It’s the only method of game development that ever made sense to me.

They still average out to be very positive scores, so I don’t think we can say most people don’t want what they’re making, and no viewpoint is universal, so don’t put words in my mouth.

But you’ll see the same people asking for a more sustainable game industry complain about what they find when they see it.

And has mandatory online anyway, so that would be DRM.

Obsidian getting dinged in reviews for making more focused games that don’t waste your time and don’t bet their company’s entire future on its budget and scope has been very frustrating to see.

A game is also more than the aggregate of its review scores. An average of 81 on Open Critic is derived from those who rated it a 6 and those who loved it enough to give it a 9 or a 10.

Yeah, but then you have to sift through the files with Canadian cable channel watermarks in the corner, and if you decide you want subtitles, you might not have them available.

But since you pointed it out, I don’t think there’s any kind of video that can’t be pirated easily, which makes the presence of DRM even dumber.

Man, I didn’t know that about Blu Ray encryption keys. Hollywood deserves the downturn it’s going through right now. Give me the GOG of movies and TV shows. That it doesn’t already exist is stupid.

The article we’re commenting on, after someone said Avowed was missing from this discussion, even though it wasn’t.

It’s been worth every penny at $70 to me, and I’ve still probably got about half of it left to go.

They don’t seem interested in detailing why they feel that way. They’re just going to give BG3 backhanded compliments and list games they feel are better without explaining anything. And you know, I’ve played a number of those games too. They aren’t deeper RPGs, because being deeper than BG3 is a high bar to clear.

I don’t think FF7 is one of those games.

There are challenge runners who’ve beaten the entire game with only salami for weapons. Oil puddles are just a small part of it. There was a part in act 3 where I was denied entry to a place by failing a speech check. I could have possibly brute forced my way in and murdered everyone, but instead I found a back door that was three stories up on a balcony, cast flight on my rogue, and had him stealth in to achieve the objective. That’s emergent design. Solutions to problems that weren’t explicitly programmed in but work because the rules are loose and can be applied intuitively. There’s a part in the game where you have to cross a bridge blocked off by some high level enemies, and there are a ton of ways to get across the bridge that I know of, several of which the developers didn’t intend for, and probably dozens more that I’ve never even seen before, because the game just lets you run loose with its systems.

That’s depth.

I have. I don’t know which options you’re referring to. Materia selection? I guess, but there are fewer permutations of those than there are spells/feats/stats in D&D 5e, and that’s before we even get to all the stuff that makes BG3 stand out, like its emergent design. FF7 is a great game, but it is not emergent, and emergent design will nearly always be deeper than the finite stuff.

You’re going to have to elaborate on those first two sentences, because that’s a wild thing to say.

With its nuanced characters, wonderfully layered world, and incredible depth of interactions, it was natural to feel the game had set a new bar for the whole genre—but it was pointed out that declaring it the new standard was unreasonable and unsustainable given how few other developers could possibly rise to meet it.

You could make a game a third of the size of BG3, and it would still be excellent value for BG3’s asking price. And no, you shouldn’t attempt to make a competitor with BG3 on your first try. Nor should you try to make a competitor to Elden Ring on your first try; FromSoft had been making those games for the better part of 15 years, building and iterating on what came before. I do think more RPG developers should strive to follow the systems-driven approach that Larian has and be cognizant of what it is that we all like about BG3, but it can be sustainable if you don’t try to hit a home run on the first pitch.

Game Pass is already plateauing in subscriptions. I’m sure that while it’s far fewer subscribers than they thought they’d have, they’ll be happy to keep making money this way for some time, but it’s not going to turn in to the primary way people play games.

I do have an optical drive in my PC, for Blu Rays and music CDs. The thing I was calling out was, “they want to have you buy it over and over again until the end of time,” which isn’t really a thing on PC. Sure, there are remasters and such, but the copy you bought 20 years ago largely still works on your new PC.

Perhaps one of many reasons that the console market is shrinking and PC is growing.

The patents on the Game Boy hardware expired years ago, so that’s what gives Analogue the right to do what they do. As for these Switch emulators, I have no idea, but I’ll guess it’s just Nintendo trying to scare people without their own legal departments into complying.

Game preservationists have long argued that a move to a digital-only future will cause games to be lost forever if proper preservation measures aren’t put in place.

There are already scores of online-only titles that can no longer be played either due to their delisting or servers being shut down. In some cases, game discs serve only as physical entitlement keys to be able to play the digital version of the game, meaning if the digital store itself shuts down in the future the disc will become useless.

Once again, the key to preservation is DRM-free, not physical media. We were already headed toward a future with no physical media for games, and these tariffs will only accelerate that. They may be a similar accelerant in the death of consoles.