They’re trying to portray it as something that was done from the very beginning, as opposed to something they only pinned down in preparation for the 3rd game in the series. Nothing wrong with them getting through two games before writing out their bible, but that doesn’t make for a very compelling article.

“A lot of that was in my head until we were starting Inquisition and the writers got a little bit impatient with my memory or lack thereof, so they pinned me down and dragged the uber-plot out of me. I’d talked about it, I’d hinted at it, but never really spelled out how it all connected, so they dragged it out of me, we put it into a master lore doc, the secret lore, which we had to hide from most of the team.”

So, no they didn’t know the “deepest secrets” of the lore 20 years ago. One guy had vague notions in his head, and they only actually fleshed it out when they were working on Inquisition.

One of the things that sets the original apart from a lot of other open world survival craft games is that it was designed to be a single-player experience. Hopefully they can make it work well for both solo and co-op, but that’s a tricky balance.

One thing I’d really like to see is for creatures to be able to damage structures, and to balance that by having defenses to protect those structures. Being able to throw together an invincible fortress in seconds made some of the dangerous areas a lot less threatening.

Hawaii

And for something similar in its insanity, there’s also Santa Claus, a product of Mexico that I can only assume was fueled by product from Columbia.

“I wonder if there’s beer on the sun”

The Canada Song lives rent free in my head.

“We put our faith in BLAST HARDCHEESE.”

Final Sacrifice.

I should play Skies of Arcadia again.

4x games tend to be functionally infinitely repayable, since a single game often takes an eternity and there are usually many factions to play.

I particularly like sword of the stars 1 & 2. Honestly don’t remember which I preferred but I know I got an insane amount of time sunk into both of them.

Steam isn’t a monopoly, I can get my games elsewhere (epic, gog, humble store, origin etc). But Steam is dominating the market because it does it better. It offers value and features that others don’t, and it generally hasn’t abused its dominant market position to squeeze the consumer or crush their competitors. The closest thing to enshittification we’ve seen from Steam was them allowing third party DRM and launchers, which isn’t something they wanted, it’s them backing down from a stand-off.

I want competition, but there’s good competition and bad competition. Good competition is what we see from Steam and gog, where they stand out by being good at what they do and giving customers what they want.

For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.

I think it’s easy to look at all the bullshit EA and Ubisoft and the like pull now, and imagine that same pattern from streaming playing out in gaming.

Not in a million fucking years Sony. I would have gladly given you my money, but apparently that’s not good enough for you.

Normally the ones who buy a console at the end of its lifespan are the ones getting the best deal. You have the entire library of games to choose from, and can get all the best games at once. Plus the system will have dropped in price multiple times since it came out, and the older games will cost a fraction of what they did originally. And of course, they’ll have long since addressed any design problems that early models were plagued with.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to go.

Well, since you say Christmas or not, my favorite show any time is Babylon 5.

But for Christmas stuff, Hogfather is my favorite tradition. Also Die Hard, and the Christmas episode of Justice League.

Honestly, I’ve been thinking about switching to Linux with my next system since about a month after I built my current system, over 4 years ago. That’s how long it took for me to be sick of Microsoft’s bullshit in Windows 10.

That said, I’m not looking forward to figuring out how to get into Linux. It’s probably easier than I think, but having done 0 research (as I don’t need a new system yet), the impression I have is that there’s a ton of stuff I’m going to have to figure out before getting started.

I have a similar DNS filter on my router to block ads, particularly on my TV since I can’t put ublock on it. It doesn’t work while on youtube.com, but any video that’s embedded in another site will have ads blocked. So I have a playlist I save videos to from my phone or pc, and my tv has a bookmark for a code testbed that will load the playlist as an embed.

It was still working yesterday, but no idea if that will last.