NMS was quite literally a different looking and feeling game with maybe 5% (yes, twenty times less) of the current content and gameplay loops. Everything changed from how long it takes to gather basic resources to what order you get them in, the tutorial was streamlined and the way it picks the planet you start on was changed. There's an unbelievable amount of things to do, to the point that expeditions started existing to give players a more guided experience with fresh regular content. It's truly a far cry from where it launched, even space stations (the most static structures found in most star systems) have been overhauled and the old ones are only around as easter eggs now.

CP2077 integrated a ton of content and features from the most popular mods it had after the Anime update (particularly Vehicle Combat, from which it even took improvements to the way police spawn and act in addition to, yknow, the vehicular combat). Only a few of the core systems changed, mainly quickhacking and the way cybernetic implants are handled (also almost straight up taken from a mod). They did a balance pass on guns and made some of the weapon type features a bit different. If you didn't push too terribly far through the game on release, none of it would seem different really. The locations and behavior of weapons and enemies in general gameplay didn't change much, but access to mobility via implants was made easier (as the separated stores for them were largely equalized and merged) so it's easier for fresh players and people not using guides to finish their "build". Not quite the huge makeover NMS received, but it's definitely different in terms of progression.

While you're probably right to some extent about naysayers decreasing naturally over time, both games now have suspicious steamcharts numbers for being single player experiences. They get an influx of new players regularly in ways other similar titles don't, and it's almost certainly due to the changes in opinion of people who were playing them around their major updates, journalist articles or enthused friends.

TL;DR: No man's sky really did change that much. CP2077 didn't go as far but they've clearly made end user-oriented changes that are uncharacteristic for single player experiences.

Do people genuinely not realize that sony and microsoft had a great data collection source (console gamers) that have largely "aged out"? This new push for account sign-ins is obviously because their user data flow needs a big kick. They used to get data when people bought the game on their own platform, ran it on their own platform, even how many hours their gameplay sessions were individually throughout the week. With a lot of their studios games they had either complete or timed exclusivity to really find out what was driving gamers to game, and beyond that it's a popular commodity and likely a loat or reduced revenue stream.

With helldivers 2, the account controversy sprung up on the back of Helldivers 2's stats page not showing correct numbers for anything (and sometimes being rolled back asynchronously from your currencies and unlocks). Seemed obvious to me at the time they wanted a head count from another source (a sign-in) and probably data beyond that like session time/length. Whatever people are upset about sign-ins over, I don't actually see it articulated much; there are a lot of good reasons to dislike it (potential stoppage of the service causing games to be harder to play like end of service for Games for Windows Live) and I never see them mentioned, just general vitriol for the companies. I don't find the companies sympathetic, but I do find it odd that people just slam it aimlessly everywhere instead of identifying the issues beyond basic understanding of privacy fears.

Not that odd. Seems like a decade and change ago it became common knowledge that market-tested, sanitized content wasn't really resonating with "core gamers", but we don't even call the demographic that anymore. Not really sure how we got here

Ark has cryopods which do the same thing mechanically, the only major difference being that you don't visually throw them. If you use the vague wording on the patents surrounding pokemon's box mechanics, it falls easily under there, since you are storing a captured creature in a digital storage.

Nintendo is the KING of frivolous patents. They've lost cases on it before, and with palworld being a sony interest, I don't think the usual financial bullying nintendo brings to the table is going to cut it on this one. They need an airtight case and their vague patents (and recent history trying to patent THE LOADING SCREEN and vehicle speed matching for player characters with totk being denied) is a bad look for them in a courtroom. Like the US, the holder of a patent in Japan needs to file suits swiftly to protect the patent, or they risk losing cases (like this one. See "laches defense").

Palworld is back in the top 100 global bestsellers today.

For bedrock, yes, absolutely. Bedrock used to be lauded for its performance across multiple machines and it now runs like trash on every one with the most egregious storefront in gaming. You can spend 20 extra USD on bedrock to get a single mod-equivalent data pack. You can spend that much or more on minecraft skins that won't work outside of bedrock. Minecoins as a premium currency targeted toward children are one of the worst examples of robbing a low information userbase in gaming all around, it has reached unbelievable levels.

The US invented pill mills. Mostly for this specific category of drug.

As for as storefronts go, which is what's being talked about here, they are competing and winning. With a fraction of the employees other companies employ for storefront work. Origin (Rest Unpeacefully) and Uplay never stood a chance and epic has had plenty of time to market saturate. The company not being publicly traded doesn't prevent competition, it prevents investor interests like quashing competition.

The same thing actually passing a turing test would require. You've obviously read the words "Turing test" somewhere and thought you understood what it meant, but no robot we've ever produced as a species has passed the turing test. It EXPLICITLY requires that intelligence equal to (or indistinguishable from) HUMAN intelligence is shown. Without a liar reading responses, no AI we'll produce for decades will pass the turing test.

No large language model has intelligence. They're just complicated call and response mechanisms that guess what answer we want based on a weighted response system (we tell it directly or tell another machine how to help it "weigh" words in a response). Obviously with anything that requires massive amounts of input or nuance, like language, it'll only be right about what it was guided on, which is limited to areas it is trained in.

We don't have any novel interactions with AI. They are regurgitation engines, bringing forward sentences that aren't theirs piecemeal. Given ten messages, I'm confident no major LLM would pass a Turing test.

No idea personally, but I spent my youth living in Alabama and there's a common saying they had about Mississippi: thank god for Mississippi. If it weren't for them, alabama would've been the most obese state and the least literate for a few years, though I think they've traded places again now.

How would you refer to a he/they sibling

Sounds like someone was told they couldn't use wikipedia as a source word for word in high school and never got over it. The less parrots we have saying shit they don't understand to get recognition other people worked for the better. If a four hour video is too long for you, maybe break it down into chunks or use any other time management skill. Or don't watch it still, but you're making the case that you have no attention span and say mean things about content you've never interacted with for jollies.

Unbelievable that you could miss the point this much and still ask "what's hard to understand" lmfao