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.

I mean i enjoyed palworld quite a lot. Id consider it a good game. Generally player counts come from either enjoyable gameplay or brain manipulation tactics like dailies/FOMO - palworld doesnt really have the latter from what I see. It checks lots of boxes for enjoyable gameplay - rpg elements, open world with exploration. meaningful collection, creativity options via base building, and some level of tactics/strategy in teambuilding and combat.

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.

They piggybacked off the success of dos2 which was a better game anyways. Sure, theyll lose the dnd fans that play solely for the familiar IP, but theyve gained enough name recognition to be massively successful on their own. Just keep making good games like From Soft & that’s all they need.

Add farming and base building and I’m in.

It is missing too much to call it like factorio or even rimworld as you cant even set task priority or do much optimization, but it has the foundation and could certainly go that route with some major ai improvements.

It did what ark failed to do for years and polished the shit off

““no one anticipated” Baldur’s Gate 3’s success.”

Maybe ask literally anyone who played DOS2 or DnD?

Baldur’s gate, Elden ring, Factorio, Stardew valley, Terraria, Subnautica, BotW, Hollow Knight, Project Zomboid, Kenshi, Rimworld, Risk of Rain, Ori, RDR2, Slay the Spire, Valheim.

Plenty of amazing games. If literally none of them are enjoyable, you may have depression.

It’s a massive mod that expands the base game to let you explore other planets/galaxies with new resources and a massive tech tree. Launching a rocket from the base game is essentially the beginning of the mod.

So you beat space exploration, right?

…right?

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.

Darkwood is terrifying especially with perma death on. Less emphasis on jump scares, more on terrifying environments and suspense.

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