Return Fire was a head-to-head military shooter, with a choice of four different vehicles of destruction, and is played split-screen on PC with one keyboard. I think I only ever had the demo but it was fantastic.
I recall Nintendo claiming they wanted to move away from mobile again a while ago but I didn‘t really believe it back then and I‘m still skeptical now. They‘ve received more criticism for their predatory mobile games lately so maybe that got something to do with it or it‘s simply not making enough money anymore to bother with it and they‘d rather get the devs working on something else.
That was the most logical answer I came up too. Its just crazy to do the right thing and make if work offline instead of just binning it like so many other live service games.
I mean, I never paid for it but I did the math many years ago, to explain predatory microtransactions, and found out that for a chance - a perfect rolled no dupes chance - it’d be cheaper to buy a 2DS and a physical copy of new leaf.
Like, there’s only so many times they can release a set or do a palette swap for a ‘new’ collection.
I think I remember reading a while ago that apps need to be updated occasionally to comply with .apk guidelines.
This is presumably dependant on which permissions the .apk requests. So a simple calculator app wouldn’t need to be updated, but the calculator plus app, which tracks my blood pressure, how many glasses of water I’ve drank, and my semen count, would need to be updated occasionally to comply with Google’s privacy policies.
But I’m not an app developer, so don’t trust me on a whim.
I had exactly the same experience. I played Ghosts of Tsushima after Elden Ring and Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, I was surprised how shallow the mainstream open world games are. I don’t hate them, but the gameplay really boils down to:
Walk slowly while characters talk to eachother for 5 minutes
Open the map, click on where you need to go, then walk in a straight line to your objective
Trail an enemy without being seen
Liberate an enemy camp (kill the same 3 enemies and collect the 5000 twinkly useless items in the area)
The Elden Ring withdrawal is really hitting me. Most AAA games are trying so hard to be cinematic and movie-like that it’s boring me to tears.
hollow Knight: 2d metroidvania so very different genre, but great exploration with no hints. Souls like fights, so similar there to some games you’ve played and liked. Metroidvanias in general are good at exploration.
genshin impact: most varied biomes I’ve ever seen in a 3d game. Will hold your hand first time you see a mechanic, but won’t tell you anything subsequent times. Cons: starting areas have the blandest exploration and quests. You need good willpower to not swipe. Combat is often very easy.
I liked Gensin Impact for the first few years, but last time I played it, that game was the worst example of this.
Teleport to location. Chat with npc for 5 minutes. Teleport to next location. Chat with another npc rehashing the first conversation for 5 minutes. Quick fight with trivial enemies. Teleport back to first npc Chat about random crap, slow walk to another npc, rehash the earlier conversation again, walk back to starting location, receive the most basic of rewards.
The game is 90% dialog of which very little is relevant or meaningful and none can be skipped. There is an auto advance option for conversations, but so many meaningless dialog prompts (with options are always the same semanticly) that it doesn’t work.
Of course this is all by design as the real goal is to sell you characters, not play a game.
Geralts talking to self never bothered me. The characters, story and world were really interesting for me. The side quests were definitely all filler. I found a few that were amusing but most were the same thing: go kill this over here.
Actually this is what I liked about the Witcher 3 is that the side quests were really great. Of course there were generic ones that felt like doing chores but a surprisingly big amount of quests were actually unique with great stories.
This for me was the best thing about the game. Combat was kind of meh, especially the oils, etc. but the world was very well crafted and not only the main story but also a big chunk of side quests were really engaging.
The chores ones are what I mean. Boring. But there were some really good ones for sure. I really liked finding all the Witcher gear too. The world is incredibly vast and detailed, packed with stuff in every nook and cranny. Same with elden ring. Though I felt the dlc lacked in that regard.
The blood and wine dlc was amazing. I loved the main story/mission. There was a lot to love in the Witcher 3. I’ll have to play it again some day.
You’re right. The witcher 3 never grabbed me because of these reasons. It’s got such phenomenal quests and storytelling but in between feels like a chore aince.im just staring at the minimap the whole time. I installed mods to remove HUD elements to help fix it but I still needed a toggle for them to show me direction occasionally since the games design relies on those HUD elements to drive the player.
It’s such lazy design in an otherwise rich experience. It boggles my mind.
Also, Witcher has some heart-punch right-in-the-feels moments in side quests, FFS. 😶 Even when you’re purposely avoiding what you know is gonna be an emotional wringer in a prominent quest line, they cut ya while you’re wandering around? Genius. Damn. 🤌🏾🙇🏽♂️
I haven’t played Forbidden West yet, but I had a very different experience from most with Zero Dawn. I think a lot of people view these games as Ubisoft style open world checklists, but if you turn the difficulty up a few notches, it really forces you to engage with the mechanics. A game where you used to just charge headlong into a fight you were surely going to win changes into one where you need to pay attention to weaknesses, lay traps, and pick off their deadliest weapons. Plus, you end up actively hunting certain machines for their upgrade parts, because those upgrades become more crucial to your own success.
