Disgusting? It’s a few slices of ham and cheese. It’s basic, but you find ham and cheese to be disgusting?

They largely are. $70 is becoming the new price point for a new game.

It won’t be toned down, because they’re sharing purchases between PoE1 and PoE2 so people don’t lose their purchases.

All of that MTX people wear will exist on Day 1 of PoE2.

Lately they’ve also been rewarding full armor sets for league challenges too which is nice. There has been 3 full sets in the last 4 leagues.

That would require every player even new ones to make very complex loot filters and understand what loot is valuable and not to automate it.

Every item in PoE that is automatically picked up doesn’t take up inventory space (Metamorph organs, Expedition fragments, Sulphite, Azurite). The concept is that players make an active decision of what they’re picking up and that they’re aware of what they have because they made an active decision to pick it up.
It doesn’t take control of their inventory away from the players.

It also feeds into the dopamine loop, when you get an exciting drop you see it on the ground it doesn’t automatically just get sucked into your inventory.

Trading will never be addressed in the way the community wants because what they want is not good game design.
Most players want some form of Auction House to automate trade completely, but that in conjunction with completely free trade like what exists in PoE completely undermines the actual gameplay of an ARPG.

Trade is highly highly efficient, and ARPG game developers are usually quite afraid of trade. PoE is one of the few games that has completely open and unrestricted trade.

The restriction in PoE comes from the idea of trade “friction” where it takes additional time and makes it inconvenient.

But this huge risk of trading is exactly the reason why Blizzard removed trade entirely from D3 and D4 has limited trade too, and even brand new ARPGs like Last Epoch also have restricted trade.
Trade has a huge risk of undermining the entire game and removing the reason to play it.

Many ARPG developers feel trade removes from the game, while Chris Wilson and GGG feel that trade adds value to items because they can be tradable, but once you add that AH it makes trade too powerful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE3MAFGDzWw&t=29460s

The DLC in all the games are fairly important depending on the DLC/expansion, and there can be a lot of it. DA2 and DAI both integrate well into the story while DAO was kind of built around the idea of side-story mini-adventures so there’s a lot more of them.

DAO Primary story DLC: Warden’s Keep, Stone Prisoner, Return to Ostagar add side quests to the main game and are solid to play.

DAO Standalone campaigns: Leliana’s Song is a prequel focusing on the Leliana party member (you’ll meet her pretty early in DAO although she is missable), Darkspawn Chronicles is an alternate history and not needed although fun, Golems of Amgarrak is a short post-story adventure that’s not that important, Witch Hunt is a post-game story around Morrigan that’s actually pretty important.

Awakening is a full-length expansion and absolutely worth playing, some of the characters you meet here tie into DA2.

DA2: All DLC integrates with the main story and can be played at any time. Legacy is a very important DLC that directly ties into Dragon Age Inquisition.

DAI: All 3 story DLC are fantastic, Jaws of Hakkon, The Descent and Trespasser.
Jaws and Descent are played during the main story as side quests, and Descent has some major lore implications for the world and raises some serious questions about the past and the potential future. Trespasser is a post-game story that directly leads into DA4: Dreadwolf when it comes out.

Also not sure if Gamepass supports this, but you can import your saves forward. For Dragon Age Inquisition you will need to use Dragon Age Keep to recreate your choices to import them into your world state.

2 definitely shows the issue of EA wanting to push the game out in 1.5 years. Many cut corners and a lack of assets with the repetitive maps.
I think it’s the weakest entry in the Dragon Age series, and a lot of it’s negative reception was because it failed to live up to expectations of DAO.

If Dragon Age 2 wasn’t a Dragon Age game, it wouldn’t have gotten the poor reviews it got. As a standalone game it’s actually not bad.

I always recommend playing it, as it directly leads into the story of Inquisition and it has some great characters in it.

Ultimately PoE won’t change away from that because that’s what their current playerbase wants. It’s a huge risk as a developer to alienate their current fanbase to try to appeal to a new market.

Within this genre I’d add Halls of Torment for $5.
It recently blew up in early access and I’ve really enjoyed it.

Sometimes it’s good to do things that make the world a more livable place.

Like taking a shower even though our skin is always getting dirty and we can adapt to being dirty.

If it’s anything like Path of Exile, around 60% of their playerbase uses Steam over their standalone launcher.

It’ll be nice to at least track playtimes and have that data in 1 location.

It depends on how it’s enforced.

Where I live they ended cash bail for any non-felony offense and it’s led to repeat offenders being picked up, released and they’d offend again, where they get picked up and then released again.

It’s a complex issue, many of these people need mental health help, and putting them in jail isn’t the solution, but allowing them to continue to walk free when they’re known re-offenders isn’t helping either.

Based on the language where they say there is something coming in the future, I would bet it’s that system.

They want to invalidate all existing awards so they cannot be used to give people money under the new system and likely also remove the premium feature of getting awards for free.

People who want to reward content creators will pay for premium and awards instead of just premium now.

Might as well open a Roth IRA and start contributing to an index fund like VTI or VOO.

Long term stable growth and tax beneficial. The earlier you start saving for retirement the better, compound growth is very powerful.

I think a lot of gamers just don’t care enough too. I know so many people that buy a game on release, play it for a few hours, and then drop it. Even AAA titles that are actually good.

Steam achievements kinda confirm that as well, there is a fair bit of drop-off on even the most popular games.

And we thought bots and karma farming were bad before.

I don’t think reddit or any social media company gains copyright or ownership of what you post
There’s no guarantee that what’s being posted even belongs to or is the original creation of the poster.

It’s worth pausing if there are no games you want, they’ll often (maybe always?) offer a discount on the next month if you do.

Yup, I’ve been eyeing Outer Worlds for a while. Patient gaming pays off again.