soulsource

I would not say "lazy".

There are a lot of bold promises in Unreal Engine 5 advertisements, that get taken up by publishers and producers - and then end up in the game budgets...

And then, near the end of the project, when it turns out that performance isn't good because the advertisement promises have been a bit too bold, there is no money for optimization left...

I need to give two perspectives here. One from my day-job as a gamedev, and one from my hobby as a gamedev.

The main difference is that in my spare time I do not have to suffer working on Windows.

So, first about work: I have switched from an nVidia card to an AMD one in 2022, because my work PC's nVidia card had too little VRAM to run the editor of Unreal Engine 5. Editor performance was abysmal (due to the nVidia card's limited VRAM) and running out of VRAM also frequently caused the editor to crash.

After I switched to an AMD card, those crashes were gone and performance of the editor was way better too (because it now had enough VRAM to no longer fall back to system RAM). However, Unreal kept complaining about a driver bug regarding synchronization, that never led to any observable issues other than running into a (continuable) assert on editor startup. I am still using this card, and after some driver update, that warning went away.

The AMD card is working flawlessly for me, and I honestly do not want to switch back.

There is one thing that I need to highlight though: The nVidia rendering debugging tools (most important: nVidia Insights) are locked to nVidia hardware. AMD's tools are not locked to AMD hardware. So, if you use an nVidia card, you get access to all tools, while on AMD cards you need to make do with the tools you get from AMD (or Intel, or Microsoft).

In my spare time I luckily don't have to use Windows, and on Linux the AMD drivers are, in my opinion, superior to the nVidia drivers in almost all aspects. The most important thing about them is that they are open source, so you can actually edit the drivers, and mesa (the open source project that contains the OpenGL runtime) has some pretty amazing debugging features.

The AMD Linux drivers also integrate way better with the various desktop environments. With the nVidia drivers you more or less need to use the nVidia Control Center for some settings, what is not the case with the AMD ones.

The one drawback I see on Linux, compared to the nVidia drivers, is that setting up OpenCL is a little bit more involved with the AMD drivers - but since you nowadays can combine the open source drivers with the ROCm OpenCL runtime, that's not that a big deal any more.

Last, but not least: In my experience the AMD drivers are "more strict" when it comes to using graphics APIs and shader languages correctly. Back when I still used an nVidia card, I caused several bugs that only surfaced on a coworkers' AMD card. In all of those cases the bugs were actual bugs in my code, that only worked because they accidentally did the right thing on nVidia due to implementation-defined behaviour...

Takeaway message here: Beko support person does everything they can to recommend not buying from Beko.

According to Steam, I spent most hours this year playing Book of Hours. (The word "Hours" is in the name of the game, so what choice did I have?) It is an amazing game, and I recommend it to anyone who likes cozy games with lots of lore to explore.

However, there is one game that I must confess I had even more fun with, even though it's relatively short: The Pristine Cut of Slay the Princess.
I can't really say much about it other than that it's a horror visual novel with excellent voice acting and incredibly good writing, as almost any detail of the game's story would be a spoiler.

(Edit: I know, both of those games released last year, but the question was about which Steam Replay and which games one had fun with this year - not about games that released this year.)

I did play a lot of of HoMaM back in the days - and also just recently installed VCMI on my PC, in order to re-play HoMaM 3. I didn't start with that though - too many other games to play in my backlog... I never tried any mods - I don't even know if the modding scene already existed back in the 90s, when I originally played it. I must confess that I prefer HoMaM 4 over HoMaM 3 - it feels a bit more complex.

There is one game series that is quite similar to Heroes of Might and Magic, that I personally love, and that gets the "fun all the times" and "100 hours play time" easily for me, but I didn't mention it before because the current iterations are way above $10: Dominions. I haven't bought Dominions 6 yet because of the size of my gaming backlog, but I have had a lot of fun with Dominions 4 and 5.

The way I understood it was that she did not loose her ability to use magic, but rather decided not to use it any more after what happened when she had to draw power from fire.

Even if it would be a bit disappointing, I think an explanation as simple as "she grew older, and had a lot more time to deal with the trauma of what happened in the desert" would be sufficient to explain why she is OK with using magic again.

Tough question.

Of all the games I have played, only few have 100 hours playtime, and all of them are over $10 except for

• Dwarf Fortress. However, I would have to lie if I said that it is constantly fun. There are gameplay mechanics that are boring, like the labour management (though that got vastly improved in version 50.x).

I do have one game suggestion though that is consistently fun all the time, and costs less than $10 - however I have less than 100 hours on it, because I never looked into the user-generated levels:

• TIS-100. It's a puzzle/programming game by Zachtronics (so it's in the Zach-like genre by definition), and it is amazing. Also, as said, there are user-generated levels, so even after you finish the main campaign, there's a vast selection of puzzles to solve.
• Baba is You would go in a similar direction, but misses the $10 price point (by a tiny bit).

As someone who is curious about how they are going to explain the lore (in case you haven't read the books: Ciri forswore magic after she had to draw power from fire in an emergency situation and that nearly escalated - also, you are missing out, the books are great), I feel offended by your statement.

I just finished The Pristine Cut of Slay the Princess, and I fully agree that it should be the GOTY.

It's amazing how different it feels when you play a really excellent game. With most games I regularly pause and tab out, to browse the web. With Slay the Princess I did not. It completely absorbed me, even though it was my second play-through.

• OpenTTD: Open Source and available for free.
• Settlers 2 via some DosBOX version. Back when I still used Android I used Dosbox Turbo, but it seems to have been removed from the Play Store. No clue which DosBOX build for Anrdoid is good nowadays...
• 2048: Open Source and free puzzle game
• Threes: Puzzle game similar to 2048
• Cogs: Puzzle game. No clue how to find it on the play store, but it's available at humblebundle.
• Slay the Spire: Deck Builder roguelike.
• Space Chem: Zachlike puzzle game. (Actually not only zachlike - it's form zachtronics)

and basically any Android game that ever was part of a Humble Mobile Bundle. Those happened before Humble Bundle was sold and consequently became boring.

It was there for certain.

In WoW it disappeared when the Dungeon Finder was added, which made social interaction and therefore being nice to each other optional. Before that feature, you had to chat with people in order to form groups for clearing dungeons - a step that the Dungeon Finder conveniently allowed to skip...

Don't get me wrong, the Dungeon Finder wasn't the start of it, but it is what accelerated it greatly. Before that social interaction had already been in decline, mostly because everything except for the end-game had been slowly turning into essentially a single-player experience. However, everyone (who stuck to the game) sooner or later reached the end-game content, and had to interact with other players. With the Dungone Finder, this incentive was lost too...

(I am maybe a bit too harsh on the Dungeon Finder - some end-game content was difficult, so you had much higher chances of success if you played with a team you knew well - and therefore had to form/join a guild.)

I am now at the point where I think there are two things happening.

• Actual technological progress.
• Marketing bullshit pushed by dazzlers.

Examples for the first one would be new battery tech for electric vehicles, new ways to harvest renewable energy, new tools that allow to make software more stable,... Examples for the second would be NTFs, Crypto-Currencies, "AI", e-Fuels,...