Basically, how much of the world is interesting/fun.
For example, Fallout 3 doesn’t do a great job of this, as much of the world is baren with no story or gameplay. Half of the world feels like it could be cut out without much loss. The Yakuza games on the other hand, have smaller worlds but they feel massive and fun because there’s always something to do moments away.
The work-around is to make travel fun, so the “empty-space” is just more gameplay. The Just Cause games are the perfect example of this. All the movement mechanics are quick and satisfying, from the grapple and parachute, to the driving, to the OP wingsuit.
My game last night was more like a couple minutes of lag. Luckily, Dota has an in-built system to detect it, so the game wasn’t recorded and those of us who didn’t leave spent the remainder of the game messing around.
So far as I know, there aren’t a lot of 8-player local multiplayer games. The only obvious answer is the Jackbox games, using your phones as controllers.
Beyond that, I did find this Steam curator, who seems to specialize in 8-player games. From thier list, I recognize Gang Beasts, and Pico Park: Classic Edition. Party Golf, Screen Cheat, and Cobalt also all looked interesting, but I’ve never seen anyone play them.
Tl;dr: Mastercard says they didn’t “force” Valve to remove nsfw games. Tery just told them that if they didn’t remove the games that were complained about by Collective Shout, they’ll block them.
In my opinion Luanti is a living proof that top-down extensibility aka “we make monolithic engine in C++ and then provide some APIs for scripting via bindings for some scripting language on the side” doesn’t work well. You can’t change main menu, you can’t fix player controller (and the default one sucks), you can’t write your own renderer, etc. Because developers didn’t imagine someone would want that (actually they probably did, but they simply don’t have capacity to provide this). Good extensibility/modability should be automatic, on binary level. Like what you get by developing in bytecode/JIT-compiled languages like Java/C# or in old Unreal Engines where everything was done in bytecode-(de)compilable special language called Unreal Script.
Assuming you’d have to re-buy Minecraft, I’d.say at least give Luanti a try. At the very least, Its free, so you can switch if you don’t like it.
That said, personally, I had too many issues with it. Specifically, I had performance issues, found that the graphics that looked worse (subjectively) and were much harder to modify, and kept running into roadblocks that were annoying to fix, like having to figure out how to grant myself permissions for a bunch of different actions.
While Luanti is much more accessible for modding, isn’t it more limitted? Maybe the documentation was just out of date or that, but I was trying to look into custom shaders as well as optimization mods (since I was getting suttering on block updates) a year ago or so, but from what I saw at the time, there wasn’t any way to modify these.
Edit: Was trying to find any information to confirm this, or see if its changed. I did find a couple recemt refrences to custom shaders (although they seemed very limitted). That said, there was no official documentation, nor refrences to it on any official page, so I have no idea how functional or supported it is. I found nothing at all about other methods of modifying rendering.
From what I understand, they’ve moved on from that structure. I believe that was one of the things talked about after the release of HL:A, with one of the employees saying that it was part of the reason the game actually got finished. That said, its been a while and even assuming I’m not misremembering information rarely leaves Valve, so I could be wrong.
As much as I like Valve’s work, I don’t think thats a good fit for them. Their staff seem to enjoy working on difficult technical tasks, and lose interest very fast when it comes to mundane maintenance, thus their numerous underutilized and unmaintained features throughout Steam and their games. A payment processor seems like exactly the sort of thing that would get forgotten about a month or two after it gets finished.
Not suprising, and given the nature of most of the games removed, debatably reasonably, but it still highlights the need to reduced reliance on the few big American payment processors like PayPal when they can effectively regulate what can and cannot be sold online.
Honestly, I like the weekly missions. Back in GO, when there was more discussion about the lack of willingness of players to learn/play new maps, this is one of the solutions I proposed. Its a good, non-invasive way to incentivize playing new and different maps.