Zgrok is a good alternative. Used it some months back for Foundry vtt.

Second. Performance should probably be better (I was struggling before I upgraded), but it is great fun. Very, very dark in subject matter.

Oh yeah. They added contextual interaction promots. The closest thing I had played before reforger was DayZ though. But Reforger is very intuitive. Most everything can be done by looking at stuff and pressing F (entering cars, bandaging wounds, taking on and off attachments on weapons, etc.).

It’s a bit more complex than Squad in the things you can do, but the approach is much more simple (like, in Squad you press f1-8 to switch seats, in ArmA you can freelook and look at the seat).

Great rec. Teamwork required, easy to learn but hard to master (especially the vehicles, which also require teamwork).

Honestly squad is pretty strange for me. I’m not very fond of talking to people (SzPD at least, might be on the spectrum), but Squad does not work without teamwork and communication. Guess the difference is that I don’t really get casual communication but effective comms on Squad rely on briefness and exactness. Triple Ds, that kind of stuff.

If you do end up jumping into Squad, expect some hiccups. The game is not terribly well optimized, and the community almost always picks the same factions and divisions. The devs have shown off a UE5 upgrade that’ll be dropping in the near future, so that might be good.

In a similar vein, ArmA: Reforger is great. Completely replaced my Squad addiction. While Squad is more focused (which is good), ArmA is way more free and varied in objectives. Plus, I feel like it might be more easily moddable. WCS and RH feel almost like they were vanilla, while the most polished Squad mods feel like mods. Not a knock against the mod teams, maybe unreal is harder to mod.

Not all of it though. I remember Blue from Overly Sarcastic Productions going on a tangent about how he went over to florence (or venice) and looking for a place that didn’t exist. Ubi had made it up completely.

Not OP, but the community used to be so much better before. Game is fun, begun playing it on launch, but quit about three years ago because the people that play it are pretty toxic nowadays. Also, can’t trade stuff now. Some people really enjoyed that aspect of the game (not me, but still). A shame there isn’t anything else like it.

I’ve used it to quickly reference rules for my ttrpg table, and as a scratch board for campaign ideas. I don’t really start thinking through stuff until I talk to someone about it and I don’t want to spoil/bother my table about things that might or might not happen.

Both are imperfect methods. GPT often makes up shit or misunderstands a rule (even in SWADE, a simple system that is not crunchy at all), and it does not offer good feedback on ideas. It builds generic slop on top of your idea, regardless of if it’s good or not, unless you specifically tell it to poke holes. To be expected, it’s an LLM, after all.

I’ve used it now and again to summarize a recipe process for well known and established things (like a chili oil recipe or FDA guidelines on internal temperature), but I wouldn’t trust it not to combine ingredients that don’t go well together.

Even then, it’d take a lot more than just equal quality and compatibility. Folks are too used to Adobe slop to switch.

I’ve recently started using Affinity instead and ngl, it’s getting there. No AI stuff (which is a plus for me), runs better, and is capable of doing damn near the same things.

Lady butterfly. Died 47 times against her. I’d always dodged instead of parry in soulslikes, and she kicked my ass over it.

"> capitalists need their heights shortened

FTFY

Maybe it was the botched launch. Baldur’s Gate 3 was an early access title made by a known developer (at least in crpg spaces) of an existing IP, though BG 1 and 2 are old as hell and I imagine most of the player base didn’t play them, myself included.

I played KSP and was waiting for performance to get better before buying KSP 2. Oh well.

I work in the industry, and yeah. Before, marketing was based on utility. “Buy this because it can do this and this and that”, basically marketing how effective or what it can actually do for you. Around the 50s (in the US) marketing changed to be based around lifestyle. “Buy this so you can be this”. Now nearly all ads appeal to emotion instead of reason, and it is very effective.

Researching about what a product offers is so much harder than just buying on a whim because the ads and the product are colorful.

You can see this change in old (really old) newspapers. Ad spreads were chock full of text about features. Now 3/4ths of the ads are an image of a happy woman if marketed for gals, or a stoic muscly man if marketed for guys.

Gives me the ick.

EpicLoot might also be good, if OP’s kids are keen to grind components.

Not FPS, but Valheim is plenty fun. Also, zomboid, but that ones a bit more violent

Have to pitch it. DD:DA is what if you had Monster Hunter, added magic classes that feel great, and set it in a high fantasy setting. It takes some cues from jrpgs and feels less western than any soulsborne game, but still.

Wdym? They also smile weirdly at the least appropriate times. They got that serial killer grin.