Yes and no. Like in Stardew Valley, technically you can romance every NPC in your party, but in practice you have to meet certain criteria to do so and those differ from character to character. Of course, it is possible to “game” that system.

The most famous one ATM is probably “Baldur’s Gate 3” which offers a wide variety of mechanics and stats to measure if an NPC member of the player’s party is romantically interested in the player character. Two examples given in the talk I linked are the VNs “Monster Prom” or “First Bite”.

I love this game (500 hours played), but I have to bring up a point of criticism…

One aspect which has not aged well IMHO is the “kindness coin” mechanic: The exchange of goods for the NPCs’ friendship and/or affection. You give the NPCs stuff, then you give them more stuff, then some more on top, then you get a cut scene and then you get back to giving them stuff until you trigger the next one.

Yes, the requests on the blackboard and the occasional personal quest mix up things a little bit, but overall the mechanic remains the same and for me over the years this has cheapened the interaction with the NPCs for me somewhat: They are mostly transactional and predictable to the point where you can calculate their outcome.
You have to give character A so-and-so many objects X to romance them. It takes so-and-so many days to do that.

Sure, the “kindness coins” mechanic was industry standard at the time, but I wish there were more variety in regards to the interactions with the NPCs, because they are amazingly written and I wish there was more to do with them besides giving them stuff over and over again.

They also leave out half of the story: The whole thing already started in October. After months of harassment one of the employees snapped and called their shit out. But they leave that part out, claim they got attacked out of nowhere and play the victims.

Sure, the death of the live service hype plays a role, too, but in my view it is mostly due to the gravy train of cheap money coming to a halt: Lots of companies are scaling back because they had funded themselves with loans while laundering profits through tax havens. Gaming companies are not much different from tech companies and media companies in this regard. Those are also in hot water ATM and fire people in order to stabilize their cash flow.

At the end of the day, gaming companies are going to invest far less in the future. Games such as “Spider-Man 2” and other AAA titles with exorbitant budgets will become rare. This has been a trend for years.

Thus I am rather certain that 2023 was one of the last years where we have seen a strong line-up of high quality, high budget titles alongside indie success stories.

I wonder if 2023 will go down as one of the last good years for gaming (and even that only works if you ignore all the layoffs that already happened).

My sympathies. Keyboard producers are really dropping the ball for you guys.

A beak or feet work too, but I get your point. Invertebrates obviously have a hard time with typing.

Thank you. I try to make an effort, but it is really hard to type. Humans should make smaller keyboards.

Ars Technica has done an interview with Unity’s Marc Whitten and Whitten’s responses are very, very telling:

“It was not our intent to nickel-and-dime it, but it came across that way,” he said. […]
"A large part of the problem, Whitten said, was that Unity “didn’t communicate effectively… There were areas where there was some confusion, and we could have done a better job.” […]
“That’s on us,” he continued. “We didn’t do a good enough job… of delivering the information that would help people.”

It shows how dishonest he still is: Of course, they wanted to nickel-and-dime everything. People were not “confused”, they were outraged. No matter how much of a mess Unity’s initial explanations of the details were, the core message was pretty clear: Unity was aiming to get as much money out of developers as it can and it did neither bother to iron out the details of the changes, nor assess the potential damage their plans could do.

Rumours from inside Unity said that their own employees warned management, but managment saw a chance to make money and plowed ahead.

And going by Whitten’s statements, they still want to hide behind meaningless corpo-speak and the same people who got their business into this mess now claim that they have changed their ways.

Considering that DA veteran David Gaider left ages ago, I do not have much hope left for the next DA game. BioWare may have hung on a little bit longer than other EA studios, but it looks like the notorious mismanagement by EA will get it too.

Well, there is the MetaCritic user score too. It currently sits at 1.4, so it should surprise nobody.

Tolkienesque fantasy has become the carbon copy of a carbon copy of a carbon copy ages ago…
And it becomes even more apparent when people consider that Tolkienesque fantasy tropes aren’t even about “medieval Europe”, they are about a particular English pseudo-medieval world. Fantasy doesn’t do much exploring even beyond the English-speaking world.

Southern Europe (Italy, France, Spain,…) aren’t even featured much. The landscape may allude to it, but then the same Northern European castles sit on the top of hills, occupied by the same kind of lords that you’d find in other parts of the game map.
And other parts of the medieval world do not fare much better: Everything around the Mediterranean is reduced to stereotypes or entirely replaced by some fantasy race. Every place outside of Europe/the Mediterranean fares even worse.
It has no depth, no knowledge of particular local traditions, it is not rooted in any stories, only recalls the same tired tropes that Tolkien established.

Even inside Europe and around the Mediterranean, the medieval world was very diverse. Every region had its own traditions, stories, clothing, customs and its own mythologies with their own particular kinds of monsters and creatures.
But you’d not know through most fantasy stories which - no matter the landscape they take place in - it always boils down to a band of adventurers walking into an inn, drinking a beer and paying it with gold coins, before they go off to kill some orcs in the name of some duke. Very little thought is spend on considering if it even makes sense that a place that is akin to - let’s say - Southern France had any of these things.

When Tolkien wrote LOTR, he based most of it on ancient Germanic stories like “Beowulf”, that there are uncountable other folktales and stories from all over the ancient world which could be chosen as the basis of a fantasy setting instead.

Have fun! It’s a weird little game, but I am always happy when it finds some new players.

The most successful example for a blockchain game is “Axie Infinity” which is something of a Pokémon-like. It used blockchain technology to track the unique “Axies” (= Pokémons) which could be traded and sold. So the blockchain was used to do just that.
The big promise of games like “Axie Infinity” was “play-to-earn”, games which allowed players to earn money through playing the game, such as trading in “Axie Infinity”.

Could this only be done with blockchain? No. All of that could technically also be achieved by other means.
So ultimately all of the talk about the blockchain was mostly PR and a way to distinguish the game. Nobody would have cared about it, if it had not had this feature. Which is very representative of all blockchain games.

The talk of how blockchain technology would allow players to transfer items from one game to another; or create unique characters which could be transfered between games; etc. have always been pipe dreams, They would have required a level of cooperation between publishers and developers of games that was simply impossible to achieve.

As a footnote: The use of blockchain in “Axie Infinity” ultimately resulted in an in-game economy that was largely a pyramid scheme. The game is still there, but the economy imploded and most players only ever made cents, if they earned anything through the game at all.

My answer to that question is always “King of Dragon Pass”, a narrative/management game that is unlike anything else out there. It got a spiritual successor with “Six Ages”.