It’s available on game pass, if you have it.

I played it there so much that I figured I owed it to the devs to actually buy it on Steam, and I don’t regret it, had a ton of fun

NMS is one hell of a redemption story, a really amazing job at persevering to follow through on their vision.

There’s now a new candidate for the same thing, a game called Techtonica that just released this month and totally tanked.

In the early access builds, the game was the lovechild of subnautica and factorio, two of my favourite games ever. It had the gorgeous and eerie alien open world exploration and compelling storyline, along with all the conveyor/inserter and min-maxing goodness that I crave.

It had some optimization problems as you scaled up, though, and I suppose sales in the early access must have been quite bad. My guess is that, with money running out, they opted to release on consoles for that extra buck, and completely gave up on solving the optimization issues.

Instead, they chopped up the world map into “levels”, that you unlock by constantly feeding this elevator/drill thing.

This totally breaks the open world immersion, the sense of scale from the big map, the unease one felt when running through all those miles of cavern, the thrill of finding gorgeous spots out there or hidden loot…

Plus, the dialog is at times incoherent with the revised narrative/progression path, and the factory production chains are a mess and the math doesn’t work, the balancing is just awful.

I mean, it’s still a gorgeous game and worth playing, but it has the potential to be so much more :(

But that’s just a happy little accident. Gabe is too much of a good guy, so he actually built a good distribution platform that also pushes for improvements for the whole ecosystem (like the Linux thing).

When he’s gone, capitalism dictates that enshitification must ensue in order to squeeze out every single cent of short term profit, and we’ll be screwed.

Think of the poor shareholders!

I don’t know if this recaps the situation accurately, to be honest.

Sounds like the publisher is complaining about some article that’s trying to use the game as a reference on why early access can be a bad thing.

I don’t see how the gamers are an issue though. They will expect what you tell them to expect, this is something for the publisher to manage, and I don’t even think this is a problem for Manor Lords.

All of it just seems like news sites trying to come up with their clicks.

Not the companies. But some anonymous whistleblower? Sure

Because they didn’t come out saying they won’t enable ads. They just quietly renamed the toggle to say something else, and that is shady AF. Why are you trying to spin it positively?

Which to Nintendo, wouldn’t matter a bit.

The assholes managing these megacorps are in it for the buck. When they squeeze the final scraps of profit, they go do it somewhere else, having padded their bank accounts and their resume with tales of how they are able to extract maximum returns…

What the hell is this? A corp not trying to squeeze every single penny they can get out of an IP? Damn commies hope their next game flops so bad they’re back to living in their momma’s basements.

/S

It does a stellar job of creating innovations that maximize profits, just look at enshitification! A masterpiece in shareholder value.

I feel the same. I’m too traumatized by a couple of my playthroughs to play it anytime soon… But what a great game.

I was going to mention this game, +1.

Trying to desperately survive in a world that’s upside down, fighting the hopelessness and trying to survive just one more day and slowly realising the you’re just one day closer to death…

Man, it’s a really great game, but I can’t play it again anytime soon.

Depends on the kind of games you enjoy.

While not particularly about consequences of decisions, I highly recommend Frostpunk. It always feels like any decision is about trying to choose the less horrible one, but without ever knowing if it will work out or not. The atmosphere of that game is just superb.

Us Starfield player: you guys get to manage your inventories?

Maybe related with AMDs next gen console GPU being delayed?

I didn’t know the first one until I got it as one of epic free games and it blew my mind. I’m keeping this onw on my radar.