The EULA also states you MUST report bugs and exploits to zenimax. It’s standard boilerplate. Nobody is enforcing this and there are already over 200 mods up.

If it was just facelifted and made to run on and detect newer hardware and peripherals, I’d agree, but the remaster offers a lot of new flavor to the tune of voice acting, animations, rebalancing of the leveling mechanics, and fixes to ancient bugs like paintbrushes and quests breaking mid-way. Typically not a fan of remasters, but they usually don’t have this much actual work done. Even some of the world objects have been fixed and moved around like the randomly placed giant rocks no longer serrating the gold road.

Densely packed open world without much empty space, dialogue trees that will frustrate people with ADHD (seriously, random non-quest npcs have 10 minutes of voiced lines sometimes), fluid mix and match skill trees with easy access respec in the menu, no micromanagement mechanics like ammunition or town NPC line of sight causing every guard in a town to turn hostile, better optimization to run on less powerful machines than recent comparable titles, ability to upgrade gear you like throughout the entire game, magic system held on to some of the CRPG elements (you need to find grimoires with a spell to learn it, but putting points into a spell lets you cast them without the grimoire and upgrades them an extra rank if you still use the book anyway). Does an excellent job of bringing new players into the setting if they didn’t play Pillars or Pillars 2.

My current complaints are that the melee combat tree is a bit less exciting than the others, and a few visual issues have presented themselves like enemies with multiple elemental effects applied to them having some visual flickering and distant shallow water looks wrong. There’s some player character options that are missing from Pillars of Eternity, but if you haven’t played them you’d never know.

I think it’s a pretty strong GotY contender to kick off the year, personally. I made this post because people are mentioning user reviews, but steam user reviews have been pretty worthless lately. Way too many people expecting games to behave like another game or genre entirely and basing their entire review on that, or complaining about things that have no relation to gameplay (on that note, the game has XBL login but it is not required).

Outer Wilds. Wish I could forget it, as the progression is based entirely on player knowledge it has 0 replayability(I mean this as an endorsement).

No creatures, says OP. Metro got creatures.

Truly, a gift that keeps on giving for 200 hours. And it somehow has replay value.

You didn’t read the article well and you didn’t look up any info on patents whatsoever before jumping to “Why are you lying…?”. You have a TON of unknown unknowns about the topic and it’s actually impossible to explain it all while I’m on the toilet (which is where you’re receiving this information from), but here’s another few relevant tidbits:

The US patent office will help sustain foreign patents with a few requirements based on a few treaties, one of which is that the foreign patent was filed less than a year prior. Because the USPTO ostensibly exists to protect art made by artists, you can file an application for a patent within a year of filing a similar application in a different country. These were not recent enough. Another route is to apply for many countries at once through the patent cooperation treaty, which nintendo also did not do.

The person I was responding to was acting like the Japanese dates were a “gotcha” to the article. The article correctly states the US patent dates and links them, the related JP patents happen to be on the same page (but you have to click off of it to go there), and they have different application dates listed than the ones detailed in the article. It’s literally not the patents being talked about in the article. In fact, the article goes into detail about the timing and how it’s being used in the case: nintendo is seeking injunction money based on the time their patent was active in the US up to the time the suit was filed. You and the other poster are having a critical lack of information error, and a lot of that info is in the article. You confused yourself reading a site you don’t understand outside the article.

The patent system sucks ass and exists almost wholly to protect megacorporations at this point. Copyright, likewise, has fallen into a state of disarray as we continue to write laws that are impossible to enforce for the individual without an entire legal team to guide them. While I personally think the whole system needs a rework, we are probably a long way as a society (societies, really) from identifying the problem or making meaningful change. In the meantime, learning how (and why) corporations “punch down” like this legally is our only option. Here’s hoping this case does not go to a jury; I basically only see uninformed schlock from general discussion about patents and absolutely no initiative to learn about the patent system. It is almost never used to protect the creation of an individual and the public does not understand that was the original intent.

The court systems processed them on different dates. You’re the one being belligerent and incorrect. Condescend on someone else, learn to read the stuff you link or at least make an attempt to understand it lol

Japan and the US have seperate requirements (first to file VS first to invent) for initially accepting a patent. Just because you can see them both on the USPTO website doesn’t mean the patents are for both the US and Japan. In Japan, you can legally oppose a product before the patent is granted - in the US, that doesn’t fly.

If you can’t piece together what my point was with this info, you should probably stop commenting on patent cases until you do understand. You quite literally linked info showing the dates of the US patents that are after the release of palworld. Either you didn’t read the thing you linked or you have some warped perception of patents being global.

