Great list! The only thing I’d add is to check with your credit card company if you plan to use it abroad. Some require you to notify them if you’re traveling, otherwise they may flag your transactions as fraud and deny them.

I started helping a friend with his first playthrough of Elden Ring and I’ve been completely sucked back in. I’ve got a couple new characters going now

My partner and I got an espresso machine earlier this year. It’s great, I haven’t gone out for a cup of coffee in months now

Don’t forget, the HD version will:

1. Look worse than the game with graphical mods
2. Break all existing mods

But fear not! They’ll just remove the original version from the store.

This + the occasional LAN party with the boys has gotten me through just about anything

I was feeling the same the other day so I did some digging. Apparently, “Hot” sorting was recently changed to take community size and activity into account in order to boost posts from smaller communities.

It’s not perfect, but in my experience it is a little more varied than active, or top x-hours

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3907

That’s a pretty good theory. It still skeeves me out though

Yeah, this is the part I can’t get past. WTF is Edward doing creeping around underage girls all the time?

And before that, Liam Neeson was the player character’s father in FO3.

Now just gotta find a store that keeps consoles unattended on the shelves…

Most likely, but The Reductress is a satire site so it could be from any time.

I can’t speak to the ripping of content, but you have to scroll pretty far depending on the subject to get a better result.

Searching “Soul of Cinder” on Google is all Fextralife, fandom, YouTube, reddit, ign/Gamespot/etc. Wikidot doesn’t show up until halfway down the first page and it doesn’t show up at all on duckduckgo.

The answer is probably to add specific sites names to my searches but I’m lazy

It’s pretty awful but it’s always the first search result for anything souls related. It’s bearable with an adblocker though

It’s the same with Nord. I have to pause my VPN any time I want to access Fextralife wikis

Right, but the point of the OP is that you don’t have to learn everything about something if you like it. You still can if you want to

I beat Dark Souls 3 this week and I hoarded embers the whole way. I had a stack of 60 by the time I got to Midir and Gael. I did finally crack into them when I realized that they were the only 2 bosses I had left. So, baby steps I guess

Also, since the main character is an audience insert it gives the author an excuse to expo-dump.

It’s not that I’m surprised. Personally, it’s that I felt the procedurally generated content in Skyrim and Fallout 4 was their weakest aspect. The quality, hand crafted content is why I enjoy their games.

I’ve been skeptical of this one since they announced the whole 1000 planets thing. I’m checking up on reviews and waiting for the general public to get their hands on it cause I just don’t really trust that they can make quality procedurally generated content.

Pay to win isn’t the right label, you’re just paying for access to the content and all games with expansions do that. The main issue for newcomers is how the content is broken up and sold. If you want access to all the content in the game then you need to buy

• Lightfall ($25 on sale, $50 normally)
• The Legacy Collection ($24 on sale, $60 normally)
• The Forsaken Pack ($7 on sale, $20 normally)

And if you want access to all the dungeons you’ll have to buy

• The 30th Anniversary Pack ($10 now, $25 normally)
• $20 for last year’s dungeons
• $20 for this year’s dungeons

And then there’s the season pass for $12

That’s over $100 even on sale, $200 at normal prices.

It’s just an enormous barrier to entry for newcomers and it’s really not clear what you’re even supposed to buy.

Source: I play Destiny 2 a ton and have tried throughout the years to get friends into the game with varying degrees of success

Oh God I hope award speech edits don’t make it over here