Even if the common advice is to avoid spoilers, I’m glad you found your own way to enjoy it :)
I’m sure I could play it again myself and still enjoy the atmosphere, even if the discoveries weren’t new. Or maybe it would be fun to watch a stream of someone else playing for the first time instead!
For real. It’s an amazing game that just can’t be the same again once you know all its secrets.
I bought it for two of my friends, and they both ended up hating it lol. I don’t blame them, but I think it’s very much to do with the mentality of how you approach the experience.
One friend just got plain stuck and gave up. The other found it frustrating that they were doing the same thing several times over, and just wanted to rush as quickly as they could to make progress.
Personally, I enjoyed the slow pace of discovery. I loved that feeling of being a true explorer, discoving facets of lost civilisation. Watching in melancholic awe as a world crumbled around me. Finding just a small piece of new information was always a joy, and made it feel worthwhile to get there, even if I’d done 90% of the journey before.
Slowly getting richer in a game where the only currency is knowledge.
The new ARM-based macs are actually very powerful, but as another commenter mentioned, the ARM architecture would normally be a bad fit for gaming as not much runs on it.
That said, there are ways around it.
I’m personally gaming on an M2 Macbook Pro, and am able to play almost my full Steam library of Windows games using a tool called Whisky
Whisky uses Wine (a longstanding Windows emulator commonly used on Linux) along with other toolkits to translate DirectX graphics instructions into Mac-native ‘Metal’ graphics instructions. There is a performance hit in doing this, but the end result is actually pretty good.
The result you get will depend on your hardware. I’m personally running a high-end M2 Max configuration and get 50 FPS on high settings in Deep Rock Galactic (a first-person shoooter game) but lower configurations would be okay for casual gaming.
There is another product that does the same thing as Whisky called Crossover. It is paid (unlike Whisky which is free) but is otherwise similar. You can watch this YouTube video on Crossover to get some idea on how it works, how to set it up, and the performance you might expect.
As for Minecraft, I personally play that too, and it actually runs natively on the new Apple Silicon macs anyway and doesn’t need anything special :)
You own a version of the games, sure, but the version you own is effectively useless on a modern system.
Perhaps the taste is less sour if you consider what you are paying for here is someone else doing the hard work to get an old game to run on modern hardware, saving you all that frustration and effort and time.
It seems like it can make sense. Platform fees aren’t an initial outlay, they’re effectively a cut of profits based on sales.
For the sake of argument using fake numbers, if a studio spends $1m making a game, and then they put it on Steam and it does $10m in sales, then Steam’s cut of that at 30% will be $3m
So, spending more on store fees than development seems possible - especially if your game is selling really well
Agree. I changed the way that I purchase games by setting myself a rule:
Buy it only if you are going to play it TODAY
Previously I had a library of games I had never played because I bought them on sale and they just sat there, unplayed, making me feel sad and stressed.
Purchasing only when I want to play now is both less stressful, and less expensive!