I'm on PC, decently powerful (100+ FPS with an Ultrawide resolution). I read that maybe crossplay could be an issue, so I disabled that, and just did a Legion event by myself, but it was still horrible.
It's mainly the Legion events, since they're the most frequent for me (World Tier 2). I barely see any other players in the world, but occasionally in one of the Vampire zones, where it's fine. World Bosses have been alright, but I've not done as much of them.
Diablo 4 the whole week.
I'm near the end of the main story, and started the final act. It's kinda whatever, it has some good moments, but the first half was a bit boring. After you get your mount, the world is much more fun to get around. It's just massive and there's so much shit to do, it's pretty ridiculous. Lots is repeated of course, just like every open world game, but I still have a good time.
Gear progression is pretty lame right now, since I need to finish the main story to access the higher difficulties, and gear doesn't drop above a certain level. So I've not really gotten any real upgrades in like 30 hours.
What's really terrible though is the network performance. Running around solo in the world is fine for the most part, but some of the event areas, where you're fighting alongside other players, it can be terrible. Constant lags, stutter, and rubber banding. I really need to check if it's a problem on my end, maybe my pi-hole is blocking some domains or something.
I don't think there's really any trolling going on (at least enough that it matters), just that people vote for what they know or recognize, like you said a popularity contest. Three of the titles in the Innovative Gameplay section are pretty niche, no matter how good they are. Even Remnant 2 is dwarfed by Starfield sales, so the latter just becomes the default choice for most people.
If there was any other big name AAA title on the list, I think Starfield could have lost.
This year you could skip a category, and it would still count towards the badge / stickers / whatever, but I don't think that was made clear at a glance. It was explained in the FAQ, but who reads that, when you could just click whatever and be done?
Maybe that was just for the nominations though, I don't remember checking for the actual vote.
You mean for the actual vote? Because you could nominate any game, no matter if you played it or even bought it on Steam, and the Top 5 nominations in each category made it to the final vote.
He's pissed that Mother 3 was never released in the west and is now on a mission to destroy Nintendo from the inside.
The praise comes after he gets asked about the UK regulators on a UK show. Like I said, the CMA initially also tried to block it, just like the FTC, so it wouldn't make sense to me to single one of them out.
I'm mainly associating Pepe with all the Twitch emotes.
They blocked the deal at first, because of concerns with Cloud gaming. Microsoft made concessions and made a deal with Ubisoft, and it got approved.
Started Diablo 4 a couple of days ago and alternate between the Deck and PC. Performance is much better than I would have thought, and even as a KB+M elitist I like the gamepad controls.
Then there are also some Vampire Survivors-like games. VS itself, with the latest DLC (Among Us collab) and Soulstone Survivors.
I also got Dave the Diver and Enter the Gungeon in the Winter Sale, but I don't think I'll get to those any time soon.
There were some stories going around, after the Overwatch 2 launch, that Kotick would sometimes interfere with the development on that game, which would cause them to just lose or waste tons of work. There's more that went wrong with that game, but if those stories are true, that certainly didn't help.
It really sucks, that the next FF7R will probably only come to Steam in a year or two. I liked the Remake far more than I thought, but I'm not going to buy a PS5 for the sequel.