I mean… speaking concretely, sure, they’re biologically human, but… when delving into the abstracts, this is at least highly debatable…

The increased accessibility of SM1 most definitely helped. To be very honest, the thing which got me into 40k was the excellent Dawn of War series. Not only was it one of the first fully 3D RTS games, but every one up to and including the two Dawn of War II titles are absolutely brilliant strategy games (with II being closer to Kill Team with reinforcements, granted).

Heck, I still play Dark Crusade regularly, one of the tightest and most enjoyable RTS campaign modes I’ve played to date!

I’m sorry to say, but I disagree. I remember older people having been more respectful ever since I became aware of the world around me, even those only slightly older than myself.

I used to hang out with the “older kids” during high-school, Seniors and beyond, and these groups have been calmer and more polite, even when out drinking and doing stupid things.

On the flipside, the generations immediately after mine started behaving like… well, like animals early on… I still remember entering a 6th grade class while I was in the 8th and witnessing one of the students being hit in the head with a chair. I knew most of my generational peers and can tell you with absolute certainty that no such thing ever happened for as long as I was in school with them.

This extended throughout University as well, as the dorm in which I was staying got a lot (I mean, a LOT) noisier and more chaotic, to the point where the surroinding neighbours started calling the police pretty much regularly, because the freshmen were throwing mattresses and fridges out the window (literally). Edit to add: the worst we ever did during the three years I spent there (I’m talking my generation and those above us) was play the guitar a bit too loudly while hanging around in the hallway, sharing cheap beer.

And it goes for what I’ve said about neighbourhoods, too, the only people pumping music and constantly yelling at all hours are usually teenagers, students, or people my age. Most 40s and above can barely be heard after 10PM. I’ve never heard as much noise in the neighbourhoods in which I’ve lived throughout my life (I moved around a lot) until about 6-7 years ago. Everything got WAY worse starting with the tail end of the Lockdowns, too…

It is such a minor improvement, though. Especially, as you’ve mentioned, on a 1080p screen. And, sorry to say, but having to fill up 150+ Gigs of space for a 20-30 hour game is a complete waste with, as I’ve said several times, immensely diminished returns.

Let’s take UE5, for instance. Texture streaming has become necessary because we can’t afford to have a coherent texture map loaded in all at once, precisely because those textures are stupidly large. This causes so, so many performance issues, that I’d argue it’s been a downgrade even coming off UE3.

I’d rather have a smooth and OK-looking game which doesn’t require me to get a second SSD just to fit it all, than to face significant stutters every time I do a 180° turn because the engine is struggling to load Gigs of uncached textures, which, again, barely look any better.

Oh, no, with literally hundreds of books’ worth of backstory beyond all of the “your headcanon is valid” bits, we are well and truly beyond simple fluff.

Fluff is those 3 paragraphs of contextual flavour text you get on the back of a board game box.

Very much, yes! Chaos is the clearest, most stable faction in the entire lore in terms of characterisation and intent!

Honestly, I think the ambiguity behind the Imperium’s portrayal stems from a sort of pandering to the popularity of the faction itself, maybe even to blunt the sharpness a bit, make it more accessible to new inductees. Easier to sell a “slightly Theo-Fascistic” galactic empire than “we need to sacrifice literally thousands of people marked as Other to a corpse and, yes, corpse starch is exactly what it says on the tin. Oh, and we’ll need to lobotomise about 10000 of you because our biotoxin planet-wiping nukes need polishing.”

It’s a pity, because that’s exactly what drew me into 40k to begin with, that feeling of “wow, this stuff’s beyond horrific, my morbid curiosity is tickled seventy shades of pink!”

Honestly, and surprisingly, it’s the older people who have the most decency nowadays, from what I’ve seen … A lot of people around my age (30-ish) and many, many younger than me seem to be exhibiting something akin to sociopathic tendencies.

