This conversation always felt so disingenuous to me. The game clearly has elements that we’re left open with the potential of exploring the further. The lost and destroyed crystals, missing Leviathan, ambiguous ending elements… If you go to the far north of Sanbreque and look up the coast you can also see some weird growth on the landmass that you cannot reach. They put tons of empty slots in the game then were like “We don’t plan to fill these in.” Uh huh.
Really frustrating to see online commenters speaking in favor of the acquisition (and prior MS buy ups) just because they are already locked into the Xbox ecosystem and they want games on Game Pass. Never mind that it’s objectively anti-consumer/anti-competitive and arguably bad for the industry broadly, it benefits a very specific subset of consumers so it must be good and the FTC / Sony are just haters. Complete lack of critical thinking.
I’ve heard some industry people aren’t pleased about these kind of late cycle whole-studio acquisitions either…think for example about Starfield devs who have already done the bulk of the work on their game and then have to A) shelve whatever work was done on PS versions B) throw their work onto a subscription model instead of pure sales while C) having to immediately generate profit to justify the purchase of Bethesda/Zenimax that they didn’t have any say in. Turning more and more studios into line items in a mega corp budget sheet.
Grim.
Yes, thank you! I hate these obnoxious posts that do nothing more than vaguely reference something. It’s not like memes and image macros are the greatest content at the best of times, but ones that just go “Wow, <thing> sure did happen.” are such trash. Same goes for that confused Gandalf looking around like “Huh? What’s <thing>?” Fuck off.
I was a teacher at a small rural school. Five people in my department. Our department head was the worst possible choice for the position - she wasn’t the most senior, wasn’t the best equipped, wasn’t the most innovative, wasn’t the best peacemaker. She bullied and belittled, her lessons were the same for years, her scores weren’t even particularly strong. We frequently went to professional development as a team which she didn’t attend. Couple this with an admin who was incompetent and constantly double talking and it was a giant pain.
The final straw was when one of our colleagues found a better job (department head at a neighboring school) and they needed to reshuffle classes to find a replacement. Despite being more qualified and more experienced, they refused to give any honors or AP courses to me or my colleagues, instead hiring a first year teacher with only a BA and shutting the rest of the department out of the entire hiring project. We were literally in the building running summer school and planning for the following year while they did every interview with no input, promised to talk to us, then made their offers and class decisions. We were told that we’d all meet to discuss it, then they reversed course and said they didn’t want input and we’d instead have a meeting at the start of the following school year to essentially admonish us for not blindly following our department head.
We finally decided we’d dealt with it enough. Three of the five of us left that summer, the fourth left the next year. They had to hire an entirely new department because of that one person. I’m in a better school with a better team now, one of my colleagues was poached by the same one who was originally leaving, and another sold her house and is touring the country in her RV home. The superintendent fired the admin the following year as well.
This is why I’ll never understand people who get excited about news like “We have over 1000 planets!”
Spend all that time and effort making like, 15 really complete, kick ass ones in the same physical space that I can explore instead.