I actually really dislike DLSS and FSR. At least to me the upscaling is pretty noticeable (but not the end of the world), but the artifacts that it causes drive me insane. I haven’t tested Onion Ring with it. But for example FH5 I get all sorts of ghost images on my screen and they go away as soon as I turn off DLSS.
Also weirdly on my laptop I got worse performance. I’m assuming that’s because I’m 100% CPU limited and there is a bit of CPU overhead to running DLSS.
You will need games that have crossplay between PC and Xbox One so you can play together across different platforms. Multiple people have suggested Left 4 Dead 2, but that doesn’t have crossplay. Most of the shooters I personally play don’t have it, but there definitely are shooters with crossplay.
Here are my recommendations that have crossplay:
Borderlands 3 — Collect wacky guns, travel the universe, and shoot bad guys together. The previous games in the series don’t have crossplay.
…Yeah, that’s it for crossplay shooters I recommend. For crossplay games that aren’t shooters:
Overcooked! All You Can Eat — Chaotic co-op cooking. Work together to prepare, cook, and serve food in increasingly absurd scenarios: in the middle of the highway, on an iceberg, in a hot air balloon that crashes into a different restaurant.
Ultimate Chicken Horse — Platformer where you build the levels together and then race to the finish. You only score if someone died, so you need to make the level extra dangerous.
Moving Out 2 — Goofy co-op game where your group plays as a ridiculously reckless moving company. Carry furniture from the house and shove or throw it into the truck. No one will notice if you break all the windows.
If everyone is on PC, things will open up a good bunch. Old-school networked games generally still work. You can go FFA deathmatch in your old favourites or in newer arena shooters, like Warsow or Disco Dodgeball.
The Borderlands 1 GOTY Enhanced edition has cross play I believe, and so does Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, which imo is actually incredibly fun to play. Halo has cross play now, MCC and Infinite.
I believe Sea of Thieves has cross play, but I’m not entirely sure how much mileage they’ll get out of it.
The challenge is that AI for a video game (even one fixed game) is very problem specific and there’s no generalized approach/kit for developing AI for games. So while there’s research showing AI can play games, it’s involved lots of iteration and AI expertise. Thats obviously a large barrier for any video game and that doesn’t even touch the compute requirements.
There’s also the problem of making AI players fun. Too easy and they’re boring, too hard and they’re frustrating. Expert level AI can perform at expert level, which wouldn’t be fun for the average player. Striking the right difficulty balance isn’t easy or obvious.
I wouldn’t mind an AI using unorthodox strategies, but yeah that’s a good point that fine tuning it to be fun is a big challenge. Speaking of “non-player-like behavior”, I wonder if AI could be used to find multiplayer exploits sooner, though the problem there is you don’t really have much training data besides QA and playtesters before a full release.
Historically, AI has found and used exploits. Before OpenAI was known for chatgpt, they did a lot of work in reinforcement learning (often deployed in game-like scenarios). One of the more mainstream training strategies (pioneered at OpenAI) played sonic and would exploit bugs in the game, for example.
The compute used for these strategies are pretty high though. Even crafting a diamond in Minecraft can require playing for hundreds of millions of steps, and even then, AI might not constantly reach their goal. Theres still interesting work in the space, but sadly LLMs have sucked up a lot of the R&D resources.
Balatro - Even if roguelike isn’t your thing, try it Alan Wake 1/2 & Control- if you love creepy atmosphere Superliminal - unique 1st person puzzle, think portal vibe Bastion - 1st game from Supergiant, best smash-em-up I’ve ever played Anything Supergiant for that matter
Bastion is one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played, both art-wise and theme-wise. The entire end of the game was just chills and tears for me.
I knew custom controllers were a thing but honestly the quality looked too good that I presumed it wasn’t a custom one. Thank you for the reply though! Solves that mystery :D
I knew a guy who got real into it and started an “Accidental Cannibal Cult”. It was fun to listen to, if nothing else - I don’t get into those games much. Kinda like hearing EVE Online or Dwarf Fortress stories.
