For Palworld, a new island takes 6 months, per the article. Probably talking about Sakurajima and the big southern one. That makes sense, since it’s not just putting stuff there and calling it a day on the first finished thing, some level design has to happen so the place makes sense and doesn’t feel super boring to explore.
In a way, piracy can fix that problem too, since pirate servers existing for ongoing games means they’ll never actually die, unless the server source code gets taken down and nobody archives a copy. I mean, WoW Classic only happened because a private server running vanilla got too big, despite Blizzard bullshit of “You think you want it, but you don’t” and “We don’t have the code to roll back”.
Star Wars Galaxies, Phantasy Star Online, City of Heroes, Warhammer Age of Reckoning all still exist and can be played, despite being “dead”, thanks to private/pirate servers.
The original Crash played fine, controls were very responsive, but the platforming was unforgiving. To give you an idea, the japanese version of Crash 1 is easier than the USA release, with some levels considerably shorter. Crash 2 and 3 are much easier compared to 1 (my personal favorite is 3, with all the powerups you get after beating bosses and the level variety)
Rayman 1 was similarly hard as fuck, even more so to get a 100%. Absolutely gorgeous 2D graphics that hold up even today. Rayman 2 is worth checking out if you want 3D platforming, there’s lots of that. Can’t talk about Rayman 3 tho, but it does look fun.
Maybe not here in the fediverse, but there are dozens of youtube channels that are all about whining about “the woke” ruining the gaming industry, “explaining” how every spectacular failure we’ve seen in the last few years (Starfield, Concord) are because of DEI wokeness, etc.
Doom 2016 wasn’t exactly generous with ammo limits in the early game, but Eternal was a chore. Here’s 20 enemies, 6 of them are cacodemons that will only die if you lob a shotgun grenade at their mouth. You have 12 shotgun and 50 plasma bullets, the latter enough to kill 1 caco.
But, until that person who can unite gamers appears again, and holds those important and knowledgeable discussions… Influencers will be just that: influencers - not journalists. And be unreliable shills.
Given past events, the more likely outcome is yet another gamergate, where actual criticism of the lack of honesty in games reporting gets drowned in a sea of misogyny, personal attacks and hate based on disinformation