For anyone not familiar with this game, or anyone who’s only familiarity is through the trailers (which really focus on tone and visuals), I really want to recommend the videos by YouTuber Riloe, who has been playing early builds with the devs and chatting to them extensively about the game. They’re really well produced videos, and they really help to explain the tone of the game, the interesting mechanical ideas behind it, and what exactly this company is trying to achieve. Obviously, take with a grain of salt, the guy is clearly a fan and these videos aren’t really trying to be critical, so this should all be read as basically press releases;

This antishooter game is beautiful and horrifying

The living war ecosystem where you don’t matter

The beautifully dark warscape of the antishooter

I’m really excited for this game. Not just for the visuals, but for everything they’re doing with the mechanical design. The idea of playing as scavengers trapped between two warring factions is incredibly cool, and based on early previews it sounds like there are a lot of very clever design elements, especially in the AI, all built to back up that core idea. For example enemies intelligently prioritize targets; a tank won’t focus on infantry if there’s an enemy tank present, and even when it does target the infantry it’ll use its machine guns, not the main cannon. Enemies will focus on you if you make yourself the biggest threat, but if you’re smart and follow the flow of battle you can keep their focus elsewhere.

That’s really smart stuff, and by all accounts it works very well. I also really like what the studio is doing more broadly. They’re really trying to push back on a lot of the toxic practices in the gaming industry. I’ll be getting the game day one, mostly just to reward them for trying to do something different.

So noble. So majestic. SO STUBBY.

The reasonable way to approach this problem would have been to ask a follow up question, rather than bitching at someone for not answer in the exact format you required. You’re the beggar here, you get zero fucking say in how much or how little people choose to help you.

Yeah, Saber basically bought themselves back from Embracer (Embracer are desperate for money after they absolutely fucked an investment deal), and in the process bought back a bunch of other companies, including New World Interactive (Insurgency devs) and 3D Realms. They also have an outstanding option to buy 4A and Zen Studios.

No microtransactions

Saber off to a good start after getting themselves out of Embracer. I hope this pays off for them. The game looks great and I’m excited to play it.

Yeah, the immediate problem with comparing gun to non-gun kills is that anything involving a gun is automatically more likely to result in someone dead. So it doesn’t really give you a picture of how Indy likes to approach problems. And once a gun does become the tool of choice in a scene, the body count is likely to rack up a lot faster. You can show five people getting gunned down much faster than you can show one Nazi getting his head propellered off. Guns tend to be how disposable mooks die, but signature enemies get the more elaborate deaths.

Super excited to try this out. Darktide has taken over from Vermintide for my normal play, but getting to play as a Skaven sounds fucking awesome.

Oh, that thing is fucked. Ain’t shit all you can do about that.

If you didn’t care for the first movie I don’t think the second will solve any of your complaints. I say this as someone who really liked both movies. I have criticisms, and I don’t think they’re close to being Villeneuve’s best work, but the worst Villeneuve movie is still better than most directors on their best day. But two is very definitely more of one, and if anything it amplifies the first movie’s flaws rather than diminishing them, so it’s very unlikely to address anything you didn’t like. That said, I will throw it out there that it may be worth watching anyway just to experience Austin Butler’s incredible take on Feyd Rautha, which is easily the best thing about the movie.

I think the choice to set up Aliyah but ultimately leave her arrival for another time was a smart one, just as it was smart to not introduce Feyd until the second movie. Doing so really let him arrive in a big way, like “Oh shit, this guy is important.”

(Also good lord, Austin Butler steals the second movie so hard)

I think that’s a significant improvement. Chani being “ride or die” in the books is an awfully charitable way of saying that she basically has no purpose to her existence outside of Paul. The movie choosing to have her really show some resistance to the shitty / crazy stuff he’s doing gives her more inner life as a character. It also nicely sets up for Messiah where there’s definitely some tension between her and Paul (though never sufficiently explored IMO) over his choice to make Irulan his wife.

I mean, totally crazy off the wall suggestion, but maybe Isreal could just try not doing genocide?

She is, yes. But probably not in the ways that this will be used to target.

JK is TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist; this is the term they came up with to describe themselves, before retroactively deciding it was a slur when people used it to describe them). She thinks of herself as a feminist, but what she does in practice is misogyny.

First off, she spends a LOT of time attacking other women, primarily trans women, but also any woman who dares to say they’re actually cool with trans women (so, most cis women). Very often these cis women will be accused of being secretly trans so that JK and her cult don’t ever have to stop and question the whole “Wow, we sure spend a lot of time demonizing women” part of their “feminism”.

Second, in order to justify her transphobia, she (like almost all TERFs) practices a brand of gender essentialism that runs directly counter to most modern feminist ideals. Basically, in order to create her impermeable wall between who is or is not a woman, she has to create increasingly constrained boxes around who and what women are allowed to be. Women have to have a vagina; fuck you if you’re intersex but feel more comfortable as a woman. Women have to be capable of childbirth; fuck you if you’re sterile. Women have to have periods; fuck if you’re post-menopausal. And so on.

But equally importantly, in her fucked up world women have to look and act a certain way. The Imane Khan incident recently is a perfect example of this. Khan has the audacity to be a cis woman who is good at a combat sport while also being relatively tall and having strong features. Because she doesn’t fit the perfect idealised weak submissive hourglass figure heart shaped ass anime face vision of womanhood that Rowling and her posse envision, they immediately declared that she was secretly a man, and demanded to have her well deserved victories thrown out. That is pure misogyny, plain and simple; attacking a woman for not looking and acting the way they think a woman should look and act.

Bingo

Speaking as a British person, “shitty little TERF island” is 100% accurate.

Unfortunately, given the extremely transphobic rhetoric that’s come out of Labour lately, this is almost certainly them throwing JK a huge bone. UK TERFs love to characterize any criticism of them as misogyny (especially when it comes from trans women, who they claim are angry male sexual predators). I have the horrible suspicion that this will do nothing to combat actual misogyny, while being used heavily to silence anyone standing up for trans rights.

That’s not how Russian information control works. As the internet age became a thing they quickly realized that they simply don’t have the resources to prevent people from accessing information. Instead their model is to tell the truth and a lie at the same time. Literally, one state run paper will print a true story, the other will print a totally fabricated version of the same events. What this does is it undermines the idea of “truth” as a meaningful concept. It’s the whole “alternative facts” / “fake news media” thing. You don’t prevent the information existing, you just train people to pick and choose the version of reality they like best.

It’s hard to overstate just how dangerous this is for Putin. A large part of why Russians tolerate him is because Putin Make Russia Stronk. Take that away and what has he got left?

Certainly including them. China has benefited greatly from their trading relationship with the rest of the world and continues to do so, and unlike Russia their foreign policy is much more pragmatic than personal.

The only way they make a play for Taiwan is if they are convinced they can do it without the US becoming materially involved. This would most likely mean winning so quickly that the fighting is already over by the time the US can seriously mobilize, but even that would likely turn into a larger conflict.

China has to maintain the idea that any day now they’ll retake Taiwan, for a number of reasons. Mostly because it’s a necessary pillar of their internal politics. But in practice the real value they obtain from it would be seriously diminished by the astonishing costs. The biggest practical benefit would be ability to completely control the world’s supply of semiconductors (sure was a genius idea to let everyone outsource that to TSMC), but that value will diminish if the US and other countries continue to invest in domestic chop production (add that to the list of actually good things Biden did by the way).