The DuckDuckGo browser has this baked in as ‘Cookie Pop-up Protection’. It doesn’t quite get rid of them all, and doesn’t let you set a default for what you want (it’ll basically pick the most privacy-forward option) but I’ve found it works pretty well.
Always listening is somewhat preferable to ‘Has such an accurate profile on you from the data that is available that these instances happen by pure coincidence’. That’s way scarier and just as intrusive. At least with a listening device you can get rid of it.
Sad thing is, it’s likely both.
Tbh most employees at a company this size become risk mitigation more than anything else. Once you’ve reached a certain level of success, you’re looking at what doesn’t move the needle as much as what makes it move positively. There could be a feature that is a major QoL improvement, but because in a test segment it performed 1% worse than base then it won’t be implemented.
Spotify, I believe, still works in the tribe and guild model that they created.
Chapter = people with the same skill set, squad = a group of people from different chapters focused on a single project, tribe = a group of squads focused on a large business goal, guild = a collective of folks who have a shared interest like Data Privacy.
Suffice to say, Agile is an imperfect tool and as you try to scale it, you need an increasing number of people to support it and make it run. Coders and Designers are likely just a fraction of their head count.
I’ve worked places that don’t have that support structure in place and they’ve stagnated for years struggling to get the most basic of decisions made. Decisions is what it is about too. Rarely do you get actual leadership from the c-level and especially from a CEO. So you end up with a lot of cooks trying to work out why the broth doesn’t taste quite right and lacking confidence to just add a bit of salt.
Yeah the DLCs made it feel like a full game. The base was a fun proof of concept, the the DLC fleshes that out. Both made me excited to see what version 2 with more time and funding could accomplish.
I hope they build on the more unique systems like the Holographic Shroud and give those systems more opportunities to shine.
Yeah. It came out right in the middle of multiple massive games. It also has no quicksave/quickload system which for this kind of game is almost a must. Folks can ignore a system for the challenge, but without it there entirely it puts me off playing. Call it save scummy playing, but it’s how the genre has always worked.
The first 10 hours or so of Valhalla are great too. Learning the new systems and making your first parts of the settlement are pretty engaging. It’s the other 60+ hours that become a slog. You quickly realise that the main quest chain that was kinda outstaying its welcome is what you can expect for every single kingdom. Yeah, there’s some variety, but they’re really a slog to get through. The settlement upgrades were pretty good, but your mainly unlock things that would have been ‘free’ in other games. As the gear system leans towards microtransactions nothing you unlock is really mind-blowing. Especially as you’ll have to raid yet a other generic copy-and-paste monastery for the materials to upgrade.
If we look back to a game like ACII’s Villa upgrades, they provided access to things that would be behind a perk point today. I remember grinding out my capacity upgrades etc. There was direct tie from my effort to the upgrade. With Valhalla, and the other recent games, I feel like I’ve got to gring out the lootbox/heka chest(or whatever the premium currency is in a particular game)
That’s not to say Mirage is perfect. I really hate the token system and it feels so tacked on. I am enjoying being stealthy again though. I used a cheat trainer to add in one hit kills to Odyssey a while back and it improved the game so much.
In my experience, even the consumer facing portion suffers from lack of innovation. Look at the big rounds of lay offs this year, fairly uniformly one of the hardest hit teams has been UX Research. If you’ve worked with a good researcher, you really know their value. But translating value that into hard metrics is tough. A lot of the time CEOs in the private sector will accept Good Enough & fast Vs moving at a reasonable pace.
I don’t think there would even be an appetite for hard research at most companies. Takes too long, too much of a risk, the boss’ cousin had a really cool idea instead…
Private sector is very good at operationalizing existing technology. Outside of the FAANGs(/MAMAAs) being good enough is too easy, or investing in research is considered to be too high an expense with no guarantee on return.
Not even to mention the Star Wars games, any Marvel games, the new indie game, the Avatar game from Ubi. They might not have any active in-house studios but they are quite active in giving the rights to studios for their franchises.
One QoL improvement I’ve not seen here is a better journal system. When I can’t further a quest line even something vague like ‘Continue your journey so learn more’ would be great. I have spent time on some quests hunting down a person to discover the quest can only be completed in the next act multiple times now.
I have. It’s pretty short and to the point. They’re based out of Germany so their requirements for clarity are pretty high by law. They go into quite a lot of detail about what is sent.
In this case they send date, time, language, processing time, number and the type of errors, but not the text itself
However, they do have an optional feature that uses OpenAI to rephrase sentences so that might be training through the back door.
I’ve been using it for years and have been very happy with the service.
Controller support is pretty good. I’m playing with a PS5 controller and pretty much the whole interface has been redesigned to fit it. It feels like it was an experience designed to fit the systems of the game opposed to fit a controller onto the PC release of the game.
Most annoying for me was End Turn was mapped to Y/Triangle and I kept pressing it. I swapped it to R2 and haven’t had any more slipups.
There’s refinements and QoL changes to be made for sure, but I’ve been surprised at how well it plays so far.
I’m playing docked on the Deck. Animations and cut scenes play really well. If you can, I’d recommend using a Bluetooth controller as I’ve found the deck specific controls to not be the best. The controller UI takes a little getting used to but it is pretty good now I’ve been playing a few hours.
The biggest negative is, naturally, the graphics. It’s smooth enough, but there is just a lot of blurriness and weird edging I can’t get rid of on any setting. In the close up cut scenes that pretty much goes away. That said, I’m still having a lot of fun and none of that was a deal breaker for me. It runs significantly better than it did in EA for me.
The one ‘annoying’ thing that has happened is I’m the video cut scenes there is quite a significant audio delay. It is not there for the in-engine ones or during combat. I’ve only seen two of these though and they’re right at the start of the game. I just watched on YouTube to see them properly.
If one of their goals is to sell premium access to train LLMs this type of gibberish would hurt that. When you can’t guarantee that the data source is coherent, then that would have an impact on the final model that is created.
I think a better approach is to transfer comments to a new platform or create new higher quality content. Could the solution to this problem become a guide that goes into more detail?
Interesting fact: The same parent company owns both Reddit and Turnitin.
I’m in the camp of ‘I’ll wait for reviews’ on this one. Indiana Jones is a character with a controversial past and many of his character traits are not exactly modern. The puzzle stuff looked kinda fun and I’d be interested to see just how many there are in the game. Solving what looks like a blood sacrifice bowl with a bottle of wine is neat. Or it will be if that isn’t a telegraphed narrative. If there are point and click vibes where you pick up a clown nose in the first ten minutes of the game and then use It in the 9th hour, that kinda puzzle-bypass would be great.
I will say, ‘The Great Circle’ is such a boring name when they have ‘Circuli Magni’ right there. They give a clear translation in the trailer but ‘Indiana Jones and the Circuli Magni’ is significantly more interesting. SEO considerations I guess.