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It is too big when the density of reasons to go there and explore becomes to little.

Personally, I don't really care for games that have huge maps just to pass through while traveling around. There needs to be a reason in the story for every place to be there.

Every village, town or city needs to be filled with quests and stories, and the space between them as well to a lesser extend. They serve as immersive distractions. They need to be alive.

The map is too big if it cannot be filled with enough stuff to explore and experience. And I don't mean climbing yet another tower, or doing yet another variation of the same puzzle.

TBH, I am not much of a sandbox game player and the JC 2 and 3 maps looked nice, but didn't really invite me to stay and explore a single area for a while, because the areas didn't have much depth. I prefer a much higher density of things to do. Each village should have a couple of hours of content, exploring it and the neighboring area. And larger towns or cities even more.

I want to minimize the 'just cruising through' parts of maps.

Cyberpunk as well had too much dead space when it comes to stuff to do in many parts of the city. Some parts of course act as just the background for other parts, which is fine. But other parts where beautifully handcrafted and interesting, but there is not much to interact with or people to talk to there.

To me it is important to have enough content and depth that the player learns to get to know their way around a place, and gets to know characters and develop relationship with each place.

If you like sassy AI, take a look at ADA from satisfactory. She is insulting the player ins some way on every upgrade.

I don't know what you mean by that. No country or federation in the world is self sufficient. Everyone needs global trade.

On a separate note, the BG3 native Linux version is so strange. Larian is threating the SteamDeck like a console. As if it is a bundled OS+HW system with only one available game store and only one useable OS. So they are only releasing it in steam, not on any other store. As if that means it can only be installed on SteamDeck and not on other Linux systems on different Hardware. They forget that anyone can install other Linux distributions or even windows in SteamDecks or use other game stores.

This decision is so strange, because it disadvantages people that bought the game for PC elsewhere and own a SteamDeck.

Like will they make performance patches to their games gated behind which which store the game was bought from?

I echo the criticism of the term 'sideloading', before it started to mean just installing software, I assumed it meant using a separate device or software on the side, like a PC with a debug interface or memory inspection tools, to inject custom code into a running system or software.

Similarly to preloading libraries into games or other software to replace functions in order to change or enhance the game or software. For instance used with script extenders or game mods. There it is 'pre' because the software is not running yet. 'Side' would be on running software.

But installing applications (the distribution doesn't matter) is in no way side loading.

And I really hate that the press or whoever picked this term up from apple or google and ran with it without question.

And now, because that term is so strange and useless in that way, its definition keeps getting changed into whatever the industry needs in order to squeeze out more money and personal data, while taking away the freedom and rights of the owners.

Apart from questionable quality of the result, a big issue to me about LLMs is the way it substitutes human interaction with other humans. Which is one of the most fundamental way humans learn, innovate and express themselves.

No technological innovation replaced human interaction with a facsimile, that way before.

I think humanity is really slowly being replaced by LLMs.

Presentation and simple, but stupid and wrong ideas, are preferred over actually researching and understanding situations, isolating the underlying issues and working on ways to resolve or at least lessen them.

Just like LLMs, fewer and fewer people seems to care about a deeper understanding, and more about if the stream of words look 'good'.

Maybe, but in the Kimmel case there could have been other reasons too. Like Hollywood people not wanting to make business with a company that would just cancel contacts when they have opinions on public. Disney needs those people, arguable more than subscribers.

IMO, consumer boycotts don't really work in general, here it might have worked, but it is also possible it worked for other reasons.

So game mechanics in DLCs cannot be patented, because they are just mods?

A mod isn't a standalone game, sure. It requires the base game to have meaning. Unitl it gets spinned off and becomes a "real" (standalone) game.

Many standalone games are nothing without the game engine, which many developers have bought/licensed.

In this case the "standalone game" can be considered the game engine, which allows the modder to create their own game, within the limits of that engine.

From the point of the player, they need to pay for the game engine and the game/mod in any case, either by paying with one transaction, or, incase of payed mods, in two.

To play a specific DLC, you also have to pay twice. And I am pretty sure that Nintendo will argue that game mechanics in DLCs developed by them can be patented as well...

What I mean is Nintendos argument hat mods aren't 'real games' is flawed...

I did read that. And how much of it was distributed, it doesn't say.

In every article on records about of food preparation, they never say how much of it is eaten and how much of it is thrown away.

I would necessitate that all or a large percentage of it needs to be eaten for the record to count.