goodeye8

Except the production costs have also gone down. The development itself is easier thanks to better tooling and developers no longer require putting out physical media (which used to be a pretty significant part of cost).

And there’s no excuse for $80 when Clair Obscur released at $50 and is one of the best games released this year. I seriously doubt BL4 will be $30 more impressive than Clair Obscur. How about studio heads do their job and streamline their production process to make better products for lower costs instead of offloading their bloat onto the customers.

You’re telling me we’re not going to get generation after generation of teenage “guitar players” who can only play Wonderwall?

I’ve been saying it for the last decade, there’s no real “games are too expensive to make” problem. There’s only studios choosing the “go big or go home” death spiral where they inflate the budget and need a hit to stay afloat. But then after every hit the budget grows even bigger requiring an even bigger hit until eventually they’re going to flop and the studio goes under. They could just not do that and have a sustainable business. And I get that it’s not only the game developers fault. Part of the blame falls on the publishers who most likely force budgets to balloon so they could make more money (if the game is a success). But when I say they could just not do that I mean both the developer and publisher. Both of them should be smarter than that.

But clearly even with all the major flops it has been a successful strategy, because they’ve been at it since at least mid 2000s. It’s only in the recent years where it’s really starting to strain all the AAA publishers as the budgets have grown too big even for them. These price increases are an outcome of this budget ballooning. They’re feeling their bottom line taking a hit so they increase the price to mitigate the risk.

Personally I said fuck them, let it crash and let’s get more studios like Sandfall, who made an exceptional games for a reasonable price.

Young me got that lesson when trying to play ARMA 2 on a 5400RPM HDD. It would run 60FPS if I didn’t move but as soon as I started moving the game started stuttering. When I installed it on a 7200RPM HDD the game no longer had any performance issues.

It all comes down to what specs the game was designed for and I imagine most modern open world games are designed for SSD-s. Putting them on HDDs will absolutely have a negative effect.

My bad. For some reason I associate all the consent pop-ups with GDPR as I don’t remember any pop-ups prior to GDPR.

That’s also not entirely correct.

you’ve never had to ask for permission to store cookies that are required for your site to work

You don’t need to ask permission for cookies that are strictly necessary for your site to work. They can contain personally identifiable information (PII) but only to the extent that is strictly required for the functionality to work. If your “required” cookie does anything more than what is strictly necessary (such as collecting more PII than it needs or has built in tracking) you need to ask consent.

you have to ask for permission for third party trackers to store cookies when people use your site.

If you’re using something like on premise tracking, like Matomo, then you still have to ask permission. There are some exceptions like if you don’t use cookies and you don’t track PII.

And just for extra clarification, if you are collecting PII (for example into logs) you need to ask permission even when you’re not storing any cookies.

Actually they do. They can’t just process your data without your consent. The exceptions where they can process your data without consent are (at least to my knowledge) legal obligation (for example processing your income to calculate your taxes) and public interest (for example doing statistics on households), both requiring some legal work before actually being allowed to be used without your consent.

Technically they can do so that they don’t have to care about GDPR but then it also has to become public knowledge that they don’t want to care about GDPR and it becomes the responsibility of the citizens to oppose such moves.

EDIT: Forgot to add that in this case it most likely would become part of the law so yeah, they wouldn’t have to care about GDPR in this circumstance.

In the realm of turn based combat it’s pretty good. It has pretty easy to understand skills and mechanics that make it easy to pick up, but then you also get tons of modifiers (pictos and lumina) where the combinations can significantly alter how your character plays. And the timed triggers removes probably the worst aspect of turn based combat, the passivity. You can’t just sit there and wait while your character does a thing and then the enemy does a thing. You have to time your attacks but more importantly you have to identify what attack your enemy will do so you’d know if you need to dodge, parry, jump or gradient counter and then also time them correctly. It’s far more engaging than your average turn based combat.

The mediocre part of the gameplay are the side activities usually related to gestrals. I’m gonna vent now because my experience popped into my mind and it pissed me off again. Nothing infuriated me more than that stupid beach volley ball. Thank you for putting a fixed camera at an angle where it’s really hard to see the middle gestral throw and also your position in relation to where the gestral is going to land. The amount of times I lost the hard volley ball because I couldn’t see the middle gestral until it was too late really made me question how this even passed QA. And the reason I couldn’t just focus on the middle gestrals was because I had to focus on making sure my attack would actually connect with the gestral. The marker on the ground is just purely decorative as I had multiple occasions where I would attack squarely on the marker only for the gestral to still land and take a point away. AND FOR THE LOVE OF SOPHIE DO NOT THROW OUT GESTRALS FASTER THAN I CAN ATTACK. I almost beat the hardest volley ball match, except I didn’t beat it because I literally could not attack fast enough to send back the last gestral. I would just sit there, in perfect position, punching the attack button like a maniac and then watching how the gestral lands on the ground because the attack simply would not happen. Fuck beach volley. End of rant. Actually no, fuck beach volley again stupid fucking minigame. Now it’s over.

TLDR: gameplay good.

My original wild prediction was that Hitech would take over Alpine F1 team in 2026 and Oakes puts Paul Aron in one seat and the other seat would’ve gone to the driver who did better this year, so probably Gasly. But I found it odd why they’d bring in Briatore if the team would go to Hitech. I guess I got my answer.

I have no idea what the plan is for Alpine now, except that Doohan is definitely getting kicked for Colapinto, Aron ain’t getting a seat and Gasly has a lifeline until Briatore finds someone more southern to replace him. I liked my original prediction more but there is a positive here. At least I have a team to hate-watch because I’m definitely not going to cheer for that old codger.

Looks like he barely got over 40 so I probably missed a few points somewhere because I had him at 38.

I’m not sure if I’m tallying up his points correctly but I don’t think he has the super license points to come in this year. He needs to finish F2 in the top 10 to meet the F1 requirements for next year.