Imagine the downfall of framework being the donations made to some obscure (tankie?) dev that a part of the community does not agree with. This toxic “holier than thou” attitude of the linux community leads to fragmentation and will be the doom of the linux phone project too, I swear. Someone will find an obscure package developed by an asshole/tankie/nazi/whatever and will rage about how the project is now immoral because the project devs support it and insist on a public boycott. Why do some people seem to be unable to separate the software from the developer? Framework or the software dev is not your friend. Is their hardware/software decent and open? Cool, then keep using it, tankie devs be damned, or at least fork it and make your own morally pure version. But this endless bickering over what devs support will lead to nothing good.

In increasing order of casualness I recommend: Elite Dangerous->X3/X4->Everspace/Everspace 2-> No Man’s Sky.

Everspace 2 is a spiritual successor to Freelancer, so probably your best bet ( Everspace 1 is more roguelike, but holds up nicely ). Speaking of Freelancer, I hear the game is still alive and has a vibrant community around it.

If you ever want to revisit Elite shoot me a message, I may help you with starting up. They say Elite doesn’t have a learning curve but a cliff, so help is usually needed. Luckily the game has the most welcoming and helpful community I’ve seen in/around a video game.

Other than these, there’s Chorus, but I haven’t played that one and it seems more story driven than open-ended.

For those unaware, there is also Heroes of Science and Fiction, which is essentially homm 3 with a fresh scifi coat of paint and lots of qol stuff. It’s in early access but man it catches the vibe so well.

Seeing the series’ progression so far, I just know microsoft will stuff it full of FOMO crap and monetization, as well as a lot of AI generated stuff ( which, admittedly, may not be all bad ). But still, I’m pretty excited for it.

Time to fire up Anno 2205

I loved him in mafia, he had such a recognizable voice. Almost bought Mindseye because of him lol.

But seriously, I wish him luck and hope he doesn’t give up on games.

Does anybody have the original study? I tried to find it but the link is dead ( looks like NANDA pulled it )

Finally, some competition for scs. From the trailer it doesn’t look like it will be a sim tho. Maybe a story driven teucking game?

Damn. The original was (to me) the highlight of many, many lan-parties.

I see it didn’t take long for polygon to turn into a clickbait factory post-layoffs

Even if they wanted to bank on the adblocker thing I imagine they can’t because they have to stay in Google’s good graces. Like 90% of their revenue was google money, and has been for years now.

At this point I’d honestly even pay for a privacy focused mozilla browser that is clean of all this crap, just to keep them afloat, but fat chance of that happening.

Third separate article about this game in a week? I see they’re in the hyping up phase.

It’s so damn good. I must’ve replayed it like six times since it came to pc. The story, the voice acting, characters, graphics, everything is absolutely top notch. Except for the goddamn controls (and the menus). I’m not sure if it’s due to it being a console-first game or just a rockstar thing as rdr1’s were also crap, but holy shit they’re infuriating. The amount of times I shot people by mistake, lost missions because of a wrong key, or just plain ended up with an unpayable bounty is too damn high.

It’s TakeTwo - you know they did. Bioshock was a complete arc and died with Irrational. Whatever this zombie project is, I expect it won’t live up to the name, but they’ll slap it on anyway because goshdarnit executives just can’t help milking a franchise dry instead of innovating.

Indeed

I still keep a copy of a pre-EA version on my pc, as that was the cleanest one. I played pvz2 for a bit back when it launched and don’t remember it being complete shite, but it was absolutely riddled with mtx. As far as the other pvz games, holy hell what a shitshow.

True, but iirc sims 4 also released in a more cut-down state than sims 3 - in fact it was one of the pioneers of “paradoxification” of games and victim of other bullshit that EA was trying to pull, just like with simcity.

Anyway, my point was that with EA the up-front price they charge is not awfully relevant, because you have lootboxes, p2w, mtx, gambling, dlc of varying dollar value etc. so you might end up paying a crapload, live service or not.

Yeah, wasn’t sims 4 with all dlc like 1 grand just a couple yeara ago?

Love how fast they all dial back after seeing the reaction on nintendo’s 80$ approach. But seriously EA I don’t care for those extra 10 bucks upfronf if your games are still the mtx and gambling infested shit they currently are.

I wonder what it was that made Pornhub cooperate this time around. Iirc in texas and france they just “left” instead of implementing the age verification.