They could have tried making it, I don’t know, good maybe? The writing in the sequel is even more on the nose and the 4th wall breaking stuff was démodé already a decade ago. The companions were annoying and completely underdeveloped. The setting was kind of great so I find it sad that with so much money they barely improved upon the original beyond moar guns and slightly bigger (emptier) maps.
On the subject of treating compute like magic, as the author does:
People who grew up in the iPad generation cannot fathom understanding the intrinsics of anything beyond direct input - > output. For those privileged few, a pez is indistinguishable from a tiktok video, they only go as far as understanding that action - > dopamine. It’s a wild généralisation, but after 10y educating the “elite” is one I cannot refute with the data points I have.
Oh, Digital Foundry. I’ll see myself out, I thought it was an actual analysis. Even Tim from Hardware Unboxed is more thorough and knowledgeable than Alex…
And that’s even before mentioning the enshitification of DF to get exclusive hardware reveal videos out which 100% compromises any single word coming out of them. Member when NVIDIA threatened Steve from GN with loss of access if he didn’t basically become a mouthpiece? Well, DF never lost access, so the logical conclusion is…