I had no idea Animal Crossing was that high. It’s a stupid game with no point to it… and I can’t help but play it 2-3 times a week, even if it’s just to check in. It definitely has its moments. I gave my wife shit for paying $60 for it, and I played it daily for most of the year since we got it. (She dropped it after a couple weeks, which tanked my progress since only the first player can advance the island. We started over with me starting an island and she played here and there. Then she quit, and I wanted to start over again… and she hasn’t used the new island yet, and I’ve had it for over 7 months now. It will be my forever island.)
And Hogwarts over everything but Animal Crossing? That’s kinda wild. I did not think that game was that big. Currently playing it, it was recently given away on Epic Game Store, I wonder if giveaways count (probably not). It’s basically the Harry Potter simulator we’ve all wanted for the last 20-25 years. Whenever those books and movies started coming out. Except it doesn’t have Harry Potter, or anything from the series but the places.
Well. I have about 1500 hours in AC and around 160 in Hogwarts. So those are probably both my most game hours.
Next is probably outlast trials. ~100 ish I have an eclectic taste in games.
AC is a cozy designer game. And you can play with friends. It was the best game for a pandemic. Not just a girls game either. Half my guy friends played the hell out of that game. I also was a AC new leaf fan so I was so ready for new horizons.
Its not that different than games like Minecraft. I think it appeals to people in similar ways.
As for Hogwarts.
For a lot of us millennials who grew up with Harry Potter ,the game felt like being in a Harry Potter movie. It was a beautiful game at 4k. Like I couldn’t believe how beautiful every square inch of the castle was. I spent a lot of time exploring. I did literally every single side quest and found all the demiguise statues. And all the items. And all the animals. All the mounts.
I do believe there was 60-80 side quests ? Something like that.
That’s how I spent 160 in the game.
I get that a lot of people don’t want Rowling to get any money as she is anti trans.
Rowling had nothing to do with the game aside from owning the IP.
No input or anything on the game.
I’m not here to defend her.
I will say though that a very large portion of things we love and that bring us happiness are tainted.
And we have to decide for ourselves if we can separate the art from the artist or not. And it’s a personal decision.
Examples. Walt Disney was antisemitic.
Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in wonderland was a pedo. Bill gates was a visitor of Epstein’s Island.(Creator of windows) A shit ton of actors and musicians are pro Israel Zionist. A lot of sports players have domestic battery charges. Alfred Hitchcock was a bad guy (me too situations).
Speaking of. Harvey Weinstein was part of many many movie productions.
I’m not excusing any of these people nor their behaviors.
What I’m saying is. We all get to choose if we want to separate people from their work.
And some will and some won’t.
And I don’t think judging others just because they bought the Hogwarts game and love the Hp universe, is fair.
I’m certainly not ok with her statements on trans topics.
However I’m not giving up something I love. I can separate her from it.
You too, likely still enjoy media by a shitty garbage human.
The thing is, for a game like Clair Obscur or Elden Ring, I’d echo those same complaints, but I still enjoyed them; in Elden Ring’s case, despite those complaints, I’d still call it one of the best games ever made. You might share those criticisms but still find plenty to love about it.
I do agree, as only reading reviews feels like getting to know a game only at a surface level. I’d like to believe that I won’t miss anything by ignoring those games that I excluded but really it is inevitable.
yeah that’s the nature of controller aim. there’s a scheme called “flick stick” on steam where the right stick sets your direction instead, but i don’t know if it’s available on onter platforms.
Turn up the sensitivity and practice. I had to practice with GTA at the shooting range all the way back when I played on console.
Practice is pretty much the only way that’s gonna make playing on console/controller easier. You’ll need to be comfortable not always slamming the stick all the way in the direction you’re wanting to look, it’s a lesson I needed to learn.
Dude just give up and go back to PC. You’ll never even get close to being a fraction as good with a joystick as you are with a mouse. It is impossible for anyone to be. Joysticks just aren’t meant for shooters.
