Yeah, not a fan of those civ swaps. What I am a big fan of is playing Civ as "a" civ that is also my civ, and 7 seems to be designed to completely ignore that type of approach. From this point of view, what Firaxis turned Civ into is just a disjointed mess of stuff to click through for bonuses and according to your chosen meta.

Or: Gimme back my Civ2, and get off my lawn!

One more thought: back in the day you'd play games for the fun of it, and that would extend to people reviewing games in the media. They'd play their share, it'd maybe come across in the publication that everyone is crazy about playing X at the moment etc, but once they were done - that was it. Some sleep lost over a cool new thing, but all relatively healthy still. These days The Algorithm pretty much dictates that THE way to run your YouTube channel is to laser-focus on a single game, make that your brand and very identity, build your life around it. And your income is on the line if you do that and rock the boat in any way. I'll skip the payola and how unhealthy these influencer-publisher relationships are, but I will say that if I spent half a decade playing Civ full time or near full time I'd be happy for any shake-up as well, the more radical the better, in fact, and I wouldn't care what it turns Civ into, or what constitutes the core of the identity of the game that is Civ. Does it have civs? Then whatever. After all, I'm looking at a decade of my life, right? The one and only thing that is a real objective problem in this context is... the interface. Which may sound familiar.

My take on the reception of Civ7.

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What I hear is that Civ7 seems to be designed with competitive play in mind more so then past Civs, so it's no longer just a game to be enjoyed. In that context the... questionable decision to uncouple leaders from civs starts making (cynical) sense, i.e. Firaxis wants their skinnable CoD operators very, very, VERY badly. They've toyed with this before, but here they crossed a line.

Anyhow, most of these issues aren't fixable, unless by "fixable" we mean re-designing the entire game from the ground up, and the ones that are (such as the leaders) just won't be fixed. Look at that dlc list. When did this game come out again?

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Wouldn't be S.T.A.L.K.E.R. without a disastrous (or at the very least messy) launch. On point for the brand.

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Bit late, but I when mentioned the... let's call it intel that's been leaking from the company/group there was more than just the money angle that got widely reported. Locally, we heard complaints regarding the current (inexperienced since promoted way too fast, possibly incompetent and otherwise unpleasant to some) leadership. Yeah, they laid people off, scaled back, and started turning a profit eventually, but at least for a while another story that was making the rounds was that GOG just wasn't a nice or stable place to work at or just plain be at, and that it felt largely directionless to the people inside. That last part we could see from the outside for a number of years, IMO.

So, Alpha Protocol and Croc are basically the first clear signs of any kind of legitimate vision after those financial woes and assorted unpleasantness reports. The marketing is probably also intended as that, but I dislike it too much to call it "vision". If they want to reaffirm their mission statement (from before pulling a KFC with their brand name), this is a terrible way to approach that problem as what they're doing advertises precisely the opposite of what they think they're advertising. I won't budge on this, call me cranky all you want :)

As to the other points: I wish I had your optimism, and I hope you're right :)

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I'm sorry, but have you followed the 'project Ceasar' dev dairies? I think not.
They are realeasing those for over 1 year. And they are getting a lot of feedback from those dev dairies.
A lot of that feedback is actually used to improve the game, or correct historical errors inside the game.

EU5 won't be a shitshow like victoria3 was.
The only danger EU5 faces, that is it far to complicated for 'casuals'.
Its so detailed, really awesome, but also insane hard to master...

How are the EU5 dev diaries different from the Victoria 3 dev diaries, or any other PDX diaries for that matter? Until we see the final game and actually play it I really don't care about forum posts, no matter how nice they seem.

Nothing would make me happier than a properly finished Paradox game ready to play launch day. Well, a lot of things would make me happier, but I'd still be very happy about it (and utterly flabbergasted).

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They delayed ripping that band-aid off as much as humanly possible. They need to nail EU5, and I don't think Paradox is set up to be capable of releasing anything even remotely playable as a company.

