Crazycrab

Exactly. As @Crazycrabmentioned, open world games requires lots of time to complete. You need to time to explore the surroundings and environments. Where as, games having linear missions after missions, takes less time to complete. Still, I think 12 hours is insanely short period for completing any game. 😆

You mean the poster of Attack on titan? Well, that is not an open world game. That's may be the reason why someone could easily complete the game. But if given me the game, I would have taken almost a week for that. I don't play games just for the sake of completing it. 😆

For open world games 12 hours would be pathetic of course and for online games it's pretty much infinite/as long as you can be bothered. For a single player, linear, mission by mission based designed game 10 - 12 hours is fairly substantial.  Most games like that are around 6 to 8 hours for a single playthrough.  The Last of Us is about 12 hours and I certainly wouldn't describe that game as short or easy!

We had to put Bean Dip down last night. He was completely unable to use his hind legs from what we were told. So we cut our St. Louis vacation short and came home early. I haven’t spoken or been able to form a single thought in my head. But this one is worse than when we lost Gypsy. With Bean, it was a conscious decision made to intentionally kill him.
I don’t know when or even if at this point I will be back. Losing Gypsy was extremely devastating. The role that we played in losing Bean Dip, was more than my mind has been able to handle. By the time my girl came out from the vet office, I had my .357 in my chin, and was starting to squeeze the trigger. She got to me first and wrestled the gun away from me. I wish she hadn't. I wanted to go with Bean. I still do. I just can't think at the moment. We had him since he was a puppy. He was around 11 years old. I remember crying uncontrollably the whole way home from St. Louis, but nothing else.
So this is definitely a temporary goodbye, and potentially a permanent goodbye. I don't know at the moment. Obviously the YouTube channel is on hiatus for now, assuming it ever starts up again.
 
 

I don't buy games based on what perspective they are in, I actually can’t imagine why anybody sane would.   Some would probably argue that shooters are better from 1st person and action games that use more melle are better from 3rd but that depends on how the game is designed WITH the perspective, not the perspective itself.

I seen the trailer on the recent PlayStation Showcase and it looks pretty decent, sort of a cross between Bayonetta and NieR: Automata but certainly nothing particularly ground breaking.
 
 
Much like @Shagger I don't see much evidence of the controversy your talking about.  Just a few comments that the character design is generic and... It absolutely is.    Don't believe me, check out this reaction video and pay particular attention to what is said at around 7 and then 35 seconds in:
 
 
At 10 seconds - "Oh... I recognize her, why do I recognize her?"
 
At 35 seconds - "Why does she look so familiar?"
 
I'll tell you why, it's because it's same cute, sexy, slim supermodel we've seen a million times before, the very definition of playing it safe.  THAT'S what some people including Alex from DF are being critical of.  Not because the design is sexy, but because it's generic and uninspired.
 
Personally I don't really give a shit.  If a poster for 13 year old to jerk off to is what they wanna do then fine.  They could ship the collector's edition with a bottle of her bath water and unwashed panties for all I care (I'm not sure how they would achieve that but whatever). What I don't get is why you and others in a certain corner of the internet have such a problem when others say they want something different?  Why does it always have some kind of lefty political agenda?  They keep arguing for the freedom of creative design for developer's, yet when they exercise that right to make characters "less attractive" they throw their toys out the pram!
 
I guess what I'm try to say to everyone who are making complaints about Thor being to fat, Aloy being to ugly, the main character from Project EVE being to sexy or any other design from any other game you could apply any of these bullshit arguments to is...
 
 

In case you wanted some further insight into this from a very reliable source, here's a GameSpot interview with British Powerlifting Champion Darren McCormac.  He says and I quote "Like it or not, God of War's Thor is the peak of male performance".
 
https://www.gamespot.com/amp-articles/god-of-war-ragnaroks-thor-is-the-peak-of-male-performance-powerlifting-champion-says/1100-6496246/
 
I've no issue with Chris Hemsworth or Hollywood's interpretation of Marvel's Thor, it's reasonably accurate to it's own source.
 

 
 

 
But Marvel's Thor is NOT the Norse Thor, it never was.  I appreciate that Santa Monica Studio's have gone back to Thor's Norse roots for the design, which I think looks totally badass in its own way.
 
I'm really tired of this kind of "It's not hot by the unrealistic standard set by Hollywood therefore bad" idiocy.  The same thing happened with Aloy when the Horizon Forbidden West debuted.  Does anyone know what a human being looks like anymore?
 

 
Apparently some people just want their characters to look like genetically perfect freaks.
 

 
Jezz... What the fuck is wrong with humanity!

Actually to honest most depictions of Greek gods seem to have abs...
 

 
...but that's not the point.  The point is as stated by the OP is that the Norse Thor had a belly.