Emulation seems neat to me, but I know behind every comment on it there’s a whispered implication: Piracy. Very few people are imaging their own game discs. That unfortunately makes it less appealing to me, especially as trustworthiness shifts at many of those sites.
Most of those games are no longer being sold outside secondary markets (used games, collectibles, that sort). Neither the publisher nor the developers will ever profit from a “legitimate” sale.
For other games that are still being sold on first-party marketplaces, which is more or less limited to Switch 1 games, you tell me why Nintendo deserves to be treated charitably.
I mean, if you can find and afford the games, yeah, buy them. Problem is most of the games people need to emulate are unavailable or astronomically expensive, and that’s even if you live in the west/Japan… if you live in the rest of the world, forget it.
Yup, Nintendo in particular has a bad habit of just sitting on a bunch of old games, keeping them unavailable on modern system despite the fact that there’s clearly a market for it. And occasionally they’ll reach into their great big bag of classics, pull something out and say “we’ve done the bare minimum so you can run this on our current gen system (Switch), that will be 50 dollars for a 20 year old game”.
Depending on the system it can be really easy to dump/rip your own discs. Hacking a Wii for homebrew requires jumping through a few hoops but then you can dump Wii, GameCube, and even Gameboy games. You can dump WiiU games by inserting an SD card and going to a single web page in the browser!
roms aren’t really a piracy vector, though. The worst they can really do is try to trick people into downloading and executing something that isn’t a rom
Did you ever play them back in the day? I emulated old games for years before I realized how much some of them were designed to be viewed on a CRT. CRT shaders have gotten to be pretty good these days, and it does a lot for the experience for me.
Ya, whole show was kind of a let down, TankRat, from the Beginning no less, was the only one that really cought my eye. Oh well, at least Expedition 33 got its due & EVERYTHING ELSE SOMEHOW.
I really should play it already, if even the notoriously AAA subordinate Jeffy K. had to acknowledge those French people’s game so hard.
In the line of cinematic games, maybe Journey also?
Maybe Songs for a Hero too, but do mind it has two dubbings (Portuguese and English) and they sound different from each other.
Mechanics from the Mercenaries series. Destructible buildings, getting weapons and vehicles dropped to you anywhere at any time. Being able to ally with different factions. Oh, and the ability to call in airstrikes. Bunker busters, cluster bombs, artillery barrages, etc. Just Cause and Metal Gear Solid V are the closest things to that. But they just aren’t the same.
And the ability to just fly like Superman. I’d like that in more games.
I want to see more modular building for vehicles and bases and fun traversal options. So many open world walking sims, it gets old. Or fun mounts that are more than just faster walking. (Rdr horses but fantasy beasts that ride differently)
No one brings planes into sht, why don’t mmos have magic planes, idk if seeing it in random anime as a kid changed my expectations but we should have ww2 magic based planes. Bothers me so much that fantasy societies are supposedly so smart, have such advanced magic, but couldn’t come up with magic cars. Like suspension, engines, etc. are just too complicated for them.
And same with consumers. We aren’t a charity throwing away money for no reason. We actively seek out discounts to get more for our money. We want discounts to be given priority.
By knowing most consumers don’t have the self control to not spend money and fall for marketing hype. Probably call those who don’t get sucked in and end up being more price sensitive and waiting or not buying karens for not being part of the initial revenue made.
I don’t complain online, I wait for a sale to bring it into my buying range, it’s entirely the business owners choice if I buy their product, that said that money represents hours of your life, why spend more than absolutely necessary when buying?
UUhhhh no? Steam doesn’t automatically change games’ visibility if it’s never on sale; it makes games on sale more visible, which encourages Devs to put their games on sale, meaning people who have never seen your game have seen it and might buy it. So in the end, MORE People have bout the game than would have otherwise, and if set at the right price, the Devs still get their cash and now have a larger market. I’m so glad I took Microeconomics in High School :)
And maybe if you studied beyond highschool level you would be aware this is a well studied thing in economics. If you sell a priority service and there is a limit to the resource in some way you are shutting out the people that don’t pay. Like its the same problem as dating apps that sell priority matching, if enough people buy I to it you either have to buy into it as well just to get a fair chance, or except you will never get seem.
