They did this for people with WC3 CD keys.

I wonder if I’ll get access to it with my WC2 original CDs.

They’re really in a bind though. Indie games are great because there are thousands of indie developers out there making games and we get to play any ones we want. All the indie games that fail don’t matter because we don’t need to pick the winner ahead of time.

AAA studios can’t operate this way because they can’t predict what will be a great game that everyone wants to play. The only leverage they have is that they can afford to hire a large team of artists to create all the graphics.

It’s really the same situation that Hollywood film studios are stuck in and the result is basically the same. Hollywood makes their MCU graphics extravaganzas and AAA studios makes their Call of Dutys.

I think he means “perfectly tuned to the way fans want it” which is to say “highly moddable.” Skyrim is kind of the first game in the series that sold really well on platforms other than the PC which strangely brought in a lot of fans who play the vanilla game. But as far as I can remember, the bulk of the longterm fanbase plays on PC and installs tons of mods for the game.

Sure, there are other games that fans like to mod (Minecraft being a big one) but I can’t think of any other game where fans stack dozens or even hundreds of mods by different authors all on the same game and actually expect it to work. The fact that it does work at all (and fans have created custom programs to merge mods and to carefully tune the loading order) is rather a miracle!

So this is what I think he means by “perfectly tuned.” A brand new engine would mean putting in a ton of work to support all the different forms of modding fans want to do and in all likelihood would be far less flexible and powerful, leading to modder community outcry.

Ahhhh this is an absolute tragedy. The same thing goes with many movies from the golden age of Hollywood. I love to watch these old films. It breaks my heart that so many are lost forever.

I’ve looked around quite a bit for The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. No one seems to have the complete series. The show ran nightly for 30 years and amassed 6714 episodes so it would be quite a large torrent.

Perform terribly on modern AAA titles, sure, but that’s a tiny % of the total Steam library. A lot of people these days don’t even bother with new AAA titles, instead playing older games or indie games. I bet Valve knows this and is working on the ARM transition specifically because of this fact.

How many people who worked on Morrowind, Oblivion, and/or Skyrim are still working there? This is a question I feel does not get asked enough when it comes to beloved franchises. People talk about their favourite game developers and how they “sold out” or whatever. I don’t think I see enough recognition that sometimes the best people at a company just leave.

I had actually heard about this game but didn’t pay much attention to it. It’s the first game ever published by Panic. This is a company previously known for exclusively publishing Mac software (mainly general utilities such as text editors, FTP clients, etc). I’m not surprised that the game is selling poorly given their lack of experience with game publishing.

The game looks very pretty but tactical RPGs are a niche genre. To market this game they need to get out there and get it in front of people who like these sorts of games. That means getting on forums and talking to people as well as sponsoring Twitch streamers who normally play these sorts of games.

Ever so, it’s a tough gig. I’ve seen streamers and YouTubers cover a lot of these sponsored games and many of them still flop because they just don’t interest the audience very much.

Brilliant. She has real gravitas. That’s what you need for this role. The ability to carry the weight of history.

Well they needed to do that one first, just in case…

The difficulty setting in Civilization games has never been “how smart is the AI.” The AI always plays with the same level of “intelligence” (which is almost none). What the difficulty setting controls is how much the AI cheats (which is a ton at the highest levels) and how aggressive it is.

My problem with Civ 5 (as a player of the series since the beginning) is that they’ve added a ton of stuff to the game that doesn’t actually make it more interesting or challenging to play. At the same time, instead of improving the AI to make it more interesting and challenging to play against, they decided to hobble all of the strong strategies from the early games in a way that just makes the game more annoying to play.

The fun part of the Civ series has always been about building the largest, most technologically advanced empire and steamrolling all the AI’s cities. Since Civ 5 this has been flat out impossible due to the changes they made to the game which cause exponential corruption / waste for large empires and the inability to stack units which means large armies are extremely tedious to manage.

Can you name a non-bad single player strategy game?

Funny you should bring up Caves of Qud. That game is pushing the envelope in terms of procedural generation. They want to do a ton of the world building and background stories with procedural generation while leaving the main plot hand-crafted. They also do a really fun procedural detective story with one of the quests, so the clues and evidence you find when investigating the crime are different every time.

I think a lot of the fun of that game is with exploring the procedurally generated environments and doing the random quests. There just needs to be more research into generating branching plots and simulating events, with chains of causality. Dwarf Fortress does a lot of this in its world generation, for example.

I think what works for Minecraft is the spatial nature of the game. Procedural generation gives the player a new environment in which they can role play as an architect and engineer. While nothing stops you from building exactly the same structure every time — block for block — it’s more fun to design your structures into the landscape itself, like a real architect would! The same goes for Daarf Fortress and the like. It scratches an engineering/managerial itch.

A roguelike without procedural generation is like Tetris where the order of the pieces is the same every time. Some roguelikes let you save the seed and replay the same run but this is generally referred to as cheating and done for recreation/research purposes, not for seriously attempting to win the game.

Discworld is amazing but not really a great setting for RPGs. The world is just too zany and hodge-podge. Everything I know about fantasy RPG fans tells me that they demand a “serious, rules-based” world.

There was a Discworld point and click adventure game though. The classic roguelike NetHack also has a ton of references to Discworld and a lot of humour and weirdness in general, though that also happens to be one of the things it gets criticized for the most. A Discworld RPG (which is at all faithful to the setting) would basically be NetHack on steroids.