Do not cite the deep magics to me, I was there when they were written. I grew up on System Shock and Deus Ex, and that’s exactly why I found Dishonoured so hard to get into. Those other games gave the player a complete free choice in how to approach them, but Dishonoured doesn’t do that. It presents an apparently wide open field, but the moment you pick a particular path and set off down it, the game wags its finger and says “Oh no, not like that. That’s not how you’re supposed to play.”

There’s also a lot of stuff throughout the game about how the city gets more corrupted, more rats everywhere, that sort of thing. Some of this makes some stuff harder, some of it is just vibes. But all of it is the designers very noticeably wagging their finger under your nose for engaging with the mechanics they made and actively encouraged you to engage with.

I’d be happy with either option. If you’re going to punish the player for not doing perfect (eg, no kill) stealth, don’t tease them with a bunch of really exciting combat mechanics. If you’re going to include all the exciting combat mechanics, don’t punish people for using them.

I bailed on Dishonoured for one very specific reason; the morality system.

Dishonoured is, in my opinion a spectacular example of game design, and an equally spectacular example of how to break your game design by not understanding the way players interact with the tools you give them.

Dishonoured is a stealth game. It’s also a game with a superb combat system, and a really fun and exciting set of powers for the player to enjoy using. These things can, sort of co-exist, if somewhat uneasily. But then you add the morality system.

The morality system, in effect, punishes you for playing the game in a non-stealthy way. Or, more specifically, for playing with the wrong kind of stealth. The morality system wants you to ghost the whole game, slipping past every opponent without the slightest evidence you were ever there. But doing that means not engaging with most of the powers and any of the combat.

Having the option to follow a ghost playstyle is great. But when the game sets up a bunch of really fun mechanics, then punishes you for engaging with those mechanics in exactly the way they were designed to be engaged with, that just sucks.

Usually. Enter The Matrix was one of the rare exceptions. That game genuinely slapped. The gameplay was crazy fun; it took all the slow-mo coolness of Max Payne and added wall-running, super jumps and martial arts. The combat was lots of fun, and the story was all written by the Wachowski’s to tie in with the second and third movie, including actual scenes that they filmed as part of the process. They took it really seriously, to them it was an essential part of the story.

Obviously the whole Matrix 2 & 3 saga has some problems, it’s not the Wachowski’s best work (how could it have been, they had a plot for one movie that they were told to expand into two), but the game is still a really fun entry in their ouvre.

Short answer? You can’t.

Long answer; You can if you’re willing to basically devote the entire economic output of a large country to the problem.

Here’s the thing, putting aside cooling, the entire notion of a data-centre in space is insane. Falcon Heavy is about the most efficient launch vehicle we have right now, and it still costs $1500/kg that you send up. A fully loaded data centre rack can weigh around 1,000kg. Almost all of that weight is that actual hardware in the rack; y’know, the computers and hard drives that are the data centre.

So, sending a single rack to orbit costs $1.5m. A very small data centre might contain around 20 racks. The ones being used for modern AI workloads and the like are more in the 50,000 - 100,000 range. But even if we keep this tiny, super boutique, only for data too important to keep on earth, you’re still looking at $30m just to put the actual hardware into orbit.

That sounds OK, but that is only a tiny fraction of our costs. This is all going to snowball massively. On earth those racks are cooled by massive industrial HVAC systems that each have their own standby generator as well as the astonishing amount of power they pull from the grid. That works because they can circulate cool air around the racks, blast it out into the atmosphere, then pump in fresh air that you cool in the HVAC. You have none of that in space.

So instead you’re stuck with radiating heat through massive heat sinks with massive arrays of fins. And you have to get the heat from each individual computer, with all their really hot components, out to the heat sinks. That means you have to liquid cool every single component in this orbital data centre. Thousands of CPUs, thousands of hard drives, all liquid cooled. Then your liquid cooling has to run through unimaginably large heat sinks and radiators. At a wild guess I would bet that the total weight of all this cooling equipment (heat sinks are solid metal, and liquids are heavy and hard to fly into space because they shift around) would probably be a hundred times that of the equipment being cooled. So you’re talking about billions of dollars just in hardware to orbit costs, across thousands of launches.

