Sony changed their CPU architecture every time until PS4/5. The only reason some PS3s could play PS2 games is because they had also had PS2 hardware in them. Xbox has been x86 the whole time.
The simple answer is that microsoft is a far more advanced company in terms of programming an OS, the gap shows when you compare console securities, where virtually every nintendo or sony device had software vulnerabilities, while microsoft consoles tended to need to be hardmodded
As someone who programmed drivers for nt, it’s not, the reason it’s easier is because they started later.
Xbox is a mature x86 windows platform, vs ps1 which is an embedded mips system.
They started with their windows directx stack and just kept with it, while ps did a random walk all over the place.
Msft also had really boring hardware, like, they started with a crappy pc, then made a crappy ppc pc, then went back to a crappy pc. The software was simplistic, while Sony made really interesting hardware designs, that turned out to be hard to program, till the ps4 when they just gave up.
Msft traditionally isn’t very good at operating systems, they’ve just had infinite resources and infinite monkeys for 40+ years, and they’ve been stubborn enough to make it work somehow.
I would argue they had to give it up to get the indie scene onboard as I heard many nightmare stories for indies from PS3 era. Was it worth it? I’m sure contributed a great deal to the success of PS4 but it made the PS into just a more affordable gaming PC.
Totally worth it, they spent unimaginable resources trying to make those architectures programmable, now that’s all almost free, they just compete for published titles and maybe some secondary features.
MSFT was in a better position because they didn’t need to spend those resources, and more importantly the devs didn’t either, they could write windows games then port them over easily. Now it’s just as easy to do that for ps4/5. All that matters is nailing exclusives and looking cool, plus some marketing which msft sucks at.
It’s too early to decide if it was. Yes it was the safest bet, Even though PS4 had a great deal of success you also need to keep in mind, a lot of it was because of politics. Nintendo and MS made huge mistakes at that time and Sony basically ate their lunch.
The older generations were always innovative and pushed the envelop as far as possible, but now PS just a gaming PC that is not upgradable like an actual PC. if you don’t recall, the most hyped thing about PS5 was the controller, which is not what you expect the main point of buying a new consol to be.
On the topic of exclusives, I personally hate them. I think it makes a false sense of value in modern consoles where in the past they were intentionally made to take advantage of the architecture to showcase the unique quirks (and ofc the power) of this machine in a tiny box. Now they are usually just political leverages even though the games can be ported to other platforms.
So to reiterate, I agree it definitely had positive net for Sony in the short run, we’ll have to wait and see if it will payout in the long run.
Exclusives are terrible for the customer, but they’re a way for corporate to control the market, which is a good for them.
We’ll see, but I was on the dev side of that nightmare, Sony would have gotten crushed the next gen, they barely made it out of ps3 with their extended developers in tact, nobody liked programming the cell, everybody loves the current system.
But it does reduce competitive surface area, so we’ll see. Nintendo is winning now because they didn’t follow the same path but they did innovate, more than almost anyone before.
My question is: What innovation do you see that could have been worth a unique architecture to Sony’s developers?
I agree with your sentiment, after all what is a game console without games.
What I want isn’t necessarily a unique architechture, rather I want a unique experience. I think looking at Smartphone landscape expresses my concerns much clearer. All phones today are basically just reskins of same phone in design, purpose and architechture. Sure there are some novelty phones with smaller audiences for the sake of novelty but what makes you choose a phone over the other is just marketing at this point. I’m afraid that’s where we’re headed with consoles. The difference is the home consoles are replaceable.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, to use the phone metaphor, every improvement in one phone rapidly spread to others, so even budget phones have features better than the top of the line phones a decade ago.
Now game developers can go back to focusing on games, and console makers can focus on trying to make better consoles without having to blow ludicrous resources on supporting developers or just making the thing work, they just rely on amd making better chips which seems to have worked.