Yeah, and take a look at the dates in what you linked.

You entirely ignore it in the post I replied to.

The patents being referred to by the article are not Japanese patents. Did you know Japan has its own court system?

You don’t understand logical fallacies despite obviously being the type of guy who likes multiple videos a week about them from culture war youtubers with greek and latin usernames. You are actively engaging in doublethink (claiming something, presenting evidence about your own claim, running it back when the data YOU PROVIDED doesn’t support your claim while pretending to still have “logic” behind you), you are clearly torn up about an online argument, and your ability to read and think critically is clearly broken or undeveloped.

You have no concept of arguing in good faith, instead parroting things you’ve read or heard in similar conversations online (likely the aforementioned philosophy rant youtubers) that anyone over the age of 20 with an actual interest in these things has already heard tens of times. You’re kind of an idiot, judging by how proudly you linked your first google results. You have no concept of the difference between an article, a journal, and a study; sort of like a child who doesn’t see the difference between a chapter book and a graphic novel. Hell, I’m not sure you can read well at all, you certainly can’t quote concisely even on social media.

This is ad hominem.

Does the word “intersectionality” make you recoil physically?

Do people genuinely not realize that sony and microsoft had a great data collection source (console gamers) that have largely “aged out”? This new push for account sign-ins is obviously because their user data flow needs a big kick. They used to get data when people bought the game on their own platform, ran it on their own platform, even how many hours their gameplay sessions were individually throughout the week. With a lot of their studios games they had either complete or timed exclusivity to really find out what was driving gamers to game, and beyond that it’s a popular commodity and likely a loat or reduced revenue stream.

With helldivers 2, the account controversy sprung up on the back of Helldivers 2’s stats page not showing correct numbers for anything (and sometimes being rolled back asynchronously from your currencies and unlocks). Seemed obvious to me at the time they wanted a head count from another source (a sign-in) and probably data beyond that like session time/length. Whatever people are upset about sign-ins over, I don’t actually see it articulated much; there are a lot of good reasons to dislike it (potential stoppage of the service causing games to be harder to play like end of service for Games for Windows Live) and I never see them mentioned, just general vitriol for the companies. I don’t find the companies sympathetic, but I do find it odd that people just slam it aimlessly everywhere instead of identifying the issues beyond basic understanding of privacy fears.

Because they have Douyin.

Because they have Douyin.

Shroud (and folks like me) with 200+ hours found the fun. The quest design in starfield has extreme lows, but it has some extreme highs that are probably helped if you watched the shows and films the quests are referencing. The faction questlines are stellar the first time through.

If you just hate all quests and only care about gameplay outside of that, you should probably admit that to yourself instead of flinging buzzwords and design guesses around. Bethesda open worlds have always felt surprisingly dead, closest they’ve got is morrowind and oblivion with almost every npc having a domicile and a daily routine. Their open worlds have been panned as being empty, too quest-locked, too small (or artificially large), poorly balanced, and any number of other complaints that they’re trash/slop/unplayable.

We’ve heard this take (new game bad, old game good) for the entirety of video games existing across basically every genre. If you don’t like it, cool. It’s a game where you assign your own goals after a point (or even from the get-go) so ultimately it’s on you to find a satisfying gameplay loop. It’s okay if you can’t, but it says something about you and not the title, especially when you turn into a goblin who can’t stand the fun or joy of others on public spaces

I saw your reply and regret to inform you the other folks are right, I’m no gamergater and the context isn’t even right. Woke is a descriptor that causes me to buy a game. “Core” referred to gamers that were willing to grind, basically; it was a useful demographic for describing players and I don’t really know what has replaced it.

Not that odd. Seems like a decade and change ago it became common knowledge that market-tested, sanitized content wasn’t really resonating with “core gamers”, but we don’t even call the demographic that anymore. Not really sure how we got here

Ark has cryopods which do the same thing mechanically, the only major difference being that you don’t visually throw them. If you use the vague wording on the patents surrounding pokemon’s box mechanics, it falls easily under there, since you are storing a captured creature in a digital storage.

Nintendo is the KING of frivolous patents. They’ve lost cases on it before, and with palworld being a sony interest, I don’t think the usual financial bullying nintendo brings to the table is going to cut it on this one. They need an airtight case and their vague patents (and recent history trying to patent THE LOADING SCREEN and vehicle speed matching for player characters with totk being denied) is a bad look for them in a courtroom. Like the US, the holder of a patent in Japan needs to file suits swiftly to protect the patent, or they risk losing cases (like this one. See “laches defense”).

Palworld is back in the top 100 global bestsellers today.