I think the real problem is businesses have to grow. If most big companies weren’t publicly traded then just being profitable would be enough.
Imagine making enough money to pay you and everyone else in your company a great wage one year, but it being bad because it wasn’t more profit than last year.
I was reading a blog post that talks about exactly how much the author is able to put in the public domain. My understanding is that Willingham has a fairly individualized contract with DC that he is grandfathered in on and is rather abnormal nowadays and gives him more control. DC has been trying to, as stated above, “reinterpret” that contract to give them more control.
Essentially, DC may own the rights to the individual products they published, but the world and characters Willingham created can be used outside of those in new or reimagined context.
That creates a significant can of worms in regards to what parts of the character are derived from the source material that is owned by DC. See not allowing sherlock holmes to smile for an example.
I'm skeptical of any article like this on its face. The whole beauty of a well done RPG, especially a CRPG, is that you get choices on how to build your character and how you handle encounters and can be successful with many of them.
If bard is the most fun for you, awesome. If it's "objectively better", the game is flawed.
Arguably, that’s the whole point. I never played the original Fallout thinking I could play every option. I’ve seen people complaining about “you have to use savescumming or you miss half the dialogue.” No, that’s called “replayability” so when you go back and try as a different type of character, there will be paths you’ll be locked out of, but there will also be paths that were previously closed now open.
that's something I've noticed about bg3 (only 1-2h in) vs the old ones and even ps:torment.
in most of those you can continue the dialog and usually circle back to the other choices.
in bg3 its seems much more like, you say one option you're stuck with it - which seems much better.
i'll be interested to see on the replay - but i guess itll be up to me to play it differently.
Bg3 makes you feel like your choices matter. I havnt progressed very far (10 hours in and mostly exploring) and there have been points in dialog or exploring the open world when I pass a “point of no return”. This is where I can tell there will be a consequence (good or bad) to my choices, but perhaps it’s not immediately seen. I havnt had most of these choices pay off yet, but it builds anticipation and makes me want to see how this will play out and wonder if it will come up further down the line when I least expect.
That’s actually my biggest criticism of D&D. Bards are better choices than rogues or fighters or wizards. Same goes with clerics or druids. sprinkle on a bit of paladin, a couple feats, and some magic gauntlets, and they can invalidate whole swathes of staple fantasy archetypes entirely.
if by better you mean, more fun, i think that's slightly up to you.
you can have just as much fun with a more constrained character who keeps losing dice rolls - it might be harder work though.
no, i mean more empowered to interact with the game world. They have more agency in more arenas of play. You can play a goober of any class and have fun, i agree, but a goober who picks a “better” class will be able to create more comedies of errors beyond “Player fails to hit thing with a big stick”.
That's the issue with how combat oriented D&D is. While there is a wide assortment of abilities between classes and their roles in combat, a lot of non-combat situations are reduced to just roling high on a skill check, not many choices and approaches to be made. There might be the odd utility spell, but even that isn't a choice for martial classes. Because of that, Bards dominate non-combat encounters, with Jack of all Trades and Expertise.
It’s not a problem for a videogame, but D&D5e (actually most D&D editions) is not a balanced game at all. In fact the only RPG that I’ve played and would call balanced is Pathfinder 2e.
So I was not expecting Baldur’s Gate to be balanced at all given it’s based on D&D5e.
Edit: Read the article. Really just another shit gaming journalist. Their whole justification for why the rest of the series isn’t good basically boils down to “I only wanna play boomer shooters.”
I assume most FOSS emulators have a non-commercial license, so if a company is using it to make money they are already violating the law, but who is gonna go after Nintendo for that?
If they had that, they’d no longer be FOSS and instead “source available” and half the community will raise the pitch forks. Best FOSS licence to protect against this sort of thing is AGPL because it’s toxic for corporations. But even that could be used in this case if they had the source on the same computer imo (IANAL though)
The Stardewification of everything continues - can't wait until Half-Life 3 finally comes out and it turns out that Black Mesa has purchased a dilapidated farm in the countryside that they've taken Gordon Freeman out of stasis to restore for them.
Reasonable question! It was a sub called “the_donald”. It started with a bunch of folks saying outrageous things that were satirizing Trump and his followers. Unfortunately it wasn’t outrageous enough because it was slowly taken over by true believers who spouted the same outrageous shit because they actually believed it.
Idk if this is “a reason” but leaving the launcher running without actually playing the game does count as playtime for steam, which may result in folks not being able to refund it if they don’t like it, and increases overall hours played.
Whether that’s part of why these games have useless launchers, or whether those things actually pan out that way, who knows.
I don’t think that’s part of why they do it. I’m an avid civ 6 fan, and I can say that the launcher is pretty unobstructive. Between launching from steam and launching from the 2k launcher, it takes about a minute. It’s likely to collect data, but honestly the only useful data they’d get is the pc hardware, the length of play, and common mods. 2k probably saw that they weren’t getting sellable data and decided to scrap the idea, honestly it’s probably the only decent thing the company has done in years.
Maybe, but for Civ 6 specifically the launcher came out a few years into the game’s lifespan, so I’m not sure they were doing it for whatever marginal revenue benefit that would be. I’d imagine selling DLC without Steam or whatever storefront getting a cut might be a motivating factor.
That’s just a by-product of how Steam works. Playtime is counted as long as the Play button says “Stop”.
For games without DRM (e.g. KSP), you can launch it from the Steam install folder without Steam running. Everything works perfectly but your playtime won’t be counted for the same reason.
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