And then you have to actually assemble everything. That means you need engineers who are also trained to work in orbit (so, very highly paid), and you need to get them up there. Since there’s nowhere for them to stay during construction, that means they have to go up, do a few hours work, and then come back down. Eight hour EVAs are not unheard of, so in theory your guys can do a full shift up there, but holy shit you have just invented the world’s most expensive commute by many orders of magnitude. It takes months to years to get a data centre up and running, and that’s one that doesn’t have all of these added complexities. Plus, working in space is really, really slow compared to working on Earth. You’re in a clumsy suit, wearing clumsy gloves, in an environment where nothing moves likes it’s supposed to and where you can never put anything down because it’ll just float away. Building something like this would take years of daily launches. You can’t just pre-build the components and send them up either, because everything is so ridiculously heavy that even a small chunk would exceed the weight limit of any launch vehicle we have today.

Oh, and going into space is really taxing on the human body, so you’d have to give those engineers lots of breaks, meaning you’d probably need to cycle different teams in and out for this whole thing, so that runs up your costs even higher.

And then what happens when something breaks? Liquid cooling needs constant maintenance, it’s very fiddly stuff. And hard-drives fail. Your average data centre will be swapping out a few drives every day. Even a small one is going to need a drive replaced every few weeks or months. Every time that happens someone has to go up there. You can’t just call Ted and tell him to hop in his Civic.

But we still haven’t gotten to the biggest problem yet. Power. Data centres use a truly staggering amount of power, between the computers and the cooling. Right now data centres, on their own, account for almost 5% of all power usage in the US. That’s fucking insane. So you need to somehow power everything you send up there. Powering things like space stations and communications satellites works because we build them to be very, very efficient. Even communications satellites, which have to process huge amounts of data, use between 1,000 and 5,000 watts. A single server rack, by comparison, can consume between 5,000 and 10,000 watts. So that’s 2-5 communication satellites worth of power for one rack. And we said that our absolutely tiny data centre needs twenty of those (and, again, I really need to drive home how small that is; that’s not a data centre, it’s a single room in a low-end corporate HQ). There is absolutely no way you’re going to strap enough solar panels to this thing to generate the kind of power it needs. Not without increasing the weight and construction time by another factor of one hundred. So now you need nuclear power of some kind… Which generates huge amounts of heat. So now you have to radiate that heat. Which increases the weight and construction time by another hundred-fold.

When all is said and done, we’re talking about high billions to low trillions of dollars to build a data centre that could fit in an apartment. Why? What could be possibly be worth that? Even if you were to make that argument that someone has data so valuable that it couldn’t possibly be kept on Earth, that still doesn’t make sense. On Earth you could, for a fraction of that price, bury that data in a vault deep underground or put it on an island or store it deep in the arctic where the environment makes it difficult to even approach (and solves your cooling costs). And in all of those locations, with that kind of money to throw around, you could hire a small army to protect it. Whereas in space, ultimately your precious data is just sitting there, basically unprotected. If it’s worth that much, then it’s worth it for a state-level actor with launch capabilites to send a few guys up to steal it.

This is a wild pipe-dream cooked up by silicon valley tech-bros who didn’t consult a single engineer in the process.

Edit to add: In the article the company behind this claims they’re going to use robots to do all the construction, and that it will be powered by solar panels multiple kilometres wide. Again, given everything I just said about the cost of putting that much material in orbit, vs the actual benefits, there is literally no way the economics of that works. Sure, you can knock out some of the costs I’ve listed, but you’re still basically taking the cost of a tiny data centre and massively amplifying it for absolutely no benefit. At best I suspect they’re just trying to raise their profile by making sensational claims.

Re: 4

Very, very common misconception, because of how often you see things/people in movies instantly freeze in space. But it’s just not remotely true.

The analogy the previous user gave is perfect; space is a thermos flask. It’s a perfect insulator.

To break that down a little more, you have to understand that heat moves in two basic ways; conduction and radiation. Conduction is when molecules agitate the molecules next to them. Radiation is when molecules give off electromagnetic energy.

