Larian’s party size is only 4, so it’s not much larger. Your breakdown of your spent time in Fallout sounds a lot like you’re trying to speedrun it compared to how I play it (I’d be surprised if you stood much of a chance in late game Fallout without giving combat more thought), so the differences in how we play it is probably somewhere there, and I think Larian’s games will probably force you to engage in more of those aspects in order to get through them. Divinity: Original Sin II regularly goes on sale for quite cheap these days, but I’d be lying if I told you it was anywhere near as good as Baldur’s Gate 3 despite having a lot of the same DNA. For one, the D:OS games just about encourage the genocide of every monster on the map in a way that BG3 doesn’t, but at least I’d strongly doubt your ability to play through the combat thoughtlessly.

You just described why it won’t be widely adopted.

I’m a very recent fan of loot games, and I only briefly tried Torchlight 1 as more of an academic exercise to see how the genre evolved over time. There was some special sauce that I observed starting around Borderlands 3 or Pre-Sequel (that I suspect originated in Diablo 3) around class design that was still absent from Torchlight. Other than that, I didn’t form much of an opinion on it.

I’d argue that a game like Fallout, 1 or 3, is not 99% combat, and that’s probably where the disconnect is. They intend for you to do some detective work and even solve problems without combat plenty of times too, even when you have a combat-heavy build. Pokemon is a strange one here too, because that series is built around a rock paper scissors system such that you should be regularly be switching up which attacks you’re using. I’d love to see if your complaints hold up to Larian’s games on tactician difficulty.

Would you mind listing some of the ones you’ve tried? Describing melee as spam clicking sounds like you’ve either only played real-time RPGs or didn’t understand the tactics that come with the trade-offs on your character sheet. Fallout itself comes in a ton of different flavors across the series.

Diablo III and IV don’t have a monopoly on the genre. There’s Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and the Borderlands games, all playable offline, even in multiplayer. They’re not exactly Diablo, but you’ll hardly get closer than Grim Dawn, and there’s no reason you need to be married to the Diablo IP anyway. That kind of brand stickiness is how you get taken advantage of.

Personally, when something like that doesn’t respect my values, I’m not even finding myself tempted by them these days. Oh, it’s always online? It’s dead to me. There’s a deluge of other stuff to play, including games that are similar but respect my values.

You’ll have to convince those other developers to release on GOG. It’s not Valve preventing them from doing so.

I think you just internalized this to be only about online shopping, but that was never what I meant.

If consumers’ regular buying habits at the time were not to buy on Steam by default (which they weren’t), then it’s unimpressive, and not a feasible poster child, for one’s game’s ability to survive in the modern market without Steam. That’s the point I was making. Brick and mortar was the de facto storefront for PC games at the time that most of those games came out, so it was not strange for an always-online game to sell itself online-only on their own web sites. These days, skipping Steam is not a path most will take, and for good reason.

Steam was a launcher for games most people still bought on discs back then. I remember 2007 was the first time I bought a game on Steam, and it wasn’t a regular habit for years after that. It wasn’t about which other digital store you used; it was that, as a digital store, it held no power in the market compared to brick and mortar. Plus, back then, PC gaming was definitively second fiddle to consoles.

Of course, but…broken clock, you know? A large percentage of personal computers will be freed from Windows in large part because of Valve, even though they profit off of legalized child gambling addiction. And walled gardens in mobile will be broken down in large part because of Epic, which uses dark patterns to trick people out of their money in pursuit of a cultural hodge podge of nonsense that won’t even exist in a few decades.

To be honest, Epic is doing a good job of tearing down walled gardens in places like mobile, and we’ll probably be better off for it. But yeah, they’ve done a terrible job of competing with Steam.

In 2005 when Roblox came out? No. League of Legends came out in 2009, and I had barely started shopping on Steam for non-Valve games back then. Most of us were still buying games on disc at Walmart. Minecraft was doing early access before Steam had the feature.

I’d love to see this as an official tag on the store page.

A software company can run its own store, and make its own launcher. Just look at so many of the big titles over the last two decades: Minecraft, League, Tarkov, War Thunder, Roblox, and more recently Hytale.

This is also survivorship and selection bias though. Not only would you not have heard of the ones that failed, but these are the games confident enough to not launch on Steam in the first place. Several of them are so old that Steam was in its infancy and not the de facto storefront when they came out.

Plenty of great games are not immune to failing even when they’re on Steam. The market is tough. But at the same time, it makes perfect sense that Steam has a rule preventing you from taking advantage of their infrastructure for marketing and communicating with customers while you make it available on Epic first for less money.

The only people I’ve friended online that I didn’t know in person were other people who play Skullgirls, because it was the only way to pick their brain on how I can improve, or even just to send a “ggs”. These days, we’re basically all in the same Discord server, so I can usually start typing @ and a few letters of the name they used in quick match and find them pretty easily, so it’s been a while. Still, those people are mostly strangers to me, and sometimes their accounts get hacked. The scam I’ve seen multiple times at this point is that they need people to go to an external site and vote for them to get approved for a Counter-Strike ranked league or something. I don’t know how it works, but I’m not clicking that link. If that’s how that CS ranked league works, find another one with a better method of letting you in.

Neither of these are redemption arcs where a company was let off the hook. They’re using early access the way it’s intended. The biggest thing stopping me from playing early access games is the deluge of finished games coming out all the time.

The argument they gave, cited in the article, is that there’s a skill component to them. By which I’m guessing they mean playing Ultimate Team with the contents of the loot boxes, but it doesn’t get specific. And I still don’t think that would add a skill component to the loot boxes themselves.

Iridium Studios? Man, I thought this studio closed down or something. Their last game was a long time ago.