Arkham Knight is decent except for the batmobile sections - as others have already mentioned.
I’d still argue it’s better than Origins though. From memory, memorising all the different toolbelt skills isn’t really necessary - you can definitely get through the game by just abusing jumps, cloak and counters - some special enemies might need a specific ability to make vulnerable, but the game normally warns you the first time you fight them, so I don’t think it ever feels too overwhelming - it just feels like a lot if you run through it very quickly.
Have to disagree with you on echoes - I loved the game, but it IMO it was much easier than Prime 1 - the most difficult boss was the probably the boost guardian midway through rather than any of the endgame bosses. The ammo system made the standard power beam too centralising which was boring, and the dark world damage just served to slow the player down, since the light fields regenerated your health.
No one’s suggested it yet, so I’ll say Fire Emblem: Three Houses - lots of gameplay hours, especially if you want to go through each of the four storylines, albeit can be a bit repetitive getting to that point.
Here’s another example where trying to chase the live-service money train has just ended up with a subpar product that people abandon or avoid almost instantly.
Unfortunately I suspect the wrong lessons will be taken away from this as well - e.g. the console/PC gaming market is too fickle, etc.
With GOG, you could theoretically download the offline installer, give that to someone else and then ask GOG support to remove BG3 from your account, and be fully abiding with the EULA conditions.
Holy shit, it’s actually impressive to tank that hard - not cresting more than 1000 concurrent players in over a month, and hasn’t been able to beat 5000 since November… I know people love throwing the ‘dead game’ meme around prematurely, but if this isn’t dead yet, it’s definitely got one foot in the grave.
But if it gets to the point where Ubisoft goes and every studio starts making their own, I don’t think that will work if they don’t have the game catalogue to support it, that would mean Ubisoft could just start churning out horrible games to build their stupid catalogue.
I feel like we’re starting to see a rerun of the streaming service wars - if this takes off across the industry I can definitely see people going back to piracy. I don’t want game pass, ubisoft+, Blizzard Prime, Nintendo Online Super Premium Expansion Pass or whatever stupid names these companies come up with just to play a few games that I’m interested in, just because they’re spread across different publishers.
Ironically this is actually an example of Valve using its dominant marketshare to suppress rivals - Steam’s ToS require devs to have equivalent pricing across all storefronts if they want to sell on Steam at all, so making it harder for cheaper storefront cuts to translate to lower prices to consumers, who might otherwise move to a different storefront.
Devs aren’t going to drop Steam as a store, so they’re stuck.
That may be so, but that’s not the way that the initial tweet is using the term, and not the commonly understood definition.
I’m not denying that Valve as a whole have been a force for good in the PC gaming market, but it’s pointless to argue semantics and make up definitions to better suit personal bias instead of debating the actual point that’s being made.
People saying Steam doesn’t have a monopoly because other stores exist, is the same as saying Microsoft doesn’t have a monopoly on PC Gaming because Mac and Linux exist. Technically true, but ultimately meaningless because its their market power that determines a monopoly, not whether there are other niche players.
While Valve and Steam have generally been a good player, and currently do offer the best product, they still wield an ungodly amount of influence over the PC gaming market space.
Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.
I think you’re right and it’s frontend-specific - I’m using Alexandrite and it shows perfectly, but I just checked the default Lemmy UI and it doesn’t handle it properly either.