Baldur’s Gate 3 is Causing Some Developers to Panic
I want to echo the steam deck recommendations, but not because I have one, but rather because I daily drove gaming laptops for the better part of a decade and hated it
Sincerely. Get a device dedicated for gaming, not a compromise between form factor and expected output. A cheap used Thinkpad with some knock around Linux distro will do 90% of what you likely need a laptop for, and put the rest of your budget into a tricked out steam deck. You'll have money left over relative to a gaming laptop, too, which are always -- and I mean, always, terribly low on battery life, extraordinarily hot, and rarely performant enough to justify either shortfall. Usually they weigh a ton too.
I'm glad gaming laptops are improving steadily and integrated graphics are improving to shore up the slack through things like the steam deck and also just letting most laptops play games better without breaking the bank, but I'd have been far happier with a cheap gaming computer and a cheap laptop than an expensive gaming laptop as my only option. And in lieu of a full tower for gaming, a steam deck is your next best option
The only exception, in my eyes, is if you need a laptop as a portable video editing workstation as well as for gaming. Then gaming laptops become a more valuable proposition, but even still I'd go with the above. I just figured I'd mention something that gaming laptops have over a steam deck or other comparable offerings, steam decks make a creative workload a lot more cumbersome than a proper laptop would be
Yeah but there's different ways to interact with the fediverse via activitypub, whereas Usenet was just. Usenet
Not super educated on the subject but I'm pretty sure Usenet was just one platform/standard whereas the fediverse is a bunch of interoperable standards. That's a pretty huge leap I functionality
Galaxy buds 2 with a good pair of comply foam earbuds tips clocks in at exactly $100 and has a remarkably solid sound for Bluetooth earbuds. If you want audio quality though you're not going to get it in Bluetooth headphones, there you mostly pay for convenience, but I got some galaxy buds 2 recently and they were fine stock but the foam tips sincerely make a huge difference.
I'd advise looking into a cheap, older mechanical option as best you can and cleaning it up yourself. If you want it to last you're better off investing either that time or that money into one to really make it count. Ergo boards are less in demand than a standard keyboard so they'll tend more expensive but they'll pay your hands back kindly
If you're willing to shoot a bit over the $100 budget listed on the post, "Alice style" mechanical keyboards are getting quite popular. Here's a cheaper option but certainly not the best, might be worth some research https://en.akkogear.com/product/acr-pro-alice-plus-mechanical-keyboard/
I have never been happier to download an app in my life. Connect was great for the time but the polish and ux of sync is unmatched
Yeah I agree, especially bc it's on steam now and the steam deck puts a premium on games with controller support. But even on PC sometimes I feel like I'm short on buttons, but there's probably some way to play comfortably on a controller and anet really aught to invest in it
I've been playing Guild Wars 2 a ton over the past two years and honestly I'm really glad I've spent so much time in the setting, it's so not traditional fantasy and it's richer for it. I wish that more fantasy played with the expectations of the genre. Tolkien-esque fantasy is a great jumping off point but I wish authors/creators did more with it than just start and stop there
I completely agree. And it's deeply frustrating too because this is something the right does EXCEEDINGLY well. There's a lot of ideological diversity on the right (none of which holds up to much rigor, but there sure is a lot of it) but they all agree that step 1 to getting their way is pulling the Overton window further right. Which is true, so while the left quibbles about whether anarcho-syndicalism or marxist-leninism or whatever else is really "correct" the right gets to sway common consensus in their favor BEFORE trying to get people to identify with a label. It's fundimentally missing the forest for the trees, and ignores the #1 thing that the left is supposedly all about: helping people. How can you help people if you're too busy telling them that x left-wing ideology is better than y? People don't really care, frankly. They care if they can make rent. If they can eat. If their kids won't get shot in school.
And if someone shows up to tell me that "actually anarcho-syndicalism is a marxist-leninism philosophy" you're making my point. These labels matter very little. And until your favorite label is struggling to make rent, it never will.
