If you liked BG3 and Divinity 2, I’m obligated to mention the Pathfinder games: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous. The graphics are a touch simple, but the writing is great and the detailed character building scratches an itch for me. As far as I’m concerned, Owlcat is currently the only real competition Larian has.
Those are some impressive scores, sucks that I don’t own anything I could play it on. Hopefully there’s a Switch 2 port in the future, since I’ll likely get one once a new Xenoblade game is on the horizon.
I’m not big on hardware, is a Switch 2 stronger than the weak Xbox version?
I don’t see Bioware titles on the list. Dragon Age series for fantasy, Mass Effect for sci fi. Since BG3 is on the list, I wanted to mention in case you haven’t gotten to them yet.
I’ll second Dragon Age since it’s less action oriented than Mass Effect (which is great but OP seems more interested in strategy/management than shooting)
Mass Effect has a “tactical pause” feature though, but it feels less Baldur-like :)
I have fond memories of being the only one I knew with a Virtual Boy. My mom got it on clearance along with games like Teleroboxing and Galactic Pinball.
I’m currently in the last few hours of the DLC of Borderlands 2, trying to wrap it up before moving on to the Pre-Sequel.
My wife and I finished up Split Fiction and have moved on to Blue Prince, which we’re 3 in-game days into. We love a good puzzle game, and we’re told this one will fit the bill.
And besides those, I’ve still been replaying Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance for the first time. I made it to the titular city in the former and I’m still probably in early hours in the latter, probably about to get an introduction to a major character in the story (“The Prey” is the name of the quest that I’m on right now, if you’re curious).
Also kind of breaks immersion when there’s tons of different enemies, but they never fight between themselves. Only when the player character shows up, they’re like, imma ruin this woman’s life.
It means that the publisher needs to provide the player with the server executable, which is a one time expense for them to prepare, rather than continually paying for humans and machines to keep a server running on their end.
What the petition is strictly asking for is to leave the game playable. If that means the game requires multiplayer, then there should be some way to play multiplayer without the server on the other end. I’d certainly prefer that they just make the server executable available. I personally don’t care what the architecture is. People have gotten pirate MMO servers running. Even if it’s something the layman won’t know how to do, we need to have the option to run the server ourselves.
Many games have mixed experiences, some multiplayer, some single player. Take COD, for example, it has a SP campaign, but most people play it for the MP experience. if they disable the MP experience, the game is technically playable since the SP campaign still exists.
This petition seems to focus on “phoning home”:
An increasing number of publishers are selling videogames that are required to connect through the internet to the game publisher, or “phone home” to function. While this is not a problem in itself, when support ends for these types of games, very often publishers simply sever the connection necessary for the game to function, proceed to destroy all working copies of the game, and implement extensive measures to prevent the customer from repairing the game in any way.
This sounds very much like it’s focusing on preserving the SP experience and forcing publishers to remove any artificial limitations on that experience once they stop supporting the game. Nothing in the petition sounds like it’s talking about multiplayer functions.
Here’s the part about being “playable”:
The initiative does not seek to acquire ownership of said videogames, associated intellectual rights or monetization rights, neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.
So they’re explicitly not asking for the publishers to provide anything new (i.e. the game server), it’s only asking for limitations to be removed (i.e. phoning home).
This is still an important petition, but it doesn’t seem to say what you’re arguing it’s saying.
In a game like an MMO or most free to play games, multiplayer is all that exists. The game as it exists on your computer doesn’t even have everything that it needs to function. It’s asking for the game to continue functioning. As for CoD, the petition is not allowed to be prescriptive, so it would be to the government to determine specifically what must happen. In most cases, the shortest path to honoring what this petition asks for is to provide the server code, but I agree that plenty of games make that distinction very blurry.
Right, but the petition explicitly says it’s not expecting any additional resources.
neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it
If that was the intent, the petition should have been more clear, saying it expects any resources not part of the downloaded game but necessary for the full experience to be made available once the game is discontinued, perhaps specifically calling out server code.
If this turns into a bill, I fully expect online content to be excluded since that would require more than just removing the “phone home” bit of games.
