Yeah, Embark was founded by the former CEO of DICE so I imagine quite a lot of DICE talent moved to Embark.

I think I was rambling a bit. I think the best course of action is to just give it a try because I think the gameplay is the biggest make or break for people. If you don’t enjoy the gameplay then it doesn’t matter if the game isn’t a toxic mess and not really predatory with the MTX.

I would say the community is much better than what you would expect from Call of Duty or Destiny or anything looking to hit super mainstream. I think most toxic players won’t play the game because the game has a high effective TTK. The average encounter is around probably 1-2 seconds because you usually need to hit more than 5 shots and your opponent has enough time to react and use movement to make them a harder target to hit. The higher TTK may be a deal breaker, it was for a lot of people during launch, but I personally enjoy it.

I think the MTX is pretty mild. It’s all cosmetic so they don’t impact the core gameplay at all, which means if you don’t care about cosmetics your only interaction with the MTX is the little sale window on the top left of the main menu. You can earn some in game currency to buy cosmetics but because it’s F2P their only revenue streams are the battlepass (which again is also strictly cosmetic rewards or in game currency) and the cosmetic shop. Some things are only for real cash and they can look expensive (like $20 for a pack of cosmetic items) but they usually come with in game currencies so if you’re planning to use the in game currency as well that $20 usually drops to $7-$8 which for 2025 isn’t actually that much. I forgot to mention, the battlepass can be bought for the in game currency so what I’ve done is bought the $20 thingy and the use most of the in game currency to buy the battlepass.

Just a PSA, The Finals is playable on Linux and is F2P with a very reasonable monetization (cosmetic only with some free cosmetic options as well) and the new season just began.

For me it scratches that multiplayer itch because the destructible environments make matches feel very dynamic.

I don’t think it’s even necessarily that the GPU pricing has ballooned. I think the main reason is that that every new game has to compete with pretty much every other game ever made. For example I enjoyed Death Stranding and I am interested in Death Stranding 2, but I’m probably not getting in on launch because there’s a big chance I’ll probably start playing Stardew Valley for the n’th time, because I feel like that’s what I want to play. I’ll probably play DS2 when I get the Kojima itch.

You need to be more specific than “a child” considering he mentally already seems to be at the intellectual capacity of a 15-16 year old (except without any of the capacity to learn).