Yiazmat

there are some bradleys in there too IIRC

someone doesn’t want a big pile of burning abrams plastered all over the news à la that pic of the leopards/bradleys lol

It’s a pretty interesting video too. I was expecting it to be sprinkled with some lib takes about the USSR but thankfully didn’t notice any

alright am I crazy or is this not the exact same thing these people were saying last year as winter was approaching?

Lol I actually just had another one today where I was doing a mission on Neon and told my companion to wait in one of the air ducts because she kept alerting the guards when I was trying to sneak around. I totally forgot about her in there and during the next mission I was talking to an NPC and my companion interjected with something… from a totally different floor, partially obscured by shadows of an air vent she was standing near. Gave me a good laugh imagining her standing in a dark air duct for hours and then somehow hearing our conversation from multiple floors below us and giving her thoughts on it.

yeah I guess the delay from last year helped out a lot

my thoughts after about a week of playing:

• It’s definitely one of the least buggy Bethesda games I’ve played at launch, but it’s still a Bethesda game so you’ll see the usual “npc vibrating into a wall” type bugs. An amusing one I just encountered was my companion getting stuck talking with that spacesuit filter on her voice, so even though she’s standing right next to me and we’re not wearing spacesuits her voice she still sounded like she was talking over a radio lol.
• I’ve seen a lot of complaints about performance, and I don’t know if I just got really lucky with my PC config but the game runs really well for me (max settings, 1440p with FSR2 enabled and it never goes below 60fps).
• Loading screens galore. I’m playing on an SSD so they only take like 1-3 seconds max but it’s still annoying to see so many. I feel like Bethesda needs to just bite the bullet and create a brand new engine from scratch (which would take a ton of time and resources so it will probably never happen).
• The “fast travel everywhere” system is strange. I agree that it’s a little immersion breaking to fast travel light years away with a short loading screen. I don’t really know how you’d get around it though because manually traveling everywhere in a space game would get boring very quickly.
• I like the ship builder. They make it pretty easy to snap parts together and it’s really satisfying to design a cool looking ship that actually has useful features on the inside (like the workshop for the crafting stations or the armory for showing off rare weapons). I just wish the ship builder controls were a bit better. It’s also pretty neat to put windows on your ship and then go out in space and look through them at a huge planet or other ships flying around you, or come back to your ship and see members of your crew hanging out in the living area or engineering bay.
• I like customizing guns too but it’s really easy to make guns that are super overpowered, especially if you start with one that has really good effects. That’s kinda expected in a Bethesda game though.
• I’m not sure how I feel about the procedural generation on planets. On one hand, a lot of the “random” structures you can walk to are actually pretty detailed and some are WAY bigger than they look from the outside. In fact some of my best pieces of gear came from exploring them. On the other hand, the longer I’ve played the more I find reused set pieces. It’s also strange that even on severely inhospitable planets there are still NPCs living there or ships landing and taking off.
• After I did a specific side mission, I now see a random encounter related to it all the damn time and they have the exact same dialogue every single time. I don’t know if it’s a bug but if not it’s a really strange design choice.
• Visually the NPCs don’t look that great, and the environments are okay, but the items like guns and miscellaneous objects are very detailed. The ships also look (and sound) incredible. At one point I climbed on top of my ship and noticed there are a ton of small details all over it that most players won’t even see
• I haven’t played a ton of the main story, but the side quests are usually pretty interesting. IMO they’re the best story-related parts of the game. However I agree with another comment here that Akila city is weird because it’s like the 24th century and they still have dirt roads.
• The companions are okay. I like Andreja and Vasco.
• I think people will make some really cool mods for this game. Once the creation kit is released I plan on making a few myself (I really want to add an infinite-volume storage container near the crafting stations on my ship).

Overall I don’t think this game is GOTY material or anything, but I usually have a good time with Bethesda games (with the exception of Fallout 76) so just like Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim/Fallout I’ll probably come back to it every once in a while and have fun, especially once more mods start rolling out.

They were talking about the war recently and they both thought that Russia was getting their ass kicked and incompetent.

probably about once a week one of my “apolitical” friends will post a tweet/article in our group chat talking about how Russia is so fucked/they’re running out of soldiers/they have no ammo or missiles/etc. I used to be baffled at how anyone could still believe this shit but after hate-watching my country’s media for a while it makes a lot more sense. Basically every media organization we’re exposed to here is repeating the same thing and even when it’s clearly bullshit (like “Russia is going to collapse from sanctions”) they push out so goddamn much of it that it’s super easy to forget the older claims. Eventually people forget the details of each story and just remember “Russia = bad, incompetent, desperate” which I suppose means the propaganda works.

CHINA’S COVID FAILURE

which country has over a million COVID deaths again?

nature is healing

Dead Space has that really cool diegetic “locator” system so if you come across multiple paths you can see which way points toward the story, and take your time exploring the other direction, knowing you won’t accidentally start a story cutscene that locks you out of explorable areas

apparently it got removed, I just looked at the tweet and it’s gone lol

they also wrote a really bad children’s book about Trump that included a muscular, shirtless Robert Mueller, and when someone commented on it they got really defensive and started posting pics of both of them shirtless with kids. This has remained in my memory because it led to one of the hosts of my favorite podcast having a shirt made that said “MY SON CAN SEE SHIRTLESS MEN” lol

I kinda miss watching these two goofy mfers tweet at each other for their followers like they were in a sitcom

I think probably like a 7 or 8. No idea if it’s true or not but there was that leak at the beginning of the year that said Redfall and Starfield were both delayed because they were in pretty rough shape, and they were right about Redfall so that doesn’t really bode well.

I used to pre-order a ton because I like collecting physical games and some come with special launch versions but now that I’m older I do it a lot more selectively. These days I pretty much only pre-order a game if I’m 100% sure I will love it (like I pre-ordered the Death Stranding collector’s edition because I love Kojima’s weirdass games and it ended up being one of my favorite games ever). Sometimes I’ll pre-order a game if it’s from a smaller-ish studio and I really liked their previous work (like Larian’s DOS/BG3, Owlcat’s Pathfinder games, Guild Wars 2 expansions, Yoko Taro’s stuff, etc.) because I’m familiar with the kind of work those studios do and know I’ll be getting it anyway.

Yeah as long as you’re exploring, the game throws camping supplies at you so you can rest a bit more than you think. Also resting is how you see a lot of story cutscenes with your party so it’s a good idea to rest every once in a while and talk to your party members.

I have the same problem with hoarding items/spells (probably from playing old RPGs where you needed every advantage you could get) but recently I’ve just forced myself to use them if I need to and it usually works out fine.

5th edition D&D is a lot easier to get the hang of than earlier editions, and IMO the game does a decent job tutorializing its systems. FYI when you mouse over something you can press T to “stick” it on screen and then mouse over any bold/colored words in the description to get an explanation of those things as well. Really nice quality of life feature.

As for the characters, you can pick whatever you want but be aware most of them can be in your game anyway as companion characters, and I believe you still need to make build choices for them (if past Larian games are anything to go by). Most stuff is pretty self-explanatory if you read the descriptions, e.g. if you mouse over your dexterity score it will say it increases your effectiveness with finesse weapons, and if you mouse over a dagger you’ll see it labeled “Finesse” near the bottom. If you don’t want to deal with any of it you can just google like “BG3 [class] build guide” or something and find a ton of guides, I’m sure.

not pictured: millions of Ukrainian red army soldiers rolling in their graves

She also felt that the kabob wasn’t mutton, but more like chicken or duck, and she had diarrhea the next day.

honestly I’d probably keep that to myself lol