Sure! I mean, why not? Hell, release the game DRM free in the first place on all platforms, huh? Why did we have to wait a decade and buy it twice before we could get the DRM version of any part of it, after all?

But you weren't complaining about it yesterday and you're way closer to the right outcome today. I would much rather have a DRM free version of some part of that game than not.

Wait, does it? Oh, man, it does! I actively remember the praise, where did I get so much Mandela effect from this? I didn't even think to look it up, I was so certain.

In any case, here's to being actively wrong and still having made your point. Eternal is the lesser game in general, and I have played it much less, but it's still telling I straight up forgot and invented an alternate scenario about it.

I don't think the setup for Doom 16 would be particularly doable over LAN without rebuilding the game or giving you the server code. Servers are doing a LOT of work in this.

Nobody did. It was one of this weird wave of interesting multiplayer setups that just didn't have the competitive cleanness of the established stuff and nobody ended up caring about.

It was midly interesting to try out once, but let's say there's a reason they didn't do a MP mode in the sequel and every reviewer praised that choice.

I don't know how this happened, but I am glad that it happened and yes, I just bought Doom 2016 again.

Ah, so my first reaction is "what actual indie developer who knows what they're talking about excludes BG3 from AAA"?

Turns out not this one, apparently, since the creative use of quotes seems intended to obscure that "AAA schlock" is not from the dev, it's from the journalist rehashing a quote from an article about a quote from a podcast. Speaking of schlock.

Anyway, I'm on the fence about the core point. I agree on principle that "dumbed down" doesn't make things mainstream. I agree that this is a lesson the industry insists on refusing to learn, even after The Sims doulbing as architecture software, WoW casual moms playing with a dozen UI mods, Fortnite core players building gothic cathedrals in five seconds and Roblox contianing entire gamedev teams made of unpaid children.

Whatever the mainstream wants, "simple" has nothing to do with it.

Do I think BG3 means somebody should fund Pillars 3? Yeeeeah, not so sure. BG3 works because it was the literal best time to be making D&D stuff, because it had two extremely beloved brands propping it up, because it's a sequel to two extremely well received, accessible CRPGs that both did a lot better than Pillars to begin with, because they were both focused on multiplayer and free-form systems instead of straight-up literature. Nuance matters here.

And then somebody (a lot of somebodies) gave them two hundred million to make it, so it also looks at least as good as anything Bioware ever did during their heyday. That's probably why BG3 has 140K players on Steam right now and Avowed has 1K and never peaked past 10K.

There are lessons from BG I'd love to see the industry learn. I want them to learn the right ones, though, because if they go ahead and invest another nine digits on the wrong thing then we WILL actually have to wait another 30 years for another game like that.

Oh, I'm changing it back, then.

FWIW, OnlyOffice IS much better (hey, at least it doesn't open xls files with black text on black backgrounds on dark mode!), and I do think its Google-inspired "apps-as-tabs" thing is the future for this stuff. I'm not sure I'd rank it above those, but it's certainly a much more... competitive, I guess? approach.

Sorry, freudian slip. Edited to avoid future confusion.

There's a type of applications where I'd dump HomeAssistant, Pi-Hole and maybe TrueNAS and a few others where the FOSS option is the clear leader... if you're a power user trying to do things the proprietary equivalents won't even acknowledge as an option, but they're not something you'd give a normie.

I just don't think "objectively better" is a good way to look at it for a lot of this.

That's less and opinion than Stockholm syndrome.

There's a very good argument for Blender, though, but 3D software is so specialized that I guess it depends what you're comparing it to.

And while we're on creativity software, the same goes for Godot. Arguable, but very dependent on what you're doing.

OBS and VLC yeah.

You snuck the LibreOffice hot take in there and... yeah, no, unfortunately.

I don't even think it's necessarily better than MS Office, but I'd (unfortunately) take Google's Office suite over both.

Well, South American countries made multiple attempts to put their eggs somewhere else and then found their eggs suspiciously smashed and their chicken appeared to have been replaced by a fascist dictator in the morning and when they asked what happened to the eggs they were put in a plane and quietly dropped over the ocean.

