How the mighty have fallen eh? Prince of Persia was a big franchise once upon a time. Like, the Sands of time trilogy was AAA tier.

The big reason I’m hearing in this thread is “Denuvo and I don’t trust Ubisoft.” However I doubt that is the reason the mainstream audience skipped over this game. Ubisoft franchises generally sell like hotcakes, and for the most part only nerds care about DRM (like the type of person who knows what a lemmy is).

It’s hard to say why it didn’t sell more units. Certainly it seems their internal expectations were sky high:

similarly to the biggest Metroidvania’s in the market, with millions of units sold in a relatively short space of time

The game is good, but metroidvania is not exactly an easy market; there’s some juggernauts in that genre, and they came out with a completely new and unproven concept. Apparently it sold a million units or so still, to me that’s not unimpressive.

On PC, it initially launched only on Epic afaik, which certainly doesn’t help. And by the time they brought it to steam it was much too late.

What I don’t really get is, why disband the team? They’ve proven they can produce quality stuff. Just hand them some other promising projects? I suppose that’s too much of a risk for a publisher like Ubisoft.

GOG is getting a nice little pr moment off of this but you’re getting basically the same license, no matter where you buy the game.

The root of evil in digital distribution is the DMCA anti circumvention clause: it is illegal to circumvent a DRM protection to gain access to some copyrighted work, even if you in actuality possess a license to the work. This law gives big platforms far too much power to control how you interact with their products.

It should be legal to modify a work to allow it to be played offline, to make copies for archival purposes, to fix the work to run on newer platforms, etc. As long as you have a license to the work you should be allowed to take steps to ensure your rightful access to it.

By the way, the root beyond roots of evil in digital distribution is the insane length of copyrights themselves. Why are patents 20 years, but copyright extends to 120+? The answer is pure greed.

Since Skyrim? I’d say their quality has been slowly declining since Morrowind. It wasn’t that noticeable at first, since oblivion, fallout 3, and Skyrim were still quite good and fallout 4 was decent. But then fallout 76 was a mess at release, TES blades was shit, and starfield just seems lazy.

I don’t know if phone call spam is only an American thing or something. In my country (and most of Europe) that stuff is effectively banned and doesn’t really happen.

Still hate getting calls though.

Is there any reliable source for this information? Or is it rumours only.

It gave your horse extra health actually, so not purely cosmetic. But I think in a single player game that also has extremely good modding tools, it doesn’t really matter. If you want to pay to win your single player game, you do you.

Horse armour was mostly a landmark for showing companies that consumers were willing to pay for micro stuff like that. The potential return vs effort invested was crazy. Todd himself said that they try doing nice DLC that gives you good value for your money, but it’s hard to justify business-wise when the horse armour is so cheap to make and sells so well.

It was the beginning of the end, because they saw how much money they made on the horse armour vs how much effort it took to make it. It was actually generally criticized at the time, but it also sold really well.

WoW was like the iPhone of MMOs. Didn’t invent anything, just put it all together in a coherent, accessible, user friendly package.

This is basically correct but i would add sometimes it’s better to add chips than to add mult. For example, if your score is something like:

10 x 50 = 500

Adding +50 mult here would give you 10x100=1000 points. Adding +50 chips will give you 60x50=3000 points.

Adding to the lowest of the two numbers improves your score the most. Especially early game, mult is much lower than chips, so you want to improve mult. However once you have some good mult jokers improving chips becomes important. Especially in high card based decks, where you get very few chips from your hand.

If the multiplier jokers come in, the picture can change again. It makes adding mult more valuable because the addition will be multiplied.

Why do these websites feel the need to write an article mindlessly regurgitating two Hideo Kojima tweets? You could just go and read the tweets themselves instead.

It is very fun if you want to be sure that you aren’t missing anything the game has to offer.

You’ve hit upon the crux of the issue, in my opinion. FromSoftware games in general are built on exploration and discovery, finding crazy cool stuff in some dark corner of the game is a big part of the experience. However, for discovery to be properly rewarding you have to allow for the possibility that the player will just miss the stuff you’ve hidden. Indeed, in a blind playthrough of Dark Souls you’re likely to stumble upon a bunch of different secrets and still miss 50% or more of them.

