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To get this out of the way, I was born in 1957
My first computer was an Apple A2E.
I began using PC for work in 1980.
My BIL was head of the IT department at University, he used PC at work but Apple at home. He even had a NEXT when Steve Jobs was not with apple.
So I’ve had exposure to both PC and Mac.
Apple is overpriced, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it junk.
But the proprietary nature of the beast was a definite “no” from me.
I did use Linux at home for a few years.
I had an Atari for my kids and later Nintendo then Saga then PS1
This was the only gaming I ever did, until I became disabled.
So I can’t really speak about early gamers.
Computer enthusiasts communicated with each other in my area with use-net groups. I started building my own starting with a 386 overclocked to 486.
Really all I wanted to say is Apple is not better or worse than PC.
Just more expensive.
Microsoft writes a lot of the software for Apple.
People just like to pay for the name.
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Some day, a guy claimed his, uhm, thing was the longest. Then he realized he was in a stable with a bunch of horses.
@ topic
The “good old days” are never as rosy as remembered. But I think one should accept as truth that the quality of what we’re sold today often is of lower quality than it was in the, say, 1990s.
The tech has advanced by leaps and bounds, of course. Testing a current game for bugs is more complex and error-prone than testing Mario Brothers. There are more lines of code, more combinations of hard- and software, more things to consider than back in they day. So one may say that the lack of quality is a result of technological advancement and we have to live with that.
But… no, at least not to the degree we see in the market now.
To give an anecdote about that:
In the early 2000s, somebody in my family bought a PC game on CD. Didn’t work. Patch came out. Only patch note: “The game now doesn’t delete itself after installation.” Nobody could have tested that piece of s…oftware before pressing it on thousands of CDs.
Without internet, the guy responsible would have been drawn and quartered. With internet… well, a small release day patch saved his butt.
That is, in a way, a good thing - one dead quality manager less. But it shows how the internet took away some incentive to deliver a working product.
And from there, it went downhill. Today, you can have games sold in “early access” for years, only to avoid the sh1tstorm due to lacking quality. The industry relies on modders, community patches and a huge advance payment for half the development time, and sometimes don’t even put the money in to fix the broken stuff they sold.
That can’t be right, and no, that is not how it was in the good ol’ days.
There were bugged games that you couldn’t play or finish, e. g. Dark Sun II. But those were exceptions, not the norm.
And yes, I’ve now spent about 2 h trying to get two games I spent money on to run, without success. What a…
Also, time spent on AD&D isn’t time wasted, but time lived.
Telith’s ghost. Stuff. Angry.
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This is a particular sticking point.
Once games were live, they could be utter shovelware with promises to “patch it later”.
This one wonders, how was the timing of this trend compared to the notation that one doesn’t own the software they purchase?
It’s been rubbed in the consumer face a lot lately, but it was many years ago that we stopped buying programs and started buying bovine feces use licenses (and by buy, this one means rent).
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Precisely! The tech is more complex, the platform it runs on is more fragmented, and the projects themselves are bigger.
StarCraft 1 development team had something like 20 people. Modern teams for AAA games range between 100 and 500 people, or even more.
This is why having post-release patches is such a great thing. Unlike what people like @KorgFoehammer would have you believe, I’m not against that at all.
Yeah, pre-orders leading to ultra-buggy releases suck. Endless early access sucks. But all of that can be worked around and mitigated.
Here’s what I’m adamantly against: releasing a game, getting it to a more-or-less stable state, and then breaking it later. Being unable to even play the game you paid for, like these people, should have legal consequences.
We can bicker about whether enshіttifying the game you paid for is okay or not, but not being able to play it through no fault of your own? That’s a line no one should be allowed to cross with impunity.
And there’s plenty of other consumer-hostile shіt that studios and publishers get away with. FunCent aren’t the only ones. They’re just sloppier than average.
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Retired yet?
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Yes
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Yeah, I agree. As I think I said somewhen before: I bought this game not in spite, but because it seemed somewhat dead = stable. I’m tired of companies selling non-working games, or breaking them later, or constantly messing up your game with updates. CE looked like a game with a setting I liked and not too much going on, something you can play and pause and return to without having everything broken in the meantime.
I liked that they somewhat listened to the community after the Siptah lauch, the AoS stuff looked like a good beginning for a revival, but… somehow, it all turned to camel dung. I just cannot fathom what’s going on there. If you have no resources (or not the required skill), don’t touch a running a system. It’s not that hard to NOT change the camera system, to NOT rebalance half of all followers, but not the other half, to NOT introduce a siege that isn’t fun and only breaks game balance and/or server performance. What in Crom’s name…
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lol. It’s so sad! To be ignored everywhere tho. It hurts. But I would expect their announcements here
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