If you want something with a small footprint I would personally go for Rust, but anything that compiles to a static binary is going to be better than something that needs a dedicated runtime.
Python is what I use for small one-time scripts and utility stuff that doesn’t need to run long, but it may be worse than Java…
Great article! Ubisoft seem to be really good at making worlds that are immense and magnificent and yet utterly boring to be in.
That’s a very astute observation and it made me wonder if piracy was partly to blame for the death of the B-tier game (at least on PC). In my younger pre-Steam days me and my friends would pirate 9/10 of the games we played (if not more). Games like CoD/Fifa/Sims would get enough sales from regular folks, but who the heck was going to take a chance on something like Will Rock or Scrapland? I would often check out games at my local store and then go home to torrent them, meaning they lost out on sales from the kinds of weirdos who the games were made for.
I watch a stupid amount of YouTube so I pay for YouTube Premium. I wish that meant I could have premium features like disabling shorts, disabling those annoying themed sections that keep popping up (right now it’s the olympic games), a search function that actually searches for what I want instead of shoving more suggested videos in my face, and changing every “not now” button into “don’t ever ask again”.
Despite the fact that I’m a voracious consumer of YoutTube videos and a long-time paying customer, I have to accept that I am not the target audience. They want passive users who endlessly watch whatever gets put in front of them so that they never leave the app. If there was a respectful alternative that worked well with iOS and AppleTV I’d gladly pay for that instead.
I agree. We can celebrate what makes the PC platform great without turning it into a competition.
I use this rule: accounts.google.com/gsi/*
Is yours similar?
I’ve been a fan of Dragon Age since Origins and this game looks like another step towards the kind of simplified gameplay that every game has made. It’s disappointing that the series has gone from an RPG to a generic 3rd person action adventure game, but given the gradual evolution of the other games it’s not really surprising.
kind of game Bioware has forgotten how to make.
Such a nice way to sum it up. You would think that the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 would show publishers that there is a (large) market for actual RPGs, but that’s maybe too much to hope for.
Cute article, but does anyone else find it distracting that in between some of the paragraphs there are links to other articles? I know that modern media needs to be engaging to people with TikTok-brain, but I found it somewhat obnoxious.
I counted 5 of these article links which was bad enough, but I can’t imagine what it looks like without an ad-blocker.
When you mentioned it I remembered that of course there is a setting for this… but when I went to check it just says “Updates disabled by your organisation” In this case it’s a work laptop that has a bunch of “security” things installed on it which prevent me from doing things like …installing applications I need to do my job. Not sure how Firefox is able to update when it’s been explicitly disabled, but I will at least change this setting on my personal computer.
I may have misworded it a bit. The tabs themselves get restored, but the state of the tabs (being logged in to a site, for example) isn’t always retained. In all fairness this is perhaps due to my privacy settings, but I’d prefer it if Firefox didn’t force me to restart.
I’m on macOS.
I remember feeling liberated when streaming became big. Dealing with potential fake files, low quality, or having something stuck on 95% with no seeders was something I wasn’t going to miss when I ditched piracy for Netflix… then the streaming wars began and here I come crawling back.
With all the money they’ll save from shutting down all the smaller studios they can just go out and buy more.
But how else can they guarantee infinite growth to their shareholders? Won’t someone please think of the poor shareholders???
I wonder if regulators will bring this up the next time Microsoft wants to buy another publisher. They fought tooth-and-nail to buy Activision Blizzard and like a child that got a new toy they’re throwing out the old ones.
It seems like the AAA publishers don’t know what to do with that type of mid-budget game that was the staple of the 2000s generation.
Spend a bit of money (not crazy much), make something fun with a bit of originality, and just put it out for sale. No complex monetisation strategy or pipeline to funnel people to subscriptions. We give you money, you give us game.