Maybe one day I'll show my game collection
How many copies of GTA V is there now?
I bought V four times.
30% of the human population is lost in WW3 according to Memory Alpha wiki pages but precisely which parts of the world that includes can be tricky to clarify. Many places were supposedly nuked like Washington, New York, and Paris but it also mentions most, if not all, major cities were destroyed and all governments too.
All of the Dax hosts were still Trill, and it was issues with the sixth host, Joran, that led to Sisko learning about the lie being told about just how many Trill could actually be Joined.
The fact that Jadzia was preceeded by Curzon was immaterial to the symbionts as the whole point of Joining was to maximise experiencing life. Which was also the reason resuming relationships was so taboo as it didn't add anything. The one time this gets explored in depth was the lesbian relationship and kiss the show had with Jadzia, while Ezri hooking up with Worf felt more like bad writing and drama for the sake of drama given how many episodes it lasted. Dax and Khan was a one off for the contained episode and while debatable how much it gets used as the tip of the wedge, didn't hang around longer than it should.
The show could have simply added a non binary Trill if that was the entire intention but for some stupid reason they decided to go that extra step and make the host human as well!
The whole episode where a rejected candidate steals the Dax symbiont shows just how significant the whole Joining process is to some Trill and modern writers thought it a good idea to canonise "permanent" non Trill hosts?
Idiots. Actual idiots.
I miss 10 minute Black Talon runs. Was great for getting slottable weapons and armour for companions back when that was kind of needed.
The change to the companion system was one of the few good things the updates brought, no more needing to bring comps you actively despised or wanted to space because it was your only healer option. Looking at you Malavai Quinn!
Stellaris does lean hard on various Sci-fi references throughout the game, like with Babylon 5 and the Fallen Empires. The awakening notification even has "Giants in the playground" as the confirmation button, a line said by Sheridan when discussing the opposing Vorlon and Shadow forces, as well as the neutral option to the War in Heaven forming/leading The League of Non-Aligned Worlds, also from B5.
The actual crisis events also match up with other themes like the Prethoryn and Tyranids as invading extragalactic fleets of organic ships whose only goal is to consume the galaxy.
Not what I was intending with my post. If someone is buying it I would only recommend they do so when the various parts are on offer in some way. The base game is frequently free in some deals/bundles and the actual DLCs can be as much as 75% off, especially on Xmas.
A good crew in TNG also had a diverse cast of different races
Keep in mind the character of Geordi La Forge is from Somalia. Ask any normies what race "the engineer from TNG" was and you'd likely get the same level of stupidity that labelled Idris Elba as "African American" because that's all that matters to such superficial topics 🙄
One of the dumbest things in a Nu Trek show was some random non binary human character with a Trill symbiont. Clearly it was done because symbionts bond with both males and females which obviously means gender isn't important so the show needed a character where gender was both important AND not important!
The reason this is dumb however is that the reason there are so few Joined Trill is that there are so few symbiont. It's literally as simple as a numbers game.
A DS9 episode even reveals that the Trill government statement about the very low compatibility amongst the population is a lie and far more of the population could in fact be Joined. The lie is perpetuated to prevent civil unrest from those who want to Join. The fact a future episode then has some random human Join, and even call attention to how normal humans can now successfully Join since Riker had to temporarily for plot reasons and prolonged exposure would have killed him, completely glosses over the point about how the Unjoined Trill population would respond to this where symbionts were being Joined with non-Trill over their own population!
It would literally cause a civil war! 🙄
I get the feeling someone saw Cavill's attempts to minimise damage during The Witcher then asked "What show can we do with him that has swords but isn't Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones?"
Shall wait and see how this goes for now.
Alien Nation
RIP James Caan from last year who played Shithead/the human in the original movie.
I bought Stellaris and Endless Space 2 at the same time as both were going dirt cheap for what content existed at the time. Ironically I went with Stellaris as I didn't really like how ES2 felt and since then Stellaris has slowly been creeping towards playing like ES2 🙃
Would recommend buying the game and DLCs when they are on offer. As OP mentions it's almost $300 for everything atm and tbh even though I've been playing myself for about 5 years I still don't have some of the most recent big story DLCs. In part because I always wait for them to go on offer, but also because most when released are buggy messes and break the game. The most recent being Paragons that revamped the leader system and currently significantly lowers the number of leaders players can use.
While a major reason for this may be to put a soft cap on performance by imposing penalties if you recruit too many leaders, the problem is with four categories you will hit the caps very quickly and then end up in a situation where you have a potentially galaxy spanning empire that can only support a dozen named leaders across your fleets, planets, science facilities, and armies. Effectively having one Sci-fi show worth of main characters in charge of everything in the galaxy with no minor or supporting characters at all.
Edit: this does of course get modded by a lot of players to simply raise the new cap.
Steam banned it and possibly nexusmods IIRC. You can download and use any mod that exists but Steam is a simple subscribe click which then automates the implementation. For more "freelance" options you need to do that manually and tbh it's not complicated, but it might be enough to put off the more casual players.
they just redid the human portraits to make them look better
The problem with that wasn't just the new models being criticised, it was that Paradox also removed the original human portraits as well. They backtracked and brought the original option back alongside the new one, but it's still a shitty practice to remove content from a game.
Using several past WoW expansions as an example, and probably the current one, the concept of OP "Ooo, shiny!" to market new features has been done in Wrath of the Lich King, Mists of Pandaria, Legion, and IIRC in Dragonflight where new classes were added in to the game.
Wrath was the first expansion to add in a new class, the Death Knight. It had 3 specs: Blood, Frost, and Unholy, and originally all 3 could Tank or Dps depending what abilities were picked because the talent trees weren't nerfed to shit back then. While nowadays Blood is the Tank spec in Wrath the best pick for a DK was 2h Frost tanking, something they don't get to do now because Frost is now the dual wield spec while Unholy is the 2h dps spec. DK tanks were next to impossible to kill. If you died it was probably because you fucked up something special, like falling off a mountain. Even later on a well played Blood DK could out last his entire raid group if done properly however that starts to require actual player skill and the issues here are more to do with the inherent class designs.
Then came Monks in MoP who were literally broken as fuck. The healing spec could outperfom dps in damage and was colloquially referred to as "Fistweaving" rather than 'Mistweaving' as it was actually called due to using water themes.
Legion added in Demonhunters which could both Tank and Dps. So they were amazing at both.
In these cases subsequent expansions toned/nerfed these classes down but in their original content they were that OP literal idiots could play them and still do exceedingly well. Much like Hunters and Warlocks in TBC who were so badly designed single button pressing was all you needed so groups filled with any idiot who decided to roll one 🙄 the term "huntard" existed for a reason.
The current expansion, Dragonflight, added in another new class, Dracthyr, who could either dps or heal. Because they are the new kids on the block they are both front and centre at ongoing events as well as class performance because the devs want people to play with the new toy.
Whatever happens next you can be sure the Dracthyr will be toned down to some degree to fit more in line with how other classes perform and if another class comes out eventually you can expect the pattern to repeat itself where the new shiny will be awesome for the duration of its expansion before being firmly resized and stuffed into a box of the devs choosing.
Stair muffins everywhere!