I honestly tried to get back into it with an old account. Apparently, the entire world went up in power level with no exceptions, but not my character - meaning there was literally not a single enemy I could kill across the PVE environment to gain better gear/levels to contend with enemies.

I did not feel like making a new character or redoing the tutorial so I decided to not even bother, taking it as a sign the game was poorly thought out.

Okay, totally off topic…what is it with this annoying trend of censoring a company/name with an asterisk when it’s a subject of ire? It just bugs me - and not in a way that focuses my anger to Microsoft.

Semantically doesn’t matter much.

If a peach seller has a harvest of 1,000 peaches that will go bad in a week, he doesn’t care about “only having 940 peaches” when someone steals 60 of them. He cares that he spent all that effort and money growing the peaches on the bet he’d make a profit, rented the shop space in the market, hired an assistant to bag and sell them, and some douchebag still didn’t pay for them.

The quantity of product a seller maintains is generally almost completely irrelevant to the costs. It’s about the societal expectations of paying your due to people who have put work into something you want.

I might enjoy this, but I’d have a requirement: Every participant join via webcam, not text posting.

Yes, that gives away much of your identity and makes you vulnerable. That’s the shared price we’d all pay to have a little bit of trust in each other. It would make it much harder for one person to be a bot posting from multiple accounts.

My spiders make such efforts to get away from my hand that I often end up taking the simple route and…killing them.

Normally I’m fine with them around to cut down on other insects, but they do show up in some annoying places for me.

Free-to-play is often a lazy comment from social media that represents an incomplete business plan. Developers have to get paid, and you need a plan for how players will be pushed into that.

The assumption is often on a vague “skins and charms” type of thing but it depends on whether the game was built for that expectation. They likely knew they wouldn’t be putting out compelling reskins of their characters.

I want to paint easy villains into the world as much as anyone, but I didn’t see anything especially “evil” about Concord; just poorly planned and uninteresting. It’s more of a tragic failure of incompetence than anyone being greedy or hurtful.

It tends to be a good writing tip when storytelling to use specific details to build a detailed picture.

So, “I drove my car to the place where my friends and I drink beers” becomes “I drove the old Focus out to the abandoned track, where my friends and I would always set out lawn chairs to drink a few Coors.”

The worst part is, they could actually get slammed by Xbox for throwing them under the bus publicly. Professionals are often expected to keep disagreements or communication gaps private rather than use them for blame.

Personally ever since Xbox’s firing spree I’ve been tempted to know what the hell is going on there, so I’m presuming this is just a sign of their mess.

They’ve learned some important lessons from past games, and now must fit dat ass into the thumbnail.

Game Pass owners fired the people who made Hi-Fi Rush, so I wouldn’t expect many bangers from them in the coming months.

Ah, Khura’in! I admit, I was always curious whether the locals were offended by the way the Ace Attorney series depicted them as corrupt.

Ironically, if I ever play this I may turn nudity off, because I sometimes consider revealing lingerie more alluring.

Given that I already mentioned there are anecdotes of that happening under poor coding, I SINCERELY hope you have a MORE reliable source for that.

…Great, so you’re going to start giving just as much criticism to devs for writing debug logs every so often?

There’s an order of magnitude between a difficult task slowing operations, and pure inefficiency / bad coding doing it. Can you describe something that actually proves you know the slightest thing about how programming works?

Given that I already mentioned there are anecdotes of that happening under poor coding, I sincerely hope you have a more reliable source for that.

The “slows down your game” bit has always been hotly contested. There are certainly occasions where a modified exe without Denuvo runs faster, combined with accusations that that specific game integrated Denuvo in a very poor last-minute implementation that calls it dozens of times a second.

I don’t work on video games, but my own experience with software engineering and release management suggests those sorts of murky answers are likely to be the norm.

Funny thing is, I mostly agree with you, but in Epic’s case, it’s a launcher written by a company that’s 40% owned by a Chinese corporation. I can sometimes stomach running their executables while playing something, but not having it constantly running.

It is American public transit, so the trolley only passes once every four hours

I did mention in the rules, if it was good enough to actually be your game of the year, you can make an exception. (I’m trusting that doesn’t mean we see Baldur’s Gate 3 on top or something)