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Nope.

I like difficulty, and I love stealth, but I really, really don’t enjoy insta-fail stealth. Having the enemy react and start hunting you is half the fun.

Take this with a grain of salt, because I haven’t played in years, and am only vaguely aware of others playing it.

But my understanding is that you have ads, then get finite lives per day, which you can buy with actual money, and you can buy powerups with money, and (without seeing the code to verify) over time they get you to the point where most of the levels are generated to be either impossible without powerups or you have to get really lucky with how the level plays out to succeed without powerups. I know someone who gets like 5-10 minutes a day (with ads, of course) of gameplay without spending money.

Also candy crush at least is exploitive as absolute fuck. It starts out playable to make you an addict, but it’s tuned very carefully to become as unplayable as possible without just shoveling money at them.

I went in expecting a space-skyrim with typical Bethesda jank, and that’s exactly what we got

I won’t say I disliked it. There was a lot of stuff I liked, and the gunplay was substantially less painful than fallout. But the thing with Skyrim that makes it easy to get hooked for me is the fact that from wherever I am, I can just wander, and I’ll find cool places to go. I’ll find a cave to wander down that goes through more than one civilization before letting me out somewhere different, that I can also just pick a direction and wander.

There’s nothing really in Starfield that does that. I still really liked a lot about it, and some of the city stuff pushes into feeling immersive-sim-like. But I would have preferred less solar systems, but ones that were (or had been) more fully populated by humans and felt like you were really exploring each world instead of a small area.

It’s still worth playing, and the base is potentially there for some really cool total conversion type mods. But it doesn’t really do the open world feeling that Bethesda was one of the few who consistently did really well.

lol at “we’re automatically refunding the people we managed to rip off (in pretend money)”

Their user base isn’t games as a service bullshit. That stuff exists, sure, but Sony’s market share is because of their library of expansive single player experiences.

It’s Uncharted, SpiderMan, God of War, Horizon, The Last of Us. That’s their bread and butter type of product, and that’s what they should focus on. They don’t need to chase microtransaction hell bullshit to be successful.

I hate recasting characters, replacing narrators in the middle of an audiobook series, etc. It’s super jarring, and it feels bad even if the replacement does a really good job.

There have been cases where it’s been for the better, cases where someone died and there’s no way around it, etc, and cases where I still kind of wish they didn’t do it, but it works OK. But there should be an extremely strong preference to avoid doing so unless there’s actually no alternative.

Digital is so much worse than physical, though.

The difference in friction is huge. At least you notice if you buy a grand worth of baseball card packs.

I’m just not sure how they’re “a fresh take”.

I’m fine with them. The benefit of turn based is that it’s easier to stop paying attention without consequences, but button sequence/timing stuff is mostly only a couple seconds after choosing your move, so it doesn’t change how they play for me.

But they already exist. Free aiming ranged weapons exists in grid based games. Their version might be done really well, and I’m interested in the game, but they’re not describing any new ideas here.

I missed that it was rebellion until partway down the page. I absolutely love how they handle stealth (and enemy AI, which is inherently linked) in the sniper elite games, and the non-sniper gunplay isn’t bad either. I had the early impression that there wasn’t going to be a lot of combat, but the combat encounter he described sounds promising.

I love mysteries reading-wise, and I’ve always been interested in the idea of how you build a mystery in a game in a way that isn’t just on rails, so I’m curious how well they pull that off.

Right, just ignore the rest of the sentence where it says he openly used his status in the company to make advances towards women.

That’s mostly how it works for me. BG3, Elden Ring? Full price, and maybe more than one platform. Almost anything else? I’m waiting for 50%+ off.

You pretty clearly don’t know what a call to action is, or an ad is, because “please give money” is very obviously a call to action, and many ads make no effort whatsoever to sell any product.

Yes. It is literally impossible for an organization asking for money not to be an ad.

And yes, showing me a single ad once means I never give them money again. I am not OK with ads.

Yes, it is an ad. Any call to action is an ad.

And its mere presence will ensure I don’t give them any more money. The core concept of inserting any ad in an OS is not behavior I am willing to reward.

It’s not complicated.

It’s an ad.

There’s no version of advertising I will ever be OK with.

It’s implemented as a KDE Daemon (KDED) module, which allows users and distributors to permanently disable it if they like.

Eh. I guess good enough.

But I’m still opposed on principle.

I follow tech, gaming, consoles, etc.

I still have to fucking double check S/Series S and X/series X because those are the dumbest names ever.

You can buy plates for sub-$50 on Amazon that look like basically whatever you want. The stock plates are designed to just pop off.