So there was that reason.

They actually lampshade this further down the article, at the point where clickbaiting has fulfilled its goal.

It's almost nostalgic being mildly annoyed at some slightly sub-par journalistic ethics displayed by Gizmodo and company. Feels quaint and nostalgic now. I honestly didn't know Gizmodo was still running, if I'm perfectly honest. It's been quite the decade.

Because ragebait is engagement and engagement gets you revenue and radicalizes young men to keep fascists in power.

I mean, this is not new, the playbook is some 4chan gamergate psyop bullshit that's what? a decade old now?

Great, now I'm disappointed in humanity AND feeling old.

Not even the first guy to incel his way to an extremely inaccurate AI virtual girlfriend chatbot based on an inaccessible married celebrity.

Just saying, Geordi is NOT the face you want to use for warnings about ethical generative AI usage.

Hah. Yeah, I'll do that as soon as you invent a way to freeze time.

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure it's less energy efficient to run a local open source LLM than to offload the task to a data center, but the flexibility and privacy are too big of a deal to ignore.

In any case chatbots suck at finding information reliably, but they are actually pretty good at reaching things you already know or can verify at a glance. The fact that a piece of tech is being misused often doesn't mean it's useless. This simplistic black-and-white stuff is so dumb and social media is so full of it. Speaking of often misused technology, I suppose.

Not to be that guy, but if there's a fictional character that made a career out of prompt engineering a surprisingly flaky AI it's Geordi La Forge. The guy hasn't given the hand to a "Computer!" interaction in his life.

This, but unironically.

I don't get it. There is a test that takes ten seconds blowing into a tube. Why is "the right to refuse the breathalyzer" a thing? What's the point if you're still going to get tested in a less accurate way that takes longer? What right or freedom is being preserved there other than the right to waste everybody's time and risk a worse outcome? Why does it matter if it's "on you"? There are other people involved, from the cop performing the test to whoever else needs to get stopped or tested after you to potentially the public interest of not having drunk drivers zooming around. Why is it "being on you" relevant?

It's mostly trivial, but man, it is such a microcosm of weird-ass American/anarchocapitalist thinking about public/private interactions.

Subscription cost/value is hard to measure because you can get promos and sales plus you're receiving a bunch of games as part of the package, so... sure, that's 80 bucks a year for basic and what? 120+ for the higher tiers, but how much that is a straight add to the cost of the hardware does depend on how much of that money you'd have spent buying the games new (or still signing up to Game Pass if you were eyeing an Xbox instead, I suppose).

So that is valid back-of-the-envelope math, but not really accurate.

Plus the "only play offline" scenario is still a viable use case. I cancelled my PS Plus and Xbox Live subs because I only ever played offline games on consoles.

"I wouldn't recommend one ever" is just not a reasonable stance today, and I don't know if I'd say you can build a PC that "demolishes a PS5" for that money. What GPU would you need to do 4K60 or 1440p120 upscaled on AAA? The B580/4060 tier won't cut it, you need one step up. A 4070 shows up for 650 bucks on my local Amazon. The 4060 Ti for 550. Current gen AMD is more expensive than that.

It's not impossible to build a functional PC around that purchase, but man, you better be a savvy hardware guy or have one on hand. A quick glance shows my local trusted builders will give you a vanilla 8 Gig 4060 paired with an Intel i5 12th gen and 32 gigs of slow-ish DDR4. I mean, you'll play some games, they'll look fine with some tinkering, but that's barely PS5 tier, let alone PS5 Pro. And that's assuming you're plugging that thing into a TV like a bulky, noisy console. Otherwise you're gonna need a monitor to go with it.

Again, not saying it's not an option. Absolutely the right move for a whole bunch of people.

But everybody? Sight unseen? In all circumstances? Yeah, nah. When my little cousin comes asking I'm not just pointing him at the cheapo trashcan PC, I'm asking questions. Do they have a laptop in good nick for work/school? Do they have a decent TV/monitor to use with it? What kinds of games do they want to play? It's not a one-size-fits-all thing the way it was five to ten years ago.