Pretty thorough breakdown, and I’d agree with most of it. Some paraphrased bullet points though:

Perhaps stealth isn’t doing well right now because of all of those bad stealth sequences in non-stealth games that are otherwise great

Possible, but I doubt it. The late 90s and early 00s was full of those too, but that was also simultaneously the height of stealth games. I think it’s just that fads come in waves. Underground racing games were hot when The Fast and the Furious started. World War II shooters were popular after Saving Private Ryan, and modern military shooters followed when a lot of the target demographic either fought in the war on terror or knew someone who did. Dungeons & Dragons and a lot of Led Zeppelin’s catalogue only exist because The Lord of the Rings books made a huge impression on people. If something in the cultural zeitgeist comes along that would make a good stealth game, there will be more stealth games; at this point, the last James Bond movie was 5 years ago, and the next one won’t be for a while still.

A good compromise we landed on rather than perfect wallhack vision was to mark targets

Perhaps, but I’m even kind of sick of that, too. I played a good portion of MGSV without tagging and found it perfectly playable, largely because, as he acknowledges in the video, you can scope it out from any angle from far away before you make your approach. This is something the original Deus Ex and Ghost Recon: Wildlands do well too, even though the latter also does the trivialized target marking. I don’t mind some light wallhacks when you’re up close to simulate the character’s hearing, like in The Last of Us. If we found ourselves in that stealth situation in real life, we’d have pretty good three-dimensional awareness of enemy locations just by the way sound bounces off the walls, and I think it’s okay to represent that in some way. I think the marking target mechanic is so prevalent because Ubisoft made a large number of games featured in this video and inspired more still; and Ubisoft for the last decade and change has been a company that made an efficient machine for churning out games that used a lot of common mechanics between multiple franchises.

Playing through 007 First Light right now, a lot of my most common grievances are in predictability, but not of the enemies. There are a lot of context-sensitive actions, and while this game has a sort of tutorial that we’ll be talking about for years, it did a poor job of explaining those contexts to me. I had similar issues blackjacking guards in Thief, and there’s that guy-on-the-couch section in Splinter Cell that he highlights in the save scumming section that you could describe much the same.

I think they’re hoping to make a profit off of what they’re charging rather than loss leading.

Because this is more like a side benefit to Game Pass. Most people are playing locally, not cloud.

More like, “Of their Game Pass users, very few use the cloud gaming feature, and even fewer of them would exceed these limits.”

Best they can do for you is shitpost and build a ballroom.

Correct. Only cloud.

Of course not. It’s expensive. That’s why Stadia isn’t still around.

I edited the post to spell that out now. But it really only ever made financial sense for both parties if it was a value add on top of what you already get with Game Pass. We all know how OnLive and Stadia worked out.

Yeah, maybe that’s in the paywalled article that this one cites, but it was only via summaries I saw elsewhere that I realized EA might not own them.

Leveraged buyout. Any dev still on payroll is a liability, and it’s not like these guys make Ultimate Team. EA’s got a lot of debt to service.

I’ve still got to peruse reviews to see if it’s for me, but it’s looking likely. If you want to put your money where your mouth is and show that there’s demand for DRM-free games, it’s also available day 1 on GOG.

Yeah, it’s on my to-do list for my domain registrar, but the above was in relation to OPNsense configuration, which I found a solution for.

It does sound exactly like this. However, I’m concerned about following these instructions when my external IP isn’t static. I still have yet to set up DDNS (I believe is the term, for automatically updating my domain’s DNS servers with whatever new IP address my ISP gave me), but this looks like it’s entirely IP driven.

EDIT: Actually, I just realized OPNsense has an alias for that, so I’m not sure why their own manual didn’t recommend it. I can just set the value to “WAN address”. It works! That’s step #1 down, and now I’m curious about step #2.

My local DNS only seems to set up IP address routing, so I’m not sure how to hit my reverse proxy with the subdomain I’m interested in and have it route accordingly; or even just skip the reverse proxy by having that URL internally route to an IP address and port, because there’s nowhere to put in a port.

It looks like another GTA, but I like GTA. I hope they lean more into the agency that comes along with heist setup missions rather than not, but even if they don’t, I’ll probably still enjoy it.

Horizon with co-op would be excellent. As a mode inside ordinary Horizon. No one asked for whatever this is.

I agree with the first sentence, but that’s what I feel this slogan does a poor job of reinforcing.

If you’re endorsing piracy as a political stance in any way, I don’t see it gaining traction. People need to be paid for their work; especially those who built a product for you that’s meant to last and can’t be taken away from you. I don’t know how you convey that in a three- or four-word slogan, but I don’t think this one does it.

It is not self-explanatory. You needed to explain it. On its face, it sounds like it’s saying to just pirate. I can get behind the message, but these three words aren’t it. I know that coming up with effective, catchy slogans is hard, but this one’s not going to do well.