If you like Lord of the Rings: Lord of the Rings Online is extremely nice story wise. It’s an old school MMO, but that shouldn’t shock you when you only know old school ones anyway.
If a low initial fee is fine, wait for Elder Scrolls Online sale. You can regularly get the base game for $5 or so. It has no forced monthly cost so those $5 are worth hundreds of hours or quest content.
Interesting, it’s my absolute favourite personally. I don’t hear many people dislike it.
On the subject of pixel art retro styled RPGs though I want to make a case for https://store.steampowered.com/app/1069160/SKALD_Against_the_Black_Priory/. It doesn’t have voice acting, but otherwise should satisfy your demands given you say you tolerate pixel art. It’s very short for an RPG (16-20h) but that also means it’s very concise, has no filler and no grinding. Should play well on a Steam Deck too. I played it back in January I think and had an absolute blast with it. Cool story and world building, fun somewhat simple combat. Very enjoyable.
EDIT: though there is some dice rolling in dialogue, so maybe that’s a no go.
I think you might enjoy the Atelier series. There are a lot of games in the series (~26 entries); Barrel Wisdom gives a good breakdown, but, generally, Atelier Ryza is a good starting point
Don’t know if by dnd mechanics you mean any games inspired by tabletop rpgs or not and most of the gamesin your list being jrpgs. Age of Decadence is one of my favorite with interesting setting, Serpent in the Staglands is another one. Not exactly a rpg but interesting no truce with the furries Disco Elysium.
I played Albion for a bit, it's quite fun and its free to play. I just started WoW Classic a couple of weeks back and I have never played it before, not too difficult and like some have said its free until level 20.
ah, Runescape. The version I played aaaages ago is apparently now called “Classic”. The only thing I (barely) remember from those times are my massive piles of Kebab -items in my inventory, they were dirt cheap as healing items, but they did have a chance of dealing damage when eaten, instead of healing. :D
No, there was definitely some criticism before. Prior to this month, it wouldn’t be unusual to hear people complain about how it would destroy the live service market and was therefore Bad Actually for games and game preservation
The topic getting much more mainstream just brought all those people with.
There are a handful of concerns from insiders are that somewhat valid, more or less things to be careful about when trying to sort out how to make this fair and reasonable to both sides.
You can ponder how long from shutdown of an online server until the companies IP is no longer worth anything because they have to give up keys to playing it without subs. Same goes for anti-piracy. If A goes under and is bought up by B, how long is that timer before the assets aren’t worth anything anymore.
But all those concepts get thrown the hell out the window when CEOS stick their fingers in their ears and start stamping their feet and shouting “nothing is written in stone” “at some point the service may be discontinued” “Nothing is eternal” when in fact all those problems can be solved. Fucking tone-deaf asshats. Costs you money, sorry nothing is eternal. Costs them money, ohhh noooo can’t do that it might cost money.
When you launch a title with online requirements, you have to escrow or insure the servers for X months and escrow code. When you sell or fold, you then have X months to work out a new buyer or maintainer. At the end of X months. you either keep the game online through other means (sales) or provide server binaries, serverless binaries, or details/code to keep the game running indefinitely.
It makes sense if you are completely consumer-brained and only see it as “companies will make less (live service) games if they are forced to support them/let them be community supported”
No, remember, it only makes sense if you are consumer-brained
Less live service games = less consooming. Some people literally don’t care about things that are in their best interest, they will happily pay $120 for a game that has pay2win microtransactions and requires a monthly subscription and will also shutdown after 18 months, as long as there is a new one to buy after it.
so far the only legit critique I’ve seen is the uncertainty of what this will mean to indie devs - will they be forced to sign with publishers who can assist with compliance etc., what will compliance actually look like to small shops, etc.
I will say this: the vast majority of game devs feel the same way and want to be able to play the games we paid for as well. there’s just a bit of fear of the unknown for small devs.
Warframe is an unconventional mmo, and there’s actually a bit of rpg in there too, moreso than I would’ve expected coming in. It’s great fun though.
I will say the mandatory trading for weapon and frame slots is kinda annoying, but gets less annoying as you progress and get more access to better grinds.
I have posts being critical of it from over a year ago. I’d assume most people who have criticism don’t leave a comment because it’ll get you massively downvoted and your inbox will be flooded with angry replies.
What are the criticisms? Genuinely curious, have no idea what problems anyone might have with it, other than some quotes from the Ubisoft exec trying to act like implementing user run servers is borderline impossible
I don’t understand why there’s such a hyperfocus on petitions. The only thing being attempted is signing petitions in various countries. Every country has declined to do anything and the last hope is the EU parliament which is being treated like some all or nothing final bet. Why just petitions?
