Basically, you’re confined to the no-fun welcome channel zone—forever in slow mode—until you prove you can behave yourself, at which point Denuvo will elevate you to “Verified Player” status and let you get into the meme, chat, and dev Q&A channels.

And this, friends, is why so many businesses are closing their forums and other public facing, indexed spaces and using Discord. It’s a black box that they can gatekeep. No complainers allowed to kill the “vibe”, no publicly searchable database that will keep track of what has been deleted, and no visibility for the negativity to the general public doing a Google search on the product.

Moreover, they’re going to want an emulator that can be managed alongside the rest of the museum software.

That’s like saying what’s the point of the air and space museum if they’re not actually flying the planes.

They’re not going to use the original hardware and put wear on them. That’s a standard part of archiving.

Just for the record, this is exactly what any museum would do, because they’re not going to actually run anything on the original hardware. Those systems are part of the collection, and it behooves a museum to not put any wear on them.

Also because emulators can be managed remotely.

Dragon Age’s drop in reputation had nothing to do with launchers, given many if not most players were on console.

“Simplicity” is arguably what killed it, because they had an excellent formula with Origins, and “simplified” it to the point it lost its identity as a true RPG.

combat was more fun I thought,

And this is the problem. The original game was made for people into RPGs (technically Real Time with Pause RPG).

The sequels gave a middle finger to those people by chasing simplistic, action focused combat with minimal RPG aspects. Hence why people despise them.

It’s always weird to me when people talk about video games as if story is the single most important aspect.

Personally I think 2’s biggest folly was abandoning the deep RPG in favor of overly-simplistic hack and slash. A mistake 3 somewhat attempted to correct, and for that, I’ll take its weaker story because I enjoy playing it much more. And if course 1 blows them both out of the water in terms of RPG gameplay.

Inquisition wasn’t quite as bad, I actually enjoyed it because it made an attempt to walk back some of the “streamlining” from 2, though obviously they both pale in comparison to Origins.

I was kind of hopeful they’d rediscovered their identity somewhat with Inquisition, but 4 looks like that hope was misplaced. They doubled down on abandoning the RPG in favor of the overly simplistic button masher with a smattering of RPG elements that are more or less meaningless.

It genuinely feels like the notion of a pure triple AAA RPG is slowly being torn down by publishers chasing the wide audience of action game fans who will ultimately not care that much for the end product.

There aren’t any good search engines anymore, because there isn’t a good internet anymore. SOE has buried the internet’s wealth of information and centralization starved out all the spaces where information used to be. Hell half the forums that used to appear in search results aren’t even online anymore, and live only in the way back machine (which doesn’t come up in results).

There’s so little to find anymore compared to the halcyon days of search engines we remember.

Maybe throttled unless it passes some kind of check for being “authentic” or something. Feels like that’s the general pattern with Google now.

Hell, maybe it was related to implementing this feature. You can get parallel downloads from the store now because they changed how downloads are queued or something.

after some further research, it became apparent that Discord staff could save a significant amount of money by changing S3 providers. The new bucket was set up, but when the time came to make the change NC refused to do it, even though he was not the one footing the bill.

There’s a conspicuous absence of explaining why they wouldn’t do it. What were their actual concerns? Did they not voice them or are they just being withheld?

NC refused to join the Discord to talk about solutions in real-time.

Why was this a requirement?

Did we vent in private? Sure.

And what did you say?

Did we dox or threaten? Fucking hell, no! And frankly I’m LIVID at even the suggestion that we did.

Well something clearly happened if his family was brought into it, so if you’re going to skimp on the details, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to believe that.

The whole thing just comes back to the larger issue with discord: the record vanishes.

If it’s a romhacking site, it wont have the actual ROMs, just the patches. It never would have survived 20 years if it had been hosting ROMs.