
You’ve got a good point there that I am also often making when talking about gaming and maybe also trying to present gaming to non gamers.
There is so much implicit stuff grown over decades that for some series the barrier of entry is almost impossible for newbies. Be it the control scheme of some fifa or the complexity of a strategy game that just has to surpass its predecessor, not many developers consider this. Sometimes it’s even part of a reason for downfall.

This is always interesting. I’m not really a big fan of Zelda games but always respect them. And open world is often a lifeless experience with unfun todos. So despite all the praise I skipped botw.
Years later I tried it, and it was just awesome! Totk is another story though, I think it sucks for multiple reasons.
Anyhow tl;dr: some non Zelda fans love botw and some Zelda fans don’t like it 😁

Oh man. I’ve supported gog from the beginning, always purchased there.
Even if it was more expensive or late or downsides (especially to steam).
Still, they didn’t always hold up to the drm free standard they set.
Then they come up with this, which to me sounds like ‘give us subscription money for what we already did the whole time’.
The Patrons initiative is particularly interesting
No it’s not! I care for the games. I want a drm free packaged version. You name the price, but keep all original features.
I don’t give a flying shit about any online badges or whatever. How could I know where the additional money goes? By my estimate I’ll pay the subscription and your ceo gets more money but the games wont see any of it…
Oh and spamming me with mails telling me how awesome it would be for me to be patron but completely without any real, tangible, non corpo speak reason to leaves a bad taste and kills a little confidence in you every time.

I seem to have struck a nerve there, apologies.
I don’t think it’s a shit example. It’s the latest I experienced. It’s a good game but hampered technically. Nobody needs to tell me, I’ve been gaming since before dos and grew up with it; I’ve also been working in it for a few decades.
Look; you could just have a bigger or more gpus with more ram in a pc but if the end result does not significantly look better the question is for what all the effort is.
And that’s what happened with UE5.
Yes, maybe in a few years it might look different but it’s also been some time and hasn’t really been worth any of the performance impact.
And - as said - I see quality impact in UE5 games which I personally can not comprehend in an supposed upgrade.
However, feel free to disagree.
Maybe it’s my background in datacenters: of course you can always meet demand with more raw power but it’s a losing fight and the intelligent progress is to optimize and use resources in a clever way.

I really am? (no sarcasm here, honest surprise)
I thought it’s widespread knowledge that the “upgrade” to UE5 mainly brought a lot of performance loss compared to UE4 while having a signature blurry (or whatever) style which actually worsens the perceived quality.
For example expedition 33, while it’s style is awesome, it’s performance is absolutely not. It should run flawless on ps5 and on superior pcs but still doesn’t and the fps range is not in line with the hardware capabilities.

Ha, indeed I never even got into hollow knight and didn’t even find it appealing. Big metroidvania player otherwise. Love dead cells.
Anyhow, I really like(d) expedition 33, played through on easy. Due to the qte stuff which I wish could be turned off entirely. It’s also a question of accessibility imo.
Technically it’s not really great and should perform way better on ps5 or pc.
But whatever, it was generally a good game.

Yeah that was nice. The whole game was nice albeit too much promise and left far behind by any uncharted (>1) which came long before.
That at a premium price is too little. (not saying anyone should share this highly subjective opinion!)
But that’s not the point I was teing to make. I literally laughed at that typical Bethesda T-pose.

I had a Playdate for a while. I thought it would fill a gap when playing in sunlight (as a retro collector / curator).
But it just didn’t hold up software wise for me. Everything is more or less minigames. It does have system selling minigames - but that wasn’t enough for me.
And for that it’s too expensive, sadly.

Yes, I had 2 monster3d* voodoo 2 cards and could play sort of most 3dfx games with shutter* glasses in more or less good 3d.
(* I am pretty sure but it’s been a long time)
It was draining like most 3d implementations but the novelty wore off rather quickly too.
I was trying to find some stuff to link but was mostly unsuccessful but I’ll give it another go.
It might have been that wicked3d stuff:
What a weird thing to gatekeep.