Cethin

You’re right, but also it resets occasionally. However, this is always the case anyway. I used to play Escape from Tarkov (I recently started playing Singleplayer Tarkov again, which runs on Linux, and development was recently stopped due to a trademark warning —not copyright, they just can’t use the name), and the way streamers play is so much different to most players. They spend so much time in the game that they have a skill level where they hardly are playing the same game. Even starting from the same position, or even worse through optional challenges, they stomp the average player.

There’s no such thing as an even playing field. I do think efforts should be made to minimize it, but making progression off-limits because it gives players who progressed further an advantage is a little silly. It doesn’t belong in every game, but it’s fine in some.

I don’t have the game yet because Linux doesn’t work, but I assume these are community servers, where the admins changed settings to make grinds easier. Are you saying they shouldn’t give these tools out? I guess it does mess with the game design, but I think giving the community tools to make the game their own is also good.

“Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.”

-Soren Johnson, the lead designer of Civilization IV

The whole game is about making money. Without this, there are no goals. However, if players start subverting the designed mechanics for an advantage, it makes others feel like they’re missing out and they do the same.

Grind is not all negative. For example RuneScape is entirely a game about the grind. Sure, you could just give every player a “max” button, but then what’s your goal/accomplishment while playing? There isn’t one.

I agree that a grind that doesn’t have a purpose sucks. The open world Ubisoft games, for example, have you just grind pointless things that waste your time, for no reason but to extend playtime. That’s bad grind. I haven’t played this, because it doesn’t run on Linux yet, but it seems to be mostly good grind.

I’m skeptical about locking some things behind exp, not just money, though. It gives players with more hours to spend a larger advantage.

NV was also an incredibly unstable game, and worse at launch than it is today, which is still incredibly bad even with mods. NV was great, but let’s not pretend it was flawless.

Also, Obsidian isn’t the same studio it was back then. I don’t know how people still view things like this. Obsidian is a name. The people working there are the talent. The talent is mostly gone.

Bethesda was profitable too, at minimum until MS purchased them.

It’s a space ship I guess. I have a fondness for sci-fi that uses naval conventions because that’s probably how things will end up going, because tradition takes priority over utility.

They’re both imperial though. The Brits are fucking weird. They act like they use metric, but they swap between them like crazy. The US and British have different versions of several measurements with the same name though. If you look into the history of the measurements, some of them get insane with dozens of different potential values.

I think it’s more likely making a game that’s exclusive to Steam/PC. I don’t think there’s really any way to make one exclusive to the Steam Machine. At most, it could be exclusive to Linux.

I agree. However, the only reason anyone wants those mostly is because of the marketing. I have too many better and cheaper games that I need to get to on PC already. While some of the console exclusives look interesting, I’ve realized they aren’t made for me anyway. They aren’t really made for anyone for that matter. They’re made for everyone, which means they’re made for no one.

That doesn’t hurt BG3, and Larian has been adding free content to BG3 over time, so really the longer you wait the better it’ll be. Still, it’s definitely worth the price. It’s a pretty long game, and good for the entire duration. Its also pretty replayable.

Discord has quite a few good features that IRC doesn’t. I will agree that it being used as a replacement for a forum, while also being unsearchable, is amazingly stupid. However, it’s used by almost everyone for a reason, and to ignore that (if you were to develop and alternative) ensures you won’t succeed. Yeah, we don’t need every feature from Discord, but easy voice/text channels, image/file sharing, and all the other useful things are required. Yeah, we can probably lose the emotes and crap and be fine.