It did. Good on 'em for correcting it.

Obsidian’s long made games in this way—a way that places a remarkable amount of trust in players. You might look back to Fallout 76, the company’s take on the Fallout series which gives players a far wider array of narrative tools to influence the Wasteland than its predecessor Fallout 3 by Bethesda Softworks.

Yikes, bad slip there.

Gotcha. Well, there are some low-cost entry points when you come into some funds. Best of luck.

What’s your budget? You can get a Strive-capable computer for pretty cheap these days.

EDIT: Case and point.

I suspect marketing deals for Switch 2 or the difficulty in having two launch dates are responsible for delays for plenty of high-profile games that still don’t have release dates.

I’m also on Linux, and your link refers to anti-cheat, not Denuvo. I acknowledged the former as a problem, but I haven’t had issues with the latter.

Which games have given you a hard time? I don’t think I’ve ever chosen not to buy a game based on Denuvo’s presence, and certainly some of the games I play have had it, but the only things that have caused compatibility issues for me are the usual culprits of anti-cheat and Windows video formats.

Still Divinity: Original Sin II. While the first island was, by comparison, far more open, this last area of the game is falling back into a lot of the same downsides as D:OS1, where you’re very pigeon-holed into what you can do next. Often times, I can only find a combat encounter that’s a level or two higher than me, only to eventually stumble upon a lower level area that I couldn’t find earlier when I needed it. It turns the combat into a lot of save scumming, which is unfortunate. Still a very good game, but Larian did so much better in BG3, and you can feel it.

They’re greasing the wheels with big games in a “if you build it, they will come” play, but historically, that hasn’t worked, like with Steam Machines or Stadia. Apple has a history of abandoning industry standards for their own, and that makes it a pain in the ass for everyone to port their games over.

This was by far the worst part of the RPG systems in their games. This sort of design always encourages really dumb and counter intuitive play.

It will do something. It will be a resource sink for a while, and then it will become a resource faucet. Nothing more interesting than that.

Nintendo will last longer on what is quickly becoming an outdated business model because they sell to a large audience of children. Their older Zelda or Metroid fans are more likely to be bothered by the fact that, for arbitrary business reasons, they’re prohibited from running those games at higher frame rates or resolutions. But I’m a tinkerer. If I want to do something my way, and there’s a way to do it, I’m going to. Nintendo could monetize me, but they opt not to.

You brought up your interpretation of why people pirate Nintendo games. I think it’s pretty clear that if stealing is better, people have an incentive to steal it. It’s also a harder sell to say that those poor creators need to get paid when the way they made it available is not how their customers want it. All of this is relevant to the discussion of the diminishing role consoles play these days compared to the old days.

It’s interesting that you assume I pirate Switch games just because I can see why people pirate. I probably booted up Yuzu at some point to just see it running, but I only actually played Switch games on an actual Switch. My preferred method of playing Switch games these days is to not play them at all.

The ROMs I’ve got for their old platforms are games I’ve mostly bought before, and the rest are those that can’t be purchased digitally at all. I just organize them and play them my way, which is better than Nintendo has ever made them available. If they have people they need to pay, then maybe they ought to sell me those old ROMs rather than sue the people who make them available.

Nor I them. If they want to curb piracy, they can offer a better product than you’d get if you stole it. At this point, that means making their games available on PC. Likewise, when their back catalog is only legally available to rent and not purchase, I don’t know how they expect anything other than piracy to result from that.

The other console makers put their games on PC already. That you can pirate Nintendo games on PC and run them better than if you bought them legitimately is further evidence that the console exclusive model doesn’t make sense anymore.

It was East Coast Throwdown weekend, so I was playing a ton of Skullgirls, Street Fighter 6, and Guilty Gear Strive, as well as unwinding at the hotel room with some Marvel vs Capcom collection and Vampire Savior in the other Capcom collection. I expected to do better in all three games that I entered than I did, but I really do think the level of competition was just that high. It was nice to see iControl take Skullgirls, over Dekillsage, no less.

Other than that, it’s been Divinity: Original Sin II still. I’m at that part of that game that happens in both Divinity: Original Sin games where you’re just pigeon-holed into what combat challenges you can actually overcome at your current level, so I’m prodding at the edges until I come across a quest or combat encounter that’s level-appropriate. These are the benefits of Baldur’s Gate 3 having half as many levels, so there’s approximately twice as much content you can opt to do at any given time.

You’re arguing points that I haven’t made. I haven’t said that Unreal is best out of the box for every game. I haven’t said that switching engines is easy. It’s hard. They should have bitten the bullet and done the hard thing by now. It doesn’t have to be Unreal, but for the sake of the quality of their future titles, it can’t be what they’re using now. Given that they still haven’t made the switch yet, it means we’ve all got an incredibly long wait until we can expect them to put out a game that has a level of quality we’d expect from other modern games.

If that’s the overall point, it was nested in several worse points. The problem is that they’re still using the same tech, and switching to Unreal is the fastest path between two points in time that anyone can propose. Really, they should have been working on a new engine after reviews criticized them for it in Fallout 4 back in 2015.

They were an engine company for two decades before Fortnite, and it has tons of features that game never uses.

I have used Unreal but not Gamebryo/Creation, and I don’t think I need inside knowledge to see how far behind the best output of the latter engine is from its peers. Unreal is not the end-all, but it allows a company to switch to a new engine more quickly than building one themselves, and in this case, their sister company, Obsidian, has already built an imitation of Bethesda style RPGs in Unreal.

With any luck, REX will be that competitor. But also, quite frankly, so few companies can afford to make a game that pushes graphical boundaries and the latest technology that I’d rather champion Godot.