Obsession with character sheets comes from pen and paper and a desire to simulate every aspect of the world. Without the tools to tweak your ability to interact with the system you can pretend to be a master thief, but unless the game reinforces that with its behaviour you’re just pretending. Like you can pretend to be a vampire in Skyrim, sure, but it’s more fun when you’ve actually got the curse and the game reinforces that.

Fundamentally a stat sheet is just a way to tell the game what your character is like in a way that it understands and can reinforce that’s more granular than definition by class or by what skills you’ve used. And every game has one, whether you can see it and change it or not.

It’s why “everyone” ends up as a stealth archer in Skyrim. Because stealth and ranged attacks are something every character would try to do, Skyrim’s design means if you as much as try something it makes you better at it, even if you want to be a clumbsy barbarian.

Which ironically makes it so you can’t just roleplay, you have to avoid trying anything that isn’t what your character is best at. It means you can’t hide from a patrol you can’t handle, you have to just charge in and swing, because the game will change your character otherwise and you can’t tell it not to.

You’d think the sensible business decision would be to see an under supplied gap in the market and fill it, but God-forbid they do something sensible.

Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith explained that Larian’s success is an “exception” to the last decade of gaming trends, but one that shows a shift in desire from gamers.

There’s been no shift, we’ve just been ignored and under-served for around two decades. But, sure, keep ignoring us.

Payday 2 and payday 3 we’re made by the same dev studio, but with different producers. They own the IP, they’re burning it down of their own free will.

They tried to milk payday 2 to death and it didn’t work, so they tried again with payday 3 and lost their audience.

If we’re just talking about analogy then the band is the game, the dev team is the roadies and management is the publisher? Still. They fucked the stage by their own choice.

Tell that to everyone playing fortnite or other shooters on their phones.

Looks insane and disgusting to me, but to each their own I guess.

Couch co-op can be difficult, because it often means having to run the game twice on the same machine. The devs of Windrush also found that it made it harder for players to keep track of where they were (with a single player they can fix the center of the screen on the player)

That said, yes, more couch co-op please. I’d settle for cheaper second copies.

Nah, they said sorry, they didn’t do anything different. They still restricted the purchase regions of the game to those that can get PSN. I expect a return of the PSN requirement for Helldivers 2 eventually.

Their next game will be better, 5e held them back as much as its recognition boosted it’s popularity. WotC will spend the next decade chasing the success of BG3 while these guys rinse and repeat as they always have.

There’s no reason to believe there was anything special about BG3 other than any WotC funding and lore.

That’s not what the paper says. This is specifically COD games that this was tested with

The loosening the skill matchmaking found players leaving from the bottom and continuing as new players found themselves at the bottom. Higher skilled players liked this as they got treated as having lower skill as lower skilled players left.

Tightening it found higher skill players leaving due to longer queue times and having less lower skill players to beat on in their matches. Lower skilled players had higher retention due to being more likely to be matched with their peers.

In other words high skill players enjoy stomping noobs more than fighting each other. Noobs don’t like being stomped.

It’s not entire untrue to say “everybody hated it”, but it also misses the point.