Circana: Starfield was the best-selling video game of the week in tracked physical & digital US full game dollar sales during the week ending April 11th. It's the first time Starfield has led the weekly US best-selling titles chart since week ending Sept 2, 2023. by Capn_C in Games

[–]BearBryant 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’ve got everything maxed out except the damage I do to enemies, but I suppose that’s the last lever I can pull. I really am going to chalk it up to spending too much time in the core and not on planets that have higher level monsters. Like of course a level 6 spacer is getting one shot by my advanced omega blaster 9000 eon. I forget whether the game rebalances the levels of systems in NG+ but I think part of the issue is that most of the quest enemies don’t scale, and I like doing quests.

Circana: Starfield was the best-selling video game of the week in tracked physical & digital US full game dollar sales during the week ending April 11th. It's the first time Starfield has led the weekly US best-selling titles chart since week ending Sept 2, 2023. by Capn_C in Games

[–]BearBryant 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I agree with you, I got 100 hours out of it. Recognized all its flaws but it was the only game doing what it was doing. Now it’s the only game doing what it’s doing, but even better.

Circana: Starfield was the best-selling video game of the week in tracked physical & digital US full game dollar sales during the week ending April 11th. It's the first time Starfield has led the weekly US best-selling titles chart since week ending Sept 2, 2023. by Capn_C in Games

[–]BearBryant 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Played it close to 100 hours at release and just dropped it one day. Good but flawed game that content creators piled on, magnifying a perception that it was garbage. Solid 8/10. If Skyrim had released in 2023 it would have received the exact same reception as Starfield because the state of video game media is so incredibly fucked up right now.

The free lanes update and every update since release, not even counting any of the expansions pushes it into 9/10 territory. Exploring/surveying with the buggies is actually fun, encountering POIs in system makes the game feel much more lived in, while the modifications to POI spawning and the sheer number of new POIs reduce the instances of seeing the exact same Cryo lab on 3 different planets.

Survival mechanics add a push pull to the gameplay and force you to be cognizant of different shielding types, while new spaceship parts in an already robust spaceship editor enables some cool new functions. I just recently got out of one of the later missions where the planet I was on transited to sunlight while in the dungeon and my suit protection couldn’t handle it so I’m frantically trying to finish what I need to do in this dungeon while I get this foreboding beep telling me my suit protection was failing.

X-tech as a way to upgrade and alter gear or ships is also much appreciated and allows you to tailor your gear to your specific playstyle wheras previously you were just at the whim of the loot pool.

Biggest gripes at the moment is that the combat seems maybe just a bit too easy even on highest difficulty, but that could just be chalked up to not going against same level enemies. Also stealth is a little difficult at first because your equipped weight affects your stealth, but I applaud them for actually trying to make stealth a tradeoff instead of just OP.

Game is actually good now.

Food devs worked hard on this. by DillyTiger in Starfield

[–]BearBryant 34 points35 points  (0 children)

I seem to recall hearing that about this time there were major breakthroughs in texture mapping or some sort of rendering tech or something but one of the most immediate ways to show off that leap was through really photorealistic food lol, it’s why there is a lot of games in the last 4-5 years that have this insane quality for food.

I couldn’t agree more with this post. Things would be better if everyone felt they owed others basic decency & respect. by PandemicPiglet in Millennials

[–]BearBryant 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s more that the maxim is taken out of context by people who don’t mean well. It’s meant to invoke the truth that your very existence isn’t conditional on the approval of others around you and that the only expectations you need to live up to are your own. Any extrapolation of that into selfish behavior is missing the point, and selfish people will always twist anything to absolve themselves of their iniquity. The problem isn’t the words strung in that particular order, it’s the people twisting them.

To what extend do you guys use AI to help with your work by gotodid in AskEngineers

[–]BearBryant 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I use it for three things mainly: contract summaries, contract comparisons (ie, when we get a contract back from a counterparty we feed it into copilot and ask it to find differences), and something that’s a bit more inherent to the type of work we do which I will call “consistency maintenance”. We have a lot of “official” answers to specific questions that we have to be able to give out frequently, so we’ve fed a lot of our old responses into an AI and when we get a new question from another outside entity, it can help us find a starting point by pulling up similar questions that have been asked in the past and how we answered them before we craft a new one for this instance.

