Not entirely well versed in the New World Saga but from what I’ve heard and read here’s roughly what happened:
The dev team was developing a hardcore always-on PvP MMO, which is fine but not for everyone
Playtest rolls around and the devs get back player numbers you would expect for a hardcore PvP MMO
Speculation: the higher ups really don’t like the projected return on their investment given the abysmal (for their ideas) player numbers and force the Studio to pivot to PvE content
At this point the entire game has been designed around PvP and the devs now have only ~1 year to somehow shove PvE content in there
Launch comes and since the devs had to spend all available time on forcing in PvE content what is present is buggy and doesn’t fit the game mechanics
Ensue several months of panicked back and forth patching of the game by the devs, making the entire mess worse because everyone is pissed by one change or another
It sort of is an optimization problem though because excess textures and audio files could be separated off into their own DLC packages (see Age of Empire II High-Res texture DLC and Steam’s Language Selection feature)
The really big problem is people being riddled with 4K textures on 1080p monitors and 20 audio tracks for different languages when they only need one.
Baldur’s Gate 3 also was in Early Access for a few years so people had plenty of independent experiences to base their opinion on. The release content was more, true, but there were a lot of known factors.
On another note this will make for an easy comparison of Denuvo ridden game vs Denuvo removed. The Day 1 Patch bringing some Fixes and Performance gains would muddy the results a bit but I think it’s still a good idea to have a test like that. If the rumors/speculation about Denuvos performance impact are true I doubt even a Day 1 Patch would manage to balance out the performance difference.
Valve really understands how to get people to stay. Proton is an absolute life saver for gaming on linux and Steam currently offers the best experience with it. You just click play and most of the times that’s it, game works. I have no idea how VR works without Steam but I can only imagine it being a giant pain in the ass given how easy SteamVR is to use (a couple of Linux Bugs aside)
I mean that’s the same side that steam is using their monopoly for, too
Steam only has a monopoly because they have the absolute feature advantage. There is no other launcher that offers all of the features Steam does. Steams Monopoly is a natural one, it formed because every other choice was worse and developers don’t want to put the game on another 30 stores where it won’t sell anyway. Epic is trying to create an artificial monopoly where everyone uses Epic because the developers literally cannot sell the game anywhere else (at least for a time).
Steam: Developers voluntarily restrict themselves to that single store out of convenience (99% of the customer base is there, why bother with another store). The customer base is there because the store is feature rich. Epic: Developers are artificially restricted to that single store. The customer base is there because they can’t get the game anywhere else.
Given the above I predict that, unless Epic gets their Store feature equal to Steam (which won’t happen imo), Epic will have to continue forcing exclusivity indefinitely. The moment they stop forcing people to use their store their customers will migrate back to Steam for a better experience.
If I priate anything I still end up adding it to Steam as a non-steam game just because I am dependant on Proton working. Even then the ootb experience is better since Steam handles actually setting up the Proton environment for me when I actually buy the game.
It isn’t (at least over here) but the “cost” for a game is really iffy to define because if you want to be pedantic the distribution cost for a digital game are cents and that only if you actually factor in infrastructure costs. So technically they can just price them however they want because technically a single game download has 0 cost.
Technically because we all know that the production costs have to be regained somehow, just that with enough lawyer bs you can ignore that as a product cost on paper (for example if you label the entire production a learning experience or smth)
The Xbox Seried S does not have 10GB VRAM it has 10GB VRAM/RAM that can be dynamically allocated to whatever the game needs.
Baldur’s Gate 3 needs 12GB combined VRAM/RAM at minimum. While the Xbox OS peobably doesn’t eat as much RAM as Windows does the difference is apparently not 2GB which leaves the Series S with not eniugh RAM to power the game.
As others mentioned for the Steamdeck Splitscreen was disabled, however that was likely done to save GPU performance, unlike the Series S the Steamdeck has enough RAM (16GB) to meet the minimum requirements.
Cannot speak for randoms, only the Solo Aspect: You can take control of any additional party members (also works in Multiplayer) so playing alone is technically definitely possible. What I can tell you from my brief experience though is that managing the extra characters is somewhat tedious so I don’t think you’ll get the maximum out of the party solo. Playing with only one character is not really something I’d do, there does not seem to be any mechanic balancing out all of the disadvantages there from what I can tell.
Adding onto that, Dishonored 2 feels way more fun when playing non-lethal. Dishonored 1 kind of handicaps you if you decide not to kill enemies, whereas Dishonored 2 gives you a few more Options.
Both are incredible games though, definitely worth playing.