Definitely a mission to keep an eye on, but when Orion drive?
Your personal hatred is blinding you, OP.
Hate to disappoint, but it's far more than you could possibly imagine. You could dump the equivalent mass of the entire human civilization, every single person and everything we've ever made, on the Moon and it wouldn't have a noticeable effect.
And the gravitational pull of all the other planets. I'm sure Jupiter is totally cool with us trying to precisely align and balance a satellite swarm on the point of a needle.
Yeah, it compiled system files/shaders on every launch. I'm honestly surprised they coded the game to do that instead of storing the shaders after first launch, though I suppose it's to account for newer drivers possibly changing the shader pipeline. I think I ran it off my M.2 drive, loading times to get in-game were around 5 minutes and nearly all of that was shader compile.
I haven't overclocked my CPU or GPU, but I have enabled the XMP equivalent on my RAM. That still only brings it up to 32GB@3200MHz.
Bought and launched through Steam.
And optimizing for PC is HARD. There's countless permutations of hardware. As a developer you can aim for the median configuration, the rig built of all the most common components, but what do you do when that's just not enough oomph to run the game well? Hell, there's variability even among the same components. CPUs of the same model can ramp up to higher or lower boost speeds due to minute imperfections in the silicon. Someone else, who got the same RAM sticks as I did, might find that their system becomes unstable at 3000MHz. As the components get more and more intricate, such tiny faults can have mounting effects on overall performance.
Even if the US and EU pony up the not insignificant amount of cash to do it, there's still nothing that can put 1000t into orbit, let alone L1. And splitting it up into 100t segments isn't a solution, since L1 is unstable. The segments will need power, thrusters, gyros, propellant and guidance for station-keeping, so there goes a large chunk of your mass budget. To compensate for that, you need more mirrors. And they need to be continuously replaced as they break down or run out of propellant.
Man, I keep hearing of the game running awful and crashing all the time, but that just was not my experience. I played it from day one. And yeah, the game did crash once and there were stutters in the wide-open areas of Koboh, but those were like half a second and while running around. My rig is no beast either, it's a 5600X and a 3070. As a general rule, at 1080p Ultra, I was getting a stable 60+ fps.
Peter Parker as a Prime Warframe.
Horizon: Zero Dawn. I got absolute shite aim on the best of days and playing on a controller just makes it worse. Switched to m+kb eventually, but by then, the experience was already marred. Think I'll give it some more time, then try again.
Most likely? Nostalgia and familiarity. We'll probably never know if the decision to make it Baldur's Gate 3 was WotC/Hasbro's or Larian's.
There's precedent, though. Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance had less of a connection to Bioware's BG than this one does.
And it shouldn't be. Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 are amazing games that pioneered or popularized many things we've come to expect in modern RPGs, but they're also 20+ years old. If Bioware's Baldur's Gate was released today, it wouldn't be revolutionary. It would be an excellently made throwback to how RPGs used to be.
BG3 isn't made by the same studio, let alone the same people. Their admiration of what they're building upon is clear as a sunny day, though. So let this carry on the spirit of what was and be the foundation of something new.
Trying to recreate my favorite tabletop character, a tiefling celestial bladelock. Probably gonna have to multiclass into cleric or druid for the heals and his backstory obviously can't be done, but he's a much better melee fighter than the tabletop version ever was.