It’s wild how many people who do not have mods published on nexus/workshop/bethesda are happy to speak on the behalf of modders.

I don’t think that has been the case for at least a full console generation, maybe more.

Look at the rise and fall of pre-order goodies to get a rough estimate of when publishers really, really wanted you to buy the game day 1 (and when it stopped mattering as much)

60fps complaints go back to the dark days of 360/ps3 ports where HD resolutions on the consoles meant high framerate was no longer a viable option there. Since AAA games started using console as lead platform pc became saddled with 30fps caps as well. It possibly happened even earlier, but that was the time where I started noticing it.

Still waiting for the “to be announced” steam release date. I’ve tried getting into it on mobile twice, but it’s not really the type of game I’m looking for on that platform.

any sufficiently advanced incompetence (elon musk) is indistinguishable from malice

the DDG browser can setup a “fake vpn” tracking blocker for your entire phone. Last I checked certain apps were excluded by default as the tech is quite new and some apps don’t work right with it. It’ll then give you an overview of how many tracking attempts it blocks for each app.

https://trilarion.github.io/opensourcegames/games/top50.html

Keep in mind that this list contains both full games and engines for closed source games.

the nft implementation in breakpoint was so bad that it seemed like it was missing the point on purpose. It was just different serial numbers printed on a helmet and the rarer the helmet the more play time you had to have on your account to actually wear it. So the nfts were barely unique, didn’t look cool and you couldn’t just buy whatever to show it off. Respect to the devs that managed to pull this off when execs asked for nfts.

They probably still do a lot of those, but recently they’ve been using opinion writers to create outrage bait with writings they should know better than to print.

In the last few years they have been willing to post a large amount of transphobic nonsense. To the point where early in the year almost 1000 current or former contributors signed an open letter complaining about the issue (and made a callback to the paper doing roughly the same thing with gay and lesbian people in the 60s through 80s)

Since the game is getting a rather big addition in a few days: RuneScape 3 is also not bad, but if you want to avoid mtx and p2w you have to pick the “Iron(wo)man” option when you start. This removes the ability to trade or use the auction house system, but in return all the p2w is stripped out (and imho the progression of your character becomes much better)

most of the f2p offerings are games with energy systems limit play. And in those cases you simply have unlimited energy, or the entire energy system is removed. For other types you have ever jigsaw puzzle etc that was ever available for the game. Sometimes you need to go in and claim the dlc and it’ll then be active for you for as long as you are subbed (and as long as the game in question is part of the program) Usually the games that have heavy p2w and FoMo built into the core gameplay loop and mechanics don’t show up. I assume it’s because it would be way too much work to make the game fun to play and that they don’t want to give people a way to avoid the monetization.

2 examples I can remember easily: The Battle for Polytopia has every single faction unlocked from the start. Titan Quest is based on the earlier version that only had the first expansion, so the 2 more recent expansions are for sale in the ingame menu, but since you have play pass you just hit “download” on them and get them.

I wouldn’t expect to see a lot of clash of clans or raid shadow legends -types of game there, because “real money” is an important and significant resource in those games.

The amount of effort spent to convert the game to play pass varies, but in almost every game it’s not a detractor.

The offerings are usually a mix of premium or semi-premium games as well as your typical predatory games. They all have had every bit of monetization stripped out of them (no dlc, no ads, no paid currency). I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mmorpg on play pass but there are many high quality games. If you setup family sharing you can share the subscription at no extra cost. Good discount for annual renewal too.

The easiest way to break immersion is frustration. Not adding options to take color blindness into account does not add immersion for colorblind people because it’s more like the real world or has less UI. It adds frustration and ruins any chance of them being immersed. What frustrates us is not a universal and static list of concepts, so neither is immersion.

Old School RuneScape is a good pick. Great game and solid mobile client.

If you’re okay with optional cosmetic mtx then Albion might be worth looking at too.

AdventureQuest 3D has a single class exclusively behind paywall, but it’s a one-time fee. Beyond that it’s cosmetics and crafting speed-ups for real money currency (which is also earnable from normal gameplay)