I’m one of the privileged people to have studied engineering and was able to move to Germany relatively easily (due largely to luck and some good planning). If you qualify for an EU Blue Card that may be an easy path towards a new life outside of the US.

If you are in college or younger it’s easy to start making plans to give you your best chances of success. And if you’re retired, approaching retirement, self-employed, or something akin to a digital nomad you should have less problems moving somewhere close like Canada or Mexico.

Not saying it’s easy, but there are paths. The cool thing about borders and countries is they’re all made up. French people need the same goods and services as Americans (with variation of course) and thus most labor is needed in most places. With declining birth rates nearly everywhere, the smartest countries are opening their borders to immigrants or have been open for a long time.

I was just getting this set up, this and the music one, because I want to leave Spotify. Hopefully an alternative solution shows up.

That’s really exciting! If he’s bringing his whole team with him that bodes well for an amazing take on 007. He’s one of my favorite directors, if not #1.

I’m in Europe. I would like to buy a folding smartphone as I want more screen space. They’re still too expensive and have too short of lifespans as far as I can tell.

When they’re… Oh idk… $1300 and last 5+ years I’ll pick one up.

If I could speak directly to the phone makers I’d also say I don’t want a front facing camera if there is a nicer camera on the back and a screen of almost any size. A front facing camera just feels antiquated for that design.

The technical alpha slapped and I’m fuckin dying to get back in. I was really hoping for them to open up a beta but now I’m just sad I have to wait till October to play this.

I understand the delay to get things right, but there’s almost half a year where no game is satisfying this itch which is a shame. Marathon hasn’t been delayed yet and I know Hell Let Loose guys are making an extraction shooter that looks sick as hell that’s due to release this year as well.

All I’m saying is I would have paid €40 for that alpha it was so good, October will be a slam dunk, but the genre will be more crowded by that time.

I appreciate difficulty options for other people and I think everyone should agree it’s a good thing to make games more accessible or more challenging depending on what a player is seeking.

My only caution is maintaining the vision for the expected experience. I imagine we’ve all played games where the normal difficulty or the default experience feels bad or improperly tuned. Multiple difficulty options can, I imagine, lead to less tuning on the default experience. I have no doubt I disliked games I would have liked if they’d encouraged me to play at a different difficulty or spent more time tuning their preferred difficulty. I have no doubt I liked games that if they’d provided difficulty options I may have changed the default experience to my detriment without realizing it.

That’s sorta my point, it shouldn’t be seen as a start. We can agree that the AfD would be an immediate loss, they would make things immediately worse and the country would very quickly decline for everyone but the elite who would be insulated from their own policies.

I need people in Germany to see the CDU as a slow loss, because they make things worse at a slower time scale, and the country will continue to decline under their guidance for everyone but the elite who will benefit from their policies.

The AfD losing is good. The CDU winning over the AfD winning is better. But both scenarios are still a loss, and they are the signals that the system is organically producing worse results and it’ll continue to increase the magnitude of those poor results until we improve the system.

The CDU should barely be considered a win in Germany. They pave the road that the AfD will walk down. Conservatives make everything worse and fascists thrive in poor conditions.

I assumed pretty immediately upon hearing him in a couple of interviews that he was exactly this right winger camoflaughing as a centralist. I gave the game the benefit of the doubt because I hadn’t seen any hard evidence but I’ll stop talking kindly about the game based on this info.

Politics is how we organize our society. Most of everything is political. When society starts organizing movements against groups of people, stripping away rights, and generally being Nazis you have to get more political to stop them. Taking no position is taking a position. Join the rebellion or support the empire, there is no in-between.

Unfortunately, the snippet from the Wikipedia article you quoted exactly exemplifies my understanding of the genre tags and how I’ve seen them used since I was old enough to get on the Internet and read such things.

Zelda has, for me, always been an action adventure game. I don’t think I’d called Zelda breath of the wild an RPG game or an ARPG game but that’s because the item portion of the game felt incomparable to a game like Witcher or Diablo where every piece of your character is an item that can be upgraded.

That being said, I’m not exactly the biggest Zelda fan and BotW was like 10 years ago for me.

I guess I haven’t heard Souls-Like or games like Zelda or Witcher 3 (what I’d call Action Adventure I guess or RPG) called an ARPG although they fit the name well enough that maybe I have and today I’m falling on the other side of a fuzzy line.

Yes, I was referring to Diablo, PoE, Last Epoch, and the rest of the “looter” ARPG’s or what I’d just call ARPG’s. Maybe this is why the Diablo-like meme came up? To further drill in to the genre.

