With regard to vehicle combat, I find it very strange that the very first NPC we meet has a man-portable surface-to-air missile launcher, but there don’t seem to be any anti-vehicular weapons that players can use.
Or at least I think there aren’t; I’m not nearly as far as you are, but I looked ahead in the research tab and didn’t see any.
The videogamey parts are really funny to me. I laughed my ass off when I saw Thufir Hawat standing around in the heat outside the Leto residence in Arrakeen because I guess players have to talk to him at some point, and the interior of the residence doesn’t exist in the game, so he has to stand around under an awning in the parking lot like a valet or something.
I am about 4-ish resource tiers in out of 7-ish or so, and I don’t feel like it is especially grindy by the standards of survival crafting games. There is obviously some grinding for resources, but there is also a good amount of exploring and doing quests, during which you can pick up a lot of the things you need. Getting through the iron tier was a little bit long because you don’t have access to a large vehicle inventory yet at that point, but I also took that time to reveal a bunch of the map, clear out bandit camps, etc. so it didn’t become too monotonous. There are a good variety of secondary resources that will keep you visiting different kinds of locations (wrecked ships, old mining operations, etc.) so that even if you just want to farm resources, you won’t just be spending all your time running between ore nodes.
If your friends would be playing together, they could also do things more efficiently by sharing bases so that they don’t each have to build their own infrastructure, and eventually you get access to a mining buggy that is faster to operate with two players (a solo player has to switch between the driver and mining laser seats).
IME framegen hasn’t meaningfully reduced the open-world hitching. It gets the framerate nice and smooth while standing still, fighting a bandit or whatever… until you walk a bit and the game becomes CPU-limited while streaming in new cells, at which point you noticeably hitch.
The performance in interior cells (including cities) is very good even on Ultra settings.
I suspect that this is one of the compromises they made by keeping the old engine running under the hood, because as DF notes this also happened in the original.
The cars make contact so much in this game that it feels like a missed opportunity to not have damage, at least visually. I want to see those cars crumple!
I know it’s typically because of licensing issues, though.
It is hard to see how the slot machine in LBALL can be gambling when you are guaranteed to profit on every spin (unless you’ve intentionally designed a machine where you can win nothing, but that seems like your fault). Gambling involves risking a stake, but in almost every configuration of the machine that you’ll encounter during normal play there is no risk, you are guaranteed to make more than it costs to spin. The challenge is to make enough to stay ahead of the landlord.
The Sims 3. I had to figure out how to disable OneDrive backup for my Documents folder, because Sims 3 insists on keeping your saves there, and somehow everything breaks if OneDrive tries to sync them. Previously I had given in and let OneDrive sync everything because Win11 nags you if you try to avoid it.
I also have to fiddle with processor affinity to get the game to launch, for some reason.
World of Warcraft is probably still in the lead even though I stopped playing years ago. It would be in the thousands of hours, which dwarfs anything else I’ve played.