For example in GTAV 90% of the map you drive through once and that's it. Yet how many thousands of hours go into designing those parts? Only for the player to pass through it once on their way to a poi. What makes exploring fun is interesting POIs with intriguing lore and artifacts, or actually unique loot items. But since loot now comes from lootboxes and paid transactions, exploration has lost one of its biggest draws.

Couldn't agree more with you more.  I think that is by far the biggest problem with open world games right now, their getting to big. They put areas of interest between miles and miles of mostly empty space.
They need to do what games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Skyrim did, which is make the best use of the space that it's got.  When you make your map dense and effective it doesn't need to be massive.  At no point when playing these games did I ever feel it was "to small", despite the maps being a fraction of the size of Zelda BOTW or some of the more recent Assassin's Creed games.  These titles (BOTW especially) frustrated the hell out of me at times because of their oversized maps.
It's like most of these devs have this obsession with making their game world's as big as possible as if it's a competition on who's got the biggest dick.  It needs to stop and they need to back the fundamentals of what makes exploring an open be world fun... because it's NOT size.

I think the biggest problem with open world games, is that they are cardboard cutouts. Nothing is functional, nothing is interactive. They all just go for size, instead of quality. I think anything larger than GTAIV is pointless. Instead of making the world bigger, it should be made interactive, where every building is explorable, and has a function, even if it is not relevant to your quest. I find it immersion breaking that in every open world game only 1 in a hundred buildings can be entered into, and even there the only accessible room is where you have a mission objective. Cities should have working mass transit systems, and every vendor and shop should be real where you can actually buy food or something. I think with ai technology you can easily generate random NPCs with proper spoken lines without having to involve writers or even voice actors.
Current open world games all feel like walking around a movie set instead of a real living breathing environment.

Why would they need to get bigger? I've had 10 times more fun in GTA3 and Vice City than in GTAV, despite the map being only a fraction of the size. What you ask for is not feasible, and not even necessary. And the exact mentality while we get big but pointless open world games devoid of meaningful content.
As for being able to destroy cities, see Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. You can literally level everything in that game, and it's one of the most underrated open world games I've seen.

Honestly most of the time I barely notice.

Honestly most of the time I barely notice.

That's the main reason I never got into them, they were so fumbling and awkward.  Thankfully the latter games improved on this dramatically.

The old Tomb Raider games were particularly guilty of this. The jumping mechanic was so awkward because you had to line up a jump perfectly - one degree off and the jump will fail.

The best way to learn is with someone who can teach. That said, the best place is either at your home or theirs. Wherever the both of you feel comfortable. A decent teacher wont gouge you for lesson payments, but you will have to pay a fair price.
If you practice for just an hour or two daily between lessons, and apply yourself to it, you could learn to play rather well in just a matter of a few weeks. Practice more, and you could learn to tear that bass up.

I'm sorry about your uncle passing. There are tutorials on YouTube and also there are sites like Skillshare that can help you as well.

I figured I'd just throw this out there because my uncle recently passed away and amoung his things was a bass guitar I gave him some years back that got passed back to me.  I try playing years ago but never got very far.  I also get an electro-acoustic guitar that belonged to his late son.  After looking through some local classifieds I found a pretty decent 1980's amp for £20 (pictured).
 

 
So I've got the gear but you think is the best place/way to learn?  I'm basically starting from beginners level again.

I figured I'd just throw this out there because my uncle recently passed away and amoung his things was a bass guitar I gave him some years back that got passed back to me.  I try playing years ago but never got very far.  I also get an electro-acoustic guitar that belonged to his late son.  After looking through some local classifieds I found a pretty decent 1980's amp for £20 (pictured).
 

 
So I've got the gear but you think is the best place/way to learn?  I'm basically starting from beginners level again.

Hardware fails, it's the unfortunate reality of technology.  I think you wound up with two bad consoles, but that is not indicative of the quality of the PS4, necessarily.  It's unfortunate both of them have failed you, and unfortunate you had to do a drive swap, but sadly not unheard of in the realm of hard drives, especially platter-based drives with moving components.  That's why SSDs and nvme's in particular have been on the rise for a decade or so.  They're just less likely to fail.  I hope you have good luck with this new drive in place!

Wow that sucks!  I wouldn't blame anyone for nervous then especially with such an expensive card.

This one: New World was bricking EVGA 3090s but they had put out some patches to correct the issue. However, I am waiting on an update video of sorts to confirm that everything is running smoothly before I try to play New World on a 3090.
 

Honestly this is kind of a shitty quiz, half the questions don't seem relevent at all.
 

Oh I totally see narcissistic behaviour among gamers all the time, I dare say they seem to be narcissists most of the time!  Maybe it's a little unfair to point the fingers at just gamers for it, it's a pretty common thing in general these days.