I guess my ideal gaming community would be a good balance of Srs Gaming Industry News and silly memes/idle chatter, without veering too hard in either direction. /r/games and /r/gaming are neither of them much fun, precisely because of the split.
I vote to keep the leftwing propaganda as a regular feature, so long as it’s gaming-themed. It’d irritate the crap out of that one guy, while also helping ward off the whole toxic-gamer-community thing a bit, and give this place its own unique vibe.
Maybe a bit unpopular but… Cyberpunk 2077. I followed this game intensely since it was first announced with nothing more than a short animatic sequence. It went through all kinds of changes, and many of those were publicly documented before the launch of the game and still had people complaining that they were not in the final game.
It did kind of start with pretty pie in the sky promises, but over thirteen years those promises were tempered. The hacking stuff most people point to is technically all there. Just not as presented in that extremely obvious pre-rendering. Many of the other disappointing things like cops not chasing you should have been expected. They were adamant about it not being like GTA and the cops wouldn’t give chase the same way.
Somehow, everyone got hyped to shit about a lot of stuff with this game only ever mentioned way early into production while they were still brainstorming ideas they wanted to do while I was watching every single thing CDPR put out about it and ended up getting exactly what I expected. My biggest disappointment with the game is the overhype and overreaction leading to them cancelling a lot of planned additions and likely even completely changing the scope of the DLC.
That isn’t to say I think it’s a flawless masterpiece; I expected The Witcher 3 but sci-fi, and I feel that’s what I got. Great story, well done dialogue, cool world, and fun combat. I see a lot of bad decisions and unfinished pieces, but as a long time gamer I can’t say I don’t expect that kind of shit from pretty much every game. Even the best games have those parts where you can clearly see the budget dropped off or management pulled some bullshit.
How do you get 13 years? It's been 11 years since the pre-rendered teaser trailer, and it was less than that between announcement and release. They also were open about not being full force on development for the game until Witcher 3 finished, and the announcement trailer served as a recruitment tool, something that most studios don't do anymore.
Er… I think I was just thinking 2013 when that teaser came out. Them not being full-on in development was part of my point. A lot of things they mentioned that hyped the game up were before they were actually set in stone and actively being worked on.
Well, if you feel that that's what set that game up for failure, let me tell you about another RPG going through the exact same cycle: the next Mass Effect. That game isn't getting full attention until after Dragon Age. Its first teaser was 3 years ago, and it's still got at least 3 more years to go, assuming Dragon Age comes out this year.
Sometimes devs just need to keep their big mouths shut. Especially if they are still in the planning phase. They’re not immune to over-excitement for the very thing they are hoping to create, even if they aren’t straight up lying about stuff.
I expect Elder Scrolls VI to be similarly received. Although, it seems that after Starfield, people are definitely beginning to temper their expectations of the new TES game.
Also announced far too early and it’ll probably only start major development later this year once the Starfield DLC is out (at best), and that’ll last for about four years, but more likely somewhere around five, which means it’ll probably be released about five to six years from now, which is… At least 11 years after announcing it (2018) and a full 18+ years after Skyrim.
Someone could literally have been born after Skyrim and begun college by the time TES VI is released. It’s fucking wild.
Yup. But if Microsoft is smart, they'll be examining exactly the reasons why Starfield is what it is and how to improve the next BGS game. That will start with throwing their engine away, because any way you slice it, there's just no saving that thing.
I just did a replay recently and it was a lot of fun. They really nailed environments, sound, really the whole look and feel of the thing. Gameplay too; I did a monowire netrunner build this time and it was wild. Unlike anything I’ve played before, really. But I did have to cheat a bit to get there.
There used to be a monowire you could go grab out of a box right from the start, but they took it out and locked access to any monowire behind street smarts. I added a console to give myself one and added some cyberware while I’m at it, because why not chrome up?
This was, in fact, totally fine. The locking out doesn’t seem to have anything at all to do with balance.
I did have to spawn myself a bunch of these new shards to increase my cyberware limit, though, because they decided to cap them out and add an item to unlock them. Again, my going crazy with it really didn’t disrupt balance at all.
So why? Because someone in some department somewhere sees game mechanics as a commodity, and they’re treating them like dlc. I get an infinite sea of generic weapons, but try to do the cyberpunk things and the game wags its finger.
Aside from treating game mechanics as a commodity and meting out little scraps, it really doesn’t seem to have any concern for player autonomy when it comes to a lot of the quests. At one point they shoved me into a hideous green snake skin pantsuit and I stopped playing for a week. The game repeatedly forced me to use a pistol, turning what would have been fun quests into obnoxious slogs while I waited to be allowed to play the game again.
