ME has stuck with me as my favorite game for fifteen years now. I love it visually, the soundtrack is incredible, and the gameplay is fantastic.
Lingo and its sequel are a bizzare, unmatched puzzle experience. I don’t know what else to say there.
And Yet It Moves is… something else. An indy platformer from the heyday of Indy platformers. It is an interesting example of how story can influence art style.
Valve also clarified today that it was the processors, not the card management companies, that they talked to. The processors were pointing at MasterCard’s rules, but refusing to provide Valve with someone at MasterCard to talk to.
There’s a skill tree, equipment (not clothing/weapons like most RPGs, but still equipment), and crafting. That’s enough to make it an RPG mechanically.
There’s also the perspective definition. You are embodying a person separate from yourself and you are expected to make choices as them. Textbook RPG.
Now for the real question: is it actually IRC or just an in-game IRC-like interface.
The greatest hacking game of all time, Uplink, has an actual IRC client that you can buy and install on your in-game systems.
IRC pops up a lot in less obvious places too. The in-game chat in Warframe is IRC, but it handles all the server and channel connecting, locking you out of connecting to arbitrary servers.
Many modern games have a separate physics frame rate to avoid that issue, but tend to always have the physics process a fixed amount of ‘time’ regardless of how long the frame takes so that the physics is more consistent. If that lags, the whole game will pretty much play in slow motion.
The problem with combat in Morrowind is that it simultaneously measures player skill and character skill. Chance-to-hit works when the character does the aiming and gap-closing for you. When you have to handle that with poor depth perception and you have chance-to-hit on top of that, it’s always going to feel like garbage.
They didn’t make another because they were forced to make a game that was Wonder Woman and live service. How does that work? Clearly they didn’t know either since they spun their wheels for like seven years, lost all their old staff, and then got shut down.
I remember playing 3-person multiplayer with no router in that game. A friend had two Ethernet ports but couldn’t bridge them, so he’d host and the other two of us would join. Some stuff worked smoothly, but other stuff was super broken.
Part of the issue is that modern games are usually getting fixes right up to release. Pre-release reviews tend to focus on things that aren’t likely to ever change significantly, like design and writing.
It would be nice if they gave a summary of issues they saw with a disclaimer that they may get fixed instead of omitting that information entirely.