Even if you believe that all privately owned capital is intrinsicly evil, you still ought to go after companies from most to least problematic within a specific category, no?
That is, for digital storefronts, start with the likes of Epic or in a broader digital gaming space in general, Microsoft or Ubisoft. Go after Steam when you’ve cleaned up the rapists, backroom dealers and collusionists.
All those large online action/claim sites are commercial in underlying nature. When you saw all the small farmers protest in Germany it was primarily driven as an action by about 5 large farming conglomerates because they are the ones getting ~85% of the grant money that was being cut. The whole point of the cut was to not funnel money that was supposed to go to small farmers to large megacorps after all. Who in turn instrumentalized the small farmers to protest it.
Probably what’s going on here, too. You can bet somewhere deep deep down, this is something Tim Sweeney cooked up.
Wow, an actual new Mana game. Looks quite rough from the trailer but going to keep an eye on it. If the dress-spheres, sorry, class-changes, work mid-fight I could see myself enjoy that combat system.
Okay so caveat first: It is just Far Cry wearing a Pandora mask. That’s it. I’d say it’s even slightly less than that because they had to thin some mechanics to make space to fit the theme a bit more.
But, that theme? It… it makes it work! Even the mechanics being watered down works, because making it fit the theme just ends up being more important. Yeah, you play this for playing on Pandora. But fuck does the game sell this well! Incredibly well. I found myself just stalking the jungle (or plains, or forest, of which the plains are the weakest but still incredibly beautiful) half the time, genuinely doing the grindathon entirely willingly, just because of the lush atmosphere the game presents and how it feels to be roaming in this alien nature.
Plus, I played Horizon Forbidden West right after this, and while I give HFW that it has much higher fidelity overall and is really pretty, the actual jungle and forest in particular are leaps and bounds above it in Avatar. You can notice the artists focused their entire effort on that, and even at daytime it looks amazing. Nighttime and they did the bioluminsensce we know from the movies incredibly well.
So erm… recommended? In a weird way? It’s really just Far Cry: Pandora, but it turns out that despite not expecting to, that’s kinda what I wanted? 😅
(Caveat though: I don’t think it’s worth €70. However given how much I liked it, €50 or so seems perfectly adequate.)
Yeah, Daggerfall was cool. I can’t really tell nowadays whether it impressed me more than Arena did or not because obviously the first one got me when I was younger and it was my first experience of an open adventure game, constrained as it was.
Yeah it seems like a remaster. Or more specifically via a re-implementation as a sort-of official mod for Age of Empires 3 (thanks for the correction) I imagine, and judging from the graphics.