I totally get where you’re going, and I agree we need that macro-innovation as it were, but games were a nightmare of hacks and bullshit for decades, I think a period of consolidation is good right now, then we can start the whole race all over again with crazy new tech.
It doesnt say anything about modern consoles though. Although its dofferent at the start, their modern consoles are still effectively full of exploits. Hell VERY recently, “backup” PS4 titles are running on the PS5. Security is the main reason why BOTH the PS5 and the Nintendo Switch do not have easily accessible web browsers while Microsoft can.
I heard that the Xbox is basically like a PC (since Microsoft is so adept at this), so backwards compatibility is natural. But what you said about x86 architecture is interesting.
The original Xbox, Xbox One, and S/X are all basically x86 PCs, but the 360 was basically a Power Mac. Microsoft was literally using PowerMac G5 towers as early development kits for the 360.
Supporting 360 games is pretty time consuming and requires emulation. MS has been slowly chipping away at it for years.
The Xbox 360 was based on the same weird, in-order PowerPC 970 derived CPU as the PS3, it just had three of them stuck together instead of one of them tied to seven weird Cell units. The TL;DR of how Xbox backwards compatibility has been achieved is that Microsoft's whole approach with the Xbox has always been to create a PC-like environment which makes porting games to or from the Xbox simpler.
The real star of the show here is the Windows NT kernel and DirectX. Microsoft's core APIs have been designed to be portable and platform-agnostic since the beginning of the NT days (of course, that isn't necessarily true of the rest of the Windows operating system we use on our PCs). Developers could still program their games mostly as though they were targeting a Windows PC using DirectX since all the same high-level APIs worked in basically the same way, just with less memory and some platform-specific optimisations to keep in mind (stuff like the 10MB of eDRAM, or that you could always assume three 3.2GHz in-order CPU cores with 2-way SMT).
Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One seem to be run through something akin to Dolphin's "Übershaders" - in this case, per-game optimised modifications of an entire Xenon GPU stack implemented in software running alongside the entire Xbox 360 operating environment in a hypervisor. This is aided by the integration of hardware-level support for certain texture and audio formats common in Xbox 360 games into the Xbox One's CPU design, similarly to how Apple's M-series SoCs integrate support for x86-style memory ordering to greatly accelerate Rosetta 2.
Microsoft's APIs for developers to target tend to be fairly platform-agnostic - see Windows CE, which could run on anything from ARM handhelds to the Hitachi SH-4 powered Sega Dreamcast. This enables developers who are mostly experienced in coding for x86 PCs running Windows to relatively easily start writing programs (or games) for other platforms using those APIs. This also has the beneficial side-effect of allowing Microsoft to, with their collective first-hand knowledge of those APIs, create compatibility layers on an x86 system that can run code targeted at a different platform.
The PowerPC cores aren’t the problem, emulating that is pretty straightforward. It’s the many SPUs that present a huge headache to emulate in a performant manner.
And yeah, MS building everything on Windows and DirectX also makes things considerably easier.
Funnily enough, one of the few legitimately impactful non-enterprise uses of AVX512 I'm aware of is that it does a really good job of accelerating emulation of the Cell SPUs in RPCS3. But you're absolutely right, those things are very funky and implementing their functions is by far the most difficult part of PS3 emulation.
Luckily, I think most games either didn't do much with them or left programming for them to middleware, so it would mostly be first- and second-party games that would need super-extensive customisation and testing. Sony could probably figure it out, if they were convinced there was sufficient demand and potential profit on the other side.
For what it’s worth, Robin Walker and his team are working on the next half life after Alyx. Will that ever come out? I have no idea and I’m not expecting anything. Deadlock however is a game designed by one of the grandfathers of the moba genre, and has had over 20k concurrent players at any given time, and it wasn’t even announced with it’s existence only known through word of mouth. That’s insanely impressive and shows how huge the moba genre really is and how those players are thirsty for a new game from a big company. It sucks and I wish we had more sp valve games but I’m content with the work they’ve done on proton, steamos, the steam deck, steam itself, and half life alyx. They haven’t been sitting on their hands not doing anything, they’ve been putting their focus on more technical areas versus making games and that’s ok.
