Hold up, “enshitification” is just turning into a buzzword now.
Enshitification has from the beginning described a service or product which is first released one way, and then over time is made worse for the users in ways designed to squeeze more profit out of them.
Without some serious mental gymnastics, forced stealth sections tend to just be bad design choices. Not every bad thing is the same kind of bad thing.
Without some serious mental gymnastics, forced stealth sections tend to just be bad design choices. Not every bad thing is the same kind of bad thing.
While I disagree with your comment on the definition of “enshittification”, I agree that forced stealth sections are just bad design. I remember those have been a thing for a long time now, and before then it was ice levels.
Copying from a later reply: I was reading their definition as being too specific. Imo enshittification is any time the relative average quality of a class of products or services decreases, either due to increased prices or decreased quality at the same price. This can be applied to a specific product or service, but can also describe a decline in quality across an industry.
Wikipedia isn’t the end all, but in this case I think it provides a working definition.
Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
I was reading your definition as being too specific. Imo enshittification is any time the relative average quality of a class of products or services decreases, either due to increased prices or decreased quality at the same price. This can be applied to a specific product or service, but can also describe a decline in quality across an industry.
Enshittification refers to a process with specific phases that ensure services will degrade at the expense of users, and then business customers, so that shareholders can extract as much profit as possible from both of those groups. It was coined by Cory Doctorow, who explains it here:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
On the one hand I get where you’re coming from, those sections are very thematically different from the rest of the game, but realistically it’s just a couple of minutes of very easy stealth.
I have no interest in playing this game myself, but I’ve been watching a streamer go thorugh the story mode. The combat is whatever, probably good enough if you like this type of game. The story between all the fights is told absolutely horribly though. Lots of stuff just gets skipped over or mentioned in a single picture. Like suddenly Goku is Super Saiyan God, with no explanation or a character is dead.
I’m pretty dialed into indie games. What kind of games do you like? I might be able to recommend some. I get most of my indie recommendations through word of mouth or curators.
The steam store page has an algorithm tuned to your preferences. If you’ve already been playing a lot of live service games, then it assumes you must like them. Once you start showing an interest in other games, you can probably just cruise through your discovery queue.
To skip the algorithm, you can try looking at the steam store web page in a private / incognito window. But if most of the money makers are live service or free-to-play then that may just be the default offering.
It’s mostly just finding some reviews/word of mouth sources that you trust and which align with your tastes.
On the review side of things Second Wind covers a decent spread of indie games. I also occasionally see some new stuff from streamers, but that’s more of a toss up since there’s a lot of sponsored coverage.
Almost everything on my store page is AAA or liveservice trash.
Very little on my Steam page is. This is just one data point but still it suggests their suggestion algorithm somewhat works for this.
Just an observation on that specific thing not a disagreement with the problem. Live service is trash and needs to go away if it’s not an exclusively multiplayer game.
Look at what pirate repackers like fitgirl and dodi are putting out. They have a much lower throughput and often focus on popular indie or small studio titles.
That’s not my experience with steam at all. Only one or two options of the steam store tend to show AAA games over indie games. If you browse by category or using the dynamic recommendation you’ll see plenty of good games.
I think this may be algorithmic. Like steam gives suggestions based on what you have already purchased, and what other people who purchased the same games also like. Additionally it’ll tell you what your friends are playing if you friend them on steam. This sort of gives everyone a different picture of steam suggestions that is tailored to them. It might be a good idea to find older non-live service games you like, add them to a new profile or wishlist, and then see what new information pops up for you.
We all are, but people keep paying them money. It won’t stop until people get their heads out of their asses and stop doing that. Kind of like how microtransactions won’t go away because whales won’t stop shoveling dump trucks of money at mobile games.
Why’d you bring up tem tem specifically? It’s supposed to be “Pokemon but an MMO”. That’s the entire appeal. I had Pokemon loving friends that played it at launch and loved it dearly. It’s sad that it’s died, but if you want a single player version of tem tem, there’s about 22 Pokemon games according to Bulbapedia. Go play one of those.
Yeah, I’m an offline RPG gamer and this generation is leaving me behind. Thankfully there’s still some great options like Zelda, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy. But I feel our options are slimming down.
