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Woo. Chud souls.
Also figures the only way they could get on the keighelys was to pay for it.
To elaborate a bit. Even ignoring the chud anti-transphobe shit the studio actively courted in the hopes of making asmongold-senpai love them (it failed?), it is just a really bad Souls game.
The concept of the lantern to shift dimensions is REALLY cool. In practice? it just means that you go as far as you can in one realm, shift, and go as far as you can in the next. There is no real sense of inter-connectivity or navigability because the coherence between the shifted realms is so poor. You just get a new bonfire right before the boss.
The idea of tying item descriptions to ability scores SEEMS interesting… except that it mostly means you can’t plan ahead because you genuinely have no idea what a skill does without going to the wiki. So… it defeats the purpose entirely and just penalizes those who try to actually play the game.
And the combat balance is also real questionable. If you pick a “meta” weapon, you shred. Otherwise you are doing constant chip damage. Which, ironically, is a problem Lords of the Fallen 1 had… on new game plus. Not new game.
All this game had going for it was that they wanted to glaze the chuds.
“We are responsible for what we say and what we do, not the interpretation others do out of them.”
Yeah, fuck off with that Steven Universe bullshit. It is fun to tell kids to do what is true to them and to not care about what anyone else says. Until they are an adult who thinks dressing up like a school shooter and making “I identify as an attack helicopter” ‘jokes’ is fun.
Intent is excuses and apologies. Actions are… actions. And if someone’s take is that they totally get why sucker punch bent over backwards to protect chuds (at the expense of labor) and that they clearly don’t give a shit about the massive waves of abuse thrown at a voice actress? I’mma gonna assume they are a chud. And, because I believe in judging people by their actions, I 'mma gonna call them a chud.
Does that mean they are a chud? Of course not. There is a LOT of room to apologize and make it clear they are actually an ally. A half-assed “no, I didn’t do that” ain’t it.
And… if you aren’t an ally, you are an enemy. And a large part of allyship is doing what you can, no matter how small, to make people feel Seen and welcome. And when you have moderators siding with the people who don’t really give a shit what kinds of abuse a genderfluid actress received for daring to exist while making DAMNED sure we understand why the company that left them out to dry is gonna protect the chuds?
So, on that note: Decide where you stand. But, by all indications, you might as well ban me now because I’m going to continue to call out chuds. And I’d hate for that to get in the way of the hype train and posting daily blog posts.
I forget a lot of 3. But 1 and 2 didn’t really do mission rankings along those lines and were generally built around having to push through multiple rooms and hallways. Whereas 4(a) heavily emphasized wide open spaces and rushing to get those objectives.
6 was a MUCH better balance where the S rank actually often required a certain number of kills and many missions had ways to justify the ammo expenditure so that it wasn’t just “get a karasawa and then human plus”.
I always preferred the chonky bois of AC1/2, but 4/4a did indeed feel REAL damned good.
My main issue is that everything about the mission structure encouraged just rushing the objective and DPSing it down. Which is fun sometimes but not when it is EVERY mission.
Its also a big reason I genuinely loved Daemon Ex Machina (the first one, at least). You had the blitzes and the arena missions but you also had some truly amazing slogs where you are just fighting nigh endless waves of MTs and are grabbing whatever gun you can off the ground to down a few more enemies.
It was literally a joke about wondering if the killer would be named “mario”. It was far tamer than what many of the chuds have said.
It was sheer and utter cowardice and abandoning the people who actually make the games that got them there. And when even god damned paramount reversed course with kimmel, the head of Sucker Punch doubled down on standing by their actions.
As for Ishii: “Social media was being social media” sums up how much you care on that front.
And THIS is why GTA6 will sell like hotcakes no matter what happens.
Part of me thinks that this is going to be the one where no one fucking gives a shit because of all the BS that R* have been doing since GTA5,
Zero chance.
Sucker Punch fired one of their senior devs for a mario and luigi joke when kirk got got. EVERYONE was angry, the studio heads came out to say they stand by their decision, and plenty of people were keyed in to the hell that Erika Ishii has had to put up with on social media for daring to portray a female character in a video game.