It’s called HLX, and it’s apparently a traditional non-vr game. Robin Walker was leading the Alyx team, it’s a safe bet he’s leading this team or working with this team on the sequel.
Having HL:A Alyx be VR was super cool. The game was so immersive and for a while afterwards, I was convinced that any furure HL game had to be VR. Then the novelty wore off and the VR market basically is basically dead. Now I’m excited for another flat screen HL game.
I honestly couldn’t even tell you what it’s about, but it’s one of my favourite games ever. You can die from reading a book that’s too sad and if you do it right, you can smell communism.
Incredible game that can be a little jarring for people who are probably expecting something like Baldur’s Gate 1&2, Fallout 1&2, or some other kind of isometric killfest RPG. It essentially turns the dialogue into 90% of the game, but the dialogue is so damn good that it doesn’t matter.
It also takes getting used to damage, as sometimes you can “die” in seemingly random ways. I was on a rooftop, I think trying to reach for a scarf or something, and failed my roll. That caused me to apparently get so depressed that I lost the game. I can’t remember which stat/trait it was but I think there’s a morale or mental trait you have to watch out for too.
Pirate this game if you wanna give it a try, don’t ever buy it. This is what the developers have advocated for and it actually fits right in with parts of the game itself.
I remember playing Far Cry 3 on Steam way back when… It opened up uPlay. I was not happy, but what can you do.
So I played for a bit, then… the game crashed. Nothing seemed to be wrong with the game, but the uPlay lost connection. Everything else worked just fine. Happened several times after that, never bought anything else from Ubisoft.
Even if their launcher isn’t such piece of shit anymore, I don’t care.
Plus it works so smoothly I never even think of it as DRM
AFAIK SteamWorks DRM is something developers have to actively implement in their games. From what I understand, by default Steam is merely a delivery system without DRM.
As a linux gamer, a game that is not available on Steam is a game i won’t even bother checking. I can easily run non-steam game using lutris or heroic-game-launcher but I prefer to stick to my walled garden than step in their’s.
No, they should definitely be accountable for all the other shitty things too. This is just a game I was actually kind of excited for, hence why I’m upset about it.
In short, Epic is anti-consumer. They claim better support for developers, but in reality consumers are the one paying for that. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but you the consumer have no choice in it. You are forced through exclusives and other limitations to use inferior service for the same price. Even free games they give are there to drag you into their ecosystem and abuse.
This is why Valve doesn’t feel threatened, I assume, and is not likely to feel the pressure from Epic anytime soon. For that to happen, Epic would have to get on par with features and customer benefits equal or better than Steam and that’s not happening anytime soon. Epic would rather throw hundreds of millions on exclusive deal with some developer and force you the consumer to buy the game on EGS than actually improve the service.
As someone who used to run a louis rossman electronics repair business for a couple years before i burned out.
LG G5 was and still is my point to for perfectly fixable devices.
Motorola is trash because you have to dismantle the phone from the back layer by layer just to reach the front screen.
HTC was even worse with two tier motherboards and octopuss ribbon cables were a nightmare to navigate.
iPhone was/ is possibly the easiest fucking phone to fix, ironically…however by the iphone 8 and onwards apple found increasingly shitty ways to make 3rd party repairs nearly impossible.
windows phones, nokia, and others were hit or miss. tablets were long winded affairs but generally easy due to their inherent size.
ive been out of the game since 2019 when covid dropped. id really like to hear the inside baseball on any current operators running repair business.
i used Repair Shopr software to manage my customers. idk if thats still the go to or if another has bested it.
When I couldn’t repair my Nokia and replace the 5 € USB-Port because there happened to be a small crack in the screen (of course you have to remove the glued on screen to accese the innards), I caved and bought a Fairphone 3.
