It was supposed to be. I have to admit I haven't paid any attention to it in many years so maybe things have changed, but it had turned into more of a vortex of ego, fleecing a fanbase, and sunk-cost fallacy, than a spiritual successor to anything.
Nope. Yes, that search I just did for how to break my network security. They don't need to know that, they can figure that shit out on their own.
And even then, that proof only applies retrospectively. It can't predict future behaviours.
I posted this above, but I really want to emphasize the point. The is not new, it's not rare, but we need to demand it and be angry when we don't get it. Dedicated servers should be the norm.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dedicated_Servers_List
AKA dedicated servers. They exist now for games now, but are... well not rare, but very specific. Factorio has a dedicated server. Ark has a dedicated server. Valheim, Space Engineers (windows only), Satisfactory, to name a few that I've dealt with myself. Demand them. Punish devs who don't accommodate them with your wallets. No user dedicated servers, no purchase. Fuck you and the distributed info-scraping service you rode in on.
I have a list of games I will never buy because they have succumbed to the lure of hosted services with no user control, no dedicated server support. Those devs want control; they want to control you, how you play and how you interact with those you play with.
Because Fortnight. Epic cancelled development on everything else except fortnight.
https://screenrant.com/unreal-tournament-4-cancelled-epic-games-fortnite-reason/ https://www.pcgamesn.com/unreal-tournament/unreal-tournament-cancelled
I played that beta. I played that Early Access. UT4 was fun and I was stoked for it. I was shit at it, but I was having a blast when I played it. Now it's dead. All Hail Fortnight!
Ok.
Who cares? This shit was tired decades ago.
Committee design is what it's always known to be. It has a name. Everybody here who has the basics of understanding knows what it is.
A game I'm not seeing mentioned here but for me it's one of the top games is Ark. I have so many... Ok, it seems I HAD so many glamour shots of the world as I played it. HD death has lost me a bunch of largely meaningless micro-memories. Well, I still have the memories, but it makes it harder to share them. Here have this one:
Science is not a belief, nor is it a fact. It's a set of tools for building knowledge by methodically separating models that work from models that don't. Facts can certainly fall out of scientific work, but it's a mistake to pick up any scientific work and label it "Fact". It's a constant work in progress.
Facts aren't that difficult to define, the real problem is finding universally accepted sources to communicate facts. None of us are going to be able to critically examine every single claim made by every single scientific theory, journalist, blogger, podcast host, ChatGPT instance, preacher, prophet, etc. And did that politician mean to say the words that came out of their mouth, or did they actually misspeak and their real intention was something else?