I don’t disagree with your conclusion, but I think part of why it sucks now is all the Search Engine Optimization, of people trying to game Google into showing you their website, and only necessarily the one most pertinent to your search

I’ve used them both a good bit for D&D/TTRPG campaigns. The image generation has been great for making NPC portraits and custom magic item images. LLM’s have been pretty handy for practicing my DM-ing and improv, by asking it to act like a player and reacting to what it decides to do. And sometimes in the reverse by asking it to pitch interesting ideas for characters/dungeons/quest lines. I rarely took those in their entirety, but would often have bits and pieces I’d use.

I probably do this a good bit without really thinking about it. I don’t really care about walking in mud/grass and I like to give people their space. The fact that they continued to walk on the grass after they passed makes me think it wasn’t a big deal for them either.

I’m always reminded of https://youtu.be/ZI0w_pwZY3E?si=MM_jYb2Xey7Hz-zb for Skype

I mean, I guess, but that’s only a selling point to the small number of people without smartphones, which isn’t a large enough group to make it a sound business strategy.

Also, the “(after federal incentives)” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The basic option for the 2023 Bolt comes out to about $20K after federal incentives, but you get way more range and a bunch of those “luxury” features this is missing. Considering how cheap low-end smart phones are, I have a hard time imagining that infotainment systems actually add more than 1-2% of the cost of the vehicle. Feels more like a type of virtue signal than a real cost-saving measure.

For me, the huge value-add of Discord is for gaming (and is what Discord was created for). In college, my friends and I were originally using Skype calls when we’d play League together, but it was super annoying; essentially in order to not have to create a new call and add everyone who happened to be playing every time we just had one giant call with everyone we’d “redial” when playing. The downside is that if you were on Skype but not part of the game (in class or something) you’d get the Skype call invitation and have to decline it.

Switching to Discord was fantastic. We’d just have a persistent voice channel for different games, and you could chill in there to indicate it’s what you were playing or wanted to play, and if someone wanted to join they just jump on the call. It was also nice for organizing our text chats into different subjects (using different text channels), so if you were trying to ask if anyone had any advice for a certain class, you wouldn’t have your messages drowned out by people talking about news about a upcoming game. We just have a “games” text channels and a “classes” text channels and a “weekend plans” text channel, etc. This became particularly important as the server grew from friends to friends of friends and would’ve been overwhelming to have everyone stuck in one chat.

That’s pretty much been the extent of my Discord use, and I’m continually amazed to hear how others have been using it. I’ve seen the “join us on Discord, X, Facebook, etc.” for different games coming out, but never thought much of it or ever considered doing that.

Corporations cannot create nontoxic social media, the incentives will always be there to make it toxic.

I don’t know that’s true. The incentives to make it toxic come from engagement being the goal, which is a function of advertising being the income. I’m not advocating for it, but if there were a flat subscription and no ads, I don’t think they’d have any economic pressures for toxicity.

Oh, I don’t heat it at all, I just eat it room temperature

I’m continually shocked by how often I learn of some structural systemic issue, pull the thread to see where it started and- oh, surprise, it was once again Reagan.

Absolutely makes sense for most planets to be rather barren.

This idea is something I’ve heard a lot about Starfield and is why I don’t think I’ll pick it up, at least until a big sale. To me, it seems like they made a fair number of design decisions around what “makes sense” rather than what’s fun.

Cyberpunk 2077. I was pretty skeptical of it before it came out (didn’t really feel like it was doing anything unique), but it was such a big release I picked it up to have an opinion on it.

Don’t think I’m gonna do the same for Starfield, though, that’s just a pass

I often quote “deal with it, Ted”

Games should cost more than $60, they have not remotely kept up with inflation. The price was able to stay static so long because things could get cheaper with economies of scale as the industry grew, but it can’t do that forever. The price has to go up.

https://youtu.be/VhWGQCzAtl8?si=Lxpy-xO8o2frw8qx

And Andor

Larian D:OS games have been very well received.

This is a big part to me, in addition to your other points. D:OS2 didn’t have the same hype going into launch because (at least to me) D:OD was good, but not amazing. Given how well received D:OS2 was, I think the media was primed both to give it attention and praise.

I think it’s generally agreed that pretty much all our genre naming conventions are bad and alternatives exist. https://youtu.be/uepAJ-rqJKA has a pretty good description of an alternative, where you describe games by their core reason for play as opposed to mechanics or camera perspective

Into the Radius, to me, had the best “controller” scheme so far and I hope it becomes standard. I played Bonelab afterwards and constantly got frustrated by how often it would have me take out the magazine in my gun when I’m just trying to hold a pistol with a second hand.

If you plan on playing both, I’d recommend starting with Kingmaker. I’d agree that it has a bit of a nicer beginning, where WotR kinda floods you with exposition. If you’re only planning on playing one, is probably recommend WotR, since I think it has a bit larger scope.

Always my answer when questions like these come up. I played it before FF7 and I always considered it the better of the two