Let’s say you design a revolutionary widget of some kind, but don’t have the means to to produce it at scale. How do you get it to market? You parter with a larger company. For a share of the proceeds, you have them produce the item. Without a patent, when you go to the manufacturer and show them the design, they can just start making it themselves and tell you to beat sand.
Also, patents require competitive companies to alter a product design in order to sell it. If everyone could just copy the same product, there would be further incentive to monopolize the means of production to produce the single product at a larger scale, since the only differentiation between products would be the price. Patents allow competition through limited-term protection of their innovations.
Is the patent system abused by large companies? Absolutely. But removing patents won’t make them.good actors. It’ll just remove any limitations on their theft.
I haven’t, and I really should. Like, REALLY should. I was college roommates with and took part in the wedding of someone high enough at Gearbox that I can’t say their role without doxxing myself, and we’ve stayed really close.
Yes. The out of left field had more to do with what was expected going in. We all expected silly D&D and fart jokes. We didn’t expect a legitimately touching examination of grief and denial to bring depth to a silly character.
BL2 was great. Some of its DLC was even better. Assault on Dragon Keep is one of the best looter shooters ever made. The gameplay was a blast. The jokes were funny…And out of left field it broke your fucking heart by secretly being about a young, traumatized girl’s grief.
The Castlevania date is a little misleading, however.
Castlevania changed from a simple linear level-based side-scroller to the open world exploration, progression, and backtracking formula of the Metroidvania genre with Symphony of the Night in 1997.
Please embargo us. We need our economy to be in ruins next November, with Trump and his goons as the culprits. Heck - if you can fuck our economy by January, we may even be able to primary some current Republicans so thet Trump is fucked by the midterms no matter which party wins.
It’s also a very long campaign with several points that feel like they’re coming up on the ending, only for a lot more game and story to come afterward.
I never finished the 1st one because I found the complete lack of connection between the stories frustrating. I get that they wanted you to be able to play with any combination of the 8 characters, but the story suffered heavily.
It was just 8 separate games played at once with the same mechanics, and the lack of any real overarching story meant the narative scope of everything felt small.
Clair Obscur. Made from former Ubisoft team members in what sounds like a healthy development culture and it’s a godamnned masterpiece at every level. Visuals, art direction, story, characters, mechanics, music - it’s all stellar.