Generally, companies are trying to maximise profit, which means that the price will be reduced only when it’s stopped selling at the previous and they want to make sales the next, more price-conscious, segment of the market. They might want some quick bucks if the company is in financial trouble, or to ‘make the news’ with a sale if they need some publicity.
BG3 sold shedloads, is still selling shedloads, was on multiple games-of-the-year list and generally ranks amongst the best games of all time, often at the top; and Larian seem sufficiently flush with cash from the success of it. So like you say, don’t hold your breath waiting for a big sale, it doesn’t make sense for them to do that.
Zelda 3? You get fast travel quite early and the world is packed with stuff, it’s not absurdly huge. Doesn’t have that bloody owl in it either, telling you the obvious at great length.
Certainly not Wind Waker, anyway. Now there is a slow game.
Best story, for sure. Most emotionally affecting is Majora’s, for me, but TP is close.
Don’t think the gameplay holds up. The Wii version is pure waggle, but even on the Gamecube, there’s a lot of filler - empty space and backtracking. Doesn’t respect your gaming time.
Indeed - most Java IDEs have FernFlower built in, so it’s dead easy.
Decompiled Java is surprisingly close to the original, especially compared to eg. decompiled C++; good luck with that. You get all the class, function and variable names back on the original line numbers.
What you do not get back is any comments. So you can see what and how, but not why. Admittedly, most comments are kind of useless and do not explain ‘why’ very well, but for weird-but-critical code they can be essential.
Strangely enough, “Windows always fucking up my dual boot setup” is what caused me to drop Windows for good about a decade ago. And Linux gaming has come on absolutely leaps and bounds since then.
There were huge numbers of people that wouldn’t move to Linux because it didn’t support all of their games. Now it does, and lots of people are moving.
There are lots of people that won’t move to Linux because they have a random bit of hardware that’s not supported, or a highly-specific bit of software they need to do their job that only runs on Windows. The manufacturers wouldn’t support Linux because not enough people used it. Ah, but now we have all the gamers, so there are quite a lot of people using it.
Each domino that falls encourages the rest. Steam Linux users are more than 3x Steam macOS users, and we’re not that far from overtaking it for general desktop usage. In some regions, that’s already the case, and while the Windows 10 exodus can move to Linux easily, they’d need to buy new hardware fo use the Mac operating system. Not many companies would question providing Apple support; once Linux has a comparable share, it would be foolish to leave that out of consideration as well.
Listen, there’s dozens of Linux users on Void, Slackware and Gentoo. Dozens! Especially the ones wanting to run the latest games. Can’t just leave all of them out.
Strangely, the search page for ProtonDB shows the ‘proton rating’ for games which have a ‘native but abandoned / broken’ native Linux build, whereas the actual page for the game just shows ‘native’ and I can’t see the button to show the rest of the information. I’m sure it used to be there; they’ve started hiding a lot of stuff in favour of making the ‘steam deck’ results more prominent. But in some cases, ‘proton rating even with a native Linux build’ is quite important.
Ah, nice. I destroyed my first one playing Sekiro; the trigger buttons are really awkward to get to pieces to replace the internals, and my replacement Steam controller is almost too valuable to use, since I can’t replace it any more.
InXile did Wasteland 2/3 and Torment: Numenara. All fine RPGs.
Completely agree that the talent needs to go elsewhere - this deal is the death knell for creative works at EA. I’d be careful about what you promise on Kickstarter, though. Signing up to lots of stretch goals is likely to burden your game with lots of tickbox features that don’t make any sense.
In fact, I’d say that Bloodstained (while generally excellent) would be improved by cropping out some stuff. The crafting, cooking and crop farming could just be chopped out whole, and put all the upgraded gear in the place where you find items. Would swap out some of the enemy and boss count for a bit more variety. And ‘hard mode’ could have done with some playtesting and a general rebalance, or just be renamed ‘infrequent crazy difficulty spike’ mode. But someone paid for those tickboxes and so we’ve got them.
Letting RPG designers run completely free from publishers can be a recipe for disaster, too. Pillars of Eternity? Excellent. PoE2? Unbelievably unfocussed and sprawling, disrespectful of your time, goes nowhere fast. Could possibly have made two games out of it if someone had told them to chop it in half and then polish the bits, but was a bit of a studio killer instead, could never sell enough to cover the costs.
The original looks fine; it’s gone from ‘okay for 2000’, through to ‘dated’ and back to ‘retro charm’ again. Plus you can turn up the resolution and fps to silly levels, which wasn’t the originally intended effect but is pretty nice.
All early 3D games look so bad that the slight year-on-year improvements are nearly irrelevant now. A hideous AI texture ‘upgrade’ doesn’t bring it to to modern standards, and distracts from the truly amazing game behind it all.
48 studios will be closed before they get a game out, and then the other two will be closed after making something award-winning and genre-redefining, and the IP will never see the light of day again.