The only reason AW2 happened at all is because Epic paid for its development. Hate on the Epic store all you want (it deserves a lot of it), but it’s one of the few instances where it actually makes perfect sense that it’s an exclusive.

Nothing to do with Half Life besides someone there being a fan:

As many of you correctly assessed, we’re actually a real company in the Boston area. We’re working hard to assure and secure vaccine and other biological manufacturing production. As much as we would be honored to be part of any Valve game - we do not work in this sector at all. We are not secretly working on Half Life 3, Project White Sands (whatever that is/may be) or any other Valve title - we’re just nerds working to secure the global bioeconomy.

I’ve restricted the repository to prior contributors, and if they have any concerns, they are more than welcome to do so here. If this turns into harassment, then I’ll just shut the whole thing down, because I’m way too busy with my actual job to be dealing with unsubstantiated drama from a hobby that is supposed to be fun.

This is how projects die. Duckstation had a good run at the top, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it dethroned if it becomes a dramafest with bizarre restrictions on forks and distribution.

Such a shame NOLF is so deeply mired in rights disputes that we’ll probably never even get a digital rerelease, let alone a sequel.

It’s called a branching narrative. Most common related Steam tag for finding similar games would probably be ‘choices matter’.

Yes, but they were already on Steam - this release is new

You can manually restart in OW - it’s an ability you can learn from one of the characters you meet.

In my experience, if people are going to bounce off the game it’ll come down to one (or more) of three reasons:

• They hate the flight controls
• They hate the feeling of being on a constant timer
• They hate the lack of explicit direction in what to do next

It’s one of my favourite games of all time, and it has good reasons for all of the above, but it’s definitely not for everyone!

Not to mention native console ports with crossplay multiplayer

There are prebuilt solutions in some common engines, and companies like Multiplay that will help with development and hosting, but ultimately it depends on the specific needs of each game.

What works well for one project might be overkill for another, so studios have to spend a lot of time figuring out their needs and building something bespoke for it.

Turn-based all the way for me. I need time to think about my moves!

I want to love RTS games, but I just don’t have the executive function skills needed to prioritise tasks and make decisions fast enough to do well. Single player against CPU is sometimes doable if there’s an easy mode or cheats, but online multiplayer is just impossible.

As a kid I thought they were shouting ’Uncle Fester!’ and wondered what the Addams Family had to do with WW2

Newer, cheaper competitors like the FPGBC are finally muscling in on the Analogue Pocket’s market, so I guess they’ve decided to double down on being the ‘premium option’.

Not just the engine, no.

the company is planning to make its proprietary Carbon Development Platform – which encompasses the studio’s Carbon Engine and other technology – an open source property

This has nothing to do with the subject of the post…

The correct answer is because game developers are, as a rule, not unionised. No one is pushing developers or publishers to properly credit their staff, so a lot of them simply don’t.

I’ve played Risk of Rain 2 on and off for years and I’m not bored of it yet

Okay, I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, but this can’t be true, can it?!

Surely Nintendo have made at least one game with some kind of procedural content??

Delisting always sucks, but it looks like they’re at least doing what they’ve done for previous Forza titles: still available to play if you bought it digitally or physically, and if you played on Game Pass but bought DLC they’ll send you a free copy of the base game itself.

Microsoft is a terrible company, but at least they treat their back catalogue with some degree of respect. I just wish Sony cared more.