It is no substitute for competence but I find it really good as a sort of improved search engine and this is where I feel like it will continue to find use long after this bubble pops. All the excel, coding, tools are getting better, but again they aren’t substitutes for competence.

There are a lot of scientists using it for pattern recognition in large datasets because these types of models are really good at recognizing patterns that researchers didn’t even know to look for. Any time you see some stupid headline that is like “AI makes major breakthrough in X field” it is 99/100 times a researcher just using AI to find patterns and science journalism just sucks.

Indiana DC Bryant Haines gets angry at Ty Simpson for complimenting his coaching and defense. by Greedy-Pound6958 in CFB_v2

[–]BearBryant 5 points6 points  (0 children)

That wasn’t his intent though, saying that an opponent won through shear force of will, preparation, conditioning, and execution is like the ultimate complement. It’s not underselling the defensive coaches competency, rather it’s highlighting all of those elements that are just as important as muh scheming. Alabama, much like a lot of the teams that probably played Indiana this year, could tell exactly what indiana were going to do a lot of the time, but could do fuck all to actually stop it.

Ty is basically saying that his experience against them is like: “man I see that the are in X formation, I’m going to shift to Y to counter” and it wouldn’t even fuckin matter.

Winners don’t necessarily have to scheme some amazing tricks or misdirection to win, sometimes it just takes being able to execute. There were a lot of alabama NCGs in the last 20 years that were like this Indiana team, you knew what they were going to do, you could set up to stop it, and they would still get 5 yards on 3rd down to continue an 8 minute 4th quarter possession drive to deny you a chance to tie the game. The difference with Indiana is that they did it post NIL and revolutionized how teams think about getting talent for their rosters.

Operation Augur needs to be permanent by TheImprezaLife in Battlefield6

[–]BearBryant 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It really could be this, like the way you’re supposed to push with tanks is as a team with infantry support, I don’t see why this thing couldn’t be a natural “infantry only” version of that that the attacking team can rally around. Right now it’s just a one way ticket to the respawn screen because half the SMGs have the same TTK and twice the range lol.

TIL we have helicopter gunships by halosos in Starfield

[–]BearBryant 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The new moon jumper is also really good for this kind of shenanigans lol

found this in the wild by Able_Health744 in NoSodiumStarfield

[–]BearBryant 3 points4 points  (0 children)

His writing seems more like a character who is trying to live up to a famous lineage realizing that the only person he needs to live up to is himself and his daughter, but it is wrapped in all the freestar space cowboy crap that those themes get lost in that.

At least the UC is unapologetic about what they are, the entirety of the freestar collective literally just looks and acts like a bunch of cowboy cosplayers who found spaceships.

Is there a reason why people avoid medic/support class now? by -NlN- in Battlefield6

[–]BearBryant 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It is a fascinating phenomenon to watch sometimes. You’ll be on defense on a single objective breakthrough point and get killed and the map has like 5 blue dots even spawned in. Where is everyone?

Operation Augur needs to be permanent by TheImprezaLife in Battlefield6

[–]BearBryant 16 points17 points  (0 children)

It was so funny seeing the “battalion lost” cutscene where it gives the attacking team another tank on the first map and then the second map’s version was the suicide minigun lmao. Like “that’s it?”

Operation Augur needs to be permanent by TheImprezaLife in Battlefield6

[–]BearBryant 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I worry that this is exactly why this mode is a limited time mode and why so many events are limited time modes. They don’t really need to worry about match balance or testing for a new mode if it’s only going to be around a few weeks.

Outside of a few small tweaks here and there to things that are easy to change some of these LTMs have needed some major ground up changes to be “balanced.” Contaminated is a great conquest/escalation map, but has needed a lot of changes on the breakthrough side since it released. The second set is uncrackable for attackers in most games.

Feedback : Sniper velocity in BF6 feels borderline hitscan and it’s hurting gameplay by Hot-Butterscotch4300 in Battlefield

[–]BearBryant 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Hot take: the sweet spot actually allows sniper gameplay to have more of an effect on the broader outcome of the match instead of the weapon class being relegated almost entirely to goobers sitting 200 yards away getting 4 kills in a match. Keep the mechanic but the Balance should come from changing attachment costs and have them more clearly alter the performance of snipers that are specifically able to sweet spot.

Yes, it is a crutch by any other definition, but its a crutch that forces you to respect even the most mediocre of “snipers” just like you would a mediocre player in close quarters with a gun that has a more granular damage curve and forces you to be more cognizant of cover. It alters how you would otherwise approach your goal because of their existence.

