit of salt.

The largest owners are Advance Publications and Tencent. Advance also own Condé Nasty (Reddit even used to be under the Condé Nast banner). Weirdly they also own everyone’s favorite plagiarism detection service Turnitin.

Yeah. They could have gotten freaky with that corpse. Telling me Damage Control is out here chasing down Kamala when they could be after a celestial just chilling in the water lol. You know some villain going to try and eat it, get crazy powers. Some good guy has some wash up on their shore, gets crazy powers. So many opportunities left on the table.

The multiverse could have been so cool, but they went about it ass backwards. They introduce Kaang in a ‘quiet’ part of the overall story, where no one really has any stakes and we have little investment in anyone’s stories. Everyone is kinda doing their own things, mainly dealing with the aftermath of Endgame. Even Spider-Man, who we should be feeling protective of, decides to have a reset. We didn’t care about Kaang because we no long had an investment in any character.

Then we’re supposed to feel scared of Kaang? And then in >!Quantumania they straight up just strip him of all mystique to the point the end shot of that movie is just comical with the arena full of Kaang’s making the character have 0 remaining intrigue. !< Even had the stuff with Masters not happened they’d lost their chances to make it interesting. Paired with Skrull just not really resonating with the audience at all, it has been misstep after misstep.

!imo the only way you fix it now is have Doom come in the the F4, outright murder Kaang as the actual universal badass and then switch back to the personal less connected stories to tell a series of Invasion stories as the universe crumbles. Lead up to Fox-verse Vs MCU showdown. Then have a battleworld at the end of it and just reset the whole thing.!<

Basically, in trying to make a mainstream product they’ve ended up with something no one really cares about.

In my experience, even the consumer facing portion suffers from lack of innovation. Look at the big rounds of lay offs this year, fairly uniformly one of the hardest hit teams has been UX Research. If you’ve worked with a good researcher, you really know their value. But translating value that into hard metrics is tough. A lot of the time CEOs in the private sector will accept Good Enough & fast Vs moving at a reasonable pace.

I don’t think there would even be an appetite for hard research at most companies. Takes too long, too much of a risk, the boss’ cousin had a really cool idea instead…

Private sector is very good at operationalizing existing technology. Outside of the FAANGs(/MAMAAs) being good enough is too easy, or investing in research is considered to be too high an expense with no guarantee on return.

One QoL improvement I’ve not seen here is a better journal system. When I can’t further a quest line even something vague like ‘Continue your journey so learn more’ would be great. I have spent time on some quests hunting down a person to discover the quest can only be completed in the next act multiple times now.

I have. It’s pretty short and to the point. They’re based out of Germany so their requirements for clarity are pretty high by law. They go into quite a lot of detail about what is sent.

In this case they send date, time, language, processing time, number and the type of errors, but not the text itself

However, they do have an optional feature that uses OpenAI to rephrase sentences so that might be training through the back door.

I’ve been using it for years and have been very happy with the service.

I enjoyed what I played, and the choices felt like they could potentially be impactful in the future. Episode 1 is incredibly short, however. I explored a bunch, picked up most, if not all, the extra resources and it still clocked in at under an hour. Looking back, there were four main ‘scenes’ that actually contributed to any story.

Good start, but I really hope the future episodes are more substantial.

This is Charles Dickens syndrome (a term I just made up) but basically Dickens grew up 1810’s which was uncharacteristicly cold for Britain. Specifically, a lot more snowy than it had been for centuries. When he came to put the season into his stories, it was those seminal years that he wrote about. This then imprinted on our culture and the stories that came after it followed the theme. Anyone who lives in Britain can tell you, while we get some years that have a decent amount of snow, we get just as many that are wet and miserable.

People who believe ‘It was that hot when they were young’ likely remember one pivotal day or feeling warm but I doubt had any real concept of the actual temperature as a kid. What we’re seeing now is more regularity in the extremes. Yes, that day they remember may be imprinted on their minds for being extra hot, but then that becomes ‘It was this hot when we were young’.

Also, since the 60s life expectancy has got way longer. We’re living decades more than someone of that era, we’re extending the lifespans of the critically ill, and access to things like affordable housing have tanked making people live in less than ideal situations or a part of a much larger unhoused population than we’ve had for many years. All of these add up to extreme weather having an oversized impact.

It really annoys me when folks like that make blanket statements without realising we live in a very different world today. (Of course, there are some positives that advancements in technology and material science can bring to mitigate some of this).