Definitely check out the soundtrack of this game. It is really good - weird but good.

What interests me more:

• Will a mostly single player game again be online only?
• Will there be elsusive targets or similar parts of the game, where I pay for something that I might not be able to access, because If I don’t have time or want to play in a specific week I won’t be able to access it?
• Are you going to sell us the game in parts and over and over again until I end up like I do now on EPIC where I have no way of actually knowing what content I own and which I don’t own and having to buy the elusive targets twice (once when they were timed and now that they are not anymore)?

IO Interactive makes good games, but they got away with a lot of shite every other developer would get crucified over. I am just waiting for the day Hitman gets unplyable because they shut off the servers.

No matter how good their next IP will be, if they go on with these practices, then I am not buying. It is unnecessary and anti consumer and there are more good games than I can play in a life time that allow offline play and where I don’t need a spread sheet to find out what content I want/need.

My e-book reader (Tolino).

As I got older and had problems with my eyes, this was a game changer. I had basically stopped reading books and now I do it daily. I can choose the font and letter size, background color, and backlighting based on what works best for my eyes that day and the light where I am.

Being able to hold a very light device with a big screen when I would have to balance a heavy weight as a paper book is also great, and I take the reader with me everywhere, whereas a big book would stay at home most of the time.

The reader has a bigger screen than my phone and the battery lasts longer.

The reader works flawlessly with my library, so I don’t have to buy books, which keeps costs down, and I don’t have to leave the house to get a new book.

Calibre helps us share books in our family, which is one reason we’ve stayed away from Amazon’s Kindle, so we’ve all gone to “.epub”.

Nah, the value didn’t drop becaue it has even less value. The bubble let some air out in a stinking fart, because people start to realize that’s what coming out of Musks mouth: “Warm air and nothing of substance.”

Indy games are art. Find an artist(s), pay them a living wage, and let them do their art largely undisturbed, guided by a vision of what the game should be, so they keep working towards the same goal. Let them learn from their mistakes and make their next game better. That leads to Baldur’s Gate 3.

CEO of an AAAAAAA+ game developer/publisher: “No games are a product. The most important thing is that the line goes up, so we check what the user feedback is and listen to the loudest crowd that wants the same old shit, only to complain that they always get the same old shit. Also, hire cheap, treat people terribly and get everyone out of the industry as quickly as possible, and none of that art nonsense - I mean, how am I going to sell that to the shareholders, they just want an estimate of how many skins we will sell in 2025 so they will agree to my pay rise?”

As long as they don’t do it on real humans nobody is hurt.

Living out the fantasy of having sex with children (or other harmful sexual practices and fantasies) wit AI or alike can strengthen the wish to actual do it in RL. It can weaken the strength to abstain. If you constantly have fantasies where for example “the child AI wanted it too” then it can desensitize you and making it harder and harder to push that thought aside when in a tempting situation. Instead of replacing the real thing with a fantasy you are preparing for the real thing. Some pedophiles already interpret children’s behavior as sexual that isn’t at all, but the AI might be told to act in that way and strengthen these beliefs.

This is still something that is and has to be studied more to fully understand it. Of course this is difficult because of the stigma. There might be differences between people who only are attracted to children and ones that are attracted to adults and children and there is just not enough data yet, but even the communities in which pedophiles who do not act on their attraction discuss coping strategies this is heavily discussed and controversial.

If you are interested in the subject a bit more, this is a start: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8419289/

In the first region in the midst of the first small village two neighbors are arguing. They are not giving a quest, they just talk to each other and listening gives such an insight in how war can turn people against each other that have been living peacfully and been friends for years.

Do the side quests and take your time with the dialogue. Some of these stories are impactful, mostly sad and worth your time. If you are told that you should talk to people to find out more about your contract, do it. Some of these quests can be done with only talking to one person but you want to get the information from everyone and especially their side of the story.

Do not look up the outcome of decisions. Make your decisions and live with them at least at your first playthrough. Most decisions have impact and seeing the outcome unfold makes this game special and yes often there is no “good choice” - that’s war for you.

Last: Buy every Gwent card you can get your hands on and play with everyone you can. If you can’t win just come back later with better cards and obliterate them - it will feel goooood!

The DLC’s are a must.

Try out difficulty settings - there is a sweet spot for most people somewhere but what it will be for you no one can know, but it would be a shame if you play through the game not having found the difficulty that fits you best because you “always play on <insert difficulty>”.

Have fun, I wish I could play this game for the first time again.

