Maybe not news in the sense that it’s a new development (though the title implies it is a deterioration), but still very much worthy of reporting. Just because something is typical doesn’t mean it is unremarkable.

It’s a bit harsh to put such words in their mouth. They said their sympathies lie elsewhere, not that he deserved it.

“Taiwan never has been a sovereign state”

I guess the Republic of China never existed?

Taiwan isn’t exactly a rogue province. It’s the holdover of the prior government of China that lost the revolutionary war and retreated there.

It doesn’t entirely invalidate the point, but it has to be said that the situation is markedly different from the one with Texas.

It’s more like if Texas overthrew the US government in a violent rebellion and the UK worked to support the holdover of the old US government that retreated to Puerto Rico.

Nothing that happened since has invalidated truly the right of Taiwan to remain a sovereign state. It’s in no sense a rogue province.

The point being made though was that the languages are well shown to be genuinely related through a common ancestral language from which they both deviated, just as have most languages in Europe and parts of the Near East. The connection is tangible and quite real, not something just based on some few similarities.

Paradox has long maintained a DLC policy based around their permanent improvement and development of their games. I don’t get what is greedy about genuinely expanding their games with content that wouldn’t have been in the base game and charging money for it. Some of the DLC may indeed be on the more expensive side, but calling their entire policy greedy is simplistic and just trying to bunch them in with companies trying to rip you off. Sure, there’s been cases where some of Paradox DLC has been egregious, but frankly, the standard case is that they clearly added onto the game that otherwise wouldn’t have been there at all.

To propose one of the titles where this works best is Stellaris. I genuinely mean it, take a look at that games post release development and tell me that Paradox is being genuinely greedy. Just because something is long term profitable doesn’t make them necessarily immoral.

I am just barely at the start of Shadowbringer now and I’ve been playing for more than two years now. I personally really enjoy having an MMO to continuously play next to other games, but it definitely doesn’t help with my backlog either, lol

It’s very fun. I also really enjoyed the sequel, even if it felt like it lost some of its charme and attention to detail in exchange for scope and combat depth. Felt a little harsh to switch to the next one, but I had a lot of fun either way.

I admire your ability to keep track of all that. I actively play FF14 to fill my MMO slot and then some other game that is my mainstay at the time. If I dare even touch another serious title, it tends to completely push out the prior one, so I have been really trying hard not to start another bigger game while I’m not done with the last one.

It’s how I’ve been playing Yakuza 0 for the last entire year, coming back every half eternity. I really need to just sit down and play a title or take forever.

Shogun 2 and older games massively lose out on the UX. Especially in combat, the games have much less quality of life.

Furthermore, the newer games simply work towards a somewhat different audience. The studio has clearly picked up on the success of Warhammer and after stumbling both through all of Three Kingdoms and the launch of Troy, they seem to have firmly settled towards the more fantasy direction which is counter to the philosophy of the earlier games.

While I certainly support trying out the older titles too, calling Troy a simply worse game than the older titles is a bit reductionistic and definitely has a personal bias and may be somewhat misleading, even if your advice was in good faith.

My first leveled Tank was Gunbreaker, my first leveled DPS was Mechanist and I am myself now working on Sage to fill out my “shoot guns at it to solve your problem” Trifecta.