I do enjoy game mechanics that interact in emergent ways that weren’t fully planned out by the developer in games like Dwarf Fortress.

What is stopping them from reintroducing those requirements in the future?

I am honestly surprised about this. I sort of assumed that whole sector had been at zero for at least a decade.

No, that is generally what we refer to as hardware. Arguably the whole point of the term software is to refer to the bits that aren’t physical in the overall system.

Certainly means that large companies didn’t invent digital distribution as some form to eliminate physical distribution as an anti-consumer move. Consumers (via piracy) invented it for convenience.

Valve didn’t invent the idea, piracy did. You could download full games years before any legal distribution channel allowed you to do so.

Well, sure, but there are limits. In e.g. a game like Dwarf Fortress you could probably add hundreds of different production chains and professions without running into too much trouble of individual players keeping track and using all of them. If you added maps each requiring one of dozens of different tactics or strategies to a multiplayer shooter it wouldn’t feel like a single game any more and would probably just splinter the community into groups where each just plays one or a few of those maps.

I feel there is a fundamental difference between games like Dwarf Fortress or survival games or even open world story-driven games getting new content though that allows players to explore different options when replaying the game and games like this where the game play loop is inherently short and people are somewhat forced to do the ‘optimal strategy’ whatever that happens to be at the time.

It is called “going gold” because it is the gold standard for measuring the tolerance level for embarrassment from releasing the pile of garbage a project produced. Going gold is done at exactly the point when that drops from intolerable to tolerable to the stake holders.

Even if it can’t tell how much load you put on your system because that is a complex interaction of various bottlenecks, it would at least be nice if they labelled which settings are likely to contribute to the CPU, CPU, RAM, VRAM,… bottlenecks.

English is the <“French language” in Italian> is a pretty strange statement when you think about it.

only the first 10 are fun.

Or worse, a game where everyone keeps telling you that you need to put in 100 hours before it is fun.

Not my experience with Windows at all. Windows has a lot of the kind of users who see the system as some mystical thing that can not be understood and they speculate on reasons but their solutions are always more along the line of cargo cults than proper, well-understood solutions.

And lets be honest, it is not as if tinkering isn’t required for a lot of things on Windows too, it is just that the tinkering is a lot more random “hope & pray” stuff like uninstalling and reinstalling things, rebooting,… and hoping the problem goes away.

You will like Linux then because on Linux, unlike Windows, you can figure out why stuff goes wrong and then fix it for good instead of randomly having reappearances of the same problem (barring hardware issues like overheating of course but that affects all systems equally).

I bet many of the engineers did and then their management told them that they have to do it anyway.

One assumes they have to come up with some sort of strategy to keep players like me on a pvp only game.

And that strategy was to allow you to play against bots on purpose and with your knowledge. It has been around for as long as bots have been.

The difficulty is in getting people to agree not just to make a change, but on what that change should look like.

This is certainly a component in most political decisions favoring the status quo too, that is a good point. By definition there is only one status quo but many options for alternatives that might not each have a majority of its own even if the sum of their proponents might be larger than the people actually favoring the status quo itself.

Monarchs are still popular enough to keep their symbolic role, otherwise they would have been disposed.

Not necessarily. This just means that the issue of the monarchy isn’t important enough to most people to start a violent revolution over it or make it their main issue to vote on (if there even are parties making it part of their agenda to remove the monarchy).

It can certainly be depressing at times but on the other hand not nearly as depressing as a complete disconnect between the bleak reality you observe yourself and overly positive portrayal in media (social or otherwise).