In a perfect world, things like FOMO and group pressure would not exist. People would understand that skins are just useless pixels. We do not live in that world. Yes there are a handful of people who are not affected by the psychological effects of this and if you are one of them lucky you. The truth is, most people are affected, most people feel bad to be the only one with no knife skin, with default armor ( “Default” being an insult in online games with a very young audience) and most people do love the “look” and feel a real need to buy cosmetics.

There is a reason game developers hire psychologists. That’s why all lootboxes have sparkles and sound effects and even look like slot machines although what is in your box is long decided. It is because it works for most people’s brains as stimulating. That’s why some people make a living out of videos where they open loot boxes because even watching someone else open them makes our brain chemistry go WROOOOOM.

It is way less of a choice for most people than you think it is. I remember one FPS game has a quest where you need to open a loot box ingame and others can watch you do it, to animate them to buy loot boxes. These businesses have no shame to invent constantly new ways of making you enter the shop. Like making food rot ingame so you will have to buy a fridge from the shop (Fallout 76).

MTX and loot boxes are part of the core of many games. When they finally got rid of loot boxes in Mordor: Shadow of War , they had to redo the whole economy of the game, because it was to the core made in a way to encourage you to buy war chests for better Orcs.

You CAN live without ever eating cake, but if everyone eats cake, all other food looks bland and boring and you constatnly are shown ads for cake, shiny cake, tasty cake, colorful cake, cake that you can only buy until <date> and cake that only 100 people can buy and all your friends are having cake right now and telling you how good it is… there is a point where it doesn’t matter that the cake is a lie scam, you will want cake too.

… and they could put an end to the black market for skins and the gambling at anytime, but refuse to do so. This would get rid of the account stealing mostly too.

Not to mention that Valve had to be forced to follow consumer laws in some countries by expensive lawsuits.

It was also Valve who started the “you do not own your games” shite, by forcing the connection of licences to an account and a gaming client, which got rid of the ability to resell your games or to have at least the game’s installer offline available.

I’ll never get why Valve always gets a pass. Would it be worse if Steam was owned by Epic / Tencent / Activision …, no doubt, but that doesn’t make it great.

If someone want to give praise I would point to GOG. Not perfect but at least I own my licence to the point that I can install my games from an installer I have archived on my HDD (no deleting the game, no forced updates, no adding MTX at a later time, no taking away licenced music), I can go to earlier versions of Early Access games if they change it for the worse and more.

Why are y’all so dumb?

this is the wrong question, The real question is:

Why are y’all so mean?

See, the people believing this shit are the ones who, if being able to create a hurricane, would do it in an instant to harm their political opponents, so it makes sense to them others would do it. They would steal an election, they would get rid of elections once elected, they would pretend to be a shooting victim if paid enough money… Once you leave all morals behind and get on the me and my version of America first train, everything is possible and thinkable. It is not about “is this possible” or “can they do it” it is all about “if I could do it I would so they are doing it”.

This is my winner!

Unhinged AI will solve anything human made by getting us killed. That will work very fast because there is no “human made” climate change when there is “no human”.

I also hate how they went from “human made climate change does not exist so we can keep everything as it is” to “we can’t meet the goals anyway so we can keep everything as it is” and how many people fall for it.

They want to keep their money and power at all cost and at this point I question more and more if we can take it from them peacfully. We have to take it to make a better world possible or even survival possible, because they will not be helpful ever.

Years ago I had fun with “what if the US never actually went to the moon”. I did not believe it, it was just a nice plot idea, we even made a pen & paper oneshot about it. Nowadays I have no whatsoever fun in thought experiments like this, because the real threat of someone believing it to be true. I want to enjoy “birds aren’t real” or “giraffes do not exist” or … the worst is flat earth. It started out as a joke and now idiots try to proof the earth is flat, proof by accident it isn’t and then question rather their methods than their belief system. We just can’t have nice things.

German, only having been there once some years ago, so no idea if it still is that way:

Not knowing what I will have to pay in the grocery store until the cashier tells me what to pay. Here the price on the shelf is THE price. I might have a voucher that reduces the price in the end, but nothing is ever added only subtracted, all prices on the shelf are easily comparable, because no matter the weight of one package there is also given the price of 1kg or 100 g for everything.

No kids on playing grounds without parents standing around. No kids just playing on the side walk (often there is no side walk anyway), no kids walking to school. It made me aware of how much freedom kids have in Germany, how independent even 6 y.o. are in Germany compared to kids in the US. They walk to to school alone or use public transport alone, they buy groceries alone, they visit friends by foot or public transport, three y.o. already having a bike and cycling besides their parents to kindergarden…

On the other hand seeing so many very young people having a job, like a really hard job for many hours besides school. It broke my heart, they should be free to be young and having all the time, working comes fast enough and goes on forever. Also I saw very old people doing jobs that should be able to retire because you could see them being in pain and barely able to function, definitely not a “choice” for them.

