Part of the issue is that modern games are usually getting fixes right up to release. Pre-release reviews tend to focus on things that aren’t likely to ever change significantly, like design and writing.

It would be nice if they gave a summary of issues they saw with a disclaimer that they may get fixed instead of omitting that information entirely.

Excel functions are translated. This leads to being pretty much locked out of any support beyond documentation if your system language isn’t English.

Expanse does too, though it isn’t common in that world.

Exactly. If you implement DRM that will make the software unusable if it can’t phone home, you should be legally required to have a plan in place for when your servers shut down.

MMO servers get a bit more complicated since they often rely on third-party components that aren’t releasable.

Only if the publisher has taken steps to stop individuals from preserving them through more traditional means.

Kerbal Space Program 2

I’ve been playing Gamedle recently. I tend to discover interesting games both as answers and while researching the info I have.

More biomes don’t fix the fundamental flaw in the design. It treats planets the same way Raft treats islands. They become purely a resource hunt for the player, no matter what skin they have.

Raft gets away with it by having your base travel with you, being incredibly hostile, and being short enough that the loop doesn’t get tiring.

NMS and Starbound struggle from the same issues. Infinite tiered worlds end up feeling the same, but also remove all meaning from the exploration. In Minecraft or Terraria you aren’t going to be flying to a totally new place in five minutes, so you want to get to know your surroundings and put down some roots.

Travel time and not having tiered world progression makes the player care about where they are at instead of seeing it as a stepping stone.

The lack of pressure leads to absurd file sizes for silly things.

A few weeks ago, I needed a vector company logo, so I asked our graphics team for one. The file they sent me was 6MB. While working with it, I noticed it was actually quite clean, so I exported it as an SVG and it came out to 2KB. 1/3000th the size for the exact same graphic.

I opened their file up in a text editor and found font configs for specific printer models (in a graphic with only filled curves), conditional logic, multiple thumbnails, and other junk.

Banks like to think that branch employees (bank tellers) are sales people. Most of them give ‘goals’ to each employee requiring them to open a certain number of new accounts, land a certain number of loans, etc each week/month. It isn’t ethical since the only people you can really sell on those services are the ones who should least get them. Anyone who actually wants/needs the services will come to you.

Wells Fargo differed from the rest of the industry by setting completely impossible goals, not just unethical ones. This led to them developing a culture where signing people up for services they didn’t agree to became commonplace.

Check out the demo if you have a chance. The game is a lot of fun and it has some pretty funny demo-exclusive writing.

This is what I’ve found too. Tutorials help to learn tools and some basic techniques, but actual learning requires doing. That’s easy if you have something you want to do, but incredibly difficult if you don’t.

Factorio is the best manufacturing/logistics sim by a huge margin. Some of that is technical things, but the biggest contributor is game balance and the complexity curve. They spent years iterating to find a sweet spot.

The regulatory agency is pretty large, but it’s headed by a 5-member commission.

They specifically used it to make major players blatantly cheat during a tournament so that it would be taken seriously and fixed quickly.

There are a couple of decent reasons. One is that your servers may be a network of services that can’t operate independently. Another is that they may rely on things you don’t have a license to distribute.

Why would someone feel the need to leak classified info on the Warframe forums? It’s far-future scifi.

I think you are confusing it with War Thunder.

It gets thrown around a lot as a buzzword, but it really just means “intended to get post-release updates that go beyond bug fixes.” Nearly every game released these days, good or not, classifies as GaaS. It’s functionally meaningless.

Petroglyph had Grey Goo and the 8-Bit family, but those are decently old now. They’ve been pretty much the only game in town for quite a while, sadly.