To my eyes, Pokemon also went clay/plastic when they moved from 3DS (USUM) to Switch. I hope Nintendo moves on from this look. I want to see something in the style of Windwaker, personally.
Since publishers are allergic to dedicated community servers nowadays, I’d argue there‘s just no feeling of community anymore and hence it‘s worse or at least different than it used to be. You just get matched with random people you‘ll never see again and that makes it easier for people to be unhinged pricks.
I think I‘ve spent hundreds of hours on an militia only server (uk2 or sth?) in cs1.6 in the past and hundreds on a back to karkand (or so?) rush only server in bf3 back in the day. I recognized a lot of names on these servers every time I played.
With how multiplayer games work now, I also try to avoid them.
Helldivers‘ success somehow caused a crazy knee jerk reaction among the management suits at Sony. This whole sudden „make a PSN account or fuck you“ is just bizarre. To me it seems like they’ve lost more than what they‘re hoping to gain from this. Just a mindboggling move.
Valve isn‘t publicly traded (AFAIK) so they don‘t have to squeeze every last penny if they don‘t want to. And Steam revenue alone can fund anything gabeN wants to do. They don‘t have any ideas for HL3 they‘re satisfied with so they don‘t make it. And I respect that a lot TBH.
I got all the Assassin‘s Creeds (apart from Valhalla and Mirage) on sale for way less with all the extra bs… it‘s not a multiplayer game with a playerbase that could die off, so I‘ve got time to wait for a sale in 3-5 years. Who knows, maybe it‘ll even run properly by then. Buying on release is paying extra to take part in an extended early access beta.