Yeah, I thought about changing it, but…the problem is that while the base game is playable now for $0, the overwhelming bulk of the game’s content is in expansion packs. Like, I don’t think that people really buy and play just the base game; it’d be more like a demo.

EDIT: A similar game might be DCS. I mean, yes, technically the base game is free, and you get (checks) a WW2 fighter and a Soviet ground-attack jet. But…basically that acts as a demo, and everyone is going to go out and get at least their favorite aircraft, and most of those aircraft cost about as much as a full-priced video game does. Hell, a couple of them are $80 each.

Yeah, but thanks for the heads-up!

I should totally put release date on there too. Just a sec, will add on a column with that.

I think that a bigger story there is the dominance of F2P games.

EDIT: Added release year after @Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world mentioned age.

EDIT2: And country of origin, while I’m at it.

EDIT3: Note that the release dates on some of these are a bit apples-to-oranges. For example, Escape From Tarkov only had its 1.0 release in 2025, but had been widely-played well before that, so maybe “availability” would be more interesting than “release”. World of Warcraft Classic only split from World of Warcraft in 2019, but both games have an origin in World of Warcraft, which was released in 2004.

Followed by a lot of Jira.

It was clear that more use of Bugzilla would cure many of society’s ills.

Yall know that ‘Fallout’ was originally turn-based?

And there’s still the Wasteland series, which is what the isometric Fallout games heavily derived from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jo2BKNtKDI

This guy recommends Overload. I haven’t played it, but…

My main requirement was for the touchpad to actually have physical tactile buttons, fuck that whole solid slab of touch thing, I want 2 proper clicky buttons.

I’m in the same boat, except I want three for Linux, where the third button is more-useful than in Windows, and there are very, very few laptops that have that any more — a few Thinkpad models. I finally gave up on it, just accepted that I was going to have a laptop without same, though you can get USB touchpads with physical buttons if you want to haul one around (and I keep one in my car for just this reason — sometimes it’s worth hauling out).

But I want a Kenshi like game set in Morrowind.

Honestly, I’d like a Kenshi-like game set in damn near any setting.

Like, the Kenshi setting is interesting, but in terms of gameplay…it’s essentially unique from a gameplay standpoint. I’m still a bit amazed that nobody has made other games in the genre.

There is a sequel that is being worked on and will come out someday…

I think that part of the problem is that there aren’t that many settings where it makes sense. Descent worked because you were supposed to be on low-gravity asteroids to justify the zero-G environment. That also means that it has to be in space and in the future. It had to be in mines, to justify the scale — most human-created environments are going to be smaller.

I was playing Starfield and one of the moments there that I was impressed — most of the combat isn’t all that new — was in a zero-G gunfight on a space station (the Almagest or whatever the space casino is), where gunfire was sending objects flying around and riccocheting all over. I was thinking “it’s odd that more games haven’t done zero-G first-person shooters”. But…when you think about how limited the settings are where it really makes sense, I think it’s understandable.

I mean, I guess you could create a fantasy world and just throw up your hands and say, “it’s all magic” or something, but…

Some games that I like thematically, but don’t enjoy the gameplay on:

• Elden Ring. If it was more RPG-like, avoided respawning enemies and reliance on learning patterns, I think I’d like it more.

• Sunless Sea. Neat setting and writing. I don’t like the gameplay — simple combat, not very interesting choices, hunt-the-item stuff.

• Cyberpunk 2077. This isn’t bad, but I wanted something like a Bethesda game, and I got something like a Grand Theft Auto game. I think that it’d be much better as a Bethesda-like game. Oh, though I never really liked Johnny Silverhand as a character much.

• Fallout 76 — well, I don’t have a problem with the franchise — but on that particular game, I’d rather it wasn’t an online game, were a single-player open-world RPG. It’s more like that than when it launched, but…

• To expand on that: a whole slew of games that are really intended to be played multiplayer, but where I only want to play against the computer. I don’t like playing games multiplayer. I would buy an expansion for these that went back and put in some major single-player improvements and good game AI. Carrier Command 2 can be played single-player, but it’s kinda repetitive and not balanced well for single-player teams. Wargame: Red Dragon. I like the game and the setting, but the AI is very difficult to enjoy playing against; just too primitive. Steel Division 2, later in Eugen’s series, really improved on the AI. Defense of the Ancients 2; the whole MOBA genre is really oriented towards playing with real humans.

