I have lost all interest in playing any future Bethesda games because of their engine. It was pretty crap (but acceptable) back in 2011. Now it feels like a scam to pay for their games. Like one of those “GameStation 5” you can buy on Wish.

But but… branding!

That’s not really true. I recently migrated from Notion to Obsidian. It wasn’t 100% painless but good enough.

Yes, the US is a third world country

I don’t believe that. You can’t tell me there’s no difference in the amount of bias between Fox News and AP. Sure, we can’t reach some kind of theoretical 0.0 bias - even particle physics research is biased by assumptions. But at least it makes an honest attempt. Although the conclusions an article arrives at may be influenced by the author’s opinions, a journalist who is honestly trying to avoid bias would provide the reasoning, data and sources behind those opinions instead of simply stating them as fact. That gives me as a reader a chance to evaluate their merits.

The thing I’m really aching for in news media is journalism that rises above merely reporting events. “A guy got murdered yesterday” is not useful information for me. It’s barely even a data point, because I can’t read about ten such events and extrapolate anything meaningful from it. Other things like population size, number of stopped crime, completeness of data etc affect any conclusion that could be drawn from it

In fact I shouldn’t try to extrapolate from it, because I’m paying the journalist to talk to the right experts and hopefully also do research on their own, to figure out trends and cause-effect relationships. That’s meaningful journalism that helps me make decisions such as how to vote.

Media today has so much noise and so little signal. I don’t need a daily newspaper filled to the brim with events. I need perhaps a weekly magazine that I can read on a Sunday morning in half an hour, which teaches me something about what’s going on in the world without bias, and brings up the data as evidence. I wouldn’t mind paying for it and I’d take it on paper, though e-ink would be better. I’d trust it a lot more if ads were not mentioned anywhere in its business model.

Only Viktor Orbán left to appease. Nato has a real nice gang of crooks among its cohorts. I’m kinda surprised they don’t just join ranks with Putin instead.

Well why the hell not, everybody else is bombing and shooting. It’s the latest trend.

They literally pulled the game from the PlayStation Store because of the low quality. At that point it’s not just a subjective opinion but fact, so I resent the claim that I’m bending the truth.

Yes, the issue was with last gen consoles. I don’t think that matters to the point I am making, nor that it worked for you personally on your setup. It worked okay for me too, but I was on a high-end PC.

I think renting should be renting, and purchasing should be purchasing. I’m okay with renting, and what that entails (e.g. they might remove the service in the future and I won’t ever own the game). I’m also fine with buying games, and for some games that have a lot of sentimental value or replayability I do want to own them.

What I’m not okay with is the current state of affairs, where they make it seem as if you buy the game and you pay full price, but legally it’s only “licensed” to you and the license can be revoked at any time. It’s all the disadvantages you describe with renting, but with the price of buying. So that’s what I had in mind with my comment: I’d be content instead of angry if they offered a rental service with honest terms of service and a fair price, instead of the bullshit they’re pulling right now.

If there was a proper rental service I would likely rent a lot of games that I wanted to try out. Then I would go to GOG to buy DRM-free versions of the games I want to keep for a long time. Games like Civ5, RimWorld and Cyberpunk 2077. I think I wouldn’t need to rent a game for three years to figure out that I want to buy it, more like a month.

The problem is that they advertise it a certain way and sell preorders, and then the game doesn’t live up to what they advertised. Worse, they didn’t allow anyone to review the console versions which were so unplayable that Sony removed it from the store. It would have been fine if people knew exactly what they were paying for, but they were misled.

Sure, it was unmet expectations but even if the expectation was just 'it works", they still didn’t meet it. And that’s kind of the bare minimum to even be legal when you’re charging money for it. I disagree that the console versions were 7/10 on release - more like 1/10.

For most games, I’m fine with renting my games. If they charge a reasonable continuous rental fee and not a crazy one-off price that will make the game available for some unspecified amount of time at the publisher’s discretion. For example, I could imagine paying $2 / month to play Assassin’s Creed. And if it turns out to be boring I can just stop renting it.

The Monster product placement was tone deaf and took away so much from the immersion. IMHO it almost ruined the experience.