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Rename the headline to: "Software has gotten objectively worse" Technology on the hardware front has long track record of getting better. But the software stack running on them has gotten worse. Writing good, optimal code is no longer economical. Move fast and break things. Marketing wants new features and done quickly. They want to monetise everything, and run things on subscription model. And they want to spy on yo…
If your internet is down you can't play your gamepass games offline. Exciting stuff.
If you set your Xbox settings to "Go Offline" on console or PC after you lose the connection, your Game Pass games will work for up to 30 days before an active internet connection is required
Maybe this has changed.
The first outage I had, you couldn't even sign in.
The second outage, you had to set it offline before your internet died. This was when Rogers was down in Canada.
The first example is because the game had a patch, I'm pretty sure that you can skip that on Switch, but even if you can't, games that couldn't be patched were objectively worse than ones that can. The second example is social media and has been discussed to death. No arguments there. The third example, Tesla's UI, could be said to be worse than manual buttons, but the technology in a Tesla is not objectively worse o…
In theory, modern games, with patching could be even better. They could be just as well tested as older games, but also ship patches to fix the things that do slip through testing. But in practice nobody does that. Instead, game developers just compress the schedule, knowing full well that they can now ship games with totally breaking bugs that get addressed with multi-gigabyte "day one" patches.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern cars are much safer than cars of even 10 years ago
For their occupants, maybe! It's getting harder and harder to see over the front hood. My wife, standing straight, is invisible to a new F150.
I just bought my kids a switch to hopefully feel that nes era gaming. It kind of hits on it.
Pre-xbox was nice. The game was pretty solid state. The systems were 'dumb' and performed the function they were designed to do.
There wasn't 10 control configurations, touch this and that. They were games.
It's sad with the newer Mario's that if you die repeatedly it gives you a powerful at the start of the level.
- Game crashed on startup - after searching online for a bit apparently changing your Steam Download Region can fix it. As in not redownloading the game from another region, just changing the setting. This worked.
- Start game, started in Windowed mode and changing resolution caused the mouse to move super slowly. Restart game. Fixed.
- Try to start game with friend. I can't join him, he can't join me. Generic error about not being able to join host. Search online, apparently newest build is broken.
- Do some more searching - apparently adding the beta code for the legacy version allows you to download the previously released version. Do that. We can now play together!
- Play for a few hours, have fun. I need to go so I suggest we pick up some other time. We ponder if this is possible. We see a "Save Game" option. Do that, but given the earlier issues, doubt it will be useable to continue playing later.
- Try to play the next day. We are right, the saved game is completely hosed and we can't resume progress.
- Uninstall Civ 6
I find this experience so typical of modern software. Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards. It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart.
Social media companies, but Facebook in particular, have always operated out of fear of missing the next big trend and never stopped to be content with what they were. And that poisonous attitude took over social media. They are all complicated algorithm driven nightmares. Twitter’s ability to sort chronologically is a cold glass of water in hell.
Video games aren’t completely bad. I think games are in some ways the best they have ever been, especially when it all comes together, but it is rare when it all comes together these days. All the big publishers put out broken, derivative games that require constant patching with giant downloads. It is especially bad on PC. Every big game is some level of broken for the first year. Part of that is probably a hangover from the pandemic, but I really hope something changes. It feels downright unprofessional the state some games release in.