SI just isn’t, or at least hasn’t been, set up to do this kind of step-change development. It’s been streamlined essentially since the split from the Championship Manager series to operate on an iterate-on-what-we-have basis with overlapping one-, two-, and three-year dev cycles geared toward developing annual refreshes of essentially the same game.

Everything from the dev cycle through AA, marketing, publishing, and even licensing is based on that fundamental structure. But that’s a model with an expiry date, and the kind of complete refresh they are currently attempting has been sorely needed for years already.

But they should have just announced a hiatus year at the start to get this done. They were never going to be able to do this within their regular annual cycle.

Nah we’re speedrunning the 20s currently, so it’ll probably be another ten, fifteen years or so.

I’m from Vesterålen in Northern Norway and this is giving me huge home vibes.

Engagement is merely the ability to, or the degree to which you are able to, maintain interaction with something (a system, a game, a fidget toy, whatever) over time. It has absolutely nothing to do with entertainment, although you can use entertainment as a means of achieving or increasing engagement. However, entertainment is hard. People are entertained by different things to different degrees, and respond to their entertainment in different ways. Engagement on the other hand is a fairly simple behavioural matter and that’s a whole field of science (which is mostly bollocks, to be fair, but its lessons can be very effective when applied at scale).

Source: I used to be a behavioural engineer, specifically a gamification specialist. Engagement was the oil I was employed to extract, and entertainment the excuse my field used to pretend what we were (and still are) doing isn’t just social manipulation at scale.

I really, really need people to grok the distinction between engagement and entertainment.

Removal of dedicated server functionality in favour of matchmaking was always going to be a horrible, horrible idea. And this is honestly the least of its negative consequences. Even before that there was the requirement of multiplayer servers to be set up through ‘official channels’ of various sorts, which has this same problem because those are still platforms with maintenance costs that companies will eventually cut.

It’s the same platforms vs protocols issue that the fediverse is addressing, just in a different sphere of the internet.

Honestly, the game is amazing 95% of the time. But Act 3 feels a bit too packed and a bit rushed at the same time. I’ve not been able to complete it because the game consistently crashes for me at a particular point on what amounts to ‘the final run’.

The fact that instead of just leaving the gsme until patched I instead chose to start over with a second character says something about how good the game is otherwise.

Thing to keep in mind on this is that it’s a national regulatory decision based on an EU regulatory decision, and it is expected to be just the first of several more like it to come from it. Meaning, it is likely to spread and it is likely to escalate over time. And even if it’s just an added cost of doing business, it does impact the financial viability of Facebook surveillance-capitalistic model.