I’m upgrading my PC from 2017 (GTX 1070) this year and the GPU market is a bloodbath. I managed to get a 5080 via a Newegg scam combo after sitting there and refreshing… for days. Even the combos would sell out almost instantly upon going up.

The lack of availability of 50-series combined with lackluster generational performance growth (4090 is better than 5080) means that used 40-series cards either kept or even gained value. New 40-series cards don’t exist anymore since nvidia stopped production months ago to focus on 50-series.

5070(ti) launches later this month and the rumors I’ve seen are that it will be just as bad as 5080/5090.

Quest guides like what Belgdore is talking about just tell you who to fight/talk to if you want to finish certain quests or get certain endings. It doesn’t tell you how to fight your battles and usually doesn’t even cover how to get there (unless its especially arcane – looking at you Millicent).

Further, the best part of these kinds of games (at least IMO) is the adventure itself. Working through a zone to a boss and then learning how to overcome the boss is the fun part. It’s the part of the game that makes you hone your skill as a player and “git gud”. Quest guides… stat build guides… pretty much anything short of a zone walkthrough or boss mechanic overview won’t help you with that.

Not necessarily. For a game like this that only functions online, you could presumably determine all the possible server calls and point them to a server you own. You could do this purely via clever network settings without modifying the game at all. If you could do that, the game would run fine and you could even use the original authentication server to ensure the user holds a valid license.

At that point, you “just” need to implement and run a server for the game. This also doesn’t involve modifying the game, but could run afoul of potential laws against reverse engineering if not done in a clean room manner (I’m not a lawyer so there could be other things too since unfortunately US law tends to not favor the end user).

Regardless of any of that, it always feels silly to me when companies fight tooth-and-nail against people not only performing free work and hosting for a dead game but ALSO trying to ensure people actually own the game before playing on their private server. Of course they could just use 🏴‍☠️ versions and black-hole the authentication server. All the company does by withdrawing licenses is ensure they have to skip authentication so the company loses out.

Don’t worry, the devs have already won if the sales numbers are any indication.

As far as winning the larger gaming community’s opinion, I think that will depend on how they handle updates and bug fixes for the game going forwards. As an example, the dedicated servers have a massive glitch that causes you to lose all your progress and it’s hard to tell what causes it. Personally, how they respond to that bug (or bugs of similar magnitude) is my litmus test for whether this game will stand the test of time or not.