I believe in you! Personally, when I find someone charging me subscription prices for something that should have a one-time fee, I flip the bird and run to the nearest competitor, but I can’t speak for your line of work. For my amateur needs, open source alternatives have gotten the job done, and I wish you the best.

There are a lot of reasons to not want to upgrade to Windows 10 or 11, so it’s likely those people who defiantly choose not to move on. In the case of Windows 11, it also requires newer hardware just for TPM support.

Pirates have managed to run servers for tons of MMOs. The only thing stopping people from running servers themselves is that they’re not made available.

Given the technical problems with Cyberpunk at launch, I don’t know that it’s a great idea to champion them. Both studios have had a similar release cadence in the same time periods.

When Microsoft bought Bethesda, they bought Zenimax, which includes far more than just the likes of Elder Scrolls.

For my tastes, this is too deep a dive for a game whose entertainment value is going to come significantly from solving puzzles. I’m already sold on the game at this point.

It gets to be way harder to argue in court when it isn’t a “clean kill”, using Ross Scott’s words, so The Crew is going to be one of the best examples we’ll ever get for courts to rule on. I expect Ubisoft would rather settle than let this one go that far though.

I think it’s just because it was the dominant monetization scheme when they were introduced, people got used to spending nothing up front on their mobile games. Then there are other barriers. Like why would I pay $15 for Stardew Valley when it probably won’t work with a controller or output comfortably to a TV. You can do some of that stuff sometimes in mobile, but there’s no enforcement of it, so that means you’re getting a lesser version of the game, which drives the price down. I wanted to revisit Planescape: Torment on mobile, but they ported it to Android too long ago, and now it just doesn’t work with modern Android OSes. They’re really teaching me to not treat mobile as a place where people like me should expect to find stuff to play.

They’re not too scared to make Elder Scrolls VI. It’s their next project. It’s just not coming until probably 2028 at the rate they’ve been working lately, and it’ll feel 15 years out of date this time instead of only 10.

I know this is a cynical critique of capitalism, but even so, capitalists love lowering budgets and charging the same amount. Quite frankly, I’d happily pay the same or more to get a game with less bloat in a lot of cases.

You have no idea. The opening moments of that game are surprising, even with that blurb and my recommendation, lol.

I haven’t played Still Wakes the Deep, but Indika was that smaller game for me this year, and I’d highly recommend it.

I haven’t played the Jedi games, but it’s crazy that the new God of War games are somehow a demonstration of restraint, as that one from 2018 is probably twice as long as I would have liked, and Ragnarok is longer still, according to How Long to Beat.

Here’s hoping! Not only has it ruined a lot of once-smaller games, but it’s also largely responsible for ballooning development budgets, so let’s get that down to something sustainable.

Not so much the size it takes up on your drive, he’s referring to the breadth and scope of the game itself.

The opening moments of the story are about intense racism over the most minute differences.

More than the actual demand for them, as they’re reselling at a loss.

Indicators are showing that Dragon Age is selling just fine. And it’s not like they get to their planning meeting and ask, “Can we spend some more time on the game design? It’s got real problems,” only to be met with, “No, we’ve got to really focus on diversity this quarter.” They’re not related. While I hardly trust Ubisoft to wow audiences with a cool story, it’s not hard to imagine the related struggles that a foreigner and a woman might have to bond over in that setting.

The Quake games (1 and 2) got updated with co-op support and cross play.

The lead developer of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is in Quebec. And does it not matter that it’s based on a historical figure? Consider also that in California, you’re just more likely to encounter a diverse group of people, so wouldn’t that just be representing the world around them?

Your precise Google Trends inputs are precisely what I took issue with, because they’re a bad sample set for reasons that I pointed out.