Worst decision ever. The stupid thing refuses to break to let me even use the better repairability.
Honestly, I think I’ve never dropped a phone as much as this one. And apart from a few scratches there’s nothing. I think it’s the battery cover that usually just pops off like on the indestructible Nokia phones of decades past.
Really funny how I can use Nokia as both a positive and a negative example.
All of the selfish things I’m learning from the comments in this thread about what Microsoft has been doing with their console such as banning aftermarket tech like controllers or generic SSDs is why I finally quit buying consoles entirely years ago and why I stopped paying for Xbox live. Enshitification is a real thing, my dudes.
Not a big surprise on the Huffman Shitshow. A lot of subs over there are insanely toxic. But yeah, a ban for that? That’s crazy.
I didn’t even know RuneScape had a subscription! I think I briefly played it about 15 years ago. Good game, I just don’t have the time to play it, unfortunately. I assume you play? What’s the community like over there?
I just looked up their pricing and it makes sense for them to have an optional subscription. $14 a month is in line with other similar games (e.g. wow). Would be nice if they had a couple of tiers of subscription. Maybe a $7 and a $14. But that might complicate things. How much can you do on the free mode?
My brother has been playing for years and has a few paid accounts. Here’s how he explained it to me. All paid accounts had their prices locked in until you cancelled them. His first, and main, account had a price of $5 a month because he first bought it 15 years ago.
There are also “ironman” modes that exist in the main game. It’s an option at character creation that will restrict your account from trading with other players forcing you to obtain all items on your own instead of just buying them from the trade board. Since you need to make a new character, this is also another payment. My brother has two ironman accounts.
There are “leagues” which are new temporary servers where the rules are different and XP gain is incredibly fast. You’re given tasks to complete before the “league” ends and are awarded cosmetic items based on how much you complete. This requires its own paid account to play. My brother has one of these too.
In total he spent about $20 a month on the game for his various accounts. This change to the subscription will set every single one of his subscriptions to $14 a month raising his monthly payment to something like $56 a month which is ridiculous. He plans on ending all of his subscriptions since there is now no incentive to stay subscribed (the price is no longer locked in). So my brother, a long time and devoted customer, will play the game less and give less money because Jagex is hoping most people like him won’t go through the hassle of unsubscribing.
He, and lots of other long time players, are hoping that Jagex does what other MMOs do and allow multiple accounts for one subscription price.
You don’t need a separate account to play Leagues or any other temporary game modes. You are correct however that you do need to pay a separate membership for each character unless you’re okay with that character only being able to do F2P activities.
20 years ago it was $5 and maybe like 10% of skills were locked behind it. I noticed very little impact from it. But I’m pretty sure end game stuff was locked. IIRC, dragon armor was locked and may have been the best armor.
I’d be surprised if that general model changed significantly.
The model hasn’t changed, but as development of new content has continued, 95% of new content is subscription only.
That said, I can’t speak for Runescape “proper” aka Runescape 3, the current “main” version. I’ve heard a lot of concerning things about all sorts of mobile game style predatory shit going on there.
I’ve only played Runescape 2, now called “Old School Runescape”, which is a fork of the game from (I think) 2006.
Essentially, right around that time they completely overhauled combat, stat progression, and a bunch of other stuff, and called it Runescape 3. A lot of people didn’t like the changes and started hosting custom servers from before the changes.
Eventually they made an official version, called it Old School Runescape, and have been developing it side by side with “normal” Runescape since.
Old School isn’t predatory in my opinion. Outside of occasional “leagues” on special servers with specific challenges applied, there’s no FOMO. The f2p game has plenty of content enjoyable on its own. The subscription just unlocks a mountain of more content, including alternative ways to level up through early game. Technically you can advance faster with a subscription, but that’s due to having more options to turn into an over optimized plan, not some shit exp multiplier or something.
Look up YouTube videos on fastest max level on RS3. You can get all your levels to max level with micro transaction loot boxes in a very very short time for a very very large amount of money.
