I’m down for uh… one tiny part of this. I certainly think we could do to make games smaller, I’m sick of massive open worlds and colossal play times, which seem like an astounding amount of developer time to make swathes of stuff that ends up so soulless that I don’t want to play it.

More focus on fundamentals, shorter, more meaningful campaigns with well executed gameplay and ideas would be wonderful, because we’re rapidly finding the limits of every studio on earth trying to make the “forever” game. Players only have so much time.

The best recent example I have is Mario Kart World. It’s a marvellous game, wall and rail grinding are amazing, the tracks are some of the best in the franchise, it’s fantastic. But you can tell a massive amount of effort and years went into the open world, which uh… actively makes the game worse? Free roam is fun for an hour or so, but I have no idea why I’d want to do it with friends, and the game shoves its 200+ “intermission” tracks down your throat constantly. Time trials are the best mode in the game, because it’s the only real way to consistently play the excellent tracks enough to actually unpack and learn the shortcuts and tricks that are afforded by the game’s deep new mechanics. I feel bad that the team wasted so much time on something the community begs for better ways to avoid.

Honestly, the delays have increased my hype more than decreased it. I’m not one to obsess over a release, I’ve played other things and enjoyed them in the interim, so I really have no resentment for the long dev cycle.

Lately my habits have been to try to avoid games for a couple months to let them get polished up anyway (I recently regretted picking up DOOM TDA at launch after they reworked combat across the whole game, and that would’ve been a better first playthrough experience). Team Cherry is a team I know can use time well like that, in fact, HK did get broad balance overhauls before I discovered it. They also added an astounding amount of well integrated post-launch content, so I’m excited to see just how much they’ve managed to create and polish Silksong with all this time, and will feel comfortable playing at or close to launch now due to these delays.

Bit of an odd answer, but for me (and my wife), the last piece of the puzzle was really budgeting. The invisible, constant financial stress is a lot, and adds to that feeling of “pretending” when you’re not even sure if buying groceries will cause a bill to bounce, let alone hanging out with friends who always seem to comfortably have the money to do whatever it is you’re doing.

It’s been several years now (early 30s, started budgeting in late 20s), it took us a while to figure it out and progress was slow, but I can “see the line” now, towards retirement, towards home ownership, we have no more credit card debt (just student loans left, which we’re working on), and we budget “fun money” that I save up to make big purchases like a 7900XTX without any guilt or credit.

We’re also having our first kid soon, and at least financially, I’m not stressed about it at all, which would’ve been impossible in our twenties. Getting our financials in hand and headed in the right direction has just done massive work in helping me feel like I know what I’m doing, and that our life is actually getting better rather than stuck in place.

I’ll give two answers to this question, from the perspective of a Christian reading the Old Testament/Torah.

Wouldn’t it be effective to convince followers of a religion if a religion could accurately predict a scientific phenomenon before its followers have the means of discovering it?

This is interpretative, but if there is a God, he seems big on free will. Why give humanity the option to sin in the garden at all? Why not just reveal himself in the sky each morning? Why even bother creating a universe that can be explained without him? There’s an abundance of easy ways God could make himself irrefutable, and yet in the Bible he makes us “in His image”, and offers us choices like that tree in the garden.

Furthermore, why even create us to sin in the first place? My interpretation of the Torah is that God is big on relationship, and that free will is a key part of that. Just like a human relationship based on a love potion is kinda creepy, and a pale imitation of something real, it seems like God doesn’t want to be irrefutable.

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I think that’s the more relevant answer to your question, but I’ll also give the only example that comes to mind of the Bible seemingly imparting “scientific knowledge”, which is to look at the laws around “cleanliness”. Someone else already mentioned some “unclean” animals, but if you read more, they pretty consistently seem like good advice around bacteria. Some examples of times you need to “purify” (essentially take a bath) that seem like common sense now:

• being around dead bodies
• touching blood that’s not yours
• having your period
• etc.

Reading this as a modern person aware of germs, many of these “laws” seem like they would have kept the death rate of faithful Jews a lot lower than their neighbours in that day.

Wait… they’re doing rebate checks? I thought these tariffs were supposed to magically cover the overwhelming budget deficits? And how exactly will they do that when it’s being distributed as free money?

Literally trying to bribe their terrible ideas into being popular, while blowing the deficit out even further. 600$ will finally convince Americans their economy is doing well and isn’t barrelling towards utter catastrophe at mach speeds. Astounding work.