Maybe it’s different for the upper management types, but for me I am easily 3x more productive at home in < 6 hours than I ever was at 8+ hours in the office.

There are soo many distractions in the office environment we had (cubicle farm). People chatting behind me, constant noise, people coming up to my desk throughout the day to ask me something and disrupt my entire workflow.

I work in my quiet home with headphones on listening to music. When people need something from me they ping me in Teams or send an email and I get to choose when to stop my work to respond. And when I really need to focus I can throw on Do Not Disturb mode. In the office “Do Not Disturb” was me booking a conference room for myself to work in silence.

(all the copy and paste rule of 3 quests to find three MacGuffins then SAM will figure out how to find a location for another fight).

This has been my biggest complaint as I’ve been going through ME:A for the first time. I have limited time/energy to play so jumping into ME:A for 2ish hours and basically accomplish nothing really hurts my motivation for the next play session.

When I first started playing it, I was really enjoying the game. It was about the 3rd planet where I had to go to 3 places to unlock a vault to do a thing that the progression loop really started to weigh me down.

The original trilogy was brilliant for me. Get in, do a couple of missions (each one progressing the story a little more) maybe get sucked into a couple more missions and go to bed excited for the next session. But ME:A is just a slog. I’m doing various loyalty missions which is a little better, but still seems to require a lot of go here, here, and here and shoot some guys and then go into here to finish up.

Final Fantasy 7 when Aeries dies. I was a teen then and it was the first RPG I ever played and the first time I experienced a main character just die and is gone from the game.

I don’t think I experienced anything like that again until maybe Destiny 2 when Cayde died. Little different with that though as they should his death in a live stream about the launch of that DLC. Had a different impact but had to be done since the entire premise of that DLC was getting revenge so couldn’t hide it from the promo materials.

Read through the post, OP mentioned a few times that this isn’t about a phone war. It’s just one persons experience going from Android to iPhone; what worked well and what didn’t.

I think a lot of folks have picked an ecosystem and never strayed from it; seeing a post like this helps fill the gaps of their curiosity. Being exposed to other people’s experiences and experience a change yourself is a good thing.

At the end of the day phones are just tools to help you go about your day to day. We don’t have to foam at the mouth over a discussion like this. iPhones are very good devices and have great synergy with other Apple devices and apps. Android is a very customizable experience which has many great phones at very good prices. You can’t go wrong with either IMO.

I’ve been out of the loop on this game. I really liked the first one, it brought back a lot of team fortress 2 memories. How bad is the second one? The general sentiment is “bad”.

That’s awesome and what a deal. I think my mother-in-law has at least another year or so before we need to think about swapping hardware, but these little guys make so much sense.

Yeah it was a headache for me in the past too, but the latest Steam Big Picture which behaves more like a Steamdeck has made it pretty easy. Since it launches right away, I can easily launch and quit steam games with 0 issue and when I’m done I used big picture to just shut the PC down.

One issue I found was if I let the PC sleep, it always brings up the login screen on wake so I just shut it down everytime. NVME’s are so fast the boot up is whatevs. Non-steam games are also a little painful as sometimes it won’t switch active windows, or I have to login or something.

I only use this machine for games. Like you said, HTPC was a pain. I have a different server that I have Plex setup on and I use Apple TV’s / Roku’s for streaming.

I wouldn’t buy any consoles, I would build (though you can buy) a really powerful gaming PC to plug up to my 4k TV. I’ve actually recently done just that and it works amazingly well.

Things to make it a good experience:

1. Make sure you have a 4k TV with HDMI 2.1 for 120hz gaming
2. Configure Windows to bypass the login screen on boot
3. Configure Steam to launch in Big Picture mode on startup
4. Buy an Xbox Controller and the little dongle for it (it works better than just bluetooth)
5. Buy a small wireless keyboard with built in trackpad for the odd occasion you need to use a mouse and keyboard (looking at you EA Play).

With that, you’ve got the best console ever. Huge backlog of games, games on steep discounts, a machine that has a much better experience outputting to a 4k TV than something like a Steamdeck or a console. I’ve tried the Steamdeck to a 4k TV and the quality was pretty awful; 720p does not upscale to 4k well at all. And if you wanted to, you could set it up with emulators using retroarch for any games you are missing.

My TVPC specs:

1. Ryzen 7800x
2. 32GB DDR5-6000
3. 2TB NVME SSD
4. RTX 4080
5. Fractal Design Torrent Nano

I picked that case specifically for the huge 180mm fan in the front, the fact it can fit a massive cooler like the Peerless Assassin and the GPU gets fresh air from the bottom. It’s not the smallest case, but it stays cool and super quiet.

