I think “mandatory physical versions” kinda misses the point of the issue, tbh. It’s bad digital rights laws that are the cause of the problems that you’ve mentioned, not a lack of physical media. DRM has been around a lot longer than digital downloads of games, and shutting down a game’s online services affects purchasers of physical disks just as much as digital downloaders.

Besides, mass-producing physical media is expensive, and I’d rather not give publishers another excuse to make games even more expensive than they already are.

This is one of those things where it’s something weird published April 1st, but it doesn’t feel over-the-top enough to absolutely be a joke. I have no idea if this is real or not lol

I don’t think Morrowind needs a remake. A remake would likely try to smooth over the game’s rough edges, but the rough edges are a big part of what makes the game actually work, imo.

Now, at this point I don’t think I trust Bethesda enough to get an Oblivion remake right, either, but Oblivion was very much held back by technological limitations of the time, and in my opinion it hasn’t aged very well. I can at least see the potential of an Oblivion remake where they don’t have to be concerned about how much they can fit on an Xbox 360 disc.

Idiocracy gets the causes of its particular type of dystopia pretty catastrophically wrong, to the point of basically being inadvertently pro-eugenics (“society collapsed because stupid people wouldn’t stop breeding” implies that intelligence is exclusively tied to genetics, which is… a very bad take), but it sure seemed to be an indicator of just how brazenly dumb things could get.

Why does everything have to be so fucking stupid? Is it really not enough that we have to watch the destruction of democracy happen before our eyes? Must it really be carried out by a group named after an early 2010s internet meme featuring a Shiba Inu with bad grammar? Do we really have to read serious reporting about the criminal connections of a 19-year-old government employee called “Big Balls?”

I just never imagined the fall of American democracy would be so… inane.

If a game hasn’t been fully bugtested, I wouldn’t consider it “done…”

Well, I guess “making your country such a shithole that no one wants to come here” is technically one way to stop immigration…

The spread of “skill-based” matchmaking and ranked competitive ladders largely took away a valuable communal aspect of online multiplayer games, IMO. Getting dropped into a match with a bunch of random people you’ll probably never see again just makes things so impersonal, which can cultivate a lot of toxicity.

Some of the best times I’ve ever had with online gaming were from finding a dedicated server with settings I liked, hanging out there often, gradually getting to know the regulars, and becoming part of a community. I’ve never had that kind of feeling from a game with automated matchmaking.

Yeah, he led the design. The whole thing was his brainchild, iirc.

Yeah, I’m… skeptical, to say the least. I don’t think any of these sprawling, massively-scoped “everything games” have ever actually lived up to the hype. It’s a problem of pure logistics. Making a game with so many different segments each with entirely unique gameplay loops is essentially like developing more than half a dozen games at once. It’s the problem Spore had - the scope was just too broad, and even with EA and Will Wright behind it, it eventually released as a pretty decent creature creator stapled to four shallow, rushed game stages.

No studio has the resources or inclination to commit to the 10-15+ year development cycle for a single game needed to fit that much scope, and even if they did, the entire game design landscape would have changed between the beginning and the end of the project, which would make major technical and design components of the game obsolete before it was even finished.

I’d put money on this game either becoming vaporware or releasing as a chaotic, disjointed mess with the depth of a puddle. I’d love to see them prove me wrong, but I just don’t see how anyone could overcome those kinds of logistical hurdles.

No need, actually, I originally assumed this was a past code that I missed, but it’s currently up on Prime right now, so I’ll grab it myself

Is RIOT - Civil Unrest still available?

The most that I have proof of is Europa Universalis IV at a little over 1k hours, but I wouldn’t be surprised if my time on Guitar Hero 3 in high school surpassed that by quite a bit. I played a lot of Guitar Hero in high school…

I mean, sure, you’re not wrong. It’s just that cyberpunk as a genre is pretty strongly linked to anti-capitalist and anti-corporate themes, and I think a triple-A game published by a big corporation is not very likely to adhere to the spirit of the genre.

You know, I had heard a lot about how much Cyberpunk had improved since launch, but I still couldn’t really convince myself to try it. “Cyberpunk game made by big corporate studio” always just struck me as something of an oxymoron.