Alright, not like for like exactly, and at 34M, we’re stretching the definition of shoestring. I’ll bet KC:D’s sequel spent far more, for one. I’m with you that more of these studios ought to be aiming for reasonable fidelity in a game that can be made cheaply, but when each of those studios took more than 5 years to build their sequels, that becomes more and more unlikely.
Baldur’s Gate 3 showed studios that gamers are looking for an actual complete game for their $60
This language always misses me. Every game I buy is complete. Adding an expansion to it later doesn’t make it less complete, and it’s not like BG3 wasn’t without major bugs.
It’s hard for them to realize because good graphics used to effectively sell lots of copies of games. If they spent their graphics budget on writers, they’d have spent way too much on writing.
I felt far more restricted by D:OS2’s armor system. Freeform classes sound great on paper, but it also means you kind of naturally end up at a spot where you’ve got everything instead of making meaningfully difficult choices in classes or multiclassing. Learning abilities from books leads to a lot of money bottlenecks and leveling decisions that I didn’t care for. The way that the combat usually doesn’t have any chance to hit, but then does very occasionally, makes missing an attack feel like bullshit rather than a calculated risk. I’m also looking forward to whatever they do next, maybe even a sci-fi interstellar RPG, but I hope they don’t go back to the Divinity well too often for RPG mechanics.
I can’t say conclusively that every LAN game on GOG is DRM-free on Steam, but there are times where Steam’s DRM has caused annoyances for me when trying to play offline on Steam Deck that I would not run into with side loaded GOG games, which I detailed in another comment here.
Airplane mode is not offline mode. I found that out explicitly this year due to how Ubisoft’s launcher interacts with playing offline in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Offline mode is found from the Internet menu in the Steam Deck interface and is very much not the same thing as just not having an internet connection, as much as that would make sense.
I didn’t break any game data. This is an OS level feature, and it just does it sometimes on boot. I’m glad you’ve never been inconvenienced by these things yourself, but this is the intended functionality.
The beginning of D:OS2 felt like a cheat code to get more BG3 after I’d already finished BG3, but as time went on, I found that everything from RPG systems to pacing of combat/non-combat is leagues better in BG3, to say nothing of the production value that’s obviously better in BG3. Still a good game, but the improvement between each of their RPGs is immense.
Nope, this is something different. I booted up Metaphor: ReFantazio, and it just about made it to the main menu before telling me I needed to be in offline mode, but you can’t explicitly put the device in offline mode if you don’t have an internet connection, funny enough. Fortunately I was on an Amtrak with Wi-Fi, but I shouldn’t have needed to do that. As far as I can tell, the reason I needed to authenticate the game again is because the Deck ran a “validating install” step on boot, but I have no idea when that step is going to happen, and once again, I shouldn’t have to plan ahead for being offline.
Well, that’s not true either. I hate this trend of developers only relying on the platform-provided servers for multiplayer, but you have to find a game with LAN. That limits your selection a lot, but I for sure played Star Wars: Episode I - Racer from GOG in LAN without talking to their servers at all.
I’ve traveled domestically and had the Steam Deck randomly decide that the games I preloaded need to be authenticated again because I didn’t explicitly put the device in “offline mode” before traveling. A GOG game sideloaded through Heroic would just work.