Rimworld is a great Colony Sim if you love the idea of Dwarf Fortress but want a gameplay experience that’s much more accessible with a much softer learning curve.
It plays into the chaotic post apocalyptic Mad Max style hellscape fantasy really well, and does not attempt to police your morality. You can love and care for your colonists, meeting their needs and growing to know them as individual people with their own unique stories, or you can play as efficiently or sadistically as you like, throwing ethics out the window and following the Geneva Suggestions wherever you deem prudent.
The base game is good for hundreds of hours of play, and expansions bump that up to thousands of hours of fun, but it also has a very healthy modding community if that’s still not enough.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Colony Sim genre, the basic idea is that you start with a set of semi-randomized colonists on a randomized map and need to build up a functioning Colony to survive. You the player take the role of a manager or overlord and set tasks for your colonists to complete, which they then take time to carry out while you watch and plan the next set of tasks. You need to gather materials, build shelter, grow or hunt food, defend yourself from wildlife and raiders, and recruit new colonists.
Rimworld in particular has fun building mechanics with an emphasis on building power grids and heat management (air conditioning and heating to keep your colonists comfy and keep food from spoiling). It’s a lot like a top-down Oxygen Not Included, but with simpler mechanics and more focus on its (procedurally generated) story.
Neat! Thank you for taking the time to make such a comprehensive review. Sounds like it’s up my alley! I enjoyed Frostpunk and the Tropico series (as well as Banished although I thought it was sort of boring after a while).
The colonists you are given all have character traits and there is a social aspect of the game. Colonists can start relationships, start families, break up, start social fights and end up in infirmarry… Sometimes, family members of your colonists come to your colony as raiders. All these stories forming during gameplay is the real strength of the game for me.
For example, there was this one colonist woman in one of my playthroughs. She was the tough, soldier type. She started one or two relationships in the colony but ended them. Then she tried to go back to them. It started creating some complicated feelings among the colony so I sent her to scavenge a nearby abandoned base.
Before she can leave, a band of raiders popped in. One of the raiders was her teenage son! So I start getting so invested in saving the son and bringing him back to the colony. I’m not that skilled in combat or tactics so I save the game multiple times until a trap injures the boy so his mom can snatch him without fighting. She takes him into one of the intact rooms in the ruin and patches up his wound, shares her food. (She takes him prisoner and you can keep talking to prisoners and convert them into your colonists. )
Here is a scene where raiders running around outside, raiding. And a mother and son, hunkered down in a room, trying to reconnect.
While the boy is recovering in the impromptu prison room, she gets out and shoots the raiders one by one. Rest of the raiders leave the map after losing enough members.
Mother and son talk about family, son talks about some childhood memories. Eventually, he is no longer a prisoner but a newly recruited member of the colony. Woman comes back with her son. Son turns out to be a psychopath but that’s ok. At the Rim, we love psychopaths, they do gruesome task of disposing raider corpses, for example, without getting emotional strain.
Mother stopped creating drama in the colony after son joined.
…
If you read people’s stories in the steam comments (there are a lot of war crime simulator stories, too, be warned) you may get why it’s so addictive.
My first ever international business trip (in the late 90s) was to Skovde, and that was for software development reasons. So the town has a long history for it.
This. The stuff OP hates in the games is added as the “endgame content” for people planning on spending half their lifetime in the game. That kind of “content” is generally not added to single-player-first games like those you mentioned.
It’s technically still in early access, but damn I haven’t had that much fun with a boomer-shooter in a while. The level design is top-notch, the music slaps, and the AI is actually good at cornering you.
They’re working on the next two chapters, which you’ll get when they come out at no additional cost. Also, the OST is on Bandcamp.
I don’t know why you got downvoted, because you answered the question. I don’t know if they’re planning on making any DLC, but as it is right now I’ve played for about 6 hours and just made it past the mall. This is all still in the first chapter, for those who didn’t know.
#4: No early access games, except for games that were in early access and hit v1.0 this year. Even if it’s a great game this year, odds are it’ll be a better game when it’s done, so I made this thread to call out games that are done.
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