I imagine LTT did that for meme purposes more than anything else. Threadrippers are not built for games. They're built for production workloads which don't translate to gaming performance.
That said, the point still stands. This game needs the most powerful gaming hardware (e.g. Ryzen X3D series and RTX 4090) on "recommended" settings and 1080p to get averages above 60fps, which is wild. There's a rather dedicated fellow on reddit who does detailed performance tests after each patch.
I started with Ubuntu and slowly tried getting used to Gnome over the course of a few months (mainly using windows, every now and then hopping into Ubuntu when not gaming). I learned of KDE, tried it in Kubuntu, and it all instantly clicked for me. I switched over in about a week and haven't had much reason to boot Windows since.
It turned out that front-facing experience was incredibly important to me.
I've always wandered if the Captain or other Senior Officer had that idea in their back pocket just waiting for an excuse to use it.
For me it's not so much the travel; the main story tries to sell this idea of exploring the unknown, but literally everything you find is a known quantity in some form or another.
Her response during the motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFTNSGu_OoQ
I think usage of that particular phrase was probably overkill or an oversight, but I agree with her that criticising the actions of Israel's government is not Antisemitic.
It reminds me of when a trans representative was censured for condemning restrictions on gender-affirming care using the phrase "you will have blood on your hands" and opponents jumped on that to say she was out of line. It gives me a strong impression that their motivations go far beyond the language used, using excessive pedantry as an excuse.
It's been genuinely distressing to see people condoning such horrific behaviour. Thank you for the small dose of sanity.
I do not believe it to be an outright scam. However, it is horribly managed and I do consider the funding model to be predatory.
The whole "pledge" store should not be a thing at this stage IMO. It's just a cash shop they can justify huge prices with. It's actively contributed to the scope creep by introducing new vehicle roles, which they sometimes admit to not having designed gameplay for yet. Nor does it currently tell you if you can actually rent or buy the ship in-game (subject to progress wipes). Heck, the closest thing to a scam they've had recently was a "new starter bundle" of in-game gear that you lose upon your first death / unrecoverable body. This is a game where 80% of your deaths are to bugs or unintuitive behaviour.
They also keep trying to change their standards to match modern games. Ships have gone through multiple reworks which take months for a single ship. A sensible dev would lock that in and commit to releasing under those standards. It's been pointed out that with the current rate of progress, they'll still be releasing currently announced ships into the 2030s.
That's not even mentioning the single player component, Squadron 42, which got indefinitely delayed a few years back before a major demo showcase which never materialised. Supposedly, it's been scrapped and re-done more than once.
Their last big chance to show they've pulled things together is going to be the upcoming CitizenCon (yes, it has one) where they'll supposedly be making a big Squadron 42 announcement. A former customer service employee, who recently criticised the company's spending practices, claimed they'd taken a much more serious approach to the scope creep and that we'd see some results of that towards the end of this year.
I'm not holding my breath though. They've been known to create bullshit for presentations before (e.g the infamous sand worm) and I absolutely would not be surprised if Chris Roberts feels pressured to one-up Starfield.
As a side note, does anyone else get the impression this article was written by an AI? It repeatedly lists of buzzword features, like the Hangar module which hasn't been relevant for years, and barely discusses what the game is actually like.
For those kind of allegations, investigation will take significantly longer than a month.
I've played a bit and explored the first major city. I love sci-fi games and am definitely starting to get a feel for the world and kinda like it. Not sure at this stage I'd call it "good" though, the gameplay is a bit clunky and the UX could do with a lot of improvements. Gunplay is pretty floaty and the default pistol iron sights are awful. My initial impression is: if you want a Fallout-style space RPG with good writing and characters, and have not yet played Obsidian's Outer Worlds, then that would likely be a better choice.
