It wasn’t even that hidden back then, games like candy crush admitted to journalists that they changed the difficulty based on spending habits. The fact they might have that formula fine tuned even more shouldn’t be surprising.

Dread delusion claims to be like Morrowind, but it’s just on my wishlist soni can’t say how accurate it is.

Most favored customer clauses are not uncommon in the retail world.

More companies targeting that level of hardware for games, more support for better V2 versions of these handhelds,

I think we are still in the middle of the crash, but concord is a pretty good marker for the death of live service game spam. The number of canceled games since then has been impressive.

That episode was so cool, I was disappointed to learn it was about a dead game.

Exploration is the most fun part of the game (at least around the castle), the story is pretty boring to me so far, the combat is average. I’ve stalled out hard on the game as I just don’t find it enjoyable. Harry Potter as a theming doesn’t really work well with the open world beat em up style gameplay that works for Batman Arkham X or Shadow of war/Mordor.

There’s a really weird and large contingent of gamers that believe you can’t criticize or have a valid opinion on a game unless you complete the game.

Heroic launcher works well with gog and shows what games are supported.

For the consumer multiple platforms sucks. There’s already competition for selling steam keys as well. Epic doesn’t want to pay other platforms for anything fortnite, anything else they do is to justify why they shouldn’t have to pay like every one else.

Fixing the level system so you aren’t punished for using major skills regularly is a really good change to the system. Managing a spreadsheet to level efficiently was always a huge negative.

It makes sense for things to level in an open world game where someone could encounter an area at level 1 or 10. In order to provide a reasonable challenge for the player coming to that area. What oblivion did wrong is it was far too global and there weren’t sensible caps and floors on areas.

The story for this game is pretty fun and memorable. It’s a shame the gameplay itself is lacking, there’s way too much going on and there’s not a great gameplay loop. The open world bits are pretty bad, but were required to unlock useful spells and things for the battles. The battles were ok, but could have benefitted from more focus on making the transition smoother between modes.

Each game has their own little quirks and focuses. From what I remember sc3000 is best to start in a corner. You only get half the pollution from buildings on the edge, which is pretty big in the early game. You also get easier access to trade partners which is a good source of income later. Public transportation is also important, and very expensive, so you need to aggressively maintain a strong budget surplus to keep expanding.

There’s also some magic numbers to know as you get more familiar with the game. Airports, farms, ports, and subways all have sizes you need to keep in mind when planning.

It probably will. Given the modest spec bump and the high even for Nintendo hostility to switch emulation, it’s probably trivial to support switch 2 as well.

It’s my second store, but it’s still a distant second to steam.

Diablo, dragon age, dynasty warriors/Hyrule warriors, monster hunter, the older lord of the rings games, vermintide 2.

The problem is a second launcher or library is a pain in the ass for a user. I already avoid GoG unless it’s massively cheaper, and there’s the no drm benefits there. I’m not even interested in free games on epic.

Epic is the latest example that’s trying. EA gave up that fight years ago, and probably had better shot than Epic ever will.

Most the article makes no sense, but the Mac stuff is really weird. This 18 year old YouTube video is still accurate about the Mac part. https://youtu.be/2B-ekl_cEWk?si=xWJ43QEO48O9t2oY

An article that could have discussed some actual problems with steam, but instead focused on non-issues like epic having a garbage store.

Retreating to PC makes sense, because PC won the console war.

The cheat weapons from mercenaries. The portable air strike was a great way to kill an entire screen and yourself if you weren’t careful. The street sweeper was aptly named.

Part of the problem is a lot of pokemon weren’t designed to live in a world, just be a sprite on a battle screen. It also got more egregious in later titles, but there’s always been some problematic pokemon. So not only do you have to make a ton of models, you have to fudge the scales a lot to make Pidgey vs Onix look remotely good. There’s really no way to make a decent looking game without drastically reducing the scope like pokemon snap did.

