Was anything ever done to mod in controller support to Pillars of Eternity from the console versions? I'm building a list of RPGs I'd like to play after BG3. Also, I'm pretty sure the game uses its own roleplaying setting and rules, but is it as complicated as 2e from those old Infinity engine games?
First off, Payday 3 has zero local play. 100% DRM. This means that if their matchmaking system goes down, you don't get to play the game. Now, this isn't a complete deal-breaker for me, provided the matchmaker doesn't go down. After an hour of play, the matchmaker went down for the rest of the night.
And that's exactly why I'm hoping to convince more people to make this a deal-breaker. The servers going down is inevitable. If they stay up, it's a bonus that makes your life easier. Of course, for Payday, I'm not expecting LAN, private servers, or split-screen. They make far too much money from funneling you to their cash shop. I just hope that the lack of these features is soon seen as a black mark that makes a game unmarketable.
I'm still going with Baldur's Gate 3, and it continues to impress me at every turn. Steam says I've played for 43.5 hours now, and I'll bet I still have at least 20 hours ahead of me on this first playthrough. After primarily playing fighting games for the past few years, this game has reminded me of what I love so much in RPGs and created a backlog of games for me to play through in the next couple of years to follow it up, especially since a tabletop group of 5e probably doesn't fit into my life right now.
No, it takes time to spin up a VM that will run PC games from a bygone era using an old version of Windows. We're talking minutes from the time you click the VM until you can run the game, compared to seconds on a native executable. It's one method, sure, but it's not ideal. It's definitely not simpler or better.
If you hate the practice of exclusivity (or the version of it that Microsoft or Sony have these days), the more effective action would be not only to not buy it but also to not play it. When you play it, you can discuss it on forums, share word of mouth, and other things that encourage other people to buy it. When you don't play it, you're probably supporting some other game that needs the support more and abides by your values.
A "forever game" also would have been what they made before. This game as a service to follow it up will more likely than not have an expiration date on it that the old games do not.
SkillUp said that he saw/played it both recently and a number of years ago (before the pandemic), and the game changed shockingly little between those two points in time. And it's basically still just the ship combat from Assassin's Creed IV.
Latency on wireless controllers isn't a big deal (and a lot of Smash players are using wired Gamecube controllers anyway), but it's not a big deal on wi-fi either. The problem with wi-fi is packet loss and not being able to send and receive at the same time, which feels like latency in fits and starts, because it has to wait until the packet sends successfully. Ethernet helps with Smash, but it still sorely needs rollback netcode regardless. Even on a wire, you're still on delay-based netcode.
The new way is better, and it's not close. The only thing I miss from the old days is the ability to preserve each individual old version and old meta, whereas these days we just update the new version on top of it. If you're the kind of player who felt like Happy Chaos ruined Guilty Gear Strive, you can't really go back to a version before he existed. Up until this latest patch, I felt like the best time in the game's lifespan so far was right before Happy Chaos launched (for reasons beyond the state that Happy Chaos launched in). Thankfully, this new season is great, but we might not have been so lucky.
People outside of the fighting game sphere would perceive these new games as a "rip off"
I'm going to wager plenty of people inside that sphere would consider them to be a rip-off as well. Super Street Fighter IV didn't change any more about characters' gimmicks than your typical seasonal update does in modern games. They had limited ability to patch games back then, and the new boxed copy was all they could do, but this new method allows them to demonstrably keep a larger pool of players online playing the game than the old method did, which provides more value to future purchasers, which theoretically drives more sales before we even get into the economics of Street Fighter costumes. I know when I bought Guilty Gear Xrd Sign, I wasn't too compelled to pick up Revelator when it came out, since it appeared to be barely different from the version I already had, and no one was really playing that previous one online anyway.
An example would be Super Street Fighter IV launching with 10 new characters and 5 new stages for 40 dollars -- a price that is basically in-line with modern "seasons" in the worst case scenario and it can be debated that it was actually a great value when you consider all of the additional work and polish to other UI and gameplay elements.
That's $40 in 2010 money. It would be more like $56 in today's dollars.
The size of Baldur's Gate 3 isn't the standard I want it to set anyway. I just want RPGs to be that deep with that level of production value. I finished Act 1 in the time it took me to finish all of Mass Effect 1, and I can't believe I've still got two thirds of the game left. This game is the entire Mass Effect trilogy in one game, but Mass Effect didn't give me a ton of ideas for different ways to play the game I just finished. You can play a Shepard who kills more with powers than with guns or more with guns than with powers, but it's nothing like this.
Also, here's the other standard. The game has multiplayer, but it's not a horde mode. It's not a live service hero shooter. It's just co-op; the video game version of playing tabletop with your friends. It's got LAN mode and direct IP connection. It's available DRM-free. It supports controllers and mouse/keyboard really well. Other than that weird Larian launcher that you can disable easily enough, this game is doing everything I need it to do from a software perspective and to stand the test of time in a world where live services inevitably keep dying.
No DLC, but I'll bet there's a Tears of the Kingdom Deluxe for the Switch's successor that has some extra content in it to justify charging you full price again.