These games have infinite replay value and people like them. That’s all a top ranking game is. Many have tried to replicate these successes and failed (in recent memory, Concord). There have been a huge number of good games coming out too. But they’re not somthing you put 2,000 hours into with your friends.
There’a a big element of the snowball effect too. Big games attract more players than small games. Esports are a lot like normal sports in that regard. People make new sports pretty often but Football, Basketball, Baseball etc have been around for 100+ years so they have large communities and social relevance. If I asked my buds to go out for a match of “whipple stick”, my new favorite sport, they’d just laugh at me.
On the other hand, new games CAN become huge if they’re built well enough. A few of the top 10 were released less than 10 years ago, which says a lot about how these “main games” DO change over time. I think Deadlock will get up there after a few years of polishing.
From what I read it was over 8 years in development, it should’ve been well beyond a rework, or maybe even a couple, already.
I’m almost certain that Sony, as any boss, was quite done with the whole fiasco and just said “fuck it, let’s go” and just see what happens. It probably wasn’t worth the time and effort to keep putting resources into a project going nowhere.
Starfield’s biggest flaw was in trying to make a grand space game given that Bethesda’s strength is sandboxy, exploration focused, RPGs.
I am of the mind that exploration fundamentally does not work in a space game because the scale is too big. There’s waaaay too much space on even a single planet to populate with meaningfully interesting things to find. So there’s maybe one or two interesting handcrafted things per planet and you spend all your time in system and galactic scale maps to find them, rather than stumbling across them while out on a walk.
The only space games that work imho, are either ones with tiny planets like The Outer Wilds, or ones that are more linear and driven by very good writing and space is more of a backdrop than the actual millions of km you have to travel through and explore (like The Outer Worlds, or Mass Effect).
So I think Bethesda has a higher chance of success in literally any other, more limited, setting, given that writing isn’t their strong suit, but all that being said, I still don’t know if they’ll course correct.
There is also the mediocre story, but hopefully they’ll learn the lesson that no, we don’t want something as automagically powerful as a dragonborn or whatever, it worked for skyrim sure, but it’s a not something needed in every title.
Working from a zero prisoner to hero was always the goal and should be again.
I think the issue is that they still have their developers write their own quests rather than hiring a team of dedicated writers like other studios do nowadays.
The games will never be narratively coherent when everyone is pulling in a different direction.
I think Skyrim’s was better because there was less central control. I know that stuff like the whole Werewolf quest was just made by a passionate designer and dev who made it after hours, but that during Starfield development a lot more got run up the chain and there was less individual freedom.
I suspect that stems from the massive procedural generativeness but am not sure.
It’s a Block Pushing Game is a sokobanlike from the creator of Baba Is You. It’s relatively short but has multiple novel mechanics. I enjoyed it enough to create a curses client for it.
PS: If you like Baba Is You, Hempuli publishes multiple new games per month, mostly clever sokoban-likes, at hempuli.itch.io
I am now 45. I tried Deadlock, was overwhelmed, some other player told me to “fuck off” through the vocal chat because I was in the wrong lane, I uninstalled.
Generally, I don’t have time anymore to play online games that are about grind and skill. I don’t want to play only one sort of game. I want a game with an end so that I can move to another one.
MOBAs were cool at the time of warcraft 3. Let’s move on.
If youre looking for a game with an end then you might wanna stick to single player. Online multiplayer is designed to keep players coming back for more
I enjoy MOBAs a lot, but their communities tend to be so toxic… I’m playing other multiplayer games because I am tired of the toxicity (among other things).
When your core gameplay loop is all of 15 minutes long that feeds into a 40-60 hour repetitive grind to unlock a slightly better item, new title or recolored cosmetic, combined with a complete absence of quality or competent writing, innovative mechanics while it’s apparent most of the budget went into marketing and pre-rendered cutscenes that can be just watched on youtube, yeah it’s bad to give potential customers a 30 minute demo that displays everything your game is without hinting any additional benefit for purchasing the full game.
I’m a bit hesitant about allowing or not linking to the website archives.
For the time being, and while we discuss about it among the mods, I’d like to ask you to refrain from posting any link to said archive.
If we decide to allow it, I’ll restore the comments containing said links I’ve removed.
Thank you for your understanding.
Final Edit :
After carefully considering both sides arguments, and talking about it with LM admins and the mod team, we decided to keep the direct links removed.