The amount of medication, especially pain medication, people take in the US compared to Germany and how much of it is freely available while it is needing a subscription from a doctor here. Every time I was feeling unwell I was offered pills that I found to be numbingly strong and switching my brain off? Hard to explain. I found them scary, but was told that they take them on a daily basis and they are harmless … nope.

I also love Ryukishi07’s VNs, “When They Cry” series. The art is admittedly ugly, but the stories are very intricate and convoluted in the best sense of the word.

The first of the “When They Cry” series are the only VNs I have ever played clicked through and it was surprisingly good, even for someone like me who isn’t into anime and kept me hooked through all the episodes. I highly recommend it.

Dear Mr. Sweeney, I fixed your words, thank me later:

A lot of games are released with CEOs earning more money than all developers of the game including outsourced work together, that makes the games too expensive. If the budget would actually go into the game we could have great games that sell.

Unfortunately you rather lay off your employees, pay them less, crunch them and burn them out, save on quality control, sell road-maps instead of a finished game and give your customers a lesser and lesser experience instead of accepting a pay cut.

And I have not mentioned the money you throw out of the window and burn because of your dreams of an “EPIC metaverse”.

F you Mr, Sweeney.

Russian “Mother’s Cross” when: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hitler-institutes-the-mothers-cross

Also the fascists call everything an “ideology”, except fascism of course.

What do humans learn from the past: That humans don’t learn from the past: https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-rating-russia/

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Voting Trump is the only way to save democracy”
George Orwell, 1984 Elon Musk, aspiring propaganda minister of Trump

An ex-Sony exec said laid-off employees should ‘go to the beach for a year’ or ‘drive an Uber’ Lian Kit Wee Sep 11, 2024, 7:15 AM MESZ

Chris Deering Sony Former Sony Entertainment president, Chris Deering, told recently laid-off employees to take a break for a year and wait for opportunities to return. Reuters

Ex-Sony Entertainment president Chris Deering said laid-off employees should take time off. Deering said that he doesn’t believe the recent Sony layoffs result from corporate greed. In February, Sony said it would lay off 900 employees from its PlayStation division.

Former Sony Computer Entertainment Europe president Chris Deering has a blunt message for recently laid-off game developers: They should “go to the beach for a year” or “drive an Uber” until the job market improves.

Deering, who led Sony’s European PlayStation division during the launch of the iconic game console and its successor, PlayStation 2, acknowledged the pain of Sony’s recent cuts.

The company said in February it would lay off about 900 people globally and close PlayStation Studios’ London studio, amid a slowing gaming market. Deering dismissed the notion that the layoffs were purely driven by corporate motives.

“I don’t think it’s fair to say that the resulting layoffs have been greed,” Deering said on journalist Simon Parkin’s “My Perfect Console” podcast. "I always tried to minimize the speed in which we added staff because I always knew there would be a cycle.

Fluctuations in consumer spending and recent games’ diminishing sales impact the company’s ability to “justify spending the money for the next game,” making some staffing cuts inevitable, said Deering.

Deering offered some unconventional advice for game developers affected by the layoffs. He suggested workers take time off or find temporary work, like driving for Uber, while the industry stabilizes.

“It’s like the pandemic,” Deering told Parkin. “You’re going to have to figure out how to get through it, drive an Uber, or whatever. Find a cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year.”

His remarks come at a time when layoffs have hit the gaming industry hard.

Other game developers, including Microsoft and Unity, have similarly downsized their studios this year, cutting over 3,000 jobs at the start of the year, BI reported in February.

This series of layoffs in the game industry stemmed from slumping game sales and a shrinking gaming demographic, BI previously reported. Revenue from video game sales in the US in 2023 fell by 2.3% from the previous year, and the average time spent gaming fell from 16.5 hours to 13 hours from 2021 to 2022. Related stories

However, Deering seemed optimistic about the prospects for game developers. He told Parkin that laid-off workers should take advantage of the time off to recharge but keep an eye out for any opportunities to return to the industry.

Game development skill is not going to “be a lifetime of poverty or limitation. It’s still where the action is,” said Deering.

Deering is currently an advisor for Cudo Ventures, a company specializing in monetization applications.

Sony Interactive Entertainment and Deering did not respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside business hours.

Why this expression? This guy just needs to spent a year homeless on the beach or so, if being fired: https://www.businessinsider.com/chris-deering-playstation-sony-laid-off-staff-beach-uber-2024-9 It definitely isn’t greed on side of the CEO who earns millions for nothing while so many get fired, right? RIGHT?