Not a single post about Prey (2017), the Arkane’s immersive sim gem set aboard the Talos I space station orbiting the Moon? I expected more of you, people!

Prey is a wonderful game. I think it wouldn’t lie make a mistake by designating it an RPG and an immersive sim, given its various skills (that are actually more than a few stat changes here and there - they affect, dictate the way you play the game), the multitude of ways you can approach so many things from puzzles to locations where you’re supposed to be to pretty much any in-game decision.

Prey’s world is rather small, but in the best way possible - it’s a space station, called Talos I, orbiting the Earth’s only moon (the Moon), doing some bleeding edge scientific research thanks to its diverse crew of the very best people Earth could send there. Talos I itself is split into different sections, each with its own purpose, making them unique locations with their own dangers and breath-taking sights; some interiors are spacious and let you navigate the level in stealthy ways, avoiding the hostiles entirely (if you have the wits!), and some are narrower, but many still offer you an alternate path to your destination if you look hard enough.

Prey lets you do stuff. You don’t like crawling in silence, trying to stay away from a fight until you hoover up every resource you can to make you “ready” to face the enemy? Go gun blazing - there’s no shortage of unique lethal tech at your disposal! You want to play a certain role, like be a mad menace to society? Feel free to murder everything you see, either with your own hands or by letting them die another brutal death! You want to be a true video game hero, saving each and every one? Roll your sleeves and get to work, because there sure is some saving to do!

Prey is the game where you think you know what’s going on, but you actually don’t. There will be surprises, and there will be moments of awe, and they’re all just done so well.

And last, but not least, is its magnificent soundtrack by Mick Gordon. The game looks gorgeous, and sometimes can give you some spooks, but the music completes the puzzle, setting its eerie atmosphere.

It’s a game you will likely play more than once to experience everything it has to offer. The game does not force you to do this or that, it does not explicitly tell you what skills to pick to be a good person, and it does not block one path if you’ve already taken another one, but you sure will experience the call of curiosity: “What if I chose only that?” Whatever you choose, you have the ability to craft yourself a unique playthrough, each equally interesting and viable.

This.

Most of my friends aren’t Linux/tech enthusiasts at all, but they do build their PCs because it’s cheaper, and they’re all over intel and nvidia. One even asked me for an advice on what GPU to get under a certain budget, and the fucker wouldn’t listen to my AMD recommendations, despite the very obvious advantage to his wallet and performance he was looking for.

Intel + Nvidia pretty much dominate the pre-built market, too. I was in a tech store recently and, as usual, gazed at some PCs and laptops they had over there just for the sake of it, and nearly every single one of them was intel+nvidia, for the very exception of a full AMD laptop.

Typical Crimson Fleet geezer right here.

I’m on the same page as you are, though.

@dear_faye@halubilo.social you should probably do the same if the price tag is too much for you. If you really do feel wrong about it, you could first get the game, keep playing it all you want, and then just pay later; or, if the experience turns out to be disappointing, never pay for it as a result.

Either is better than pre-ordering. Even if Starfield is worth every penny on launch, i.e. no bugs, no issues that cannot justify the price tag, not a single argument against the very practice of pre-ordering games, giving companies money before they deliver anything at all is giving them much more than just the money - it’s giving them an idea that it’s okay to ask for money before any of the paying customers ever get anything, and this kind of appeasement has to stop.

I think of that every time I see a cursor following my mouse in an FPS game.

And at the moment, I struggle to remember anything besides the tiny resemblance of that in Cyberpunk 2077 lol

Can anyone explain to me, a dumbass, what it means for my current save file? I haven’t beaten the main quest yet because I’ve been doing everything else for over 120 hours (finally got all the gigs and NCPD scanners, at least), but I still don’t see how an overhaul of that caliber is going to play well with the current balance of things. Judging by that one update that reset my skill and perk points, I think we can expect some resets again.

I think Phantom Liberty is my incentive to finally finish the game and then start a completely new playthrough, preferably with a consistent build and playstyle this time from start to finish. So much to choose from!

You and I are similar. I’ve developed a slightly bigger interest for fantasy in the recent months, but still am sci-fi space-faring monkey through-and-through.

I have sunk hundreds of hours into No Man’s Sky already, and I think I’ll sink even more into Starfield tinkering with my ships… or ships that didn’t use to be mine at first, to be more precise. I’m really excited to play a game of that scope where ships and their systems are kinda psychical objects in the world, taking space, changing what you see, etc. Same goes for the outposts.

I’m not going to preorder either, although I will go much more off the grid 5 days prior to release, as the early access spacers are probably going to spoil some initial moments for me. I’ve been waiting for this game for way too many years to know anything more than the marketing material about it.

I’m sure this kind of concerns is one of the prime reasons that seems to “slow down” the support. I don’t want to whitewash anyone, but I’ll give credit when credit is due - the officials in the western(-oriented) countries do realize that they’re a temporary asset in their position, with a goal to contribute to the society that enables their entire lifestyle. While some may not be a proper fit for the position of such power, today many, if not everyone, realize that they’re going to have to step down sooner rather than later, and if they want to enjoy the benefits, they better make the electorate happy - today, this surely includes making sure that none of the electorate has to go die because Putin wanted some landgrab out of some pissy revenge and power-hunger.

We all want this war to end as soon as possible. Even Putin wants to, undoubtedly, but he’s too stupid and arrogant to withdraw and admit he made a mistake.

I don’t think that’s what they meant.

Judging by the “long range targets” mentioned, I’d assume they’re talking about the precautions many Ukraine supporters are voicing, such as that providing Ukraine with proper longer-range equipment would be seen by Russia (Putin, more specifically, and some other old farts) as existential threat, leading to them actually nuking someone, or something along these lines. Basically the same old appeasement and careful treading around an old and delusional dictator.

Like you said, you hope you won’t have to go and fight for Ukraine (I don’t mean to sound offensive in any way, I just don’t know how to frame it better), and I think this is similar to what the leaders of the western nations have been feeling as well - hoping that they won’t have to send anything more than equipment and ammo that won’t provoke an even larger conflict.

But in all honesty, we’ve seen action in Russia for quite some time anyway, now with merciful drone attacks on Moscow and active combat in Belgorod (if I’m not mistaken). There’s a reason people like me don’t lead nations, but to me it seems like Ukraine is both capable of bringing war onto the Russian soil anyway, and has shown to do so in a strategic and insanely restrained way (I can easily imagine the drone attack on Moscow going a very different way than it did).

To me, it seems like giving Ukraine proper long-range equipment is not going to result in anything more than unambiguous defense, without avenger strikes that Putin can use for… whatever. And, well, after almost 1.5 years of war, one would think that if Putin was capable of doing something that the western leaders fear so much, he would already do it, as an unhinged tyrant like he is. Putin seems to care about his life, maybe his immediate family’s life, too, knowing full well that a nuclear strike is a sure way to make their life either extremely difficult in whatever way, or even end it prematurely (most likely, in extreme pain and/or fear). Not to mention that launching nukes takes way more than just one man pressing the button, or even three men - the people directly responsible for executing the order always have a change of turning out to be more sensible and not committing to the procedure; in the end, Russia must have more people willing to live, even among the nuclear personnel, rather than die for some absurd ambition that only one old sorry fuck shares.

Oh, and judging by the actual state of the Russian military that was revealed to us all after they invaded Ukraine, I seriously doubt they have anything worthwhile left in stock - might’ve ended up as a liquidated asset in a form of some general’s palace, yacht, or several apartments somewhere in the western world.

Same engine doesn’t necessarily meant the same problems. Game engines aren’t a monolith solution - Source, for example, the engine that used to be famous for its physics back in the day, uses another engine to handle said physics.

So, the fact that Starfield is going to use the same engine (I don’t know if it does, actually, I don’t care) is not a reason to panic or be upset. For all we know, they may have updated many of its components in one way or another, including swapping some for better alternatives.

Having seen the entire Starfield Direct, I honestly do believe it’s an upgraded version of the engine - it really looks like it doesn’t behave in the same way. And, well, the new tech the devs can leverage allows them to work on some older engine limitations as well, resulting in a smoother experience overall, especially knowing what they were going for in this game.

