I’m in the same boat, want FemShep, always romance Tali. The ME2 LE romance mod is pretty painless. Unfortunately, last I checked, the modder never finished the ME3 LE mod. There’s a way to force it in ME3 by hacking the save file and it’ll still get you there, but it won’t be as seamless.

Holy hell. I have some bad GameStop trade-in stories, and that’s just from taking in normal trade-ins. I can’t even imagine the clusterfuck this would be. I’d be calling in sick.

A small AAA production in 2000, maybe. E33’s was only a fraction of a small AAA budget today.

TGA calls it “a game made outside the traditional publisher system,” which fits. I’d agree that we’re looking at wildly different scales of production in the same category, though.

Good showing for E33 but I’m not convinced it’s a shoo-in for GotY. It’s a media-run event and the press adored Hades 2. Plus there’s always the Kojima factor and it would be the first time TGA’s ever given it to a studio’s first game.

This article didn’t even go into the service disruptions Perplexity has had the past couple of weeks. In short, the best thing Perplexity does is give you access to multiple models at once, but frequently when you try to select one for a specific thread, it will throw an error and (quietly) kick the response to your prompt to a backup.

Perplexity’s calling it a technical issue but it looks more like throttling, especially considering API access to Claude is expensive and that’s the one that is having the most “technical issues.” I would have already gone elsewhere if my sub wasn’t free, and if it continues to be this bad, I might end up going elsewhere anyway.

In terms of content moderation? Not in the least. Discord is extremely laissez-faire about it. They intervene when compelled to by law enforcement. I can’t speak to the large server experience, but we’ve run our server for nearly six years and not a single member of staff has ever spoken with anyone at Discord. Every single one of the moderation tools we use are third party.

As a practical matter, Discord provides the communication infrastructure for us and that’s literally it. Irrelevant to the topic at hand. We could pack up and move it all to Matrix tomorrow and our content moderation experience would be just as centralized (that is to say, it would not be).

I don’t think it’s necessarily true that it’s so overly onerous that it must lead to centralization. I’m part of staff on a medium-sized Discord server and we have more than enough coverage to handle objectionable content. As another example, Fediverse instances here have proactively established rules and norms for NSFW content that ensures the communities keep running, and most are still going a few years later after the Reddit exodus exploded their populations.

It absolutely does make scaling up more expensive, but I’ve gone from a fairly libertarian stance on this to now asserting proper community moderation has become part of the social responsibility corps have now when making these spaces grow to have massive reach. And yes, I don’t think big corps do enough on this topic, and it’s another inequity because it’s really starting to look like new organizations are going to have to be more responsible for what content they allow. But I’m all for coming down hard on the big corps. Everyone got by just fine in the 90’s and 2000’s when they had much, much larger customer support/moderator staffs. “It’s too expensive” is the same garbage excuse used for other forms of enshittification today while these platforms make money hand over fist.

Yeah, my phone has productivity timers, my note taking app, temperature controls for my home office, not to mention 2FA and other tools I need. I don’t see myself leaving it in the kitchen.

That said, reading this did made me think to turn off email push notifications. Fortunately I’m not in a position where I have to reply to emails immediately, so I like the idea of scheduled email time. Honestly don’t know why I didn’t think of that.

You won’t find any questions on the CES about, say, whether the respondent approves of capitalism. So yes, this analysis was likely done with the American Overton window in mind.

If you’re still playing it, feel free to message me for tips on the Fediverse or on Discord. I love talking TO.

Difficulty definitely starts picking up chapter 4, so you’ll have to start finding creative ways to work within the level cap. Gear crafting is one of them.

A lot of the sports subs’ better content is instant reaction. Harder to fake. The only participation I still have on reddit is a similar community for a large video game. It’s more like a chatroom than a message board. Small wonder I spend way more time talking on Discord than anywhere these days.

Something’s that’s easy to forget is barely half of US households were even online by the 360’s release. Under a third had broadband. Even the Nintendo Power hotline ran until 2010.

I sold thousands of book guides at Gamestop, and the retailers also pushed them because they were higher margin than the games themselves. Yes, back then, the gaming enthusiasts knew GameFAQs was the place for info, but the mass market? The vast majority still got their info from guides and magazines, or word-of-mouth.

It’s like social media adoption. The mass market didn’t jump in until a generation later.

Even just revising my guide for the new Final Fantasy Tactics remaster is way too big a project for me right now. It’s amazing how much work it is.

This is where I’ve been at on it. On top of that, the stuff that’s not directly exploiting human actors (like drawn or animated content) or pushing their boundaries is still coming out of studios that aren’t exactly known for healthy work/life balance. To say nothing of the kind of fetish content that might come out of those places too, which surely takes its own toll on creators.

If we can offload all of that potential trauma onto computers, I’m all for it.

Staff shake-up last year. Phil Savage and Tyler Wilde have really stepped it up and let their writers sound off.

Like any of the major sites though, the news side still has its share of articles generated from one-liners sourced from interviews ran elsewhere.

If an Internet infrastructure giant can’t make MMOs work, I don’t see how these smaller MMO projects that keep popping up are going to, either. Greg Street also recently just talked about how his isn’t getting funding.

It’s too bad, I think SpaceCraft looks interesting but I don’t know if it’s going to make to 1.0, much less stick around.

I get the feeling the people at Aftermath are just hungry to poke the bear. I imagine it’ll eventually catch up to them, but hey, more power to them for now.

Maybe it’s because my experience with it goes well back into the print era, but very little of it is actual fact-finding capital “J” journalism, and even that part has only come on in the industry more recently. I’ve always put the games press in its proper buckets of “previews for access” and then game criticism. Quality for both varies, but I’m rarely disappointed when I stick to a publication I like (until the inevitable EIC churn, anyway).

If I had the money I’d definitely do the same, but for now I do RSS instead of link aggregator communities if I’m being serious about it. Takes some curation, but at the very least it’s not being run through a vote algorithm first.

Ugh, the only thing I hate more than a few people I regularly talk with still using Messenger is having to deal with the desktop client. Now this 🙄

I moved to a web browser but I can’t even get push notifications working.