What’s genuinely shocking is that Unity believe they can apparently completely unilaterally make absolutely vast changes to their rules, without consultation, without real warning, and severely to the detriment of the people using their product. Even if they get you to sign something saying that, that’s not exactly…

Yup, there’s no reasonable way to predict how much this could cost the dev and could easily outrun their profit over time. I'm a customer with a desktop, steam deck, laptop, and family sharing with two kids, that’s a lot of potential installs from a single purchase.

At this point no reasonable CTO or small game dev will choose Unity. Even if they roll this change back, the damage is done. The risk is far too high to start a new project that will take years to complete for Unity to suddenly do a rug pull on your project.

The “fraud” aspect is such a weird approach also. If you completely removed bad-faith actors from the equation, there’s still tons of people who may just have to reinstall multiple times to fix some bug, mod a game, or just don’t have a lot of storage space. Are devs supposed to report those as fraud also? How would…

including that charity games and bundles are excluded from fees

My opinion doesn’t carry much weight because I haven’t played nor do I really want to play Starfield. I can, anytime, because I have GamePass, but what this article outlines is exactly why I have no interest. The “Bethesda game” format has never been immersive or interesting or engaging, to me. This is, of course, to…

Seconding that.... I’d be tempted to debate the “writing” aspect in modern Bethesda games. Not that there isn’t bits of questlines here and there that aren’t really good but how the *structure* of the world kind of negate a lot of it in my opinion after playing these games for a while(I’d actually purchased Skyrim on…

This is a bonkers take. After character creation, almost every single upgrade in Starfield is “+10% pistol damage” “+10kg carry weight” “-5% O2 consumption” “+10% persuasion chance”. Comparatively, the skill tree in AC: Valhalla was a fucking design masterclass.

Again, you’re taking a very surface level understanding of things and stretching it to the point of being woefully wrong.

That’s roundtrip latency. The thing that is most important in game perception is not light-action-light, its action-light. Your ability to perceive that gap is roughly an order of magnitude higher.…

Who to believe, Todd Howard who is a part of a Dev studio with a history of horribly optimized games, or myself and my friends who are getting much lower performance in Starfield as compared to games like RDR2 and CP2077, both of which run at higher settings, look far better and get far higher FPS for us. As well as…

You make it painfully obvious that you have no idea how framerate works.

So - just bear with me now - what if I told you you could actually tell when your framerate drops without actually having to monitor the exact number? What if I also told you that it can be highly distracting when that happens?

I feel like needing 120 fps is ridiculous, personally (ditto for needing ultra high…

(Admittedly, somewhat cynical) translation: I got my bag, and the longer this remains available for purchase, the more liable I am for the obvious and blatant copyright infringement the game made its fortune on.

Which, to be clear, I don’t really begrudge. I doubt this dude thought this game would ever have the…

And as far as jetpacks go, even on low gravity planets they are still only as fast as running anyway.

“Todd Howard says it’s all about making planet exploration an “experience.”

Got about 55 hours in now. The main ‘experience’ I have walking towards unexplored waypoints on planets is boredom and annoyance as I sometimes need to wait for my stamina/oxygen to replenish before I can sprint again. And as far as jetpacks…

Let’s see...Tribes managed to have jet packs over 20 years ago. No Man’s Sky has jet packs and vehicles.

Harder to play and also just significantly less joyful. Menuing is not exploration. There is no “ooh whats that over there” impulse except when you’re literally within cities. Something is either placed directly on your lap, or you have to just pick a location from a menu and hope there might be something interesting…

“So we end up where we are with Starfield, a game that visually looks like something from this era, but still plays and operates like a game from 2005"

I’m fine with the same engine and gameplay loop, but they made Starfield harder to play, navigate, and understand compared to their previous games. I was fine playing another Bethesda game, in space, that’s what I wanted and expected, but trying to remember where every shop is, where the trader posts are, and where…