Encased is a CRPG, heavily inspired by the classic Fallout games, bringing it’s mechanics into the modern age. It’s story is based on the classic book “Roadside Picknick” (known for being the inspiration of the Stalker series) and is very well written. It has a story narrator, similar to the Divinity: Original Sin games and a very in depth character creation. At the start you choose a department of a research company to work in, which will change the way you interact with many characters, adding some replay value. Anything more I could say would be a spoiler, but the entire beginning (first half to one hour) is an absolute banger.
It’s my favorite indie game of the last few years and at the time of writing this, it is currently 90% of on steam, an absolute bargain
I may have to try it again some day. I thought the story and world was interesting and engaging. I played without guides and despite trying to explore and do everything while following the main story line, I soon found myself extremely underleveled to enemies. I thought it was hilarious that each person in the game is assigned a color based on their role in the colony so sometimes you meet someone who is introduced a being “a black”
I mean we have tons of anticheat games working on Linux. More than people realize. Elden Ring, The Finals, Overwatch 2, CS2, Apex Legends, xDefiant and more that I can’t remember right now. It’s not that bad even as a multiplayer gamer. The ones that don’t work R6S, Val, LoL, Fortnite, CoD and Destiny pretty much.
Yeah, quantity over quality right here. If my favourite game doesn’t run on Linux, Linux is dead to me. Even if I had 5 favourite games and 1 doesn’t work, it’s still dead.
So for a lot of people it’s either 100% or it might as well not exist.
My guess is that they just want to separate GOG and their game accounts from each other because they are easier to manage that way. I think in legal sense GOG is still a separate corporate entity even though it’s owned by CD Projekt.
They are legally separate entities, but why should that affect customers? Why are CDPR games no longer being sold on the GOG store? This almost would be like if Valve stopped selling Half Life on Steam.
I don’t think it has anything to do with being “easier to manage”. I think the corporate structure is purely for financial reasons. Valve never spun up a second business for Steam.
I also suspect it has something to do with the fact that GOG is a staunchly DRM free platform. It sounds like either CDPR want to sell games with DRM (which means future titles similar to Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Baldur’s Gate 3 would no longer have a DRM-free option, as CDPR would simply have them on their main store rather than GOG), or CDPR want to include DRM in their own games.
I understand your concern based on how corporations tend to run these days, but this is a lot of speculation. It’s good to be skeptical though.
My guess is that they want to use a single account across more services unrelated to GOG, akin to the way google SSO works for gmail, YouTube, drive, etc. If the account is owned by a subsidiary that might not be possible for other subsidiaries to use the same account per data regulation rules.
I’d like to think I’m not so much speculating, but rather concerned about what this might mean. There’s certainly no apparent reason why splitting CDPR games away from GOG would be good for consumers.
My guess is that they want to use a single account across more services unrelated to GOG
The specific reasoning they’ve given is pretty clear:
You are receiving this email due to your use of online features, including Cross Progression and My Rewards, in CD PROJEKT RED games, as well as your participation in platforms like the CD PROJEKT RED Forums.
None of these things have a clear advantage in being separated from GOG. GOG is owned by CDPR, GOG is a CDPR subsidiary. CDPR have full authority to dictate how their games are sold on the GOG platform. The only unique thing about GOG is the DRM-free position.
By separating CDPR games from GOG, they can separate CDPR games from the DRM-free position, without facing the inevitable backlash that doing so would normally face. Then, newer CDPR games won’t be bound by the GOG philosophy, while GOG can die off somewhat naturally and without such significant backlash. This could be seen as commercially preferable over the current situation for a publicly traded company such as CDPR.
I am making assumptions, but that is the very nature of future predictions. I ask if you could make any other assumption that really challenges mine.
Their games might end up on both, but when it comes to a new 3rd party game being put on CDPR store with DRM or GOG store without DRM, which do you think will happen? Long term, do you think GOG would survive if CDPR shift their focus to another store?
