Katana314

If somebody goes to the zoo, jumps in the lion pit, and throws rocks at a lion, I imagine a lot of people wouldn't "wish the death penalty on him for his sheer offence" when he's pulled out of the enclosure. However, I also imagine many people would feel unsympathetic if said person happened to die at the lion's jaws, nor wish for the lion to be punished.

I’m reminded of an old Saints Row 2 mission where somebody needs to tank property values in an area, and so sends you to spray literal shit everywhere.

I’ll admit, even as someone hating on Xbox recently this does worry me.

At the very least, Steam forms a decent competitor with the Deck. It’s a very high mark up in console convenience.

But there HAVE been other games based around time loops that manage to avoid that frustration, for instance by letting you manually restart the loop yourself in a quick way, or giving other starting points.

Famous examples include Majora's Mask, The Sexy Brutale, and others. I understand Outer Wilds tries to hold the trappings of its story around the loop being more sci-fi than magic/fantasy in nature, but that's still a goal of the writers to wrap the rules of the world around mechanics that are fun to play.

I can even think of many games that gave themselves minor plotholes and odd exceptions to the "world rules" just so that the player could get through it more conveniently.

I don’t know if I can agree - there’s enough friction just in being able to explore the world from workings like that, I don’t blame them for changing it. At best it can feel cheap. There’s still plenty of ways to apply vulnerability of the unseen.

I guess that may be at least partly a consequence of its development hell.

Keep in mind, you don’t tend to hear about failed studios that didn’t release their games on a console. This may be survivorship bias.

Whether or not it’s a failure, it’s a waste of time. Imagine if a relaxed open world game constantly interrupted you with cutscenes of your character falling over, slowly waking up, and trudging back to where they fell.

The auto pilot literally steered me into the sun.

The investigation board didn’t really help me. Basically just said somewhere on this planet is a clue, so spend several loops trying to get into the locked areas. I also got tired of the janky physics and quit, even after successfully navigating the portal bramble place

True, most metaphors around DRM related to physical items collapse reasonably quickly. The thing about home locks was only worthwhile for the topic of how dysfunctional society gets with locks on everything and no trust.

Most DRM metaphors start with “A person has X object, and is greedy for money” - nothing written as to how they obtained that object.

The more intricate comparison is that someone has produced a good that is easily copied, but required deep financial investment on their part to first create. It’s disingenuous to forget that part or imply all people selling something digital are rich by those or other means. People put large investments into the idea that their copiable works would be desired by other people. No one’s obligated to buy it, but they’re betting enough people will want it to pay for it and recoup costs. “It’s okay, we didn’t delete your copy from your hard drive” means nothing.

The extension to the thought about “we don’t put locks on everything because we trust most people act honorably” is this: If we naturally expected all players to pirate all games, then there would be much, much fewer artists dedicated to creating media. There are many cases of people writing software for donations, and they often need additional funding. Firefox is unfortunately a prime example of that, being primarily funded by Google.

By the way, Google puts out its free software thanks to ads. Don’t you love those? Makes you prefer a different financial relationship with consumers.

It'd be fun if the EU started policing any use of the phrase "We are required to show this dialog".

They're not. They choose to show that dialog so that they can try to apply commercial tracking cookies. Anything for website function is already covered by EU laws.