That’s a classic negotiation technique abusing the psychological anchoring effect.

His best hope is for Lance to lose interest in F1.

Even that thread is full of mixed messages but I guess I’ll just risk it.

It’s as if two completely different studios made these games, and the one behind Syndicate had no idea what made Unity great.

Funny you say that. Unity was developed by Ubisoft Montreal, the primary Ubisoft studio who are responsible for much of the good work they’ve done (think Splinter Cell, Far Cry and AC: Black Flag). Syndicate was developed by Ubisoft Quebec, and it was also that developer’s first AC game.

I’ve heard such disparate opinions of WotR, I’m very interested to see what I feel about it whenever I get to it. I played Kingmaker over Christmas and while I really enjoyed parts of it I was also endlessly frustrated about many things. And some things I’ve heard make me anxious about the sequel too. I’m also very concerned about the scale and scope - I enjoyed the more grounded narrative and setting of KM and worry I’ll have trouble getting onboard with being a Chosen One and battling gods and other epic narratives and whatnot.

Man I bought F.E.A.R. recently for like a dollar on GOG and I really want to play it, but I don’t want SecuROM malware all over my system.

Seeing you post from an account without a profile picture feels profoundly weird.

I do feel like smartphones are close to essential in modern society. I can’t say I like that, but it is what it is. From all the things you describe to stuff like sending money between each other and paying for services in today’s cashless society you really kind of struggle without one.

For me, I got my first phone at 11 or 12, but back then it was of course not a smartphone but a regular cell phone. Times were different then. Kids still interacted with each other during recess, the best distraction your phone had available was Snake. The internet as we know it wasn’t a thing. The main thing you used your phone for was actually calling people.

I’m sorry. The attention span comment wasn’t directed at you personally, it was reflecting on your point that people would find it too slow and boring with fewer kills. It wasn’t meant as a jab at all.

I think it sounds like we’re mostly in agreement. And yeah, the O’Driscolls spawning in and popping up like whack-a-moles is another great example!

I saw Skald: Against the Black Priory was 40% off and I’ve had my eyes on it for a while, so I just went for it. Have played about 6 hours now and I’m loving it. The only thing I’m unsure of is replayability as it’s feeling fairly linear and with only marginal decision making, but otherwise it’s been really cool. You get the old school late 80s/early 90s RPG look but with a less clunky feel. It doesn’t have the most beautiful sprite work, but I really like the art for the splash screens. The music is great and nostalgic and the display settings emulating period monitors via filters was a lovely touch.

The writing feels solid and the atmosphere of gloomy hopelessness and cosmic horror really works for me. Combat has felt fun enough - though fairly simple - and I don’t think the game is long enough that it will become a problem.

Looking forward to seeing how it ends, but from what I’ve seen so far I’d recommend it to almost anyone. It’s not that expensive either, even at full price.

I don’t really disagree with you about the nature of the story, and I don’t have anything against the overall narrative. I just personally think the story could have been told with fewer bloodbaths and outright massacres and still be compelling. In fact, for me every innocent you kill would feel more impactful morally and narratively if there were fewer of them.

But maybe I’m out of touch with the attention span of the modern mind.

It might well be a me-problem. I had the same issue with Sleeping Dogs that I just finished last week. So I might just have a fundamental problem with the type of gameplay design these kinds of games go for and the fundamental ludonarrative dissonance you have to be able to look past to enjoy them. I just have a hard time squaring off war crime levels of mass murder as “getting into a little too much trouble”. Killing a lawman or two as things get out of hand in Valentine? That’s getting into a bit too much trouble. But Arthur Morgan literally kills hundreds upon hundreds of people and that just breaks my immersion.

Highly unsurprising. This will be the case for most teams, I reckon. With such a complete overhaul as this next set of regulations it would be foolish not to give yourself the best possible platform for the next couple of years.

I also felt like there was a certain whiff of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace about it, like how years are names after corporate sponsors.

That this has not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature can only be described as a crime against humanity.

I’ll get through the RDR2 story one day. I played it for two stints last year but I just space out and lose immersion every time the main story forces you to kill one hundred lawmen in the middle of a town. For a game that put so much effort into making the open world vibrant, alive and dynamic you face very little consequences for committing what can only be classified as genocide in the main story.

I’m usually pretty thick-skinned about stuff like this but man, that picture made even my stomach knot.

I regularly had more than 4 feeds up before so even the new top subscription wouldn’t work… This is a disaster.

Yeah, Reddit benefits from the traffic regardless of the accuracy of the posts, so this is mostly wasting the time of regular people with issues who are trying to search for an answer.

Nah he’s just farming +2’s