Yea that’s a decent point. Might be worth sticking around a bit to kill off some collaborators so some other piece of trash doesn’t take over the position as soon as Putin’s out of the way.

Ouch. I didn’t even know either were on the switch. Ironic that the first ran well because they had a good bit of performance issues with it in beta. Though mostly around efficiently streaming assets while moving around, which I’m sure a cart is much faster than old spinny HDDs.

Yea, if only they had thrown in the extra effort! Maybe we’d be here heralding it as a worthy successor instead of identifying the low hanging fruit still on the branch. lol

Eh I know what you mean from a development standpoint (remixing the map would be a huge effort), but I still find it a kinda’ copout excuse. I bet we’d be here heralding the design instead of lambasting it if they took the time to really mix the biomes together properly once they had the assets complete.

In fact, I remember some early early access games doing exactly that: basically having demos that were WAY different than the final product. Ugh I wish I remembered any names, though such effort in to game development was over a decade ago, when some companies still treated it like an actual art form instead of a money vessel…

Yea but what are executive responsibilities to a company? They generally are not creative and dynamic positions and instead focus on producing results for the corporate body. I could readily see Krafton firing them for trying to make a fun and compelling game as opposed to a profitable game ripe for DLC, for example. Of course they’d couch such money grubbing expectations in to language of the managerial class…

Is it actually smaller, though?

Don’t get me wrong, I fully agree in spirit, it just seems like several aspects royally screwed over the map design so it felt much smaller.

1. The bay being the main area where you started meant everything felt far more like linear progression regardless of where one wandered to.
2. The island bifurcating the bay made the bay itself far more prominent, isolated, and greatly reduced how many under water biomes were simply ‘there’ to explore. You always HAD to wander out in one of two directions to get to some other under water biome open to the surface, of which there were only, what? three?
3. Most later game biomes were solo, single entrance offshoots of the already limited ‘main’ areas. This made them feel much more like explicitly added game assets instead of areas you’d just wander in to while exploring.
4. The story and the game design itself seemed to want the on-land biome to be more cool than it was. It was ONE biome, and not even the type of biome that the game is known for.
5. The sea truck is cool in concept, but when every area is disparate and isolated, it SUCKED to drive a loaded truck to any of them.
6. The “AI” companion (and really, the story over all) totally and completely popped the isolated explorative feeling of the game.

Basically, the basic design of the map and story ran completely counter to everything that made the first such an amazing experience.

The individual biomes and assets themselves were still great, but they were composed in such a way that left them … not greater than the sum of their parts.

I think it could’ve been a banger if they had interconnected more biomes and made them larger so there was ANY point to dragging a loaded sea truck to them. The land biome could have worked if they made it much more like a real arctic; an ocean mostly covered in ice sheets instead of it just being some random biome “over there” largely literally on land. The ice worm would’ve been waaay cooler if the player had to wonder if it could make an appearance under water, for example, even if it never did. The snow fox (or what ever the land vehicle was called, it’s been a while) could’ve been way cooler if it wasn’t for one biome “over there”, too.

I don’t know how much larger it’d need to be, but a little more creativity in mixing the biomes together would’ve gone a LONG way.

I don’t know what this means but it makes me giggle.

https://media1.tenor.com/m/OhSittlaBH8AAAAd/robbie-rotten-shocked.gif (ugh I don’t know how to embed, especially on mobile…)

Don’t kink shame.

No, that’s literally within the hypothetical.

I mean, Willem Dafeo is such a legend… I think you’d be surprised at how many people prefer character over looks…

I dunno’, I’d still be happy as a lark if I could slap him in to an early grave after taking the blindfold off…

If I could choke him to death after, that would be a consolation prize I’d be fully and gladly willing to accept.

I dunno’, that sounds like moron defeatism to me. There are MANY things I am fully, wholly, and confidantly certain in, in this shitty world.

You KNOW that’s still going to be a dog.

This is not only AI slop but assumes I am Putin. Totally ruins it. If I woke up one day and realized I was Putin, the first fucking thing I’d do is put a bullet through my brain.

This definitely happened and totally isn’t a shitty made up event by a 15 year old on 4chan that probably doesn’t even drive, yet.

Ehh, I’ve found a good number of items for better prices off of Amazon. Mostly parts like carbon fiber tubes (a local manufacturer had some awesome prices), electric motors, weird niche parts… it really depends. Though Amazon IS NOT the best place to look for many items when you actually know what you want.

Even then, once you find something you’re willing to throw in your cart, it’s always worth it to do a couple general web searches (not shopping searches) for the same/similar items to check prices. Even if Amazon is the best normal price, sales and discounts crop up pretty often.

Amazon is thoroughly in their enshittification phase. It shouldn’t be surprising that others can offer similar/better prices.

Depends if it’s sold by Amazon who stuffed 90000 units in their own warehouse or if it’s just sold through amazon by the same vendor. I’ve seen all three prices on the same item all still on amazon.

I dunno’, quite a few people are aware that they’re dying before they die.