There’s a revolving door of hundreds of players in the community at any given time. You can find a game in quick match with absolutely no skill-based matchmaking at most times of the day, so it’s a total dice roll in that regard, or you can hit up the Skullgirls or Mix Masters Discord servers to find one at your skill level. Hunter Half Hands runs beginner tournaments, there are the Get Gr8 events to help learn the game, and there’s a community danisen league to fill in for the game’s lack of ranked mode that runs about 3 times per week in North America. This year, at Combo Breaker, the bracket was larger for Skullgirls than it was for Dragon Ball FighterZ. As far as I’m concerned, it’s more alive than I’d need it to be, but I’m happy it’s this alive.

The quest bugged out a few times, but with a bit of reloading old saves, I managed to transport some brahmin for about 3k caps, so I think I can afford that armor now.

I can’t speak to how Halo does it under the hood, but it’s very common to have a separate skill rating for unranked and to just not surface it, which is exactly what you’d want here, since that’s what prevents the brand new player from getting decimated in their early matches. You’re saying that the social playlists affected the same ranking as the competitive modes? That would be strange. In my experience though, a lot of new players bounce off a game when they get matched against people who are only marginally better than they are, which can be a matter of that other player understanding one thing that the loser does not. I’ve seen people call their opponents smurfs, and then when you check the replay, you realize, no, that player really is only a tiny bit better.

So sometime since I last played Call of Duty, they got rid of unranked modes?

No, I’m playing with the one that isn’t labeled “classic” in my GOG library. As far as I can tell, it may have cleaned up how that game interfaces with modern displays and maybe not much else. I’m level 7, and I just got to NCR with my posse of three companions. I had some encounters in the Wanamingo Mines and Vault 15 that wiped the floor with me, so I left them for now, though maybe with some guns I just picked up, Vault 15 would go better at this point. I’d love to get some better armor, but I have yet to find any in drops from enemies.

Is social matchmaking some synonym for skill based matchmaking? Because the latter is what it says they’re implementing, and it really shouldn’t be controversial.

Like everyone else, I’ve been playing Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. It is more challenging than the base game so far, but not dramatically so. The game gives you plenty of tools to deal with it, including situational loadouts to give you more damage or defense depending on what’s giving you trouble. Maybe a lot of people got too complacent with a single build that handled it all in the base game.

When I wasn’t playing that I was playing Fallout 2. It’s continued to be just what the doctor ordered after watching the Fallout TV show, but now I really feel bottlenecked by my gear. I don’t know if guns exist in the game that will do enough damage to take down some of the tankier enemies I’ve found, but if they do, I definitely can’t afford them. I haven’t even managed to find any armor to equip over my starting Vault 13 uniform, and there’s always a huge money sink for certain unique items or quests that eat into my savings just as I became a thousand-aire. I’ll have to find some ways to earn more caps quickly.

And when I wasn’t playing either of those, I was playing more Skullgirls, but I’m always playing Skullgirls, so that’s basically the free space on my bingo card.

That doesn’t make exercise worthless for weight loss.

That line about “only 20% stick around for the multiplayer” isn’t exclusive to RTS. Usually I hear a number like 30%, even for other RTS games, but that’s the case across every genre, even for games like fighting games that you think are only there for multiplayer. Only about 30% of people of any game’s player base will stick around to play online matches against other people.

StarCraft II is one of my favorite games, but to get back into RTSes, for me personally, I’m looking for two solutions: I want it to work well with a controller, and I think I want to get rid of the fog of war. The controller thing, done well, solves the APM complaint already, since there’s usually a speed limit on it. Tooth & Tail, Cannon Brawl, Brutal Legend, etc. give you a “cursor” character such that it doesn’t matter what input device you’re on, since that character can only move at a set speed. This isn’t the only way to do it though; it isn’t coded to use controllers, but Northgard operates on distinct tiles and things move at a slower pace such that a game like it could work on a controller without compromise. One of those compromises that games like Halo Wars or Battle Aces have made is that you can’t really place buildings strategically, and that feels like they’ve gone too far. As for the fog of war, I recognize its strategic value, but it wrecks me mentally and emotionally. It’s just so stress-inducing, even when I understand how to thoroughly scout. Cannon Brawl does without it entirely, and I can enjoy that game in a way that I can’t other RTSes. You still have to split your attention paying attention to all of the different attacks in motion that your opponent has thrown at you, and so it doesn’t feel like it’s missing something. I’m the star of my own story, so these things definitely feel important to me, but I do feel like both of these things would do wonders for making the genre feel more approachable.

And of course, for me, it’s a non-starter if the game is online-only. The two big RTS revivals with the most marketing right now are Stormforge and Battle Aces, and both are online-only, as is that Beyond All Reason game right now. These games have been cooking for a long time, and they’re going to be launching into a live service game crash. Their lead developers may take away the lesson that the genre can’t be saved when I hope that the actual reason is that customers hate putting time and money into a game that will likely be deleted off the face of the earth in a matter of months, not even years.

As far as I can tell, it was the original creators that they handed the franchise back to that fumbled it. I think there was a rumor that a classics collection was in development a while back, but that could be one of dozens of projects that got cut when Embracer lost that Saudi deal.

Sure, but trying to lose weight without exercise is still hard mode. I’ve done it with and without the exercise part.

Well, the reason I suspected it was this instead was because, with ray tracing turned on high, it looked like shader stutter, but that problem had actually been solved a long time ago.

Microsoft is a wrench in the works, but they’re not building a game any larger than they’ve been doing for some years now. This is still a game that is scoped so that it doesn’t need to sell 10 million copies to break even.

If you’re going to get that pedantic about it though, you may as well say weight is lost in the bathroom.

Calories are burned through exercise though. Come on. You know how they’re connected.

They enabled ray tracing on high by default, after I hadn’t played it in months. It wasn’t there before. When I turned it off, performance was back to where it ought to be.

Nah, man, I’m a capitalist, and this is stupid.

Thus far, Obsidian has been very good at creating games within reasonable constraints, which means they’re typically not overscoped relative to the size of the game’s actual audience. And they do all of this while being a multi project studio that’s allegedly good to its employees.

It’s not the engines’ fault that game development got longer. It’s that most AAA games over scope and go open world when they don’t have to, which not only takes longer to make but often results in a worse game. Make games smaller and iterate on them quickly, like the industry did 20 years ago. That’s how you make this make sense.

If you like Fallout: New Vegas and wanted to like Starfield, you will like The Outer Worlds. It’s compact and satisfying.