Their first pathfinder game was so excruciatingly guide dang it I never finished it, and never even considered this game. I kind of assumed it was the same way, where there’s stuff like “Ah, you didn’t return to this unmarked forest on day 7, so now you never get a wizard”

Oh, now I remember having an argument on here with some asshole who insisted I just have “fomo” over this. Sign posting and foreshadowing are only to appease fomo, I guess.

Played the games. Not interested.

A new story in the setting could be good

Retelling the game sounds bad. Conveniently, the reasons why are nicely outlined in the article.

I switched to linux because windows 10 is going end-of-life, and I can’t upgrade to windows 11 even if I wanted to.

It’s been fine, other than some trouble getting mint to dual boot the first time.

My understanding is XFCE is lighter weight and simpler. Little to no animations, for example.

https://itsfoss.com/linux-mint-cinnamon-mate-xfce/

I am extremely basic and I’m using the XFCE that came with Linux mint. I don’t need anything fancy.

I really don’t think Baldur’s gate 3 and whatever the fuck Monopoly go is are the same kind of thing.

At least you can improve inventory in-game (eg: do normal gameplay quest and crafting stuff to get bigger bags). Some monetization is cash or nothing.

Still bad when they make something annoying and then charge to fix it.

Guild wars 2 specifically has a surprising amount of quality of life stuff for free, but you can see places where “we can make money here” won out occasionally.

Baldur’s gate 3 characters aren’t even that complicated. You pick stats at the start from a limited range of options, and then make very few choices when you level up. Some levels you don’t pick anything at all. This ain’t path of exile.

I got a mod for bg3 that gives you a feat every level and holy shit did that make it more interesting.

To WotC’s credit, making character choice really shallow is probably why the game succeeded so well. A lot of people don’t really want a lot of choices, especially when some are traps.

The larian games have some interesting interactions beyond just oil. You can make people slip on ice.

The old Magicka game also had some fun interactions that more games could learn from.

For a generous definition of “these days”, check out the pillars of eternity games. They’re very good and clearly a love letter to Baldur’s gate. Unfortunately the team is now making a Skyrim-like for some reason, but I hope they come back and finish the main game story sometime.

There’s also that solasta game that’s DND 5e but on a smaller budget from a few years ago.

“constantly be jumping while conjuring a skeleton” is pretty stupid and counter intuitive for an optimum thing to do, but it that’s what you should do if you want to level those skills up.

Morrowind also had some bizarre optimum behavior if you wanted to get the +5s on stats when you leveled.

best solution could probably be good public transport in the city and self driving cars in the countryside.

You don’t even need self driving if it’s mostly just the countryside. That’s just not a lot of people and the resources required to get it working would be better spent on building mass transit and walkable areas in cities where people actually live (and thus where culture and economy actually happen)

Among other reasons, caps chill usage. A lot of user content would not get shared because “ehh I don’t want to waste my data for the month”

One of my friends wanted kids. She has a full time job in software and does side gigs like bartending. Can’t afford kids, so she didn’t have any. It’s sad.

Meanwhile the ultra wealthy have more money than they can spend.

Nationalize health care. Basic income. Public housing. Enforce existing tax laws. Tax or prohibit bullshit like “I’ll get a loan against my assets but that’s not technically income so I don’t pay anything”. Break up monopolies.

It’s not you. Google has been getting worse.

https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/

There was a (fiction) book I was called “all the birds in the sky”. I really liked it. Highly recommend.

One of the plot threads is a rich tech bro character that’s like “the world is doomed we need to abandon it for somewhere else. Better pour tons of resources into this sci-fi sounding project”. And I’m just screaming at the book “use that money for housing and transport and clean energy you absolute donkey”.

There are a lot of well understood things we could be doing to make the world better, but they’re difficult for idiotic political reasons. Racism, nimbyism, emotional immaturity, etc.

Targeted ads should be illegal.

Contextual ads are a compromise I would accept. That is, you can buy ads based on the page content, but not the viewer details. So if I’m looking at a website about bikes, you can have bike ads on there. You don’t need to know I’m a xx year old living in zip code 10001. That’s how ads worked for like decades (centuries?). It’s fine.

Been happy buying music from Bandcamp and not having a subscription. Didn’t even make it onto the chart :(

A response (or status!) on slack that’s like “I’m at the grocery, back in 20” is fine with me. It’s more annoying when someone wanders away with no status and is unresponsive for hours.

Some people are bad at working remote, and want to drag the rest of us down with them, too.

Yes, it’s a slightly different skill set to work remote. You have to be better at the written word. You can’t just roll up to someone’s desk and be like “have a minute?” (which is fucking awful anyway). You also need to be responsive and set your status appropriately. A lot of coworkers just wander off and leave their slack status as active. To my mind if you’re running an errand longer than taking a dump, you should update your status.