Ghost of Yotei comes out. Metacritic of 86 and just about every outlet had to cover it and talk about how much they love it. A few of the more independent outlets stood true but… there are just so few video games that come out in a given year that you can’t possibly dare to deprive yourself of something over things like workers rights or politics. I mean, what else could you possibly play in September of 2025!!!
More or less all companies (that are legally allowed to (and some that aren’t)) send anti-union propaganda. Whether it is outright villification or just “We are your friends. Talk to us. If you form a union it is you saying we failed”. That is kind of just the nature of the game.
What matters is what happens when the workforce decides to unionize anyway. You can either respect it or do everything you can to slaughter your workforce.
Sleeping Dogs (aka “Sleepy Dogs”) is basically GTA in Hong Kong but inspired by HK crime dramas rather than tarantino stealing his ideas from them. And it was REALLY good and shockingly holds up (did another run late last year). Arkham Batman style combat on foot but you also have guns and cars (with Total Overdose style shenanigans to leap from car to car). Technically a sequel to True Crime LA but nobody cares about that.
Also… Emma Stone is in it for reasons nobody understands. And it is still unclear if she actually knows she was in it either.
But it also highlights the issue. Taking GTA and moving it to another country would, by and large, lose the purpose of the game. Modern day Rockstar is very much an American company and all of their points of reference are American cinema (or what few foreign films take off here). That was very noticeable any time Nico began referring to “the old country”. To transplant that to Russia or Thailand would just be an American movie set in Russia or Thailand.
Whereas… if you enjoy HK crime dramas than you will LOVE Sleepy Dogs because it 100% understood the assignment. United Front clearly worshipped the movies and it very much showed… while also making sure Wei Shen had spent most of his life in the US to account for any weirdness there.
And if you’ve ever spent time in Hong Kong? Okay, it isn’t quite as good as RGG and Kabukicho or Yokohama. But you very much get all the right vibes in a way that the GTAs often fail at with LA and NYC. You aren’t going to be able to navigate Wan Chai just because you beat up some fools there (unlike how you can 100% navigate Kabukicho after any modern Yakuza…) but you are going to feel “at home” on the streets in either form.
Exactly, as I don’t expect QA done by something that can’t think or feel to know what actually needs to be fixed
That is a very small part of QA’s responsibility. Mostly it is about testing and identifying bugs that get triaged by management. The person running the tests is NOT responsible for deciding what can and can’t ship.
And, in that regard… this is actually a REALLY good use of “AI” (not so much generative). Imagine something like the old “A star algorithm plays mario” where it is about finding different paths to accomplish the same goal (e.g. a quest) and immediately having a lot of exactly what steps led to the anomaly for the purposes of building a reproducer.
Which actually DOES feel like a really good use case… at the cost of massive computational costs (so… “AI”).
That said: it also has all of the usual labor implications. But from a purely technical “make the best games” standpoint? Managers overseeing a rack that is running through the games 24/7 for bugs that they can then review and prioritize seems like a REALLY good move.
Yeah. I’ve never worked anywhere that the staff didn’t have side channels for socializing out of work that inevitably ended up getting kinda borderline with some discussions. It’s against company policy and it is a problem but it is mostly ignored because good employees know where to draw the line and the orgs that own those third party chats tend to not be competitors.
And it leaves people open to stuff like this. “Well, you probably talked about your work schedule or compensation which we consider Office Use Only so you violated corporate policy and are eligible to be fired”
As for “Well, they should have used matrix or signal!”: Maybe. But if you’ve ever tried to convince a friend group to install another client then you know that is a much bigger struggle than convincing people to engage in collective bargaining.
But also? While it is possible rockstar/take2 just guessed, the more likely outcome is that someone narced. At which point it doesn’t actually matter if everyone was on Discord or Matrix or Signal or whatever.
Yeah. I never fucked with EU but I am a huge CK sicko and… I have a LOT of problems with Paradox as a publisher but they’ve really been pushing their internal/flagship studios to focus on onboarding and approachability for these games.
