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).

As always, it works at the Speed of Plot™.

Which somehow becomes much slower the second players come up with a use for an infinite source of unclean water.

It’s A Cauldron of Endless Bog Water. The merchant lost it a while back and came here to retrieve it after tales spread of a new swamp popping up out of nowhere.

If they didn’t want players to do this, they wouldn’t have included a drum magazine upgrade for the assault rifle.

With a full party of casters? One hour IC, a couple years OOC.

See, he could have gone about things the smart way, but this was way funnier and made for a better story. It was also 100% in-character for him to do something like that - the guild he was a part of was commonly mocked in-universe for thinking with their swords rather than their brains.

Plus I was able to hold it over his head for years afterwards. I was a cleric and he didn’t even wait for me to do the bare minimum preparations that might have let us survive before summoning them.

In an online game I used to play, we were infiltrating deep in necromancer territory and encountered a rune on the floor that would summon an incredibly strong undead specter when a player touched it. One of the players wondered if there was a cooldown between summons, and decided to test this by pressing the rune several times in quick succession.

One total party kill later, I can confidently state that there was not in fact a cooldown, and that three nightshades will kill your entire group faster than you can run away.

I’m pretty sure Steam has sharing of precompiled shaders for regular PCs too, you’re just SOL unless someone else has the feature enabled and has launched the game with the exact same card+driver revision in the past. It’s much easier and more consistent on the Deck where everyone’s using the same hardware.

Yeah, “survival” is about as watered down a term as “roguelike”, especially when it’s “survival-crafting” (a meaningless distinction - crafting mechanics were popularized by survival games in the first place). I play and enjoy both casual and hardcore survival games, though I have to shut my brain off not to get annoyed at some of the former.

There’s a recent trend in the genre where eating isn’t required for survival, food just gives temporary stat bonuses. At least Subnautica has proper hunger and thirst mechanics, even if you’re set for life for both within the first hour.

I can count the games that get the survival gameplay loop right on one hand. Hardcore survival is a sadly neglected niche.

I’ve had my eye on Vintage Story for a long time. Have you ever played UnReal World? That game has the most detailed and brutally realistic survival mechanics I’ve ever seen. I’m wondering how VS ranks in comparison.

I think placing base foundations still flattens nearby terrain? But yeah, the devs admitted that the destructible terrain was a huge mistake that caused massive pop-in and performance losses, even now after they dialed it down to nearly zero.

They couldn’t just remove voxel terrain entirely because the world is a mishmash of voxel and classic geometry. The voxel destruction/deformation only applied to the sand and soil on the ocean floor, which let players dig several feet down before hitting solid terrain. Most other terrain features are static props.

They’d have had to redo nearly the entire terrain to remake it as a traditional polygonal mesh, so instead they simply removed the player’s dig prompt and the terraformer item. I think there’s even a console command to re-enable everything? There was at some point during Early Access, at least.

I don’t recall them ever saying anything about randomly generated worlds though. It’s been bespoke since the very first alpha, though a lot of first-time players thought it was procgen due to the random spawn locations.

The patch was worth it for the load time reduction alone.

They’ve also bought up a ton of quality studios. I’m half expecting Krafton to go bankrupt due to incompetence and end up pulling an Embracer and take everyone else down with them.

If they end up torpedoing Hi-Fi Rush 2, I may start a riot.

RimWorld also releases a huge list of polish and quality of life changes for free with each expansion. The latest patch that released alongside the Odyssey expansion obviated the need for about half of the QoL mods I considered mandatory before then.

A lot of indie devs are good about that. Squad, KSP’s original devs, even mandated to their buyer that all DLCs existing and future had to be free for backers since they’d listed that as a promise on their original Kickstarter.

“We wanted a fresh new debacle instead!”

Edit:

"As Unknown Worlds’ sole stockholder, Krafton had invested $500 million in the success of not only Subnautica 2, but also Subnautica 3, Subnautica 4, and any other future Subnautica franchise product.”

Ew. Survival games benefit more than most genres from iteration, but that’s better done as updates and expansions unless they make a truly qualitative leap, which I doubt will happen under their leadership. This reeks of them wanting to pump out as many full-priced titles as possible, probably with an ever-higher price tag as Subnautica becomes an established IP.

Smacking other racers in the face with a metal chain never got old. I was terrible at the actual racing but at least nobody could overtake me!

Considering one of the common refrains about the most famous game in the series, Silent Hill 2, is that the combat being crap is an important part of making you feel like a regular guy way out of your depth, I’d say they have right to feel concerned. There’s a serious incongruity between “horror game” and “detailed combat system”.

Though the mention of durability and weapon degradation implies that maybe you won’t be able to smack your way out of every encounter.

“Hopefully they pull a Bloober and prove me wrong.”

Is this a Gen Z reference I’m too Millennial to understand? Is this what getting old feels like?

The motion capture excuse would also hold more water if they didn’t go for an actor only two years younger than David Hayter.

He wanted out for a long time, IIRC as early as MGS 2. 4 was originally planned to end with Snake and Otacon being captured and executed for terrorism to put the final nail in the franchise’s coffin, with Kojima only dropping the idea after his entire writing staff protested.

I think you hit the nail on the head with his dissatisfaction being why 5 felt so different. It barely feels like a Metal Gear game even if the stealth is at its all-time best, but you can definitely see some proto-Death Stranding DNA in it in retrospect. He was clearly experimenting with new gameplay ideas, which might explain why the game went so far over budget and ended up unfinished.