Premium currencies are just very anti-consumer, I’m sure you know most of the arguments against it so I won’t reiterate them.

GGG are great developers, but their sales department is as predatory as every other game, FOMO sales, lootboxes, premium currencies, supporter packs… Not being p2w (the standard on pc btw) is really the only good thing you can say about their current monetization.

There’s plenty to explore for sure, and the 3 acts will give most people a run for their money, but the game is incomplete, literally missing half the campaign. The missing weapons and skill gems means you actually don’t have many options that aren’t railroaded, there’s also going to be a lot of balance fixes and probably item drop buffs; EA is never the best time to start a game.

Given you don’t pay extra for EA and premium stuff like stash space you buy goes to both PoE1 and 2, you get quite a bit for your early access ticket.

Most new players buying into EA are not going to stick around. Also fuck premium currencies, this shit is manipulative as hell, not to mention it makes refunds needlessly complicated.

Well that’s how poe2 is usually described, i personally have never played any of the souls game so i can’t attest to the similarity. Poe2 is a lot more boss centric.

The dodge roll has its niche: avoid boss mechanics. You can spam it so it doesn’t provide any movement advantage, i think it gives iframes on targeted attacks, but you can still get hit by AOEs. However, because you can’t attack while rolling you want to avoid doing it unless you really need to.

They slowed down the game tremendously and added dodge roll.

For anyone that’s not familiar with the game, it’s a slow top-down arpg with a souls like gameplay. The game is challenging but the progression can currently be tedious and unrewarding, the EA is also missing a lot of content that isn’t ready yet; I recommend waiting for the full release if you want to give it a shot.

The EU has a term for what steam is: a gatekeeper. Sure our current overlord is mostly benign, but at the end of the day that doesn’t mean they should be allowed free reign.

I dislike microsoft as much as the next guy, but xbox doesn’t have a monopoly on phones, or really any presence at all. Competition on android is good for everyone but google.

Concord: The game nobody played but everyone remembers.

Can’t wait for the re-release trying to scrounge up a few bucks.

The very first cutscene has a worm crawling into your eye aboard a ship with brain-eating mindflayers, talk about setting the tone.

Typically prices go down, not up. This is already the cheaper version.

Warcraft 3’s custom games were a mess, people left all the time which made team games irritating as hell, and the skill level varied widely from one game to the next so half the games ended up with feeders and a stomping one way or the other.

Battle net only became a thing in like 2010, steam came very early in 2002, and started off straight away with exclusives that required you to install their client. They still do btw, there’s no portal, dota… on epic or whatever.

I mean, we definitely do have a steam monopoly on desktop, they might not be abusing their position much, as of yet anyways, but it’s a monopoly all the same. They captured the desktop playerbase in their little ecosystem and now people are stuck because of their game catalog, achievements, friend list…

What we really need is a standardization of these systems and interoperability between platforms so that they’re forced to actually compete instead of being miles ahead just by virtue of being there first.

It’s bloat, unnecessary junk that’s part of their ecosystem. Instead of having specialized apps, you have one app that does everything; and of course every other brand has to have their own, even fucking musk wants it for twitter.

This creates two problems, first it strains your hardware for no reason, second it creates dozens of walled gardens that don’t interoperate, if you want to chat with your steam friends, you need to go on steam, if you want to play your games, you need to open the right launcher; this is the same shit apple is getting prosecuted for by the EU right now.

Sounds good to me. It’s annoying that connecting to a store and a social media platform has become so normalized. I just want to play a game.

They probably just never got around to updating that description. I only inquired because I’d heard of that website before.

Brand new is definitely a stretch, their legal page seems to date back to 2019.

That 10% is only there so that you can participate and feel involved; awards are mostly money schemes and industry people patting each other on the back.

Meanwhile they reveal 1 Billion revenue from their latest acquisition…

Game development isn’t linear, projects get discarded in early development all the time. The development team starts small and balloons as the game gets closer to release; diablo 4 for example spent 10 years in development, 8 years is nothing special.

Normally a company struggling with console sales

You’re assuming microsoft still cares about selling consoles… at this point either they gave up on this generation, or they moved on altogether.

This isn’t massive flaws that suddenly appeared overnight, or the straw that broke the camel’s back, it’s purely because they want to get back at the developer. So yes, I think “review bombing” is accurate.

Don’t get me wrong, i dislike enshittification as much as the next guy; but I don’t think a game’s review should be about what the devs posted on twitter yesterday.

It’s just unfortunate that this is the only avenue for players to make their disagreement felt. Game reviews should focus on the game as a whole and not one single aspect, the more these happen the less steam reviews become reliable to gauge the game’s quality.

This would only serve to advertise their ips, just look at Overwatch. If you really want to fuck with a corporation, the best way is to forget about them.

Yes. Linux on desktop is by design modulable, you grab parts from plenty of different packages and put them together to make a distribution. Gnome and KDE are just packages, large ones with plenty of dependencies to be sure, but just packages. Here’s the gnome package on arch, do you see any driver?

Literally never heard of it before. Please don’t recommend tiny distributions to new users, they’re a pain to debug due to the lack of information, and they typically have much less support.

drivers for software

That’s not a thing.

theme brings drivers

Gnome and kde don’t bring drivers, they bring a compositor. The drivers come from LINUX and other packages like MESA which are distro agnostic.

only working on Windows

OS compatibility is in the hands of the engineers and developers, or more accurately in the hands of corporations that will go where there’s money. If you want shit to work on linux, you need to use linux.

They can’t be too heavy handed, otherwise they’ll end up with another IE lawsuit that fucked them over. Instead what you have is windows slowly creeping up the enshittification, slowly pushing the boundaries of what they’re allowed to do, and doing so regionally too, with the EU getting less shit shoveled in.

There’s some distributions that are windows-like, if you want that you can try Linux Mint. But some DEs like Gnome approach desktop use very differently and do away with plenty of windows designs.

Windows at this point is barely an OS anymore, it’s freemium, it exists solely to push ads and their other products. You say it yourself, most people just use the browser, but hey today windows wants you to use edge, onedrive, outlook, the office suite… and they’re taking every step to make sure you do. Their unique goal is to lock you into their ecosystem and make more money off you.

It’s just a “I disagree” button for most ppl. Also windows do be that bad, you’ve used it so long you don’t notice or know any better.

The system seems already implemented, even if not yet deployed. Anyhow you’re giving last epoch way too much credit here, deterministic crafting is nothing new.

You don’t implement systems like these in a few days, it’s probably been in the works for months.

Plenty of old live service games see active development like world of warcraft. I’ll remind you that you don’t know me, so please keep your projections to yourself if you want to keep arguing.

GGG has left poe to rot for the past 5 years while they’ve been creating a game for a new audience and misleading their current players in their intentions. They certainly won’t be commended by me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OosC1E8TVM&t=1s This was 4.5 years ago, before the scope creep. The expected turnaround was less than 1 year. The project is more than 5 years in the works, and will probably reach 6-7 years before it’s done.

PoE2 has been postponed for 5 years. It’s the classic example of feature creep.
Will it be amazing when it comes out? Maybe. You know what would have been amazing, having all those new animations and models for the past 5 years. It could have been an iterative work, nobody asked them to do it all in one go.

If only it could stick to its release dates too.

Obviously they made the announcement at an opportune moment, but blizz wouldn’t be making this change if it didn’t coincide with their bottom line.

I don’t see the correlation between those and making new heroes free. Maybe as a way to douse the community flames. I think it’s simply because people want to play the new content. While some cave and buy the battlepass, it doesn’t offset the losses of the grind and paywall that stops people from coming back and investing to begin with.