kuberoot

It's my turn to ask this question, it seems, but if this image low resolution and very compressed?

You can design a game without open world and the players don't even notice it.

I think part of what that's about, and what's important for me, is a sense of agency. Giving the player choices, and importantly including implicit choices the game doesn't explicitly tell you about, and reacting to those choices.

I find it really lame when a game puts you through basically a linear game, and at the very end, after a convenient save point, tells you to make The Big Choice (probably That Decides The Fate Of The World), because that feels completely meaningless - as opposed to the game for example telling me to do something, some fundamental gameplay element, and at a crucial story point if you refuse to do it it doesn't fail you, it offers a different path forward.

Doing an open world feels like a conceptually simple way to give players a sense of agency and set more things up. If you see something cool, you can go there, if you can make it. You're not required to stick to the path, you're allowed to explore, look for things to do, or run straight to the big objective. And if you do run into something optional, help a character, maybe they show up in the grand finale and play a role, and it makes those encounters feel rewarding.

One thing is that pet groomers will recommend grooming kittens so they get used to the experience, so that if they have trouble grooming themselves and need help it's less stressful for them to get washed, dried, all that stuff. (Though this is coming from the groomers who get paid when you do that, for your consideration)

Regarding the last paragraph, developers have adapted, and now include more complex/obscure secrets meant to be shared by people and solved together. Though of course if players just look things up before even trying then you can't stop them, but that's their own fault.

The modern scourge are dataminers, who will immediately jump to digging through game files and spoil puzzles in the communities trying to solve them. Not all of them will do that, but it only takes one to ruin the fun.

Also Tunic is an absolute banger of a game, would recommend, just don't spoil yourself!

Worth noting is that you can also get factorio DRM-free on the website, and then downloading mods is locked behind logging in with your account - same as playing multiplayer on online-mode servers. But mods are also just zip files that you can also download from the website (still need to log in and own the game), so same as games with steam workshop, people will share mods same as they share game files.

If that's too inconvenient for you to pirate, well, "piracy is a service issue" ;)

Divinity Original Sin (1 and 2) lets you play as big of an asshole as you'd like.

I haven't gone through it myself, but I think Baldur's Gate 3 has ways to side with "bad guys", I believe I've seen patch notes about expanding the content there, so that's also an option from the same devs.

But the origin characters generally aren't perfect and have their motivations, especially The Dark Urge.

*sweaty

Opinionated sweater is when somebody offers to refund the sweater they gave you as a gift

Arguing that fission power won't do anything is objectively incorrect.

That's an opinion, regardless of whether it's true or not. The analogy is analogous because I'm taking the same actions and statements, applying them to analogous topics in a different field. Dismissing that because you believe your beliefs to be objective fact is just dishonest.

But that's more like having people talk about how we should do nuclear and renewable power, and you coming along complaining people should be working on developing fusion power instead because fission power just won't do anything

To my understanding, you can't really do more than bring the parts together in a compact arrangement and keep them like that, so if the demon core would stay together (and not, say, get blown apart by the release of energy), then the issue would be a lack of fissile material (or reflectors), no?

See also an image of a nuclear bomb design (I think Little Boy) from Wikipedia, which illustrates the idea of sliding a rod of fissile material into a hollow cylinder, though the bomb did it in reverse. I think the design might be obsolete due to inefficiency, and it might need the tough shell to hold it together (and act as a neutron reflector).

This has been explored to death, e.g. via the Demon Core experiments

If I'm not mistaken, in case of the demon core accidents, the reaction was always interrupted by the experimenter frantically separating the two halves, right? Doesn't mean it would detonate, but using it as an example of why it wouldn't doesn't seem to check out if I'm remembering correctly.

I've had dreams where I played a 2D top down game, and my perception would get mixed up/confused between the top down game view and a first person perspective.

I could certainly see myself dreaming of watching a video of something happening and transitioning from watching it to being there.