No Civilization on your strategy game list? Civ V and VI are both great picks.
Also, Factorio is a ton of fun and will literally let you play with hundreds of players in the same game if you so choose. The cap is 255.
And I just started diving into loot games with Titan Quest. Allegedly that game supports up to 6 players.
I’ve got a friend who waits for a sale and then buys games like this for White Elephant parties at the end of the year. Often times he buys them for himself because he just has a burning curiosity for bad games.
Really looking forward to Avowed, and the other three ain’t half bad either.
This will probably be similar to the switch from small, limited world maps in games to expansive open-worlds.
Interesting comparison, because I’d argue that that switch has, lately, been worse more often than it’s been better, and that a lot of games would have been far better off if they stuck to the more limited equivalent.
The article says that they’re from all over but also that Unity is refocusing on “core business”, so maybe more cuts from the malware startup.
I enjoy Cyberpunk quite a lot too, but if you’re going to criticize the depth of the game, it’s not necessarily because the writing is subpar or anything. It would just be a reflection of how differently the game can play out with different builds. It’s a little better now with the 2.0 update, but the designers still very explicitly allowed for a hacking option here, a strength option there, and so on. Compare that against something like Baldur’s Gate 3 where you’re free to break all sorts of rules by just casting flight or invisibility on your party and solving a problem in a way that you came up with that the designers didn’t go out of their way to plan for. The latter is real depth. A deep RPG should probably feel like your experience was pretty different from others’ experience.
To be fair, we’ve seen very little of the 2024 slate. We’ve only got release dates for about the first few months of the year.
I wish I could get into it. I’m into games that are inspired by Monster Hunter but not so much Monster Hunter itself. The monsters are too tanky, and you and the monster trade turns rendering each other unable to attack rather than having the proper push and pull of a boss fight. Plus MHW in particular (the only one I spent I any real time with) waits until you’re in “the end game” before it lets you start setting your objectives by hunting something because you want its parts. Before that point, the latest thing you found is always objectively better than any other thing you found, regardless of weaknesses.
What I suggested is not ignoring the problem. Ignoring bad products makes bad products less financially viable. Buying good products instead creates more supply of good products, because producers want the money coming from consumers who only buy good products. This is not a binary boycott vs. no boycott. There is every minute step along the way. Half the industry by revenue is not coming from half the customers.
Sega’s $70M whoopsie-daisy evidently hasn’t ruined the company.
Nor does it need to. It just shows that they don’t think the live service business model they made was going to work; so much so that they flushed their most expensive game to date down the toilet.
Nor has it seemed to stop their plans for Dreamcast-era nostalgia-bait games with the same abusive business model as their hilariously-late-to-the-party battle royale cancellation.
There is zero information on their nostalgic franchises play regarding business model. Many of which came from a different era of predatory monetization that came to an end without legislation (the arcades).
There is no sufficient back-pressure against publishers asking, ‘but what if more money?’
There is when you stop buying their games in the first place.
The fact that you call it ever-shrinking when there is too much to play that doesn’t fit into that bucket is exactly what I was talking about. Plus you must have missed the bottom falling out of live service games this past year, perhaps due to a lack of consumer trust in the product lasting long enough to justify their time or money. Sega just spent $70M on a game that they decided was better to never even launch. Sony shrunk their live service portfolio forecast from a dozen down to half of that. These are the microtransaction-driven games.
If the only games you acknowledge are the big games committing the offense, that’s why the market is taking us there. You’re part of the market. Reward the other games.
Don’t play big games using it then. That’s how you shop your way out of it. If you think every game is full of bad monetization practices, you’re not looking very hard for your video games. There’s an asterisk there on the addiction that a lot of them prey on, but if you’re sick of playing a game where they keep asking you for money instead of letting you enjoy the game, play a different game. There are too many great games that don’t bother with that nonsense.
A victory isn’t the totality of Netflix as a company sinking in the ground. It’s every step along the way, including directing your money toward those that respect you as a customer. Pretty much unanimously the best game of last year went to a game that’s sold DRM-free, with no DLC, with the ability to play mulitplayer without some stupid live service strings attached, and it sold about 10M copies. Rewarding those games is the other side of the coin of voting with your wallet.
My fiance and I just finished the DLC for The Case of the Golden Idol, and not only is that game awesome, but the story hooks for the DLC were a pleasant surprise. We can’t wait for the sequel.
I’ve been playing a lot of Pillars of Eternity, and I made it to Act 2. It’s impressive how insanely good this game is. And then on top of that, it’s impressive that I think everything I like about it is done better in Baldur’s Gate 3.
I finally made it to Master rank in Street Fighter 6! Still some input frustrations until the game can get a season 2 patch, but I’m just happy to finally have something like an Elo rather than the superficial league system, even though my master rating settled slightly below the default 1500 value.
Unsubscribing from Netflix fixes this.
Yeah, it’s on my to-do list. “Seamless” co-op was never really my problem with FromSoft’s mulitplayer design, as they implemented really cool mechanics to make strangers want to help each other. The unfortunate part is that they put in additional mechanics to deter them from helping each other (invasions). The summon sign system is also neat but is prone to race conditions where the sign disappears before you can summon the person because someone else got there first. Things like that are why menus may not only be simpler but also better.
I’m with you on Dark Souls 3. The invasion mechanic was a fun experiment, but in practice, it just kinda blows. It would be nice to have a game with the good combat and level design of Dark Souls, without the invasions, that just lets you summon people from a damn menu like a normal video game.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I feel like it’s been a while since FPS games have been made for me.
No LAN is a no-go for me lately, for multiplayer games. I’m tired of games being designed with forced obsolescence. Sometimes you get lucky and the game has LAN but doesn’t list it on the features, so I figured I’d ask.
Plenty of games still rely on procedural generation to different degrees. It’s a huge selling point in many cases, and in others, it’s a pillar of their genre.