Yes the Devs that buy into it get more sales. The entire point is it works for those people, if it didn’t they would have no reason to buy into it. But the people who don’t buy into it are then inherently disadvantaged.
Why would consumers want the store to not prioritize giving visibility to games on discounts during sale events?
If people want to discover games they can go to steam queue and see what is recommended that they may be interested in. But, the last thing I want a company to do is hide sales for me and pushing full retail products.
That to me would be anticonsumer. Might not be what sellers want, but visibility to discounts so my money goes further is what I want as a consumer. I go as far as using isthereanydeals to check to see if other stores sell for cheaper than Steam and alert me to targetted price drops.
That works when we’re talking about big businesses and AAA games, but the problem is when we consider indie developers, who struggle to get attention so are pressured into putting their game on sale when they don’t want to just get some attention.
And why would consumers who are trying to get the most value for their money care about that financial aspect? They aren’t a business. They are consumers looking for deals. Not to be paying full price for games as an act of charity. Many look at the store because they are looking to see what is discounted for the day. And wishlist and use deal trackers like isthereanydeals.
People who get hyped and preorder are the ones willing to pay more because they value first access. After that its mostly value based consumers left with different price thresholds. If you want the full price paying demographic you have to front load your marketing budget before the game launches.
Its like you want the store to be advertising old full priced games and suppressing sales which is the opposite of what consumers want to see.
And why would consumers who are trying to get the most value for their money care about that financial aspect? They aren’t a business. They are consumers looking for deals.
Sure if you don’t give a shit about other people, and then you can use the same logic to justify sweatshop clothes and any other shitty businesses practice you like.
You consider sales to be equivalent to sweat shops?
So do you go out of your way to avoid sales and pay full price for everything?
Anyways, pretty confused why you expect the store part of a business to not prioritize promoting sales, since that’s what consumers want in that section. The discovery queue is where titles that might be of interest is shown without regard to discounts. Its like going to the mods section and being upset there’s only mods being displayed.
Sales page prioritizing visibility to sales is coercion? Damn everything is coercion then. You must hate sites like isthereanydeals deals with them encouraging coercion. And sites like pcpartspicker encouraging coercion showing discounts. If only consumers were kept in the dark about sales. Must fill you with rage using visiting places like GOG too and seeing them showing games on sale or any site for that matter showing sales.
Again you’re only listen to a part of what I’m saying to make it more convenient to argue against.
Pc part picker is not a distributer with a functional monopoly on the pc hardware market, nor are AMD Nvidia and Intel small indie teams. That’s the key here.
Steam use their position as THE retailer of PC games as leverage to make small indie Devs put their games on ridiculous sales even when they don’t want to, just to get featured, in order to benefit themselves by being the place that has the crazy sales.
If you want a more apt example think of companies that use unpaid or underpaid inters for work in return for “the exposure” it’s very similar and widely considered exploitative.
Damn GOG is evil too for leveraging their platform to show sales? I didn’t know sales were so evil. Maybe consoles…oh no sales are everywhere being promoted. The horror. Can’t escape it. Where is the sanctuary where everything stays at retail price.
Honestly this sounds like some logic EA or Ubisoft CEO would make up to try to push the idea of sales as evil so games stay at retail prices longer or go up in price.
There are plenty of examples to the contrary of this. In particular, I know that factorio has literally never gone on sale on principle, and has only ever gone up in price upon leaving early access. Despite this, it shows up with some regularity in the store.
It’s certainly the case that Steam can be a rat race for developers to get attention, but I don’t believe your framing is accurate.
I thought about mentioning factorio in the original comment, but yeah as you say there is some exception, factorio. Being wildly popular and the game that more or less birthed an entire genre helps and even if you don’t play the same game it’s still entirely possible to succeed through word of nouth. But for less popular indie games it’s still true.
