To make video games for people, be authentic. Children and people early in their careers usually don’t have a lot of money, so it should come as no surprise that they’re primarily playing games that cost nothing or under $10. We can talk ourselves out of a lot of logical decisions by insisting on grouping people into these arbitrary generational buckets.

Maybe at first, but it’s had a long tail, especially with the TV show funneling people to Fallout games. And even with the reception Starfield got, it probably still made bank.

To set your expectations accordingly, it was probably a skeleton crew working on pre-production, grayboxing, and technology upgrades while the majority of the studio was on Starfield until a ways after it shipped. So they announced it way too early (often a tactic to get talent to apply for a job), and they’ve probably only really been working on it for about 2 years now.

I’m just past act 1 in Kingmaker, and even having seen 4 level ups, I don’t think they’ve been noticeably more interesting than 5e, and this is quite similar to the Pillars of Eternity games (I never played 3.5e or Pathfinder tabletop, but I’m pretty sure I understand the lineage there). Plenty of level ups are just putting points into a handful of those skills that, at least in CRPG form, don’t really manifest in interesting gameplay the way they do in Larian’s engine, or even the passive checks that happen in Solasta.

As I see it, 5e’s main advantage is speeding up the math, which matters a lot more when you’re calculating it by hand. The main thing I prefer about it other than that is that it’s a flatter character progression. Using Pathfinder: Kingmaker as an example, a single level up’s worth of to-hit and armor class turned a Bear-Like Ent from “nearly impossible” to “trivially easy”, and I saw the same phenomenon play out plenty of times in Pillars as well. In 5e, you do get more powerful, but not by orders of magnitude like those 3.5-based systems, which makes any given encounter feel more tactical rather than feeling like you should have just gained a level to trivialize it.

Couch competitive multiplayer? Because it’s not a fighting game, and I’d say it has more in common with Speedrunners than it does Smash Bros. And Samurai Gunn is a good one of those.

This studio in particular has a hell of a history of making some all-time greats, so it sucks to see it squandered.

Yeah, same. And I’m currently scratching my head on Docker right now. I downloaded a Jellyfin build that was not labeled unstable but is still considered an unstable version, and go figure, everything is behaving correctly now that I’ve actually identified the latest stable version. But I’ve also got three containers, one of them a bespoke version of Jellyfin provided by my NAS manufacturer, and of the other two containers, I can’t figure out yet how to upgrade in place so that it uses the same users and settings from the other container. So that’s where I’m at, haha. After that, I need to figure out how and why SSL certs work and how to set that up, and then I’ve got a lead on exposing that to the internet via WireGuard, a cheap VPS, and a cheap domain name. If I can get all that working, I figure I’ll be ready for hosting something besides Jellyfin on my local network only. And yes, the clock is ticking until Discord becomes a problem.

I’ll probably pick up Kena: Bridge of Spirits, and depending on launch discounts and reviews, I might pick up Screamer as well, if the sale is still running by the 26th. There’s no point in picking up anything else if I don’t think I’ll get around to it by the next Steam sale.