Was really surprised to see that the new East Asia DLC for CK3 actually added a new tutorial sequence/character. Haven’t sat down yet to see if it is focused on the Mandate of Heaven or if it is just for people who want to get back in and are sick and freaking tired of Petty King Murchad.
Big enough that I lose interest or notice the padding.
A lot of it boils down to execution. The more urban areas of a Sleeping Dogs or the TW3 map with the Bloody Baron (not the viking map) feel geuinely massive enough though both are on the smaller end. Whereas something like GTA5’s San Andreas actively pissed me off because so much of the game was just driving to and from set pieces on the interstate.
That said: I actively don’t care about completion unless I really love the game. So if something was 40000km^2… I might never leave the two square kilomters the actual game takes place in and not care about the rest.
As for Just Cause 2 and 3? Neither felt overly large but both were broken down into regions and I mostly just played those whenever I felt like over the course of a month or two. So it really was closer to “levels” than anything else.
Contrast that with a Far Cry 2 which is downright tiny and… I’ll never have the patience to drive past even one outpost ever again.
If you actually look at the MMO/MMO-adjacent landscape… most of the ones that are still alive are over a decade old with some legally allowed to drink.
- Runescape: 2001
- WoW: 2004
- LOTRO: 2007
- Star Wars TOR: 2011
- Guild Wars 2: 2012
- Final Fantasy MMO (that people actually liked): 2013
- Old School Runescape: 2013
- Elder Scrolls Online (about that…): 2014
And a lot of that has to do with people increasingly using MMOs as “comfort games” which… work best for the oldies. And most of the money going into game dev focused more on annual games and then live service games where you still spend about the same amount of money per year but feel better because it isn’t a monthly subscription. Instead of spending 10-15 bucks a month you spend 30-50 bucks every other month for the battle pass or the new expansion or the Officer D.Va skin and so forth. TOTALLY different.
So most of the newer MMO-ass MMOs are either doomed from the start for being overly niche or take a more Korean or Gacha oriented balance and monetization scheme where… they are competing against the juggernauts that are also closer to a decade old than not.
Haven’t used bazzite, but there is an App Store you can get all of the apps anyone would need.
Its one of the quirks of a lot of the atomic distros. Because they are specifically built around the idea of having a specific set of packages at a specific range of versions for every rev of the distro itself… adding more packages is kind of a clusterfuck.
For flatpaks (and I think appimages too?), it is seamless. For anything else you are googling the commands to add packages as “layers” and so forth
And, to be fair to Bazzite (which I use for my HTPC and love it on there), I have had zero issues with actual gaming. Steam out of the box and Heroic is one flatpak away. But holy shit was adding iperf3 to test some network infrastructure tweaks a Thing.
Its why I personally recommend to friends to just raw dog Fedora rather than use one of the atomic distros. Atomic distros make a lot of sense for deployed machines but for anything someone is going to use as “their” computer? Just learn to not type sudo before every command you run… and maybe get a jetkvm so your tech savvy friend can fix your computer after an nvidia driver update.
Bazzite is great, but it still has the failure(maybe it’s not failure to you and me, but the average gamer) is that most stuff isn’t just, download .exe, run that .exe there are loops and frameworks that need to be installed through command line
Strong disagree on “most”
For the vast majority of users? Everything they need is in Steam and MAYBE Heroic, which is the same as on Windows.
In terms of non-gaming? I… have very strong Thoughts on atomic distros and the hoops Bazzite et al make you jump through with regard to layering and the like, but they are in Discover and the like. So “app store” experience.
I personally don’t think Bazzite is a good desktop OS (but I love it for my HTPC). But any of the user friendly distros (e.g. Fedora, Mint, and Ubuntu) should be almost zero command line usage unless you have a reason to use it.
Up until the big UI/UX update a few years back, the vast majority of people had never heard about Dwarf Fortress outside of the sickos and the people who remember when LPs were forum/blog posts.
