The incredible map with deep oceans and rewarding exploration are what made it popular. I cant think of another game that makes you WANT to be in the water. Hard to replicate that, but turning the ocean into a puddle and making half the game land-based certainly didnt help.

Former soviet union and the dam was blown up by russia…

Probably not a good idea to use russia as your example when youre trying to make nuclear look like the better option…

This looks much more egregious than palworld/pokemon. Palword has very distinct gameplay from pokemon and adds many features and gameplay elements that nintendo has never done. It’s much more similar to Ark if anything in terms of gameplay. The only thing it takes from pokemon is the fact that it’s a creature collector game and a couple of the pals look like they were generated by ai trained on a database of creatures from other games, but even that isnt conclusive. It definitely takes inspiration from Zelda, but again thats a few gameplay elements, not the whole game.

Most of the games id be willing to pay $60 for are indie games that are <$20.

Hollow knight comes to mind. Diablo does not.

Gamers can understand this. Casinos understand this. But how do you articulate the difference to a court or actually legislate against it? FOMO is usually used in a predatory way, like with daily rewards. Paid random lootboxes are definitely predatory, but other rng systems can be genuinely fun. Not an easy problem to solve without stepping on toes.

Dailies are probably something that could be solved with targetted legislation. Harmful to player mental health just to boost stats for investors. Some games need to limit progression, but there are loads of ways to do so other than dailies.

Add farming and base building and I’m in.

and literally any other developer

Ever hear of FromSoft?

Its easy to miss entire zones and dozens of bosses in a playthrough. You can kill an npc or make a dialogue choice and miss their entire questline in Elden Ring/dark souls. They intentionally hide these things so you could never even know you’re missing huge chunks of content.

Go ahead and spend $50 to form your own opinion. Be sure to leave a review!

“Please do the needful” - Idk what you need to do but pls fix

This is true even today. Ads are shady af and even the top link on Google is often a literal scam/virus. Ie for years if you looked up the most popular game client for runescape - runelite - the very first link was a fake version that stole your login info. They paid Google and Google said ‘not my problem’. Not to even mention ads on other sites like Facebook. Even in the cases where an ad isnt a blatant scam or virus, ads are inherently dishonest by design and there is no consequence for using them to lie about your product.

Neuroscience, not yet. Data science absolutely is though.

From Soft is the light in the darkness.

Yeah I mean I thought divinity combat was fun. I could make massive plays to freeze everyone, create all sorts of elemental clouds and surfaces, group enemies up with teleports, etc. Some combos were definitely OP but that’s what makes it fun + you could ramp up difficulty with mods and such. You could also cast spells for fun or teleport just to get around the map without having to long rest. Baldur’s gate is much slower paced and playing with the elements like that seems way less viable.

Divinity 2 has better combat than bg3

But portals can create energy. Put one above the other face to face and drop an object into the bottom one, it now has infinite potential energy.