It’s not really the same as Rockstar Launcher and Steam, because Rockstar don’t own Steam.
They are legally separate entities, but why should that affect customers?
Because they are not doing it because of customers, they are more likely doing it for themselves. It’s easier to manage things on a corporate level when the data is also separated similarly as their companies are.
I’m not confusing anything here. For clarity, CPD is the parent company, CDPR is a department within the parent company that develops games. The two are basically synonymous.
What I’m doing is inferring that their statement “online services including…” is in no way an exhaustive list, and directly implies that other things are migrating also. Furthermore, when I logged into GOG Galaxy I could no longer shop for new games (not just CDPR games, but recent games from other publishers - only old titles were available), which further leant into the idea that games were being removed from the GOG store. I’ve since checked gog.com and they’re still there, though.
In any case, even if it doesn’t happen right away this move absolutely is a step towards CDPR games not being listed on the GOG store and potentially even coming with DRM.
I’ve created a support ticket with them asking for further details about the change.
Doom Eternal. I don’t usually enjoy FPS games and I’m not very good at them but I absolutely loved Doom (2016) as it took out most of the things I hate about FPS games. But in Eternal I just felt like I was constantly out of ammo, and there was too much focus on using specific weapons against specific weak points on enemies which I couldn’t get the hang of
Yeah I also couldn’t get the hang on Doom Eternal. Loved the first one but the second one cramped so many unnecessary elements into it and made it too complicated. The first one was a simple but highly effective shooter, but the second one was just bloated with stuff nobody asked for.
I quite enjoy Doom Eternal, but it's true it's a very different game from Doom (2016). You either vibe with the combat flow the game enforces or you don't. There is exactly one way to play it, by rotating between all the abilities as they go off their cooldowns, so you can keep restoring your ammo, HP and armor respectively.
I agree, when I first picked it up I couldn’t get into the rhythm of the game and hated it, but once it clicked it was a lot of fun. You can’t really go in expecting to play exactly like Doom (2016).
I didn’t even like Doom (2016). It was ugly, dull and I hated the finisher system. Really disappointed because I’m old enough to have played the other Doom games as a kid and I mostly enjoyed the new wave of boomer shooters. Great soundtrack though.
The only thing I really hated about Eternal was the Marauder. As a mini boss it was fine, but as a recurring enemy it absolutely kills the pace. I tried the DLC and as soon as I encountered another Marauder early on I turned it off and haven’t gone back.
It’s a shame because I really enjoy the lore, and contrary to yourself I liked most of the other changes Eternal made to nu-Doom. Fewer rooms where you get locked in until you defeat all enemies, mainly.
I agree with the Marauder bit. As a boss it was fine, but as a recurring enemy it just killed the pace of the game.
As for ammo, the game gives you so much chainsaw fuel that if ever you run out of ammo, you just chainsaw the next enemy and you’re back to shooting with your preferred weapon.
The problem I had was that their way of making the game harder was just to throw more enemies at you. Some of the battles were just way too long, fighting dozens of the same enemies that spawned in as you killed the previous ones. It just got so tedious at some point, and rather than being excited for what was coming next, I was just hoping the fight would end so I could move on.
Doom hit the right balance, but Eternal just overdid it.
From memory it respawns the low level enemies constantly, since they’re just ammo/health/armour pinatas. You needed to kill the big enemies to complete an arena.
Not really a fan of the design choice, but I had a decent amount of fun when I clicked with how the Devs wanted you to play.
Funnily enough, the Marauder is one of the only things I kind of liked about Eternal.
And the grapple hook on the super shotgun was fantastic, especially in that boss fight where you grapple and then punch the boss.
Other than that, I find 2016 so much better. Some of the things in Eternal were just not fun at all, like the enemies that are invulnerable except for 3 seconds while charging their super attack AND EVEN THEN ONLY THE HEAD TAKES DAMAGE. Felt just unfair rather than difficult.
