The trend would be developers that are unwilling or unable to release a new game that is better than the old one (especially in formulaic series like a racing game), or that they intentionally withhold features in order to resell them again. I’m not saying there aren’t sometimes good reasons for it, just that it’s something I’ve personally noticed happening now that developers are leaning harder and harder into DLC, and now that games are stagnating in innovation and reasons to buy the next entry in the series.
Also for PAYDAY 3 specifically if you don’t have any familiarity with Overkill/Starbreeze I wouldn’t defend them on this one. They have chosen money over their players every single chance they could get, including breaking their promise to never include microtransactions in the game, and then breaking their promise in 2017 that they wouldn’t release any more paid DLC. In 2017 they released the Ultimate Edition with this promise, and in 2019 they went back on it. In 2019, they started releasing DLC again with the mission statement of “hey any money you put into this DLC will help fund PAYDAY 3 development”. The community immediately noticed that the DLC from 2019 onwards was of lower quality and more expensive, and although people frequently brought this up, others would defend it and say “yes, but we need to support Overkill or PAYDAY 3 won’t be made.”
They started development on PAYDAY 3 in 2016, so they’ve had 7 years to develop it before it released, whereas PAYDAY 2 has been out for 10 years at this point. The moral of the story is they kept releasing mediocre DLC for PAYDAY 2 because it was easy and lucrative, and it became such an addiction that they neglected PAYDAY 3’s development to the point where it released with barely any features or content even after 7 years of development.
This is a trend that I have recently started noticing. PAYDAY 3 came out with basically nothing included after PAYDAY 2 had literally 10 years of continuous content/80 DLCs pumped into it. As another example, The Sims always comes out with a new release that has every feature removed so they can sell you all the same DLC again and again.
In some cases this would appear to be a (corporate) success, but it seems it’s actually been part of the downfall of recently-released PAYDAY 3. As of this moment in time, the rolling 24-hour peak of player count in PAYDAY 3 is 4,699. The rolling 24-hour peak of PAYDAY 2 is 37,399. Why would players who have a fully finished game with all DLC already available want to play your new barren game?
My biggest one is robust modding support. I understand it’s something that potentially needs a lot of extra effort to implement from the developers, but when I look at my collection of games that I love, almost all of them let me mod like crazy. Let me download 90 bugfixes and 40 QoL tweaks for a game from 2003.
perfectmediaserver.com can give you some inspiration on system architecture/layout. There’s a lot of right answers here depending on your situation, so you’ll likely want to research the various options and trade-offs.
Some common base architecture layouts that I know of:
Any Linux + no parity: Just throw Debian on a box, put Docker on it, and away we go. No data integrity, and data loss will be permanent, but it’s an option if you set up backups for your important data and assume the rest is expendable. If you want to start setting up parity on raw Linux you’ll probably want to move down to a more dedicated architecture below for less headaches.
OpenMediaVault + SnapRAID + MergerFS + backed by BTRFS disks: my personal choice for ad-hoc/budget setups. Great for having really flexible storage that lets you make use of all HDD space that you have laying around without fuss. You’ll need to sacrifice your largest drive to hold RAID parity and the storage architecture is not especially performant but that’s not a big deal for a media server. OpenMediaVault can run Docker for you on the host without needing to run it in a VM (and you should be using Docker for your software stack).
Unraid: Similar in storage architecture to the OpenMediaVault combo, but it’s not free. I don’t have personal experience with this one but a lot of people like it. IMO this option would only make sense if you want a turn-key system and don’t want to think about anything on the software side. It has turn-key “apps” that are just Docker behind the scenes (to my knowledge).
TrueNAS Scale: This will be running ZFS for storage, but ZFS has a lot of problems with storage flexibility. You need to really know what you’re doing when designing your storage layout, and you probably won’t get full usage out of the HDDs you have laying around. In exchange, ZFS is bulletproof for data integrity and makes full use of your drives’ combined speed. You’ll likely be giving up 50% of your total HDD capacity to run ZFS - either explicitly by running mirrored drives or by running mismatched RAIDZ1/2 (which makes all drives become the size of the smallest disk). I would recommend a mirrored setup for home use due to its flexibility - it gives up more space than RAIDZ but it’s able to be upgraded easier in the future, so you can throw random drives that are on sale into your system when needed. You could write a book on ZFS’s complexities and trade-offs and I’m sure many have. TrueNAS itself is basically just a turn-key appliance to run a ZFS storage server, but the “Scale” version also comes with the ability to install apps via some Kubernetes+Docker thing. It’s still in beta and I hear a lot of people have problems with how the app system is designed, so if you go this route I’d recommend installing Debian/Alpine Linux under TrueNAS Scale in a VM with something like this method, and running normal Docker on that VM. TrueNAS is otherwise very locked down and if your usecase is not supported by them you’ll probably need to bail out to a VM anyway.
Proxmox + TrueNAS + Docker Host: This has all the caveats of ZFS from before. Proxmox is just a virtualization hypervisor that you can put other operating systems on, via VMs and LXCs. The easiest way to use it in a NAS configuration is to install Proxmox on the bare metal, then spin up a TrueNAS Core/Scale VM and pass through your HDDs to that (may require special hardware consideration). You’ll probably want to run a minimal Debian/Alpine Linux VM under Proxmox to hold your Docker stack. Then you can use an NFS/SMB mount to get access to your ZFS storage from your Docker VM. You can also run ZFS raw on Proxmox without the GUI of TrueNAS, but you’ll have to manage it by CLI. Proxmox can be more difficult to understand than the other architectures, but personally I think it’s easier to use once you do. It allows greater flexibility on the software side via snapshotting VMs and building up/tearing down operating systems at-will.
Proxmox + OpenMediaVault + SnapRAID + MergerFS + backed by BTRFS disks: Same as Proxmox+TrueNAS, except instead of TrueNAS you run OpenMediaVault’s storage stack to give yourself flexibility with HDDs. You’ll might also want to move your Docker stack into its own VM instead of running it on OpenMediaVault, but this isn’t required. While this is technically an option, it feels a bit weird. If you want to dive head-first into a robust server setup but don’t want to buy a bunch of new drives, this could work in a pinch.
Personally my two recommended options are the OpenMediaVault stack or the Proxmox+TrueNAS stack, depending on if you want to buy new drives for a clean storage layout. Keep in mind these blurbs are just a crash course on each option and there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes that will also need consideration/planning.
In my experience DODI installers tend to work slightly better than Fitgirl’s on Linux, but keep in mind that different games are compressed with different tools, and some of those tools inherently work better on Linux/Wine than others. The standard Ubisoft compression tool (more accurately it’s called a precompressor) has given me a lot of trouble on Linux, and every repacker is going to be using that same tool. Grabbing clean files and applying a crack yourself is always going to be the most compatible way.
It’s completely down to your opinion. Legally I would guess that you’re not allowed to do it, but nowadays we live in a hellscape where we own nothing so I wouldn’t base your moral compass off of the rules that corporations set. Personally if I’ve already bought it somewhere it is mine. They’re lucky I even purchased one copy, they’re not getting anything else from me.
Most game cracks work just fine through WINE. You just need to get the game extracted into the WINE prefix and have the crack applied, then point Lutris at it and it will work fine. If you find a specific crack isn’t working, you can probably find another that does, or crack it yourself using simple tools that are always Linux-compatible. I wrote a guide on using these tools for reference.