I’m not talking about politics or other such grand scale stuff, I’m talking day-to-day interactions. More and more new neighbors are demonstrating a complete lack of respect for others in their neighborhoods, playing loud music at ungodly hours, parading around in their overrevved cars with the bass thumping directly into your brain stem, younger people (30-40 and below) are far more impatient in traffic, far more self-absorbed, self-concerned, and egotistic. Of course, the older people aren’t all good, with outdated and regressive mentalities still flourishing among their ranks, but in terms of habitual decency, they’re in the lead…

These are all purely personal observations, of course, but I genuinely think an innate sense of respecting other people’s existence has been diminishing, if not entirely lost generation to generation.

These can, of course, all be tracked all the way back to the voracious consumerism engendered by Capitalism. The main symptoms are not clustered around older people, though.

Never asked!😕

This is why I either went with Chaos (during my adolescence, mostly outgrew them) or Aeldari. I mean, they aren’t that much better from a lore perspective, but at least they give everyone a chance to suffer equally…

Pretty much! I remember attending Sunday services several times at the behest of my grandmother, and half the time they consisted of mean gossip and fear-mongering.

Edit: of course, I’m not saying all Orthodox priests follow this script, but the Orthodox dogma in general seems to be VERY conducive to it…

Very! Too bad they’re not getting the attention they’d deserve. I’ve yet to properly digest ULTRABLISS, but Cyberfunk! before it is a masterwork! I still regularly listen to Love The Filth, too, I think it generated several new neural pathways in my noggin the first time I went into it.

Did several, the CPU is fine. Of course, it isn’t fine when a new game suffers from unpatched memory leaks and unoptimised respurce consumption, which has become the trend rather than the exception - looking at Cyberpunk 2077 for demonstrating to publishers that gamers will buy literally anything out of inertia.

I don’t doubt that! My point was that a 9th-gen i7 is beef enough to handle literally everything I’ve ever thrown at it, games or otherwise, yet some newer games with very few graphical enhancements (I’m talking not even ray-tracing) are so poorly optimised, that the hardware isn’t to blame. UE5 in general, for instance, is a hot mess, not in terms of graphical fidelity, but in terms of software bulk and resource consumption. And it really doesn’t look THAT much better when compared to UE4.

I’d rather just stop buying half-baked software than be strong-armed into expensive and unnecessary upgrades to play a game which was clearly rushed to market and is oftentimes incomplete not just from a software perspective, but also from a narrative and feature perspective.

Honestly, I find 4k in general to be entirely unnecessary. Anything above 1440p is redundant imho, as diminishing returns kick in very fast as the density increases.

Eh, Christian Orthodox traditions frown upon any sort of black magic and such, as Jesus’s divinity is held as THE factor for his performing miracles. Anything which isn’t Jesus-related is considered to stem from Lucifer.

Exactly! As long as a person lives and breathes, they are literally incapable of doing pure “nothing,” in my opinion.

Of course, I am aware that people who say others do “nothing” actually mean “nothing productive when considered within the context of the Grindset,” but screw that…

Yep. Popularity hasn’t yet died down, but having a bunch of closed-minded “anti-woke” (i.e. Fascists) people dogpiling onto 40k as though they’re begging to be Servitorised in the service of the Emp’rah is… dismaying, to say the least.

Worst part is, one can’t even have a conversation with such fans, as they instantly shoot down any and all subjects which they deem even marginally related to “woke stuff,” sometimes with disturbing zeal. How such an obvious satirical dystopia can be misinterpreted in such a way is beyond me…

This should be of interest to anyone with any degree of involvement in software/digital content in general, as gaming has set off multiple predatory trends throughout the industry (see tiered subscription models, preorders, online-only, FOMO purchases, etc.)

Plus this thing has been happening for a while with digital content. I’m thinking here of music, as Amon Tobin, for example, has a couple of songs which cannot be obtained legally, or even streamed online, due to copyright shenanigans (if I’m not mistaken, Nissan holds the rights to Easy Muffin and Four Ton Mantis since around the mid-2000s, as they were used in a couple of commercials…).

Everything The Zuck touches becomes high-risk to users…

This would have been a useful upgrade during Uni…