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

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.

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.

I heard a streamer describe it as while PoE2 looks harder combat-wise, there is a lot less hidden mandatory knowledge and building so it’s more approachable.

PoE2 has more punishing mechanics, combat is more active and you need to dodge enemy attacks, and bosses reset HP if you die. But you don’t have the same checklist of things you need to be viable, and there’s less focus on knowing the mathed out optimal setups since support gems are now focused on changing skill behavior rather than providing multiplicative damage boosts.

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.

I think in general people do. The concern is that the devs will be splitting their focus and their team between two games, and it potentially splits the playerbase and the economy.

There are some concerns that this means PoE1’s issues won’t be addressed as well. PoE2 was made to solve many of the problems that PoE1 has, and they continued to develop the game beyond that scope to the point it became it’s own product and changed too much of PoE, and because PoE2 is such a significantly different game, it risks alienating their existing playerbase, so they are now preserving PoE1’s gameplay, while making the changes they wanted to make for PoE2 which should attract more players.

But that now means that those solutions that were developed to fix PoE1’s problems are now only in PoE2 and tied to an overall total rework of the game built around those solutions and how they change the game. Things like how the skill gem system works to be more simple, mana reservation no longer existing, etc.

Ultimately it’s no different than having WoW and WoW classic. Just hopefully they’ll have a large enough playerbase between both games to justify maintaining both. Their idea of staggering releases does mean that many players will likely swap between the two though and play both.

They did answer in a Q&A later on at Exilecon that the games run the same engine and things can be ported between the games, if there is content that’s popular in PoE2 they may release it in PoE1 and vice-versa. The only real thing that cannot be ported is the character animations.
This does also mean that since purchases are shared, MTX have to be made multiple times for the 7 PoE1 character models and for the 12 PoE2 character models.

tl;dr If you like the existing PoE1 gameplay, PoE1 will continue to exist largely as it is now. If you like PoE2 more, then you will have that. And if you like both you can continue to play both and there will be more overall content to play between the two with the staggered releases.

If someone asked me what games I thought would get remastered next I never would’ve guessed Tomba.

I played on PS and I don’t think I’ve seen anyone really mention it since then.

I recently played an indie game called Iron Danger that allowed you to rewind time.

It was a party based real-time-with-pause tactical RPG. So you’d pause, command your 2 party members to use their skills and then rewind if things didn’t go exactly right.

It led to combat being a really interesting puzzle where you’re playing with the timing of skills to block a hit at the right moment, get a knockdown off before an enemy hits you, or trying to position your characters just right.

It’s a nice twist on the typical tactical RPG combat that sort of merges turn based and RTWP combat. Timing matters, where normally in a RTWP combat you wouldn’t have the ability to fine tune your actions, and in turn based timing doesn’t matter at all.

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.

And we thought bots and karma farming were bad before.

Fandom acquired Gamepedia a few years ago.

This was a big thing with the WoWwiki, they were on Fandom with WoWwiki and moved to Gamepedia with WoWpedia to get away from Fandom, and then Gamepedia got bought out so they ended up where they started.

Seems now the only options are Fandom, Fextralife or self-hosted.

Personally I’d love a visual remaster for Brave Fencer Musashi.

I did originally create an account there, but it was when they announced it. I’d reccomend reaching out to Multiplicity on the PoE discord as he runs the PoE lemmy server.

You should be able to post directly there using your current account though, it should be federated with most lemmy instances and kbin.

Outer Worlds is currently in the July Humble Choice if anyone wants to pay $12 for it and some other games.

Depends on the game.
Some DLC are equivalent to the expansion packs of the 90s where they add new content, new areas, and let you continue the story.
Others are just small cosmetics, or single new classes.

I grew up with expansion packs being the norm.
There are very few memorable games from my childhood that didn’t have expansion packs, and I think for many games DLC is the modern version of an expansion pack. Although DLC varies quite a bit.

Obviously there are good pieces of DLC and bad ones, and it can be hard to tell what’s what. Day 1 DLC can be a big offender, but I do remember the days where games had content in them that wasn’t finished.
Baldur’s Gate 2 has a mod called Unfinished Business that modders finished up the content, and there is the famous Ascension mod that rewrites much of the ending of the expansion, the funny thing with this mod is that the creator was David Gaider of Bioware, one of the writers and directors of Baldur’s Gate 2, due to his feelings that the expansion was unfinished he released a mod to fix his problems with it.

I don’t see either thing happening in today’s gaming world, that unfinished content can be finished before the game is released and then sold as DLC, being unhappy with the game’s ending can be patched later on, or again sold as DLC.

My annoyances with DLC are typically pre-order bonuses, especially if they’re exclusive to stores. And if they’re selling very important story based content on Day 1.

I don’t mind additional story content coming later, because that seems so similar to the expansion packs of years ago.

A good comparison is Mass Effect. Lair of the Shadowbroker I think is a fine DLC, it’s not largely important to the plot of ME2, but it’s a good side quest that is important to the character and was released about 9 months after the launch of the game.
But From Ashes in ME3 I think was terrible, it was Day 1 DLC and featured an extremely important and lore significant character locked behind an additional paywall.

That said, I do have some annoyances with DLC:
An abundance of cosmetic DLC in single player games is whatever for me, but if the game doesn’t have a way to unlock other cosmetics in game, it feels like a cheap cash grab.
Pre-order DLC especially if it’s store-exclusive and ESPECIALLY if it’s not available for purchase later- I would like the ability to have a complete game.
Having to wait for all DLC to come out before I can feel like I’m playing a complete game. Although this isn’t always new, as things like the D2 Battle Chest, Neverwinter Nights Platinum Edition or Heroes of Might and Magic 3: Complete Edition existed when I was a kid as well, where we were buying individual expansion packs as they released or we waited for the special editions.

Given CDPRs track record with the deep Witcher series discounts I’d expect a complete 2077 edition for cheap in a few years.

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.