Came here to say this. The new player experience is an awesome upgrade in terms of being people into the world and narrative, but you're still thrown into an ocean of systems and content without a map. If you're not following a guide or piecing things together from the wiki it's very easy to get totally overwhelmed.

Always nice to meet another dad.

I would look at some of the tech demos for Unreal Engine 5 and its capabilities. We're at the point now where the engine itself, with sufficient art assets, can look photorealistic more or less out of the box.

Where this is still hardest- and likely always will be- is in faces, because our brains are so thoroughly wired to spot micro-expressions and subtle facial and body language as social animals.

That said, for a game like Doom or Path of Exile, sure, I think we're way past the point of diminishing returns. But for games where you're actually experiencing a story and interested in the relationships and characters involved? Things like Death Stranding, RDR, Cyberpunk 2077, or more recently BG3? All of those same nuances of expression can definitely add to the experience- it's the difference between a mediocre actor and a good or great one.

This right here is how you wind up with Tenochitlan in Texas.

Seconding this. Garuda has been great, all of the advantages of aur and bleeding edge with some fool proofing and ease of use features. It's like pop_os for folks who don't want to jump on the Ubuntu train.

This is awesome. It's great to see the modernization of the rule set for the setting, but the potential for cross pollination and romps through genres is amazing, or blends of the two like Shadowrun or 40k... I'm looking forward to it a lot.

This is 100% the way.

Pine hides their hobby-grade hardware behind in-development software. I owned both a PBP and PPP and much as I'd like to say otherwise, really can't say anything to recommend either.

Unless they're the oceangoing variety, in which case they just hide it under their sea beds.

Did FW ever solve the issue with battery drain during sleep? I owned one of the original batch and sold it because I couldn't effectively use it as a laptop. Other than that it was awesome, great build quality, loved the ethics of it and the form factor, but being unable to use it as a portable computer was a deal breaker.

I mained druid in pre, and while I enjoyed it enough, it was annoying having pretty much all of the build diversity locked behind unique rng. Similarly, while I enjoyed HotA barb, the fact that literally no other build is appealing makes that a non-starter.

So consequently I'll be going with necro for S1. Sever, spear, surge, and lance are all solid builds not locked behind uniques (though they can absolutely benefit from them), so I'm covered both from boredom and balance changes.