LM allows meta-discussions around piracy, but not linking to possible pirated content. As we do not have the means and resources to check the whole 12Go dump to make sure no there is no copyrighted content in one of those Rom Hacks. More information here.
Rom Hacking is a gray area which is, depending on your location and/or interpretation of your local law, allowed or not. LW is under EU Jurisdiction (see that part of the TOS), and has to abide with rather restrictive law on that matter. There is unfortunately no broad “fair use” exception in that jurisdiction, only specific exceptions listed here. None of them seem to be applicable to Rom Hacks, which mean that they are to be considered potentially illegal under LW jurisdiction.
From what I see in the archive link I posted, it only contains patches, not playable games, neither original nor patched. You need a copy of the game already to make any use of it.
You don’t need to have the full game to be considered as piracy. Anything allowing to break a DRM could be considered as such.
Edit :
I understand that most of you do not agree with that, and I do too, but as a mod I have to put my feelings on the matter aside and put the community and lemmy.world interest first. If we get DMCA (or the EU equivalent), consequences could be quite significant for this community or the server itself.
You can find a more specific explanation of my stance here :
Thank you for taking the time to share your expertise.
In the EU, things are a bit different. US Fair Use is quite open ended, with a lot of room for interpretation. In the case of EU copyright laws, the list of exclusions is explicitly listed in Information Society Directive Article 5.
In my opinion this could fall into either art. 5.3(d), art. 5.3(i), or art. 5.3(k), but I’m no copyright law specialist. I do have one among my friends, but she kinda got a child last week, I’m not gonna bother her for that 😅.
First, please take into consideration that lemmy.world website and organisation is bound to EU laws (as stated in the TOS). As such, in the current case the EU copyright laws, that are as previously stated, far more restrictive than the US ones.
As you stated, the objective of ROM patches is to modify copyrighted material. One of the right protected by copyright in the EU is the right to modify a software.
By default, if no licence is given, software is considered as being under the most restrictive licence available (even if the source code is freely available), which means, in this case, an “all rights reserved” licence, which prohibit software modification.
In the EU, third party patches are considered as derivative works, and requires an explicit authorisation from the copyright holder to be published and used on copyrighted material. Some exceptions exists, as previously stated, but applying them here would be quite far fetched.
For now, and while I keep researching on the application of EU copyright laws to try to find a flaw that would allow me to authorize those links, I’ll have to keep those links removed.
The comments would be restored if the link are removed by the comment authors.
Functionally speaking the distinction is negligible. Users won’t be able to download patches from the site, and new patch submissions won’t be accepted.
People also used RHDN as a news source to find out about new hacks and translation releases, and it was the best resource for doing that. And it sounds like it still will be going forward, so... I disagree with you on that.
For the same reason that YouTube music refuses to play offline content stored on your phone until there’s a live internet connection - particularly helpful when you’re outside of coverage.
That reason is that you are the product and playing without being tracked doesn’t make any money.
Unless something has recently changed, I was unable to play music that was downloaded inside YouTube music but refused to play if there was no internet access.
No, it’s not the same; not even slightly! Youtube Music is a monthly subscription, whereas Ubisoft presents the transaction as a sale. Ubisoft has no right to gatekeep your property away from you.
I feel like a lot of people haven’t ever played Rogue and so struggle understand what Roguelike actually means. Fair call, it’s a very old game with essentially no graphics, but to understand the genre properly everyone needs to give it a go at least once in my opinion.
Side note; love me the whole Mystery Dungeon franchise. I still need to pick up the Shiren the Wanderer series.
Major part of it is that some people differentiate hard between rogue-likes and lites, and others simply do not, and the two will never get along with each other. The thing being that if there are any type of permanent upgrade/unlock systems that makes the game easier the more you play, it is not like rogue, where instead of grinding for more max hp or dodge percentage, you “grind” knowledge and experience as a player.
Which means that there are very, very few actual roguelikes because upgrade systems are just so cool ™ and every game obviously needs one. Or three.
Tunic is a solid 10-15 hour adventure game, and I highly recommend playing without spoilers as several experiences are information-locked like Outer Wilds. It’s an isometric adventure game heavily inspired by Zelda with some Souls influence bleeding into the lore, mechanics, and boss fights. Replayability is limited to speedrunning and challenge runs.
Bastion is a wonderful adventure game with a heavy focus on combat. It’s a precursor to Hades from the same developer, and shares the same mechanical DNA minus the rogue-lite elements that Hades introduced. The followup game, Transistor, is also worth checking out, though it didn’t quite hit the same highs for me as Bastion. Both are 10-20 hour adventures with limited replayability if you want to achievement hunt.