Unreal World has been in that same category where the people who play it love it and the rest vaguely recall their favorite youtubers maybe trying it out once.
Yeah… that is a pretty shit article?
Describing Bilibili as “a social media company” is like describing Google as “a search engine” or Microsoft as “the people what make the calculator app”.
Duckov seems solid from what I have seen. It also has the full might of Chinese Youtube behind it and has been doing sponsorships with basically any influencer who will take the money. Its as simple as that.
Yeah.
I can’t speak to Mexico. But, at least in the US, video games very much have been a pipeline for both rehabilitation of the military’s image and direct recruitment. It is what leads to generations that believe tier ninety special force operators are the greatest people ever which both provides “They know what they are doing and have their reasons” and “I want to be one of those”
I am not aware of any cartel friendly games (unless you REALLY disliked Fifty Cent, I guess?) but I wouldn’t immediately rule this out IF it is part of a wider media push.
Violent video games do not make you violent. But “cool guys doing cool shit” makes people want to “do cool shit”. There is a reason (para)militaries around the world tend to cooperate with, and outright fund, so much media that glazes them. Hell, military/spy porn is sometimes so good that it makes you ALMOST stop making jokes about how Sullivan Stapleton should play Hank Hill in a live action KOTH (that man wishes he had Hank Hill’s ass).
As long as you run the proprietary nvidia drivers, performance is more or less noise for a given driver version. There IS some annoyance with slower releases for drivers to Linux but… nvidia has had much bigger problems with new driver releases over the past year.
The big issue is if you run the open source community drivers. And… if you are spending leather jacket money and then using low performance drivers… you are an idiot. Because Mistah J already has the metrics and money he wants and doesn’t care if you actually use your card after buying it.
Those are a related but still “acceptable” situation where they are contractors who are generally over leveraged to the point that a single missed deal is enough to kill them. Which is definitely not helped by (allegedly?) being told the contract is for 3 scenes, it getting bumped up to 5, and them not even getting the final versions of the costumes until a week before it needs to be turned in. And then getting told they can either deal with it or never work for totally not Marvel ever again.
Contract for, let’s say Ant Man 3, is done but they are already in the hole because of the resources they spent on that and having to turn down other movies and then they get told they won’t be getting the contract for Dr Strange 2 and to go fuck themselves. And, of course, the entire internet (especially the generative ai loving chuds at corridor digital) shit on their work because it is horrible and “looks like someone made it in an afternoon” which… they kind of did because they weren’t even allowed to know who the villain in that sequence was until a month before it was due.
Whereas what we are seeing more of, this year in particular, is effectively entire departments getting spun up for a project and then everyone laid off when it is done. Has cost and severance implications but it is how corporations are getting the kind of senior staff who don’t want the instability of contract work… more or less on contract work. Which is why this is still a big news story.
Nowhere near it.
The “corporate roles” are likely a case of downsizing after building out infrastructure and policies/protocols. A LOT of companies are doing it these days. They staffed up for a project, finished (or pivoted) the project, and now have full time staff that they don’t actually need. And rather than work on new efforts they just look for an excuse to purge the because they know they can rehire for the next big push. Ironically, that is a model that had a LOT of use in video games in the days before DLC.
And the warehouse jobs (what this is to “distract” from) are about attempts at automation. Which… okay, it is really hard to do worse than the grossly incompetent, and yet STILL horrifically underpaid, staff they already have so that will probably actually be a net positive to consumers. Which will, in turn, result in rapidly hiring back that staff when the warehouses all collapse because they got an extra shipment of SD cards and had nowhere to store them.
Aside from the windows and armory crate bullshit (both of which go away if you install bazzite…), the ROG allies are actually pretty good hardware for their price.
Because… you aren’t driving 4k@60 for under a thousand bucks. And the ROG Ally X whatever is very comparable to laptops with similar hardware. And while I do not at all think you need that power in a handheld, people are going to notice it when it gets compared to a PS5 pro or a PS6. Which it will.
