Those will die off soon enough, through forced obsolescence and an inability to compete with ad-subsidised junk that spies on you.

I think that was the one that started in an ice zone, if I remember correctly? I literally couldn’t get past it because I find that aesthetic quite boring…

I played the hell out of the first Borderlands (including New Game+ across all expansions), but promptly bounced off 2 & Pre-Sequel because it literally just felt like more of the same and I was already sated.

BL3 and now BL4 are literally just more of the same, but with ever increasingly more egregious monetisation.

That’s definitely another workaround, for sure! I think our supermarkets here carry Steam gift cards - for example.

Though I imagine that those same payment processors could threaten to pull out of stores that carry Steam gift cards, and we’d be back to square one.

Additionally, it puts more burden on the end users to have to physically shop somewhere ahead of time - lowering convenience. Ultimately, as Valve themselves put it - piracy is a service problem. Any additional hurdles will deter some potential customers.

So in order for people to be able to spend their own money how they see fit, we need a new player in the field - either fiat (eg. via the EU) or reliable, low/no fee stable coin(s).

100% in agreement; those are the factors that I was alluding to when I said it would be too much for end users to deal with…

…and that’s all before we even begin to take into consideration regional pricing!

True, the best bet currently would be to stick to a ‘stable coin’ to avoid the drastic price fluctuations - but even having to deal with that will largely be a bridge too far for most would-be customers, I fear.

Not the Yoshi’s Island 2 we deserved, but the Yoshi’s Island 2 we needed.

Still won’t give Nintendo a cent of my money, so I look forward to emulating this at some point in the not too distant future.

All good, I’m currently lodging a patent on lodging patents for a system for summoning a character.

See you in court, Nintendo!

P.S.: I’m also lodging a patent for a system of pirating every single game on a Nintendo platform (past, present and future), however I will be opening that one up to the public once granted.

I hope that this is just a misunderstood pun?

I’m ok with there being a conversation on this topic, even if the arguments devolve to ‘waaah’ vs. ‘git gud’.

Ultimately though, I agree that a small dev team shouldn’t have to focus on a game-mode outside their vision - and any such demand for an easy-mode or other additions can and should be left up to mod makers.

It’s a single-player game, so in the end how the individual user wants to play is how they should be able to play.

Activision/Blizzard have frequently had game launches where their servers were unavailable due to demand.

But that’s probably more due to terrible network infrastructure, than overwhelming demand!

Can’t; you are objectively correct.

Ah, it’s always good to see a fellow Logitech Z-5500D owner in the wild!

As a bit of a thought exercise, I went through every mainline GTA game using that website to get an idea of each title’s respective headcount:

• GTA : 86 people (DOS)
• GTA2 : 170 professional roles (Windows)
• GTA3 : 185 professional roles (PS2)
• GTA:VC : 688 professional roles (PS2)
• GTA:SA : 780 people (PS2)
• GTA4 : 1,333 professional roles (PS3)
• GTA5 : 3,686 professional roles (X360)

So while the general headcount growth over time tends to track, as each generation of platform requires more and more people to churn out higher fidelity content, I can’t help but wonder what portion of that headcount is just there to churn out micro transaction and Games-as-a-Service garbage.

I don’t get how/why it’s still profitable for them to keep working on it - but I’m in full support.

It’s not to dissimilar to Minecraft in a number of ways, in a sense - there’s not really any drive to do anything in particular, it’s ultimately up to the player to do what they feel like.

It’s a literal sandbox, rather than a narrative experience. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, that’s perfectly fine!

According to the Diablo IV credits, over 9,500 people worked on that title in some capacity:

https://www.mobygames.com/game/204085/diablo-iv/credits/windows/

…and so it fucking should; the more pain average Americans feel, the better - honestly.

We are less than 8 months into this administration, and they are already doing their damnedest to rat-fuck the elections in an effort to fully seize power for at least a generation and remake the nation in their own twisted vision.

The last chance left to stop this takeover is the 2026 midterms, and the GOP are already pulling out all of the stops to stop that from happening:

• Gerrymandering the absolute shit out of Texas
• Closing polling booths in locations likely to vote against the GOP
• Imposing voter identification laws to further disenfranchise ‘undesirables’
• Rail against mail-in ballots to further suppress turnout

Hopefully the dam breaks and inflation well and truly begins to run away - so that the majority of the population feel the impact of this President’s policies to their wallets, and vote out his lapdogs and lackeys.

If not, then the nation and its people are truly lost and more expensive consoles are going to be the least of your worries.

Edited to add: sorry, backbone was probably the wrong term to use.

The actual history of Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) is actually needlessly complicated - primarily due to a (somewhat) successful sabotage attempt by our Conservative government in the early 2010s.

But basically, every single new home is built with Fiber to the Home, and every single metropolitan and suburban home either has Fiber to the Home (or Premises), or at the very least Fiber to the Curb through a remediation process to replace the Conservative-implemented Fiber to the Node boondoggle.

We also have a number of neighbourhoods stuck with HFC (again due to Conservstice sabotage) which while still delivering 100+ Mbit connections - are a bit of a technical dead end and will need to be remediated at some point in the future.

Basically, nbnCo serves as a national broadband wholesaler providing high speed connectivity (100, 250, 500, Gigabit) to something like >95% of the population.

The most remote communities are also serviced either through a fixed wireless option or satellite.

Basically though, unlike the US we don’t have a significant number of people still on dial-up and haven’t had so for a very long time.

There’s a reason that particular cohort is mockingly referred to as capital-G Gamers^TM.

Honest question, can anyone actually name a mainstream game where the main playable character is canonically and explicitly portrayed as gay?

I honestly can’t even think of one.