Hell, even a pivotal moment in the DLC literally forces a gun into my hands and glitches out if I try to do anything it doesn’t expect. I had a character literally glitch its hands through its head to shoot at me when I tried to run behind it. That’s not even mentioning the numerous points where going off the rails just immediately kills you and forces you to reload. Not because of anything actually dangerous or bad, but just because you’re not supposed to go that way. Rather than making some obstacle, they literally just pick you up and put you back on the path. Could have invented literally anything to explain it away, maybe a security shield or something that kills anyone with a head computer who tries to leave the area, but they just didn’t bother. Telling the player ‘no’ is enough for them. Cool. Fun.
It’s a fun game overall, but it could have been a way better game with a little more inter-departmental communication, a few less money people, and a little more respect for player agency.
I’m on my 3rd play through. It’s still janky and buggy in some regards, but my god the theme, the characterisation, the stories, the plot. It’s how you put together an open world game, where immersion relies on the art of story telling.
Someone tell Todd Howard. Maybe the next Bethesda game won’t be so incredibly bland.
The v2.0 changes were actually pretty good, made me want to start another playthrough. I really like the new metro system even though it’s such a small thing considering everything else they changed, but it’s fun to be able to hop onto a metro to get somewhere. The game is already pretty immersive and that small detail just adds to it
Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Kirby Planet Robobot for the same reason: while not the most innovative games and not necessarily my favorites in their respective franchises, they represent nearly flawless implementations of their respective franchise’s ideas.
Sometimes I feel like Mario and a couple popular indie games are the only platformers that get taken seriously honestly.
FFX Blitzball is the mini-game that I sunk the most time into by far (100+ hours), and always had fun.
Gwent from Witcher 3 kind of goes without saying, the framework is so good it’s spawned 3 full games that I can think of.
Best Hacking mini-game goes to the newer Deux Ex games, quick, the right amount of challenge but if you didn’t like it you could basically never do it.
Best lockpicking I’m going to give to Starfield. Literally the only part of the game I actually enjoyed, each is a great little puzzle.
I remember spending so much time playing Farkle in Kingdom Come Deliverance, betting my money on every game. I think Witcher 1 or 2 have similar dice game that i also very into it, played with every NPC possible whenever i have the chance.
Granted you have to have VR for it, but Beat Saber has pretty famously never gone on sale and never will, but it’s an unbelievably good game that super worth it.
This reminds me I need to start playing beat saber again.
In addition to this there is also occasionally the case where playing an extremely popular game right at launch lets you participate in the zeitgeist in a way you can’t really do if you wait a year and a half for a sale. I imagine whether this matters to you is extremely subjective, but I remember this being a big thing for me with both Elden Ring and BG3; being able to participate in discussions and discovery at the point in time when not everything about the game has been mapped out. Watercooler talk or chatting on Discord with others and sharing your respective findings during that early time when the Wikis aren’t filled in yet.
While that’s true, specifically avoiding the zeitgeist (read: hype) is the stated goal for patient gaming communities (at least the ones on Reddit and here on Lemmy at !patientgamers). It’s why people pay too much for games that are released unfinished in the first place. And there’s always a popular game out or right around the corner.
Not sure how well known it is, but on a friend’s recommendation I bought Cassette Beasts. I just got a second hand Steam Deck and it’s a fun combination. It’s basically a Pokemon-like game, but with its own charm. Instead of pokeballs you record monsters with cassette tapes. It’s quite a goofy game and I’m enjoying it so far.
If you do get it for the Steam Deck, you should play it with compatibility mode set to Proton 8, because then it somehow uses 40% less battery or something.
Whatever it is, the launcher is just bad in general. May I reccommend Heroic Games Launcher instead? You log in, get authenticated, and then it can download the games directly from the source, without ever having to run this god awful launcher.
Sea of thieves is great, but only plays 4 at any given time. It also has alcohol and some T rated violence, but it depends on what your boundaries are for the kids.
Hello, fellow pirate! I would argue nobody could actually take the violence on Sea of Thieves as being T-rated - it’s a bunch of goofy, heavily deformed people fighting with swords that don’t draw blood.
This is a good suggestion. I like this game as well. There’s a lot of customization that can be done without paying extra for it, but I am an old fart and don’t care to have all that crap in my game. Give everyone the same pair of pants and lets go. Time to go change the onion on my belt.
Not scifi or fantasy, but have you heard of Pentiment? It's by Josh Sawyer, lead designer of New Vegas. You're an artist in 1518 Bavaria completing your masterpiece at a monastery, when someone gets killed and you must collect evidence. There's much more to it than that, of which I can't speak without giving anything away. However, I can tell you that the game has no combat, it's just exploration and dialogue. The whole game looks like an illuminated manuscript, and you walk around engaging in some of the most captivating conversations ever to be in a video game. The character creation is extremely unique; in the beginning, you pick where you spent your year abroad, what you do in your free time, what you got your Master's degree in, and what your favorite subject was at university. All of these determine your attitude on and knowledge of pretty much every subject in the game. It has one of the most unique speech check systems in any RPG, with entire conversations counting toward convincing someone, showing you what you said right and wrong at the very end. Masterpiece.
bin.pol.social
Ważne