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.
If you like space games, X3 and X4 can probably eat up lots and lots of your time. Space Engineers if you’re less interested in flying, space economics and creating a supply chain (which X lets you) and more in gathering materials and creating all sorts of weird, funny or actually amazing stuff. SE is probably better played with at least 1 other person, possibly more, while X is exclusively single player.
Grand Strategy games can also obliterate your free time. Civilization 5, any Total War game. Hell, Age of Empires 2 can have very long matches if you play on huge maps and people have loved that game for over 20 years.
You can also go for Fallout 4 or Skyrim with extra content mods, like dungeons, quests or areas.
Personally, I’m just past 400h on Palworld, so I’d recommend it as well. I’ve played from start to “finish” some 4 times by now. Official servers will be wiped sometime in December, possibly with a new patch arriving, but you can always play single player and even invite a friend to play on your local save and never lose progress (unless the save gets corrupted, which can happen).
And considering Bethesda’s track record, we will get a buggy mess 2 years from now. I mean, just compare the list of shit the Unofficial Skyrim Patch fixes that Bethesda hasn’t addressed in 13 fucking years
Their “open arms” has felt like a vampiric embrace for almost a decade now, because they would really, really, really prefer if modders released stuff via their club, where modders can get money and they also get a slice for free.
The bigger PC names of the 90s and early 2000s were all welcoming to modding, with some games shipping with the “official editor tools” for anyone to mess around with (UT99 and Warcraft 3 come to mind)
Oblivion’s leveling didn’t change from Morrowind, it also had that flaw that could really fuck you up if you didn’t optimize getting extra points in the minor skills before the major skills.
I enjoy that Skyrim made leveling up simply a matter of gaining X points across skills, but how they ditched the attributes and went for +10 on one of Health, Stamina or Magicka made it feel kinda dumb.
It’s all this bland uniform container of “content” with nothing making any of it stand out.
The big irony here is that they could damn well make weights for the procgen to create spots with dense “habitation” and others with zero points of interest. But nope, just generate a map, plop down 5-8 POI, call it a day. The “big cities” like New Atlantis stand out in the worst way possible, a small square of buildings surrounded by absolutely fucking nothing. They effectively copied the worst aspects of No Man’s Sky