Maybe Im reading the vibe wrong but to me, it seems like when it comes to the programmer/sysadmin/poweruser side of Microsoft, they seem pretty good in terms of not being total shit. Their “normie” facing side though seems hella shady though. Things like ads in windows, the speculated subscription model for windows, office 365, one drive spam.

For example, things like vscode, WSL, winget, power tools, the new console app, powershell, typescript, opening up .net to native cross platform. All these things are pretty sweet and seem like something they wouldn’t be interested in doing.

It almost feels like there are two Microsofts right now and they are at odds with each other. So yeah, I guess enjoy it while it lasts, but always be ready to drop them like a sack of potatoes.

Is it really the sloppiest though?

I’d say its about on par with their past games. It’s clearly their game engine, modified to do space stuff.

If you come at it with the mindset that not every game has to get bigger and more expansive and have more and more realism/mechanics that don’t serve the core gameplay, it achieves it’s goal.

Not saying its game of the year material or anything, but if I was doing an employee review, I’d give it a meets expectations grade.

That’s the thing. I think it is a carry over from that. Back then a lot of games didn’t have a menu or anything, after you hit the button, you were just playing the game.

Like Mario 1 and 3 have just a simple 1 or 2 player select then you are in the game. Some single player games didn’t have anything, they just would go straight to the game after you hit start.

Now there isn’t really a need since nearly every game has a menu for loading saves, starting a new game and such. So they could go, but are just a vestigial part of gaming history at this point.