dreadgoat

You're missing the scale.

Everyone knew BG3 would "a success," but it hasn't just been a success, it's been a nuclear bomb of a success.

Optimistically, people were expecting to get around 1 million in sales. Total. THAT would have been a GREAT SUCCESS. Today I think it has around 10 million on Steam alone, 10x the "hope we get there" number.

Imagine taking a job and hoping for a $10,000 bonus for good performance, and then your boss drops $100,000 on your desk. It's that level of joyful shock.

The determining question for whether or not it's the same is this: Are you the physical matter of your brain, or the electricity running through it? In the first case, sleep isn't death. In the second case, it is. I would argue that you're closer to the electricity than the brain matter, since an unpowered brain is how we define death.

But REALLY it ultimately doesn't matter, if you think about it. An exact clone of you created after any kind of destruction of consciousness is no different than the original you had the destruction never occurred. We just intuitively really do not like that idea.

It's strange, people can't seem to help themselves.

Even the Star Citizen community was full of people talking about how Starfield was finally going to deliver as the superior sandbox space sim.

Space Game is not a genre, it's a setting. Bethesda RPGs are gonna Bethesda RPG, no matter how you flavor it.

You don't need a distant science fiction MacGuffin for this. Every night you lay down and "die" for 8 hours or so, then your consciousness turns back on and you simply trust that it wasn't altered too much in the interim. We know very well that the way we think can change from one day to the other, so who's to say you're really the same person?

Too different to compare. These are all tearjerkers for sure, but in sort of a happysad way, like "so sad that we lost it but so happy that we had it." There is something good and warm that you can identify with, and the hurt comes from it being taken away too soon.

Happy Sugar Life is obvious from the outset that there will be nothing good or warm, there is no hope or anything worth saving. The viewer knows this, but the characters don't. That's what makes it so painful (in a good way) to watch unfold.

I don't think OP made the point clear, but I agree with the spirit.

Fundamentally it is this:
Sense of scale
Meaningful content at every turn
CHOOSE ONE

Examples
Daggerfall - infinite scale, but quests, dungeons, meaningful content have to be specifically targeted or else be lost in the gigantic procedurally generated world.
Elite Dangerous - spending 20 minutes supercrusing across a binary star system really makes you feel the size, but also that's 20 minutes of not doing anything.
No Man's Sky - The universe is effectively infinite, and there is something useful almost everywhere! But (almost) none of it is handcrafted, so the random content gets stale in the scale.
Star Citizen - Basically no content, but absolutely unmatched as an immersive space experience, as it doesn't compromise on scale for QoL or filler content in the slightest. Worth noting that most people hate this.

Meanwhile Skyrim is impressive because the world is pretty big, but there's also something interesting to do every 5 steps. Starfield tries to maintain this while also tossing in some NMS-style randomized infinite content, but ends up suffering the same feeling of staleness once you spend any time exploring it.

I'm a huge book fan, and I have to say that book purists are the worst.

The show has made some changes that I don't love, and some of the characters aren't portrayed as I imagined, but for the most part it has been wonderful to see one of my favorite fantasy series brought to life, and to be able to enjoy this world with new fans. I always expect screen adaptions to make creative changes, since things that work in a book just don't work on screen sometimes, and I'd say the changes and presentations have been pretty sensible for the most part.

For every change I dislike there's at least one I appreciate, and all of the actors are killing it (with what they are given at least, looking at you weird Lan funeral scene). I'm looking forward to how they handle the story going forward!

It was pre-approved on launch for 3 seasons at minimum. It's locked in at least that far.

Everybody romanticizes Karlach forgetting the part where she was a hellknight for 20 years and had a GREAT time with the wanton slaughter aspect. Absolutely revels in chopping up people she doesn't like. She's a sweetie deep down but also for sure got anger issues.

Flash drives are not a lasting medium. You'd need something like a quad-layer blu-ray, which is not cheap and has slow read speeds compared to solid state storage. Also nobody has blu-ray readers anymore. Also blu-ray publishers are tiny. Also the expense of distributing physical media.

So we've arrived back at the beginning - you can have this cake and eat it too, but you're going to have to eat the expense yourself. Imposing it upon the entire consumer market is selfish and wasteful.

"You asked me what cake I like, then you didn't bake me that cake, then you were upset that I expressed disappointment that I didn't get the cake I said I liked after you asked me what I like"

is a metaphor for the more abstract concept of

"you prioritize your desire to impress me over actually pleasing me, and I do not recognize the importance appreciating your efforts even when they fall short, and both of us are too self-absorbed to understand the emotional needs of the other and make compromises so we can both feel loved"

Everybody thinking it's about the cake when it's not at all about the cake.

The event is a metaphor for how both people in the relationship are incapable of effective communication. Don't think about it as a single event, imagine this as the 100th time something like this has happened, both of them 99 times brushing it off, but eventually snapping.

Most of the worst fights I've been in throughout my relationships have been sparked by something stupid like this, but the fight isn't ever about the cake. The fight is about all the other times there was a slight, a feeling of disrespect, a failure to understand each others' needs. I broke up with someone once over a vegetable while making dinner - it wasn't about the vegetable, it was about both of us being unwilling to compromise for each others' idiosyncrasies, which had already happened dozens of times before we were unable to agree on a vegetable. The vegetable just made me realize the root problem.

This is also why the AITA story is useless to make any judgments on. If she has a consistent pattern of ignoring his requests, then she's the problem. If he has a consistent pattern of being ungrateful, he's the problem. High likelihood both are the problem to some degree, but no way to know without investigating the pattern of behavior over a long period.