As a builder, would you say there’s a somewhat budget pre-built option that’s decent that lazy and curious people like me can look at?

I’m not having a lot of trouble with my body with the regular keyboards, but they do force.me into specific positions when I have to do actual work, because I need both sides of it rather than just the gaming one when I play.

I don’t know when they introduced it, but at some point, in some servers, I noticed a new channel type: forum. The fact that this is a thing is the greatest proof that Discord is not the end all, be all solution to communication.

Nothing is, really. One thing I really enjoyed about the 00s web was its diversity, because different things had different places and different formats, and the ever-lasting stakeholder grasp wasn’t as successful at trying to put people in one place to show them ads and drive engagement to please the statistics gazers.

1080 here. I’m really happy with the decision I made years back. Some games are terribly not optimized, but that won’t make me cash out for a new piece of hardware.

And anything that’s actually worth upgrading from my GPU is going to be even bigger and block the front panel pins on my new motherboard I was gifted last year. Yep.

Not to mention that the discussion is almost guaranteed to consist of similarly short (or even shorter) witty one-liners. Twitter format is just horrible, and its restrictions promote equally horrible behavior where you have to look for ways to convey ideas and feeling in a short manner, which almost never results in more polite and sophisticated conversations.

Never used Twitter for anything more serious than some announcements from the game devs I follow. Anything else is just plain stupid, which makes me really surprised over the wide-spread adoption of Twitter by officials and ministries and the like.

And raising the character limit is going to be even more absurd, because then it’s going to be reminiscent of an actual forum, just less structured and sensible.

Twitter, as a format, is the worst option between messengers like Matrix and proper forums of any kind.

It’s called programmer humor for a reason: we’re just using established libraries instead of inventing a bicycle from scratch.

Skyrim is probably one of those games you either can’t put down or can’t start. No in-betweens.

I’d love it. I don’t hate the UI as it currently is, but I’d definitely appreciate some features, like the hotkeys RES has, or a tighter UI in general, with less padding and space between elements.

To be fair, tweaking the UI is surely in my power and skillset, but UI is surely my least favorite part of development as a whole.

Holy shit, I thought I was alone in the big gaming world!

The reason I never played it is because at the time the game was out, my PC couldn’t handle it, so I gave up after my sad attempts to sit through the unplayable frames. And by the time I upgraded, there were simply too many games to steal my attention entirely - that’s how it been ever since.

I want to play it, though. I never considered it boring - I liked it even when I wasn’t that interested in fantasy, and now I’m gravitating even more towards it. Hope to get my hands down to it one day, but with Starfield (hopefully) coming out this year, and with The Outer Worlds to beat before that happens, I think I’m not slaying any dragons any time soon.

“We’re right, you’re wrong, cope and cry about, thanks for coming” type of AMA incoming, along with the fan favorite nothing burger with lame ass excuses on the side

I was actually trying to call out basically every smartphone out there because they have to be packing multicore CPUs with at least 3 GB of RAM in order to be functional.

My current phone has 2 GB, and almost all of it is dedicated to the Android system itself, even without any shells (i.e. not MiUI or anything like that, which is basically Android OS plus something on top, eating up even more resources), and can be really painful to use at times. I seem to have won some performance back by switching to Via browser instead of the native Google Chrome, YMusic instead of the native YouTube app, and RedReader for Reddit (might kiss goodbye to that some time soon, as we all know) - the rest of the applications I use either lack a proper mobile version of the website (viewing some with the desktop option on is horrible), a lightweight alternative, or both. I also don’t have the memory to download every single app for the websites I use as they keep suggesting - more importantly, I don’t want to.

When I’m on PC, I use the web applications available for nearly every single thing I use - but oh no, I can’t do that on mobile, I need an app, which I’d have to update frequently, wasting even more space with the piss-poor solutions they go for in the name of profits.

Damn I’m getting worked up talking software and especially the mobile world.

Exactly! Screens are so big now, they should pack so much real estate, but they just don’t most of the time, and it’s not even because of human eyesight limitations.