u/phoenixgsu

Been using CachyOS for a while and recently got a new used laptop that came with windows on it. Promptly trashed that and wanted to try something different so I put Fedora KDE on it for a few days.

All I learned is that I missed CachyOS because it's what I'm used to now, and was getting frustrated with the package manager in it. Should I just stick to arch based distros? I was also considering tumbleweed because I like the rolling nature of arch so far.

No Guts No Galaxy did a really nice and long interview with Russ Bullock, the CEO of PGI. Russ goes through some of the different aspects of the past, current, and future state of the studio and MechWarrior as a series in terms of market performance. The cliff's notes are basically:

• The games industry is a bloodbath right now where a lot of people play the same game again and again, so new games have a difficult time being picked up.
• Gamepass may have had significant impact on Clans with around 100k players at launch.
• Clans was developed on a budget of around 10 million dollars. This is incredibly cheap for a AA game. Mercs in contrast cost 15 million dollars
• The "Glass Ceiling" of the IP: Bullock explicitly notes that despite various efforts over the years, the MechWarrior IP remains firmly nested in its core community. While it is highly loved, it struggles to break out into mainstream, massive-scale popularity
• Clans underperformed due to not breaking out of its niche and parts of the MechWarrior fanbase only buying it for Gamepass or just stuck with Mercs because they were satisfied enough
• MechWarrior fans who think it's a competition between Clans and Mercs are a detriment to the series because supporting both means that both get sufficient development resources
• Because Clans underperformed, there is less convincing reasons for EG7 to fund a new standalone game. Currently, PGI is tasked with making DLCs for Mercs and potentially Clans.
• With the original team, after Clans released, Russ envisioned that the team might pivot to a MechWarrior 6: Mercenaries that combined all the tech and features from Clans and Mercs into one single product. Due to Clans not selling well enough (for reasons listed above), they instead had to scope down and managed to put out DLC7 and DLC8.
• This also meant that a MW6 is not in the cards at the moment because players have shown that they are satisfied with what they have in MW5 Mercs and it uses the UE5 cinematics from Clans.
• DLC7 and 8 for Mercs were more expensive to produce than DLC1-6
• Russ confirmed that they are working on a DLC9 for Mercs. Not sure when to expect this - either late this year or early next year is my guess. Clans DLC is "neither confirm nor deny" and some smiles for what it's worth
• Beyond the DLC plans at the moment, they are having design meetings to toy with different ideas - such as Battlefield-type of MWO but that doesn't really fly at all due to current market conditions and a hard no by EG7. Russ' best idea that would be the most cost-effective is a sort of MechCommander strategy game that uses what they have in Clans as a base and further down the line have some sort of standalone strategy game.
• But this all depends on what EG7 thinks and how much they are willing to fund a new standalone game that would also require a lot of investment.

What the title says. 60k+ in the bank for a down payment. Found a perfect house for myself and family, 5 minutes from work, the right size, features, everything. Agent can only get me a showing at 4:30 on a Friday. We go look at the house and it's perfect. I want to make an offer on it but the complication being I just had to purchase a used car this week because my daily driver finally died. Agent suggested that I needed to speak with my loan officers that I had already gotten a pre-approval from, so I called after looking at the home. No answer. I leave a message. I call again Saturday morning and leave another message. They call me back while I'm busy with something else and miss the call. Call them back no answer. Someone else got an offer accepted on the home today. Feeling devastated right now because nothing else I have looked at in 2 months comes close to checking my boxes.