I wonder if talent agencies have something to do with that. SEGA had long postponed Judgment PC release because they put a popular TV show star as an MC and their agency insisted it shouldn’t leave closed consoles’ systems because his likeness can be used to do obscene (or just unapproved\unpaid) things via mods.

Akschually, Doom DA needs to have raytracing enabled at all times, and your vcard is in the first nvidia gen that has it. While 10xx and 20xx haven’t shown much of a difference, and both series are still okay for average gaming, there’s the planned divide vcard producers wanted. RTX IS ON ads visuals were fancy at best (imho) while consuming too much resources, and now there’s the first game that doesn’t function without it, pushing consumers to either updgrade their hardware or miss out on big hits. Not the first time it happened, but it gives a sense why there were a lot of media noise about that technology in the beginning.

So, basically, this cool guy Durov sold an idea of a confidential messenger hosted by a russian FBI. Add there that you can’t lawfully buy a SIM wihtout a local passport, so everyone using it as a lawful citizens have everything they’ve posted right to their registered entity. And that you can link persons even without obvious address book sniffing.

Not Ishin though, and that’s a shame. No one patched Denuvo from it too. It’s not a mainline game, but from what I’ve seen, it may become my favorite entry one day :(

You know, you could afford glass armor too, if you skipped the cup of soy ale every other day! Coin-to-coin, that’s how my business is going!

An article for an article: https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/27/18281082/elder-scrolls-morrowind-oral-history-bethesda

I feel like that push (and then radiant quests, automated faction battles, structure of dungeons with a final chest and an exit, mini-bosses etc) came from Todd trying to optimize everything in production after the hell of making Morrowind. Let the game write itself as much as possible, let’s make places not Lego, but Lego Duplo constructors for our designers and generate trees\grass over them, and then - the leveling got too generalized to become awkward. Wide brush strokes and big ideas as a base canvas, with some select things painted-in afterwards intentionally.

also, while i’m here, the native leveling system is bonkers… It’s horrible. You can kind of ignore it, but you’ll be much weaker than you would be if you play into it.

The only roadblock here are guild requirements to get to the top of the hierarchy. Gameplay-wise, I can’t remember any time I had regrets over a borked leveling in the past or something. In spite of Morrowind’s system sounding utterly weird, it didn’t implement autoleveling to such a degree that it matters. Comparatively, I got frustrated with Skyrim and completely dropped Oblivion the last time I tried to revisit them. The latter directly tied enemies and their equipment to your base level, so it punished you greatly in the middle of the game if you pick something weird, and you can’t just sink money to correct that.

The argument would probably start with defining what RPG means. My local gaming journos for example used ‘rpg elements’ to describe multiplayer progression in CoD: MW games. Some people call Far Cry 3+ a sandbox\RPG.

In a sense, topping the numbers may be seen as a sign of an aRPG like Borderlands\Diablo that do no involve roleplaying, but rather a munchkin reduction of the genre to stats, loot, etc. There are a lot of these numbers to empower your MC, including solid perks to acquire - like better weapon handling or rewards for working as a first responders. Nothing we haven’t seen in arcade or action games, but either way people do consider this as a RPG influence at the very least.

Actual roleplay, or rather choices defining your journey, like in choose-your-own-adventure books, are seemingly non-existent. You don’t pick your character like you don’t pick Geralt, but at the same time, you have little to no agency over what happens, unlike what’s seen in Witcher. There are strict win and fail conditions, you can sometimes equip yourself better or pick your route from A to B, but from that understanding of RPG, it isn’t one.

What gives it a fleur of freedom is it being a big ol’ sandbox where you can play with multiple toys and bend it’s rules.

I, therefore, would insist on calling it a sandbox action game with rpg-lite mechanics.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Same. Also seeing how everything windows or chromium wants the minimum of 8GBs now, doubling that becomes the point of comfort now, and quadrupling it seems like a reasonable go-to if you want guaranteed years of work without upgrades. With how SSDs became mandatory, it won’t take long devs would assume 16 is the new 8, especially if these stats kinda approve that pov.