Skyrim’s varied gameplay systems?

It has stealth, it has magic, it has melee combat, it has ranged combat, it has dialogue options for talking your way through stuff, it has multiple ways of solving quest lines…

It’s basically Skyrim, if it was smaller and more focused, with better combat, voice acting, level design, and heads and tails better writing.

From a mechanistic standpoint I think that mostly has to do with the high cost of entry for games.

At $80-$100 for a full priced game these days, it’s hard to just buy on a whim. The only time you would is when they’re on sale, which happens well after initial release. So initial sales of games are basically entirely driven by reviews and online discourse (which itself has an effect on reviews), and you basically just have a bunch of people all waiting for the signal to buy or not.

I do think that services like Gamepass are a genuinely good way of reducing that effect, because now anyone can try anything on a lark.

People are complaining about Avowed? What the fuck is wrong with them?

I’ve been too busy loving it to be online reading anything, honestly cannot fathom what their complaints are tho. Avowed has repeatedly impressed me by being more clever and nuanced than I was expecting a game to be, in writing, level design, and combat.

Is this more dumb gamer anti-woke hysteria?

South Korea won’t sell theirs will they?

Auto manufacturing is already done in North America.

All the posturing about tariffs before the election was about bringing back the manufacturing that has been off shored from North America to countries with lower labour standards (i.e. to India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, etc.), and in the case of China, to stop being so dependent on a country that is veering on outright hostility.

The tariffs against Mexico and Canada have always been asinine and have never served a purpose, and quite frankly, using your economic weight to avoid competition and steal your neighbours jobs doesn’t benefit the world, it’s just being a greedy and immoral dick.

When I got my 3D printer, the first spool of filament I bought was transparent / crystal. No regrets.

I’m still mostly shopping at my locally owned store but I’ve always like pet valu.

As a shout out, I recently decided to try First Mate wet cat food as it’s one of the few true Product of Canada cat foods that I could find.