The downfall began when Ubisoft abruptly wrote Lucy out of the story after Kristen Bell asked for more money. Then they killed off the literal main character one game later, and nowadays you’d be excused for forgetting Desmond ever even existed given how little the modern day matters to the plot.

If Valve’s Employee Handbook is to be believed, they don’t use a formal project structure with static teams. Instead each developer works on whatever project interests them, and one of Valve’s current goals is to improve game performance on Linux/AMD by contributing to upstream open source projects.

Valve is as close as we’ve gotten to someone paying a bunch of industry veterans to contribute to open source. It’s amazing what happens when all innovation isn’t black-boxed in an internal repository and forgotten about.

He’s excellent, but I’ll stress the “not a review” part. He’s hilarious but you usually won’t get a good look at the games from watching his videos. He’ll often take a single mechanic and spend the entire video breaking the game in half using it, which means he won’t show 90% of the game’s content or how it normally plays.

With Steam Link you can play on the Deck and have the quality and power of the $2,000 PC. Valve spoils us.

Both can be played on modern Windows with Krimsky’s patches. They’d probably work in Wine, but I’ve never tested them.

Not only that, but he has enough clout that he can usually convince GOG to put whatever game he’s reviewing on sale when his video comes out. He’s a great channel to follow for patient gamers.

I would have been happy with the change if they dropped the slot system entirely for cargo now that it serves no purpose (equipment gets bonuses based on slot and adjacent gear, cargo does not). For some unfathomable reason they kept the manual slots for cargo and it makes finding anything specific in a large cargo hold a nightmare.

This is compounded by their terrible crafting system where you have to manually pick every single component of a recipe rather than just clicking on the recipe and having it grab stuff from cargo for you. Cargo should have been turned into a sortable list like in nearly every other RPG.

The inventory has been one of the primary sources of complaints since day one, but despite several major overhauls they haven’t fixed the core issues, just made it slightly less inconvenient to use each update.

The best thing to come out of Microsoft’s push into the indie space was XNA, which even now stands as one of the best game development frameworks of all time. It’s a shame they murdered it in its crib.

(I know Monogame/FNA exist, but I’ll always wonder where the project could have gone with Microsoft-level funding)

Reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from Burn Notice.

A communications disruption can mean only one thing - invasion temporary DNS quibbles.