Well, if there’s one release no one wants to be near, it’s GTA6, so February looks far better by comparison. And for me personally, I couldn’t care less about Assassin’s Creed or Monster Hunter. Kingdom Come, Rift of the NecroDancer, and Civilization are more likely to be competing for my time.

Only if you play as Sauron.

It’s not a new IP. It’s based in the Pillars of Eternity universe.

They were the first to settle it (from a Western perspective). That’s what they were pioneers of.

There are tons of online games that don’t require you to be online. We know exactly how to do that, whether it’s providing LAN or private servers, but the industry is happy to let you forget that. The difference with MMOs is that they charged a subscription that people were willing to pay and, for a long while at least, it was impossible to pirate, which was a goal of the industry for a long time. By no coincidence, Steam was the first big digital distribution platform right as broadband became mainstream.

And sorry, it was a third person shooter called Tex Atomic’s Big Bot Battles, not a real time strategy. I confused my acronyms in my head while typing.

Ah, I never knew that. But even that was a callback to them using a very similar trick in the old MSX games as anti-piracy. (Meryl, btw.)

deleted by creator

To be a pioneer is to be the first to do something. In the context of American pioneers, they were Western settlers, who intended to actually live in the place rather than just chart it. If you put enough qualifiers in front of it that I don’t think are necessary to the argument, like “single player”, then sure, they were probably pioneers. I can find an old RTS from a failed digital distribution platform a few years earlier that also seems to qualify, but fine. Even still, there’s no world where we didn’t have Steam and then online DRM didn’t become standard, because you’d have to ignore the world we lived in post-Napster that led to iTunes, which had online DRM at the time. The lack of it in video games was likely due to middleware partners having not invented the solution for it yet, but I guarantee you they were working on it (SecuROM was only a few years later), as both piracy and used copies were the enemy of the video game industry for decades, and aggressive DRM measures at the time would even negatively interface with and end up breaking some users’ disc drives. Combine that with how lucrative MMOs were turning out to be for their recurring revenue, and there was no way we weren’t rapidly converging on exactly what Steam and live service games ended up being.

The Steam hate back then was as prevalent as you say, and it earned it, particularly back then.

One of the most famous moments of Metal Gear Solid is an anti-piracy measure.

That’s what pioneered means.

This is revisionist history. Steam was not the origination of DRM or even online DRM.

Perhaps, but 10x as many? I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t think it’s likely.

My wife and I are playing Golden Idol together as well. Are you playing with controller? If so, how are you finding it? Sometimes I scroll too far to one side of a window, and it just starts cycling them for reasons I can’t explain.

Exactly. The peak number of people trying to download it simultaneously was about 24k. They didn’t all stick around because it wasn’t working, even though that’s about 1/10th of what the devs expected and prepared for the demand to be. They didn’t get anywhere close to 200k people all hitting that server at once.

It is, because everyone trying to download assets from the game servers were doing so from the executable that Steam tracks as running.

No, that’s what I’m saying. That peak is well under what they claimed they simulated.

The peak concurrent users for the game thus far has been less than 1/10th of that (EDIT: slightly more than 1/10th of that). They were well within the bounds of what they simulated. They just screwed up.

Yes. There’s no reason to buy the season pass before there’s even a single character ready, so I usually buy it the day that character comes out, but like I said, it hardly matters to me what the other content is in this case, because I’ll need it one way or the other.

A battle pass for fighting games, if you’re a competitive player like me, is easily ignored because it’s a carrot at the end of a stick to keep you playing to earn cosmetic items. In fighting games, this currently only exists in Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and kinda sorta in Mortal Kombat 1, to my knowledge.

A season pass is where you get new characters, just like you can get expansion content in any other game. These are what I do buy as a competitive player. They usually come with 4-6 characters that are released over the course of the year. There’s no world where I wouldn’t want to have every character, since even if I don’t intend to play as that character, I’d still want to bring them into training mode to figure out how to beat them. So the package is slightly discounted compared to buying each character as they release, and I know that I’ll have each character unlocked the second that they’re available.

Season passes predate the proliferation of live services. Live services tend to have “battle passes”. In my world, fighting games, “subscribing to DLC” has its advantages.

I’m at the final boss fight of Divinity: Original Sin II, I’m pretty sure. At this point, I’m quite ready for the game to be over. It’s largely very good, but Baldur’s Gate 3 this game is not. I used a lot of my best moves up front in the fight, only for the boss to transition to a phase 2 and regen all of its health while those good moves were on cooldown. Then the game pulls out one of its favorite tricks, which is that the map transition automatically clumps up my entire party in one spot, and the boss’ initiative is always higher than mine, so I just get hit with AoE attacks until my whole party is dead or nearly dead. Larian got much better at encounter design in BG3.

I’m also a stone’s throw away from finishing The Rise of the Golden Idol, which is probably my favorite game released this year, and there were a lot of very good games this year. I think controller support might be worse in this game than in its predecessor, The Case of the Golden Idol, but I really like the way they integrate the story throughout this one rather than sort of surprising you with a pop quiz at the very end like the last one did.