I never buy games at retail price anyways, so I do kind of get it past launch. I don’t care about buying a game until it is on sale and its a big part of why I wish list games to keep track of when they go on sale to see if its hit the price point I want.
I have been in the business 10 years, steam insider program is not how steam store works… it is mostly manual and if you know someone there, you have a chance. It’s some people’s work to curate, for good and bad… I prefer it to the inevitable short sighted collapse that a publicly traded company would
You mean the game will only show up in the list of games that are available on sale if the games are actually in the sale? Because that’s just literally how that works
Wow, it’s like people want the games that are part of the big sale going on! How are you twisting the ability to sort by what’s on discount into being evil?
Because the big sale only happens because steam presses Devs into it in order to get promoted. So Devs that don’t buy into the sale, get sent to the back of line.
Then explain better, because at the moment all you are doing is pearl clutching about people wanting a good deal on a product they want, what would your solution be?
I have explained plenty well. You are just refusing to listen because you have already set your opinion in stone and have either ignored or twisted everything I have said to fit that opinion.
If you have any desire to engage in good faith I suggest you go back and re read my comments.
You haven’t explained shit, you just keep saying Valve is abusing devs with sales, you never give a solution and your logic is spotty at best. How would you solve this issue?
That doesn’t look like a gaming laptop, either. $20 says it has integrated graphics.
Reminds me of the “gaming laptops” at Walmart. The other day I saw a RoG laptop being sold with an AMD 740M, a integrated GPU from 2023 with performance from 2010. They dressed it up all pretty with RGB and a 144hz display to make it look like it could actually run games, and then had the nerve to charge $699 for it.
I hate shit like this so much cause people who don’t know any better will buy this thing, get 15 FPS in modern titles and think that PC gaming sucks, when it’s just their computer that sucks.
Except I’m pretty sure thats shopped on there. It has a weird border around it and the entire steam app has a different pixel density than the rest of the photo.
Friend of mine in high school was super into Star Wars Galaxy. Was pretty much all he did after school at the time. One day he got into an argument with his guild leader or some other member with thw power to remove him, and they kicked him from the guild. This pissed him off enough that he recruited another friend of ours to infiltrate the guild and then spent the next month or so getting to a position of power within it so they could re-add the original friend and kick everyone else out while also draining the guild coffers. Effectively destroying the entire guild.
Being on the patient side of things, two games I’ve played in recent years and didn’t enjoy were:
God of War (2018) - it just felt like AAA slop to me. Meaningles upgrades, tons of obvious puzzles at any corner - never throwing in even a single brain teaser, boring combat - the best option was almost always to throw the axe, that thing were you start walking at a snails pace to mask loading and/or play a cutscene and on top of that your god powers being mostly cutscene exclusive. Just your bog standard AAA game with no ‘friction’ - boring.
Factorio - it just feels like work to me. On top of that, going in blind, I just didn’t enjoy building something up just to tear it down again because I’ve unlocked something new changing the requirements. Once again, feels like a job in IT. Also, resource patches being limited just gave me the weirdest kind of anxiety despite never actually seeing one run out.
Factorio’s the awakening for a lot of people on certain ends on the spectrum. My AuDHD makes it crack for me. I will say though, while the tutorial teaches you some essentials, it just throws you into the deep end once you start a real game.
I only discovered all the tips and quality of life from videos online, and there are some troubles in the game you can solve on your own but good fucking luck (belt balancing).
Might not be your kinda game, but if you ever feel like giving it another chance, check out some vids online for beginner tips (: It’s a game about stimulating the Eureka! part of our ooga booga caveman brains and it feels amazing.
I feel vindicated. I have the exact same feeling of factorio feeling too much like work, having to refactor everything because the requirements change is one of the more frustrating parts of software engineering imo, and the game feels tailored specifically to invoke that frustration.
I imagine that part gets better after the first hundred hours where you basically know what’s coming. I don’t have the patience to learn the tech tree though, given that I don’t even enjoy the game.
