I’d argue FF12’s content is primarily grinding, though. I liked the game, actually just beat it this summer. But, I was definitely ready to be done with it by the time the credits rolled. I finished with around 70 hours, I think. There are a lot of secrets and whatnot, I just wish their crafting/bazaar system wasn’t so tedious with its requirements.

Grim Dawn is fantastic! I can’t wait for the new expansion coming in a few months. I also heard they’re making a sequal after they finish their town building game which is coming out of EA soon.

Diablo’s story is now entirely detached from its gameplay, the protag can see the villains cutscenes due to a plot device, no more clever writing to explain events after, you get rewards not from an NPC but from the menu from completing world events, and somehow there are localised areas of 100s of enemies just waiting for you to start a fight in a random spot on an open field, theres a GPS showing you the way to the next objective

Diablo 2’s story is also detached, it’s nothing new lol. I’d say Diablo 3 actually had the most protag focused story besides Diablo 1. In D4, all of the cutscenes at least involve main characters you regularly interact with.

Regardless, no one plays those games for the story. They’ve always been purely about gear grinding and demon/monster butchering. D4 is probably the most polished in the series, except for maybe D3, which was a very streamlined experience, for better or worse. I like all of the Diablo games, but I still think D2 and D3 are the most fun I’ve had playing with friends. Fun is always the most important aspect, and D4 was making strong strides to improving that aspect when I last played over the summer. Not sure if that’s still the case in the new expansion, but I figure I’ll try it out when the xpac is on a deep discount.

Discord has individual volume adjustor per person in chat. With my friends turning me up and me turning my mic volume setting in Windows all the way up, I’m able to talk quietly enough in the next room without bothering my wife if she’s sleeping. We also have a white noise sound machine we run at nigh in our bedroom, so I’m sure that helps. White noise is probably your best bet if you’re in a smaller living area.

That’s super messed. Hope he eventually helped someone who happened to be screen recording and reported him for rating himself without permission.

Because, unfortunately, millions of people still use it. If you’re selling a product, it’s in your best interest to have as much social media presence as possible.

Also, it’s better to have an official presence on those platforms so others can’t impersonate you as easily.

I know it’s on the “other” site, but this post from a few months ago has several people saying they got it working quite nicely: https://www.reddit.com/r/cavesofqud/comments/1dcqyym/regarding_qud_on_the_steam_deck/

That’s the first description on the website. It says it’s a cloud native Linux image that comes pre-installed with all the apps for gaming, e.g. Steam, Lutris, etc. I was asking a question as to why it’s better than SteamOS, as when I see cloud native I just assume it’s something designed for and around streaming. I may be misunderstanding its purpose, but that’s the impression I get from the site.

Ahhh, I misunderstood your earlier comment, my bad. Yeah, if I had a windows handheld, setting it up to boot straight into Steam Big Picture would be a no-brainer for me, just as a minor QOL thing.

As for your other point, I don’t remember them saying that, but that’s pretty crappy they fell through on delivering on that promise. I’m just hoping as SteamOS/Linux gaming continues growing in popularity that developers just start putting more effort into native support.

What makes Bazzite so much better to use on a Deck versus SteamOS? It doesn’t seem any different than just using Remote Play/Moonlight/whatever and streaming from your main gaming rig?

I 100% agree with you on your first 2 paragraphs. I really love my Deck, but God damn is it annoying getting things like Battle.net, GOG, and/or Epic games working inside of it in Game Mode sometimes.

Apps like NonSteamLaunchers or Heroic help a lot, but they don’t always work smoothly. Like I had the itch to try out WoW again this week after not playing for numerous years (I’d heard War Within was really good). Getting battle.net installed and working within Game Mode was a major pain in the ass. I’d done it a few months ago for Diablo 4 without much headache, but somehow when I tried launching BNet last night, it wouldn’t. NonSteamLauncher’s BNet integrator also wasn’t working for whatever reason. So I had to do a few workarounds before I got one that worked.

