+1 for Genshin. While I think your gacha warning is excellent I do want to point out that the amount of resources you get for getting characters is more than enough to clear all story content. Hell if you’re a good player you could probably clear the whole game without using a single primogem, not even the countless thousands you get along the way.
And massive is also the understatement of the year. There is voiced content here that dwarfs even whole trilogies. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more recorded lines than all of Dragon Age and Mass Effect put together. And the story is likely not even at the halfway point yet, there’s still years to go. Closest analogy would probably be SWTOR, the MMO, but with much better combat.
It is a great game imo, but it’s also insanely long and pretty grind heavy. I made it through two of the three disc before I sadly lost my save file in a break in.
I later tried again but only made it to disc 2 before just not being able to stomach the grind :/
It likely starts the LLM it uses as a service, and it requires running on a port. They could of course have rewritten it to not use a port and instead use other mechanisms possible when you’re in control of the code but then that requires modification of the LLM project they use and would make updating its version harder so such a thing would be reserved for the full release or skipped all together because it’s not really a big deal. All this assuming that they do use one of the hundreds of open source local LLM projects floating around Github.
For sure, as I outlined social media is a completely different beast and one I do not permit my son to interact with and will hold out for as long as is reasonable.
I’d argue that so far the load as it is, is from my outside perspective about the same as what I had. It’s just split over more stuff and what pressure you face is much more related to the crowd you interact with. My son, like me, is more of a nerd while having a theater side that I don’t. The pressure he faces is keeping up with YouTube trends, Roblox games and Minecraft mods that the creators that are popular play. While some of his friends flaunt in-game items and follow creators that do content that I personally don’t find child appropriate I have had no issues so far talking about that with him and setting limits on what he’s allowed to interact with and have managed to instill understanding about the ultimate pointlessness about avatar items. And given the vast sea of content there is there has been no issues finding appropriate content and he’s confident enough to bring what he found/enjoyed to the group and not just mindlessly follow.
It helps that he really hates loot boxes IRL, like say kindereggs and gumball machines. He finds no enjoyment in the surprise part, only disappointment when it’s not the one he wanted.
That said I understand that while I put in work as a parent the exact same amount of work might be woefully inadequate with another kid, due to no fault at all on the parenting. Hell I have three kids and they all have had vastly different challenges. Stuff that was easy with one took extreme effort with another. So I don’t really fault parents for the small stuff, if a kid watches one YouTuber that really isn’t age appropriate, OK. If they watch only stuff that is not at all for kids then I have an issue with that and have raised such concerns with them.
As a parent to a kid smack dab in the middle of this right now I gotta say that while I welcome regulation on 1, 2 and 4 generally, not just for kids, I really and firmly believe parents who allow their kids to buy whatever they want in game (i.e. gift in game currency and leaves it at that) are horrendously lazy. And I have an analogy for that as well.
Back in my day what happened when kids got unsupervised cash was at best candy instead of lunch in school and at worst alcohol or cigarettes. Back in my parents time it was basically, due to before mentioned conformity, only cigarettes as the only possible outcome.
As such I really feel loot boxes is decidedly better than cigarettes and alcohol while being tied with candy for lunch.
3 is just a parental issue. It’s the same as not knowing where your kid is and who he’s playing/interacting with.
5 is a big societal issue right now. Social media is really fucking with not just kids but virtually all of us. Me being here is largely a way to combat my own unhealthy relationship to social media. We’re extremely social creatures at our core and social media manipulates us in ways we have little chance of resisting with mindful consumption. It’s cigarettes as they were back in the early 1900s.
Not really any different from my experience around clothing and “ringtones” for your phone. And not different from my parents around clothing which was ridiculously important, much less room for any personal expression than there is today, back then it was with the times / fashion or outdated, no styles or choice existed unless you count sub-cultures which without exception were social outcasts.
They’d be dumb to keep making consoles as we know them today. A much better long term business move would be to make a “cloud gaming Chromecast” a la Stadia but, if they want to retain their fan base, a disc player that mearly reads and validates your disc and then runs the game from the cloud. Thus letting Xbox fans still have access to their games. That in turn would allow them to have the base subscription have a library that changes to a great degree every month and you only get “permanent” access if you buy the games. Hell if the “buy” cost is lowered then people would by and large applaud them for it.
The hardware has almost always been sold at a loss but with how many datacenters they have now, how long they’ve been refining the game pass and the Xbox Cloud gaming service it seems like the only way to wrestle away Sony and PlayStations dominance in high end console gaming.
Now don’t get me wrong, I absolutely hate the whole “you will own nothing, rent everything, and be happy” paradigm were in now and refuse it for a lot of things. But I also understand business and I’m reasonably sure the average consumer will actually love it. “Console” for like $100, the subscription say $15 at base, $25 for the full month and you get all the games you could ever play. It would be a no-brainer for any non-gamer parent. The kids will love it, no more begging for that new game, they’ll have it day one and so will all their friends. Hell parents will probably also love the blanket, one time, parental action of setting which ESRB ratings are allowed instead of having to vet it game by game while the kid screams that Johnny gets to play it. Now they can just say ‘no if the Xbox won’t let you see it and play it then there’s nothing I can do honey’ and it’s just enough deflection that it might pass.
It’s really only when you zoom out that it becomes a shitty deal. But that’s not something the majority ever cares go do.
Brothers in Arms is fantastic and squad management is not a very intrusive part of it at all.
As for the saturation it wasn’t just FPS, it was that every genre (well, baring racing I guess, but there every game was heavily “Fast & Furious” inspired) had more than one WWII game, it was ridiculous…
It’s a long game, I think I just overestimated how far in you’d be at 20 hours. Since I really jammed with the game (and it was before I had 3 kids 😂) I had done all the side quests I had found but I hadn’t explored further away than the zones the side quests took you to. I will say though that plot wise it would make absolutely no sense to save it to the “late game” if that’s even possible. But that is the fight I was talking about, 100%.
Well the “early” fight with the noble / king / count can’t remember in PoE had me tearing my hair on the difficulty I played on, took intense space bar action and every trick I could muster in terms of abusing targeting and kiting, etc to win it. I don’t know how many times I reloaded and how many days I tried, must’ve been in the hundreds by the end when I finally got it due to a few lucky crits and rolls.
I have this weird thing where I love a game to be challenging because it’s not engaging if it’s easy, it makes the game boring to me, but at the same time I despise grinding and generally rote gameplay with the only purpose of amassing more points to be able to challenge the next boss. But very few RPGs I like are like that. Baldurs Gate 1/2 are excellent games that I love but I get extremely frustrated by some encounters which just feels like absolute bullshit and require extreme grinding or going off to do a myriad of side quests to bump up your level. Same holds true for Pillars of Eternity which I also love.
Though I tend to be a stubborn person so I generally come back a week or month later if I get stuck but I tend to put the game down once I’ve dealt with the immediate challenge and realize that I need to do all that boring stuff again for the next boss and then I just don’t start.
Gears of War comes to mind, not much physics but a lot of emphasis on movement but in a different way from Halo, still stupid fun to play the campaign Co-op!