The way a thermal camera works is that it sees the otherwise invisible infra-red light that hot things give off. That’s the radiation part of heat transfer. Radiation is, on the whole, a really slow, really bad way of moving heat.

Conduction is much faster, especially when there’s a big difference in temperature between the two mediums. That’s why you (average temp around 37C) can stand in a 21C room and feel really comfortable. You’re losing thermal energy, because the air touching your skin is colder, but you’re losing it at about the same rate your body naturally makes it.

But if you step outside into air that’s -20C, your temperature is going to start dropping very fast. There’s a much, much bigger difference in temperature now, so the heat transfer is faster. Also that air is probably moving because of the wind, which means the parts of the air getting warmed by the transfer from your skin are instantly replaced by fresh, cold air.

In space you have none of that. Just vacuum. There’s no molecules in vacuum to agitate. So aside from the very small amount you lose from radiation, heat just builds up. This is a huge problem for spaceships and satellites. They have to build in massive fins to help radiate heat away faster.

But it gets worse, because you know what radiates heat really, really well? The Sun. Which you are now exposed to, whenever you’re not directly in Earth’s shadow, with no atmosphere to absorb any of that incoming radiation. So the biggest problem for objects in space is rarely getting too cold, and far more often it’s getting too hot.

Introducing something that already has massive cooling requirements into that environment would be a total fucking nightmare.

No, the Firefox snap genuinely is awful. It takes forever to load and runs like ass.

I’ve been wearing Rayban glasses for years, but at this point I think I’m going to have to look for a different brand, because we’re very quickly going to get to the point where anyone wearing them immediately becomes suspect.

Best sanity system ever. Plenty of games have simulated characters going insane, but only Eternal Darkness had the sheer fuck you energy needed to simulate the player going insane.

If you dig that vibe, give Signalis a go. Incredible love letter to the horror classics, and an incredible game in it’s own right.

Riven is a significantly better game. It places you in a cohesive, well thought out world where everything feels like it has a structure and a logic to it, it makes exploring that world hugely rewarding, and it weaves the puzzles into the diagetic logic of the world in a way that feels seamless.

One of the very few genuine flaws in Outer Wilds is that it does a really, really bad job of ensuring players find the rumor map / discovery board. It’s such an essential feature, one that so often makes or breaks people’s experience of the game, and I’ve seen so many players express this exact same sentiment of “I had no idea what it was doing” only for someone to point out that they’d missed the rumor map.

And every horror movie should be ten minutes long and end with the kids taking one look at the spooky cabin, getting back in the car and driving back to their dorm.

The correct answer to this question is always Outer Wilds.

It’s a game that can be beaten in five minutes if you already know the solution. But the process of discovering that solution, and unearthing the incredible story around it, is one of the most unbelievable gaming experiences you will ever have.

It’s an absolute masterpiece and if you haven’t played it yet, you really, really need to.

Yeah, parrying needs serious work. I don’t think I’ve been able to make it happen even once.

Everwind is fantastic. Fixes just about every complaint I have about Minecraft, and I say that as someone who bought Minecraft back in alpha. There are things that could be improved, but even where I think there’s room for improvement the baseline always seems to be “It’s already better than Minecraft”. For example I really feel like the combat could do with a dodge mechanic and harsher stamina management, but that’s based on comparing it to stuff like Dark Souls. Even in its current state it absolutely clowns on Minecraft’s combat.

The artstyle is lovely, the building and crafting feels really good, the range of furniture and decorations you can build is massive, and you get to build and fly an airship. And that’s not an afterthought, it’s a core part of the game and feels really, really good.

This is an obscure one, and not high on most people’s lists, but my personal favourite PS2 game is Steel Lancer International, a game where you build mechs and take them into arena battles in a post-apocalyptic future.

+1 for Burnout 3. That’s a series that desparately needs a new entry.

Zone of the Enders was phenomenal.

Ah yes, single player open world Helldivers.

Absolutely amazing game. Just Cause kind of captured some of the same energy, but never quite there. There’s nothing quite like being able to deploy cluster bomb strikes at will.