Is this the one with the weird multiplayer stuff where you fight other people’s orcs, and sometimes they’re suspiciously like level 100 and super annoying to kill? And it has stupid sexy shelob?

I never finished it because of those things, but otherwise the core gameplay was alright.

Dying Light’s gameplay is pretty good, but I like immediately got a mod to fix the idiotic weapon break system. It’s the extremely tiresome “Your hammer breaks after hitting 20 zombies” system plus “you leveled up! now you can use a better hammer with bigger numbers!”. Easy enough to mod to taste.

The story, however, is kind of bad. You don’t really get any choices, which is fine, but what happens is not satisfying. The DLC is also fun, but the story ending is trash. I just uninstalled it after instead of doing any of the extra bits.

–

Hades, on the other hand, is very good. No complaints.

That’s what I meant. In the story they’re super dangerous walking nuclear bombs. In the first game, it kind of lives up to it in the game play. You have a massive fireball (with knockdown!), blood magic shuts down the whole field, and more.

But by the third game, mages are more of a “control” class. If you want to actually do damage and kill monsters, you want to play a rogue. It’s extremely disappointing.

I wanted it to be more like dragon’s dogma where you summon meteors and tornadoes. Instead it’s like some ice cubes and a campfire.

The first one is a love letter to the original Baldur’s Gate games. Tactical group combat, real time with pause, fantasy. It’s an original setting that tries to subvert some Tolkien ideas. It’s pretty good, though it does feel a little old-bioware. The story is a basic “global threat -> gather allies” with a touch of political intrigue. The romance is kind of badly done. It’s peak “give them gifts until sex happens”.

The second one suffered from being extremely rushed. Much asset reuse. It also made the game more “action-y” because I assume some souless suit said that kids don’t want tactics they want biff bam ACTION. The story tries to do something interesting in that it follows a single city over a long period of time as tensions rise. It’s not as bad as people say, but it’s very flawed. The romances are okay. Internet shitheads absolutely lost their minds that gay people exist and might mistakenly think you’re interested until you say no thanks.

This one also switched to the dialogue wheel instead of giving you informed choices about what you’d say. It does a subtle thing where your actions in cutscenes and stuff are informed by what style you often pick.

The third one barely holds on to the origins (pun intended). It really wants to be an action game like mass effect. That kind of sucks because we already have mass effect, and I wanted something different for my different game. The story is okay and has some good beats. The characters are really good. The romance is much improved. The gameplay is kind of okay. Mages are really nerfed despite the story saying they’re super powerful and dangerous. The world is big and has a lot of shallow quests. There’s a shit mobile game style “click a button and wait an hour” mechanic. You can mod that out. The story is also a "global threat -> gather power ". I bet critical analysis of the story is fascinating because a lot of it is kind of suspect, politically. But most gamers are like critically illiterate and probably didn’t think about it.

Fun aside: the first game has a “sex scene” where one of the character’s naked state is less revealing than her ridiculously revealing "armor ". The third game you can actually see nipples in the sex scenes, but I think they haven’t crossed the line to show a vag or erect dong (though I haven’t done all the romances). Lots of folks are still ashamed of bodies.

You can import saves from one game into the next. There are a lot of choices to make in all of them.

And that’s my off the cuff typed on my phone quick summary of the games.

That’s what I always say. Targeted advertising should be illegal. Contextual advertising is acceptable.

If I’m on the star trek wiki, serve me ads for star trek, sci-fi, and whatever. You don’t need to know anything about me specifically.

We’d still need to do something about like ads that take up too much space, hurt page performance, or introduce malware, but removing the stalking would be an improvement

Healthy parenting would go a long way. See some of the other comments in this thread.

You can also have settings on your local network. If you’re afraid of your kid casually finding something inappropriate, you can set that up stuff locally without involving the government. A determined kid will still find a way to get stuff, so this is more a safeguard against accidental discovery.

Investing in quality education would also benefit everyone.

the only way to protect kinds (like little me) is to block the porn.

This is false.

Parents have a number of options available to them that do no need to involve the state.

Friend of mine never got their driver’s license. They live in NYC and don’t need one. They also were concerned about safety- they have ADHD and are prone to inattentiveness, and they didn’t want to be driving a car when that manifested.

I have a license but I also live in NYC. I don’t need to drive. It’s pretty great. It’s expensive in time money space and externalized costs, and it’s often less effective than just taking public transit.

Unfortunately most of the US is resistant to investing in mass transit and density, so it’s going to be shitty car-first spaces for a while.

A verbal secret passphrase to identify yourself to your family would be pretty smart.

Most of the subway smells fine.

I know pre 1.x.x is kind of a wild west for versioning but uh is there any logic to the version numbers here? I’d think a new feature would be a minor version bump, not patch

Opportunity cost is a pretty well understood concept.

Like, inagine you have 100 gallons of water. You could use all of them to water a single water intensive plant that will feed one person, or you could use them to water a whole farm that will feed a community, and also let people drink and bathe and stuff.

The resource is limited.

Sure, we could try to get more of the resource and make it less expensive, but we should also not squander what we have.

Been seriously thinking of switching to linux for my desktop. I mostly use it for games. Today I was looking at mods for Mass Effect, and the mod manager says in all caps - LINUX IS NOT SUPPORTED :(

There’s probably going to be a lot of that sort of annoyance for years.

It was a gift from an old partner. I think she bought a nice bathrobe and then put all the stars on it herself.

T-shirt. Boxers. Sometimes a wizard robe. I work from home.

You can buy music from Bandcamp. You get it drm free. There may be other sites that sell music too, but Bandcamp is the one I’ve been using.

You can also still buy CD/vinyl and rip it yourself.

I don’t think poor clarity is tightly coupled to vocabulary. Poor clarity often comes from extra words and poorly organized text.

“John walked to the grocery store”

vs

“The man known in his building, but not throughout the entire city, as John, took it upon himself to walk the winding streets of Brooklyn on foot until he reached a open storefront that sold mostly, but not exclusively, groceries”

The latter is pretty limited in vocabulary but is a mess.

This is a fair position to take.

I tend to avoid listening to interviews with bands I like in case they’re terrible.

Though weirdly I’ll chat with folks at merch tables.

Oh, not mocking you. It’s just a semi famous Greek thing about when changing the parts of a thing changes the thing. It’s hard to draw clear lines about it.

Especially in the case where you take the parts off the original ship one at a time and replace them, while reassembling them somewhere else. Now you have two ships and it’s unclear which is the “original”

It applies somewhat well to a band changing members, but I guess if your band is only like 3 people it’s less fuzzy. A symphony of 100 people that changes one member every year, though, would be harder to call.

For anyone else who doesn’t know: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

“the Beatles are overrated” is a poorly defined statement often made by people who give the impression they want to be seen as an iconoclast of some sort.

Ok. Overrated on what metrics? Historical impact? Popularity at the time? Popularity now?

“I don’t like the Beatles’ music” is probably closer to what people mean, and that’s fine. I rarely listen to them on purpose. But the whole “I don’t like them, and neither should you” thing is kind of insufferable.