“Finishing the game” comes before the “replayability” aspect though. You finish the game first, THEN you see if it’s replayable. So… Yes, I completely agree? Replaying is usually always optional lol
I kind of agree with OC’s sentiment. The game is a masterpiece, but the puzzle solving and metagame is half of the game, if not more. Once you’ve solved that, replaying it is just going through the motions of a pretty OK action adventure game. I dunno.
It’s like playing Braid after beating it. Another masterpiece of a game! You could speed run it—which I was very much into—but the thought of playing it again after that just doesn’t interest me. It’s just going through the motions.
That being said, its been years and years since I’ve played it and there’s a new anniversary edition coming out with new content. I’m almost certainly going to buy it.
I loved the built-in speed run of that game. You only had 45 minutes to beat the whole thing. The first time I accomplished that, my time was 44:58 and some change! I lost my shit that I managed to juuuust squeak in a win! 😂
I ended up getting it down to 37 minutes. There are so many tricks in that game to speed it up. I wonder what the official best time is. Back in the Xbox 360 days there were a lot of cheaters using the back-end to submit bullshit scores. Or people doing save trading and all having the exact same time down to 1/100 of a second.
I’ve got my Tunic time down quite a bit too, and since your upgrades carry over I’m super OP with my health, magic, and stamina spanning basically the entire screen lol. To me it’s fun to go in and just do a run here and there. Personal preference obviously but there’s certainly replayability there.
I definitely played through Bastion at least thrice. There is enough build variety that you can make another playthrough feel totally different, not to mention the difficulty modifiers. First game that I took the time to 100% for achievements.
Bastion’s story doesn’t necessitate multiple plays. Sure, it’s fun to play through again and try different builds. I’ve also 100%'ed the game.
The important thing, I think, for OP’s question is that it can be finished in one play. It has a satisfying ending from which the player can set down the game and move on.
I would somewhat disagree with Subnautica. There are lots of different settings you can tweak to make the game harder or more survival-oriented that might warrant a replay (although probably only one) if your first play-through was on a simpler/easier mode. Plus there are the creation modes where you can create your own base without restrictions, which sort of counts as replay? Mostly though the setting in Subnautica is quite unique, and short of playing Below Zero you won’t be able to find that vibe anywhere without playing the game again. However as a story-oriented game I’d agree it has lower-than-average replay value.
I find Subnautica has less replayability than other survival games since the map and questline is static. Once you know where everything is and you’ve seen all the plot beats there’s not much reason to play the game again unless you want to challenge yourself with a speedrun or, as you said, one of the harder difficulties.
I wouldn’t consider creative mode or sandbox mode to be a core part of the game. They’re great for fucking around or as an extended tutorial, but I see them more as external tools than as part of the game experience proper.
For me the story really drew me in. It was like watching Terminator 1 and 2 for the first time - you had no idea where it was going but it was going to be awesome.
I have watched both movies again, and while they are great they don’t hit the same as the first time.
I would absolutely consider replaying subnautica if managing inventories wasn’t so bad. Playing it to build up a base would be fun if it wasn’t such a frustrating process to deal with. I think all crafting should pull from all inventories in your base, and also preferably adding inventories just increases the size of one large abstract storage system of your base that you don’t need to worry about organizing.
As it is, once the story was done I was done. I had become so annoyed with building out my bases that I just couldn’t be bothered to do it again.
I haven’t really tried a walking sim before but I suspect I’ll find it boring - considering the reviews on What Remains of Edith Finch, I’m statistically unlikely to dislike it though, so I guess I’ll give it a shot and see what I think :)
Try changing your mindset when you approach the game, treat it like an interactive exploration or a digital toy. You might get into it more easily doing that.
I would not recommend Road 96 although some people seem to like it.
Personally I thought What Remains Of Edith Finch was boring as hell as none of the emotional points hit and the super-low-fi sequences made the game feel almost buggy and as a result ruined a lot of the atmosphere.
OTOH, I loved Firewatch, a great short interactive story about someone working in isolation and trying to get away from their life.
I hate the term “walking simulator”. It’s totally missing the point. They’re never about walking, but about discovery. Outer Wilds is a “walking simulator” in that there’s no combat and traversal is the only “action” you take. That’s definitely not what Outer Wilds is about though, right? That term should probably die.
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