Veraxus

Helping with complex Terminal commands/shell scripts is basically my #1 practical use-case for AI right now… especially if you use tools like JQ a lot. Saving keystrokes is a lifestyle, after all.

I am also a really big fan of Warp, and was even before they added the AI feature (the editor-style functionality is wonderful). For the record, the AI isn’t always running in Warp, to use it you start a prompt with hash (#) and then ask for what you want and it presents options.

It does not make a meaningful difference at all. Get the keyboard you like best. Personally, I’m a fan of the Logitech G915 (Windows layout) for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Hi-Fi Rush

Pure joy and happiness from start to finish.

Yes, please!

PSVR2 is a great headset, and I would love to free it from the shackles of PS5 exclusivity. If they officially supported PC, it would easily be the best PCVR headset you can get right now.

And that. The list of “nopes” is so long I missed the most obvious one!

Always online, live service, Denuvo, and characters that are not remotely faithful to their source material abilities…?

Hard pass four times over.

That’s the weird thing about this, nobody would ever NEED to own all the vehicles at once… not even the biggest Org. The game just doesn’t work like that.

You’d need all the vehicles in Star Citizen like you’d need all the vehicles on earth. You just buy or rent what you need when you need it.

It’s an MMO, so…

As an Early Access, it has a LOT of jank; but it’s unlike anything else that has ever existed. It really is a no-compromises, persistent, open, seamless sci-fi universe. It gets massive updates every 3 months, and those updates have been getting gradually bigger and more meaningful over the last 2 years. We’ve seen huge amounts of progress, so the developers are actually delivering. And regardless of how you feel about their business model as an outsider, it’s successfully ensuring that progress can continue in perpetuity, which is exactly what all of us regular players want.

I skipped the original Kickstarter because even the smaller scope of that pitch seemed impossible on the budget they were asking. Then I watched the project for years as it seemed like it was falling apart. I didn’t actually buy in until they showed off planet tech, and it was obvious that (1) they had finally gotten their development problems fixed and (2) their business model was capable of funding the project indefinitely (no matter how long it took to realize the vision). As of now, I have well over 1,000 hours in the game… probably more than anything else I’ve ever played.

Only about half of those vehicles are actually in the game right now, too.

The thing is, with only one exception that I can think of, everything can be acquired in-game. The only reason you’d buy one of these ship packages is to have immediate access to those specific types of gameplay and, eventually, free in-game insurance (which otherwise also uses in-game currency). Sometimes these things make sense for player Orgs, but I can’t imagine any Org needing all vehicles at all times… especially at that price.

I’ve been playing it for years and I certainly hope it’s never “finished”. It gets massive updates every 3 months (quarterly), and even after it’s officially 1.0 I hope it continues to get regular updates. The version is irrelevant to me at this point - it’s fun, interesting, and unlike anything else out there, and it only gets better with each update. That’s all I want out of the project.

Daggerfall remains, to this day, one of the best games ever made. I still have my original boxed copy, and several pre-patched CDs that Bethesda would mail out back in the day. I replay it a few times a year, because it’s held up so well and there is nothing else that scratches the same itch.

I frequently wonder what Bethesda would be like today if Peterson, Lakshman, and Lefay had stayed at the company and Todd had been chased out, instead. Those three created The Elder Scrolls from scratch - lore, gameplay concepts, all of it. They had a TES Bible covering the story from Arena to Oblivion… and one by one, Todd excised all their influence from the franchise.

I miss the oppressive, grimdark atmosphere and lore, the complex world simulation, the unprecedented freedom, the unflinching maturity, and the epic, massive dungeon crawls.

I don’t see anyone trying to make a game like that again, ever. Certainly not Todd Howard’s Bethesda.

…are they going to apply this rule to Nintendo or Sony…

They absolutely should. Closed ecosystems should be illegal. They are literally an intentional form of unethical, predatory trust.

Yes.

The thing that has struck me the most is how much lighter it is. Nobody seems to be mention that, but that one small thing makes such an outsize difference.

The battery life is also very noticeable, and you can multiply the benefit by using energy conserving settings.

The other big difference is control responsiveness. If you play fighting games or other games with intense timing and accuracy needs, you WILL notice the difference.

The OG Steam Deck is still great, but the OLED is just better in so many little, meaningful ways.

I’m sure not preordering and I will wait until plenty of detailed reviews and gameplay videos are out before I buy. As solid as NMS is right now, it was a steaming pile on release. I won’t risk it again.

In an attempt to atone for creating the bomb, Julius Robert Oppenheimer would go on to invent a quantum teleportation device. But when a failed experiment sends him back in time, attracting the attention of a hostile alien species, he is forced to turn his invention into a weapon that will expose the alien homeworld to a distant black hole…

Oh, did GM just step in it this time. Being stupid and removing important features is one thing, but straight-up defamation like this is another.

Google and Apple’s lawyers must be salivating a river right now.

Daggerfall had some basic guiding principles that have been slowly stripped away by every new release…

1. It was unapologetically grimdark. The lore was dark, sinister, and scary… very Robert E Howard meets Lovecraft.

2. It was obsessed with simulation. They wanted a world that functioned logically… hour to hour, day to day, season to season, character to character, and as seamlessly as possible.

3. It strove for tabletop-level freedom without limits. You could climb, sneak, swim… across rooftops, in streets, in dungeons… there were no barriers whatsoever.

4. It reinforced that decisions have consequences, with multiple paths if you followed the main story.

With Morrowind, they killed the grimdark and gutted the lore. They replaced the existential dread of the lore with “weirdness”. They took the mature, unflinching tone out behind the shed… replacing it with T-rated YA content. Oblivion finally completed the transition from grimdark to sterile high fantasy. This is especially heinous because the Elder Scrolls Bible laid out the franchise from Daggerfall through Oblivion, and Oblivion was supposed to be the final, the darkest, most oppressive game in the series, being literally about the end of the world.

While Morrowind strove to preserve some of the simulation, the grand multi-season scope pared this back somewhat. From there, it never evolved or advanced at all, with each new game using the same minimal, basic simulation.

The tabletop level freedom was completely axed as a guiding principle. Instead, the gameplay became much more gamey. No longer would you sink if you tried to swim while carrying too much weight, climbing has been completely non-existent, dungeoneering mechanics - and dungeoneering as a major gameplay loop - were removed en masse… and all while the seamless open world has had more and more seams - loading zones, invisible walls, etc - added.

And finally, all consequences were removed as basic principles. You could join any and all guilds or factions, your choices had no ramifications or outcomes or branching paths… there was not so much as an attempt to maintain an illusion of impact on the story or simulation.

These are the things people are talking about when they complain about each new TES game being lesser than the one before. And worst of all, they took all this withering away of ambition and applied it to Fallout, gutting the IP’s very soul… and nobody really noticed this trend until Starfield, because it was a new IP that was less prone to being viewed through rose-tinted nostalgia.

Every Bethesda game that comes out (not just TES) is worse than the previous. Objectively. Because Todd Howard has removed every shred of fearless ambition from the company.

See, this is what I’m talking about. We have entire generations of people parroting this nonsense because they started with Morrowind and never actually played Daggerfall. It’s incredibly sad.

40h is where I gave up, too. I would stopped much sooner, because everything feels like the worst kind of MMO grind… but folks kept telling me “keep going, it gets better!”

Narrator: It never gets better.