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I found the combat frustratingly bland, and Hello Games don’t seem interested in improving it. The first time I played was several years after release, and I was surprised to learn the only two enemy encounters that were at all fun or interesting (the sentinel mech and capital ships) were only recently added. That was years ago, and I don’t think they’ve added any new major enemies since. Last I checked there were less than twenty enemy types in the entire galaxy and most are braindead “approach and shoot at the player until you die” types.
The on-foot weapons also feel anemic and sluggish - even your heavy weapons feel like shooting someone with a Nerf gun while whispering pew pew under your breath until they explode, and your actions will often be delayed waiting for an animation to complete (unstowing your weapon every few seconds being the main offender). Ship weapons are better by virtue of not having animations and being the same as every space game ever.
I hope Light No Fire has more enemy variety and a better-designed combat loop.
IIRC you can get them through the derelict freighter missions (which take forever and are kind of boring after the first one), or by blasting NPC freighters if you don’t care about reputation.
For the latter I’ve heard (but wasn’t willing to try myself to confirm) that you can just shoot the external cargo modules off of friendly freighters without them becoming mad and summoning sentinels.
Re: 3, unfortunately, pirating the game won’t let you avoid supporting transphobic lunatics. The person who cracked the game is even worse than Rowling - as in, “makes Rowling look like a paragon of progressiveness in comparison” worse - and uses the download numbers for her cracks (and the fact she’s usually the only one willing to crack Denuvo) to justify asking for donations.
They announced a new one a few years ago alongside the Legendary Edition remaster of the original trilogy, but I don’t think we’ve heard anything about it since the announcement teaser.
He’s also using the funds to live out his dream of being a movie producer, something he desires as much (if not more than) being a game developer, with the Squadron spinoff mainly being an excuse to hire big-name actors he likes to deliver his script.
Not that that’s a bad thing, but he hasn’t really changed much over his decades-long career, flaws included.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The original PlayStation release is the only one that has the terrible (in a good way) translation and voiceover work. It also holds up perfectly - I only played it for the first time a few years ago, and it’s easily my favorite Metroidvania. Decades after it came out, it still remains the king of the genre that partly bears its name.
It’s playable solo (and only solo in the current beta branch), but the devs have been nerfing that playstyle for years in the name of multiplayer balance. There are artificial limits on what one player can learn and do, with massive penalties to anything you didn’t start the game with. They include those nerfs in single player because they intend for NPCs to pick up the slack after they’re introduced.
(Note: NPCs have been a promised upcoming feature “after the next set of changes” for nearly fifteen years at this point.)
Fortunately they include settings to undo the learning speed nerfs, and hopefully will add more to make the upcoming crafting rework less of a pain for solo players. The litany of tweaks available at world creation is one of my favorite things about Project Zomboid, right after all the stellar business name puns.
That’s not a bad description, though Stationeers is even more hardcore than Vintage Story. It’s ridiculously complex, to the point you need basic mastery of several different systems just to survive the opening of the game. I’m talking building complete and fully-modeled atmospherics and electrical grids from scratch, with a single block in the wrong configuration being potentially run-ending (I’ve plugged my oxygen tanks into an improperly set up system and lost my entire air supply more than once). It’s incredibly rewarding after you do figure it all out, though.
It’s also the one survival game I can think of where a single minor mistake remains crippling even tens of hours into a playthrough. Your only insurance against disaster is whatever redundancy you built into your systems. It truly nails how monumental a task surviving on other planets would be.
This feels unnecessary and overblown. From what I’ve heard, the exploit in question requires a local file and only operates at the privilege level of the game itself, so you’re unlikely to encounter it unless you’re adding files to your game install.
So you’re vulnerable if you install malicious mods, in other words. Which, considering Unity mods are done via DLL injection, is already the case even without this exploit.
How hard was it to maintain your sanity while working on this? Whenever InfernoPlus goes into detail on working with Halo’s content creation tools, it sounds like the most painful jury-rigged mess imaginable.
Edit: misread your post, thought you were the creator.
As an aside, if you want to try a fun heist game without needing to worry about letting down any teammates, I highly recommend checking out Heat Signature.
It’s single-player and is a 2D, top-down heist game where you sneak aboard space ships to complete objectives like assassinating a crew member, stealing something valuable, hijacking the entire ship, etc.
It looks simple, but things get crazy fast. One minute you’re sneaking behind guards and knocking them out with a wrench, the next you’re teleporting into a locked cabin, shooting out the glass so the explosive decompression blows you and your target into space, then teleporting back to your original location (because you used a recall teleporter that does so automatically after a few seconds) while they slowly asphyxiate, before hacking the nearby turrets to shoot down any investigating guards while you sprint back to your shuttle and escape.
And when 64-bit support first came to Windows, Microsoft artificially limited the amount of RAM you could use unless you shelled out for the much more expensive editions. On Vista you were arbitrarily limited to 8 gigs with the basic edition, 16 with premium, and even the business editions had a limit of 128 gigs, a tiny fraction of the addressable space under a 64 bit architecture.
Even now there’s a limit, though it’s insanely high (over a terabyte) and you’re unlikely to ever see it unless you’re running a server on Windows instead of Windows Server (still limited, but in the dozens of terabytes) or Linux (which has a “limit” in the petabytes).
That’s just the inherent cost of going with general purpose engines. They’ll always perform worse than specialized tech, but modern games are so complicated that custom engines aren’t really feasible anymore.
Unreal is the king of bloat. Rather than “general purpose” they strove for “all purpose” - Unreal Engine tries to do literally everything out of the box with as many bells and whistles attached as possible. The result is that Unreal Engine games require tons of optimization to run well, and even the editor itself consumes tens of gigabytes and runs like crap.
Unity is simply a mess of poor decisions and technical debt. Their devs seem to reinvent a crucial development pipeline every few years, give up halfway, then leave both options exposed and expect developers to just automatically know the pitfalls of each. Combined with horrific mismanagement and hostile revenue-seeking, Unity has lost a ton of goodwill over the past few years. It’s a major fall from grace for what was once the undisputed king of Indie dev engines.
Godot is tiny, decently performant, and great for simple games, but it’s very bare-bones and expects developers to implement their own systems for anything beyond basic rendering, physics, and netcode. Additionally, the core developers have a reputation for being incredibly resistant to making major changes even when a battle-tested pull request for a frequently requested feature is available. Still my personal pick though.
The DS with a flashcart was nearly perfect. It was incredibly pocket-friendly due to the rectangular shape, the screen was protected from scratches while folded so you didn’t need a case, and it could emulate every console up to the N64 as well as every Nintendo handheld (obviously). I was upset when my cart finally died - no other handheld emulator I’ve found is as convenient.
Meanwhile if you’re part of Steam’s partner program you know that Valve are constantly improving things on the backhand for devs and publishers. Just about the only “developer-friendly” thing Epic does that Steam doesn’t do better is asking for a smaller cut.