With regards to Ciri’s age, she’s 21 during the main events in The Witcher 3.
At the end of the books she’s 17.
No idea if they’ll play down the salaciousness or not, but given when the game will likely take place that at least won’t be any issues with the main character being a minor.
If it means a return to random encounters, no absolutely not. There’s a reason I don’t go back and replay the older games even though I have fond memories of them. That reason is largely Zubat. Fuck you Zubat.
But also, aside from a handful of bugs and performance problems Scarlet/Violet and Legends: Arceus are the best the franchise has ever been. I’d rather they refine what they’re already doing and keep making things better rather then regress purely to appease someone’s misguided nostalgia.
I’ll believe HL:3 is real when it is for sale, purchased by me, and played in it’s entirety. And even then it might just be a particularly vivid delusion.
HL:3 is gaming’s dark matter. Until all other possibilities are definitively ruled out, it’s not HL:3.
Looks like it’s just the brand it’s sold under in that market.
I was more just pointing out that they are the same thing, since it wasn’t clear if you knew that or not and I think it’s important that people know what the drugs they’re taking actually are. Tends to be safer that way.
Hopefully, you’re either taking it as prescribed or having fun responsibly. Benzos can be fun, but they’re also some of the most addictive substances on the planet.
Also, these articles you’re posting are some quality writing.
I typed out the below as a response to you, then reread what you wrote. We might be making the same point just with different words. Hopefully I’m not coming across as overly adversarial.
I think most people on social media, including lemmy, exist in an echo chamber that amplifies specific views to the point that it becomes easy to think those views are much more broadly held then they actually are.
Changing the question around like you suggest might help some people realize that, but I also think that there are a lot of people who think that the views expressed in their slice of social media are actually indicative of broader trends.
I also don’t think I’m immune to this effect, but I do feel somewhat compelled to point out specific instances of it when I notice it.
At the time I’m writing this there are 78 comments in this comment section. I haven’t read all of them, so let’s just assume that every single one of those comments represents a unique individual who believes that the Switch 2 and the Steam Deck (and related) are direct competitors.
Given the nature of this platform and community that number is not even remotely surprising. It’s also an utterly insignificant number of people.
The overlap between people who would buy a Switch 2 and people who would buy a Steam Deck is a tiny sliver of a Venn diagram. Those are two largely separate categories of gamer.
I was more thinking of the N64 and GameCube games (Stadium 1&2, Colloseum, and XD Gale of Darkness) when referencing older games with poor graphics specifically. All four of those games were graphically inferior to other titles on the same consoles.
However, every single release has been plagued by bugs that can result in completely corrupted save data, softlocks, and a wide variety of other unexpected behaviors. Major examples being MissingNo and the other glitch pokemon, bad eggs, a wide variety of exploitable, but potentially save corrupting bugs like the infinite item glitches in gens 1-3, and a whole host of bugs that break how moves are supposed to work in battle.
Hell, shinies were originally a graphical bug in gen 2.
I don’t disagree that the graphics could and probably should have been better. I do disagree with the idea that it’s anything more than a minor annoyance with no meaningful impact on the game.
However, regardless of what I think about it, my point was that at this point in the franchise, Gamefreak, the Pokemon Company, and Nintendo have demonstrated repeatedly since the very first game that optimization, stability, graphical fidelity, and any semblance of good development practices are not something they’re willing to commit to. Expecting that to change at this point is unreasonable and continuing to complain about it is demonstrably unproductive and just introduces pointless negativity into the pokemon community.
Because graphics are the most important part of a game?
If the games are fun to play who cares if the graphics are bad? Scarlet and Violet were the best pokemon games since P:LA and that was the best since Gen 5.
Based on the limited information we’ve gotten about ZA there’s no reason as of yet to doubt that it won’t be comparable to P:LA and S&V in terms of enjoyability.
Complaining about the graphics of pokemon games or the bugginess of pokemon games is like complaining about CoD being an FPS or Assassin’s Creed having traversable terrain or Souls-likes being hard. At this point it’s a staple of the franchise with 40 games between the mainline games and major spinoffs establishing a trend of the games being thoroughly buggy messes and/or having shit graphics. There is absolutely no reason to expect any of that to change and constantly hearing complaints about it with every new game is getting fucking old.
Technically, you’re allowed to make copies for personal use unless doing so requires bypassing DRM, encryption, or some other lockout mechanism.
Emulation is still not piracy and neither is making a personal backup, but if making that backup requires anything more than a standard disc drive or a cart reader then it is a DMCA violation.
The game was solid from launch. When a game is an offline, single-player game, with no future content planned, and good QC from the get go, you don’t need a whole lot of updates. You just need to fix the bugs that pop up when the general public with their wide variety of hardware/software configs and gameplay styles that weren’t tested for get their hands on it.
The last three bioware games the last three mass effect games?
Of Bioware’s last three games, Andromeda sucked, Anthem was an atrocity, but Veilguard was decent, not great like classic Bioware games, but it wasn’t bad, it was at least fun to play and had a decent story and characters.
Of the last three Mass Effect games, Andromeda sucked, ME3 was great until the Horizon mission then it goes to absolute dog shit, and ME2 was great as a character driven RPG but feels a bit out of place in the franchise as a whole.
Only in the latter case do I really see a true downward trajectory. In the former there’s a tentative upward trend in the quality of Bioware’s games.
I think it should also be noted that the games industry is not audited for security to the same degree as a lot of other industries. So vulnerabilities may not be found until years after launch and then go unpatched indefinitely because the company has already moved on to the next thing.
Hell, one of the older CoD games had an RCE vulnerability that as far as I’m aware is still not patched.
Plus, major publishers like EA are now pushing to create their own kernel-level anticheat in-house. Why should anyone trust them to create a secure piece of software that runs with the highest permissions possible when they can’t even be trusted to create stable, functional games?