As somebody in both communities, these people are outliers, by far. I’d say 95% of the randoms I play with in either game are decent folk who aren’t trying to ruin other people’s fun. Even if the random player is way too underleveled for the mission and picked 4 support weapon strategems not knowing what they are and keeps getting stuck in respawn loops, everybody has been friendly and helpful, because that’s the democratic way. Anybody who tries to make the lives of their fellow players miserable is a dirty traitor and will be court-martialed.

Good on them for acknowledging what was a pretty terrible response to player complaints. It’s one thing to be firm in your balancing decisions, but it’s another thing to demean your players over it.

That said, the responses from a lot of the players were also really over-the-top to begin with. Hopefully Arrowhead is able to remedy this combativeness between the studio and the community. A live service game really only does well when the developers are on the same wavelength as their players.

I wonder why they settled

I’d imagine because they charged for access to piracy-specific functions of the tool and knew they couldn’t argue a case.

It was a dumb move for them to add functionality for unreleased games in the first place, and an even worse move to charge money for it. It makes it a lot harder to convince a court that your tool is for backup/archival purposes only, when you have features that could only work with pirated materials.

It’s kinda crazy how just by getting the camera movement, lens distortion, and exposure settings just right, you end up with a very natural-looking video. Even the game textures and animations end up looking more convincing this way. This might be a really fun way to play a stealth build.

Because it’s a live service game and has GMs who adjust in-game events in real time. Everybody is playing in the same world, which requires everyone on one server. The world and story adjust based on what all players accomplish.

What’s the situation with the DRM? I’ve not heard much of this, but a quick search shows that it’s causing a lot of crashes, which isn’t super uncommon for a newly-released game.

Huge concurrent player counts like this are pretty significant milestones that not every game hits. The popularity of this game, which seems to me like it had hardly any marketing campaign behind it, is pretty noteworthy.

Probably just for the poetic justice of seizing money from Russia and giving it to Ukraine.

If he does, I hope he manages to recapture what made those games magical in the first place. Some of his most recent projects have really missed the mark, IMO. Bayo 3 should have been an absolute banger, but was mostly unimpressive.

an incompatible protocol with less features and worse UX

And yet, they have the one thing that matters: the users.

I think that’s because the current gen is just “last gen, but more powerful”. Nothing really got innovated this time around, and the architectures for the current platforms are almost identical to the last ones (which is part of the reason cross-gen has been so popular with developers, as it’s very easy to implement).

I do feel that catering to cross-gen is creating a situation where a lot of games just aren’t taking advantage of the capabilities of the current gen properly, in order to maintain parity with the “weaker” versions of the same titles.

They’re not getting older faster. You’re older, so time feels faster now.

Also, the scarcity of current gen consoles for the first couple years kinda made it seem like the current generation only barely started since most people only barely got their current-gen hardware in the last year or so, but keep in mind we’re currently in the 4th year of the 9th gen at this point. This gen started in 2020. We’re past the halfway point for most generations by now.

Been playing a lot of The Finals lately. Normally my time would be spent in Destiny 2, but the current D2 season is gonna last for a looooong time, so I’m not in any hurry to grind it out just yet. But The Finals has absolutely blown me away so far. It can be buggy and unbalanced at times, but it’s so damn fun. Demolishing an entire building to bury the cashout station in rubble and prevent a steal is so satisfying.

Embark has also recently said that they’ve got a lot of updates in the works, so I’m really excited to see how Season 2 plays out.

Based.

Ahh, this is their “discredit the media” phase of fascism, I see.

It’s not a matter of opinion, look up the definition of the word, chief.

Okay, still not what “theme” means, tho. Maybe “skin” is the word you’re looking for?

I disagree with the use of “theme”. It evokes a visual for me.

That’s on you, because the word “theme” does not mean “visual” at all.

No, because that directly supports Trump. That’s hardly an apt comparison to talking about HP on an obscure website with no ads or links to Rowling whatsoever.

Because continuing to engage with her content is a form of endorsement of her viewpoints

This is a pretty significant leap that doesn’t seem realistic.