Hate: disproportionately excessive penalties for falls (usually found in platformers).
If you get shot in the face by an enemy, you lose your shield, lose a life, whatever. In a bad platformer, if you don’t time a difficult jump exactly right, you lose a life, lose everything in your inventory, get sent back to the very beginning of the level, get audited, and have to mow the developers lawn for an entire summer.
Platformers are “guilty until proven innocent” - I won’t play one until I know it won’t destroy my will to live.
I honestly can’t even remember the one that first set me off. It’s been a while. I just remember realizing that gravity was more punishing than any of the enemies, and thinking “oh, to hell with this.”
For platformers, maybe. But for certain genres – like battle royale – the risk of losing it all after one mistake is part of the thrill. It all depends on the game.
Tin Can is a space survival simulator, where you are trapped in an escape pod after the loss of your ship. There are a few systems in your escape pod, and each system has components you need to look after. Your pod regularly flies through astoroid fields & other space phenomena that break these component parts forcing you to repair, replace or do without the systems keeping you afloat.
I did mention in the rules, if it was good enough to actually be your game of the year, you can make an exception. (I’m trusting that doesn’t mean we see Baldur’s Gate 3 on top or something)
Maybe cheating a bit but there are several genres of games that are named after the games that popularized their mechanics such as roguelike/roguelite, souls-like, metroidvania
One thing I’ve gotten into doing is instead of starting a new game I just run off in some random direction for an hour. It’s neat to stumble across things you built years ago
If you’re looking for a samurai game, rather than a samurai themed game. Then there’s really no question, it’s Ghosts of Tsushima. It’s the closest thing we’ll likely ever have to a Akira Kurosawa game.
Any “cozy” game. Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, others like those.
One that I personally really like, that sort of blends different aspects of AC and SV, is Paleo Pines. You have a ranch that you little by little clear out, fix up, and decorate; all with the help of adorable dinosaur friends. There’s actually a surprising number of species and map space in the game, and the vibe and aesthetic are ridiculously cute. I will say it’s slightly more laid back than SV as there are no real timers for the different quests and such, and there are fewer characters to keep track of/befriend.
I did, I played all the borderlands until the third (which I just couldn’t put up with) multiple times and he just annoyed the piss out of me constantly xD
I agree, but I do think that is kind of the point with him.
I do not get every other character’s willingness to overlook it and treat him like just another quirky member of the gang. I mean, Tanisha has no social skills but she’s at least clever and has some clear utility to the Raiders.
All of them, but especially V. I have tried a few times to play them but never get more than a few missions in before losing interest in the story. I think I have to like or identify with a protagonist to enjoy a game, and most GTA characters are pretty unlikable.
I'm with you on this one. I can see the appeal, but for me it ends up being a cycle of: do a mission or two, get bored of the larger than life characters, do some open world stuff, get my wanted level up too high, die, repeat until I quickly get bored and shut it off.
Which is odd because I do that exact same thing in other games I love (BotW, WoW (long since quit) or Destiny) and its all golden... but in a game like GTA? Yawn.
This War of Mine. Honestly can't believe nobody else has mentioned it.
You play as a group of civilians in a war torn country. By day you craft things needed for survival like a stove for cooking, guns for protection, barricades to prevent raiders. At night you send one person with a backpack to scavenge an area of your choice for things like food, medicine, supplies etc. The others will either sleep or guard the property. Things you do while scavenging have real effects on your characters. Decided to rob an elderly couple? Your characters will react based on their personality.
Things become grim fast if you decide to start robbing supplies or get attacked. Your players get sick, become depressed, starve, get hurt etc. I've never made it to the end.
It's a great way to understand the struggles of being a civilian in a war. The Polish government actually recommends it for educational purposes and the devs have donated a lot of proceeds to charities serving people impacted by war, including Ukraine most recently.
I was a bit aggressive on like my second playthrough and ended up killing a couple people to get their medicine. The guy that killed them was too depressed to scavenge and killed himself. Then another person got depressed because of that and wouldn't do anything. Then she got sick and died shortly after. I was too sad to play for awhile after that one.
