I have. I don’t know which options you’re referring to. Materia selection? I guess, but there are fewer permutations of those than there are spells/feats/stats in D&D 5e, and that’s before we even get to all the stuff that makes BG3 stand out, like its emergent design. FF7 is a great game, but it is not emergent, and emergent design will nearly always be deeper than the finite stuff.

You’re going to have to elaborate on those first two sentences, because that’s a wild thing to say.

With its nuanced characters, wonderfully layered world, and incredible depth of interactions, it was natural to feel the game had set a new bar for the whole genre—but it was pointed out that declaring it the new standard was unreasonable and unsustainable given how few other developers could possibly rise to meet it.

You could make a game a third of the size of BG3, and it would still be excellent value for BG3’s asking price. And no, you shouldn’t attempt to make a competitor with BG3 on your first try. Nor should you try to make a competitor to Elden Ring on your first try; FromSoft had been making those games for the better part of 15 years, building and iterating on what came before. I do think more RPG developers should strive to follow the systems-driven approach that Larian has and be cognizant of what it is that we all like about BG3, but it can be sustainable if you don’t try to hit a home run on the first pitch.

Game Pass is already plateauing in subscriptions. I’m sure that while it’s far fewer subscribers than they thought they’d have, they’ll be happy to keep making money this way for some time, but it’s not going to turn in to the primary way people play games.

Steam isn’t always DRM, and even with its DRM, the vast majority of those games have continued to work without repurchasing them for over 20 years now. The premise at the top was basically that people are willing to give up the ability to resell their games when competition on PC has led to deep sale discounts, and I’d agree with that as well. On consoles now, you’re rapidly headed toward a future where you can’t resell your games and there’s no competition to drive prices down.

I’m struggling with your English a bit, but basically yes.

“But the publishers don’t want you to resell games. They want to have you buy games from their first party sales channel over and over again until the end of time.”

This is a problem that doesn’t really exist on PC due to forward compatibility and competing marketplaces. That forward compatibility has now been easily observed for decades by people who’ve been slowly losing the advantages that consoles used to offer.

I do have an optical drive in my PC, for Blu Rays and music CDs. The thing I was calling out was, “they want to have you buy it over and over again until the end of time,” which isn’t really a thing on PC. Sure, there are remasters and such, but the copy you bought 20 years ago largely still works on your new PC.

Perhaps one of many reasons that the console market is shrinking and PC is growing.

It pisses me off that there’s no GOG for movies and TV. I don’t want to have Blu Rays, but it’s the only way to actually own that stuff.

The reality is that Nintendo removed your ability to buy those old games for $10, because they’d rather rent you those games forever on their subscription service. If they were on Steam for $10, I’d have bought those old ROMs.

The patents on the Game Boy hardware expired years ago, so that’s what gives Analogue the right to do what they do. As for these Switch emulators, I have no idea, but I’ll guess it’s just Nintendo trying to scare people without their own legal departments into complying.

Game preservationists have long argued that a move to a digital-only future will cause games to be lost forever if proper preservation measures aren’t put in place.

There are already scores of online-only titles that can no longer be played either due to their delisting or servers being shut down. In some cases, game discs serve only as physical entitlement keys to be able to play the digital version of the game, meaning if the digital store itself shuts down in the future the disc will become useless.

Once again, the key to preservation is DRM-free, not physical media. We were already headed toward a future with no physical media for games, and these tariffs will only accelerate that. They may be a similar accelerant in the death of consoles.

$50 for the base game, $70 for digital deluxe with two bonus skins from Doom and some unknown number of additional songs, as well as 3 days advance access.

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I cannot meet you on this. Seriously, put Meryl from MGS4 next to Monster Hunter Wilds Lady; it’s night and day. And Monster Hunter is operating at a scale that MGS4 cannot. MGS4, of course, also has performance problems trying to push what it did on that hardware.

Look, it may not run well, but you need to go back and take another look at PS3 games. If I wanted to say a new game looks like a PS3 game, I’d pick Earth Defense Force, not Monster Hunter (unless you mean Monster Hunter Rise).

You don’t, but the “lazy devs” accusations are nonsense explanations for it being poorly optimized.

By doing these kinds of experiments, they hone in on what people want. They know it’s closer to FF7 remake than it is to FF16, and they know that the game must not have exclusivity to any platform no matter what.

Have you ever worked on a game before? I’m curious how you think laziness plays into this when the entire industry is collapsing and everyone would love to hold on to their jobs.

Nah, that doesn’t make it sad. It’s just that some of my best memories of racing games come from the likes of Burnout Revenge or F-Zero GX in local multiplayer. Single player is cool. Online is cool. I’m just looking for that local multiplayer fix.

One of the other games that fit that bill is Star Wars: Episode One - Racer, which you can find on GOG. At least on Linux, it requires some mods to fix it, which I made sure were documented on the PC Gaming Wiki, but you can play that one on LAN on PC through the GOG version. I don’t think split-screen on PC games was something they were thinking about back then, but LAN will do in the meantime.