The execs probably get away fine from it as well, even if the company sinks, they’ll end up high up somewhere else.

Online service games are just peak venture capitalism, grinding a small studio to dust and causing massive misery followed by unemployment for a 1/50 shot at making a money printer.

Subnautica is the perfect mesh of several things that work fantastically. It is a good survival game but with it’s upgrade and discovery based exploration limitations, it’s closer to a metroidvania than it is to Minecraft. The thing it does so well is sneak this past you, it’s a mystery driven metroidvania where the downtime is a resource gathering, based building game.

The closest game I can think of of that tried the same mystery metroidvania approach is The Forest, but this feels like one of the many many games from the post Minecraft and DayZ boom that has a certain scrappiness to it that somehow Subnautica absolutely sidesteps, and it’s all from just being a really well made game. The vibrant and often tranquil art style that lends itself to awe inspiring locations, and the level design and overall plot support eachother so well.

That said, I’m not in love with the amount of resources. A 4*8 gridded inventory puts me off a game from a worry of it to getting too grindy, and subnautica is a “I need to build another storeroom” kind of game. With a full survival game like Minecraft, which is endless and about exploration and progress alone, I know my storage will be unweildy and I can forgive it, but I’d have appreciated Subnautica finding a way to require less mindless resource hunting / busywork unless itnwas optional base cosmetics or the like.

My big three are Outer Wilds which at this point barely needs mentioning, Disco Elysium which seems to be getting more famous by the day, and Hollow Knight.

Outer wilds is an exploration game, and if the other comments haven’t been clear, that’s all I’m saying.

Disco Elysium is an unbelievably dense police procedural set in a unique setting, it can also be fantastic to explore without hearing much beforehand but unlike outer wilds, you don’t really need to beat yourself up for looking up the occasional piece of lore.

Hollow Knight is a souls-like metroidvania, so it’s ticking the Sekiro / Dark Souls box well.

I got about 90% through the game with only a rough understanding of the lore before ending up watching video essays about it and I was absolutely blown away. I don’t think the lore is overly difficult to find, and isn’t that complicated, but like FromSoft’s games, it’s not always delivered in a way that you naturally pick it up.

I play a lot of games with the “media literacy” part of my brain firmly switched off, because often games handhold you through the storytelling. With Disco Elysium, you know from the getgo that it’s a pay attention kind of game, but Hollow Knight, it sort of feels like a storyless flash game, and sometimes key lore is delivered in a beautiful set piece or creature design, so I only realised I should have been paying attention when it was too late to catch up.

I got no less enjoyment from it by catching up on the lore later though, these three games are absolutely my top three.

My final bonus suggestion is to bash out all the supergiant games in order, Bastion, Transistor, Pyre and Hades all hit the marks for me to sometimes just stop in awe and let myself get chills, although less tban the three above. I also think Pyre is one of the most overlooked games of all time.

There was the occasion dark environment on old mario kart games that ticked all these boxes and I never had an issue with.

On the D&D side, the final big adventure is releasing for D&D now before they refresh the rules starting in autumn. That adventure is high level and the main antagonist is Vecna, with him effectively having lieutenants of many of the other popular villains.

This isn’t just a D&D tie in, it’s an ad for Vecna: Eve of Ruin.

Yeah I absolutely adored the concept and would love.to see it picked up. I discovered it after pitching to a friend Tony Hawk’s Borderlands 4 and gradually realising the proof of concept existed.

I’ve had a (probably wrong) take on the ridiculous direction modern GPUs have gone, that isn’t just because of crypto mining, ridiculous profit margins and machine learning. From when I got into the hobby until the release of the PS5 and whatever Xbox competed with it, if you built a PC at a similar budget to a console, it would consistently outperform it. The PC I built 8 years ago has started showing its age but in its prime was about 1½ times the cost of a console for triple the power, now 1½ the cost of a console more or less gets you a console.

Part of that is the horrendous inflation of PC parts, particularly the GPUs, but also that the hobby has shifted away from being competitive against consoles to having no chance of being cost competitive. When they stopped being in competing fields, the cost of PC parts just exploded.

It’s a shame cities skylines 2 doesn’t run on many PCs, or even that the first one became so DLC heavy because watching SimCity implode under EA’s bullshit just for an amazing successor to take to the field was amazing.

I’m very excited for the successor to the Sims but I’ve been waiting for it a scarily long time without any major promising news.

Half of those were me and my 2014 hellish Skyrim setup.

I can’t really check my overall playtime but once again I’m being sucked in by Minecraft.

