ampersandrew

Live service games really did a number on people. Why does it matter if people stop playing Palworld between now and when those new people they hire can produce the things they're hired for?

I finally finished Pillars of Eternity. I've got lots of criticisms for it, but mostly I really enjoyed it. I do wish there was less combat and that there were more opportunities to talk your way out of combat, for instance. The combat is very good, but there's so much of it that you can easily get decision fatigue. I'm going to take a slight break from Pillars of Eternity before I start the sequel.

So I moved on to replaying Planescape: Torment instead. I last played it about 12 years ago, and there's a good amount of it I've forgotten since then, but at the time I felt it was the best writing I'd seen in games to date. As poorly aged as it was then, even on the enhanced edition now, it's perhaps aged even worse now, so I'm not sure if I'll finish replaying it this time, but we'll see. At least it's not particularly long.

My friends and I are continuing our co-op playthrough of Quake II since we don't live in a timeline where we've got a plethora of modern FPS games to play instead; not the traditional campaign variety, at the very least. The indie scene is mostly replicating Doom/Quake 1 sorts of games, and Quake II is surprisingly much more modern in its design...at least when you use the compass built in to the remaster.

EDIT: Changed my mind. Moved on to Pillars 2. There are already a lot of great improvements.

People always talk about this being physical versus digital, but I'd say this is about DRM. Physical media decays. DRM-free games can be perfectly copied over and over again, and it comes with the bonus of not taking up space in my apartment. If a game requires a server to connect to or stream from, that's often just a fancy form of DRM.

The distinction is that they're making a decision that will likely result in not making consoles anymore. It's like how governments don't decide to increase traffic; they decide to expand freeways to more lanes, but the only thing that can come from that is that they increased traffic. They think they're solving a problem, but they're actually, usually, making it worse by those actions that we have a historical record for how they play out.

Sony will hold on to that kicking and screaming, because once they're just selling a PC, they lose money for each third party game sold, and they lose PS+ revenue.

Latency is enough of a thing that even a child raised on it will recognize the benefits of running the game locally, not to mention mods and other privileges that come with having a local copy of a game.

If Xbox disappears and leaves only PlayStation at that tier, I think it's more likely we're looking at the end of consoles altogether in as little as 15 years.

I thought they were both delightful, but neither's storyline had the emotional payoff that something like Shadowheart's or Karlach's had.

To be fair, the rumor isn't that Microsoft is getting rid of consoles. The rumor is that they're making decisions that will, in a handful of years' time, almost certainly result of getting rid of their consoles.

Which is funny, because they're not built to last.

Factorio's a great one for this, as is RimWorld, but specifically on the modes where there's no combat in the former and "base builder" difficulty on the latter. Lately, Palworld has been filling this slot for me. Just build stuff, occasionally tackle enemies, and listen to podcasts while you do it.

Dread Delusion was one of the best games I've played at PAX. I was bummed to see it launch into early access, but I guess they needed funding in a hurry. I'm definitely going to pick it up once it's done.