If you want to play the same game over and over, there are plenty of those.

Live games are for ever-changing environments.

Fallout 76 didn’t ruin New Vegas

Ultima online wasn’t a “cancer” to the gaming industry

I wish Final Fantasy XIV ruined the franchise so we didn’t get the abomination that is the latest two installments.

Greedy shit developers make shit products, no surprise. But GemStone, Asheron’s Call, World of Warcraft (the early years, I can’t speak to the latest) and other forms of long-term games offer a chance to experience a world for years in an additive environment instead of waiting for the next installment of starting at ground zero again.

Different games are made for different people. If you don’t find a genre or model fun, their existence doesn’t ruin anything for you.

Live service games have been around for decades.

I had no idea there was a shopping list app. We’ve been using Keep for that kind of list and it syncs pretty quick, but no idea about Home.

Not a deal breaker for me. Runs perfectly fine, except for an occasional hitch when zooming.

Agreed. It’s a solid game that just gets boring. I enjoyed the campaign and the co-op play. I liked the variety of play of the classes.

But since the launch they’ve just made the game boring. The first big patch just nerfed every build. It’s not a competitive game - they just decided you should have less fun I guess.

Gems are super boring - instead of being excited for them to drop, inactively ignore them. And the first seasons only mechanic is… fancy gems.

The towns are designed to make you run around a ton. The mount mechanics are actively hostile (maps have areas where you need to dismount to progress, then there’s a 10s cool down before you can mount again). Inventory management kinda sucks. The whole loot management part of the game is kinda flat and that’s a major component of this series.

It’s weird because this was the smoothest launch of a Diablo and the game felt feature rich as you leveled. But the end game is so fucking boring. They have so many things in D3 they could have just copied but instead we’ll end up with yet another patch of nerfs in a single player game.

This is nowhere near reality.

Even if you could just “translate” code from one language to another, that ignores asset pipelines, asset store libraries, and all the build pipelines that allow you to ship cross-platform.

You also need to now train your entire dev team on a new tech stack.

Switching engines is an enormous effort

AAA studios were used to having local build farms, in-person build-review sessions, and testers being in the same physical space so engineers could see what’s going on. They have collections of unreleased hardware that need to be distributed and secured.

It’s not simple to completely overhaul a setup like that and go full remote. You’re moving 100s of GB a day to each dev and trying to change every one of your processes.

Every AAA engineer I know complained about how how slow everything was remote. Studios are figuring that shit out now, but I don’t think “hurr durr Todd Howard old” is really accurate or adding anything to the conversation here

VS for Mac was really just a renamed Xamarin Studio too.