I’m waiting for their multiplayer patch to play the game in full but I enjoyed the combat in the first 10 minutes and an excited to play it. ARPGs need to evolve past the idle games most of the current popular ones devolve into.

Merz is bad for the working class and for Germany. Every day out of power is a good day for the world.

Ya, happy to spread the word! I was hesitant for a long while for the same reason but then Steam Deck happened and I looked into it more and BAM here we are. It’s one of the more hopeful changes in this tech landscape - the growth of open source and/or free software that’s often equivalent to the paid software.

I know you’re getting a ton of replies already, but I switched to Arch Linux two months back or so and I just want to say nearly every game I’ve tried works great out of the box, a handful of games required me to go to my steam settings a flip a switch or copy and paste something from protondb, and no games have failed to work.

Gaming on Linux is so good that you end up flipping one switch in steam and get nearly perfect performance (with most games running identically or better than they did on Windows for me). It’s been such a surprise, I just played the Arc Raiders technical Alpha and I thought for sure Linux would fail me then. And it did. For the first day, then on the second day they patched proton and the game and I played all week and weekend with zero issues. It was fantastic!

I would highly encourage any gamer who’s thinking about switching to Linux but worried their games won’t work to not worry as much. Check protondb for your favorites, but you can safely assume most game work out of the box.

I’m struggling a bit with what you’re asking for but here’s what I think you’re asking for. You brought up two worries with Arc

• longterm gunplay
• meta progression

I think gunplay is at a really good point systems-wise in Arc. I think at this point the important long term factors are balance and variety. Balance is anyone’s guess in any single game or with any single company, sometimes they get close at the start and just make nothing but bad calls from then on like in Helldivers 2. So no comment on Arc’s long term balance but I’d give them no worse odds than Bungie to fuck that up - and based off the technical alpha feedback Arc is in a great place in terms of balance and Marathon is most definitely not.

Variety is an easy solve with extraction shooters in my opinion because you can control so many variables. You can have a busted gun but it’s ammo or durability decay is so large you only use it one run per find, you can make it a legendary drop, you can make it only good against players or only good against bots, etc. There’s a lot of factors in what makes a gun good when an economy and RPG elements are brought in. I imagine if they released a new gun every season or every 6 months or released a set of consumables and legendaries the variety would be maintained for a decade. Again, because there’s a bigger PvE emphasis in Arc than in Marathon from what we’ve seen, I’d bet Arc is able to keep things fresh for longer. Imagine a Javelin in Arc - it sucks against players but it crippled the Queen, that’s cool as hell and reasonably feasible. Marathon screams Apex gun design and I think Apex didn’t do a good job with their gun pool - every expansion felt like it hurt the pool instead of making it more diverse IMHO but that could have also come down to balance - I suspect marathon will be the same.

Meta progression is easy. Arc has a skill tree that I like (although it’s missing details which I think is important) and bench upgrades (and maybe vendor levels?). They also have battlepasses but this is actually a negative for me, I think current battlepass design sucks even if they’re going with the friendlier Helldivers style passes. They’re just boring. Still, more little “achievement” targets and rewards.

Those have been very compelling. Marathon has quests for a half a dozen vendors. I believe that’s it. I don’t recall a skill system, I don’t recall bench upgrades, just quests. I like the aesthetic, and I don’t really mind it all being just quests but between the lack of personalization in meta progression AND the fact it’s a hero shooter the game lacks the golden itch of individuality that I love when games have. I think marathon has significantly worse meta progression today AND I don’t think they’ve promised to make it better. That’s super important to me. Hunt Showdown is a great game but it’s lack of meta progression has made it feel shallow for me. Marathon, I imagine, will feel the same way.

Again, this comes down to Arc being good to go today with systems I can dream about them expanding. Marathon isn’t accessible outside the US right now and I imagine even if I could play it it wouldn’t feel even close to a finished project - and with a bunch of corpos making promises to the cameras my gut says if the game is good it’ll be in a year or two and even then it’ll be corporate good and not artist good.

To be as specific as I’m feeling right now, feel free to tell me to dial in further, and coming from having only played Arc Raiders and only watched Marathon vods here is the main difference - Marathon’s devs are making a lot of promises vs Arc Raiders delivering on those same promised plans.

• For instance marathon is promising to launch with 3 maps, arc has 3 maps today.
• Marathon is promising tense extractor gunplay with high stakes loot, everything I heard from multiple streamers/reviewers say the tension isn’t there and the loot isn’t there. Arc has tension and definitely has loot. Their guns have clean 1-4 ranking and the weapons are rarity binned. I’ve yet to use most of the weapons available in Arc because I haven’t focused on crafting them and haven’t found them, theres already a ton of width to the pool.
• Marathon is promising strong PvE encounters with raid boss like content (or maybe the raid boss promise was actually people just speculating on where they could take this). Arc has boss like encounters with the Queen (and honestly fuck the Rocketeer and the Bastion those guys are tough little bastards that will punish you if you make a mistake).
• Marathon is promising dynamic events during the match. Arc Raiders already has dynamic events on a per map basis, night raids, and in server events like rocket landings, middle barages, etc.

I would pay $60 bucks today for Arc Raiders as it is now. My friends and I would play the fuck out of it. And if they would do DLC instead of battle passes we’d continue to financially support the game.

Based on what I heard and saw of marathons identical closed alpha, I don’t know if there’s enough content there for more than 10 hours and none of it excited me because it seemed like 20% of what they promised.

I think people are hyped by the concept of Marathon and the hope for an old Bungie game. But I think right now the reality is they’re not the same Bungie as the one that gave us Halo, I personally never got into Destiny, and they’ve only gotten more corporate not less.

If in 6 months they can spin up what seems to be 80% of a game, then I’ll be there and interested. But if Arc released next week, or spent the next 6 months adding content and I had to pick one, I’d be playing Arc without question.

I think in the US we’ve seen a small rise in characters like Bernie pulling in new blood along the same ideological lines like AOC which didn’t feel present 20 years ago. I also think Obama’s tenure was sold to the public as a period of progress and change and I think in all actuality whatever good it did it wasn’t enough to steer the boat. To me that was the sign that the US was likely too far gone from a political standpoint to recover. BUT if there is a chance, I think the past 25 years have been a clear enough signal to me that things must drastically change for things to get meaningfully better. Trump is the dark side of that “drastic change” coin and we’ve yet to see what the good side looks like but I would argue the US is running out of time to figure out which side of the coin is going to come up the winner.

Britain is seeing a minor rise in Wealth Inequality awareness. I think that knowledge could be the exact anti-bodies the world needs distributed to reverse this course. In Europe wealth taxes, capital gains taxes, etc are higher than in the US but still not enough. Unions are also more prevalent, at least in Germany. I like to compare it by saying both the US and Germany are on the same graph of declining living standards and for the exact same reason, Germany is just a decade or two behind the US. We still have a lot of power in the hands of the people, but it seems to me that the media is still able to whip up 30-40% of the population into being conservative despite their best interests and something like another 30% being too moderate to make a difference.

Right now we have a conservative government, things will only get worse while they’re in power, but if the wealth disparity conversation continues anywhere in the world and billionaires are removed from the population, the entire world benefits. If the next progressive government enacts a tax plan like Die Linke’s or takes step to removing land lords from existence or provides a UBI I think the results will speak for themselves rather quickly.

It’s a big pendulum, right now in Germany and the US it’s swung to the right (yours further than ours) but it all comes down to how effective the left swing can be. Take hold of all the power you can at the local level, form a union, conquer the state level offices, and educate people. That’s the best advice I can give.

It buys us time to elect a party capable of making good changes. As long as a conservative or centralist government is in power I would agree with you that the root causes will not change, in fact with Friedrich Merz and the grand coalition things will get worse faster. But if we can buy the population some time not going fully into fascism we can hopefully point to the decline into fascism brought on by the CDU/SPD/FDP and elect politicians that actually care to serve Germans.

I think it’s important to treat the rise of fascism, the growing wealth inequality, the new wave of media, as a flu we have to fight but also get through. We need to build up anti-bodies against these things. That means taxing wealth, strengthening unions, breaking up monopolies, etc.

Totally valid take. I just think the text to voice system is hilarious, the animations/models are more enjoyable, the actual item gameplay loop has more fun and interactive components in repo, I like the items in repo more although shout-out to the boom box in LC, and the monsters in repo are way more interactive imo - I miss the coil head and the turrets and the teleporting randomly into base but otherwise the monsters are really fun in repo. I agree that Repo’s difficulty doesn’t scale too well currently but I expect them to balance things as it goes on.

I think LC is a great game and I hope everyone tries it out as well. Repo just feels like a more polished iteration on the concept and I’m happy to see the genre expand.

Sorry about the motion sickness, that’s rough.