I also love flight games, but space combat seems very bland. It seems you're mostly big and slow, so there's not much manuevering going on that makes these games fun. Even a simple variation of Star Wars Squadrons boost>drift mechananic would make it much more engaging. You get an opportunity to see what a larger ship feels like and it still only has forward-facing weapons so it feels like you just try to out-DPS whatever is in front of you. If you try to use the environment, like giant asteroids, for cover or to split up enemies, said asteroids get blown up in seconds, a weird design decsion IMO. I've not messed with ship customisation yet. I did really like getting to a traffic zone and just hailing other ships to trade and chat though!
There are things I'm liking about the writing. This is, so far, the only game I've played which lets you choose they/them pronouns as a third option for voiced dialogue, which is really neat and something I've wanted to see for a long time, as opposed to just male/female OR gender neutral everywhere. The first major city has some interesting places and a history walkthrough from the local faction's perspective, which heavily hints at there being a lot of bias to unravel by visiting the others. I quite like the religeous centre books which discuss the idea of faith being core to human experience in a broader sense than just belief in gods and spirituality. I'm generally enjoying getting immersed into the world so far.
The game's opening is crazy fast-paced though, a thing happens and a guy gives you his ship within like, 10 minutes excluding character creation. I can't help but wander if the writers are relying on you having read lore on their website or something, because at creation you get choices for which faction you were raised by, but ZERO context about any of them. Could also just be a thing for repeat RP playthroughs, but I don't play games this large that way.
Another thing I'll add is graphically the game is pretty weird. It has some of the worst luminance balancing I've ever seen in a game. You'll see what I mean if you fire a mining laser in the first cave, the laser is dark. They seem to heavily rely on screen colour filters that add a grey/brown tint to everything and crush the dynamic range, Their first big outdoors reveal with a musical flourish is a brown landscape with a grey-tinted sun from the filters lmao. It's slightly improved on PC by tricking the game into using Windows Auto-HDR (which, amusingly, involves renaming the executable to farcry5.exe), but not by much. For a game that largely sells itself on exploring and finding beautiful vistas (I think at least, I avoided marketing and got the game with my new GPU) this is an alarmingly bizarre art direction choice to me.
Otherwise, the game feels like it's from 2016. It's lacking a lot of basic options like FoV sliders (can be edited in a config file, but still). Space travel is a series of black screens presumably because they couldn't get any kind of seamless loading to work. Besides equipping weapons from the ground, they don't seem to use alt-actions for anything else like eating food in front of you or reading a book without taking it (the former requires going through menus). Shop inventories do not show how much of an item you already have, etc. After installing the lastest AMD drivers, it runs well on my Ryzen 3600x RX 7900XT, 32GB system on High (not Ultra) settings, but in a way that suggests performance is significantly worse on lower-end hardware (and I am aware consoles are locked to 30fps!). I have yet to see the game justify its intense performance requirements given that, again, it does not look next-gen to me nor does there seem to be much complexity behind the scenes that affects gameplay from the player's perspective.
Overall I like it, but I would NOT have gotten it if it wasn't free with the GPU I got from my last one failing. I'm generally happy with playing an immersive space RPG so far, but would not recommend it over The Outer Worlds based on a more objective view of it so far.
They is, and has been for a very long time, perfectly valid for singular use.
Most people I've encounted do it all the time without noticing between sentences.
Damn, it's nice to see he's doing something which is having an effect, even if it is small in the grand scheme of things.
I love how parkplace is literally the kind of single-minded insanity this article talks about (which is significantly longer than 2 paragraphs btw)
Like, skimming through their articles and you get stuff like this https://thatparkplace.com/wish-actor-harvey-guillen-says-he-believes-disney-will-make-a-queer-princess-in-his-lifetime/ where they relay the quotes then immediately jump to:
I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Yes, it is perfectly possible that the studio's writing work might be a bit shit, I dunno. If you find they are consistently involved with writing you don't enjoy, then sure, whatever. The point of this article is the absolute insanity this kind of stuff gets taken to, like it's a massive conspiracy rather than just the work of another studio managing the struggles and interests of our age.
To quote the 2+n paragraph article: