With Steam Machines being more or less officially dead now, the one danger we now face is that some publishers who entered the Linux market -because- of Steam Machines could possibly decide to give up on us. Valve pushed Linux support as a long-term investment, as the upcoming chance to gain a foothold in a new console market not controlled by MS or Sony. This perspective is gone and we are still the 1% market we started with. I doubt this will help convincing studios who didn't try publishing on Linux yet to give us a chance. All this push and support we got, all the improvements Linux gaming has seen didn't change the fact that our market share didn't go up one bit. That's...bad. If we want to be a sustainable platform, we can't remain at 1% forever and hope bigger studios will take us for serious.

On the positive end: While a few years ago it seemed that the PC vs consoles war would eventually be won by consoles, this is no longer the case. PC gaming is stronger than ever, and PCs consistently remain the technologically superior platform. It's the -consoles- who seem to be the dying species of dinosaurs these days. Stationary consoles are fading even in Japan...the country that invented them. Smartphone gaming and hand-held consoles is the big thing now, and these aren't directly competing with PC gaming, in contrast to PS4 and XB1. Valve might have stopped pushing Steam Machines for the simple reason that they don't see them as a critical factor anymore. If we keep seeing them pushing SteamOS (at least in their typical Valve turtle speed), it is probably the latter. Valve's push -still- got Linux in a position where it can realistically replace Windows as a gaming platform. Which is what they wanted. But in order to maintain that looming pressure on Microsoft, Linux needs to keep going. Valves knows that. Who knows - I wouldn't be surprised to see SteamOS making a resurgence, one day: As a pre-installed OS on Steam-branded PCs.

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Bad news (at least for those of us using 4k screens) - the Linux version has a severe UI scaling issue that makes your mouse clicks mismatch the pointer position.

Good news - they are working on it.

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Quoting: etonbearsThe biggest problem was that NWN1 mods were based on assembling playing areas from pre-existing rectangular tile sets, for both interior and exterior scenes, which could be quite limiting even 15 years ago. It produces OK interiors, as one is generally accustomed to rectilinear architecture, but creating good exterior areas is challenging.

The simplicity allowed single creators to rapidly make a large numbers of areas though, which I believe had no small part in drawing in so many creators. NWN2's area editor was more powerful, but also much more tedious to use. I don't believe it's a coincidence that NWN2 had dramatically fewer games made with it than NWN. And both editors don't remotely compare to full-blown game engines, where you can't even build a garden shed in any reasonable amount of time.

Personally, I think the trade-off was very acceptable and a smart move by NWN devs.

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Bought it. For full price, which I normally don't do. In return, I -really- hope to see the Toolset on Linux on day!

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I guess publishers love subscriptions because they make people pay a LOT more over time, without them noticing it. I am pretty sure the average WoW player would faint if they calculated how much money they sunk into the game since it launched.

But yeah, to me it's a dealbreaker. I don't subscribe to anything unless the service itself is of a reoccurring nature. Newspapers are. Cable TV is. Software isn't.

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12 million? oO

No wonder that most Indie games look so bad. I don't think they can blow 12 million on art assets...

Can these be used in other game engines (*cough* Godot), or did Epic disallow that?

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WINE has come -such- a long way from three years ago, when I was considering it basically useless for the type of Windows games I want to use it for (mostly more recent games using DX11, not twenty year old retro games). Now? It runs almost all of my legacy Windows games more or less flawlessly. Sims 3/4, Star Trek Online, Champions Online, Guild Wars 2, Skyrim... all works. Not not only works, but works well! With a bit more work on the D3D bits, I guess it will soon run Fallout 4 and Elder Scrolls Online nicely, too. Both of these games already run for me, but with fairly major issues.

Overall I am really impressed. A few months ago, I became a 100% Linux user when my Windows partition got corrupted and I decided that this was a signal from the Penguin gods to finally do away with it for good. WINE helps me to still run the few non-Linux games I still crave, and is a nice insurance in case some of the publishers currently supporting Linux decide not to anymore.

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I think 5 is the only one they ever ported to Linux, but if that's not a concern, I'd say 4 captured the spirit for the franchise a bit better than 5.

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Really looks great! 100% buy when it's out. I have played every single release of this franchise. Love the humor! I hope for a bit more depth than Tropico 5 too, though.

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Quoting: bisbyxThey also now state that you can only have 1 downloaded copy of the game ever, so people that like to have copies of different game versions (for archival, or mod compatibility, since the "active" mod community doesn't always update their mods to the latest release, so people still playing on older versions just for mods is actually super common) are technically breaking the rules.

In all quite honesty, I am not sure I care about rules like that. Even if I would be aware of them, which I never am, because I am habitually not reading EULAs. I find it actually offensive to expect me to read 15 letter pages of legal gibberish to play a game. I am an otherwise very law-abiding and honest person, but stupid breaking rules like that wouldn't make me lose any sleep.

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