It's only bad if it's not an USian company, didn't you get the memo?

You forgot your /s there, friend. Be careful with the Internet these days, reading comprehension is a hard to find skill in this age.

I once made this argument to a game dev community on Reddit and was called crazy for it. There are games where I literally have to remove my headsets when they open. Devs that make games for pc should understand that pc users don't just use their pc to play games, but also for other things. So volume control is obviously tied to each individual app/program.

I would like it if all games launched a simplified settings menu first thing after you open them up, before any cutscenes or intros.

I haven't played it yet, still unsure if I will, but everything I've seen of it is nudging me towards not playing it. The dialogues I've watched were poorly written, cutscenes were okay at best, and the new companions seemed all to be obnoxious teenagers.

To me, Dragon Age Origins is the only game in the franchise that's worth playing. The Warden is your character as the player, and that, to me, is the hallmark of a good rpg. None of the other Dragon Age games put as much effort into allowing you to choose and make your own character. The fact that DA:O had entirely different intros, that were both long, well written, and nuanced, based on your combination of class + race was the thing that sold me into that game. Hawke is not your character, but a character they wanted you to play for a reason, but I'll give it a pass since the idea of Hawke's story was fairly good, just not as well implemented (DA2 should have been a spin off and not part of the main series). The Inquisitor is even worse, it could have been your character, but it's some weird generic character that's there just to perform a function in the world. I've played most of DA2, but only a couple of hours of Inquisition, and it was enough to know that both those games fell short of Origins, and this one is looking even worse.

An RPG needs excellent writing above all else. Good gameplay comes as a close second, but it should be mostly about allowing players to forge their own path and have their own interpretations of the world. RPGs need nuance and subtlety, you can't just constantly regurgitate something to someone's face and expect them not to be annoyed by it.

That'd be cool, but compatibility is a huge issue. I've looked into buying one, and there's no model available for my device.

I couldn't quite understand why people were memeing on Zen 5. It's 5% performance increase while at much lower TDP, what is there not to like? Efficiency is plenty important. And even if we could see a 20% performance increase while using more power, is that worth it? What are the true benefits of a 20% faster CPU when considering pure gaming while we are already at the top of the spec sheet? The games where the difference would be a massive number of FPS are those like CS2 where you would go from 600 to 720 fps, does that truly matter? I like my pcs running as efficient as possible, that way I know they'll last longer.

Great! Now bring back phones with physical QWERTY keyboards.

My pc auto-upgraded because I donwloaded what I thought was just a regular update. I've been using 11 for like a year already, and it's fine. Install powertoys, run christitus utility... The one thing that really bothered me for a while was not having as granular of a control of my taskbar, but that only lasted for like two weeks.

Same! I probably will be replaced just as all the other "meat sacks", but I hope to at least be given a degree of dignity upon my inevitable demise.

Nowhere so far. We have 0 gameplay for it yet. Maybe soon we'll get to see something as they stated that the game will come in 2025.

I'll bother and explain why you're being stupid and not understanding the thing you yourself posted.

From the definition of factors of production on Wikipedia:

"In economics, factors of production, resources, or inputs are what is used in the production process to produce output—that is, goods and services.

Simply put, rent is paid at INPUT, for things like land, in order to produce OUTPUT, which are things like goods and services. What Steam provides is a SERVICE, an output. You don't pay economic rent on outputs, you pay economic rent for inputs. Steam's service being: marketing and distribution of games in place of others, plus integration with analytics and a bunch of other features.

The comparison you're making is the same as saying you're paying rent to your team of marketers and accountants...

You could make a point and argue that artists are paying economic rent for Adobe suite, and that game developers are paying rent for unreal engine fees. Without those things, which are inputs for production, neither artists or game developers would have a product at all. Steam only comes into play once the final product is already done. You don't need Steam before the game is a product at all, which corroborates that Steam is not economic rent, for it's not a payment made for an Input in order to produce an output.

Also, in what way is the marketplace for games fixed? It's not a finite resource. There's no finite number of how many stores there are out there, anyone can go and make their own client and store. There are games and developers that up to this day make their own standalone launchers.

Steams offers a service, the best one in the block. You don't want it? You're entirely free to go and figure it out yourself. No monopolistic behavior in sight.

Really cool that they can plant and harvest fresh vegetables in space. I bet they joked about eating space lettuce and tomato.

They are in the same universe, and they are both FPS, and that seems as far as similarities go. But maybe it won't be just that, maybe they'll tie the plot of the new game to the old ones somehow, maybe the ship marathon crashed in the alien planet where the whole extraction thing happens, and maybe that's the reason? I've never played the original games, but recently watched a youtube video about them and it seems that it was really loved by bungie, and they took many of the lessons from it to make Halo. My bet is that someone at Bungie has always kept those games in a corner of their memory, thinking about how they could revive them one day. Usually, when old franchises are revived, it's because of some execs trying to make use of their popularity. But it doesn't seem to be the case here, as Marathon was quite an obscure game.

This could be cool if you managed to grab a second-hand board for cheap.

It knows it wants to be an AAA game in 2024, and we all know what that means...

And paid expansions.

There's a point made at the end of the article that most people seems to have missed entirely:

Existing facilities that can filter carbon dioxide out of the air only have the capacity to capture 0.01 million metric tons of CO2 globally today, costing companies like Microsoft as much as $600 per ton of CO2. That’s very little capacity with a very high price tag.

“We cannot squander carbon dioxide removal on offsetting emissions we have the ability to avoid,” study coauthor Gaurav Ganti, a research analyst at Climate Analytics, said in a press release. The priority needs to be preventing pollution now instead of cleaning it up later.

It's obviously a matter of "why not both?", and both the article and the scientists behind the report agree on it. However, a lot of people are betting their eggs on the idea that climate reversal technology will suddenly become a lot more effective and cheaper than it is right now. And sure, that may be the case, or not. For how many years have we heard of flying cars or self-driving autonomous vehicles and predicted that they were just around the corner, at most a few years away, but nada so far? Betting on the invention of a new technology that'll make a very expensive process today way cheaper is a VERY naive and bad approach.

Yeah, I guess that would be the ideal. But starting with just non-commercial use is already way better than what we have today. People could use those resources to learn how to make games, and also to preserve videogames for the future.

They can dick about as much as they want, piracy will make sure to preserve the things they want gone. The reason they don't want older games to be preserved is that new generations, whilst playing them, may come to realize that you don't need gacha mechanics, stupid fomo, micro transactions, 6 different currencies, 3 different shop menus, 2 battlepasses and so forth to have a good game.

I've played twelve hours of the demo, ten of those last Sunday. Had a lot of fun. Was playing the game with a friend, and we loved the pvp part. The coolest thing about the game is that you can make and design your own trampler, using buildpieces. After we made our first trampler, we went around the servers trampling on everyone. We won a fight 2v3 and another one just after that in a 2v4 situation. Our trampler was designed from the ground up to be run as a two-men team, and it worked like a charm. I was above running guns and engines, and my friend was below piloting and running repairs, in a fully enclosed box of steel.