Live service doesn’t need to be shit.

There could have been games where there was just a brilliant idea for a game that keeps having engaging content on an ongoing basis with passionate devs.

But live service so an exec could check a box for their quarterly shareholder call was always going to be DOA.

Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.

From the linked article:

It is understood at least two Danish women in their 20s have died, and at least 10 have fallen ill after drinking the tainted alcohol.

A statement from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs can confirm that two Danish citizens have passed away in Laos. For reasons of confidentiality in personal matters the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has no further comments.”

‘Nobody’ says anything about anything if you don’t bother to read anything they have to say.

In many cases yes (though I’ve been in good ones when playing off and on, usually the smaller the more there’s actual group activities).

But they are essential to be a part of for blueprints and trading, which are very core parts of the game.

You’ll almost always end up doing missions with other people other than when you intentionally want to do certain tasks solo.

A lot of the game is built around guilds and player to player interactions.

PvP sucks and it’s almost all PvE content vs Destiny though.

Let there be this kind of light in these dark times.

The DLC is really the right balance for FromSoft.

The zones in the base game are slightly too big.

In the DLC, it’s still open world and extremely flexible in how you explore it, but there’s less wasted space.

It’s very tightly knit and the pacing is better as a result.

It’s like Elden Ring was watching masters of their craft cut their teeth on something new, and then the DLC was them applying everything they learned in that process.

Can’t wait for their next game in that same vein (especially not held back by last gen consoles).

Part of the problem with this approach is that prediction engines are predicted on the idea that there’s more of a thing to predict.

So unless they really, really go out of their way with modeling the records to account for this, they’ll have a system very strongly biased towards predicting more criminal behavior for everyone fed into it.

I hate that the Smithscript weapons can’t be buffed.

Especially for the daggers.

Wanted to pew pew little bolts of lightning buffed daggers doing an additional 200+ damage per hit. 😢

No, it was awesome. Went to like 12 over the years. Early 2000s was peak E3.

So far. But the thing with viruses is they are susceptible to mutations.

We’re already seeing it jump across several mammalian lines. Probably only a matter of time.

The thing about disease is that it spreads.

There are people today dealing with serious complications of COVID even years later who were infected by stupid people doing stupid selfish things.

Everyone suffers if morons become willing petri dishes.

Probably added after that update.

The new items stuff in particular seems like QoL considerations for “we just added a hundred items to the game for players coming back to it after months away.”

I don’t think Jesus ever existed. Show me 12 guys that experience something absolutely world changing, and none of them write anything about it for decades and then tell me they were factually motivated. This is the premise we’re dealing with.

I’d agree with the statement “the twelve apostles didn’t exist,” especially seeing how in Luke they go from the ten to the twelve and the various gospels can’t even agree on the list of them.

But show me the invented religious figure where the earliest surviving records are disputes over who they were and what they were talking about. Pretty much every cult around a real person ends up that way after the person dies or is imprisoned. But not the made up figures so much.

You were born into a planet where the moon perfectly eclipses the sun and where the next brightest object in the sky goes on a katabasis that inspired entirely separate intelligent cultures from the Aztecs to the Sumerians to develop the idea that the dead could come back to life.

The fact that solar eclipses were visible meant that we started to track them, discovering the Saros cycle and eventually building the first analog computer to track them.

The fact that the odd orbit of Venus as viewed from the Earth dipping down below the ground before emerging again leading to cultures imagining the dead being raised has resulted in widespread hyperstition of resurrection.

You were born into a generation of humans when a three trillion dollar company has already been granted a patent on resurrecting dead people using computers and the social media they leave behind.

Absolutely none of the above features of your world can be attributed to selection bias by something like the anthropic principal, but absolutely can be explained by selection bias if you are in an ancestor simulation - for life to exist unusual celestial features contributing to life recreating itself is unnecessary, but any accurate ancestor simulation should exhibit features of a world that lead to it eventually recreating itself.

The physics of your universe behaves as if continuous at both macro and micro scales, up until interacted with, which is very convenient given state changes by free agents to a continuous manifold would require an infinite amount of memory to simulate.

But yeah, sure, the idea of an afterlife is humorous. Humorous like the Roman satirist Lucian in the 2nd century making fun of the impossibility of a ship of men ever flying up to the moon.

You can point out the fact her depiction of a divine parent fails the Solomon test.

In the classic Solomon story, he tests two different claimants both saying they are the parent of a child.

The false parent was the one that only cared about being recognized as the parent and was willing to see the child harmed and killed to fulfill that desire.

The true parent was the one that wanted the child to continue to live as their complete unadulterated self, even if that meant the child never even knew they existed, let alone get they were the parent.

While it should be easy to understand why a church collecting your money promotes a divine parent who demands recognition and is willing to see its supposed children harmed without collecting its dues, it doesn’t seem all that wise to believe such a parent represents a true parent and not a false one if we use Solomon’s wisdom as a guiding principle.

“This is not fine.”

I’ve always thought Superman would be such an interesting game to do right.

A game where you are invincible and OP, but other people aren’t.

Where the weight of impossible decisions pulls you down into the depths of despair.

I think the tech is finally getting to a point where it’d be possible to fill a virtual city with people powered by AI that makes you really care about the individuals in the world. To form relationships and friendships that matter to you. For there to be dynamic characters that put a smile on your face when you see them in your world.

And then to watch many of them die as a result of your failures, as despite being an invincible god among men you can’t beat the impossible.

I really think the gameplay in a Superman game done right can be one of the darkest and most brutal games ever done, with dramatic tension just not typically seen in video games. The juxtaposition of having God mode turned on the entire game but it not mattering to your goals and motivations because it isn’t on for the NPCs would be unlike anything I’ve seen to date.

This has been a fixed problem for about a year now.

You’re awfully talkative for the dead, btw.

With the advances in AI this is no longer as reliable an option, and will quickly become less so.

But absolutely letting someone know where you are going and as many identifying details about who you are meeting is wise. As is having them check in on you by a certain time after.