I've selected "performance" in the PS5 settings, but I've experienced several AAA games ignoring it and having their own graphics setting that defaults to "fancy graphics" mode.

3/4 of players want performance, but publishers don't care.

If you want something with a small footprint I would personally go for Rust, but anything that compiles to a static binary is going to be better than something that needs a dedicated runtime.

Python is what I use for small one-time scripts and utility stuff that doesn't need to run long, but it may be worse than Java..

It's great that Godot was in a good place when Unity had its (inevitable?) implosion. Having used both engines I think they are comparable enough that Godot was a perfect fit for small indie and casual devs to move over to without having to learn a completely new workflow. If Godot hadn't been around I don't know where everyone would've migrated to.

Coincidentally I recently watched this Basement Brothers video about the game: https://youtu.be/NTMMZq63AIw

Great article! Ubisoft seem to be really good at making worlds that are immense and magnificent and yet utterly boring to be in.

That's a very astute observation and it made me wonder if piracy was partly to blame for the death of the B-tier game (at least on PC). In my younger pre-Steam days me and my friends would pirate 9/10 of the games we played (if not more). Games like CoD/Fifa/Sims would get enough sales from regular folks, but who the heck was going to take a chance on something like Will Rock or Scrapland? I would often check out games at my local store and then go home to torrent them, meaning they lost out on sales from the kinds of weirdos who the games were made for.

I watch a stupid amount of YouTube so I pay for YouTube Premium. I wish that meant I could have premium features like disabling shorts, disabling those annoying themed sections that keep popping up (right now it's the olympic games), a search function that actually searches for what I want instead of shoving more suggested videos in my face, and changing every "not now" button into "don't ever ask again".

Despite the fact that I'm a voracious consumer of YoutTube videos and a long-time paying customer, I have to accept that I am not the target audience. They want passive users who endlessly watch whatever gets put in front of them so that they never leave the app. If there was a respectful alternative that worked well with iOS and AppleTV I'd gladly pay for that instead.

I agree. We can celebrate what makes the PC platform great without turning it into a competition.

Maybe you can get the same experience at a place llike AniList or Kitsu?

I've been a macOS user for over a decade and I am never going back to Windows. That being said, Apple does have iCloud (their version of OneDrive) which is tightly integrated into the OS and they're not shy about asking you to pay for more storage. They also want you to log in with an Apple ID when you first start your computer and I don't know how easy it is to use a local account.

It's not the same as Windows in terms of aggressive ads and upsells, but Apple aren't innocent in wanting more of your money. If you want true freedom you have to pay with your time and energy and run Linux.

I use this rule: accounts.google.com/gsi/* Is yours similar?

That's a very valid point, albeit incredibly disappointing. Mechanisms to block tracking should be built into the operating system, but I also realise that it would probably be impossible to accurately implement.

"Ask app not to track" is accurate to what you're choosing, I just hate that we've gotten to this point.

I loathe the wording that's been normalised around tracking. The options for the upcoming dialog are "Allow" or "Ask app not to track".

Why the fuck do I need to ask, as if the app is free to deny my humble request not to be spied upon? The whole tracking industry is awash with weasel words and vagueness in an effort to have us make ill-informed decisions.

Fucking parasites.

I've been a fan of Dragon Age since Origins and this game looks like another step towards the kind of simplified gameplay that every game has made. It's disappointing that the series has gone from an RPG to a generic 3rd person action adventure game, but given the gradual evolution of the other games it's not really surprising.

kind of game Bioware has forgotten how to make.

Such a nice way to sum it up. You would think that the success of Baldur's Gate 3 would show publishers that there is a (large) market for actual RPGs, but that's maybe too much to hope for.

I haven't had a gaming-capable PC for about a decade and I'm very happy with my PS5 (and the PS4 before it). Sony bringing exclusives to PC don't feel like the end times as it's just a way for them to make more money.

I'm genuinely glad that PC players will get to experience some of the great games that have been on the PS5 in the last few years.

I know that the world has changed and these kinds of big conferences aren't really viable (or necessary) anymore, but my younger self who always wished to go to E3 at some point is sad.

Even single-player games aren't single-player anymore with all the online-requiring bullshit publishers have shoved into their games. The game most likely comes with a fuckton of telemetry and user-behaviour tracking which is a lot more valuable to Sony if it can be attached to a specific user.

Cute article, but does anyone else find it distracting that in between some of the paragraphs there are links to other articles? I know that modern media needs to be engaging to people with TikTok-brain, but I found it somewhat obnoxious.

I counted 5 of these article links which was bad enough, but I can't imagine what it looks like without an ad-blocker.

When you mentioned it I remembered that of course there is a setting for this.. but when I went to check it just says "Updates disabled by your organisation" In this case it's a work laptop that has a bunch of "security" things installed on it which prevent me from doing things like ...installing applications I need to do my job. Not sure how Firefox is able to update when it's been explicitly disabled, but I will at least change this setting on my personal computer.

I may have misworded it a bit. The tabs themselves get restored, but the state of the tabs (being logged in to a site, for example) isn't always retained. In all fairness this is perhaps due to my privacy settings, but I'd prefer it if Firefox didn't force me to restart.