Ouch. The primary care situation in some parts of Canada is grim too but at least my appointment wait times are 1-2 weeks

A new engine would just have to have a new mod API. Plenty of engines have mod APIs. Nothing’s really stopping them, but they really love driving creation engine onward for some reason.

90% of the badwebcomics wiki exists for no reason but to shit on someone for daring to put themselves out in public where others can see them. I completely agree. There’s the odd creator on there that fully deserves criticism for genuine assholery and abuse, but mostly it’s like “this guy makes a very cringy comic, jump him!” bullshit.

I’d go back to around the time my daughter started sleeping through the night. Don’t want to risk a reality where my kids don’t exist. I’d tell my friend the cancer is coming back, when it’s still early enough to do something.

Don’t really know what else I’d do. Don’t really care. Be nice to live through those years again without changing much else to be totally honest

You got some good answers but remember too, you’re only seeing a fragment of those kids at your place. The screen might for example be a special rare reward for them to keep them quite so your friends can visit you… doesn’t mean they’re on scree s all the time.

My kids aren’t particularly screen born most of the time, but when we’re out I often relax the rules to keep things smooth. The fact that it’s a rare treat makes it even more effective

“I can’t fathom it” doesn’t mean “I haven’t heard the criticisms of this movie”. I mean that I remain surprised at how long lasting and vitriolic the hate for it is, as you’re demonstrating by popping in to complain about how toxic last jedi fans are while also trying to tell me what you hate about a thing I love.

And I know you don’t mean it that way but goddamn am I tired of having a conversation like this every time I mention liking the movie online for more than half a decade.

I wasn’t asking for someone to explain why they didn’t like it thanks. We went through that six years ago.

I always assumed that was a joke, because they’re just kind of bland generic rock and roll that it seems like it would be comical to pretend to have any really strong negative reaction to it. Then I met a few real people who actually despise them, and realized it’s not a joke.

People in general are so weird about other people eating stuff they don’t like.

Listen Karen, you don’t have to have a slice of my pizza.

That was such a weird one to me. I think partly they leaned too hard into trying to leverage controversy for attention, but still, the movie was fine. Like… except for the first one, they’ve all just been “okay” movies, in that context it’s probably one of the better ones.

Was scrolling for this comment. I spent a few nights excitedly going over it with my friends before I learned about the internet meltdown, it was utterly baffling. I still can’t really fathom it, it’s one of the best SW movies ever made imo.

I’m loving starfield and I’ll agree with this. It’s a mid eighties score kind of game. If it’s what you want it’s amazing, but the people calling it game of the century and whatnot are buying their own hype.

On the other hand, it’s likely to have serious staying power as an all time classic game, Bethesda is great at that and there’s a ton of room for people to use it as an incredible mod canvas. I don’t think that should affect launch reviews though.

I think this is it. I enjoy making fun of the NPCs in starfield but mostly when I’m playing I don’t notice them at all. I do have a few very pretty screenshots of the game. It’s not perfect by any stretch but the scope is impressive and most of it really is pretty good

I don’t think Bethesda has ever sold based on graphics no matter how much they want to pretend it. Morrowind and oblivion both looked under par when they came out as well.

I’m not a fan of Bethesda’s reliance on mods to do basic shit, like fix a broken UI and inventory management system, by honestly I also think this argument is overused. People pay for these games because they want to mod the shit out of them, it’s like ninety percent of the appeal. Nobody is forcing modders to work on them, either. That argument can only stretch so far. For comparison, No Man’s Sky is actively hostile to modding, and as a result I probably won’t be going back to it despite loving it. They’re not going to add the kind of content I want, they’re likely never going to, and they’re not letting anyone else do it either. I wish they’d allow free volunteers to finish off some of their 75%-of-the-way-to-greatness features.

With starfield, I’m excited for the mods, and the game is far from flawless goodness knows, but I’ve had a friggin good time and definitely got my money’s worth on vanilla. Now I look forward to spicing it as I like.

