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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • While I’m happy that AMD remains a viable competitor, their absolutely anemic competition with nVidia in the PC gaming segment is very disturbing. This means that nVidia’s still showing a 9% revenue increase YoY, and still getting an impressive rate of return for their gaming investments despite their horrendous price gouging and large number of customers exiting the PC gaming segment.

    The fact that the console revenue isn’t making up for the loss of PC customers means Radeon just abandoned post in the PC gaming segment overall, with the public news that AMD isn’t even going to target performance oriented price-insensitive customers anymore at all, and not even trying to increase the TAM.

    What I just heard was “We kept ourselves just slightly cheaper than nVidia, and don’t really care about bringing value back into the TAM for PC hardware, so we’re just going to focus our efforts on console-only going forward in the pipeline, and customers can join us there”.

    That means as a customer in the PC hardware space, we all just ultimately lost, and it’s a single-vendor market now going forward.

    Fuck.


  • Granted the semi I saw had a guard on the front of it, but I witnessed one smoke a fully grown cow at 70mph. Sent the cow and pieces of it flying about 100 feet, with no visible damage to the truck at all. There was a tremendous amount of blood and spatter everywhere and my own car got a ton of blood on it from the cloud of guts and blood made by the truck. Mostly there was just shit everywhere leading up to the remnants of the carcass, but the truck gave no fucks whatsoever. I asked the driver if he was ok and he didn’t even seem to have any agitation whatsoever, more like “oh, another one”.

    A truck will not disintegrate, there might be damage if it didn’t have a guard, but against a deer, that must’ve been a paper mache piece of shit truck if it disintegrated on a deer.


  • Lol, how is that political? It’s a “water makes wet” kind of thing. I’m sorry you have such fragile feelings about Bioware and don’t like the narrative. If it’s any consolation, it’s not even the same people who made the prior games. Whether the game’s a massive success or financial failure, EA’s just going to fire them all anyway. That’s cool though, we’ll see how it looks on the Steam reviews this weekend. If past experience is any indicator, whenever a publisher resorts to funny business, it’s because they have to. Nobody was needed in the defense of BG, MDK2, BG2, NWN, Kotor, Jade Empire, ME, ME2, DA:O, DA2, SW:TOR, DA:I, etc.

    I don’t even really care about the studio anymore to be honest, after the layoffs and turnover, we have no idea whether this crew delivered or not, and judging from the review oddities, it paints a bleak picture. Let them sink or swim based on what EA allowed them to do, then through no true fault of their own, face a studio closure because of the obtuse fuckwads in EA corporate. Either way, the future sucks for the gaming studio called Bioware, in name only.



  • Fextralife was not given a review code due to their pattern of objectivity

    Fextralife also mentions they host the most widely used DA:I wiki, they went through the effort of preserving the original Dragon Age forum threads from the Bioware forums prior to EA’s closure of them. They have a long history of being one of the central hosts of the largest community of Dragon Age enthusiasts, and longtime proponents of the Dragon Age series overall. When they expressed cautious optimism after the reveal trailer, their press contacts at EA went silent and they were not selected for an advance review code due to the risk of them being critical or not giving a high enough score to the game and dragging down the initial metacritic score.

    Either way, if the company is worried about the perceived quality of the game, they wouldn’t have cherry picked favorable reviewers. It looks bad.


  • It depends on how you frame it. I don’t see it as “hate” as I don’t hate Bioware, but objectively speaking, the work speaks for itself. Hyperbole such as disaster, catastrophe, etc are embellishments, but to say the game isn’t bad or just so-so isn’t a scathing criticism.

    Anthem was treated the way it was due to ME3 and the narrative choices, for better or worse. People wanted to tell off Casey Hudson, and the game suffered unfairly. Granted it wasn’t a good game, it wasn’t as terrible as it was made out to be either.

    Now on Andromeda, however, it was fairly criticized. The gameplay was fun and engaging, but the narrative and storytelling were given their fair treatment. That stuff was just bad, and the developer responses didn’t help either. The pathetic rants amounted to “I put mah heart and souuuulll into it”, and just because people worked really hard on something, doesn’t mean it was a good thing. People worked really hard in the sewers of London to get rid of fatbergs, but in the end all they achieved was moving shit around, and that’s more dignified than the trash we got in Andromeda’s writing and character animations.

    Looking at the current marketing situation and the “Bioware hate” as you refer to it, I really think there’s more EA hate at this point. EA is blatantly manipulating the review scores by means of review embargos and selectively cherry picking only favorable review outlets, and in some cases we are even spotting reused catchphrases that indicate signs of coaching by EA to say positive things about the game. They do this in light of the consumer sentiment about preorders “Not touching this or preordering, I want reviews first” is a common sentiment amongst their video comments telling their marketing engagement experts to use dirty tricks like review manipulation.

    I’d honestly love for Veilguard to be fantastic, but the layoffs and staff turnover tell me they didn’t value their developers, didn’t value the product, and don’t value the art or anything really beyond making some flashy flim-flam with marketable gimmicks. The reviews I’ve read mention that the characters in the game must definitely know what Tiktok is, due to the cringy dialogue, and that’s a review that gave it a favorable score.

    Just wait until the objective reviews hit and this game is widely panned. That will draw the line between “hate” and “oh, this is actually shitty”, and make things especially clear.



  • Year of the Linux Deskto…oh wait wrong thread, same same though. If we just wait one more year, we’ll have FULL FSD!

    Next year, I promise, is the year we all switch to crypto, just wait!

    In just two years, no one will be driving 4,000lb cars anymore, everyone just needs a Segway.

    We’re going to have “just walk out” grocery stores in two years, where you pick items off the shelf, and 10,000 outsourced Indians will review your purchase and complete your CC transaction in about a half hour. our awesome technology will handle everything, charging you for your groceries as you leave the store, in just two more years!












  • One of the things missing from other comments is the architecture of it, why it use to be slow, and how the binaries were handled. Canonical started Snap as a server oriented application deployment system, that has been adapted to desktop use with some technological debt. The differences between it and Flatpak as far as configurability, dependencies, bundled binaries, etc are somewhat nuanced. They dealt with the application speed opening issue by allowing decompressed executables and different hooks to be used.

    The other main point of contention aside from technological debt inherited by a server-first development principle is how they closed sourced their Snap server backend. It’s proprietary, while the Snap client is open source, how the actual Snap server runs is a mystery.

    Flatpak (and by extension Flathub) are all open sourced, which aligns more with the philosophy that users tend to prefer. It was covered in other comments that everyone else uses Flatpak, and this really isn’t so much as a debate between package managers vs Flatpak, but moreso of application deployment overall. The community prefers Flatpak, and Snap is pushed as a means of lock-in and sunk cost fallacy on the side of Canonical.