It’s very good, but the tone can be totally broken if you master combat. Killing soldiers doesn’t lower morale, so they are free targets.
Depending on what locations spawn, it is possible to completely ruin the intended vibe. I’ve wiped out the military outpost and ended up with so many supplies I didn’t know what to do with them all.
Trying to desperately survive in a world that’s upside down, fighting the hopelessness and trying to survive just one more day and slowly realising the you’re just one day closer to death…
Man, it’s a really great game, but I can’t play it again anytime soon.
One reason is that Epic are very dismissive of Linux, while Steam go out of their way to be supportive and GOG are supportive when it’s convenient
Another is trying to lock games into exclusives with them, which other distribution platforms don’t do so much
That said, if you don’t play games without cross platform multiplayer and don’t care about Linux support or see yourself caring any time soon, there’s not a huge reason to push you towards steam and away from epic. GOG is more of an anti-DRM thing, however barring sales the price and the cut for the devs is identical on all of them and it’s the same game aside from DRM.
for sure! steam liberated my machine from a windows dual boot partition. and made me go 100% linux all the time. gratitude is not really strong enough. it is more like when you have been captured, and then set free.
For me it’s entirely self-centered and I’m dispensing with all the aspirational and political feelings that people have about the way businesses operate.
Quite simply I recommend Steam because it is a product with so many killer features, it’s really hard to take anybody else seriously.
It’s just shy of 2024, and Epic is still a non-realized alpha product. Their website, store, and launcher/library is a perfunctory effort at best. The most recent feature they added that I even consider to be an improvement would be the ability to look at my own games library - that should sound like a pretty funny joke but it’s said deadpan. They don’t even have proper controller support for PC, whereas Steam for example recognizes that PC gamers come with a variety of input hardware.
I mean it’s so simply that steam is such a mature product that offers so much to the gamer, and epic just wants money and they’re not really doing anything to compel me to want to use that platform.
GOG is great, it’s a simple system that gives you the power to own your own games and I very much appreciate that. Personally I don’t like to splinter my collection across different services so I’m mostly avoid them but I can’t say anything really negative.
Anyways this is just my opinion, I feel like steam has tons of killer features, the otherS simply don’t. There’s lots of valid discussion in other areas about ethics and things like that but really I’m just looking at it from the perspective of what do I want from my money. Steam gives me the most, and the others don’t even hold a candle.
I try so hard to be a rational consumer and not an emotion-driven zealot for any company or product. I just look at Epic and what they tell and show gamers/devs/publishers about who they are as a company. They don’t hide it.
Epic doesn’t seem to add any killer (and at times rudimentary) features while they focus their pitch down to more money for publishers now but we own your soul; By comparison Valve says here’s a robust and trusted, feature-rich platform you can deploy upon and we’re improving it constantly.
Valve engages in continual expansion of their Steam ecosystem (look at the Deck alone and how much value that added overnight); Valve does continual short-lived research projects like the Steam Link / Steam Controller, which don’t survive as stand-alone products but pound one novel killer-feature after the next into the platform; Epic treats their product like an afterthought and their customers as wallets.
This is really what is at the crux of it. I am not sympathetic to Epic’s way of doing business where the customer is last, the developers and their art are the pawns, and publishers are plied with sweet, predictable short-money in exchange for souls.
I’ve seen enough enshittification to know at this point that doing business with a bean-counting, value-wringing company hurts us all, and perhaps I’m out on a limb here but I feel like this sentiment is becoming highly solidified among many.
The whole idea of digital licenses are stupid and risky. If you can find it on GOG, it’s preferable to get it there. The games are DRM-free, and you can directly download the installers and make an offline backup of them.
What if Steam went bankrupt, or start playing less nice?
Thankfully, there’s not too much reason to worry about this yet. Steam is a money-printing machine, and it’s not a public company or beholden to investors who demand increasing profitability every quarter. As long as Gabe Newell is still alive and doesn’t sell out by taking Valve public, things probably won’t change much.
