Chebucto Regional Softball Club

> This is why work/life balance is so important. I wouldn’t ever call myself “well-off” but I don’t have kids and my job allows me ample time off to play games and watch movies and shit. Neither do they! They aren't workaholics, they're home bodies that work the absolute least they can! It's just that the workplaces are shit. One went back to mandated RTO for *no reason* even though much of the work is overseas at odd hours. The companies literally just trying to make people miserable so they quit without severence. The other is work-from-home, but with enough pointless meetings and complete workplace dysfunction to eat energy. And these seem like well above average jobs.

> next Xbox If it's really a PC, I bet they AMD customized Strix Halo (their 40 CU APU) for Microsoft instead of doing a fully custom chip like before. It'd save them money (as custom chip tapeouts are 9 figures last I hear). I bet Microsoft couldn't help themselves, heh.

+1 to literally everything. > Fuck brand recognition or loyalty, fuck development talent, fuck community building, fuck long-term strategy, we can realize a gain right now by sowing half the planet with salt, so that’s what we’re going to do. So what is there for people to buy? I wish this would fit on a bumpersticker.

Single data point: my young, working, well off gaming part of my family is just out of energy. It's easier to watch a YouTube video instead of TV or gaming, before then falling asleep to wake up for work. Seems like much of their circle is similar. As for myself, I'm going through a, uh, icky phase of life and am not really motivated to play unless it's coop. ...Maybe others are struggling similarly? *** Also, the games we *do* look at tend to be from indie to mid-size studios, with BG3 and KCD2 being the only recent exceptions.

Practically though, Microsoft wanted the Chief (and Cortana I guess) because that's what sells. So that was kinda a constraint. They could have sent him on a space boat somewhere more remote though. Basically infinite without Halo 4/5.

> Forza Motorsport Yeah, it seems *weird* to me. It looks like they have the framework for a more elaborate multiplayer/matchmaking system and... just didn't really use it? I am not even touching it now because the 10-minute races are so awful (and they got rid of all the 20 minute ones).

Yeah, Halo 3 wrote them into a corner. *Still,* they could have creatively 'reset' the scope. Focus on a frontier story, a prequel, some kind of cataclysm, probably reset a lot of characters. Even if they lost the silent-chief 'feel' of the trilogy, the tone change would have been excused (like Reach to an extent). Infinite *tried* this, I guess, but they hauled over too much baggage from 4 and 5. Honestly, if I were in charge of Halo I'm not sure what I'd do now...

*Sometimes* there's a rock hard justification. Orbital mechanics is a great one. Game engines are literally not built for physics at that scale. KSA's feature scope is *way* narrower than, say, a game with tons of NPCs and voxels and elaborate foilage and MMO-scale multiplayer and such. The DayZ guy and the studio are also pretty experienced at this point. So yeah, I agree! And I'm glad KSA is seemingly progressing well, actually...

> ...even after a major reboot of the game engine... Custom engines claim another victim. Game dev is hard, game *engines* are apparently pretty much cost prohibitive these days, unless licensed out en masse. They're killing studios and franchises left and right.