The vast majority of Russian citizens are living in cities. How practical do you think it is for them to use Starlink antennas there, especially undetected? How are they going to pay for the service with Russia being increasingly detached from the global banking system? Not to mention: Musk has close ties to Putin and restricted this service upon request from Moscow in the past - and it's trivial to block these signals even if he doesn't.
Probably because they want to use this card with an old board, which means an older CPU, which makes no sense with a card this powerful, since it'll drastically bottleneck GPU performance. It's a common mistake people are making though.
A AAA game will have these kinds of details today, because it's expected by customers. AAA(A) games that don't (looking at you, Ubisoft, with your shoddy animations) get relentlessly mocked unless they excel in every other area. First party Sony titles in particular are expected to push technical boundaries (at least of their hardware) in some way or another. That's part of the reason why people are buying these games and the systems they are running on. This isn't an optional thing, it's not a choice, it's the baseline.
You also have to consider that even if this wasn't the case, you can't just radically change the way studios are being organized. Large studios are art-heavy in terms of their manpower, in large part because it's very easy to produce tons of game assets in parallel. It's not easy to hire or retrain people after a switch in priorities and it's much more difficult to apply the same kind of manpower to game design tasks. The old saying that nine women can't birth a baby in one month applies here as well.
Taking a rough look at the credits, Horizon Zero Dawn had 30 designers working on it (world, quest, writing, etc.). Compare this to 57 coders coding things and 148 artists creating audio and visual assets. There are other departments like production, marketing, HR, etc. that I'm not counting, but I think you get the picture.
It's not an "either - or" thing. The artists modeling fine details like peach fuzz had nothing to do with the game's design and it also had no influence on how replayable the game would be.
Dorfromantik. I had bought the award-winning board game as a gift for a relative and figured I'd try the videogame version. Please send help, I can't stop playing. This game is so addictive, it should be classified as a dangerous narcotic. I have deliberately not installed it to my Steam Deck (which it's verified for), because I need at least a few hours per day that I'm not playing it. In completely unrelated news, who knew birds are waking up this early?
I've also been playing a bit of GTA Vice City and San Andreas, not the botched remasters, but the original PC ports with mod packs (Reviced and SA Enhanced Edition Plus) that restore features from the PS2 version and overhaul them a little. I'm having a blast, unsurprisingly. These are games you can replay forever. San Andreas in particular absolutely glows (both figuratively and literally) with the restored lighting and holds up incredibly well. Since it's been a while since I last played it, I noticed just how incredible the architecture in this game is. Weird thing to focus on, I know, but every building has the right proportions and, by PS2 standards at least, a remarkable amount of variety and detail, in large part due to the photo textures. Even most newer open world games don't even come close, like the entire Saints Row series or the recent Mafia 1 remake (which I actually enjoyed quite a bit otherwise). It's a huge step up from Vice City in this regard, which is however still a ton of fun. The attention to detail in SA remains impressive in every way, like how radio talk hosts will comment on story events.
I tried a bit of the classic hacking game Uplink again, with the brilliant UplinkOS mod that modernizes its UI and makes the game usable on modern display. I haven't done many missions yet, but it's still as enjoyable as when it was new 23 years ago. It's remarkable how little this old Indie darling needs to set the right atmosphere: Some appropriately beepy Hollywood sound effects, a charming electronic soundtrack and just the right amount of well-written text.
Parking Garage Rally Circuit: Little retro arcade racer with a delightfully limited scope. If you like the old Sega arcade racers, this one is a well-crafted throwback and even if you don't, it's the perfect game to play in short bursts. The difficulty is old-school hard too - and comes with tons of filters and resolution options to make it look like it's playing on your parents' crappy old tube TV.
Just make sure you have GPU that can do ray-tracing, since it's one of the first games that requires hardware support for this feature. If it can, the game will likely run very well and look just as good.
Do you blame capitalism and America for bad weather too - or when you stab your toe in the morning?
Capitalism is a product of human nature; nobody designed it that way. When people attempt to design better systems from the ground up, far worse human behavior is being directly rewarded. Seriously, do you have any idea how much more disgustingly selfish and self-centered people are under economic and political systems that are supposedly better?
If you look at the most democratic nations on Earth, the ones with the best functioning institutions, the best education, the most innovation, least inequality, you'll find nations that are fiercely capitalist, with strong mercantile tradition dating back centuries. These people were capitalists before the term was first coined and they selfishly wanted the state to protect their investments, so they created strong institutions for that purpose. They had no idea that these institutions would end up doing so much more, spreading and maintaining wealth far beyond the small elite that they were supposed to serve while at the same time slowly moving power away from them. The many smaller educated merchants, who only educated themselves, because they selfishly wanted more prosperity for themselves, ended up being an amazing nucleus of a well-formed civil society, which is the backbone of every single successful free country.
Forget about America for a second or pie in the sky ideas that failed spectacularly any time they came in contact with the basic reality of human nature. This is what works: Stumble into a system that accidentally rewards selfish human behavior in such a way that everyone ends up benefiting from it. The problem from the perspective of ideologues is that this isn't glamorous, there are no dashing revolutionaries applying catchy slogans with the butts of their rifles. It's slow, incredibly difficult to replicate, requires rewarding the "wrong" kind of people for the longest time and. There's no trickling down or other such nonsense, but rather the slow collective realization that the same system that protects investments and the free exchange of goods and services can do a rather excellent job at protecting and increasing civil rights. It was neither linear nor planned and the resulting societies are by no means perfect, but they are the best we managed to achieve as a species so far, so consider learning from them how they were able to make capitalism work.
Sorry for the uncalled for wall of text, but I'm increasingly tired of people here blaming capitalism for everything. It comes across as performative, even downright intellectually lazy. I get that this is a left-leaning place to say the least and there's a reason why I'm here too, because I'm identifying with many typical left political positions - but certainly not all of them and most definitely not those that have failed historically and don't hold up to the most basic of scrutiny.
Correct!