I think the indie scene is still where the best games are at. Currently enjoying Caves of Qud but it’s not for everyone.

Unfortunate. Competition is generally good for the consumer and I’d hate to see one of more more customer-friendly storefronts go away.

Noita (finally got my first win this week!)

Spirit Island

Return to Moria

Victoria 3

Full agree. I do want some kind of policy for games that introduce anti-cheat both during early access and after release. Bricking a game you paid for should offer some sort of recourse.

Has it ever worked out when a big studio buys the rights to a game from an indie?

I played Civ 1 as a kid and civ 2 was a big improvement. Civ 3 I had to stop playing because it was interfering with my college. Civ 4 was my favorite and I played thousands of hours of it (after BtS) great modding scene too. Civ 5 was ok, but i found I played it the same way a lot. I did not like Civ 6 at all, mostly because of the AI, but also the civics system.

I am not especially confident in Civ 7, but I will reserve judgement. I often play 4x games multi-player and if they use the same DLC policy as Civ 6 I will probably give it a miss.

This is incredibly short-sighted. Having your business model hitched to a single vendor is just asking to screwed by whatever walled garden that vendor puts up. There’s a reason Valve is pushing Linux.

I only play online games with friends because I don’t feel like dealing with fuckheads in my spare time. That does mean there are a lot of games which are probably cool but I won’t play because they are meant to be played in lobbies.

Y’all motherfuckers need Torm.

I could never get into the new ones except for FONV since I felt the writing in 3 and 4 didn’t capture the satirical feel of the first two games.

I’m not convinced Paradox knows what they are doing as publisher. Millenia was similarly pushed out the door before it was ready (though in a better state than Cities: Skylines 2). And both games pushed out the door in the last week of the quarter in a transparent effort to boost their earnings. The shortsightedness of the publisher is now impacting their reputation in ways that will be hard to recover. I no longer consider buying Paradox published titles until they are at least a year old or have at least a few months of reviews showing they are solid (like AoW4).

So many ways to have fun in DF!

I think Pong, but I can’t remember if I played it before getting the Atari XT. The first game I played on that was Galaxian.

Shadow of the Forbidden Gods - a strategy game where you play as the ancient cthonic entity waking up because the stars are right. Set in a fantasy world where the forces of good slowly become aware of the coming apocalypse and attempt to forestall your return. You have to get past the janky UI and some dreadful AI art, but the gameplay is unique and satisfying.

Shadowbringers was just so good. The parts that really get me were in 5.3 and just… everything. Probably the best patch the game ever had. One quest in particular left me a blubbering mess (returning a certain crystal), even thinking about it now chokes me up. The voice acting is also just top notch the whole expansion.

Endwalker also had several moments that got me and basically the entire last zone (and the music. Omg).

I ended up fighting Nere really early before finishing most of Act 1 and reloaded that fight just so many times before finally winning with some creative strategies.

I don’t think demanding quality games is inherently at odds with wanting studios to not abuse their workers. What we really should support is broad labor protections and labor unions for developers. Because clearly the AAA studios don’t need the excuse of high demand for features from gamers in order to abuse their people since they have been doing that for years while churning out trash titles.

Shadows of Forbidden Gods - a map-based strategic game where you play as an Old God seeking to destroy the world. You mostly interact with the world through your agents and the forces of good will seek to stop you so you need to sow chaos and strife in the world, cause war, plague, famine and death to keep heroes occupied until you bring about the end.

The UI is… not good. But the game ends up being really fun anyway and there is a good payoff of seeing long laid plans come to fruition.

Would this impact web proxies at all? If so, that would entail a pretty huge security change for a lot of corporations.