It’s wild how CBU3 dumped FF14 design straight into FF16 and decided it was good enough. MMO gameplay makes a lot of design compromises to accommodate for the multiplayer shared-state world, network latency, etc. None of which make sense for a single player offline experience.

At this point, Western gaming companies’ monetization schemes are becoming worse than gacha, so you may as well go play Genshin Impact ;-)

Half of this article’s word count seems to be the writer snarking about how he doesn’t care about these games and doesn’t know much about them. I guess it’s good to show contempt for your audience…

If AI really was such a game-changer, it would increase the chances of finding extraterrestrial aliens, not decrease it. If AI allows for superhuman feats of intellect and engineering, then even if 99.9% of all strong AI leads to the destruction of the original civilization, you’d only need the 0.1% of civilizations that develop stable benevolent civilization-boosting AI (let’s call them The Culture). Those would spread around, and we would have seen them. So we’re back at Fermi’s paradox.

since at least the 80s

People have been reliant on “ole’ techno-solutions” since the dawn of humanity 2 million years ago on the African savannah, long before capitalism was even a thing. Just sayin’.

This cloud-brightening stuff seems finicky compared to stratospheric aerosol injection. Clouds are hard for climate models to handle as it is, so it would be hard to predict the impact on climate change ahead of time. If you want to do geoengineering, this seems pretty far down on the list of alternatives.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

I find Pathfinder 2e (and D&D 3e before it) way clunkier. Maintaining a level-appropriate power level requires stacking buffs like the Overlord meme, and if you decline to do so, you’re just crippling your character. It’s bad enough that auto-buffing mods are considered mandatory for the Pathfinder CRPGs.

Lots of RPGs allow rest cheesing. Even if you don’t let players rest in random locations like BG3 does, the players can always hoof it back to town to rest. Attempts to prevent this kind of cheesing often end up feeling unduly punishing and un-fun. It’s not a tabletop vs computer issue.

DOS2 fights felt much more like a slog than BG3. Especially in higher difficulties, every battlefield ended up a nightmarish soup of elemental surfaces, which got old after awhile. I also found whittling down enemy toughness bars un-fun.

Personally, I liked both the BG3 and DOS1 systems better than DOS2.

Another high profile research group done in by bad photoshopping. I wonder how many frauds never get caught because they have decent photoshop skills.

I want to like Palworld, but I don’t know if I can support running existing Pokemon through a fusor and passing them off as ‘new’ IP

Imagine being morally outraged on behalf of a multibillion dollar corporate behemoth.

The bloodiness of the battles of the American Civil War is often remarked upon, including by contemporary commentators. So it’s nice that they emphasized that in the game.

The layoffs and budget cuts are symptoms, not cause. They’ve been terribly mismanaged for years – on the studio side, not EA – pissing away resources doing essentially nothing.

• Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, still the single best computer gaming representation of an epic D&D campaign, edging out even Baldur’s Gate 1-3 in my opinion.

• Ultima 7: an RPG built around the goal of immersing the player completely into the game world, eschewing any straightforward gameplay loops. If only the Ultima series had continued going strong, like the Elder Scrolls, rather than fizzling out with 8 and 9…

It’s amazing that CT never spawned an ongoing franchise. Aside from the controversial CC, there have been no other followups or even remakes, only a remaster. It’s like the platonic ideal of a JRPG, sitting alone and unsullied in the timestream.

Does it still present the classic UO experience where as soon as you walk five steps into the wilderness, PKs descend on you, kill you in a few hits, and take all your stuff?