Pokemon has influence far beyond a genre. Palworld being called pokemon with guns is a good example.

Like I said in the other thread, I vote pokemon. I don’t think you can go too much older, because the audience was just so small relative to more modern games. Scale is a major factor to influence.

I’m saying pokemon. It’s still a dominant franchise today. It’s inspired countless spin offs and copy cats. It made gaming social and the connector for Gameboys a required accessory. Pokemon Go was a covid time revolution. The series is likely responsible for a sizable growth in the gaming market in the late 90s and early 2000s. People who never played a video game can identify Pikachu, and might even have a plushie. We are closing in on 30 years of pokemon being a dominant franchise.

It’s a new game. Unfortunately I think we are now in an era where we can expect new games to run like shit on release, and be improved over the first year.

You can be almost everything in Morrowind, just like Skyrim. If anything Skyrim actually locks a chosen play style in more due to talents. There’s a few more exclusive guilds in Morrowind, but they aren’t major for the most part. Just because you have spent the time to learn how to avoid the rough edges doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

The fact you have to start your comment with multiple don’t do X things proves my point. As a story it’s great, but as a game it’s got a lot of problems.

The level up system was bad. The thrust/chop/slash system for weapons is awkward. Every attack costing stamina is bad for early characters. The excessive number of weapon categories, combined with short and long blades being the only ones that were common. The persuasion system was just bribe people to get what you want, or taunt them for free murder. Run speed being a skill, jumping being faster than running and being a skill as well (combined with the level system this can cause problems). Item durability in general. The encumbrance system, and containers having weight limits. The spell making and enchantment system had some cool things, but it was also trivial to break the game in multiple ways. The quest tracking and journaling was garbage. Alchemy was undercooked. Merchants had way too little gold so selling became annoying by mid level. The haggling quickly got annoying as you could sell at extreme markup or buy for nothing fairly easy. Magicka didn’t regenerate, so being a mage was annoying at early levels until you had sufficient potion access.

There’s also some things that are more bugs I think than bad mechanics. Stealing from a merchant flagged every copy of an item as stolen from them. I once managed to make every redoran guard hostile to me on sight, which got really annoying.

Morrowind had a decent story and great world building but the mechanics were absolute shit.

Amazon launcher requires an internet connection for games, at least the free ones.

There was definitely heavy skepticism at first. Buying online was new when it launched and physical was still king. I remember thinking it was dumb to buy from a website that could disappear instead of good old CDs.

They offer keys which allows for third party sellers to exist, and there are a handful of legitimate sites that sell keys for steam.

Steam is a platform that happens to also have a storefront. Other companies are building storefronts and hoping that’s enough.

If you can’t provide fast downloads, cloud saves synced across devices, achievements, mod support, friends lists, and multiplayer support, it’s not a real option. Being cheaper or having some exclusives aren’t attractive. Gog already has the drm free angle to be a legitimate competitor.

There’s never been much content blocking in elder scrolls. You could always master every skill even in Morrowind. Morrowind had a few exclusive guilds, but even Skyrim had a couple. Role playing in Skyrim is self imposed.

It’s not the lack of exclusives, it’s that consoles are offering a lesser experience than PC now. Controller support on PC is amazing, that wasn’t always true. Hooking up a console to a TV is the same as a PC now. Hardware and graphic performance is stabilized, while a console might be slightly cheaper than an equivalent desktop, it’s much closer than it has ever been. The steam deck is a legitimate contender for consoles. PC doesn’t have the problem of game libraries going away with each upgrade. PC has mod support and a wider selection than console can dream of. PC often has free multiplayer, consoles require a subscription. Consoles don’t really support couch co-op or multiplayer anymore, which was an advantage over PC.

The only enforceable patents they have are Japanese. This is an attempt to get US ones.

I bought it with iceborne when it was on sale recently on steam, I had a copy for PS4 but I’ve transitioned to just PC games at this point.