I agree with you here. While turning up the difficulty means it takes me quite a bit longer to finish as I have limited time to play these days, I tend to enjoy the time more as I learn the mechanics.
Elden Ring and the other Souls games are just different in that there isn’t a difficulty setting so you have to do this from the get go. I prefer this style, but it’s possible to get a more enjoyable experience in other games.
In my opinion, easy games aren’t as fun and I lose interest much more quickly.
Speaking of this, I hate the fact that farcry just stuck with the farcry 3 format.
Farcry 2 had none of this “tag an enemy to make them always visible” bullshit. But then they did 3, and that was just their settled format from there on out.
I love Tears of Kingdom, that’s one of the few games that does open world really well and doesn’t do any of the things that OP mentioned. Sense of exploration in ToTK is even better than Elden Ring imo with some really clever environmental puzzles and multiple ways to tackle them.
What Remains of Edith Finch. A psychological horror game that REALLY sucks you in. As you play, there is a lot of stuff that doesn’t make any sense, but there’s a secret (disturbing) meaning behind it all.
I spent a good chunk of a Saturday going through it and there’s no need to do it again, but it was a great ride!
The Unfinished Swan is such a hidden gem, honestly. I never hear anyone talk about it. Very unique style and mechanics and an endearing story. Some beautiful environments too. And pretty short, so not a big commitment.
For BG3, don’t search something about it, just start and play. You don’t need to know anything prior, however it’s a role-playing game so play accordingly what kind of character you created. You can save-scumming if you want if some desicion you made leads to something bad, though they all the part of the game. Just play and experience.
For games like Overwatch, it isn’t complicated at all. It just requires you to play it constantly and learn counter measures just by playing. Learning them is the fun part, overthinking about them not so much.
To be fair when I see “complex game” part, I was kinda expexting some advanced building games, something like Factorio, maybe RimWorld.
Anyway, also you don’t have to like any games even if they are overwhelmingly positive titles. Just find what you like and dig in.
I don’t know I’d qualify Rimworld as complicated, honestly. It has more moving parts than The Sims, sure, but it is nowhere near how complicated EU4 seems (I haven’t played it, it scares me, but CK is another good example).
Hey now factorio isn’t complex, just play it a lot and you’ll pick it up… I’m 2000 hours in and managed to finish a game in only 70 hours! I’m thiiiiis close to making train lines without constant crashes. Pretty soon I’ll feel ready to add in Bob’s mods to the mix. It’s… Simple…
Those same streamers are also reporting 16GB of RAM usage when loading up a new map, which means that the minimum recommended spec of 8GB was a blatant lie from the devs.
I’m not saying this is necessarily the case, but just because a game uses 16gb of ram on a 32gb system does not been it can’t make do with 8gb on a more limited system.
Yeah IMO it’s far better for games like Cities Skylines to use as much RAM as they can - especially once mods start coming out! I’ve had times where my heavily modded version of CS1 wanted 16+ gb of memory because loading assets from RAM is way faster than loading from SSD/HDD!
I’m curious of they have managed to make the camera feel better in this game versus Fallout or Skyrim when using a controller.
I realize that’s somewhat a vague statement, but I’m not sure how to describe it other than to say the that moving the camera up/down/left/right always felt very linear and it was hard to do precise movements. Like if you try to barely adjust your aim you might overshoot your target. As a comparison, Destiny feels really great to move and jump and aim. And many other games have figured this out. But Bethesda games have always felt very jerky. And, yes, it’s more RPG focused, but that doesn’t mean they also can’t feel good.
Edit: Also, as an aside I want to say I appreciate these big review posts that show up here. I enjoyed those on Reddit so keep it up!
Edit 2: at least in this Digital Foundry video, it’s very briefly mentioned that the combat “feels great” so perhaps they fixed it.
I focused a lot on my social skills because, much like Fallout before it, Starfield isn’t the most adept shooter. It may look like one, with a huge range of weapons to collect and the ability to play from a first-person perspective, but this is not Destiny. Aiming feels wonky, and oftentimes, shots that seem to hit an enemy point blank will fail to register. It’d be nice if Starfield had the equivalent of the VATS system from Fallout, giving it pseudo-turn-based combat, but instead, it’s just a passable shooter attached to a very ambitious RPG. That might be the reason I spent so many skill points on my persuasion abilities.
