Derek

"Button Bloat, BUTTON BLOAT!!" You cry. You cannot handle 1/10th the struggle of a Frontline commander.

The main difference between Elon Musk and Sam Altman: Elon Musk actually changes the world for the better and saves lives: Tesla accelerates clean energy and has saved thousands of lives on the roads. SpaceX is making humanity multi-planetary. Starlink connects and saves millions in wars and disasters. Neuralink gives hope to the paralyzed. He pays a very heavy personal price for it — endless attacks, lawsuits, media smears, and a broken personal life. Sam Altman? He mostly just takes. His technology (ChatGPT) still struggles to genuinely help people with real problems — hallucinations, lies, and fabrications instead of real answers. He turned OpenAI from “for the benefit of humanity” into a profit machine. And the suspicious death of whistleblower researcher Suchir Balaji, who was highly critical of OpenAI, still raises serious unanswered questions. One builds the future and saves lives. The other takes the money and plays games.

Orion and Sirius: a rivalry for the ages. Which side will you choose? Coming to the Origin System in Jade Shadows: Constellations this June.

Crimson Desert - 100 HOURS REVIEW CURRENT VERDICT - 9.5/10 - MUST-PLAY Crimson Desert is a game that I have been obsessively playing since its launch last month. I have about 115 hours in, and I am nowhere near completion. This is my experience so far: Crimson Desert has changed a lot since last month. In a lot of ways, it’s a very different game from the one I played on release, and it’s a very different game from the one I played 2 weeks ago. It has had one of the most rapid update cycles I've been witness to. Core mechanics are being overhauled entirely at what feels like a weekly basis, so this review probably won't be fully accurate to what the game is in another month. Keeping that in mind, Crimson Desert is one of the finest open-world games I have ever experienced. The entire highlight of Crimson Desert and why you should play it is the open-world exploration. Simply put, this is one of the best open worlds ever created. The world of Crimson Desert feels like a modern take on Skyrim, where the scale of the world feels almost impossible to even believe. In my 115 hours, I have only focused on Pailune and Hernand, only two of the five regions in this game. Overall, they make up about 40% of the map, which at 115 hours feels impossible to believe, but this game has entire cities and unique environments, biomes that I have not seen yet myself. Apparently, one of the regions even has a train. I could not praise Pearly Abyss's work more on this open world. I have not been this impressed with exploration since Elden Ring and Red Dead 2. On the gameplay front, Crimson Desert started off confusing. The controls take a long time to grasp, and it’s an overall strange layout as this is a game that wants to allow you to do everything, which means there are many button combinations that you need to keep in mind. Thankfully, this got pretty simple, and the controls feel natural about 8 hours into the game. The combat is a blast. It is very responsive and has an almost "Dynasty Warriors" energy as you take on what feels like hundreds of enemies at a time in these major forts and just cut through them. Where the combat stumbles is in the boss fights. The problem with the boss fights is that the parry windows are generally too short. Too often, these boss fights feel more like a battle of attrition of how long you can tank damage and spam heals until the boss falls rather than having to learn their combos and parry windows. The other side of gameplay and in my opinion the true highlight is how Crimson Desert handles itself outside of combat. Pearl Abyss has clearly taken notes from Red Dead 2 in particular in this aspect, with a massive focus on immersion. Everything is interactive. Just existing in the world and walking around feels immersive and real, like you truly exist in these cities and countryside. If you know me and my taste in games, you know I absolutely adore when games try to be as immersive as possible, and Crimson Desert fully allows that. I start a typical day off at camp, first cooking to prepare for future battles, checking in on the camp members to ensure I've sent everyone out on missions. I check my farm, then the barn, then get on the horse to find a new adventure. Sometimes I'll stop at town to get water from the well in order to use it for cooking later, grab a few quests, maybe a bounty, and head out. There's a crime system here, and it works great. I often find myself robbing houses at night in order to make more money and get better gear. Other times I go out lumbering or fishing. There is a huge variety of things to do in this game, and it frankly feels like you can never run out. Pearl Abyss has managed to combine the immersive life-sim level gameplay of Red Dead 2 with the infinite content feeling of Skyrim. It is as great as it sounds. As pretty much everyone who played the game knows, its biggest flaw is the story. While it eventually does get going and there are some truly great massive battles, I am now at Chapter 9, 115 hours in, and the game only now introduced a proper plot for its wider world and a real conflict. For most of the game, the story feels like it was an afterthought. Especially in its first 8 hours or so, where there is frankly no story, and you are stuck doing meandering fetch quests until the plot eventually gets going. I don't think this is an awful story, but it isn't a good one either. It kind of just exists. I personally wasn't too bothered by this, however, because everything else about this game, in my opinion, is spectacular. So bad writing has felt more like a small blip in the experience rather than a major flaw. I highly recommend speedrunning through to Chapter 4, which is when the camp system opens up, then forgetting about the main story until 70 hours later when you finish up Hernand and upgrade your camp to its fullest. Another flaw with Crimson Desert is the strange implementation of multiple protagonists. Kliff himself is the main character and what everyone will focus on for the entire game, upgrading his gear constantly, investing into skills. The problem is, Crimson Desert very randomly introduces 2 extra protagonists and locks them for the vast majority of the main story, then forces you to use them in major boss fights despite you having no time to upgrade their gear or ever have room to invest into them as resources are scarce. Crimson Desert has gotten so many patches, so quickly, that it’s likely they'll fix all my personal complaints very shortly as they did with the camera, for example, which was a major issue for me as it’s far too zoomed out and high up, feeling like mission control from space rather than a normal camera. Thankfully, they added camera customization in a patch, and now I have my RDR2-style camera. Overall, Crimson Desert's flaws are far too minor for me personally to complain much about. The exploration and gameplay are impeccable, with the best open world I have played in many years. This is a game that should not be missed. 115 hours in, and it somehow still feels like I've seen nothing of Crimson Desert. I still have more than half the game left to explore and see. And somehow, I am not even close to being bored yet. So I'll see you for my final review whenever I finish this game, likely over the 200-hour mark.