I never realized until recently that a NUC is the perfect device for my aging mother-in-law. She has an old gaming desktop (sans-gpu) with a i5-4670 that is plugged up to a 1080p monitor next to her recliner chair. At some point that PC will die and these seem like a pretty meaty upgrade in a tiny box.

I’m glad someone “reputable” is taking the helm.

I agree with that for most people. I’m a bit of a weirdo who has a PC and Xbox Series X. I bought the X purely so I can play Destiny from my recliner chair on days where I just can’t sit at my desk anymore. It (along with GamePass) has also benefited my wife immensely. She’s played so many games on GamePass on the Xbox, it’s great.

Most recently I tried to make my PC hybrid between desk and TV and the experience was so frustratingly bad. Trying to send audio to 2 different places was bad (even with Voicemeter) and then the monitors kept getting all screwed up because of the TV being sometimes seen and sometimes not. It was a terrible experience. Eventually I said screw it and built a completely dedicated PC for my tv couch gaming and it honestly works pretty damn great.

That’s totally fair. I’m not sure where MS’ steam games fall on “working with linux” via Proton. I haven’t heard them being actively hostile like Bungie is with Destiny, but I’m not sure where that’s at.

That’s exactly why I finally pulled the trigger on the 6XX. It’s already on sale but even if it wasn’t it’s still over $100 cheaper than the reg 650’s.

Yeah while MS does also “own” the PC ecosystem via Windows, I’d bet MS probably makes more money off of an individual Xbox player than a PC player which should make them a bit less friendly to PC.

For starters:

• Steam takes a 30% cut of all sales
• Sales and prices are usually much better on Steam than consoles so a lot of people wait for that number to drop over time
• For most multiplayer games you need to pay for Xbox Gold which is upwards of $50-$60 a year (or gamepass which is even more, though you get more out of it).
• You have to buy the console (this really depends on if MS actually makes money on console sales though) to play the game too.

Microsoft doesn’t have to put their games on PC if they don’t want to and in the past they kind of didn’t (no one liked GFWL). They could totally go the exclusive route again, but I think MS knows that Xbox die-hard will buy an Xbox console and obviously buy the games on the xbox store for whatever it cost. PC players will also buy it if it’s a good game and a good price and, this is crucial, is on Steam.

PC players are an untapped resource of potential customers; That’s why Sony finally decided to also cave and put their games on Steam. Money is money, but the difference is MS is betting big on GamePass and good-will right now since they are behind Sony in sales. I think because they’re behind Sony and trying to earn that good-will back, MS becomes more friendly to PC by putting their games on PC day one and on GamePass day one whereas Sony is still going with the 1-year (or more) PS5 exclusivity thing.

The interesting thing will be if MS ever gets back on top again, who knows what that looks like, but it’ll probably suck.

Yeah the PS5 is pretty reasonably priced for what you get. I think the issue is two fold:

1. We already have really expensive machines that probably play games much better than the PS5 in frames and quality so buying another machine for a handful of games is just not in the cards.
2. Many of us much prefer keyboard/mouse and using controllers is really hard when you’ve not done it in many years.

I think we just wish Playstation was more friendly to PC players and not have these long exclusives (they’ve gotten a lot better recently though). Microsoft for example is a lot friendlier to PC players than Sony. Pretty much all MS first party games are on PC pretty much day one and many of them are on GamePass day one as well.

I played Mass Effect 3 all the way to just before the final mission using only level 1 weapons. When I was doing my final walk through of the ship I went down to the hangar and encountered a terminal I hadn’t seen that let me upgrade my weapons. I had like 700,000 credits and upgraded everything right then and there.

This happened to me when I was streaming. My favorite hobby became like a job. I only played while streaming and the time I was putting in outside of work was kind of killing me. Working a full day, coming home to do dinner and time with my wife and then start streaming by 8pm a couple days a week. It exhausted me. At some point I started to skip days and then I just never went back. Now I play games as a form of entertainment like watching Netflix/Hulu. I do it for leisure.

Sometimes I miss it though and think maybe I should try and get back into it but so far I’ve just not.

Was going to say this as well. As a long time destiny player it very much feels like checking boxes or doing chores each week.

I’ve finally managed to break away and play other games and am so excited for my current to do pile. Mass Effect 1,2,3 done, Andromeda is in progress and after that is Control, Cyberpunk and Fallout 4.

My first run through was femshep and I just finished my second run through with broshep. He gets much much better in ME2 and is incredible in ME3.

The small drop in users isn’t super surprising. I’m more interested in the drop of mods and tools. If more garbage slips through on the regular than I can imagine users start to drop off from their favorite subs turning to shit. Either way I’m done with reddit

Matrix Path of Neo. I loved that game so much and the last time I tried emulating it was so bad. I was completely hyped at that recent tech demo until I realized that was all it would be.