EvaUnit02

As I see it, it's a confluence of things which have captured the zeitgeist:

• Larian D:OS games have been very well received.
• Baldur's Gate and the Infinity Engine games are beloved.
• Final Fantasy XVI, the big JRPG for the year, is squarely an action game and some view that as off-kilter. Baldur's Gate 3, the big CRPG for the year, is squarely an RPG.
• D&D is a big property and new D&D games often gain a fair bit of attention.
• People seem to appreciate having no in-game purchases.

These five things, in my opinion, have pushed Baldur's Gate 3 to the front of media outlets and, in turn, to the forefront of conversations.

I'm a former game dev and I can tell you, at least from my experience, there was no golden age where developers and customers were treated fairly. It's the primary reason why I left. Hell, I once interviewed at a place that showed off how the offices had beds in them, as if that was a selling point.

That said, I'd probably be someone who you'd consider "doesn't care about the bad things these companies did." I'm just too fuckin' old to be mad about shit all of the time. If I was only going to patronize folks and companies who matched my own set of ideals and ethics, I would be more than just gameless. I would be homeless and penniless as well.

What I do is simply detach products and services from those who provide them. I can buy a thing from a person I find distasteful. I don't have to invite them out for a drink and I certainly don't have to avoid taking them to task for their poor or unethical behavior. Moreover, ethics and behavior are saleable. If someone comes around who offers something comparable to something from someone I find distasteful, then I can go patronize the new person instead. I have jumped ship from many service and product providers for that very reason. If you want my business, then you better ensure you're either the only person who can provide what I want or ensure you're the person I want to buy from.

Mage Knight. This game threw me in to an unbridaled rage with how much I loathed it. I couldn't understand why it was rated so highly. So, I went to BGG to see just how so many people could like this awful game.

Turns out everyone plays it cooperatively. Not a soul plays nor recommends the competitive mode; the mode I was playing in.

Just to try the stave off an inquisition against multi-lingual support, the extreme filesize isn't because you're downloading different "language packs". The extreme filesize is because, for whatever reason, they decided to package up five entirely seperate copies of the game in five different languages. You are, in fact, downloading Fallout 3 in its entirety five times.

I couldn't get in to this game, myself. Granted, due to that, I've only played about an hour of it but this game felt much more like a Visual Novel than an RPG, to me. Stats seemed to have no bearing on anything other than what the narrative decided they have a bearing on. It was therefore, very difficult to figure out who my character was. Otherwise, you're just clicking on things and reading reams of text.

I get that they were trying to go for a more tabletop version of an RPG but without a DM, I find that near impossible to translate 1:1. I would have preferred a more Baldur's Gate approach to the game.

Not everything can be easily compressed to significantly smaller sizes. In fact, for any random arrangement of bytes, finding one that is compressable by any significant amount is rare.

I had such a blast with it save for that last island.

Well, understand that it doesn't really play like a Souls game at all. That said, I'd probably just wait for the new one if you're excited for it. If not, either AC4 or AC5 would probably be the way to go. The early games didn't map camera movement to the right stick; so, I would avoid those as a newcomer.

AC4 plays a lot more "super robot-y" than the other games. AC5 has much smaller mechs by scale which makes terrain and cover much more important tactical considerations.

Starcraft, Doom, Exceed, Sniper Elite, and Space Empires are all brilliant. Personally, I think Street Fighter: The Miniatures Game is pretty good as well (although perhaps not for the price)

I'm a bit of a fan.

Nor I. Honestly, I'd rather have a wealth of options I can play and never do rather than having a giant fuckin' chore list for something that is not supposed to be a chore.

I don't have to "get through my backlog" because it's not a backlog. It's an option set.

Not necessarily, no. 32-bit applications are going to be making calls to 32-bit libraries and referencing a 32-bit address space. If those libraries are missing and/or there's no virtualization layer to translate the 32-bit calls, then the 32-bit apps won't work.