Let Sony launch the PS6 at 1k or higher. Let Microsoft somehow get the xbox series 2 out at 2k because they are pulling a The Producers or whatever. And if there is demand? Premium ass Steam Box. If there is not? MAYBE do a more premium 500-800 USD NUC. And if people REALLY love the ASUS Bumfuck ROG Seventy Seven Y Y Z or whatever? Give ASUS 20 bucks to sell a shit ton with SteamOS installed by default.
The key difference is that Valve were trying to build a market with the Steam Boxes. SteamOS is already demonstrably viable for “console” gaming and the consoles are going to be selling bigass PCs in 2027 already. Let them take the risk and then let Valve swoop in.
Which… is kinda what they did with the Steam Deck. GDP and Aya Neo put in the work to make handheld form factor laptops at semi-reasonable prices. Valve rolled up and wrecked their shit with the Steam Deck.
All signs are that we are getting the new VR headset first.
And it is probably in Valve’s best interest to let other people drive the HTPC consoles. They are not going to be cheap since “1024 at 40 FPS” doesn’t scale all that well to a 50 inch 4k display. So let other integrators deal with that. Just release the steam controller 2 already.
And I’ll say that you can get a really nice AMD NUC HTPC for under 500 bucks that can handle “steam deck games” on a TV. And I THINK I have a way to get Display Port -> HDMI 2.1 that I need to sit down and test.
I want to say that is one of the last bosses of the DLC “narratively”?
But yeah. From love stuff like that. Gargoyles and Maneater in Dark 1 and Demon. The gargoyle gauntlet in Dark 2. The idea being that it is meant to pressure you but is really just a thinly veiled DPS gate.
I forget if the tree fuckers are one at a time or if they can Four Kings to overwhelm you, but the idea is that you are going to take damage but that is what your estus is for. The idea being that you can spike DPS to minimize the damage you take per health bar. And then you cry when you realize you decided to do that on NG+ where you can no longer rush them.
The one which is like four bosses in a row?
Get more scadutree fragments to increase your DPS and look into weapon arts that drop a DOT blob on the field (e.g. a magma puddle) since those are meant to hurt enemies that walk past and do ridiculous damage on the biggies what barely move.
And if your build supports if (or you want to go hang out with mommy), Great Stars is RIDICULOUSLY good for the DLC due to healing per hit. And the Prayerful Strike weapon art is more or less cheating in the DLC because of a mix of strong healing and holy being one of the few elements DLC bosses tend to at least not be strong against.
Yes. I have a Steam Deck and an HTPC running bazzite. I am aware of what it does. I like what it does.
But what you are now describing is just defaulting all windows to launch in fullscreen. The rest is just the natural stack and focusing. if I double click Warframe in desktop and don’t immediately go off to do other stuff while it launches, it defaults to the launcher in focus. Just like if I launch it in big picture mode it defaults to the launcher in focus.
And you continue to assume that the asus xbox deck is the new xbox. Whereas this lines up with what MS have been saying since the last time they pivoted their entire division a few months back: the next xbox is what is going to do this and it is going to be heavily dependent on windows gaming mode. Which isn’t out yet.
That isn’t the point.
I was more just pointing out that most (all?) of what you said is… not anything special. In fact, the big advantage seems to just be that SteamOS closes your windows for you rather than expecting you to care about going through your systray to see if you actually need banzai buddy running while you play WoW.
If you shut off most of your other apps (like fucking discord) you don’t have the popups from that.
As for OS level shenanigans? Steam Big Picture alone can’t stop the mess that is KDE (Wayland?) whinging that steam input looks like a remote desktop session as far as inputs are concerned (although I finally found the setting for that after like 55 hours of Pillars 1). SteamOS/Bazzite “solve” that by having a ridiculously stripped down mode… which is not dissimilar from what MS is arguing as their “gaming mode” that will probably still not work but is conceivably that.
To be clear. Fuck ASUS. Their ROG Armory Crate shit is god damned malware.