The upper whites thing has led to some of the funniest memes I’ve seen in ages, not gonna complain about that one.

Assigned snake at birth, it’s a yuan-ti thing

ADHD isn’t particularly hard to diagnose most of the time. If we’re going to wait for psychologists in every bog standard case, good luck with the upcoming twelve year waiting list to get your kid some help.

People just need to know when to identify confounders and refer out. Takes a few good training seminars.

It’s perfectly reasonable to wait. Games only gonna get better.

I’d try not to read too much into the internet fuss. It’s a better release than Bethesda’s usual in most regards. I wound up sinking almost the entire weekend into it, haven’t done that in ages. The games really fun. That said, it is only going to get better with time.

I’m not sure. It’s a good game, but the fun you can have in it is more Minecraft style than Bethesda style. If you want that, then it’s probably worth a try

I posted a shorter version of this elsewhere in here but I’ve thought more and want to expand.

Disclaimer: I really like both no man’s sky and starfield. Gonna be down on both of them but I’ve got hundreds of hours in NMS and I expect to have hundreds more in SF, they are both good games, I have no regrets about buying either of them.

That said, I’ve realized that starfield is actually making me low-key kind of angry at NMS, for all the potential it wasted. It’s showing just how little extra depth NMS could have used (could still use) to be great. There are really only a couple fairly minor ways that starfield is better, and yet for me and I think a lot of people they spell the difference between “fun sandbox” and “awesome game”. Starfield is so shallow on all of these that despite being the first game to really deliver on the promise of an open world space RPG sandbox, it’s like a wish-dot-com version of what nms could be.

First, combat. Nms has all right space combat, nothing great but acceptable, but there’s no excusing its ground combat. There’s effectively one enemy, they’re not really designed to be fought most of the time, and they’re almost never involved in battles of any meaning. The combat overhaul added some mechanics but didn’t solve the problem… in a way it’s worse now because fighting seems like it could be interesting. How come when I find a trading post it’s never a ruin overrun by pirates, with scattered notes from the lost inhabitants, written in their native language so that if I can speak it I can read their sad story? Why don’t I ever find a detail of gek security bots defending the inner chambers of a crashed frigate? Why can’t I have a shootout with the crew of a frigate on board its procedurally generated interior?

That leads into the issue that there’s no story at all. People complain about the main quest of SF, but nms has one of the flimsiest, poorest written central plots of any game I’ve ever seen. That would be okay, but there are also no side quests. You can’t stumble upon an abandoned mine, or have a spacer randomly ask you to help break a blockade of their home system. There are a tiny number of very shallow fetch quests, but nothing with even a hint of effort in the writing.

I get a bit annoyed at starfield for systems not interacting. Like, i have a house, but I can’t build outpost buildings around it, eg. However, NMS takes that to extremes with how outpost building, village building, and frigate building all seem like they’re actively hostile to each other, as if coming from different games. IIRC even some of the outpost components won’t properly snap together if they’re from different ‘styles’ of outpost, although I may be misremembering.

Add to that that there’s also not a lot of gear collecting mechanics, minimal ways to display loot, minimal character customisation, and so on, and it’s just… sigh. Everything nms does feels like it falls just short of being amazing, but they get bored right before completing the last step to bring it all home and then they go work on another system that they’ll get 3/4 through and then abandon. I wish it had mods.

Meanwhile, starfield doesn’t do any individually thing particularly well either, but unlike NMS, it feels like I can do stuff with what I make. I can build a ship… and then take it smuggling! Or fight pirates! I can have NPCs on board and they’ll chat with each other while I’m flying around, and help run the ship! They’re not all well written, but they’re actually written, and do more than just stand around saying one line back at me. It’s frustrating, because honestly, taken on its own, starfield isn’t particularly remarkable (see how bland space travel is eg) but there’s nothing out there that’s actually gone the very obvious extra mile of “okay we have beautiful worlds to explore, what if now we put some things to do on them”