A lot of Bethesda content is quasi-procedural. TES and FO maps are littered dungeons/encampments that are pretty formulaic. Re-used passage & room artwork, generic antagonists, just little opportunities to engage in combat mechanics. And they respawn periodically, so you can go back and get your mechanics fix.
Everything in BG3 is scripted. There are no random encounters, wandering mobs, or replayable dungeons. Everything in the game is there intentionally, and everything in the game has been hand crafted.
And trading partial shares. Don’t need to have $150 to get a whole share of GOOG or AAPL; instead of putting $20 in a 0.5% savings account, it can go into an actual investment.
Almost all of GOP’s “reforms” for social security start with people 50 or 45 years old at their inception. It’s a lot easier to get current reitrees to reduce benefits for future retirees if you assure them that their own benefits are safe. But I agree that SS/MC will still be around, even if the purchasing power of benefits erodes substantially. It’s easier, and more conservative, to plan without SS, though, and retirement is so important that it makes sense to have safety factors at every step.
Yeah, but it’s part of the fantasy world they inhabit, and they make voting decisions based on their fantasy world. The fantasy world where liberals cast millions of votes on behalf of dead people (which everyone knows, but no one has ever talked about), can’t spend a week in NYC without getting mugged or gang raped, walk down a sidewalk in San Francisco without stepping in human feces, and where woke parents force their 8-year-olds to have gender surgery.
I wonder how many of these “nice but transphobic” people would revise themselves if they knew that even puberty blockers aren’t OTC, but require extensive therapy and professional counseling. I mean, it’s not a situation many people have direct experience with, so it’s easy to fall for fake stories. Of course, I also wonder how many of them don’t consider psychologists “real doctors” or psychology itself legitimate science.
If you want to disincentivize landlords through tax, it’ll be through income tax to directly reduce their profit. Take away the tax deduction for mortgage interest. Take away depreciation. It’s easy for most landlords to book taxable losses every year while generating positive cash flow.
Rent is always more than mortgage+insurance+taxes on equivalent property. The landlord has all the same expenses (and more) as a homeowner, passes them on to tenants, then adds expected vacancy and his profit on top.
The crash of 2008 is just 15 years ago. You could hardly give away properties in my neighborhood - there were multiple sales for less than the cost of my car. Those exact conditions may not recur, but speculators always, always overextend. The 15 years of continuous gains we’ve experienced since 2008 are historically unprecedented, so one might even guess that we’re due for a major correction. Maybe it won’t be for another 10 years, but there will definitely be a major housing crash “in our lifetime.” Unless, maybe, you’re already 80 years old.
Taxing property doesn’t really work, because landlords just pass those taxes on to their tenants. Even if you make a big differential between owner-occupied and rental property (and homestead exemptions are already common), there’s a huge base of people who are either short-term residents or lack down payment, and will rent regardless of how much of the landlord’s taxes they have to pay. You can make specific neighborhoods or communities unappealing to landlords, but that just makes them move across the street.
One of the things that makes rental property attractive is the massive leverage available to speculators. You can easily get 5:1 leverage on a property - i.e., you get the profits on a million dollar investment for just $200k cash. Interest on the loan is low, because it’s backed the the property, and that interest is tax deductible, and there’s many ways to disguise profits or offset them with management expenses. Maybe there’s things you can do in the income tax code to discourage property rental, but it’s not going to be taxing the property directly.
I feel like there’s two parts. On the one hand, Larian’s engine is fantastic and allows really creative and diverse approaches to their puzzles. There’s a number of fights that feel more like puzzles than fights, because they’re nearly impossible if you just go in spells blazing, but not nearly as threatening with a little preparation. They’ve honed that engine through DOS & DOS2, so it’s much more mature than you’d get if this were a pure derivative of BG1/2. The first time I lit Shadowheart up with Spirit Guardians and dashed her around a battlefield reaping the canon fodder…I actually giggled with glee.
Then there’s the storytelling. My journal is filling up with quests & side quests, but I don’t think any of them have been the “Kill 5 orcs,” “gather 10 blood moss,” or “deliver this McGuffin” variety. The NPCs you meet tend to reappear later and react differently depending on how their previous quest ended. I suppose, technically, that’s similar to going back to the same quest-giver, rising in their ‘ranks’ toward some prize, but it doesn’t feel the same. The NPCs, even the side-quest NPCs, feel like they’re woven into the overall narrative and it makes for a much more immersive experience.
I can’t imagine how much writing, animation, and voice acting had to be done to accommodate all the choices I won’t make. Even just the times some NPC voices my gender.
I kind of stopped paying attention to side quests. In a lot of RPGs, I feel like they’re discrete, separate errands, and usually contained within the area where they’re given. BG3 side quests seem a lot more integrated, in the sense that I’ll often just happen along the next step in one as I pursue main quest. If not, then it may be because the next step is in the next Act. And some of them seem to be mutually exclusive.
Maybe because it’s my first play through, but I’m now in ‘if it happens, it happens’ mode, and I’m confident that there are enough opportunities for me to make different choices to have a substantially different experience next time.
I don’t think anyone’s seriously considered abortion a 50:50 issue in a long time. As far as I remember, it’s always been an extremist faction within the GOP, but a faction large and energized enough to dominate party politics. And it’s been ‘safe’ enough for mainstream GOP to play along with, because it was settled law protected by SCOTUS. Now that protection is gone, GOP politicians are going to have to decide whether courting those extremists in the primaries is worth the cost in the general.
I feel like someone generally familiar with RPGs will be fine with the basic mechanics of BG3. It’s my first exposure to the 5e rules - bonus moves, reactions, feats, etc - but they mostly make sense. I may not have combat as optimized as someone with tons of practice, but it works most of the time.
Long term character building, though? When I was presented with class specializations at L3, with nothing to tell me about what they get at L4, 5, 6…those choices seemed completely arbitrary. Being able to respec on the cheap if you feel like you’ve made a mistake is nice reassurance.
OTOH, making choices of specialization and feats without a long term plan, but entirely on the immediate circumstances and whim, feels a lot more like how I planned my IRL degree, job, home… So, immersion?
I’m looking forward to the return of games so big they merit physical distribution. Like, the first terabyte game that comes on its own SSD - plug it into a spare M2 slot or a USB3 port and go.