But for a “new xbox” that is the “PC with gaming mode” that MS have been alluding to over the past few months? That is effectively what Valve are doing with SteamOS (and same with the Bazzite devs).
it intercepts how popups and game windows are drawn to the screen so that you never lose focus of the game window
Huh? That is kind of just how window managers work. The game launches so it is on top. It may or may not be exclusive fullscreen these days. The game spawns up another window as part of a social media thing or because you typed /wiki jennah's feet and then that is on top until you close it. That is, mostly, OS agnostic these days.
It doesn’t force you to get out a keyboard or use the touch screen to enter a login password or PIN
Big Picture 100% makes you do that if there is a text input. You can choose to use your controller to navigate the keyboard and… that is a love it or hate it. From a quick google, the asus equivalent (as of 2 years ago) is that you can switch your input to desktop mode to use the joysticks as a mouse. And while that is a step down from automagically “just working”… the fact that I know that it is steam+square kinda sums up just how automagic it is with Big Picture.
My understanding, heavily tainted by Dan Ryckert’s stupidity, is that the big problem the xbox decks have is the OS login window. Yes, Microsoft need to get off their fucking asses and make that work consistently. But Valve mostly bypasses that by having a shitty pin login. That is a “I left my SteamOS laptop on my bed and someone from a dorm down the hallway stole all my money” story away from being a debacle.
Yeah. People very much forget how horrible most online multiplayer infrastructure was back in the early 2000s. Voice chat was a case where you used teamspeak/ventrillo for atrocious quality audio that optimally depended on using an actual phone line in conjunction or it just never worked. Messaging was basically xfire or AIM. And servers were generally listen servers that someone in your clan left running in the background when they forgot about it.
Live provided a messaging system people would actually use and tapped into MS infrastructure for voice chat that actually worked… which was great for playing with your friends and learning all new slurs when you had it on in a pub. Game servers themselves were still generally all listen servers but that changed over time.
These days? Discord has a LOT of problems but it actually works and is a much more universal platform. Server hosting infrastructure is such that there isn’t really a point in paying the platform for it. And EVERYTHING needs to be social media for people to not whinge so having a messaging system loses its value.
But also… have any of the consoles really pushed the online infrastructure as why you pay for premium? Okay, Nintendo have but they REALLY shouldn’t considering what they are offering. It is all about the IGC and has been since Sony got involved as part of the PSN hack.
It is just deeply stupid. These were GenX and Millennial games.
I care less for “boomer CRPG” (mostly I just laugh because it isn’t like the genre has evolved significantly since Baldurs Gate. Mostly just polish and folding in more TTRPG mechanics) than I do for “boomer shooters”. Mostly because boomers were the ones trying to get all violent video games, and especially games like DOOM, banned.
Millennials increasingly feel like a forgotten generation that increasingly catches all the hell that boomers and genx have unleashed upon the world (and, in fairness, people don’t often realize that genx aren’t millennials), but whatever. Mostly it is just really stupid and… we can do so much better.
Like… Demon Souls is 16 years old. Let’s start calling Soulsborne games “boomer bonfires”. I mean, it is old, right?
I would argue it is more similar to the last few bubbles for this same kind of tech.
A decade or so the big deal was computer vision (think “recognize stuff through the power of AI”). Massive promises were made, a LOT of people specialized in glorified signal processing, and then it mostly faded away when it didn’t live up to the hype.
Except… a significant percentage of the smart home industry is all about paying money to have your video feeds analyzed for people. Same with image hosting services and so forth. Hell, youtube runs on it for DMCA purposes.
And we’re going to see the same thing with “AI” yet again. People will realize chatgpt isn’t going to suddenly manifest itself as Stana Katic and suck you off while telling you you are ten times the man Malcolm Reynolds ever was. But it really does do a lot of “admin work” and is one of the best tools out there for text based pre and post processing of human readable data.
It really wouldn’t.
The general “gold standard” for game AI uses (My background is Unreal so) pathnodes. Little blips that indicate where an NPC should be and that get built into a graph. That graph represents the paths NPCs can take. You add special pathnodes to indicate an interactives and weight the paths to prioritize routes. So imagine if you had the heaviest weight pathnodes on the streets of a town, lower weight nodes for alleyways, and very low weight nodes for a path through a swamp in case of emergency.