Yeah, Doom 2016 is easily one of my favorite singleplayer fps games. Doom Eternal is just worse in every way, and I couldn't get through more than a few hours.
It completely breaks the combat flow state that made the original great
Instead of having the freedom to prioritize enemies and weapons, it wants you to do things a very specific way
Instead of the minimal but interesting story from the 2016, we get a convoluted mess, with random characters that we have no reason to care about.
Also, despite 2016 looking quite good, they decided to make Eternal garish and cartoony for some reason??
I could go on, but anyway I hope we get a proper 2016 sequel some day.
I’m replaying Doom Eternal right now and I feel this so hard. Even with ammo upgrades and judicious chainsaw use I’m constantly out of ammo. Really makes me wish for a melee weapon that doesn’t have limited fuel or whatever.
This is a few days old but I might be able to help. Are you switching weapons or just sticking to a single one?
A single chainsaw gives you something like 20 shotgun slugs and a bunch of ammo for every single other weapon, you shouldn’t have ammo problems unless you are trying to kill a heavy demon with the assault rifle primary fire.
A complete downgrade from Doom 2016 in every way. Combat was complete madness, there’s no such thing as planning ahead. You can only endlessly dash away while insta-swapping weapons ad infinitum.
Doom 2016 made you think. Is this glory kill to risky? Is the gap wide enough to make it through, who do I have to kill first? Doom Eternal reduced that to a single repetitive four button loop.
I disagree but I understand you… I don’t know why it didn’t click for me as an old Yu-Gi-Oh! Player (that is the only card game I have ever played… And several minutes of a “Duel Master” card game for GBA… Perhaps that one would trigger some old memories for some it was based on an anime too).
It suffers the same problem every trading card game does: if you don’t have the best cards, you lose. Skill and strategy and even luck are nothing compared to just having better cards.
IMO pay-to-win mechanics work really well for a game-within-a-game since rather than exploiting the player for money, they are exploiting the player character for effort, which can lead you to go on more epic quests
Personally I found it really annoying that halfway through the game when I decided to give gwent a go, i got absolutely trashed and was basically tole to go back to the beginning of the game and redo a bunch of areas I’d already spent too much time in.
Not to mention none of the gwent quests were epic in the slightest. They were literally “play these people, if you win you get a card”.
That’s a really superficial take. For instance in MTG every format has “must have” cards, like fetchlands or shock lands (or dual lands), but beyond that there’s no “best” cards. There are “meta” cards that go into a specific meta deck and when you have one meta deck playing against another that’s when skill and strategy come into play. And it’s not like you must build a meta deck to play, you can build anti-meta decks or lab out a completely new meta deck. The problem is that such a level of deck building skills go way beyond what 99% of players are capable of doing. Even some of the best players in the world suck at deck building, because is an entirely different skillset to playing the game.
But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. The modern meta looks very different to when I got into MTG 10+ years ago. Some are still around in some form, like regular Tron turned into mono-g tron and burn turned into boros burn. But the bans on Twin and Pod have killed those decks while Jund and Affinity have dropped out of the meta. In those place we have brand new decks like amulet titan or 5c Omnath. Somewhere in that timeframe we also got Eggs that was literally jank cards thrown into a pile of meta-defining solitaire playing, and then it got banned for being too boring.
You can get meta cards to build a meta deck but you can’t explicitly buy “best” cards because a new combination of “bad” cards can create a meta deck and then those become the new “best” cards.
The one with a better deck wins. If a homebrew deck goes against a meta deck then it’s likely the meta deck wins, but if you homebrew a deck with meta cards vs homebrewing without meta cards it comes down to how well the deck is built. A homebrew with all the meta cards but without any game plan or poor mana source distribution is going to do worse than a homebrew without meta cards, but with a clear plan and cards that support that plan.
People not building their own decks and instead just copying meta decks is another discussion.
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