As a teenager it was my default game and if I could see my playtime I recon it’s 5 times higher than my next biggest game which was Skyrim at about 500 hours across both editions. When I was a teen, I’d adored how I could just get lost in this peaceful, lonely world.

For the last 6 years, I’ve been trying to play more innovative indie games that I can broaden my love for the medium, but every now and again I yearn for the mines. It’s basically the only game I can enjoy after day of work too.

I really doubt Hasbro are looking to sell it unless they’re planning to shut their doors too. To my knowledge they have two profitable IPs, Magic the gathering and Dungeons and Dragons. D&D is also a strong brand but people don’t need the brand to enjoy the game. If the designers aren’t appeased, they’ll just leave and make their own D&D clone. It’s happened before and it’s currently happening now.

Also the repeated use of only referring to the game as DND in the article is very odd, nobody calls it that maybe DnD is ok but not in a professional setting where either Dungeons and Dragons or maybe D&D is the standard. It sets off my hearsay alarm massively.

Freeleague have money but I’d doubt they’d have D&D buying money. I think GW may be able to afford it but it would be an enormous cost for them.

Like Club Penguin.

I wouldn’t call it a soulslike really. Beyond being an over the shoulder melee game, it’s more of a classic PS2 era adventure game.

I picked up En Garde recently because I absolutely adore the tone, setting and swashbuckling duelist vibe.

It’s a little flat for me, I don’t feel like it has achieved the character fantasy of being a swashbuckler in the mechanics, instead I’m basically kicking boxes into people and stabbing them again and again.

I always thought he wanted to be the Steve Jobs of the gaming world and never found his signature product to sell his success.

With GTAV, the original release was 2013, the next gen was 2014 and PC 2015 so I forsee it being the same and being even later.

The upside was that the PC port was really good at release and I’m pretty indifferent to if I pick this game up in 2030 when it’s actually a good value on PC.

I paid for star citizen a decade ago and honestly enjoyed it enough for about 2 days. It always felt exciting to see how ahead they were of early Xbox 1 / PS4 games in their scope with volumetric effects etc.

The trouble is, 90% of their innovative content has been long overtook by general game progression, they’re making a game that could have probably launched with the PS5 and been innovative and are already falling behind there. I genuinely believe that they were Innovating their game slowly over time and there were amazing things in the works, but they missed the moment that it was exciting and new by so many years.

I played it back when it first released and loved the graphics, I think it’s still generally agreed to be a beautiful game to my knowledge.

The only bit I was underwealmed by was the ending, but they’d also write something with grounded intrigue, which is a difficult thing to pull off without having a cynical ending of “of you thought this was gonna be exciting? This is real buddy”, which wasn’t really what firewatch was evoking.

I swear my spelling is getting worse every day.

I played a modpack about 7 years ago that basically removed a lot of official content including most hostle mobs, villages and villagers, and a bunch of other content, but replaced it with lots of non-fantastical creatures, a wider range of materials, different medieval era weapons etc. It really felt like you were alone in an untouched world, in a way that Minecraft already really does, except that the existence of zombies and villages juxtaposes that.

Then on the flipside, it had the Twilight forest mod, perhaps the aether mod (I don’t really remember) and this general idea that if you want epic fantasy and magic, you need to leave the overworked, which felt narrativly really nice to do, I think it populated the nether with skeletons and and endermen before official Minecraft did too, I don’t clearly remember.

I’ve longed for that game ever since but I don’t know what the modpack was called, and I’ve never found it again.

I’d recommend Photopea for casual use that’s not miserable to use. It’s in browser only and is basically a photoshop clone with slightly less features, but it’s amazingly close to Photoshop when I need it to be, even with things like using a pen or a really specific option menu.

It does generate it’s revenue via banner ads but I’ve never seen them with my adblock, if I’m needing to quickly whip something up and utilise my Photoshop familiarity, it’s my go to.

I used to boot it up and just play through that one repeatable painting heist that was optionally 4 player, although I’d do it by myself.

Unity spent a long time being unplayable in an are where that was unforgivable than it is now. I picked it up just before the big patch where they also threw in the first DLC for free as an apology and I ran pretty well on my device, but nobody cared because nobody was playing it.

I feel it also had a pretty lackluster story, I opened strongly but generally but then just became blander as it progressed. I really wanted to like the characters, but they never landed for me.

The last game that I feel had a great plot was black flag, largely because everything since origins has been enormous in scope in a way that’s just directly detrimental to a linear cutscene style story. Also as historical RPGs they’re good but Assassin’s Creed has something really special that has been forgotten, and I was hoping this game would reignite it, but it seems not.