It’s important to note that just because you got it on GOG does not guarantee it is DRM free but they do try. (Unless things have changed since I last looked)
This is where I’m often torn. My sentiments lean fully to the principle of the user owning his/her purchased software.
But I want Valve to have my money and I trust them, because their entire business model is giving me the power to play my games in the most ways possible, and in ways that having the OG installer on my Desktop can’t do.
I can stream my entire 900 game Steam library to my phone and when my Deck gets here I’ll have access to it all there as well. Muahahaha. Take my money. No GOG RAR Installer is going to give me that, ever. This doesn’t seem to get talked about enough. Valve adds so much value, they make it so I don’t even want to pirate.
I disagree, with or without taking bugs into consideration. It was a great experience and if you liked the base game you'll probably like the expansion too, if you didn't like the base game then you won't.
OK that’s your opinion. If you are poor and/or from a low income country that’s even understandable.
OTOH, 3 million people thought otherwise and bought it. Wake me up when you have made a game and an expansion for it for 3 people, let’s see how buggy those are. I will take the time to online shit-talk about those, too!
What is worth 30 dollars to you…? You said you’d have paid 15 for this, which is absurdly low in this day and age. A small expansion pack in the early 2000s would have cost more than that.
I think that 20 side missions and a bit more of story would have made this more acceptable. The base game is what 60 side missions for 60 bucks? Why should you get less value from this? Most of the work was already done
What a bizarrely corporate measure of quality this is… this is how you end up with mile wide, inch deep grind fests that just ooze “value” by pure volume. I think expecting this amount of content for $15 at this point just means that you can expect no content at all, because it won’t be commercially viable to keep all your dev teams spun up to work on it, along with patches.
There are a lot of games where a sizeable amount of players won’t have the initial achievements.
They may have just launched the game and never played it, achievements could have been added later on after the release like with Grand Theft Auto IV, some people only play multiplayer, or there may be something in place to disable achievements when you mod the game like in Fallout New Vegas.
Yup, the sample size is out of people who've booted up the game ever. So 13% of players downloaded it, installed it, thought about playing it, and didn't get much further than the menu screen. 7% of players of Fallout: New Vegas never finished the first mission.
or there may be something in place to disable achievements when you mod the game like in Fallout New Vegas.
This is why my achievements for Skyrim look completely incongruent with my play time. Someone might assume that I’d spent 700 hours in the character creator…
I didn’t realise Skyrim blocked achievements when modding, I’d definitely didn’t back in the day, it’s one of the few games that I have all achievements on and I’ve modded it to hell basically every time.
I think it didn’t used to either, as I have some achievements on the original version of the game, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never played it unmodded. But I have no achievements at all on the later editions, despite many, many hours of playtime.
Yeah, completely different markets. My friend bought the wrong one and for months he wouldn’t try outer wilds because it “wasn’t his sort of game” when it totally was.
the PC version is pretty fucked in the “feel great” department. the engine itself renders frames at arbitrary framerates just fine, but the animations (including the camera) only update at up to 60 FPS, with no in-game option to cap the frame rate to that animation rate. vsync doesn’t work properly with high refresh rates, and external framerate limiters aren’t able to get a good match. it’s borderline impossible to get this game to feel smooth with proper frame pacing, even with a vrr display.
best i could get was to use external tools to force the game to set my monitor to 60 hz, then turn on vsync in game, but this added a ton of input lag
Seems to me like Outer Wilds outshone Outer Worlds if anything. I never hear anyone talking of Outer Worlds anymore, but Outer Wilds is still brought up as one of the greatest indie games out there.
Mannnn. Outer Wilds is so freaking good. I had put it off for a while, but then last year I decided to go through it. It managed to be the perfect game at the perfect time. Raw intrigue and fascination turned into somehow helping me cope with the loss of my sister and dad who I had lost very recently at the time.
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