Care to explain?

If I had a nickel for every time a full power cycle fixed it all, I’d be rich. However, if you did power cycle before and call in again, often it’s an issue that needs deeper investigation. In that case, the tech can likely watch the process of your equipment coming online in realtime to see where the issue is happening. Network entry, authentication, package application, DHCP, it can often be monitored as it’s happening. A reboot while on the phone starts the process right from the beginning so it can be monitored to determine what happens immediately and what happens after it sits for a while.

1. Unplug the power
2. Wait ~30 seconds, just to ensure it’s good and off
3. Plug it back in

Fortunately there are no commands to enter or buttons to click. They’re designed to handle losing power.

I work in the magical world of ISPs. If you’re having an internet issue, reboot your router and/or modem before calling in. It may not seem like much to you, but many background processes happen when you do so. This can be useful to troubleshoot where the issue lies. There’s a reason why techs will make you do so when calling in. And yes, they can tell on their end if and when you do so. So don’t bullshit them by saying you already did it if you didn’t.

Been charging my phone overnight for years. Battery health is 100% and I never have to worry about charging.

Seriously though, who asked for photorealistic graphics? If people agreed on a reasonable target, we could just have games at a reasonable size and cost, hardware upgrades wouldn’t need to be so insane, and teams could be put on other important things like, I dunno, making sure the game works instead of just looking pretty.

I could see it working as Too Loud Didn’t Watch, like when those idiotic YouTube meme videos crank up the volume until it’s distorted for “comedic effect.”

Starfield, Diablo 4, and Tears of the Kingdom for me.

Starfield was a hard pass at 30FPS on my Series X. But also, the gameplay and story just didn’t interest me at all.

Diablo 4 was monotonous. Grinding for hours to get a percentage of a percentage increase on gear was not fun. I’ve played every other Diablo game along with numerous other action RPGs of that style, but D4 is a snorefest. It’s frustrating being chain stunned by all the crowd control, it’s frustrating that a lot of enemies have a lot of health for no reason, and it’s bland when you face the same few bosses over and over again. It wasn’t so bad in the other Diablo games because you could just nuke the bosses, but in D4 each one is a straight up chore to kill.

Tears of the Kingdom… it’s a fun action adventure game, but if it has The Legend of Zelda on it, it needs to be held to The Legend of Zelda standards. And it, just like Breath of the Wild, is an awful Zelda game. If it didn’t have LoZ on it, I’d probably rate it much higher.

Google search results are literally the only time I read Reddit content these days, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that regard. They’re going to lose so many views if they block their content on Google.

Make 4K textures a separate download, via a free DLC. That way if people only ever play in 1080p, they don’t need to waste disk space on files that will never get used.

Not in a position to say. But I can say that, anecdotally, they’re always high on searches and contribute very little.

I mean it’s Exputer, do they even have human writers?

Let’s say you buy an Xbox Series S. At the current going rate of games, you can fit four, maybe five games on the thing, assuming you don’t play older or indie titles. You can buy an external USB hard drive, sure, but you can’t play games off it. You’d have to awkwardly shuffle games around any time you wanted to play something else. Wanna expand it with storage that can actually be played off of? You need to pay the same cost as the console for proprietary storage.

It’s different on PC and PS5 since you can upgrade storage relatively easily but even then, a 1TB NVMe disk can hold a maximum of 10 games at today’s storage requirements. Want something bigger? Get ready to shell out some serious cash.

Storage has not kept up with file size. And to be fair, 4k HDR Remux files are just as bad. You can’t tell me the average person can even tell the difference from a 1080p WebRip (a fraction of the size) and one of them. Not unless you’ve got the high end hardware to make use of it, and I highly doubt the average person is shelling out the $5000+ required for that to be a thing.

Why not both?

I didn’t decide to pirate when games went from $70 to $80 (CAD). I didn’t decide to when they went from $80 to $90. I decided to when, on top of that price, I also am encouraged via predatory tactics (such as matchmaking intentionally matching you up with players who have all of this nonsense so you can “see what you’re missing”) to buy a deluxe edition, season pass, monthly battlepass, “cosmetic only” microtransactions, second season pass, additional DLC not part of any season pass, and whatever other crap they want to nickel and dime their playerbase into buying. All just to actually get the full content of the game. Remember when games had the full game when you bought it? Maybe an expansion pack that had a substantial amount of content that was developed and released after the game was released?

It’s because these companies keep driving up production costs on their own. Their next game has to top their last. At what point do we say that graphics are good enough? Who needs these insane amount of details? Why does a game absolutely need to be 100+GB in size? Is Bloodborne not visually appealing enough? What about God of War (2018)?

Can we not find a “good enough” acceptable baseline and just work with that? This infinite growth is annoying as both a developer and a player. Like okay, ooooh, you can render each individual hair on someone’s head and they each have their own physics. Congratulations. How’s the story for the game? Ah, broken to the point of unplayable, but you pinky swear a patch is coming.

At least there’s potential now!

If Keanu was in the studio that day, someone should have said “Silverhand, arm the nuke.”

Personally I’m still a fan of GameMaker. Pay for the tool, use the tool, pay literally nothing else even if your game is the next Minecraft.

Downside is it’s 2D only, but that’s fine for my preferences.

Allow me to introduce you to Screeps. You’re welcome.