I can’t help comparing it (unfavourably) to baldurs gate 1. The story just didn’t hook me the same way.

I haven’t played a lot of souls, but elden ring death (both of non-boss enemies and protagonist) is super toothless. What made it more relevant in previous games?

Omg yes. It was not just a corridor. It was a send up of every game corridor game that I had played to that point. Taking a design limitation and making it a compelling plot twist was exactly what made bioshock awesome. One of my top 5 gaming moments of all time.

For me grind is when the gameplay loop is motivated by reward not exploration and plays out the same every time.

Good gameplay can come from a feeling of freshness because there are lots of possibilities, because rng or because player options (say, slay the spire), or from lots of genuinely novel content (say, elden ring).

It doesn’t feel like a balancing act at all. I just want more of the latter and less of the former, but maybe some people really do play for repetition?

It had a single player campaign too! Deck builder pvp gets too sweaty for me, but I really like deck builder RPGs.

Couldn’t find a good primary source to dig into it. But from Ipsos:

“I believe the preference for physical discs amongst next gen gamers reflects the potential value they derive from the pre-owned market,” commented Ipsos director Ian Bramley to MCV, “which is holding up the preference for physical - this is unlike the music and film markets.”

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/64-percent-prefer-physical-media-to-digital-distribution

I’m sure there’s a lot of generational and market segment differences. I never really understood “collecting” games. But I guess people do that in digital too with their huge steam sale backlogs!

I’m sure not many people care about physical vs digital per se. It’s the arbitrary locks by servers, digital storefront, DRM etc. So that when you pay your money you have no idea what you are getting and what your rights are. Physical game media was a simpler time from that perspective (play in perpetuity, don’t redistribute, cool cool that seems like a fair trade) and resulted in better pricing and experience for consumers.

I’d accept “move on” if the argument was just “muh pretty box” (god knows there are plenty of ways to buy pretty boxes of vidya IP) but consumer rights are surely worth fighting for, or we get needlessly bled for ever more dollars.

Pretty weak analogy. Wikipedia was technologically trivial and did a really good job of avoiding vested interests. Also the hype is orders of magnitude different, noone ever claimed Wikipedia was going to lead to superhuman intelligences or to replacement of swathes of human creative/service workers.

Actually since you mention it, my hot take is that Wikipedia might have been a more significant step forward in AI than openAI/latest generation LLMs. The creation of that corpus is hugely valuable in training and benchmarking models of natural language. Also it actually disrupted an industry (conventional encyclopedias) in a way that I’m struggling to think of anything that LLMs has replaced in the same way thus far.

Agreed, de facto, budget cuts have been and would be racist.

Fiscal conservatism actually does mean something though. Like you could imagine a left leaning fiscally conservative government that maintained a balanced budget by raising taxes on corps and the wealthy. That would be basically fine (though I think on balance not as good as running a modest deficit to fund nice policy). If you just go, yeah no those words are henceforth no-bueno, aren’t you just buying into their doublespeak?

Trumps “platform” was by any measure or definition less fiscally conservative than kamala. Pretty sure the reps left fiscal conservatism in the wasteland with Romney.

The new bullshit dogma for the right wing is “growth”. But I don’t think the Trump parade really even tried to explain that was the goal, or really any coherent economic policy.

Edit: the article seems to make the same point. That previously at least outwardly normal people have gone off the deep end.

Only has a fraction of the strategy and deck building of the actual TCG. Just seems like the usual mobile garbage to me (stamina mechanics, a million currency types, pay to win), shame.

Quick Google suggests healthcare costs for obese people are <50% higher than non-obese and the US has 15-30% more obesity than these countries. So maybe 15% at most of the 100% higher cost per capita of healthcare is obesity related. The killer for me for that hypothesis is that within the set of countries with normal healthcare costs, there’s huge variation in obesity (10% in France to 30%in ireland) with limited variation in cost.

Maybe the life expectancy side does have more to do with obesity?

“As usual with those sorts of memes, the numbers are completely wrong. European nations spend around 11-12% of GDP on healthcare vs about 17% for the US. So you’d likely pay significantly less (about 30% less)”

Dis you?

It must really suck to be a good hearted doctor in that system. When every incentive is to push unnecessary interventions and you must encounter patients that can’t or won’t accept your help because it would ruin them or their family financially.

Really USA, how does anyone pretend this is OK?

OK cool, well if “someone is wrong on this Internet” is more important to you than making a case for a better health are system (that I note you have spent 0 energy on) I think I’m done. Thanks for the entertainment of “$5k per person is 30% cheaper than $10k” though, that was a good one.

So when the meme was wrong about 5% vs 20% it was “outright lying” but when you were shown to be wrong about your 30% you just continue on your high horse. Cool beans.

Not a political issue for me anymore thank goodness. Lived in the US for a while but very glad that public health is available for everyone where I live now (as is literally everyone else I know).

I mean private healthcare is strictly worse for everyone except business owners (and doctors without morals I guess). So that’s my best guess at your motivation, but please correct me. Why?

“30% less” 😂 US GDP (it said % of pay, but let’s play your game) per capita is 1.5x or more European countries, so try at least 50% less. It’s a meme, it’s not meant to be accurate, but if you’re going to be a pedant at least be right.

Not to mention the lower cost is like 3rd on the list of reasons why public health care is amazing. Why you our here shilling for big business pal?

Yup. Betfair in the UK didn’t close or settle their 2020 market for months, even though the terms of the market were about who was declared winner on election night, and were long since met with 100% certainty. That was some very easy money.

Absolutely. The othering is a symptom of this tribal politics-as-team-sport too. “They are bad because they are tanky/neolib/whatever”. Leads to lazy argument. Sure there are people who are dogmatic and rude, who you’ll probably end up blocking, but if we all gave each other a bit of grace the quality of discourse would surely improve.