I don’t know who Spike Laurie is, but I don’t trust him.
Hiro Capital partner Spike Laurie believes you can trace the current wave(s) of layoffs to one in particular: Elon Musk cutting 50% of Twitter’s workforce in November 2022.
“[Elon Musk] had figured out from people’s electronic passes that there were more people serving food in the cafeteria than actually there to eat it,” he says. “This was the impetus other business leaders needed in order to start looking carefully at the size of their companies and start making judicious cuts.”
This sounded suspect so I looked it up. The claim was posted to Twitter by Musk himself, completely unsubstantiated, and directly contested by Twitter’s former VP of real estate. If I had to choose between this being the actual impetus for other businesses making judicious cuts or the empty claims of a Musk fanboy, I’m betting fanboy.
You know one of the reasons I jump to 2, and I didn’t think of it until now, is because of aerial assassinations. If I remember right, there wasn’t an actual mechanic for it in 1, and the addition in 2 and beyond tied things up nicely.
By the time Assassin’s Creed 2 came out, I was calling this my favorite series ever. The Ezio games made you feel like an expertly skilled badass with unprecedented success, and the stealthy, agile archetype is my favorite to inhabit. Even the gameplay loop was fresh and borderline revolutionary, and so successful it became the basis for what would soon be tarnished as the Ubisoft blueprint.
Last game I played was Odyssey, and though I spent…a lot of time on it, I’ve never felt more bitter at the end of the game. Seems you only get half the conclusion by completing the story missions, with the other half locked away behind the assassination list. And since any enemies 3 or more levels higher than you are always essentially indestructible, and the assassination targets climb very high in levels, it’s essentially a driver for bottomless grinding. By that point I’d already had far more than my fill.
I was casually interested in Mirage, but I learned from Skillup’s video that it’s essentially an upscaled Valhalla DLC, which is a red flag. With other reviewers pointing out that it, well, feels like upscaled DLC, I’ve no interest personally.
Pillars of Eternity is the only real-time-with-pause game I’ve played, and honestly I don’t get it. It’s too chaotic for me to absorb everything that’s happening. If I play another I’m just going to drop the difficulty.
Good Ness, I was going to express concern for you for spending that much time on character creation, but then I watched the Mortismal new player guide and…that looks overwhelming in a possibly good way.
This is such a absurd statement I’m inclined to agree about the trolling.
Maybe you love the characters, maybe you love the world, or maybe you love the character creator. That’s all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that all of those things—and a good many other aspects that Baldur’s Gate 3 has been praised for—are poor measurements of evaluating a game. If these subjectivities were the most important aspects of games, then we could say that chess or soccer are bad games. And I don’t think I need to explain how absurd that statement would be.
Nice, I was looking at this a while back but got turned off by references in reviews to poor combat and general lack of polish. Sounds like the definitive edition may have smoothed the edges enough to push it across the line. I’ll add it to my list!
Is there any scaled/linear progress in it? For example, I loved Subnautica because I loved the gameplay loop of finding a new resource, which let me craft a new item, which let me explore a new area and find new resources to craft more powerful items.
I wanted to like No Man’s Sky for similar reasons, but it’s too sandboxy, and there’s no sense of purposeful progress and growth.
Yeah, that’s fair. The first time you go to any new site there is walking involved along with everything else, but I still think calling it a walking simulator is reductive, since it just one tool in an ever-expanding toolbox.
Maybe it’s better to call it a scifi delivery simulator (including factions of delivery addicts you have to fight because they keep trying to take your things).
I strongly object to the characterization of Death Stranding as a walking simulator. Walking place to place is core to the experience for maybe one quarter of the game. Once you get to the largest area and continue unlocking new tools and features, you spend very little time walking. It also dismisses combat, which I felt was considerably more prevalent than I expected.