If it’s a game like an MMO (which several on that list are) they’d have to publish the server software in order to avoid fully killing the game. And to publish the server software that was only ever expected to run in their own datacenters they’d then have to publish documentation, dependencies, etc. and this is all assuming that it can be contained in a single installer for a single machine without relying on additional services they host, and assuming it has reasonable system requirements for average users to self host.
That’s also assuming playing an MMO alone/with only 1-2 people doesn’t suck. Play some 2009scape single player without adventure bots. It feels lonely as all heck
Plus there’s all of the legal and PR hurdles to ensure you’re not exposing yourself to undue risk.
Basically a million reasons for a company to not spend a thousand work hours ensuring their crappy MMO (I’ve tried out a couple of the listed MMOs, they were unsuccessful for a reason) can continue to be played after they’ve divested from it
Looks like some of those are games that were cancelled, some were online multiplayer games that had the servers shutdown, some were simply removed from the Microsoft Store and some were single player games with always online DRM for which they shut the servers down. So it’s not all super scummy nonsense
In the context of Runescape this is just a hellish mess, because its ultimately a codebase from the late 90s with graphics created everywhere from the early 00s to the mid 20s. Oh and as an MMORPG anyone who was a player but stops playing is a lost sale so no pressure at all
The Sims 4 actually added a similar approach to character creation about 2 years ago, but very different kind of game with a very different market
Off the top of my head it has options for male presenting body type, female presenting body type, sliders for fat and muscle (and you can generally reshape most of the body) and the available clothing and hairstyles got sorted into masculine and feminine with I believe more traditionally gender neutral stuff getting placed into both, then for biological purposes there’s “can pee standing up/cannot pee standing up” and “can impregnate/can be impregnated” It defaults to Male/Female defaults but makes it easy to customize, and a good mix of default townies (NPCs) are all over the spectrum.
They also recently added more complex relationship and romance preferences, so sims can be sexually bi but romantically straight for example, but also expanded to allow various levels of openness to relationships as well as poly relationships
I feel like some nudity and sex scenes when it’s appropriate are better than not. Really ruins my sense of immersion when there’s a naked person with a random potted plant conveniently blocking your view of their bits. Either commit to them being naked or don’t have them naked at all is my take
Witcher 3 it is more explicit if you buy the services on offer in the brothel. But it’s still far less than one romp in Wicked Whims, which of course is all mods so no motion capture there
My daughter learned to jump because she learned she could walk over and hit the spacebar and see immediate feedback on almost every game we played, but at the time I was playing through one of the Tomb Raider games so I’d relatively frequently walk away with the game unpaused. Then she connected the dots of what she saw on screen and tried repeating the motions she saw Laura doing and did her first jumps mimicking what she saw on screen.
So in summary, Laura Croft taught my daughter how to jump.
I know very little about cars, and even less about trucks. When I think of a truck, I think of a bed in the back where you can haul stuff from Home Depot. Where is the “truck” part?
Generally if you get a truck and do truck things with it, there’s 2 specific things a truck will have that no other class has:
A protected bed that you can put bulky and dirty/stinky items into for transport
The ability to pull a large trailer
But hilariously your average crossover is fully capable of hauling an inexpensive trailer and a couple thousand pounds of whatever if not more than that, which covers 99.9% of the lifestyle arguments most pavement princes truck owners make for why they need a truck
My wife’s been playing a bunch of it and honestly best I can tell it’s an Unreal Engine tech demo combined with a easy-to-use game engine for beginners to make mini games in (similar to Roblox’s various games) with integrated hosting, release, discovery, authentication and payment processing.
Which is kinda confusing given Epic also has Core which is also an Unreal Engine tech demo combined with easy-to-use game engine with integrated hosting, release, discovery, authentication and payment processing
Oh and Fortnite has its official Battle Royale mode that’s largely a copy of PUBG
My wife only went because I was hellbent on seeing the eclipse at totality (we saw the last October’s eclipse and 2017 both from around 90% coverage). Afterwards she said “the Grand canyon ain’t got shit on a solar eclipse” and we are both still in shock for how amazing of an experience it was.
The wonky colors as day slowly turned to night, the sudden whooshing shadow as totality began, the burning ring of fire in the sky then the light whooshing back as totality ended, the cacophony of yelps by folks too slow to put their eclipse glasses back on. It was a hell of an experience
This has been big on some of AMD’s workstation and server chips because Windows generally doesn’t know what to do with the unexpected NUMA Node layouts. Or the scheduler just can’t handle 128 cores. So abstracting that away with Linux’s superior scheduler can help significantly on certain hardware
The gower brothers have not been part of Jagex for about 10 years, but are all involved in the development of this game IIRC
Edit: I was slightly worried too but it looks like the handful of tiles is more of a fog of war/view distance type thing. These two screenshots seem to show it the clearest