More than likely they need EU5 released whatever quarter the accountants calculated it needs to get released, and they'll be thinking about fixing the game up later, maybe, if their playerbase gives them all the money. They might relocate some more remote employees out of the company to cut some more costs and corners while they're at it. Eh, who needs 'em anyway? I'm also expecting new heights of predatory, broken and incomplete dlc.

Published games aside, Vicky 3 has been extremely concerning. Yeah, on one hand they stuck with it. On the other, they screwed the pooch so bad on one of their mainline titles, it necessitated a ton of urgent rework that took years, and the players for sure paid for it. Handsomely.

Yeah, I should be excited, but Paradox has been making it very hard for years now. Taking the company public is the worst thing they could've done from a product quality pov.

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So, this particular elephant in this particular room bugs me a lot, because I'm under the impression I'm treated like a complete fool.

GOG is selling these games they are trumpeting they will maintain to have them be playable. OK, but how is that different from the Before Times when they were also selling these games, and also maintaining them? Presumably for the reason that selling a non-functional product isn't a very attractive proposition from the (potential) customer's point of view. If that Win7 work needs some more work to make a title function under Win12 you either put the work in and keep selling the game, keep potentially profiting from it, or you don't do anything, keep the game up on the store and draw ire from your customers, because you're knowingly selling damaged goods, OR you delist it, and that's not very... uh, preservationist of you. So, am I to assume that games not inducted into GOG's prestigious Chosen list will, at some point, become non-functional? That's also a terrible idea to implant into your customers, but that's what they suggest on the flipside of all their new marketing. It's just stupid to do it this way, no other way for me to say it.

I mean, I get this is marketing, but I think they handled this (non-)switcheroo poorly. It just bothers me. Even if you soften the angle into "additional effort/special care" that still makes the alternative kind of uncomfortable to spell out ("yeah, they're baaaaasically playable, sure, whatever"), but at least that's - I think - preferable to what we have now.

Or, they started saying the quiet part out loud and since they're doing it via marketing they're actually putting it through a megaphone. Time will tell.

For some years now GOG has been making me uncomfortable with buying games on their store. A lot of what they do or say, or what we hear is happening or not happening internally has that "this is extremely uncertain and unstable as a business that they have no idea how to run to turn a profit" subtext.. I hope I'm reading too much into this. And I'm assuming with Alpha Protocol, Croc and maybe some others they got a cash injection to try and get some profit going, but I'm still watching them closely, and not believing that's possible. There's little to no money in preservation, that's flat-out not what preservation is or is about. And I'm just not sure Croc was spending that money wisely, as much as I love Croc. Where this seems to be going - to me - is to a point where CDPR, a public company, will run out of arguments for keeping GOG afloat. The shareholders will demand blood. All the game preservation hot air won't matter at that point.

Sorry to be a downer.

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It ain't finished till it's... hotfixed.

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NWN2 is almost 19 years old, so I doubt anyone remastering this game cared about the performance outside of stability and the like.

I... probably wouldn't be launching the remaster on vintage hardware if I were you? Although I kinda want to build an XP rig now and try.

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People will probably be saying it's a modpack just because it's conservative in terms of preserving the look and feel, i.e. Not A Remake, but if the devs rebuilt the game in a new engine then by definition it is a remake, not to even mention the asset work. It's just they chose to stick to the original in remaking it, and especially kept a similar fidelity. I like the approach. Proper built-in mod support is nothing to sniff at, either.

From a certain point of view I can see how dredging up the fact that the A3D tech (or any passable equivalent - we'll see if that's the case at release) is missing as I have above would be unreasonable (maybe consider what "definitive" entails for once beyond how nice it sounds, eh, marketing people?), but it's still less unreasonable than claiming something is, essentially, lazy just because it looks kind of similar. In essence, if they had no source code this was absolutely the right thing to do. I'm not seeing anyone outside of Nightdive doing it on the old, half-forgotten PC games front, either. I still remember Blade Runner, I passionately despise how Quake 1 makes you wait on it connect to some servers before allowing you to even navigate the menu (what monster made THAT choice?), but it's worth calling out the good with the bad, and they do a lot of good.

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