Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, a collaboration between Ensemble Studios and Lucas Arts to reskin Age of Empires 2 for Star Wars. The base game had campaigns for the OT and Phantom Menace and a bit later there was an Attack of the Clones expansion.
I would really love for them to port this to the AoE2 Definitive Edition engine and add more content.
They have gone the safest path for over a decade now, making reskins of the same three games over and over to the point where Assassin’s Creed and FarCry which used to be real innovations in their fields are now just boring copies of copies. They haven’t taken a single risk since AC2.
They got negative feedback to including Yasuke - a real historical figure who did exist in the era the game depicts - and now they’d rather preemptively cancel their own game than tell a story about freedom and rebellion from an unusual perspective.
Cowards.
So in other words, you pay more and unless you’re on the highest tier, they take away the one thing that made Game Pass worth the money: new games available on day one.
I’m not a fan of subscription models overall but getting a ton of new releases for about what two full price titles per year would cost was a great deal. Not anymore.
And there goes another reason to keep a Windows machine around.
Nirav talks about that in the other video they released today. They’re working on it and in the meantime there is a DIY solution.
DB: “At least we’re not National Rail.”
National Rail: “At least we’re not Amtrak.”
Do NOT, I repeat NOT do this. Someone very close to me did something similar and got irreversible brain damage that still shows itself years later in the form of epilepsy. Our brains are not made for that little sleep over long periods of time.
Absolutely and it has done so for over a decade. Not LLMs of course, those are not suitable for the job but there are lots of specialized AI models for medical applications.
My day job is software development for ophthalmology (eye medicine) and people are developing models that can, for example, detect cataracts in an OCT scan long before they become a problem. Grading those by hand is usually pretty hard.
I only found out about E.V.O. way later, probably around 2005 when a friend made a web game that combined its evolution theme with gameplay similar to Legend of the Green Dragon. I still wonder why E.V.O. wasn’t more popular. It’s an amazing game, I still occasionally play it on my Analogue Pocket.
I would say Age of Empires 2 which was where I first used the name that I still have on here, over 25 years later. Its amazing editor also resonated with my urge to create my own games without requiring programming knowledge that I just didn’t have at 11 years old. I went on to create custom content for Warcraft III, Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind, eventually studied computer science and joined some indie gamedev communities where I made a lot of friends, some of whom I still meet in person once or twice a year. I never became a full time game developer but I worked on some stuff part time in the mid 2000s and still do it as a hobby.
My question was specifically about “the general non-technical population”. Do you expect my mom to even remotely understand what different servers are and why talking to me is securely encrypted but talking to her friends group isn’t? The point about secure software is that it needs to be secure by default or else, entry level users will manage to accidentally send their stuff in plain text and not even notice.
For nerds like us, I agree that Matrix is probably a good choice. For someone who needed to be told that “the internet” isn’t the blue “e” on their desktop… not so much. I’d rather send carrier pigeons than explain Matrix to my family.
What would you recommend as an alternative for the general non-technical population?
Interesting take and totally understandable though that’s not quite what happens in the plot:
I know your question is worded for movies and shows but I have one example from the world of video games that still makes me sad. Final Fantasy died shortly after X, maybe X-2. XII if you really want to stretch things. After that, they were too focused on “modernizing” gameplay. I just want something with a colorful world, quirky characters and turn-based combat that’s more about finding the right strategy for a boss than reflexes.
I guess XIV is nice in its own way but as an MMORPG I see it more as a spin-off than as a part of the main series. The VII remakes tickle some nostalgia neurons but would have been better without their real-time combat. XIII, XV and XVI were just meh. If you really want to make me happy, make a faithful remake of VIII with modern graphics, rebalanced but otherwise faithful gameplay and a few more scenes in the last act that answer a few questions that the community has been trying to answer for 25 years.
I really liked the Acolyte. Not necessarily for its acting but it leaned into the idea that dark side and light side are not so different and the Jedi can cause a lot of suffering by sticking their noses where they don’t belong. Also, there are force users that don’t fit neatly into those two categories and just want to do their own thing.
Sadly, we won’t see a second season, because some “fans” on the internet got mad that women, people of color and - very shocking - queer people exist in the Star Wars universe.
There were a few things that it eventually got but lacked for way too long like support for UNIX line endings.
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Shush, let an old man dream.
Retired, so I finally have time to finish the dozens of personal projects that I’ve started in my first 36 years.
Oh yeah, exactly what the PlayStation needs: more soulless shooter sequels from Microsoft. What ever would we have done without Halo? Played CoD?