This, I always told my juniors to not rein in their hobby for writing code in their spare time. I saw too many people get burnt out and then get stuck on their career just doing the bare minimum to not get fired. Although it can be a plus for some people.
Most of my gaming friends who play on consoles are well off. There's an abundance of games that you can play for free/cheap on PC that don't need a lot of horsepower to play. Most people play on cheapo laptops or cheap PCs with less than 500 USD budget to build. My brother in law still plays on a Ryzen 1600 and RX 480 PC built in 2017 right when it was released and the only upgrade made to the system is getting 1660 Super or 1660 Ti 3 years ago. He mostly play Brawlhalla and Forza Horizon.
There's a possibility that it's not coming to Steam. Ever.
Epic is acting as the publisher and they funded the development of the game. However there's always the possibility of Alan Wake 2 not selling well enough on EGS so Epic decided to put the game on Steam to recoup the costs.
If you're using an actual HDR capable display, HDR is pretty amazing. I know it's weird reading about it online, but the lighting seems so much more "real" when you're playing games on HDR. You actually have to "see it to believe it" as you can't see it from screenshots or from people taking pictures of their displays.
Windows 11 actually has a calibration tool similar to the ones at the console so you can get good HDR on Windows.
It works, although you need to really stick to only working during the work time. I tried it when writing my thesis and miraculously I managed to work on it basically the whole day, from morning till night. Since then I've been using it sporadically when there's an important work because for it to work for me I need to lock myself up so as to not get distracted by other people.
That doesn't make the criticisms invalid. But, there's always an option to vote with your wallet by treating this release as an early access and not buying it with the current condition and with full price.
Most people lambasting the game makes it seem that they HAVE to buy the game with the current condition no matter what. Just file this game as a play in Game Pass or buy it next year when there's a sale. If more people skip from buying the game at full price the devs will get the message and will try to release the game when the game is ready to be released like Larian.
I actually do this by buying recent Larian games (D:OS, D:OS2, & BG3) at day one or close to it after the review embargo is lifted (to see whether it's worth buying or not) to reward them releasing their games in a complete state. Even BG3 had some issues with performance and cut content with their 3rd act.
Just upgraded my home internet from a spotty 50 Mbps with lots of packet loss to a 250 Mbps with cheaper monthly costs. So most of the time I'm just downloading games for the heck of it. I might not need to use my HDD to backup games anymore as the download speed is the same as my external HDD speeds ♪～(´ε｀ )
If that's the attitude of everyone the whole world will be colonized and subjugated by imperialists. There will be a point where you cannot run anymore. Let me ask you a question, what would you do if this happened to you?
But isn't that like making excuses for yourself tho? I usually did the same as the parent commenter did. But if there's an especially critical task that I cannot afford to ignore I use something like pomodoro timer to keep my attention span in check. Barring an external distraction -- getting more of this as I'm getting more senior in my current work + kids when working remotely (ノಥ,_｣ಥ)ノ彡┻━┻ -- this method usually works.
TBH it's not really the end of the world. I remember the first one running like hot garbage on my PC. Granted maybe it was my shitty CPU being FX-8320 at that time.
On my machine I got around 40-70 with the default settings. For a city management game having a stable (meaning not crashing) game would be its first priority. Although I definitely see this as an early access release regardless of what CO is saying. So I played this on my Game Pass sub. My regional pricing for Game Pass is really good, as converted to the dollar is only tree fiddy. Although the minimum wage in my country is only 1/4 of the US so it all adds up to the same I guess.
It looks like Extraction based shooters are the new Battle Royale shooters. All of the AAA devs are spinning up their own take of the formula. To be honest extraction based shooters are not for me, because most of the time you're just going to get killed by campers or people using wall hacks.
I asked ChatGPT who then asked Dall-E 3 to make this.