Those still doing 1080p/1440p gaming get the best of both worlds: high framerates with all the fancy graphics turned on, without needing to rely on frame gen or spend a thousand bucks on a graphics card.

IMO 4k isn’t enough of a qualitative leap to justify all the hacks needed to make it run acceptably on current hardware, let alone the sky-high VRAM costs for that resolution. I’d rather run a game in ultra quality at 1080p than medium quality in 4k.

“Humans are the greatest polluters, so those death squads we hired in Colombia to kill union leaders were just us contributing to the environment!”

Gill doesn’t have to launch the game until September 15 to be eligible for the $250 million bonus at the center of the lawsuit.

Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier reported last year that, should Subnautica 2 meet the necessary revenue targets to trigger the bonus, a portion of it will be shared among some of Unknown Worlds’ staff.

I’m half-expecting the share given to employees to be a couple million tops and fans to turn on both sides, just to put the cherry on this crap sundae of a scandal.

If you block the OP you’ll get rid of a huge chunk of it. They’re one of the most blatant agenda posters on the Fediverse - they’re on track to hit 6,000 posts in their first year, many (most?) of which are puff pieces about China.

Accounts. They’ve been at this for months.

If you pick it up, know that it has a huge modding scene that makes an already great game even better. I can recommend a few basic QoL mods if you want, though the 9.0 update is coming soon and will probably break most of them for a while.

Also, the base game has some arbitrary mechanics meant purely to punish the player so veterans can’t steamroll the NPC factions too quickly, at the expense of making the new player experience harder. There’s a list of these mechanics (and links to mods that reduce/remove them) here.

Admittedly I’m in the middle of a playthrough and currently deeply enamored with the game, but I’ve enjoyed Enshrouded much more than Valheim (which I also loved, to be clear). I’ll probably start noticing all the flaws I’ve been ignoring soon, but right now it feels like Valheim, but more. More recipes, more enemies, more options for farming and better animal tames, much better combat, a building system that doesn’t drive me crazy, and a hand-built world that is vastly superior to the samey procgen of Valheim.

The comparison to the Elder Scrolls is much less flattering, admittedly. It’s only in the world design and exploration that I’d put Enshrouded ahead, and even then I bet many players would be annoyed by just how much Enshrouded uses verticality in its map (which I love, but I’ll admit it makes overland travel a pain).

The entire world being one map so a hole in the internal walls of a dungeon could lead directly outside is a massive step up from Bethesda’s engine where dungeons are basically their own separate universe. I just completed the Blackmire tower the other day, a dungeon that had the branches of a giant tree punching through its sides and forcing you to take alternate routes. I fell all the way to ground level several times but still had a blast exploring the place.

I’m not super far in. I have three characters* that are all around the same point, at or just after the boss fight at the end of Pike’s Reach. It’s possible the rest of the game lacks the same polish the early areas have.

* One created when the game first entered Early Access, one for co-op, one newly created to see all they changed in the opening hours.

That’s fair. Though, by that logic would you consider something like that one Final Fantasy MMO F2P or not? I believe it lets you play all the old content for free and only charges for the last (few?) expansions.

Roblox screws over both the players and the creators who attract and keep them there, both of which as you said are mostly children. It’s actually kind of impressive how scummy the devs are. They’re the poster child for rent-seeking parasites.

One minor correction, I believe The Sims 4 went F2P at some point. They’re funded entirely by expansion packs now.

Wow, most of them were even older than I’d thought. And even some of the new ones like Tarkov were in Early Access for years before their official release date.

(You flipped the date and country for 16 and 17, btw) Already fixed, never mind!

True. I know Dean Hall (DayZ, Stationeers, Kitten Space Agency) destroyed any hope of his survival game Icarus becoming a major success by releasing hundreds of dollars of expensive DLC during Early Access, then later admitted it was because the money from his previous projects had slowed to a trickle and splitting his current project into a bunch of paid packs was the only way he could stay solvent. Even the megahits of the past all die out at some point.

F2P games are subsidized by a small minority who will throw a hundred dollars a month into the game to obtain and max out whatever FOMO event or item/character is on rotation, and by an even smaller group of obscenely wealthy (or mentally ill) players who will spend tens of thousands of dollars just to say they own everything.

I’d honestly be fine with this model if the ones funding it were treated like patrons of the arts or something, but instead the industry hired a bunch of psychologists to run incredibly unethical experiments to create literally addictive design patterns encouraging the weak-willed or mentally ill to spend more.

Modern F2P game design is predatory and downright evil in the way it’s carefully cultivated to be just fun enough to continue playing, while constantly dangling the promise of more enjoyment if you’d only spend a tiny bit more (with that ‘bit more’ often only granting a small chance at getting what you want, with ‘pity’ systems only guaranteeing the desired drop if you spend the equivalent of around a hundred bucks in premium currency). But since it’s obscenely profitable, I don’t foresee it going away without legislation banning those practices.

Nearly every title on that list is also a live service game that has been released for years. It’s almost like supporting your product post-launch builds a dedicated userbase or something.

(And yeah, I know it’s actually because of the profitability of addictive design patterns combined with microtransactions. Let me dream, please.)

Both one and two were good fun. They recently tried to revive the series, but it was such a miserable flop that they delisted it last year.

Enshrouded is kind of close. The third-person combat and limited NPCs detract from the comparison, but the exploration and setpieces match or exceed anything Bethesda has ever put out and the survival gameplay is basically Valheim but with 10x the content.

My experience with autoresolve is that it punishes you for not fighting manually. You can basically always get better results if you take charge, and in the (old) Total War games I played resolving often cost half your army even when you vastly outnumbered/leveled the enemy.

I just wish they’d dedicate one or two of their major updates to integrating all the random features they added into a cohesive whole. Right now there are dozens of systems that are almost all pointless shallow grinds as well as completely isolated from every other system. It’d give the game some real depth if these mechanics interacted with each other in any way.

That, and fix their damn inventory system. It’s been a decade and multiple overhauls and basic crafting and inventory management is still unpleasant and tedious.

I agree with you that societal rules are mostly arbitrary bullshit. Communication and consent are the important things. Your relationship should work the way its participants all agree on.

You might want to edit your original post though. You’re probably getting downvoted so heavily because without that context it sounds like you were cheating on an unknowing partner and couldn’t see any problem with it.

If you’re open about it ahead of time, that’s not cheating. Cheating is when you go behind your partner’s back with someone outside of the established relationship.

Relationships are built on trust and establishing boundaries. Cheating (as the name indicates) breaks both of these. It’s completely different from an open relationship due to one missing and very important component: consent. If your partner is okay with it, have all the (safe) sex you want. But going behind a loyal partner’s back and breaking their trust is of course going to hurt them.

Even if they would have been okay with an open relationship, you not asking beforehand will have them wondering why you hid it from them, if they did something wrong, if they’re not good enough for you, if you ever loved them at all, and what else you might be doing behind their back. Your betrayal will have destroyed their trust in you, and rebuilding the relationship will be an uphill battle if it’s even possible at all.