NMS was quite literally a different looking and feeling game with maybe 5% (yes, twenty times less) of the current content and gameplay loops. Everything changed from how long it takes to gather basic resources to what order you get them in, the tutorial was streamlined and the way it picks the planet you start on was changed. There’s an unbelievable amount of things to do, to the point that expeditions started existing to give players a more guided experience with fresh regular content. It’s truly a far cry from where it launched, even space stations (the most static structures found in most star systems) have been overhauled and the old ones are only around as easter eggs now.

CP2077 integrated a ton of content and features from the most popular mods it had after the Anime update (particularly Vehicle Combat, from which it even took improvements to the way police spawn and act in addition to, yknow, the vehicular combat). Only a few of the core systems changed, mainly quickhacking and the way cybernetic implants are handled (also almost straight up taken from a mod). They did a balance pass on guns and made some of the weapon type features a bit different. If you didn’t push too terribly far through the game on release, none of it would seem different really. The locations and behavior of weapons and enemies in general gameplay didn’t change much, but access to mobility via implants was made easier (as the separated stores for them were largely equalized and merged) so it’s easier for fresh players and people not using guides to finish their “build”. Not quite the huge makeover NMS received, but it’s definitely different in terms of progression.

While you’re probably right to some extent about naysayers decreasing naturally over time, both games now have suspicious steamcharts numbers for being single player experiences. They get an influx of new players regularly in ways other similar titles don’t, and it’s almost certainly due to the changes in opinion of people who were playing them around their major updates, journalist articles or enthused friends.

TL;DR: No man’s sky really did change that much. CP2077 didn’t go as far but they’ve clearly made end user-oriented changes that are uncharacteristic for single player experiences.

Do people genuinely not realize that sony and microsoft had a great data collection source (console gamers) that have largely “aged out”? This new push for account sign-ins is obviously because their user data flow needs a big kick. They used to get data when people bought the game on their own platform, ran it on their own platform, even how many hours their gameplay sessions were individually throughout the week. With a lot of their studios games they had either complete or timed exclusivity to really find out what was driving gamers to game, and beyond that it’s a popular commodity and likely a loat or reduced revenue stream.

With helldivers 2, the account controversy sprung up on the back of Helldivers 2’s stats page not showing correct numbers for anything (and sometimes being rolled back asynchronously from your currencies and unlocks). Seemed obvious to me at the time they wanted a head count from another source (a sign-in) and probably data beyond that like session time/length. Whatever people are upset about sign-ins over, I don’t actually see it articulated much; there are a lot of good reasons to dislike it (potential stoppage of the service causing games to be harder to play like end of service for Games for Windows Live) and I never see them mentioned, just general vitriol for the companies. I don’t find the companies sympathetic, but I do find it odd that people just slam it aimlessly everywhere instead of identifying the issues beyond basic understanding of privacy fears.

Are you familiar with the term lobbying and how it shares a bedroom wall with bribery? Individual votes usually matter little to none in the grand scheme of things, and there’s next to no evidence that politicians above the local level give a shit about individuals throughout a huge swathe of the US. Governatorial election promises in the southeastern US are almost universally lies about quality of life improvements, from healthcare changes in florida benefitting no one to roadwork that never happens being promised every election cycle in alabama and mississippi. There is a HUGE disconnect between representatives and their constituents in these states, and they’re not the only ones.

Realistically, that money is not being used effectively to sway anyone, especially when little is actually used for propaganda, and weak vectors are chosen. Many campaigns are still running on outmoded methods of contact, like outdated lists of people for cold mailing, text messages that wind up in your spam filter, and shock value ads that only serve to annoy and change VERY few minds about anything.

You have a very optimistic outlook on how any politician views a letter or email from a constituent. Within my whole lifetime, I cannot name ONE politician in the US that has changed course over constituent contact. Not for any single thing. That’s why someone asked if you were eight years old earlier; most people from 25-40 years of age have, at this point, accepted that the current system does not operate in the way that we were taught in school. Instead, we have this broken system where the cries of the masses enter the void, and MAYBE ONE “representative” echoes them to a person or place where change can begin. The ones that do are decried so unbelievably fast it makes your head spin, and the ones that retain office while doing so are treated like crazy extremists by any media that could inform people of their goals, so there’s no hope of popular/uninformed support.

It just struck me as weird. Really strange thing to add in an edit considering the rest of the post, just extremely confusing in context.

Sorry, is this post satire or are you talking about satire you did not recognize? NEVER seen a vegan call breast milk non-vegan and have in fact actually seen more discussion about whether vegans should be breastfeeding children at all, I.e. is it healthy to do so with their diet.

You’ve put the word debate in quotation marks flippantly like there’s an obvious answer, but I’m pretty sure you just misunderstood a conversation rife with sarcasm or taken out of context (or straight up made it up).

Idk dude, just googled “id analytics ssn” and I immediately get a page of results of articles from 2012-15. Could probably just add “as someone else” in scholar for the paper

An ID analytics study showed 40 million united states SSN had more than one name associated with them over a decade ago.

https://risk.lexisnexis.com/cross-industry-fraud-files/docs/financial/LexisNexis-Risk-Solutions-SSN-White-Paper.pdf

Whitepaper from LexisNexis, corporate background check company, explaining avout SSN not being a unique or even really reliable identifier

Anyone able to find the actual published info? The hyperlink in the article leads to another article which also alleges this but also does not provide said documentation. Kind of a low point for NPR to exclusively have other articles in the hyperlinks.