That’s gonna be excruciating if you insist on “100% completing” the game. It kind of goes back to older days of gaming when there was no internet and no guides, and you just played the game and were happy when you saw the credits, and had no idea you even missed anything. I feel like modern games with their map markers for everything and completion percentages visible have kind of changed the way many people approach games.

Not to say there’s anything wrong with using a guide, play the game how you like. And there is definitely an argument that if you bought the whole game, you’d like to experience the whole game.

I agree almost 100% with you on this. I did play Oblivion, but Skyrim has the more interesting world IMO which makes it a slightly better game. The strength of Bethesda games that makes them good, in my opinion, is the same every time: explore a large interesting world with your own created character. This explains (in part) why people like Morrowind so much: the world is just so weird and interesting.

The problem is they don’t know how to improve on that concept. Instead they are mostly adding features that either don’t add anything to it or actively detract from it. For example, Fallout 4 received settlement building and weapon crafting. But, the time I’m spending on my town, I’m not actually out exploring. If I can craft weapons, I care less about the cool weapons I find in dungeons. Now, Starfield got rid of most of the crafted world altogether in exchange for procedural planets that aren’t interesting to explore at all.

Aan an aside, I don’t think it even makes sense to compare the first two fallout games with the Bethesda ones. Fallout 3 and beyond are not really sequels, they’re a completely different series set in the same universe.

When your audience is five years old you don’t really need to go anywhere with it.

is a mechanism for pilfering the shooters organs and selling them on the open market

I understand the sentiment (not that I agree), but this has myriad practical issues. For one, there is no open market for organs, and creating one would make the healthcare system extremely fucked for poor people. Secondly, harvesting organs basically requires the person to die in the hospital. Preferably not full of bullet holes.

collecting his life insurance

My main issue with this is that you screw over the beneficiary of the insurance, who may not have any responsibility for the shooting but could very well be harmed by not having the financial support. Imagine a shooter with a newborn child as beneficiary of the insurance policy; would it be just to take that money from the child?

It’s just the hot new release of the week. Gaming “journalism” sites need to get clicks for their ad money so they pump out shitty filler articles non-stop about whatever is popular. I mean, look at this shit. Before this it was Helldivers.

It is the way of all things good in this world, that eventually they end up in the hands of people who care only to extract money from it.

The title kinda puts it all on the keeper, but as the article makes clear, when you concede 31 goals in a game there’s more going on with your team.

This isn’t about phones. It’s mainly about cameras recording 4k/8k video, and devices such as the steamdeck storing lots of games.

Is there a modern (i.e. post 2000s game) that matches the definition of a roguelike as given in the article?

I think Caves Of Qud qualifies. But “real” roguelikes are few and far between these days, so it’s no surprise to me that the term has expanded to cover more. Otherwise it would’ve become essentially obsolete.

Firefox has the same problem with V3, it has nothing to do with the browser, adblocker V2 will stop working, because are the advertising companies wich will use V3 scripts.

What the hell are you talking about? This has nothing to do with what advertising companies do.

The main reason adblockers don’t like manifest V3 is that the webRequest API is gone. The proposed replacement, declarativeNetRequest, does not have the same functionality.

Why did people ever think that was going to work I don’t know. It never even worked in No Man’s Sky, the reason people consider that game good now has nothing to do with the procedural generation.

Strong-arming your customers is a terrible strategy in the long term. You’re counting on your customers staying not because they like your product, but because they have no better choice available, or the switching cost is too great, so they’re forced to stay. This can get you extra short term profit but almost ensures long-term doom. Your customer is going to drop you like a rock at the first opportunity, and eventually that opportunity will always come.

They released this jam project like two days ago. I highly doubt they’ve ported their in-progress game to a new engine in that short amount of time, that’s a significant effort that could take months.

My hot take on Bethesda is, they simply don’t do game design. They take their previous game, slap whatever is the fashionable mechanic of the day on top, and just roll with the punches until it sorta kinda works.

They haven’t done any real game design probably since Morrowind. Since then they’ve added weapon armor crafting in skyrim, base building and weapon customization in fallout 4, and now in starfield they’re adding procedural planets, resource mining, Ship building… the game is collapsing under sheer feature count.

The problem for me is, it’s not enhancing the core Bethesda experience; they are rather diluting it. All this extra crap just distracts from the actual thing I want from a Bethesda game, which is a big open designed world filled with interesting locations, characters and quests that you’re free to discover as you like. The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.