I got really into TCG Card Shop Simulator. It’s pretty much like all these other “Simulator” games, that pop up in early access every few weeks, like Supermarket Simulator, Recycling Center Simulator and whatever, although the theme is definitely much more appealing to me. The standout feature is probably that you can actually open card packs to collect the gazillion of cards already in the game or sell them as singles. The game is also made with Unity and can use existing mod frameworks, so there are tons of mods out already. You can change the cards to Pokemon, Digimon, and more, along with a bunch of mods to automate the more tedious aspects. I’m at a point right now, where I just need to restock my warehouse every night and can spend the rest of the day sitting in a dank corner and open packs like a degenerate.
The Diablo 4 expansion was supposed to launch a few hours ago, but it got delayed and nobody can play and has to wait.
I genuinely fault gamers for some of this too, though.
There’s a very small indie game out called “Liar’s Bar”. It’s simple and fun. But, there were still people in forums savagely complaining that the game’s pointless XP system didn’t save correctly after a match - and that it didn’t have skins/emotes to earn for investing time into it.
There’s also MP games I play that I find fun, where I see popular, level-headed streamers complain that there’s been “nothing new” in its past two months. For most players, this wouldn’t even matter because they’re not able to play it nearly as often.
Then there’s games like Back 4 Blood, the late-grown attempt to reinvigorate Left 4 Dead’s magic. For those who don’t know; the game is still fully playable right now. It’s still fun. The developers just don’t add more to it anymore. Yet, as soon as they made this announcement that they were moving on to other games, there were conclusive, prophetic statements out about “Why Back 4 Blood DIED” as though the game is completely gone.
It’s wrong to claim that publishers moved to the constant-update, live-service model forcefully in their own decision-making vacuum. People (maybe not even the people in this thread) asked for this.
Valheim and Satisfactory are masterclass. GOAT simulator is good for 6 year olds. Raft was kind of dull be entertaining with multiplayer. V Rising I didn’t really care for, but haven’t played since it was first available on Steam
While I disagree with how long they’re been in early access especially when other games are in early access and doing it better… The updates were still pretty impressive. The new biomes were pretty interesting.
They’ve gotten progressively more poorly thought out though.
Mistlands is glorious, but so fogged in as to be essentially invisible. I resorted to a mod to increase the value of the wisp.
Ashlands is just a brutal, unfun grind. Not hard, just relentless especially with endless pop-in of enemies. Not to mention even more horrendous performance… 20fps on a very high end system is abysmal (rtx 4090, nvme drive, etc).
I bought it the very day it came out for no real reason and fell in love with it. Put about 500 hours in it before any updates happened. Played a little since then but those higher tier biomes are pretty brutal. Gonna wait until it’s 1.0 before jumping in again. Best $20 ever
Palworld is a lot of fun. Much different than a lot of survivals since I was never into Pokémon. Enshrouded I played on release for a little bit. Gonna sound weird but I the building turned me off a bit and the combat i felt a little awkward. I know a lot of people love it so it’s like a me thing.
Icarus is really cool. I refunded it initially because I felt it was janky but they have released an update every single week since launch. Picked it up again at the start of summer and I have like 300+ hours in it. It’s so good.
I was really bad. So bad that I only played archery and even got archery class over level 30. My brother always tops the leaderboards and he came over one day and showed me how to play. Basically, make sure you’re in third person and we use either the battle axe or executioners axe. I’m now regularly at the top of the boards.
If you ever want to join up with us let me know. We do the 40 man mixed
It’s been a while but I remember I was annoyed with something to do with having to find blood. I know that’s really stupid considering it’s a vampire game. Also the top down view i have a hard time with these days since I played so much Diablo 1+2 back in the day
Just finished Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Got it five years ago but got frustrated and uninstalled it. Then I played it on-off for some time. But after lots of tries I got the final boss killed. Yes, there is an option for New Game Plus but nope, time to play something else. Brilliant game, hard but rewarding.
I strongly disagree, but that might be because I started playing on PS5 and didn’t move to PC until over a hundred hours in. Movement and interaction with the environment just seems a lot more immersive to me with the controller than with a mouse.
The controller experience is really well thought through and the game is definitely playable with the controller. That said, I still chose kb+m because I felt like I got a better overview of a situation and the options I had in that situation, but I could see why someone would think the controller option is more immersive.
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