As a fellow management sim and automation game enjoyer, I understand your love for Rimworld and why Stardew does not scratch that itch. But the appeal of Stardew is I think just what you’ve figured out for yourself, it’s the anti-management, anti-automation game. The part of the brain that Stardew taps into is the one that likes to make things with your hands. It’s a bit more tangible feeling of involvement which is its own allure that is wholly distinct from the one where you watch a bunch of cogs turn in a machine.

I love playing Satisfactory and Factorio and Rimworld, and at work I spend a lot of time automating and analyzing and alerting. Stardew is the game I play when I’m burnt the hell out and I don’t want to diagnose why the automation I’ve written isn’t doing x thing or giving me Y result. I just buy seed, plant seed, water, and harvest. There’s very little planning and virtually no troubleshooting. You just put X effort in and get X benefit back. It’s why so many IT guys retire and become goat farmers.

I don’t think the importance of the information stored changes the fact that storing it all in one centralized place is generally a bad idea. The latter is a bad idea, the former is a bad idea but with worse consequences. A decentralized internet is a healthy internet.

Yeah and why do we have more than one news organization, when we could just have one official news channel and you’d never have to go searching for news articles again. And we could have one central bank that holds all of our money, that would make sending money around much easier.

If that’s your definition of a low bar, then it hasn’t really fallen so much as it’s always been that low. From the beginning, games have gone without cutscenes, plot, even dialogue. Many of the greatest and most beloved games of this decade and the last have had sub par stories, and often times no plot, cutscenes, or characters to speak of at all, and yet they’re some of the best of all time. They’re three of the least important things for a game to have after all, especially the Borderlands games, where the story is little more than a vehicle to deliver more gameplay, and the gameplay in 3 is the best of the series. Thats the only thing that really matters when it comes to people wanting to play games.

Yeah people were spoiled by how good the characters and story were in Borderlands 2. They forgot how Borderlands 1 didn’t even really have a plot and for the most part doesn’t need one.

…yeah? It’s a video game, not a movie. Why would anyone let three things that aren’t crucial to a game stop them from enjoying the things that are crucial to a game? The skip cutscene button works just fine lol.

As a Borderlands sequel, or just as a game? I’ve never actually heard anyone complain about the gameplay. It’s the same gameplay the series is known for but even more refined, with tons of QoL improvements. It is quite literally the best in its class with no real equal.

The only thing I can imagine about your friends is that they didn’t get through much of the gameplay because they were turned off by the horrifically bad writing, cringelord villains, and a sense of humor firmly stuck 15 years in the past, which I would not blame them for.

Plot, characters, and writing aside, Borderlands 3 was a very well made and fun game on a technical level. I’m definitely interested in Borderlands 4, as long as we can continue to skip cutscenes lmao.

You ask who the fuck decided to sell your studio to a secretive block chain company

Most likely the private equity firm that owns your company

Perhaps some kind of teaser that hints at what your strategy is before going into full detail?

Let’s get you back to bed, gramps

With the rise of private equity, you don’t even have to go public to sell out anymore. So many companies in operation today are empty shells puppeted by private equity firms who buy any company in any industry just to squeeze every last bit of profit out of them before throwing them away.

Just look at the veterinary industry and the mass disappearance of vet practices owned by the doctors who work there.

Which is pretty funny because I distinctly remember AOE 3 being seen as a regression from 2.

I do remember liking the home city mechanics. Almost a roguelike in that you could improve your games over time out of band

“Because the deep state libs are in power so the only ones they’ll prosecute are the Republicans who do it”

I can hear it now lmao

Well no, it’s very obviously a bug. Several of the “ads” they were showing were old and outdated. It was not intentional.

The ads were confirmed to be a visual bug. I do miss when PSN was free.

The content of your argument exists only in your head, there’s nothing any of us on the outside can do for you there.

Yeah and you get to that point when fans rally around a beloved game renewed by mods over literally decades. If your game is dogshit from the start, that just doesn’t happen. It literally happened with Starfield as some of the most well known Bethesda game modders abandoned the game entirely.

Lmao it’s like comical how when presented with a crossroads of how to get back to printing money, EA has chosen the one path least likely to help them make any money.

I hate to be the dream-squasher here but the technology will quite literally never get there. You’re thinking along the same lines as Back to the future where 2015 is filled with flying cars and sky-highways.