Now realize that many textures and assets have those baked in these days. That road texture? That is a path with “road” weight.
What benefit would AI provide for that? None. Because you would just be computing this “live” rather than offline.
As for interactives ? Again, you can bake that into the asset itself. That apple tree has an interaction to check if there is an apple and, if you are hungry, eat it.
Again, why take that online if you don’t have to?
Then you have the idea of NPC schedules. In theory, you can give each NPC a job and they can find food and blah blah blah blah. We already did that. It was called The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. At the best of times, it was indistinguishable from just giving an NPC a schedule corresponding to a work day. The rest of the time, it was complete stupidity as people would walk five blocks for an apple. and they mostly forgot/overwrote their actual jobs (outside of the ones who were hardcoded… which were most of them).
This is one of those “holy grail” ideas that people think of to sell the idea. But you invariably end up with the Star Citizen bar tender where mostly it just breaks and the interactions people expect are the same ones we have been dealing with for decades. Asking Sam Malone for some weed is funny but it isn’t anything you are going to do while playing a game (outside of youtube content). You roll up, buy a drink, ask for some info, and leave.
As for dialogue trees? Need I remind everyone of Darth Vader’s penchant for slurs? Because that is what you get.
Mostly this is like a LOT of applications for AI. People want to replace humans. They end up making something MUCH more fragile than what those humans have been making for decades and then need to allocate resources to update the prompts when a new model drops and so forth.
Versus just continuing to bake pathnodes into a road texture and setting a property on that vacuum cleaner asset and so forth.
Having played the original (and most Obsidian games), I can only partially comment (also: Support BDS, fuck Microsoft, Obsidian are probably dead either way regardless of sales…):
I strongly disagree with that. I think a much better statement is that Obsidian… generally doesn’t super care about the overall plot outside of a few major beats (Pillars of Eternity 1 being their really big exception and it arguably being their greatest work as a result).
They instead care about the moment to moment narrative. They want you to CARE about what is happening in the now. Because the main quest? That is mostly a quick journey. What matters is the people and scenarios you meet along the way. And a huge part of that is writing those chains of quests in a way that it feels like your actions Matter.
And when it works? It fucking WORKS. You really feel like you are part of a living and breathing world in a way that few studios can even hope to manage. Like, yes, the world is ending, but life still moves on and you become deeply invested in this family that refuses to give up and die… even though they probably will. It is very reminiscent of how RGG does the Yakuza/LAD games.
And… like the LADs… it also can mean that you just don’t actually care about what the giant bad vibes tree is actually going to do. But, once you have finished up all the side quests you kind of just don’t care? RGG tends to avert that by making the last hour or two just constant cutscenes, epic fights, and shirts getting ripped off. Obsidian prefer to go much more introspective and… if you vibe with that then it works. If you don’t, it doesn’t.
Contrast that with (classic) Bioware (and modern day Larian) where you have that same fork/join model of story telling but they make it a point to constantly shoehorn in references to the main plot into every interaction to the point it is a bigger surprise if the woman who stole that cake wasn’t secretly the adjutant of the big bad’s top general.
And, just for funsies, Owlcat tend to be a lot more like Obsidian in their approach but also are generally much better at tying in enough of those side beats to the main quest (or at least a party member) that it still holds together.
But yeah. That is a huge chunk of why so many people never finished Outer Worlds 1. They did the three or four planets to get access to the imperial capital world and… were done by then because they had effectively experienced two or three REALLY solid mini stories/arcs and didn’t see much point in moving on.
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Contraband was semi-recently cancelled by microsoft. I have no idea how the hell Nordisk Film ended up owning Avalanche, but I wouldn’t be shocked if they were planning to sell off or shutter the studio entirely.
So removing the fraction of a penny that Denuvo Corp get per Just Cause 3 sale probably IS worth it while you are calling security ahead of the mass layoffs.