I think they’d already lost their way a long while before that.

They started as indies grouping together to get visibility, at a time when Steam still curated every game and accepted maybe 4 games a month (yeah, hard to imagine today. It’s still hard to be noticed, but for the opposite reason). Back then they distributed only DRM-free games too, with eventually a Steam key option.

At some point they opened their own store and started including big publisher games, and really became just another store, and mostly a key store too. They spew some bullshit about not being specifically a DRM-free store, but really “DRM-agnostic”. “We don’t restrict publishers’ choice of DRM, they can be DRM-free if they want!”

And I’m like, dude, it’s not a stance, Steam technically doesn’t either. You may need the client to install but plenty of games don’t run on any DRM, not even Steamworks.

That does seem rather high. Quests 3 512 are what, $500 now? That truck would need to contain 3,000 of those.

They told me I was too young. They told me I needed more training. I told them to drop dead! How ironic…

I had the French version. While translation was mostly correct, there were some errors here and there.

But the worst part was the newly introduced bugs, because original bethesda bugs weren’t enough apparently. For example, every interior with water had an erroneous water level value that made them entirely underwater.

There’s a slaver lair cave a couple meters from the beginning of the game, it takes like 30 seconds from the end of character creation to get there. In the French version, it’s completely underwater and everyone inside has drowned when you enter it. That’s the level of QA we had.

Oh, by the way, publisher for the French version? Ubisoft.

You know, since we’re on the subject of Elder Scrolls, Daggerfall actually had something like that.

You could ask anyone for where to find some random place, and the NPC would tell you roughly in which direction you should go, if they “knew” the place. Or sometimes they’d just write it directly on your map.

Still hard to do with voiced dialogue if you don’t want your NPCs to sound like robots. Then again, Oblivion didn’t need that to make its NPCs weird and robotic, with its 4 voice actors and huge amount of shared lines between everyone.

Fun fact, that’s why the immersion-breaking magic compass thing exists in Oblivion (and most open worlds since). Bethsoft devs explained it once.

Stuff is relocated a lot in development, and this means having to rework all dialogues refering to directions, occasionally missing some. It was even more unfeasible for Oblivion in which all dialogue is voiced and would have to be re-recorded.

So they just removed all directions from the dialogue and now you’ve got 100% accurate floating tags telling you exactly where to go, even when you are not yet sure what you’re looking for.

Actual ammo vending machines. That can be tampered with. Great.

Could we not Torment Nexus the rest of Bioshock, please?

You know, if you people wanna ditch the Kingdom and join the club, I don’t think it’s too late.

Maybe it’s because I played them too late, but while I mostly had a blast playing HL2, the first one never clicked for me.

I know, it’s been very influential and new when it released, but it was still quite straight a FPS game. Whereas HL2 is like a crazy theme park of different ambiences and mechanics.

Yeah, it’s probably terrifying at first.

I’m sure they’d get used to it though, almost any kind of riding/driving a vehicle is going against all your preservation instincts when it’s the first time you do it.

Okay, that looks pretty cool.

I remember the sense of Pride and Accomplishment everyone got from that game back then.

YouTube pushes whatever format feels popular to them at the time, like when they started giving absurd weight to shorts.

Even content creators that pretty much only do long, focussed videos started to hack useless bits of them to put in shorts as an aside, just because the algorithm would make their channel basically invisible without a few of them.

And then of course YouTube will prioritize those in all feeds, even if you’re watching on a fucking TV app.

If youtube starts the same kind of shit with vertical streaming, you can be sure they’re going to pop everywhere, no matter how fitting the format is.

So now their solution to the whole “don’t you guys have phone?” situation is to keep designing for mobile but port those everywhere.

I think I’ll keep not giving a shit, thank you very much.

Animal Crossing is a special case (and one that made a lot of people angry back when the game released).

One console is tied to one “island”, which means all accounts on the same switch play in the same town. Each has got their own house and inventory, and can contribute to the island in some ways…

But only the main account, who started the save, is “resident representative”, which means they’re the only one who can build or relocate stuff, and who can start community projects needed for the island to progress.

So yeah, all other players have an inferior experience. Which is a bit of a baffling design for a family game such as this.

Forgetting about the intrusion of shitty LLMs everywhere for a while… Who the fuck even uses notepad for something they would need redacted?

It’s not a actual writing tool, it’s a basic text file editor.

You’re right, this is what they’ve been announcing. The games you’ve bought will still be available for download.

This is not the case with the sega games we’re talking about. The announcement specifically mentions the games will still be available to download if you bought them before the delisting.

Not only nobody needs to do that trip that fast, but we’re not in the early 00’s anymore, and there has never been as many tools to communicate and collaborate remotely. So I’d expect a non-negligible part of these don’t even need to do the trip anymore if they want to save money and time.

Probably why Tony Stark’s father is named Howard, too.