It’s scenarios like that where I truly wish Valve would try harder to work with companies like Epic or Blizzard to get better native integration. I know Epic is a competitor, but really it’d be beneficial for both companies to have good integration between each other. I’m much more inclined to buy games on Epic if I can easily play them on my Deck, and I’m more lore inclined to stay within Steam’s ecosystem if I’m not constantly encountering these annoying obstacles. It will likely never happen, but I can dream

As for your last paragraph, are you referring to wiping your Deck and just installing Windows? I’ve been hesitant to do that due to how often I use the sleep mode function in games. I’ve tried using sleep mode on my desktop PC like that when I can’t save a game and I need to stop to do other stuff, and it’s really hit or miss if a game will resume without issue after waking. Have you had any problems? Also, how is your battery life impacted? The Deck has crazy good battery life, and I attribute a lot of that to how efficient the underlying OS is with power management, but maybe I’m wrong. Also, do you have issues with drivers? The APU on the Deck is a custom AMD chipset, but have people ported the drivers for it over to Windows now?

Ah okay, it didn’t used to be when I used it awhile back. I edited my comment, thanks for the correction.

That primarily happens due to voters going against their own interests. If society actively undermines their own protections eventually, then no economic and/or governing system will solve that problem.

I’d argue it’s capitalism without guardrails for consumer and worker protections that’s more problematic than capitalism itself. Just like with socialism, if it isn’t implemented and/or continually protected correctly, it eventually spirals into degeneracy.

And I’d like for society to avoid violence as much as possible. Anyone that throws that out as an option without heavy hesitation are those that haven’t experienced the horrors of open warfare/ violence at scale.

What can he even do, short of doing the exact same thing Trump did on Jan 6th and essentially starting off open, armed conflict? Anything he tries to pass now will be immediately thrown out after Jan 20th. Increase SCOTUS seats? GOP will either just undo it or add even more to counteract it. He can’t make new laws, he can only do executive orders, which Trump can easily undo. So again, that leaves only violence, and we all know that won’t play out well, since that’d pretty much require Biden to kill off enough politicians, including Trump and Vance, to give the Democrats the majority in both the House and Senate. Outside of being unlikely, that sets a really dangerous precedent that would definitely backfire down the road.

Bottom line is that politicians aren’t going to fix this, since the root of the problem lies within the electorate.

Copilot is actually linked directly into their search engine and it provides the links it pulls its data from. But you’re correct, ChatGPT is not hooked into the live internet and should not be used for such things. I’m not sure if Gemini is or not since I haven’t used it or looked into it much, so I can’t comment on it.

Edit: I stand corrected, ChatGPT is hooked into the live web now. It didn’t used to be and I haven’t used it in awhile since my work has our own private trained model running that we’re supposed to use instead.

FYI, in the future, just use Fiverr. I had the same problems when helping my wife get her business logo created. People either wanted a ridiculous amount of money for a simple logo ($1500+ and formal contracts) or like $100-200 just for prototyping to start and then another $100-200 for final image (the latter was commonplace on the freelance artist subreddits). I went with a couple artists on Reddit and they completely missed on what she wanted, despite us providing ample examples and our own rough sketch ideas.

She ended up finding a local artist through a friend who captured the logo exactly how she pictured it, and it ended up costing around $150. Ironically, I didn’t know she did that, and I’d hit up a random artist on Fiverr who came very close to what the local artist did and it was only like $50.

Sorry for the tangent, I was just somewhat surprised at how complicated and potentially expensive getting a simple logo created. I know artists gotta eat, but some of them wanted more than what plumbers or electricians ask for, which is crazy to me.

Pretty sure the only thing that happens when violating GDPR is a fine, which is ultimately the same thing as “paying off” the government, but just in a legally obligated way.

Your example is too damn spot-on, haha, man I haven’t seen one so brazenly fake in a couple months. Then again, I only stick to the smaller subs on Reddit whenever I do use it, so bot activity is a lot less frequent on those.

TIL the etymology of goodbye is a contraction of “god be with you.”