Is this copypasta I’m unfamiliar with

Because they have Douyin.

Because they have Douyin.

Shroud (and folks like me) with 200+ hours found the fun. The quest design in starfield has extreme lows, but it has some extreme highs that are probably helped if you watched the shows and films the quests are referencing. The faction questlines are stellar the first time through.

If you just hate all quests and only care about gameplay outside of that, you should probably admit that to yourself instead of flinging buzzwords and design guesses around. Bethesda open worlds have always felt surprisingly dead, closest they’ve got is morrowind and oblivion with almost every npc having a domicile and a daily routine. Their open worlds have been panned as being empty, too quest-locked, too small (or artificially large), poorly balanced, and any number of other complaints that they’re trash/slop/unplayable.

We’ve heard this take (new game bad, old game good) for the entirety of video games existing across basically every genre. If you don’t like it, cool. It’s a game where you assign your own goals after a point (or even from the get-go) so ultimately it’s on you to find a satisfying gameplay loop. It’s okay if you can’t, but it says something about you and not the title, especially when you turn into a goblin who can’t stand the fun or joy of others on public spaces

You described the garlic-like genre. Which has gotten VERY big. “we’d be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that’s what they were going for.” They are MAKING THEM it’s VAMPIRE SURVIVORS lmao

Most of your complaints about obfuscation make me think you haven’t played Last Epoch and don’t know there is a solution: simply put the information someone would alt+tab or otherwise leave the game to find it IN THE GAME! LE has a robust in-game guide with info on everything from weird status effects down to how elemental resists work against elemental penetration and reduction.

A large portion of the issue is the ever eternal Minecraft Problem imo, it seems like you (and many people in general) have trouble setting your own goals when it comes to why you’re making the character more powerful. ARPG have different approaches to this: diablo 3 hasn’t got much stuff to “distract” you from pushing greater rift levels, while Path of Exile gives you a 12 boss checklist in different dimensions and you need to finish a LOAD of content, then fight 4 of them to fight the bigger bosses after them (and content beyond even that). Without knowing which bosses or how to find them, some players get lost.

TL;DR the genre is evolving as people ask these kinds of questions and you’re slightly behind the forefront of questioning here. Not a knock, just worth mentioning that what you’re looking for (an ARPG with sparkling information clarity) already exists, and the thing you’re thinking might exist in the future (streamlined ARPG with less mechanical intensity) also already exists.

In high school, I took some time to read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. The title is as edgy as I was as a teen, but the advice is wholesome and sound, the core being one of the first few rules the book prescribes: Take a genuine interest in people. It’s a solid set of rules that help beyond masking behaviors and can even act as masking itself, even if it could do with some more up to date examples.

I saw your reply and regret to inform you the other folks are right, I’m no gamergater and the context isn’t even right. Woke is a descriptor that causes me to buy a game. “Core” referred to gamers that were willing to grind, basically; it was a useful demographic for describing players and I don’t really know what has replaced it.

Not that odd. Seems like a decade and change ago it became common knowledge that market-tested, sanitized content wasn’t really resonating with “core gamers”, but we don’t even call the demographic that anymore. Not really sure how we got here

Unfortunately not how nicotine works

E:D doesn’t really have them, but valheim and other information heavy games tend to have writeable signs. Since early modded minecraft, I have utilized these signs to communicate with my future self; writing down what I’m doing at the time and what my major goals are before logging off for the night is just part of my gaming routine now. Takes me a few seconds of reading to trigger the flow of action again. When games don’t have signs, I use a notepad .txt file to track what I was up to, or failing that I’ll save a note in my phone.

I would never have finished factorio or satisfactory without text files and signage. I would never have finished most large minecraft modpacks without signage. Organization skills rock.

MRI machines do explode and send shrapnel everywhere. Emergency stopping them causes the helium that’s trapped in the part that rotates the magnets to become a gas, then expand as the magnets superheat. In some cases, this causes an understandable explosion.

Seriously happened once already this year https://healthimaging.com/topics/medical-imaging/magnetic-resonance-imaging-mri/mri-explosion-leaves-3-injured-including-2-hospital-staffers , the cop is lucky.

Ark has cryopods which do the same thing mechanically, the only major difference being that you don’t visually throw them. If you use the vague wording on the patents surrounding pokemon’s box mechanics, it falls easily under there, since you are storing a captured creature in a digital storage.

Nintendo is the KING of frivolous patents. They’ve lost cases on it before, and with palworld being a sony interest, I don’t think the usual financial bullying nintendo brings to the table is going to cut it on this one. They need an airtight case and their vague patents (and recent history trying to patent THE LOADING SCREEN and vehicle speed matching for player characters with totk being denied) is a bad look for them in a courtroom. Like the US, the holder of a patent in Japan needs to file suits swiftly to protect the patent, or they risk losing cases (like this one. See “laches defense”).

Palworld is back in the top 100 global bestsellers today.