When I was a kid, I got an E3 badge from a family member and got to roam the floor for a few hours, and it wasn’t until I got home and saw devs posting photos online that I realized it was the highest tier access badge, and that I could have gone into the demo rooms for games not open for play on the general floor.

Call of Duty is primarily a multiplayer game and most of the US does not have access to the bandwidth or data caps to stream Call of Duty regularly at a reasonable speed for a reasonable length of time. Microsoft loses less than you think. By the time it expires, maybe the awful state of American internet speeds and…

Yeah. If the game is successful, there will be ways to play it online regardless of the efforts of the big rat’s lawyers, but the rat has fuck you money and can just kill you in litigation you can’t afford to spend years contesting.

Yeah, plus many of the DLC classes for VT2 felt like experiments and proof-of-concept tests for ideas to be incorporated in Darktide. It had me hopeful we were going to get a game that wouldn’t need to relearn all the lessons of their past 2 releases.

I think it’s the fact that the game was clearly not ready for primetime despite multiple delays and major systems were cut or reworked very late in the development cycle. We know for a fact that the entire gear and talent system worked fundamentally differently in development builds, with screenshots depicting missing…

Calling it a campaign is generous. The actual missions have some cool storytelling in the dialogue but there’s nothing to string them together and no culmination of any sort of narrative the way VT2 did with your trek into Norscan lands.

Remember - there is literally a cutscene where you are ordered to report before…

Nah, they definitely do. The most valuable thing a user can do for them as a company is to start a relationship with a hinge match and uninstall the app, because every single time someone asks that couple how they met, unless they lie, the answer is going to be Hinge. Every time a website writes an article like this,…

Having tried OKC, Tinder, Bumble, that weird bagel one, and even Feeld, Hinge is the only one where I both consistently match with people, don’t get swamped with bots, and receive a decent volume of unsolicited likes. It *is* bizarre, but it is what it is.

I can second that - being unapologetically honest about the things I am passionate about after a string of relationships where there was always something a given partner was scornful of was a big help when it came to increasing the volume of likes and matches I received.

Some random perspective as a Hinge user who feels like I at least temporarily gained the blessing of The Algorithm - the opposite of Anthony’s experience basically:

I’m pretty much oblivious to flirting and for a good chunk of my life, did not consider myself terribly attractive. I’m a lanky, physically and socially…

It’s so weird that Vermintide 2 gave them a near perfect roadmap to success with this game and they chewed it up and swallowed it so they could release a title with a fraction of the content.

In the context of BG3 where it feels like combat arenas more often than not feature bridges, second floors, chasms, spider pits, and all manner of horrible things to land in or get yeeted into or through, eldritch blast’s value goes way up. Being able to one-shot an enemy with 155 HP on demand will save you pretty…

It’s clearly a popular framework. I think as we get further away from the decade of Pottermania we will see that particular subgenre breath out a little more. In the lit world, Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy has made some waves and is primed for some network or studio to swoop in and buy the film rights if they…

Depending on how much gaming you did 10 or 15 or 20 years ago you might recall that for a long time, just about (not everything, but definitely most) every game attached to a film franchise was typically a low budget reskin of something popular, except somehow immeasurably worse.

Legacy’s strength is that it’s a high…

This is really easy to explain if you’ve played the game, which is an initially pretty and engrossing contemporary open world RPG in the style of Odyssey or Witcher III. The first 5-10 hours capture what made the movies cool when you were a kid and then the next 40-50 hours are a Ubisoft map game where you do the same…

On normal difficulty, I’ve found the AI is competent enough to not run through fire when other options exist, but fire and explosives still seem to be very effective ways to initiate combat. It’s not Divinity II levels of environmental warfare, where 3 turns into a combat, every surface is covered in one of 6…

My state has this law, but when I share this information with people, more often than not they’ve never heard of it before.

The First Amendment has no standing here - it does not regulate the behavior of private businesses.

Some states have tried with varying degrees of success to issue prohibitions on non-disparagement agreements, arbitration clauses, and some forms of non-disclosure agreement in the workplace but that also wouldn’t really…

Big time this. It’s a life saver for inventory management. I regret that I made it a good 15ish hours in before noticing it exists.

I keep finding that things I really didn’t expect to work end up being quite effective. I was underleveled and having trouble with an encounter so I decided to explore elsewhere and come back later. I found a dozen casks of exploding booze in another location, so I hauled them back and set them up around the target…