That few years is going toward making Windows less of a hindrance on handhelds and likely not so much into the hardware itself.

Hopefully they got the memo that PC games need shader compilation steps, and then it ought to be fine.

There’s a comments section on most videos, and even the nature of users uploading videos, often in response to each other, is social media as much as it is making art and entertainment.

Always has been.

You can tune out and do something passive while the ad plays, and eventually the information you wanted will appear, as opposed to trying desperately to find your article as you scroll and having pop ups and other things interrupt you as you read. Perhaps this is all just a matter of perspective though.

From the reader’s experience, sites like IGN became completely unusable without ad blockers; I still remember the X-Men (2? Origins: Wolverine?) ad where Wolverine slashed through the page in a flash animation that prevented you from clicking on the thing you wanted to read underneath it. Then the information that you wanted could have been communicated in a headline, and it just becomes frustrating. That said, I’ll still reviews if they didn’t annoy me too much on my way there. I’ll still read Schreier when it isn’t paywalled. I read NY Times articles like the one they just did on Alexey Pajitnov. Rebekah Valentine and Jordan Middler do great work. In a lot of other cases, opinionated essays on video games benefit greatly from supporting footage in video format, and even without ad blockers, the YouTube experience is far less annoying on average.

I’ve been playing little else besides Divinity: Original Sin II for the past few months, and before I get into a list of criticisms of it, I want to stress that I still think the game is good; it’s just that everything about Baldur’s Gate 3 is better by comparison. Like Original Sin 1, D:OS2 is becoming a slog toward the end of the game. The solutions to so many quests are either unintuitive or purposely hidden. I don’t like to play with a walkthrough open while I play games, so there are a lot of quests left undone, and every quest matters in this game, because each level scales so hard. I’m frequently one level under where I ought to be, and that’s the difference between a fight being a cake walk or being just challenging enough that it takes me 3 or 4 tries to get through it, which is lengthening this playthrough substantially. Even things I initially liked about their RPG systems, like the action point system in D:OS2, are starting to wear on me, as I’m now finding it doesn’t solve problems as well as D&D5e. In fact, after finishing Baldur’s Gate 3, I was confident that Larian’s next game will also be just as great regardless of the D&D license, but now I’m wondering how much of BG3’s brilliance was Larian getting better at their craft after D:OS2 and how much of it was D&D rules doing a lot of heavy lifting. Surely Larian got better at writing, both characters and plot, after D:OS2 when building BG3, but will they still fall back on so many tedious RPG systems when left to their own devices, like the D:OS2 armor, cooldown, and source point systems? Will they still make each level scale so hard, and have so many of them that it incentivizes you to kill every NPC you can? I hope not. Hopefully they come up with something better for their next game.

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.

They’ve been showing it for a while now, but it’s going to require Vanguard anti cheat, so that’s a deal-breaker for me.

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.