Once they discontinue it, they dust their hands clean and their work here is done. That’s all that means. Releasing whatever they have to do to allow it to continue to operate is up to and including the moment that it’s supported. Discontinuing support and leaving people with something they can’t play is what the petition is asking to fix. If they did the work to make The Crew playable after the server was shut down, then they are still not providing any additional resources once they discontinue it; that work would have been done in advance. Once again, the petition can’t ask for how they’d like the problem to be legally solved or how the government should define the rules. In the video that typically comes attached to this with a more verbose problem statement and what we should expect as consumers, you can buy a digital horse, but turning the game off removes your ability to access the horse you paid for, so it’s asking to retain the ability to use everything you bought. That’s more than just a phone home if your game client doesn’t contain the multiplayer mode where you would use the horse (or CoD mulitplayer skin).
I’m not in the EU, so I’m really not familiar with this process, and I’m guessing a number of EU citizens also aren’t familiar. If there’s any related information, it would be good to link it.
Pardon me. That’s an assumption on my part that the people in this community are the types that are so ingrained in this stuff that you’ve seen that video, and a link to this petition, a dozen times at this point. This is a campaign organized by Ross Scott at Accursed Farms. The main video pitch is here, and the super short version is here. And here’s the video that came along with the launch of the EU petition.
Awesome, thanks! This is literally the first time I’ve seen this petition, so I appreciate the extra info. I also wasn’t sure if it was part of Stop Killing Games or a separate initiative (looks like it’s at the 26min mark of the first video).
I’m in the US (looks like Ross Scott is too?) so I obviously can’t sign it, but I am very much interested on the outcome since it’ll likely impact me. If it’s strictly limited to SP games, that’s a lot less interesting since that can easily be region locked (so it would just be the same as piracy for me), but if it also forces release of server code, then I’m getting something I couldn’t before.
For US people, there’s still hope. It looks like Louis Rossmann is pissed off about this as well, but from a regular software perspective (Odyssee and YouTube), so he might try something similar to what he did with Right to Repair. He has a bit wider reach and probably a very different audience, and maybe he can help get something going in the US.
Thanks for the links, I’ll see what I can do to spread the word.
I don’t really follow Ross Scott outside of this campaign, but I believe he’s a US citizen married to a Polish woman, living in Poland. It sounds like it would take an act of Congress to change things here in the US. My e-mails to my representatives have gone functionally unanswered, which doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying.
Yes, but it can start at the state legislature, which is a lot easier. But you need a lobbying campaign to get anywhere. Louis Rossmann has made some progress this way by banding together with farmers, and while it’s painful and expensive, it does work.
So if we’re going to do something in the US, we need a lobbiest, a lawyer (to draft a bill), and a lot of people to show up and give testimony. But we only need to win in one state, and then it gets a lot easier. So:
Pick a state with good consumer protections and a market segment that’s somewhat rated to what you want (video games probably won’t work, but other software could)
Work with pissed off companies to put together a lobby
Find a few reps that care (e.g. the reps for those companies’ districts), and get them to sponsor your bill
Appeal to regular people saying this is a stepping stone to what they actually want
Get people to annoy their reps, show up to hearings, etc in support of the bill
Get the bill to the floor (crazy amount of effort)
If the bill passes, start the process over in the next state, which should go smoother
Once you have legal precedent, repeat the process with a small expansion to the thing you actually care about. This should be a lot easier, because you’re just expanding the same rights to more types of customers.
It’s much more of a long shot, but it does seem possible.
Controllable by Mrcrayfish. He’s an old Mod Developer and his stuff is almost always pretty high quality, so i know it will play nice with most things. It even has a built in radial menu for things i can’t bind to buttons
Probably the Total War series is up your alley… sounds exactly like what you did in Civ 6… you amass a giant army and go around putting everyone in their place… and often enough someone shows up to put you in yours… also for the combat you can just select auto and it will just do the battle for you, ORRRRR you can manually do the combat and control each of your units (cavalry, swordsman, officers… etc) it’s really pretty neat if not a little overwhelming at points.
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