Ya maybe one day. I also morally don’t want to support that behaviour.
Elden ring is the gold standard for me in multiplayer. It’s optional. It just requires you to be online. No account creation bullshit. And it’s a quality game also.
@cyberpunk007@Abundance114 that is if you play on PC. other platforms might require subscriptions of some kind in order to enable multiplayer feature(s).
if skyrim is the best they can muster, by all means.
it’s more honest than ubisoft rereleasing the same garbage with a different name over and over again, but trying to pretend it’s something new every time.
The least they could do is turn it into an evergreen game like Minecraft or valheim. Instead of just printing another copy, go back and add 5 quests and 30ft² of area. Go to nexus, find the top 100 mods, pay their makers $5 and put them in the credit roll to integrate them permanently into the game. I haven’t paid for skyrim since I bought it for the 360 and I would gladly buy a copy for every person I know if they did something like that.
They do something like this with Creation Club in Fallout 4. The last thing people still playing want is more updates that break all of our mods every few months to add crap we didn’t ask for. Check out the Steam updates, every one of them has countless comments begging them to stop. I gave up a while ago but I’m sure they’re still going.
Pre-ordering existed for the customer’s benefit back when all games were physical and you wanted to guarantee you’d have a copy available for you at launch. At some point, companies realized that they could use it to forecast success or, more nefariously, entice you to buy a stinker of a game before you’ve had time to hear that it sucks. I haven’t bought physical games in a while now, but when I did, the last time I had a hard time acquiring one at launch was more than 20 years ago (I remember Halo 2 being the mile marker for when companies got to be pretty good at meeting demand). In the digital space, it makes even less sense. They still do pre-order incentives sometimes, for the same reason as above, even when the game is good, but the bonuses are so throwaway anyway that it usually doesn’t matter. Digital storefronts on PC have a pretty good refund policy, so if you’re diligent enough, you can pre-order the day before it comes out, get the bonus, let the dust settle on review scores, and decide if you want to keep the game with the pre-order bonus or just refund it. There’s very little risk in that. Without a pre-order bonus, there’s absolutely no reason to bother, and quite frankly, I don’t feel good about supporting those bonuses in the first place.
I have no issue with early access games, especially if the game lends itself to the model, which would be anything sufficiently sandboxy that can be heavily modified by changing some variables or adding a single mechanic. Larian’s RPGs are very freeform in the ways they let you solve problems and can be upended by different powerful abilities and whatnot; roguelikes are perfect for this model, because you’re replaying them a lot anyway; regardless of genre, the ones that would catch my eye are the ones that are looking for gameplay feedback and not outsourcing QA for finding bugs to a bunch of paid customers. The real problem with early access for me now is that there are so many finished games coming out all the time that look interesting that it’s difficult to justify playing one that’s not done.
I was going to say, I don’t remember a Microsoft Ants but I sure as hell remember SimAnts.
I never figured out if bringing a piece of food next to an egg made it hatch faster but omg as I’m typing this right now I realize that makes absolutely no sense. Why the hell would an egg hatch faster if it has no mouth. Wtf was I thinking as a kid, loool.
It’s enjoyable, but I’ve never been really engaged with it. There’s no progression, I don’t feel like my character, equipment, or ships are getting better even though I’m upgrading things. No planet is special, even though they’re all unique.
I think it would be better if you started out in a “settled” region with interesting factions, hand-designed planets, optional quest lines, etc. The infinite procedurally generated stuff would come into play if you push beyond the edges of known space.
Yeah and having an expansive universe with like three languages and three races of intelligent creatures, none of which seem to have any personalities just left it feeling shallow.
There’s no storyline in even the main story. It feels like a vast and lonely universe. I think procedural world generation has largely the same problem as generative AI: infinite slight varieties of responses, all of which are as bland as a HR seminar.
I’ve come to realize over time that I would prefer a completely linear story to games on the other extreme end.
What you’re suggesting sounds very interesting though, linear and more handcrafted content paired with procedural content to pad in the margins. Keep playing forever if you want to, but feel a sense of story and accomplishment in the main storyline.
Edit: that’s probably why the expeditions feel more worth playing… You bump into people because you’re all playing on the same planets, and the star systems you’re playing through are at least somewhat curated.
