Well, I was hoping my comment would be ridiculous enough to make it clear that it’s in jest, but apparently not. 🫠
I mean, I do strongly prefer a gameplay loop you can (want to) play forever over story-driven games, but I am very much aware that this is a personal preference.
I mean, what even is the point of winning a game? Ah yes, now I get to click through half an hour of dialogue and cutscenes, so that I can then not play the game anymore, because I’ve ‘completed’ it. Really, completing a game sounds like a scam invented by Big Game to sell more games. Like, oh yeah, we’ve made our game so fucking boring that players want it to be over with, so they can buy another of our boring ass games and play that to completion instead.
To some degree, it may make the player choice seem broader, as you can go full hero or full villain. In some sense, you can also go into the middle by kicking a puppy at one point and then helping an elderly lady at another.
But then, it’s also just hard to portray nuance. If the options are “pet kitty” and “punch kitty”, you know what’s what. But if it says “pet kitty” and “ignore kitty”, it becomes a lot less clear. Maybe the kitty does not want to get pet by a random stranger. You probably won’t be able to gauge its reaction from the character model to know what’s the right choice.
But you also won’t know what “pet kitty” really means. Will your character be gentle and back off, if the kitty does not appreciate the gesture? Or will they stroke that kitty until it bites them?
I’m actually aware of the difference, but would also argue that this difference isn’t that big. If you have to bypass security mechanisms to be able to use hardware as you please, that doesn’t sound to me like you actually own it.
Yeah, I was gonna say: Oh, like most laptops then? If the hard drive is not encrypted, you can just boot a different OS to access what’s on the hard drive…
Well, I mainly mean that they’d need to put in quite a lot of work to make the existing Oblivion mods work with it or to develop a new modding API. I doubt, they’d put that much work in for a cash grab remaster/remake.
I mean, I have heard of some weird constructs before, where games used their own engine for physics and whatnot, and only used Unreal for rendering. If that makes sense for them to do, that would preserve support for most mods.
The thing is, the age of the engine doesn’t say anything. The Unreal Engine started its development before 1998. But you do have to put in work to upgrade an engine over time and Bethesda doesn’t have Fortnite money for that.
I believe, you could in principle use any Blender model, although I’m guessing, they’d need to match in terms of animations. I’m not deep into either Luanti modding or Blender, so not sure how it works together, but here’s some documentation describing it: docs.luanti.org/models/using-blender/
Yeah, its game mechanics are very similar to Civ5, which is still considered one of the high points in the Civ series. And it does reproduce them quite well, so I do think that can give you a good impression, if Civ is for you.
Then again, I do own Civ5, but still end up playing Unciv instead, because I’d rather have my laptop not screaming at me while it runs in the background and I do a couple turns every so often…
we would like to officially announce that this will be the [last] version labeled Alpha. We have already updated the versioning scheme (this version being 0.27.0) and we will progressively stop using the Alpha label altogether up to the next release, which will be Release 28.
Excellent. Whenever I told people about 0 A.D., I felt like I should add that it’s not actually an Alpha, especially with their webpage saying in various places basically “no, don’t look at us yet, we’re not ready yet”.
If they continue adding content, I do think that’s awesome, but what’s there is already plenty solid.
I’ve heard the reasoning before that reviewers typically only have access to a, well, pre-release version. A day-1-patch is pretty common now.
So, as reviewer, you have to decide whether the performance problems look like they might be fixed on release day, and therefore whether you want to incorporate them into your review/score or not.