I absolutely hate that concept, as even when, or especially if, it matters, it’s in the most cookie-cutter binary in-your-face kind of way, literally “(a) eat baby (b) safe baby”.
I don’t mind choice in games, but it should be actual choice, i.e. you do things because you want to do them, not because you think they will make the story go to the “good ending” or worse yet, be forced on you to stay on the good path, as the game is only build for good and bad path and everything in the middle is just mechanically broken.
The best choices in games are fully mechanics driven or just cosmetic, though that’s pretty damn rare in narrative games. In most games choice is generally just bad and annoying, as you aren’t focused on the actual game or story, but on what the writer might consider to be the “good way”.
That good old fragile “suspension of disbelief” gets shattered by choice systems very very easily.
I personally find the most important part of those choices isn’t the actual effect, but whether the game managed to immerse me enough so that I care.
For example, in Life is Strange, there’s a string of choices you can make that will get someone killed (or save them). The game invests enough time in the character before hand so when you come to the crossroads, the decisions FEEL very important. Do those choices have any big effects on the game? Not really. The character isn’t part of the main story line anymore after that, you only get some people referencing the difference. But if FELT important.
Think about the polar opposite: Choices that change the entire game, but you aren’t invested in. Would those be interesting choices, or would that just be 2 games in the form of one, and the choice is just a kind of “game select screen”.
That’s a large part of why, with older games, I prefer to use emulators, even if they’re available to me in other ways. I love the “save state” option. It’s terribly exploitable, of course, but it sure is convenient to be able to save literally anywhere.
The exploitable argument never made sense to me for single player games. I play Fallout, if I wanted anything and everything with a 100ft tall character, every companion, and infinite health. But of course I don’t do any of that because it would ruin my own fun.
I agree, though I think part of why that is is that so few games make failure interesting. The only one I can think of that truly accomplished making failure compelling is Disco Elysium.
Again, I see the desire to savescum as a symptom more than anything else. If you find yourself reaching for the quickload button, it's because the game didn't make it interesting enough to keep going despite something going wrong.
This is at least the case for choice-based situations, where it's incredibly common for there to be an "optimal route" and for the alternative or failure-state to be much inferior in both rewards and enjoyment.
For games where overcoming a challenge is the primary experience, such a beating a Dark Souls boss, then sure. Being able to quicksave at the start of each phase of a boss would be bad since the point is to overcome the challenge of managing to scrape through the entire fight.
I think that's a matter of preference. I don't think many video games have good writing (even compared to a lot of casual popular "beach read" type books), so I get my story telling from however many audiobooks I can squeeze into 2x 40-50 hours a week. I want challenges in games and I want distinct fail states to punish failure.
The issue from a design perspective is that many players have a tendency to optimise the fun out of the games they play. Meaning that if there is a fun thing to do that you carefully made for them to enjoy but there’s an unfun thing to do that wasn’t the point but is a slightly more effective strategy, many players will find themselves drawn to do the unfun thing and hate playing the game, whereas if they had only had the option to do the fun thing, they would have done, wouldn’t have cared in the slightest about the lack of a hypothetical better strategy not existing and loved the time they spent with the game.
Good game design always has to meet people where they are and attempt to ensure they have a great experience with the game irrespective of how they might intuitively approach it.
So… Not having ways for players to optimise all the fun out of their own experience is an important thing to consider.
I’m this person and god do I wish I wasn’t, sometimes. So many games have been way less interesting than they could’ve been for me because for me, fun is learning to play the game well. I’m not sure what frustrates me more, the way people who don’t have that attitude say “I play games to have fun” as if I don’t, or me looking at the recent LoZ games as failures design-wise because they’re too easy to cheese.
I definitely lean this way too, though I’ve become better able to step away from that mindset in games I want to enjoy without it.
I think part of what has helped for me is, having an awareness of that tendency, I now try to actively feed or restrict it.
IE, I play a lot of games where that is the intended fun experience. Stuff like Magnum Opus (or any Zachtronic’s title), Slay the Spire (or other roguelikes), Overwatch (or other competitive games) are all designed from the ground up for the fun to be in playing the game at the highest level of execution possible (some more mechanically others more intellectually.) I try to make sure I’m playing something like that if I feel like I’m at all likely to want to scratch that optimisation itch with that gaming session.
Otherwise, when playing games where that isn’t really the point, I find it easier to engage with the intended experience knowing that if I want to do the optimisation thing I could switch to something that is much more satisfying for that, but I also try to optimise how well I do the thing the game wants. If it’s a roleplaying game, I might try to challenge myself to most perfectly do as the character would actually do, rather than what I might do, or what the mechanics of the game might incentivise me to do. Often that can actually lead to more challenging gameplay too as you are restricting yourself to making the less mechanically optimal choices because you’ve challenged yourself to only do so where it aligns with the character.
