Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2, if you haven’t played already. Think of them as the stepping stones for BG3.
Spec Ops: The Line is a 3rd person shooter with an incredible story, I think it takes 4-6 hours to go through the campaign. Short when compared to RPGs, but worth the time. People also talk about Titanfall 2’s campaign being great, I haven’t played it yet.
Mass Effect trilogy is also very good, mainly the 2nd game. The first game is the jankiest of the bunch and the 3rd is much better after all the DLC, though I still don’t like how the optional Paragon/Renegade prompts from 2 became obligatory QTE in 3.
I would have liked more emphasis on replayability than skin textures and raytracing.
Reminds me of the whole kerfuffle of western devs bashing elden ring, a significant portion of which could be summed up as “why would you put something in the game without a big map marker showing them where it is???”
You don’t need to update your drivers every time a new version comes out, some games can actually get worse performance with a newer driver - I personally had problems with No Man’s Sky, nvidia drivers over version 424 I think, made the game effectively unplayable, while versions like 416 kept the game and the framerate smooth throughout.
Better title: Kadokawa employees are reportedly “optimistic” about the takeover. Subtitle: Kadokawa owns FromSoftware
Kadokawa suffered a ransomware cyberattack earlier this year, but employees were left disappointed by the response from current president and CEO Takeshi Natsuno.
As a result, employees are said to be “thrilled at the prospect of an acquisition by Sony”, according to a new report from Japanese outlet Bunshun (via Automaton).
HAAHAHAHA, Oh The Onion, you guys are… It’s not The Onion… (for anyone that doesn’t get it, PSN has been hacked a couple of times)
Anyway, the “thrill” comes from the expectation that the current Kadokawa leadership will get the boot from the acquisition.
Epic deserves shit for being a shitty company overall. The lower sale tax is great for devs, but most consumers don’t care, because the program is a shitty Unreal application pretending to be a shitty web browser
Valve can definitely lower their sale tax, they get loads of money off trading cards and skin sales, maintenance of that shit is waaay lower than the petabytes needed for games. At least some of the money is spent making better consumer stuff, like Steam deck and increasing the number of games that you can play on Linux with Proton. Doesn’t explain the 30% either way
Pathfinding still sucks and people abuse that for bosses, building walls or whatever to glitch them. The good-ish is that this has been mostly fixed for base working pals, they’ll either work in place or teleport to the thing where they’re supposed to work. Sometimes they may still drop “inside” foundations, so you gotta remove/add them again from the base bench.
Enemy AI still sucks - same applies for your combat pals’ AI. Attack, wait, maybe move a bit, repeat. They don’t dodge or attempt to move except when positioning for an attack.
Happens more often with online play. Playing offline is a lot more stable regarding clipping issues
One of the patents was for seamlessly transitioning from one type of ride to another, as it happens in Legends Arceus, ie: jumping into the water while riding the stag will automatically change to the giant piranha. The irony here is that palworld lacks anything like that, you never transition between 2 different mounts without player input. The closest to that is using some pals as gliders, but you’ll just get back on your feet once you touch the ground or water.
Another patent was for throwing stuff at enemies in order to begin combat. They’re all hard reads, mostly because they read like they’re describing how Legends Arceus works in minute detail.
World of Warcraft is the absolute winner in my case. I have no idea on actual numbers, given 99% of my time was in private servers, with a very brief stint on official. Only one of those private servers is still around, with my character from Warlords of Draenor times still there.
Outside that, probably Skyrim (many hours playing pirate versions, modding it with more lethal combat, more lore-friendly armors and “actual” civil war, among other things). I wonder how many hours I’ve spent on Dwarf Fortress, as I’ve only played the freeware version, starting with 0.34, before trees had height.
M$ monopolizes swathes of the game industry (and several other computer related areas) while Sony monopolizes nearly everything else media related. This is NOT how market competition is supposed to happen.
BTW, Gotcha Gotcha Games is the owner of RPG Maker and Pixel Game Maker, make of that what you will.