I’m playing Oblivion Remaster. I never played it before, so I don’t have any nostalgia for it. But, its the first Bethesda game I’ve tried that has actually grabbed me. It’s just super charming and immersive to me. All I have left for my current character is the main quest and the Shivering Isles. I didn’t do all the guilds or explore everything - I’m saving some stuff to do on my next character that I’m already planning.

Small correction - they said they *gained *15 million players, not that they *sold *15 million new copies - the Sims 4 base game is free to play. Also, there was some recent backlash around how Inzoi handles LGBTQ characters and EA seemingly capitalized on that by releasing a big LGBTQ update for free, months ahead of pride month. So, they might be sweating it a little. But, Sims is on a whole other level culturally than a lot of games, it’s got a lot of players that play only the Sims franchise, and it’s been doing well enough to keep a steady stream of DLC coming out for years now.

It will be funny if they make it free to play because they think maximizing player count will translate into more shark card money than box price + shark cards. Not that I think that is likely, just a funny possibility.

I use Appsales to catch sales on paid games: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=appsales&c=apps

Seconding this recommendation. You can find it on the Play store here: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=mini+review&c=apps&hl=en_US. And, you can find the website here: https://minireview.io/

If the list on PCGamingWiki is up to date, there aren’t many Epic exclusives anymore (only 26 currently): https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_exclusive_to_Epic_Games_Store

And, earlier this year, Tim Sweeney said that many of exclusivity deals weren’t a good investment while the free games have been “magical.”

So, it seems like a problem that is solving itself over time. Epic will probably still have exclusives going forward, but I would expect them to target a few high-value exclusives like they got with Alan Wake 2. Or, maybe they will just do more acquisitions of games to self-publish, like they did with Rocket League and Fall Guys.

The article says that comment came from a CEO of another game company, not players. Tim Bender, the CEO of the publisher for The Manor Lord, said “Players are happy, the developer is happy, and we as publisher are thrilled beyond belief.” I don’t understand where the post title that says he cited gamer expectations came from.

There are a lot of great suggestions here already, so I will just share Mini Review with you as a discovery tool. I like to use them because they have a lot of filters to help you find a mobile game. For example, here’s their list for free, single-player, offline games with no ads or in app purchases, sorted by highest user score. They also have an app for both Android and iOS with the same info and filtering as the site.

Have you tried Itch.io? They have a lot of Gameboy and NES roms that are “Name your own price.” I don’t have any recommendations - I’ve just started poking around with homebrew roms myself.

• https://itch.io/games/top-rated/downloadable/free/tag-nes-rom
• https://itch.io/games/top-rated/downloadable/free/tag-gameboy-rom

I can’t speak for others, but for me it’s just a nuisance. I’m not furious about it. I avoid buying EA and Ubisoft games too. It’s a small thing for one game on one account, but when you acquire a lot of games across a bunch of different accounts, all those different logins and launchers just become a bother.

I don’t mind DLC that’s done right for games I love. I just know it’s a common complaint for Paradox games to have a lot of DLC. That said, there are games that have produced a ton of free updates with very little DLC, like No Man’s Sky, Terraria, Minecraft, etc. So, I don’t know that it’s always necessary to have a ton of DLC to support ongoing game development. It’s all very subjective and varies a lot from game to game.

I had not heard about Life By You being on hold. That’s frustrating. Paradox games go nuts with DLC too, but some competition is better than none.

Oh okay. A while back, their VP Lyndsay Pearson explicitly said they plan for Sims 4 to continue to exist side by side with Project Rene (aka Sims 5). I was wondering if that had changed. My cynical take on the plan to keep both going is that Sims 5 is probably going to be a live service abomination, which they wanted Sims 4 to be, so keeping Sims 4 might be hedge in case Sims 5 fails hard. Of course, they could also have been lying.

They didn’t need to announce this. They could just fix the bugs and players would start noticing that a bunch of bugs were getting fixed.

Where did you see that they are no longer making new content for Sims 4? The article doesn’t seem to say so and the last I heard they planned to release content for Sims 4 alongside Sims 5. FYI, I would prefer they stop with Sims 4 content.

I’m guessing that they don’t mean a legally grey area. I think they probably mean it’s a grey area for Microsoft because Proton helps people get around needing Windows to play games made for Windows and Microsoft has an interest in keeping people on their OS.

I just want Marvel Heroes back.

If you excuse me now, got to continue playing Last Epoch which is even in its early access fucking amazing.

What’s the deal with the Epoch points? I keep wanting to check it out, but the Epoch point packs makes me think it’s going to be the same deal where you can’t earn cool looking stuff in game and have to buy it.

I love the title of this post. The only arpgs that I don’t see mentioned already are Victor Vran, which I think is a lot of fun, and the Warhammer arpgs, I haven’t played yet, Chaosbane and Inquisitor Martyr. Inquisitor Martyr is supposed to get a fully offline mode soon and they’ve patched it to have all the seasons available to play through.

Epic doesn’t see gamers as their customer - they see developers as their customer and shape the customer experience around that. For example, Epic said that if/when they add reviews, developers could choose to opt their games out of reviews. That’s very pro-developer, but very anti-consumer, whatever you might think of the value of reviews. Informed customers can rattle off a long list of reasons they don’t like Epic and why they’re bad, but they are a small minority of PC gamers. The “silent majority” doesn’t keep up with this kind of stuff or really care about it, so they are literally judging stores on their merits and Epic is a bare bones platform that doesn’t offer customers a good reason to spend money in their store because they don’t think they need to.