Quoting: ElamanOpiskelijaThe investment is not worth it anymore. Even the impact of Age of Empires 4 has been marginal, in the context of X-Box Studios games. There won't be a big production coming from big studios anymore.

You have to look at smaller studios, like the ones doing Riftbreaker and Age of Darkness, which by the way are both primarily single-player.

For the "big name failures", you really have to look a bit deeper.
AoE4 failed for some extremely big reasons:
1) Competing with yourself - I think that one is self explanatory.
2) It launched in an absurdly shoddy state with features lacking on all fronts - massive holes in the set of features people come to expect from an RTS title nowadays, especially big name ones.
3) Waste of money during development. Look, I believe those documentary videos are nice... but who the hell plays RTS games for that? The money could've been invested in so many better suited things, it's just a mystery.
4) Crazily slow development & updates past launch.

All of these (yes, even the first) could've been avoided, and easily so, with just a sprinkle of common sense among the higher-ups.
My guess is too many yes-men among the hierarchy.

It is by no means a case of the investment not being worth it.
Of course it isn't if you mess up your own game - but that's true for (almost) all AAA launches.

Quoting: CatKillerNorthgard has this: there's the story mode, then the additional story mode that they added recently, and a whole chunk of per-clan challenges. Plus generic skirmish mode.

Yes!
And that game has been a very welcome change. I recommend it to anyone who has the same complaints as I have about the state of RTS gaming.
But it is also a complete rarity aaaand it's not quite a classic base builder RTS with all its special mechanics.

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I wonder when RTS developers will get around to targeting the (clearly larger) pool of single player RTS gamers again with a title that offers a bit more replayability than "play through campaign once".

It's been a while... and meanwhile, almost every RTS that went for the multiplayer crowd and did not have a big name like StarCraft or AoE behind it just straight failed - without competitors ever seemingly learning from each other's failures.

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"Freedesktop.org SDK 22.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 7.61%"

What is that?

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I'll say it looks nice, but there are a lot of issues:

I can no longer pin the window to the task bar and launch Steam from that - what gets pinned is the "Steam webhelper", but clicking on that does nothing. Instead, you have to launch Steam (runtime) another way - apparently those two are now fully separate processes where they did not use to be.

Starting up VR now gives me a GPU driver crash the first time it is done and then works fine.
It also gives me a 109 error after VR startup (that doesn't seem to have any actual effect, though?).
Also, I can no longer access the desktop from within VR.

I keep getting notifications about wishlist items on sale. Again, and again, and again, for the same game.

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I tried to get into the 4th one (thankfully, there is no 3rd entry, that would have been really awful).

But that game is STILL so buggy, man...
A few hours into my playthrough, I always got a crash a few seconds after loading a save game. So that was that.

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Quoting: DrakkerThe plan is to add heat resistant mitts, which go in the gloves slot and that you can forget about forever after once equipped.

Okay. But only if you can add customizable patterns.

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The only thing I must say I don't like is the tongs system.
Before, you could just pick up stuff even if it was hot.

Now, you have to have YET ANOTHER ITEM in your (way too small anyway) hotbar you need to activate first before clicking on stuff. And not only that, but it needs to be in your offhand, which means even the hotbar isn't really that useful here.
Even more inventory tetris. That is just unnecessary, finnicky and very annoying. I'd put the constant need to drag items in and out of inventory and hands as probably the game's biggest annoyance.
It would be fine if you just had to have the item in your inventory in order to pick stuff up safely. I get that it's weird to just be able to pick up hot iron without protection.

Hopefully, a mod will come around that just disables or automates that.

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Damn it.

Every time I pull out, I read some news like that and it pulls me right back in.

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Modders and drama is like bread and butter.
You can have one without the other, but the experience is either stale or really weird.

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