I don’t really think it’s a problem at all. It’s on the level of game mechanics being taken too seriously like “why does a sword in my backpack weigh enough to slow me down but not a sword in my belt?” or “how come these vegetable merchants are willing to buy random crap I found in a cave?”

Fallout 1 has a hard timer you have to obey before it is too late to do your main objective and you lose the game. That shit stressed me out so much I just didn’t continue playing.

Is one year really that long considering the dev cycles of big video games?

They put out a single statement with no action, and everyone online instantly went “WE WON IT’S TIME TO CHANGE BACK TO POSITIVE!” and then a lot of cringy RP about democracy.

It feels incredibly artificial.

Worth noting that the boomer wojak meme started as “That 30 year old boomer”. It was never about actual Baby Boomers.

The sooner you stop expecting anything from games journalists, the better off you’ll be.

even when you’re building alliances or trading relationships it is generally to gain some temporary benefit until you are in a position to defeat your partner later on (whether militarily, scientifically, etc).

This is exactly what made me gravitate away from Civ games and more towards Paradox strategy, where the AI actually behaves more like a real country would do instead of a player trying to win a game.

I’d love a city builder based on making gritty industrial cyberpunk megacities, with plenty of verticality and layering. You know, the places where there’s nothing but concrete, steel and neon for kilometers both horizontally and vertically, and a colonies of mutant cannibals fighting against giant rats in the derelict areas near the bottom.