Steam is banned in Vietnam because it couldn’t/wouldn’t comply with their restrictive content laws.

The battle pass removed its daily check-in IIRC.

China started drafting legislation cracking down on engagement bait daily tasks a few years ago and some games (like Genshin and other Hoyoverse titles) dropped daily check-in bonuses and made more things reset weekly in response. I think China later backtracked (IIRC the politician pushing the laws fell out of favor?), but not feeling forced to log in every day made those games so much less stressful.

I haven’t played anything in the genre in years, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that crap crept back in again.

What other game lets you fight the demonic personification of Fox News and Bill O’Reilly?

I know a lot of people hyped up Outer Worlds as a spiritual successor to New Vegas and were disappointed when it didn’t reach the same heights of writing. Obsidian not being given any time to make New Vegas and then missing their contracted bonus payout by a single Metacritic point was brought up a lot before release, and gamers trumpeted this new game as what Obsidian could have made without Bethesda mismanagement. Then it came out and had the temerity to be average, leaving fans acting like they’d somehow been betrayed by Obsidian.

It wasn’t Obsidian’s or the game’s fault that people decided it had to be a 10/10 masterpiece, it just got caught up in a stupid fanbase war against Bethesda and its reputation suffered when it couldn’t meet people’s sky-high expectations.

Portal 2 has the best introduction to jumping controls of any tutorial in existence.

Same here. Though considering how the last attempt at a Dungeon Keeper revival turned out, it might be a good thing it’s not…

At least we have War For The Overworld.

I could never get into Stellaris, or most other Paradox games for that matter. I have a thing where I want the complete experience on my first playthrough, and Paradox’s DLC practices are like anti-catnip for me. I can’t enjoy the base game because I keep thinking of what all I’m missing out on, but the game with all DLCs is overwhelming for a newbie.

Side note, I got excited seeing this post’s thumbnail because I thought you were playing Starsector. Great game if you haven’t picked it up yet, one of those indie games that does a half-dozen genres and does them well.

Aquamail (when it was good)

I’m still using AquaMail, is there some news or scandal I missed? It works well enough for me, but then again I barely use email for anything other than a place for notifications so if they fucked up some other feature I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

I know their attempts at monetization have been batshit insane, but I bought it ages ago for a couple of bucks and luckily missed out on all that. Is there any reason to move to another app if I’m grandfathered into lifetime premium?

Could you remind me what features people were upset about? I stayed away from most of the drama since CDPR has a long history of releasing a free major upgrade a year or two after release that fixes everything people complained about.

I remember the dev diaries being pretty open about dropping features during development, like the RC drone turning from a staple of your kit into something shown off once in a mission and immediately forgotten.

I’d really rather gamers focused their energy into showing support for the developer groups making cool projects, than specifically deriding any works made under publishers they dislike.

The thing about EA is they have a long history of acquiring the developer groups you’re talking about, then mismanaging them into the ground before dissolving them entirely. I know just as many if not more only exist because of EA and their funding, but it’s hard not to feel bitter when many of my favorite studios no longer exist due to their incompetence and greed.

Every major Unreal Engine upgrade sucks for the first few years. Eventually it’ll get optimized (the source is available and studios regularly contribute to it) or the documentation will start pointing out pitfalls and ways to increase performance. We’ll just have to suffer through a deluge of chip-melting games until then.

I wish there was more competition in the high-end game engine scene. Unreal tries to do all of the things all of the time and suffers for it, Unity requires tuning to look good and its management keeps shooting itself in the foot, Godot isn’t there yet and has a bare-bones approach that requires devs to implement nearly everything from scratch, and the dozens of in-house engines that have been open-sourced lack the community or documentation quality to foster significant uptake.

The Saints Row devs are cackling right now.

If CDPR hadn’t forced the team to crunch to get the game running at all on PlayStation, it probably would have been much more polished on release. A lot of the bugs you see in YouTube glitch compilations were due to this over-optimization (like NPCs vanishing or changing models when you looked away for a second).

I wonder how much better the game and its reception would have been if they’d dropped the last-gen console support during development. Those were the truly awful versions; the PC version was about even with Bethesda’s launch day jank.

I also wish they’d properly managed expectations. The PC release was buggy and missing promised features, yes, but a lot of the hate came from it being a game with an open-world city with guns and driving but not mimicking GTA’s systems.

I can’t not read AV as ΔV. Damn you, KSP!

There’s a level in one of the Battlefield: Bad Company games where you’re ambushed by two attack helicopters in the desert and the only cover is a small building. Did I mention Bad Company has fully destructible environments and you’ve already fought in said building so it’s full of holes before the helicopters start blowing it apart? Or that a third helicopter shows up mid-battle?

It’s not too bad if you know what’s coming and preserve some cover, but if the building is in bad shape when they show up then you’re not going to have a fun time.

It did give us an awesome trailer though.

And sometimes the good memories become traumas when you realize the circumstances behind them are gone forever.

Produced by Niantic-ed Off.

There’s a weird level of hatred for the HD pack. Almost every video I’ve seen on the expansions shits on it and tells you to disable it in favor of the classic look.