Easy modding helps a ton, but what really keeps a game alive is releasing the source code so that it can be updated by the community (or, in rare cases like Daggerfall Unity, some absolute mad lad spending over a decade reverse engineering the game and remaking the entire thing from scratch). The list is endless - the multitude of Doom versions, OpenMW for Morrowind, OpenJK for Jedi Outcast and Academy, even OpenJKDF2 for Jedi Knight 1, OpenRCT2 for Rollercoaster Tycoon, 1.13 and Stracciatella for Jagged Alliance 2, and so on and so forth. Without these modern source ports/remakes, the games would be nowhere near as popular as they are.

Also worth noting that new games not checking these boxes is not a failure, it’s by design. Publishers don’t want you happily playing old games, because then you’d have less of a reason to buy new ones.

Votes should be inversely weighted by age. The vote of someone who’s going to clock out before the next election even rolls around shouldn’t be worth the same as the vote of someone who’s going to have to live with the consequences for half a century or more.

I get that, but at the same time I don’t. I mean, it doesn’t make sense to me. Expecting endless debate and also expecting correct conclusions to be reached seems contradictory, since once conclusions are reached, debate would cease. This is one of those things that make me feel very uncertain, like when you finish an exam in half the allotted time, watch everyone else keep furiously working, and start questioning whether everyone else is dumb or whether you are and you missed something obvious. I get that feeling a lot when reading/thinking about religion.

I’ve heard stuff like this several times from different sources over the years, but I’m still not convinced it’s not some elaborate collective prank. It reads like something written by Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams.

Yup. It’s incredibly convenient, I have no idea why people stopped using it. I follow a bunch of youtube channels, webcomics, podcasts, blogs, and apps in development. If there’s some way other than RSS to have all those updates show up on a single page, I don’t know it.

This had me in the first half, but the last sentence makes it clear it’s a complete fabrication with no basis in fact. Business tycoons have always had a disdain for the poor.

Basically all of NetHack, but if I had to pick one thing, it would be the fact that the devs foresee things that don’t even exist in the game. For example, if you polymorph yourself into a monster that can eat metal and then eat a trident, you get a humorous message referencing Trident bubble gum. A similar message exists for when you eat a piece of flint (referencing the Flintstones, naturally), despite the fact that there are no monsters in the game that can eat rocks. In other words, that message can never be seen in the vanilla version of the game, but the devs prepared it anyway just in case you mod such a monster in.

Also, Vane.

Frontier: Elite 2 had it in 1993. There really is no excuse at this point.

Dang, this is a disappointing read. This might be an unpopular take, but I have been steadily losing respect for FromSoft over the years due to them essentially following the same path as Bethesda - they used to make varied games until one of them randomly became very successful, and from that point on they’ve just been remaking that one game over and over with slightly different coats of paint. I was hoping they’d break out of that pattern with AC6 and do something original for a change, although I was also keenly aware there was a risk that, being the sixth game in the series, it would be just another AC. The fact that it’s apparently just another Souls is somehow even worse.

two decades is enough to capture Skyrim and Fallout 3.

So a decent but by no means amazing game and a complete turd? Not really helping your case here very much, IMO. The last truly great game Bethesda made was Morrowind, and I will die on this hill.

Experience. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, uh, you can’t get fooled again!

Hyping up old features as if they’re groundbreaking is a proud Bethesda tradition. I still remember laughing at their pre-release hype around the Radiant quest randomizer in Skyrim, which is virtually identical to the quest randomizer that Daggerfall had been built around fifteen years prior.

It seems like BG3 is getting more attention than all of Larian’s previous games combined (and maybe all of Obsidian’s recent crpgs as well).

Legendary brand name which the game actually lives up to.

the developers still need to work on big patches, content and fixes even years after release

Why would they need to do that? If it’s years down the line, there shouldn’t be any bugs left to fix by that point. And offline single-player games don’t need regular content drops. Sure, an expansion or two might be nice, but those don’t come free. Only online games need to constantly feed their players new content in order to keep them hooked and coming back to buy more MTX.

Would the average consumer willing to spend more for a game with everything in it? AAA already cost 70$ at launch, would the average consumer accept further price increases, or would selling plummet in comparison with reduced price+dlc or free to play with microtransanction?

Oh sales would plummet for sure, but it would still make a profit, just not as much. If From Soft and Larian can do it, everyone can. They just don’t wanna. (see below)

At the end companies are not inherently “evil” they just look for what works and what doesn’t by trial and error

That really depends on your definition of “works”. Sure, it’s a business, but what’s the goal? To me there seems to be a noticeable difference between companies that want to make good games, for which the business side of things is just a means to an end, and companies that want to make as much money as possible, where the games are the means to that end. Is that latter category ‘evil’? Maybe not strictly speaking, but I have no concern for those companies whatsoever, they can go fuck themselves.

Furthermore, once you ate your burger, if you want more, you have to buy another because it’s a consumables.

The same goes for single-player offline games, though. There’s only so much entertainment you can get out of one before you’ve seen everything, get bored, and look for another one.

you pay once but can play anytime while patched and updates require prolonged work after you purchase

If a studio fails to budget for that and make sure those costs are included in the price of the game, it frankly deserves to go bust.

In comparison to how the game is once you get a proper build going, yes, the campaign is bland as hell. Basically all ARPGs are like this due to the way their progression works.

That would require every player even new ones to make very complex loot filters and understand what loot is valuable and not to automate it.

No, it wouldn’t, because it would not be mandatory (just like loot filters themselves aren’t).

Every item in PoE that is automatically picked up doesn’t take up inventory space (Metamorph organs, Expedition fragments, Sulphite, Azurite).

You’re this close to getting it. The extremely limited inventory space in PoE and other ARPGs is a severe design defect, the games would be much better if inventory space was simply infinite. I’ve had a long and complex discussion about this very topic with someone just a day or two ago, so I don’t feel like explaining myself on this point all over again. Feel free to check that if you’re interested.

It also feeds into the dopamine loop, when you get an exciting drop you see it on the ground it doesn’t automatically just get sucked into your inventory.

That would be much better solved by having a pop-up show you the exciting drop as you automatically pick it up. That way the player would still get their dopamine hit without the game also constantly filling their annoyance meter by making them pick up garbage manually.

You get tens of hours of high-quality gameplay for free when you go through the campaign. How is that not saying much?

Because the high quality doesn’t come in until way later. When you’re playing through the campaign for the first time, you have neither the knowledge nor the resources to make a proper build, so the gameplay is very bland in comparison to what you can do later. Which means that the fact that the campaign is so long is actually a negative. It’s a tutorial that takes like twenty hours to slog through. This seems to be a common problem with free-to-play games. Warframe devs acknowledge and joke about the fact that the game starts getting good a hundred hours in.

In modern ARPGs, you automatically pick up currency just by being near it. In PoE, you have to individually click each currency item to pick it up. Given that PoE has a very sophisticated loot filter system, I find it very strange that it requires so much clicking to pick stuff up. You’ve already decided what loot you want to pick up when you set up your loot filter, so the clicking is mostly superfluous and could be automated. IMO that would make the game play much better, since having to stop to pick up loot interrupts the gameplay and breaks the flow.