Diablo 4 was a perfect example of this. People were optimising their run to the end then complaining about a lack of content within a week. Then there’s people like me who spent a good 60 hours already with plenty of stuff still to do as I’m enjoying my journey.
One of the more important skills of good game design is to understand that whenever your players are complaining about something, there is something wrong that you need to identify and address whilst also recognising that it’s rarely the thing the players think is what’s wrong (as they just see the negative end result) and that they tend to express those complaints as demands for the solution they think is best to what they think the problem is.
In this case players are yelling at Blizzard “There’s not enough content!” when in fact, as you’ve observed, there actually is plenty of content, it’s just (seemingly, I’ve not actually played it myself to say for sure first hand) that Blizzard made it too easy to optimise your way past all of that content as a minor inconvenience on your way to, uh, nothing.
The answer to the problem is twofold. One you need to plug those holes in your balance so players are no longer incentivised to optimise their way past actually playing and enjoying your game (now I talk about it I think I vaguely remember reading an article that Blizzard are doing exactly that and having a hard time cleanly pitching the benefits of it to the player-base, which is why you also need to.) Two, try to put the horse back into the stable by now, sadly, actually having to create the end game content that players have bursted their way through to because your game design unintentionally promised it would be there (or just write those players off as a lost cause. Which seems like a dreadful idea as they are the ones who were the most passionate early buyers of your product…)
Alternatively… If they’d caught these issues before release (which is often, though not always, a matter of giving the developers and designers the resources to do so) they could simply have caught those issues of optimal builds being too powerful for the content and adjusted either or both to be a better match and ended up with a title that players liked more than they will like the harder to make version Blizzard now needs to turn Diablo 4 into (not to mention, that the work they need to do to introduce worthwhile end-game content could have just gone to a paid expansion for their more well regarded release instead.)
But then the Bobby Kotick’s of the world are boastfully proud of their complete inability/unwillingness to think about the development of their games in that way so here we are…
Rimworld definitely makes it harder when you’re doing well. You can control the parameters a bit though in the storyteller settings. It depends on your colony’s wealth, number of people, how long it’s been since something ‘bad’ happens (colonist dies or gets injured), etc.
This is advice I’ve given to new Rimworld players, and I hope it was helpful. The game (on most difficulties) is itching to give you the next “scenario.”
Building your wealth in valuable equipment is not very good at the start of the game, because your town’s silver value will go up much faster than its defensive/offensive capabilities. You end up putting a target on your back for raids.
Better to build a surrounding wall and set up trap corridors than to worry about getting everyone a gun.
I’ve had success doing that too. Buttload of traps. The raids that will circumvent your traps are definitely a problem though. Also the raids that just have a bunch of grenadiers can destroy your defenses in no time.
I willing to bet the new console isn’t significantly better hardware (which was already outdated when the Switch released), but just made to have a system the didn’t already have emulators for it. The Switch emulators work perfectly (better than the console). The new one probably is focused specifically at preventing them from working and not being a better device for consumers.
That website was really tempting… until I remembered that these run on AA batteries and don’t have gyro or a touchpad. M$ really selling an 85$ controller without the features of the 50$ ps5 controller
Edit: apparently dualsense are 75$ now?? Wtf. and apparently they’ve never been 50$? Just discard my comment
Its actually a plus for me. I don’t want to use proprietary batteries and rather use standard AA sized (rechargable) batteries. They can be charged with any battery charger, you can have multiple of them and each pair lasts much longer than any builtin battery. I agree on the other parts for missing gyro and price though.
Yeh this one cost me £4 and came with a recharchable battery pack. I’ve always used my controller wired (playing on PC) but now maybe I’ll try wireless!
If latency was an issue for you, I can assure that its not even for competitive gaming. I played years with friends Fighting games in a competitive manner (offline) and since 360 days it was wireless. And in general with modern controller and batteries, a pair lasts for me at least a week if no longer, when I play at least 5 hours per day. Can’t beat that! Replacement is also cheap. Good if you don’t want to rely on original batteries in the future.
Nah I’ve never had issues with latency and don’t play anything competitive I’ve always just prefered wired to be honest. My favourite controllers were the wired 360 controllers that got rid of the massive bump at the back and were a really nice weight. I wish they did an official modern wired only version.
100%! I love controllers that use AA’s. So much easier to replace the batteries. I’m dreading the day I need to go hunt down replacement batteries for things like my DS, 3ds, Playstation controllers, etc. It’s probably not hard to find replacements. But it requires more work than just whipping out some rechargeable AA’s and calling it a day lol
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