JohnEdwa

The first Fallout barely had anything, but Fallout 2 sure is something else having specific perks, traits and statistics about sex, a bunch of people you can have sex with and some you can get pregnant, and you can work as a prostitute or a porn actor. Or force some of your companions to do so.

Telemetry is not digital rights management, nothing happens if you don’t have internet access or if you block the game with a firewall, you can still play the game fine. It’s a bummer you can’t opt-out of it completely obviously, but “they can collect whatever they want about you” is entirely false as long as you select “Limited Data” when it asks for your consent - they are GDPR compliant after all.

Here, I created a full image for you. Limited data is system & hardware specs, game crash logs & load times, network/server logs and online game data (e.g on an MMO/online match, H:ZD is offline game so doesn’t really apply) and “Legal information required by law”. Again, I don’t know when any of these are sent - it might be always you boot the game, it might be only when you send a crash log.

Now I want someone to create an entirely pointless version of Wavacity running with Electron.

This.
Scary legalize for “We collect telemetry and crash reports”, essentially. How much H:ZD actually sends I don’t know, AFAIK that’s essentially generic data collection privacy policy thing from Sony.

There actually are updates to it as for the last three years Microsoft has continued to patch it under the commercial “Extended Security Update” program - that only ended in January 2023.
You just couldn’t get them as a home user without doing a lot of tweaking on your own.

Because when you are giant studio using Unreal Engine there really is no excuse for poor performance or porting. But when you are a (relatively to Epic or Sony/Microsoft etc) a tiny team building a game using the engine you came up with yourself with its roots somewhere around 2010-ish , back when 6 cores was a brand new thing and have been tweaking it ever since, you do get some slack if it doesn’t multithread perfectly.

Also it’s a Larian game, so not only will it have all the thousands of bugs fixed (literally, the first patch had over a thousand fixes), you’ll probably get the Extended Enhanced Definitive Divine Edition that rewrites half the quests and adds a bunch of new ones.

DS2 is also a fantastic example why just because something is by a certain studio doesn’t necessarily mean much as it was made almost entirely by the B-team while the core developers were busy making Bloodborne. So while it is by FromSoft, the people working on it were mostly the ones responsible for the A.C.E series IIRC.

The same thing is what happened with Mass Effect: Andromeda as the OG trilogy team was busy making up the mess called Anthem.

Gundyr on purpose acts as an early check for the player if they would enjoy the rest of the game or not. If you can’t beat him and don’t like the trial-and-error learning process required to do so, then you most likely wouldn’t enjoy or get much further in the game anyway.

Both can kill, but only one has a rather high chance (some estimate 10-20%) of leaving you exhausted for months on end or worse - Physics Girl has been bedridden and at times hospitalized for the last year or so because of it.

Countless services exist where you can buy captcha solving, though currently it’s done by actual humans in developing countries for tiny pay. Yet another job that’s going to soon be replaced by AI, though this time it almost certainly will result in some people starving to death.

But there would be no-one to do so. In a copyrightless world George R.R Martin would need to have another job to pay the bills and wouldn’t be able to dedicate his time for writing, and HBO or anyone else pouring massive amounts of money to create shows also wouldn’t be able to exist as they would gain no profit from what they do as their creations would also be in the public domain. Unless you live in an utopia with universal income and replicators that completely eradicate any need for money or ownership of anything, copyright itself as a concept is vital, the issue is just how corrupted the current system has become - which is mostly due to the greed of Disney.

To give an example, if all books were automatically public domain HBO could have created Game of Thrones without paying George R.R. Martin a single cent for it, then publish and sell “Game of Thrones: The Book”, aka the entire Song of Ice and Fire series, again without paying him anything and stealing all of his profit in the process.

As someone who just upgraded from a setup with a GTX 1060 and a 1440p monitor to a 3060 TI - which is something like 25% faster than the RX 6600 - I would suggest getting something a bit faster if at all possible. The RX 6600 is still a pretty good card for 1080p, but the extra resolution is a bit too much with most newer games. Though if you are okay dropping to medium settings or utilizing upscaling it won’t matter as much.

Not yet. But mysk has said he wants to make X like WeChat, which has payment and sending money as one of the key features.

Only if the 94% are now completely immune to long covid and wouldn’t suffer from it if they do get covid in the future. If that’s the case, then the risks really are only the tiny chance of dying to it, usually requiring being immunocompromised or unvaccinated. Otherwise there is also always the additional, orders of magnitude higher risk that you get long covid, and with that comes the risk that you might get stuck to your bed not being able to do anything for over a year for example.

Using the numbers from your other comment, for those 45000 deaths by motor vehicle accidents you also have the over 2 million injuries and disabilities that didn’t kill anyone, some of them permanent and debilitating. The risk of death is only one number among many.

Long covid symptoms are affecting 6% of the entire US population - 1 in 4 who caught covid. One estimate says the cost of long covid to the US economy might be as high as $3.7 trillion.
Just because you don’t necessarily die to it any more doesn’t mean it “poses no issues”.

They are used to push through the lockscreen e.g. when you get a call or when a timer finishes. I assume camera apps might also use it for the button shortcut (double-tapping the power button opens your camera in most Android phones). If the app doesn’t do calls or alarms of some type, I can’t really think of any valid reason why they would need that permission unless it’s something weird like Tasker and you want it to.
Other permissions that are also “revoked by default” like this are using the accessibility services or drawing over the screen - you just need to have a popup in your app that says “the app needs \ to work, please enable it in the following screen” and then opens the settings page.

Usually they don’t. Something like Horizon Forbidden West credits almost 3500 people even though Guerilla Game has less than 500 employees, most of the rest is absolutely massive bloat from different outsourced teams and Sony departments - like the “Head of Opportunity Markets Business Operations Tim Stokes from Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.: Global Business Operations” was undoubtedly very important for the development of the game.

As for Baldurs Gate 3, Larian Studios currently has 450 employees in 6 different locations, so they are actually around the same size as Guerilla. I wouldn’t be surprised if the credits end up being well above a thousand people (D:OS2 has around 500 credits even though Larian back then had only 130 people).

We are talking about cosmetic DLC that you can also buy using ingame currency, that’s exactly the thing that most DLC should be - optional cosmetic things you can get if you want to, with no real impact on the game itself.
This would be a whole different story if they were selling four new playable characters for $100, but they aren’t.

They are bloody expensive though.