Why not directly put pressure on some of the worst offenders like Ubisoft? Lots of people are saying they’re not buying another Ubisoft game again. Cool! Start an official boycott. People who cant sign the EU petition can sign a boycott promise. It wouldn’t be binding or anything but it could create more solidarity around not purchasing their next big release. Companies care about their bottom line.
You know the hate campaign against piratesoftware? Why not do that to the official Ubisoft account instead? They’re the company that is actually causing the problem. You might not like piratesoftware but he’s not the enemy. He hasn’t killed any of his own games. He didn’t make the decision to shut down the Crew. The offical Ubisoft account shouldn’t get to post a single thing without pressure from the movement. Critical memes should be made about the company and shared on social media. The CEO shouldn’t get to speak to an audience without being booed. Companies cave to negative PR all the time.
These things can be done in addition to the petitions. Personally, I don’t think any petitions are going to bring about the change people are looking for. Governments rarely listen to them and the EU isn’t much better. There are just 10 citizens initiatives that have passed and all their responses have been pretty lack luster. Even if the EU enacts the exact laws people are hoping for, what about everywhere else? The idea seems to be that other countries will get trickle down consumer protections. Americans are pushing Europeans to petition the EU parliament to make law changes hoping it will cause American companies to change how they sell products to Americans. It’s just such an odd strategy to me. Again, it can be done, but there’s no reason more direct action can’t be taken in tandem with the petition.
I get lots of downvotes and angry replies for this take which I’m not sure why. I can only assume people don’t like hearing that petitions are largely useless.
Even if mostly useless, not doing anything is even more useless. At least that petition shows support for changes, which may influence some executive to rethink what they think is acceptable from their userbase.
I agree. I also think if you’re not European, you’ve not done anything. There wasn’t even a petition made in the US so Americans haven’t done a single thing, yet are the most vocal about it. That’s the part that confuses me.
Yes, that’s why I didn’t suggest Americans start a petition. A boycott and/or social media campaign is something Americans could do rather than just hope and wait for Europeans to fix everything.
A social media campaign by an American is exactly what SKG is…
The EU initiative was chosen specifically because it actually has a chance to get traction there, and the market is large enough that it can’t just be ignored by publishers.
Your apparent argument is based off (wilful?) ignorance as to which publishers other than Ubisoft take part in this sort of practice and suggesting a boycott, which fixes nothing…
One year ago, right at the beginning of the petition, PirateSoftware came out misreading the initiative by suggesting the idea the petition was about forcing indie developer to host their server, at their expense, forever and other stupid idea on this line. A fabricated these narrative to act as the typical popular youtubers that say endlessly: “this is st0pid, they are st0pid”. The fabricated narrative confused other popular YouTubers with mixed feelings; and there was very little support. This assured PirateSoftware the first place on the youtube rankings when you search for “stop killing games”, plus had lot of kids brainwashed into thinking " this is st0pid". This kind of criticism never went away completely, the were partially silenced by the very recent roaring as people understood correctly what it was actually about. As SKG keep hitting its milestone the angered roar did lowered, so now you can ear again the “this is st0pid” team
You can swear on the Internet. The same way I can say that I want to spray pepper spray on your private parts. And you can then cry about me because I said the big bad stupid word, so I have to una1iv3 myself.
The same way I can say I want to spray pepper spray on your private parts
That’s assault, dumbass. Swearing is fine; threatening someone is a crime. And because you specifically mention their privates, that makes it sexual assault.
For the sake of semantics, there is a difference between saying “I want to” and “I will” when it comes to threatening, and it’s on par with how saying “in my opinion” can save you from liability due to slander.
“I want to” isn’t a threat in the eyes of the law. Well, American law anyway.
Old School Runescape i’ve had a decent bit of fun with and i’d recommend it. It takes a lot of reading, but there’s a free option for you to try if you’re unsure and it runs on damn near anything. Granted i’m not the target audience for MMOs. I usually hop in and dick around a little bit then pop out
Does anyone else find it suspicious there wasn’t any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures?
Nobody here disagrees with any point of the petition. I signed it. Even if gaming companies were rushing to send shills to raid discussions they would have done it months ago and last places they would go astroturff for is this Kazakhstani anti-whaling forum. Especially when their target now is the Eu bureaucracy and MEPs. Where I might say they have not a bad chance of succeeding.
I’m pretty sure it’s in the US. I’m in Utah (pretty far western US) and ping times are like 10-15ms, which is consistent w/ a west coast server. I have a VPS in Germany, and pings are more like 100-150ms.
I’m not exactly sure how pings work w/ cloudflare, so maybe it’s hosted somewhere else, but I would imagine they’d get a cloudflare host near their VPS to minimize latency.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne