I don’t understand this bullshit, if developers/publishers drop their games, just stop investing time into their games or buying from them. How could you force private companies to invest into something which gives zero return?
Why is that ridiculous? Seems like a totally fine solution to me. Probably not possible in most cases due to licencing issues, but if not this is the best thing a developer could do. And making games and/or their servers open source isn’t even the only option. In most cases it will suffice to just provide server binaries and patch the game to make it work with self-hosted servers, or just patch it to make it playable offline. It’s that simple. Developing games with that in mind from the beginning makes this even easier.
never build in forced server components to begin with
patch out the need for the server as part of the last update before support ends
give buyers access to run their own servers with an officially-provided executable and set the client to connect to that executable
open source the whole thing
And maybe others. It’s about making sure that a product you have paid for actually works as it was sold to you. It’s honestly a really basic consumer protection concept. You sell me a television and it stops working within a reasonable lifetime due to your own failure, and you’re obligated to repair or replace it. The same should be true of software.
A couple titles that deserve mention and I don’t see in any other lists:
Children of Mora - Narrative driven action RPG with some light Roguelite-ish elements. Amazing world building and story telling, good character choice/building and gameplay.
Cassette Beasts - Pokemon, if it were good. Much more mature story, tons of quality of life systems that makes building things fun, a weakness system that matters a lot more than “number big” and the entire game is double battles. I’ve played the game start-to-finish in couch co-op and it was incredible. They’ve recently added online multiplayer, but I cannot say with 100% certainty that the online allows you to engage with the story together. Couch co-op has one player play as the companion character in an otherwise unchanged experience whereas online has one player character hop into another player characters world.
Weird enough, the Monster Hunter franchise - I’m not sure how this isn’t anywhere else in this thread. Use large weapon to hunt large monster. Build bigger weapon to hunt bigger monster. World and Rise are both on sale on Steam right now. World is dumb to move through the story together though, despite the fact that most fans who aren’t me are likely to call it the better game.
Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis is one of the best tactical rpgs I’ve ever played. I was shocked how short it was when I finished only to find I had been playing for over 40 hours.
Single-handedly? Nah. It pulled a lot of existing ideas together though, and it’s certainly responsible for the popularity. Another Minecraft influence is early-access.
Another week until the World of Warcraft Expansion releases, and I used the event to level all of my characters to 70. Even my very first character, who hadn’t seen the light of day in over 15 years, is now properly equipped to take on whatever may come. Too bad it’s a priest, which I really don’t like to play, so back into the dungeon he goes. The Remix mode also ends tomorrow, so all of those characters will migrate over to retail, which means I’ll look over those and do some final house cleaning.
Then I’m pretty much done with the Diablo 4 season, but not because it’s boring or anything, but I kinda finished everything I wanted to do and more. I was playing a Chain Lightning Sorcerer, but found the final item to change my build to Lightning Spear, which is just completely overpowered this season. I kinda breezed through everything, killed all the giga versions of the bosses, cleared Pit level 100, the new Infernal Hordes mode on Tier 8, and upgraded all my stuff. Today I killed some more of the Uber bosses and even got two Uber Legendaries (which I salvaged to crafter another one). I might try and push my Pit level a bit higher, and try to kill Echo of Lilith, the final Uber boss, which got reworked somewhat last season or something, so it’s not just you getting one-shot by terrible hit boxes all the time. (Edit: just killed her, wasn’t too bad, but you need to learn the fight a bit, so in the beginning it just feels you randomly die.)
Also, this last year or so I’ve been “playing” Melvor Idle, which is Runescape, but as an idle game. The game recently launched it’s third DLC, but I’ve been holding off on playing it, since I wanted to 100% everything else first. This week I finally got done with the base game and the first DLC and am almost finished with the second DLC, although it might take another one or two weeks just grinding stuff, so I can craft the missing items. I’ve played a bunch of idle or incremental games over the years, but this is definitely my favorite. It’s not a clicker, there is no constant rebirth or whatever, you just choose a skill and you slowly train it. The best part is, you can actually close the game and fully progress offline. The game also has an in-game mod browser with tons of mods, kinda like the Steam Workshop, which is fantastic.
It’s been Deadlock the last couple of days since I got the invite. Not sure if I’ll stick with it. The game has potential but I think I might be too bad at it to ever have fun playing it. Farming is insanely important and between lacking precision aim for last hits and not understanding neutral camp flash farming strats I guess I’m just always behind on economy.
I do alright in fights themselves and feel like I can theoretically perform with a couple of heroes at least, but that doesn’t really matter once you get out statted.
Maybe I’m just getting too old for fast paced shooters, it’s been a while since I played one.
bin.pol.social
Ważne