FermiEstimate

I felt the exact same way about the conversation you mentioned. I really liked the idea of the quest, but way they handled it just utterly drained all the stakes. And as you noted, it's weird to see a misstep like this after they nailed it once in Sumeru.

You get medals and requisition points from playing that you can use to unlock new stratagems, which includes everything from weapons to orbital bombardment. Medals get you new weapons, cosmetics, etc. You also find samples you can collect on missions, and these unlock permanent upgrades for stratagems. There are player levels, but these just unlock new titles once you get past the basics.

The battle pass equivalent is Warbonds, which include new weapons, armor, cosmetics, etc. Unlike most games, warbonds don't expire and you can find enough premium currency while playing to get them without too much trouble.

On the whole, new warbond weapons tend to be different rather than obvious upgrades. The default assault rifle you get stays perfectly viable throughout the game.

All I really know is shoot bug and if you aren’t getting friendly fired to hell and back you’re playing wrong

You've pretty much got it down, though you also shoot terminators.

OpenAI: "Our AI is so powerful it's an existential threat to humanity if we don't solve the alignment issue!"

Also OpenAI: "We can devote maybe 20% of our resources to solving this, tops. We need the rest for parlor tricks and cluttering search results."

If they're really lucky, they'll end up working for the Laundry only once. Residual Human Resources is a bad way to go out.

Charles Stross' Laundry series is basically this concept set in the present day: magic is a branch of mathematics, which means it can be computed and programmed.

It is perhaps worth noting at this point the series genre is cosmic horror.

FWIW, the shield backpack and either AMR or Quasar/EAT have served me well against bots, but I typically run light armor. I bring the grenade pistol to handle factories.

If you aren't already using it, there's never been a better time to get into the AMR now that they buffed the damage and finally zeroed in the scope.

Orbital stratagem timings make no sense, and are strictly a gameplay balance issue that *cannot* be realistic: the loading screen shows the first helldiver drops well outside the atmosphere and take several minutes to reach the ground, but turrets take 3 seconds to deploy?

I assumed this was because equipment can endure acceleration that would make a person pass out, or at least be combat-ineffective on landing. A trip from the Karman line to the ground in a few seconds would involve some deeply unpleasant G-forces...in opposite directions, back-to-back.

Come to think of it, this might explain why different gear has different call down times, as more fragile stuff might require a slower and (relatively) gentler drop.

Rockets seem more useful to me, since I can't count on tanks going where I want.

On the other hand, if the IRL combat footage videos are any indication, there might be black comedy potential with the AT mines I'm overlooking.

I'll preface this by noting that the sin of sloth has traditionally been understood to be a sin of omission, not just commission, i.e., you are insufficiently devoted to the things you ought to be.

Which means you could, in theory, have a (reflavored tiefling) devil paladin so devoted to sloth he works against evil causes. He's not interested in good per se, it's just that advancing the interests of good and traveling with a good adventuring party has the best ROI for failing to carry out his evil responsibilities.

Naturally, this has caused a fair amount of controversy among sloth devils, and there is a multi-century trial going on in the Hells about whether this ought to be allowed. This is not expected to be resolved in the foreseeable future because the advocates for both parties keep filing their responses well after petition deadlines expire.

Oof, I definitely did that once or twice.

It really does seem like they decided to bring this sequence up to introduce settlement building and power armor early. I get why they did it, but man, I do not think it ultimately has the effect they wanted.

Even if falling doesn't result in a complete kill, it would be neat if it at least resulted in a mobility kill. That has to be hard on the tracks.