This would kill the fun for everyone but the best. SBMM is there to protect casuals and new players, aka 90% of players.

I guess guidelines are a decent start, the part that’s gonna be tricky is getting the gaming industry to follow them.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it applies to literally anything: “If you’re not comfortable, don’t let your kids smoke”. A lot of parents are shit or just don’t care to micromanage their kids’ life. That’s where the government needs to step in and decide what is ok for the kids to be exposed to or not.

Parents ultimately always have the veto choice, but whether Roblox is appropriate for kids to begin with is the real crux of the issue. The CEO just doesn’t want that discussion to happen for obvious reasons.

I’m talking about the definition of the words “deep” and “shallow”, here.

Giving you choices does not add depth, it substracts it, the developers have to write twice as much content that you won’t see, and because they have to account for each choice the story is much stricter in how it can evolve. Choices and replayability are opposites to story depth.

Anyhow, my argument was more about the fact that they don’t delve beyond the surface of things much, even companions barely have a single questline each. It’s very much a theme park crpg, everything has to be short lived and interesting lest they bore the audience.

You really shouldn’t base your opinion on how other people perceive it, we’re in a bg3 thread, most people here see it positively - so do i for that matter, but any criticism here is gonna be met adversarially. It’s always weird interacting with a fanbase when 80% of ppl that started bg3 never finished it, most ppl here never really got the full experience.

a huge map with a 1000 pointless quests

Act 3 in bg3 is exactly that though. The game has huge pacing issues. The whole tadpole stuff goes completely limp halfway through act 1. Companions interactions die off after act 1. Act 2 is full of rewrites and undercooked content. The emperor was obviously added very late in game development and the story twist as a result is cheap as hell. There’s no bad guy path - most of the evil interactions are killing off people and effectively locking yourself out of content. I could go on…

I’ll take bg3, disco Elysium or mass effect over Skyrim any day of the week.

I too. That doesn’t mean bg3 is perfect by any stretch, it’s the epitome of a theme park crpg, and quite frankly your shallow ocean analogy too. One encounter with harpies, one encounter with owlbears, one encounter with fungi, one random dragon tossed in… Everything starts and ends in a flash.

The op did give an alternative, I can’t speak much for it however.

Baldur’s gate 3 barely has any character building after picking a class at the start. It really doesn’t feel you’re building a character so much as following a template. And worse, the classes are all very vanilla. Pathfinder wotr for example has much better character building, the mythic classes add a ton of depth and interesting interlacing.

The big problem about exploration in bg3 is that there’s just not much to do. Most dungeons are like a handful of rooms and that’s that. You go in, you talk to a few people, you do 1 combat and rarely 2 and go out. There’s no sprawling or sense of discovery. I’ll recommend Underrail for exploration.

I generally agree with his statement, bg3 is very simple in terms of character building and has shallow exploration/questing (particularly after act 1). But then again, that’s the case for most AAA games out there - they are made in a way that anyone can play them to the end.

Yeah there’s some romance, but there’s barely any sex. You can only romance one character at a time and there’s like one short cutscene per character, with some being a fade to black, in a 100 hour long game.

Good. Make them open their platform to third party stores. Make them open their bootloader.

Look at the thread we’re in, look at the top of the conversation. This is about people not being able to play.

Oh no, people not being able to play games for a few hours, please stop the suffering.

Why would you want them to be breached? The only people that are going to be negatively affected by that are the users who was involved in the breach.

Yes and no. Sony would face repercussions for lax security, and while it would indeed affect the consumers, Sony would be at the epicenter. Forgive me for not giving a shit to what happens to Sony, and if they did in fact get breached I’ll be there with some popcorn enjoying some Shadenfreude.

I hope they weren’t breached again.

That’s awfully nice of you, certainly not a hope I share.

Consoles have been pcs under the hood for a while, they could run pc games just fine, they choose not to. Sony could implement a browser for their 500$ walled garden, they choose not to. Sony could let you install another OS on the PS5, they choose not to.

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?