Yeah I’ve seen people try to balance things perfectly in factorio, but my strat is always to overproduce and let belts getting backed up balance out the throughput.
Yeah same. I’ve seen other people stockpile intermediate resources to try and smooth out bottlenecks, but I think that’s wasteful. Build extra throughout, and have as little product sitting there as possible.
I’m fuzzy on the details, but it went something like this:
I set up long resource lines of coal, copper and iron.
I needed a thing#1 and built a neat little package to build it, exactly to order and on minimal space.
I copy pasted that design 10 times left to right along my resource belt line.
Then thing#2 came along. Needed the same stuff and combined with thing#1 into thing#3. So I wrapped my resource belts, designed a second package on minimal space and also copy pasted it 10 times. So I had pairs of thing#1 and thing#2 with a line in the middle to combine them and a belt to collect them. Worked nicely.
Then:
Coal was replaced by electricity. I had no space for powerlines.
I got other types of the grab thingies, potentially simplifying my setup.
Suddenly I got sorting, making my belt setup a waste of space (I had one line per thing/resource).
All belts needed to be replaced by better belts.
Oh and:
Thing#4 came along, needing 2 of thing#1 and one thing#2 with some additional resources. Since I built to order, I basically had to start from scratch or severly hamper the production of thing#3. Also, my packages didn’t work anymore without wasting space and/or entirely fucking up resource belt management.
Therefore, I designed stuff from scratch to fit the new requirements.
That’s from the very beginning, but after repeating this pattern a few times, I gave up. Building it non-optimized felt even worse.
Interesting. Optimizing the factory for your immediate current needs sounds very tedious, because those needs change all the time. I instead optimize for expandability and adaptability. The factory game genre isn’t for everyone, but if you are interested in some tips:
My solution is usually something like:
really long line of basic resources (usually a belt of smelted copper and a belt of smelted iron, eventually adding more stuff and adding more belts of iron and copper as supplies are needed)
when I need thing 1, I make a little package that builds it, drawing resources from the line with splitters so the excess can continue down the line
thing 2 is an independent little package farther down the line
When it’s time for thing 3, I build copies of the packages for building thing 1 and thing 2 as necessary to feed the construction of thing 3, again as separate feeds splitting off the main resource line
when it’s time for thing 4, its again independent of the production of things 1-3, except they are splitting off the same main resource belt
If the resources on the main belt are insufficient to feed all of those machines, one of three things needs to happen: 1. Add more raw resource processing until your belt is full and backed up at the beginning 2. If that’s not enough, upgrade the belt 3. If you don’t have a belt upgrade available, build another main resource line and use splitters to rebalance it onto the main line
This construction allows for easy expansion without having to destroy anything. I typically don’t disassemble anything unless it’s actually a problem for some reason or I need the space. This is especially important because you often need some basic components like the level 1 belts even into the late game.
Also, once you unlock robots, you can literally copy-paste, just select an area to upgrade all belts/arms/etc. in, and a lot of other neat tricks that drastically speed things up.
And one last peace of advice: Overproduce everything and let belts backing up balance out the resource distribution. Then if you discover that belts that previously were backed up are now sparse, figure out why and optimize it, usually by adding more production of whatever the missing resource is.
Ultimately throughput is all that matters. Loss of throughput because you don’t need something isn’t wasteful. Loss of throughput because you aren’t producing enough of something is a problem to solve. Things that don’t affect throughput don’t matter and aren’t wasteful.
I played pretty much the same way De_Narm did. I tried caring less, though because I had no idea what would come next, it inevitably descended into spaghetti. I am stressed out about technical debt enough at work to be playing a technical debt simulator lol.
Dedicating the space needed to expand, ensuring everything you build is scalable, inevitably requires you to know a lot about what’s coming.
Yeah, if you know what you’re doing you can avoid these issues. I did not enjoy myself in the slightest, so after some hours of giving it a chance I decided that learning how to avoid these issues was not worth the pain. I’ll just stick to work instead.
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