• Scanner Sombre. This is a mostly-psychological horror game, where the gimmick is that you can only see something that you’ve scanned with this LIDAR-type gizmo. You’re walking through a cave complex, and the mechanic of things slowly emerging and having to manage your visibility really works in a horror environment. But…the game isn’t really very replayable, and I like replayable games. I wish that someone would basically take the stumbling-around-in-a-cave-with-a-scanner thing and make a different sort of game out of it. (Note: If you play this, I played the Windows version in Proton. The Linux-native build was extremely unstable for me.)

And just for the hell of it, the opposite — some where I like the gameplay, but not the theme:

• The Binding of Isaac. I love the action roguelike gameplay. I don’t like the gore/fetus/abuse/scatological stuff all that much. I’ll deal with it, but I’d have liked the game more if it had a different theme.

DDLC is available on many different major platforms, including iOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and more.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/698780/Doki_Doki_Literature_Club/

In the indirect sense that an engine might impact a game’s visual appearance, hardware compatibility, or performance, sure. But I don’t care about the engine specifically as an engine. That’s just an implementation detail. It’s just “does the game look appealing” or “does the game run well on my hardware”?

There are some cases where I can look at an engine and know that it’s very likely that some feature that I want is or isn’t there. For example, the (open-source) Twine engine supports interactive fiction multiple-choice Web-based games, usually written in a language called Sugarcube.

There’s a similar proprietary engine and language, Choicescript, which runs in a proprietary viewer. This is used by Choice of Games LLC, which has published a large number of commercial text-based games.

The developers of the Choicescript engine decided that an “undo/go back/save” feature would be undesirable, probably because it reduced the gravity of a player making choices; they basically require a player to play the game in “ironman mode”, where if anything happens that the player doesn’t like, the player has to go back and play a new game from scratch to avoid it. The Twine developers decided that “undo/go back/save” was a good idea and enabled it by default (and even if a game disables it, there are typically ways to modify a Twine game to re-enable this feature). I very strongly disagree with “undo” being disabled; I feel that it’s not respectful of my time, so when I purchase a Choicescript game, I know that I’m probably going to have to live with this particular decision that I do not like.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_that_support_PlayStation_light_bar

I’m waiting for release, myself, since I want to get the full experience all at once, so I’m not the best person to advise there.

• California is relatively-wealthy.

• I would say pretty confidently, without digging up figures, that Californians have a higher rate of using fuel-efficient vehicles. I know that they have the highest rate of BEV usage in the US. A lot of the fuel-inefficient vehicles are (large) pickup trucks, and California has a relatively low share of pickup truck ownership, whereas Wyoming has the highest.

Can use engine braking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_braking

Gasoline engines

The term “engine braking” refers to the braking effect that occurs in gasoline engines when the accelerator pedal is released. This causes fuel injection to cease and the throttle valve to close almost completely, greatly restricting forced airflow from, for example, a turbocharger. The restriction causes a strong manifold vacuum which the cylinders have to work against, sapping much of the potential energy out of the system over time and producing the majority of the engine-braking effect.[1] This vacuum manifold effect can often be amplified by a down-shift, which induces a faster spinning drivetrain to engage with the engine.

Engine braking is a viable method of controlling the speed at which a vehicle travels downhill. By shifting to a lower gear in a manual transmission, or applying “low” mode on an automatic transmission, engine braking reduces the need to repeatedly apply the foot brake, lowering the risk of the brakes overheating.[2]

California also treats capital gains at the (higher) rate of regular income, which is somewhat unusual, whereas Texas has no state-level capital gains tax, which is also somewhat unusual.

I’d point out, for those not aware, that there’s a spiritual successor in the form of Kitten Space Agency.

Every time I get an Android update, my first reaction is “what workflows that had been working am I going to need to relearn?”

I’ve had some similar comments about Windows in the past. Like, a lot of the lock-in value that Microsoft enjoys isn’t anything special that they’ve done — it’s because people are expert in using their platform. If you make them change their workflow, you throw that out. And people profoundly dislike changing their workflow, once they’ve put the effort in to become accustomed to one.