I’m currently playing The Outer Worlds on the hardest difficulty which, among other things, disallowes fast-travel. For the most part, the worlds have been small and it hadn’t been a problem, but yesterday I had to go back and forth to 3 locations several times in a row in different corners of the map. It only took a five minutes each time, but ugh. It got old.
I kept reading r/Eve for years after winning. Seemed to slow down after the casino war, then the Mittani left. Just today I see that Pandemic Horde is disbanding.
I think eve might be winding down honestly. New player experience is still fucking awful and the people that had time and money in the past to dedicate to eve seem to be moving on.
Not saying it’s going to die soon probably just a gradual slow down.
I never really played that one or followed the stories on it, but I always thought it might be a good fit for me because I remember there were a lot of excited players when Excel integration was announced.
A user base excited about data and spreadsheets? Hell yeah.
Almost never. I've stopped even changing difficulties for difficult boss fights. Gives me more satisfaction and makes me feel better at games than I actually am. If I die 24 times and manage to get it on the 25th, then at least I was actually able to do it eventually. Just more fun imo. No shame in it though, just a personal preference.
The one and only time I “cheated” at Elden Ring was to spawn in some DLC weapons (hand-to-hand arts and perfume bottles) for a brand new character. Not because they were overpowered but because I hadn’t used them on any of my previous characters and they looked fun so I wanted to use them for a full playthrough. And they were quite fun. Better than I expected too, but certainly not top tier weapons.
Of course I could have just asked a friend to drop them for me instead but it was easier to just “cheat” them in :)
Yeah, I completely understand that. Sometimes you're not trying to bust your ass for some cool items, just easier to do that (idk if this is how weapons in Elden Ring work, haven't played it yet). I used to allow myself to lower the difficulty significantly in Fallen Order for one specific boss, which, imo, is fucking awful, even on medium (Knight) difficulty. I replayed the game about a week ago on the highest difficulty, and while some sections were harder than others, I only got hit once and beat it on my first try. It felt good to beat everything in the supposed hardest possible way that was intended. Having fun is the only thing that really matters, and I think that a decent amount of people have seemed to forget about that.
Same here. I’ll intentionally play on the hardest difficulty (hell, sometimes I’ll find a mod that adds even harder difficulties if there is one) and don’t mind running boss fights 50 times if that’s what it takes to beat them. Just makes it all the sweeter in the end.
Though some games take difficulty settings way too far in lazy and unfun ways. Like when Oblivion Remastered came out, I tried it on master difficulty and quickly noticed I was getting one-shot by enemies in the tutorial and was almost unable to hurt them because I was doing 6x less damage and taking 6x more. I tried it for a while but it just wasn’t fun in the slightest so I lowered it eventually.
Oblivion is pretty unbalanced imo. It was a good game, but designed strangely. I personally think that difficulty should just be about the player taking more damage, not enemies taking less as well. Leveling up making the game harder was also interesting. Worth playing though. I think I started on the medium difficulty and stayed there tbh.
I usually don’t mind enemies having more health or taking less damage, but there’s gotta be a limit, and 6x is definitely far, far above that limit. Oblivion Remastered in particular was funny, because the damage multipliers only affect you. Meaning your followers or summons deal and take normal damage from enemies. If your sword feels like a wet noodle but your allies are doing just fine, something’s wrong. The difficulty sliders in that game were just poorly designed.
I think I eventually swapped to whatever setting is right above 1x damage taken/dealt. Fights were a bit too easy imo, but at least every mud crab wasn’t practically a miniboss.
Hopefully this doesn’t count as excessive self-promotion. This is actually largely a very single-player oriented game, and as such we don’t need additional players to enjoy it by any means… this said, I thought it would be really neat to connect with other Lemmy folks and bond over Starbound!
Our group primarily uses Discord to communicate (I know, it’s a terrible platform, but it’s really hard to replace when you’re trying to keep gamers connected to one another). It’s a very active discord - we chat every single day with one another in it. It’s been a hot minute since we’ve advertised a new server, what with the country and the world being so chaotic and negative lately… but I believe distractions like Starbound can be really important!
I hope a few folks check us out. It’s a great group of people, and we enjoy some really fun games together on a regular basis.
Got a list of the mods used or does the client automatically download the required mods when connecting? Like others here I dropped it shortly after the 1.0 release and finishing the game rather quickly.
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