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I think they'd already lost their way a long while before that.

They started as indies grouping together to get visibility, at a time when Steam still curated every game and accepted maybe 4 games a month (yeah, hard to imagine today. It's still hard to be noticed, but for the opposite reason). Back then they distributed only DRM-free games too, with eventually a Steam key option.

At some point they opened their own store and started including big publisher games, and really became just another store, and mostly a key store too. They spew some bullshit about not being specifically a DRM-free store, but really "DRM-agnostic". "We don't restrict publishers' choice of DRM, they can be DRM-free if they want!"

And I'm like, dude, it's not a stance, Steam technically doesn't either. You may need the client to install but plenty of games don't run on any DRM, not even Steamworks.

That does seem rather high. Quests 3 512 are what, $500 now? That truck would need to contain 3,000 of those.

They told me I was too young. They told me I needed more training. I told them to drop dead! How ironic...

I had the French version. While translation was mostly correct, there were some errors here and there.

But the worst part was the newly introduced bugs, because original bethesda bugs weren't enough apparently. For example, every interior with water had an erroneous water level value that made them entirely underwater.

There's a slaver lair cave a couple meters from the beginning of the game, it takes like 30 seconds from the end of character creation to get there. In the French version, it's completely underwater and everyone inside has drowned when you enter it. That's the level of QA we had.

Oh, by the way, publisher for the French version? Ubisoft.

You know, since we're on the subject of Elder Scrolls, Daggerfall actually had something like that.

You could ask anyone for where to find some random place, and the NPC would tell you roughly in which direction you should go, if they "knew" the place. Or sometimes they'd just write it directly on your map.

Still hard to do with voiced dialogue if you don't want your NPCs to sound like robots. Then again, Oblivion didn't need that to make its NPCs weird and robotic, with its 4 voice actors and huge amount of shared lines between everyone.

Fun fact, that's why the immersion-breaking magic compass thing exists in Oblivion (and most open worlds since). Bethsoft devs explained it once.

Stuff is relocated a lot in development, and this means having to rework all dialogues refering to directions, occasionally missing some. It was even more unfeasible for Oblivion in which all dialogue is voiced and would have to be re-recorded.

So they just removed all directions from the dialogue and now you've got 100% accurate floating tags telling you exactly where to go, even when you are not yet sure what you're looking for.

Ah, First Hunt. The demo that made me hope for a good DS Metroid Prime-style game.

And then we got Hunters instead. Boooo.

Il est grand temps que Christophe Lambert aille régler leur compte à nos Immortels.

Actual ammo vending machines. That can be tampered with. Great.

Could we not Torment Nexus the rest of Bioshock, please?

You know, if you people wanna ditch the Kingdom and join the club, I don't think it's too late.

Maybe it's because I played them too late, but while I mostly had a blast playing HL2, the first one never clicked for me.

I know, it's been very influential and new when it released, but it was still quite straight a FPS game. Whereas HL2 is like a crazy theme park of different ambiences and mechanics.

Yeah, it's probably terrifying at first.

I'm sure they'd get used to it though, almost any kind of riding/driving a vehicle is going against all your preservation instincts when it's the first time you do it.