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593
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • The first thing anyone should do when buying a smartphone is disabling/uninstalling the trash on it, including (especially) Google stuff.

    There are tons of better Gallery applications out there.

  • So being scared that Xbox is going to disappear is stupid, the consoles might, but Microsoft has been transforming Xbox into a platform for years, starting with the release of windows 7 when they introduced XboxLive for windows alongside halo 2.

    If Xbox disappears, so does your digital library and other purchases (some games you can buy once and get on PC as well, but last time I checked, they were few and far in between). I can see that being a concern for people that bought into the Xbox ecosystem for the last few gens.

  • You don't need to defend exclusives or become part of a cult to understand how the market works.

    Exclusives are a big part of what makes a console successful (not the only one, mind you, but they certainly play a role in convincing people to buy a console), and porting them over to the competing console would be like admitting defeat for MS.

    Although fanboys certainly exist (on both sides), a lot of people weren't being cultish. They were simply concerned for the future of Xbox and re-evaluating their choice: why buy a console, when I can buy the competition and play all its games plus other exclusive titles? Why invest in a digital library if there's no guarantee that the platform will keep existing?

  • Those games are already available on PC, nobody was freaking out about that. People were wary of MS exclusives being ported to other console platforms.

    Consoles live and die by exclusives. Porting those over suggests a lack of faith in the brand and would be like admitting defeat. It wasn't clickbait rage journos baiting people, it was people reading the room and realising that the Xbox brand wasn't as strong as they thought.

  • The point is, Xbox is performing very badly, with the latest metrics suggesting not only that PS5 blew them out of the water, but also that XSeries is selling less than its predecessor. Coupled with rumors about exclusives going multiplatform, people feared that it meant that MS didn't have enough faith in the brand to keep going, and that Xbox would end like Windows Phone.

    The concern was real and, in my opinion, perfectly justified. MS telling them to wait a week for an answer, without dismissing the rumors was the weird part. They saw the community on fire and said, "This is fine". All-around incompetence.

  • I wonder what took them so long to make a response. The community was turning against them and they took an entire week to tell them that no, they do, in fact, want to keep making video game consoles.

    Nothing announced in the video is ground-breaking, nor did it require so much time to prepare.

    (Honestly, Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush going multiplatform in place of Starfield is a huge win for PlayStation users lol)

  • Spent a good chunk of my childhood playing Sacred 1. It's aged very poorly, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone nowadays, but I still think that the world design and environmental storytelling were some of the best I've found in a videogame.

    For example, at the beginning of the game, orcs are migrating from the desert and attacking human settlements. When you progress, you discover that they aren't doing it because they want to, but because the undead army is forcing them out of their land. And when you progress in the northern part of the world, there's a completely optional region inside the forest, where you can find a few hastily made orcish settlements - but you only find women and shamans, because the men are fighting at the front. There are no dialogues, quests, books or anything telling you that, it's just something that you infer from the environment.

    It made exploring the world and finding its secrets fun, even if there wasn't always a reward.

    (There were also a metric ton of easter eggs, from tombstones mentioning LotR characters to receiving sunglasses as a reward for chasing rude orc visitors from a tourist island... it was a wild game)

  • I don't even have that. I use a dice app.

    I did gift a metal dice set to a friend, though, so I did my part.

  • I'll go counter-current here and say that it was a fun game. IGN review sells it really well, and I had fun while playing it. I'd say the main problem of the game was releasing in a year already full of big-name releases, and a marketing campaign that was too quiet - I'm honestly surprised it cost $40 million, because I only heard of the game by pure chance.

  • From personal experience, by the time casters have depleted all their spell slots, martials are low on health as well, making the balance finicky at best even if you're having multiple encounters per long rest. The game is balanced in a way that makes it impossible for martials to shine: you either play with few combat encounters, thus allowing the casters to shotgun their infinite spell slots at the enemy, or play with multiple combat encounters per long rest, which has martials on death's door because their HP drop faster than the casters' slots.

    It's also difficult, from a narrative perspective, to fit so many combat encounters in a single day, to the point that I honestly don't think it's possible unless you subscribe to some form of gritty realism ruleset (7-day long rests, long rests in safe zones, long rests at the end of a narrative arc, etc...).

  • Okay, but are the users still committed to buying them?

  • Yeah, I'm just convinced that the designers actively hate the martials classes. Even in the playtest for the new edition, after 10 years of people pointing out the martial/caster disparity, it took them over a year to write a somewhat decent skill set for martials.

    (Link away! I'm always interested in homebrews for DnD. You should also consider posting it in the c/dndhomebrew community if you want more visibility. I still don't know how to link Lemmy communities to users from different instances, but you should be able to access it from my post history.)

  • That is, unfortunately, correct. The feature specifically mentions that you only get those temp HP "provided you don't already have temporary hit points". Even if you have only a single temp HP from another source, you won't get any more.

  • Welcome to DnD, where the martial/caster disparity is a feature, not a bug. We're actually really, really bad about balancing our content, please buy our overpriced rulebooks that offer very little guidance on how to actually use them.

  • What a ride. As you read, you keep saying to yourself "this can't get any worse", and every subsequent line gets worse-er.

    I don't know the guy, but damn, I feel really bad for him. The ultimate dick move of not allowing him to work for three months out of spite was especially gut wrenching. There was no reason to do it, they just did as a final "fuck you" to a person they lied, gaslit, overworked and underpaid for months.

  • Seanchan dwarves.

  • It absolutely was scheduling for us.

    We loved the game and have been playing a pretty long campaign for slightly less than a year.

    Then work got in the way for a few members, me included, and we weren't able to find a day when everyone could play for a few hours consecutively, with some of us working on the weekend, others on the weekdays, and others still having life-changing events going on, such as having to move hundreds of kilometres away.

    We still manage to play once in a while, but nowhere near the weekly cadence we had before.