To expand on the MtG thing... WotC set up a website (Gatherer) indexing every card they’d published a couple decades ago. Sets from the 90s were added in order of publication, and new sets were added as they released. The very early sets were sorted alphabetically (this is an atypical sort order, as MtG usually sorts…

Yeah, in fairness, I don’t think Bungie wants their most dedicated players burning out. I think they’ve simply gotten far too aggressive in trying to push for constant engagement. This is (probably) the entire philosophy behind sunsetting (though it’s not the expressed position), because if your gear has a fixed…

Bungie has a real skill for abusing their playerbase. If you engage with the game very casually, it’s easy to miss some of this, but if you’re seriously committed to the game, Bungie has a habit of screwing you over, hard.

Ironically, that executive order makes life riskier for them leaving his content up. A lot of idiots on the Right seem to think that removing Section 230 means they get to sue if their content is taken down. But, it also means the companies can be sued for that content going live in the first place. So, all those…

Or waiting for the Senate control to flip, which is even more damning. Counting the elector votes is a ceremonial gesture. The senate going 50/50 was the real threat to the social media companies.

“...we need you ... to try to just slow it down...” sounds horrifyingly like, “we need you to delay the vote so our mob has time to burst into the chamber and kill or capture everyone.”

It’s possible QA did catch it, and this was labeled as a known shippable, because the impact was relatively minor.

So, probably worth remembering that CDPR is not a game. It’s a game studio. 2077 is the game.

No, the Harry Potter franchise (pre-films), and Magic: The Gathering both got some attention back in the late 90s, but the segment of The Religious Right that fomented moral panics was pretty splintered across a wide swath of media by that time. They’d go after kid’s cartoons, anime, prime-time TV (I remember the…

On walk cycles, that one comes down to the developer making an educated guess whether putting the funds into the extended walk animation is worth it. If most players will not notice it at all, then the time and money used to create it could be better spent on something else.

Also quite possible that the Japanese team didn’t know about the allegations in the first place. Either their vetting missed it entirely, or when they did encounter it, the severity of the behavior eluded them (which is not that far from what you’re suggesting.)

Technically, no. The hostile NPCs are various factions that sprung up after the viral outbreak (a genetically manipulated smallpox strain), but they’re not (usually) infected. While you sometimes move through areas that are still contaminated, the infected victims of the virus are simply sick (and dying) people, not…

With a population ~18.7 million people. So, “a small, isolated, population,” instead of, “country,” but really, we’re down to semantics at that point.

It’s the mudcrab world bosses in ESO that’ll really make you feel at home... or incredibly confused.

No. You can tell because it’s not currently on fire.

It was Dark Souls 2, but it affected the weapons. It also screwed up parry timings.

Dark Souls 2, though it affected the weapons more than the armor.

Counterpoint: Those banner ads have horrible retention numbers. You can slap a banner ad on a site, but the number of people who actually notice it are minuscule. This was a known issue back in ‘99 when I was in a college VisComm program, and web advertising was already getting started.

Reminds me of the Chrysler Building in Parasite Eve.

Also, the short turnaround between the, “beta,” and launch reinforces the idea that this is just a demo. If your beta is a week before launch, the game you push out is going to be a trainwreck.