True, but you do learn what you’re good at and what you’re not. You don’t play as a child or teen still learning their place, though you could, but generally that’s not what’s done. People generally have a decent grasp on their capabilities, though they can surprise themselves it’s rarely orders of magnitude out like it would not having a sheet.

Making it so holding a fire source sets any surface you stand on on fire is so cursed tactically.

Obsession with character sheets comes from pen and paper and a desire to simulate every aspect of the world. Without the tools to tweak your ability to interact with the system you can pretend to be a master thief, but unless the game reinforces that with its behaviour you’re just pretending. Like you can pretend to be a vampire in Skyrim, sure, but it’s more fun when you’ve actually got the curse and the game reinforces that.

Fundamentally a stat sheet is just a way to tell the game what your character is like in a way that it understands and can reinforce that’s more granular than definition by class or by what skills you’ve used. And every game has one, whether you can see it and change it or not.

It’s why “everyone” ends up as a stealth archer in Skyrim. Because stealth and ranged attacks are something every character would try to do, Skyrim’s design means if you as much as try something it makes you better at it, even if you want to be a clumbsy barbarian.

Which ironically makes it so you can’t just roleplay, you have to avoid trying anything that isn’t what your character is best at. It means you can’t hide from a patrol you can’t handle, you have to just charge in and swing, because the game will change your character otherwise and you can’t tell it not to.

I see where you’re coming from, though when they were using attack rolls to determine hits and was essentially real-time-turns I think I still disagree with your definition. I don’t have a good counter to your point, I just don’t agree on the words used now =P

You’d think the sensible business decision would be to see an under supplied gap in the market and fill it, but God-forbid they do something sensible.

Go play Morrowind and come back and say that it’s a simulationist immersion game again.

It is now but it’s roots were deep in RPG stats beforehand.

Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith explained that Larian’s success is an “exception” to the last decade of gaming trends, but one that shows a shift in desire from gamers.

There’s been no shift, we’ve just been ignored and under-served for around two decades. But, sure, keep ignoring us.

This is the bit that put me off entirely. FO4 was supposed to be an iteration of (if not an improvement on) FO3/FO:NV. It was supposed to be a first person RPG. But there’s enough dialogue where what you say just doesn’t matter at all. It was the inverse of the mass effect 3 ending made into a game where the options you choose don’t affect the dialogue and usually result in the same colour too.

Honestly I’m upset it sold as well as it did, because it reinforced the idea that people don’t buy fallout games as role-playing games any more.

Copyright doesn’t cover possession just production and distribution. You can download anything copyrighted just fine, it’s just usually illegal to distribute such things with the idea that you’re eliminating potential sales.

“normal” is around $10, “high” is $20-30, we’ve seen as high as $500 iirc.

Most indie games release between $15-30. Honestly most skins are around the cost of a new game, yeah.

My boycott of Sony continues, I would have really liked to play that.

I don’t know, they don’t seem much better than Elite Dangerous, which is a game that’s released. And those ships don’t take a real life mortgage to afford.

There’s not much of an interview here, but there’s also nothing to really tell that they learned anything from this experience. They still have this air about their words like they did nothing wrong, even when they’re admitting that it wasn’t just technical issues.

Sorry, I’m probably nit-picking. My point was team size and game size gave ballooned, but it’s not broadly a AAA thing, it’s a very recent issue (last 10 years). They did just find when they hadn’t got so insane, but not much before the numbers you listed. Halo 3 and Skyrim’s are beloved games made by studios of around 100 devs.

Payday 2 and payday 3 we’re made by the same dev studio, but with different producers. They own the IP, they’re burning it down of their own free will.

They tried to milk payday 2 to death and it didn’t work, so they tried again with payday 3 and lost their audience.

If we’re just talking about analogy then the band is the game, the dev team is the roadies and management is the publisher? Still. They fucked the stage by their own choice.

Not really true, Bethesda ballooned from ~70 around Skyrim’s launch to ~500 for Starfield.

The outer world’s dev team from obsidian was around 80.

Bungie has/had (bit unclear if this this before or after the ~200 layoffs) around 850 for Destiny

I think the AAA devs are proving that more devs don’t make things better. And Animal Well is 31MB, but I think that’s a bit of an exception really.

Self-fund or kick-start and hope (and beg) some YTer plays their game and it explodes.

The camera through the first one feels like a stalker perspective, the new one makes it very gamey

That’s cool

They’ll be constrained by unfamiliarity instead. Admittedly that’s easier to deal with though.