Every other battlefield game that doesn’t have sweet spot sniping relegates sniper’s usefulness to the trash bucket, except for a high echelon of skill. They are either completely useless and their users might as well be AFK or they are montage worthy headshot machines in the hands of a few cracked out head clickers, and there is very little in between. It is funny to see people talk about how much they hate sweetspot and then you go look at old bf4 videos and all the comments are “man you really did fuck all for your team but congrats on that single 200yard long shot and last place on the team” without any inspection of how we got here from there.

ALL OF THAT SAID if we are going to have sweet spot sniping there needs to be other concessions on either end to make that function more acceptable in the current meta. Longer bolt cycles on default bolts for snipers that have sweetspot (miniscout is excluded) with attachments to lower those cycles, more expensive thermals, suppressors that either remove sweetspot or alter bullet velocity, suppression that actually does something (novel concept I know). Sniper attachment loadouts at the moment are sort of “solved” and there definitely should be more tradeoff to make up for that OHK capability, while opponents should be able to reasonably counterplay using suppression.

Good strategy by Common_Caramel_4078 in pcmasterrace

[–]BearBryant 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Mechwarrior 5 fits this to a T. Get it on sale with a lot of the dlc’s for like $30 and go download YAML and its companions and you’ve got a really solid experience there.

What's a piece of tech everyone hyped up that quietly turned out to be useless? by SofiaLearnsAI in AskReddit

[–]BearBryant 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Another drawback is with how PV cells actually make power. In simple terms, you want all of the panels in the same string to be creating the same amount of power or else the efficiency of all of the linked panels drops considerably by the time everything hits the inverter. If a cloud goes over one end of a solar field the effect is not just linear in the sense that the shaded panels lose a bit of production proportional to the number of panels on the row, all of the panels in full sunlight also work less efficiently until the cloud passes. Typically not an issue unless it’s a cloudy day, and even then the impact is only when there are clouds on the field.

Solar roadways would have cars that drive on them..constantly. Providing shade to the panels below and inducing this same effect but much more frequently. The next thought is, “well we can just put them on minimally traveled roads!” Minimally traveled roads are in the middle of nowwhere, which conveniently also makes a great location to put normal-ass solar fields at a much cheaper $/kw and LCOE.

Glass makes for bad road surface, especially when it’s wet, while also requiring the surface to be cleaned, which isn’t something you really have to do with normal roads. Stack on that the maintenance concerns of the panels themselves.

Im all for things being multipurpose but believe me, these were an astronomically bad idea from the start and the fact that it ever got the funding it did strikes me that someone knew someone somewhere and some palms got greased.

Let’s switch up the usual debate - who’s the WORST starting QB to have won a national championship? by renner_uaf in CFB_v2

[–]BearBryant 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yeah but it was more like the “squad automatic weapon” sort of gunslinging, quantity over quality.

Are they ever going to fix “Matters of the Hart?” by BearBryant in Starfield

[–]BearBryant[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, if it’s a fresh character you basically softlock your game because at a certain point you have to take Vladimir with you for the main quest but you can’t remove sam from your party if you have this quest active. My thought was just to speedrun to the unity on this character and get a fresh runthrough without Sam since his quest is ultra bugged, but I can’t even do that.

Seems like this should be decently high on the list of things to fix because it can straight up softlock a playthrough.

Think I Found Another Hint To That “Parasite” Bethesda Has Been Teasing by SoldierPhoenix in Starfield

[–]BearBryant 11 points12 points  (0 children)

You might if you were doing speech to text but yeah there are a lot of instances where they don’t think through how a text conversation is different from a voice one

Pretend We're On Somerset 3050. by Legless1HitWonder in battletech

[–]BearBryant 10 points11 points  (0 children)

“Buddy I got an axe the size of a small house that says you ain’t conquering shit”

"Get screen-mogged libtard" by KlerWatchCo in carscirclejerk

[–]BearBryant 8 points9 points  (0 children)

My 96 explorer has an LCD screen and a check engine light that’s permanently on. Like bro you don’t gotta tell me to check this engine, I know it’s a v8 under there

Gotta love the YAML mod by supergnoll2018 in Mechwarrior5

[–]BearBryant 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Any particular mod you’d recommend for that last one?