Provided you can get the model to land at a place where it's replying like a well constructed character and not, well, an AI model (hopefully through the input and effort of a talented and well-supported writing team) I don't see a future where this isn't where this kind of tech lands. Games are always striving for some sense of realism (some correct away from reality but the driving force of the games industry is in that direction) and while I don't think absolute realism is a healthy direction for people to aim, realistically realizing characters has a lot of room for unique and incredible games to strive for. Obviously bespoke writing is still the heart and soul of a good narrative but there's some areas it can't really cover and I think that tech like this is great for covering that uncharted water
Given that, the voice actors who train these models for moment-to-moment interactions and other stuff that can't really be easily written for if a game's content creates a need for it really NEED to be properly compensated otherwise it's an incredibly unhealthy precedent for the industry. The speed at which this sort of AI develops outstripping proper precedent (legally and professionally) is much scarier to me than some sort of like, ai-overlord type future
Connect is stunningly well polished for how little time it's been in development and the dev pushes updates incredibly fast. I'm probably going to switch to sync whenever it gets released bc it was my reddit client of choice but connect is doing quite well in the interim
Honestly this is a really frustrating way to look at it. Because like, live service games are wack from a games preservation perspective but regular content releases are how you make games like this tenable long-term for the people that enjoy them. They don't need to be THE next love service game, they just need to find a stable audience and remain profitable. The issue is when devs and publishers get eyes bigger than their stomach and it comes a the cost of that player base, or the devs don't know how to sell a really good idea and the game falls apart accordingly.
Live service games aren't inherently bad, there've been some really incredible games that I've enjoyed that are live service and that content release model makes sense. But it's a shame when they fall apart because of developer ineptitude (see battlerite) or corporate greed (this, probably)
Yo! I love guild wars 2, if there's anything I can offer to help you click with the game? Or answer any questions for you? Regarding tab targeting vs action, really you can play it almost entirely like one or the other and you don't need to interact with the other system if you don't want to. And I'm happy to give you a breakdown of boons, hopefully it's not as complex as it seems as first blush? But I love helping people click with the game because it took me a while and I'm glad I finally stuck so I'd love to pay it forward
I'm on Sakurajima.social because it was partered with the small anime-oriented masto instance I used previously so it felt like an easy swap and i could trust the moderation policy but my advice is, if you wanna use it like mastodon find a small instance where you can trust the mods and talk to them, and if you want to use it like its own platform (using channels, namely) find the biggest instance that's catered towards the niche you're most passionate about. Channels are a big feature sell of firefish for me so being on an anime-centric instance makes a lot of sense for me :)
Mine should be here later today and im SO excited, it's such a gorgeous set
I'm not fond of blizzard and I think overwatch 2's time has long since passed so I'm not sure how helpful this will be
But I still play hearthstone and I sincerely think that it's the best the game has ever been so hopefully a steam release is a second wind for the game. Not that it's dead by any means but I'd love for it to feel like a popular game again
It also sounds too much like Firefox. But either way, it doesn't sound like accounting software anymore which was my issue with calckey's branding prior to now anyway lmao
But it's by far the best fediverse platform I've used from a functionality standpoint and I'm quite fond of it so hopefully this puts more eyes on it
Yeah it's wild to me that 2017 isn't brought up more often in these conversations it's an absurdly stacked year
Honestly I genuinely think that 2017 might be the best year of gaming, ever. Breath of the wild, nier automata, mario odyssey, fortnite, cuphead, horizon zero dawn, hellblade: senua's sacrifice, destiny 2, xenoblade chronicles 2, prey, sonic mania, injustice 2, divinity original sin 2, nioh, splatoon 2, hollow knight, middle earth: shadow of war, night in the woods, pubg, pyre, yakuzas 0 and kiwami, even tekken 7's console release and persona 5's western release if you want to count those. And that's not mentioning the smaller indie games that were acclaimed within their circles like Absolver or the expansions for games that were critically acclaimed like Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire or Final Fantasy: Stormblood. Like, '98 is legendary for a reason but I think that as far as just, number of incredible games released we've never seen a year like 2017.
EA is an immensely useful tool for game devs, the issue is EA as an excuse to ship unpolished games or to leave games unfinished forever. Neither of which are problems intrinsic to early access, they're just bad business practice that should be shunned like any other