This is kind of where I land. I think there are some interesting conceptual elements, but having just one life and a PvP-only win condition stresses me out. I found the Plunder mode in the original Warzone to be pretty interesting, so I think there’s still room to innovate in the genre.

Yeah Defector spun off from the old Deadspin amidst clashes with their parent company over editorial independence (among other things). Drew Magary is one of my favorite writers, so I was mostly tracking it because of him.

There’s some stuff across the Metal Gear Solid series that’s pretty memorable.

Yeah I’m really excited to see more non-Jedi stories in Star Wars. I’m hopeful that Andor created a moment where there’s space for people to explore more of the universe beyond the Jedi.

You kind of hit on the major tradeoff while thinking through it. That tight product integration (phone, watch, tablet, laptop) is a selling point for a lot of people to buy into closed tech ecosystems. It’s easy and it just works. In exchange for those seamless integrations, you kind of lock yourself in to that family of tech products. There’s also the fact that the owner of said ecosystem will happily monitor and monetize all your activity on those integrated products. Open source solutions allow you to strip out that corporate telemetry to a greater or lesser extent. You can also achieve some similar levels of product integration, but it does demand a little more effort and technical savvy from the end-user. I wouldn’t claim that one or the other choice is explicitly wrong or evil, as people have different tech needs and different amounts of skill/time to devote to this stuff. That said, I personally have tried to be more thoughtful about what I do and do not control with respect to my digital life.

Hunger or thirst mechanics in anything that’s not explicitly a survival game.

Diablo 4 pretty much nonstop since release. Really enjoying it so far.

Yeah I think it was too much to hope there would actually be good-faith engagement at this point. It was just more corporate messaging.

Yeah thanks for sharing, this seems pretty cool. My daily driver is exclusively Linux, so I’m always happy to learn from others navigating the world of Linux gaming.

I messed around with Street Fighter back in the day, and I enjoyed MK 11 and Samurai Shodown more recently. I’ve never been into it enough to claim membership in the FGC, but it’s certainly an interesting community.

Hah, thanks! Link to the Past is my GOAT Zelda game.

The initial breaking of this story is what drove me to explore some Reddit alternatives, but this is worse than I realized. It’s a bummer to see the enshittification principle on full display.

I have historically played a lot of 5E, but I’ve been looking to try out Pathfinder for quite a while now. I’m interested to see what happens with the remaster in November.