He’d dismiss the sarcasm and make it genuine, “Yes, Timmy, we really are very impressed. Good job, Billy!”

Agreed. HZD always felt like a game that was built around a story premise first and foremost, which sort of makes sense as that studio had never done a game like that before.

I remember an interview where they were struggling to shift gears from Killzone and looking for new ideas from among their staff when one of their devs pitched HZD’s premise. As a result, they approached making an open world action adventure game as complete noobs. This doesn’t excuse any of the poor design decisions. I was hoping they’d learn from their mistakes in FW, but they instead made the open world part somewhat better and then forgot to keep the focus on the main quest and characters in the process.

All valid and fair points.

Regardless, I truly hope we never have to find out either way. The human species is capable of incredible things if we just set aside historical, cultural, and petty differences and worked towards a common goal of lifting everyone up. Wars of aggression are barbaric and unnecessary and I hope one day we all mentally evolve past such tendencies for mass violence. It’s a naive pipe dream, but one can always dream.

If nukes started popping off, there’d be zero reason to send in ground forces until it was all over. Lastly, I’m not convinced Russia’s nuclear program is much better off than NATO’s. So many interviews with nuke watch officers talking about how old and decrepit our silos are. The DoD supposedly approved a modernization package a few years ago for all of them, but I’m still skeptical how efficient the targeting is on everything and how well they’ll avoid missile defense systems.

Agreed, wider and thicker with maybe a wavy/ ridge texture on the bottom half of the mustache and slight rounding/flaring on the sides that narrows to the top.

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1262480275/ron-swanson-250fp011911_400x400.jpg

Feels like that’s a good reference pic for OP.

Edit:

But I do prefer #2 more. Like others have said, it’s simpler and easier to tell the expression.

Very true, especially in countries like the US:

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unsolved-killings-record-high

https://thehill.com/homenews/3878472-nearly-half-of-us-murders-going-unsolved-data-show/

For the US, the national average is around 40-50% for unsolved homicides. Some states/cities are even higher. Pretty depressing, really. We live in a heavy Police State society and yet law enforcement fails so badly in their primary purpose.

In today’s dollars (US), that’s roughly $90,000. Depending on what a large volume means, that’s not too shabby for a random CIA grunt. I also try to remember that not all classified info is actually that worthwhile. When I worked for the government, sending generic emails on a classified network could make them classified (unless you properly marked them as Unclassified, which most workers didn’t due to laziness).

Same. I logged about 20 hours on it before my desire to play just kind of slowly faded away. The game was too large and long to warrant such basic gameplay mechanics. You could be fully upgraded within 5-10 hours and then you’ve essentially seen all the gameplay there is. There’s maybe 6-12 random “quests” you’ll see while traveling (those dynamic events, e.g. a wagon being robbed), so even that part of it becomes repetitive pretty fast.

I’ll get downvoted, but RDR2 is a really overrated game, in my opinion. The game was well made, no doubt about it. Its graphics and environmental design are still gorgeous even to this day, despite being 8 years old. The voice acting, writing, direction, cinematography, etc. are all very well executed. However, at the end of the day, I just found it kind of boring to play.

Right? For a game to be a collector’s item, it needs to still be able to function in its intended capacity. Additionally, they need to be considered good. Most games that become a collectable do so when they transition into the “classic” category, usually 20+ years after they released. In 2050, no one’s going to think, “Oh man, Concord was hailed as a masterpiece in its day, I need to own that piece of history!”

deleted by creator

Yeah, from the comments I read, it looked like some people might have needed to clear their folders out and/or others had installed the PTS files as well. Regardless, ~95GB is still quite large. I’m surprised your loading speeds weren’t that bad on the SD card. How fast were your load times, if you don’t mind me asking?

Doesn’t that game require a massive amount of storage with all the expansions/add-ons installed? Doesn’t seem very Deck friendly, IMO. Especially for base model Decks. It’s one of the main reasons I don’t bother playing BG3 on it, either.

Edit: I just looked and can’t get a concise answer, seems like tons of players’ install size differs by notable margins. Official site says it needs roughly ~95GB plus another ~30GB during the install process (guessing for temp install files during decompression/compression). Meanwhile, some players report folder sizes ranging from ~97GB all the way up to ~150GB. Regardless, seems ~95GB is the bare minimum which is still a lot for even the 500GB Deck models. And there’s no way the game would run comfortably off an SD card.

According to your equaldex link, there seems to be some conflicting data there. In one of the questions, over 70% of those surveyed said they wouldn’t want gay neighbors, and over 80% said being gay isn’t justifiable. But 63% support legal recognition of gay couples. Then 66% support gay couples being able to adopt, yet almost 60% have negative views on gays being parents?

Just weird to me you can support legal aspects but still mostly oppose homosexuality, is all. I suppose it’s better than wanting legal oppression of homosexuality.

This shift has been happening for over a decade… How is this news? Obama ordered the pivot during his presidency and the DoD has been acting on that ever since.

And how much of those profits go to those workers? Let’s take a well known Marvel movie, the Avengers Endgame. It cost roughly $220 million to make. The total global box office for that movie is estimated around $2.8 billion. That’s ~$2.6 billion in profit. Please tell me how much of that went to the film crews and various film departments? Hell, a huge chunk of the budget cost probably went to the actors to begin with.

Anyway, my original point wasn’t even entirely around sticking it to the billionaires. Until laws are made to protect our ownership of digital licenses, I have zero problems with people pirating. Additionally, the majority of folks are going to be paying, so a minority of people–who typically have lower disposable income–pirating content are not destroying regular peoples’ livelihood, this has been proven for over two decades now.

Bottom line: Come down from your ivory tower and just let it rest. Regardless of what either of us says or believes, pirating will continue with or without us. You can disagree with it, which is fine, or you can justify it, which is also fine. It won’t change reality either way.

Defending multi-billion dollar corporations in this day and age is absolutely bizarre. And for the record, I rarely pirate these days. And even then, it’s for digital copies of physical content I already own. But I really don’t give a shit what others do, especially if they’re not hurting common folk. And if you truly think it’s okay not to fully own the digital licenses your purchase, then good for you for keeping those billionaire’s boots clean.

If you don’t understand why some folks pirate by this time, you never will. There are plenty of valid–and not-so-valid–reasons to pirate. If you actually care, just type the question into a search engine, there’s a plethora of well written articles on the subject.

Honestly, that’s a sign to me that your bank doesn’t take cybersecurity seriously and would possibly consider switching. Mine has amazing security as well as fraud detection. Sometimes it’ll even send me a text to verify a purchase if their software thinks it’s weird I got across town too quickly, though that’s pretty rare so it isn’t overly aggressive/inconvenient.

Yeah, the US has been doing this to other countries for decades. The internet just made it more accessible and easier for the rest of the world to participate en masse.

I feel this would work in some areas in the US, i.e. smaller towns, possibly in the residential areas of larger cities. But in rush hour type areas? Hell no, it would be a massacre after people got used to these spaces.