I’ll ignore the market share question and talk a little about history. The compatibility layer is what killed OS/2 back in the day.
See, IBM (with OS/2) and Microsoft (with Windows 2.x and 3.x) were cooperating initially. Windows was the new kid on the block, and MS was allowing IBM to make a windows application compatibility layer on OS/2 in the early days. Think Windows 2.x/3.x. This was a brilliant stroke on behalf of MS, since the application developers would choose the Windows API and develop against that API only. Soon, there were no real native OS/2 apps being sold in any stores. Once MS Office came about, OS/2 was effectively a dead commercial product, outside of the server space.
The parallel here is that wine allows developers to target only the Windows API (again). This means you don’t have to bother with linux support at all and just hope that Proton or whatever will do the work for you.
There are some modern differences though. First: Linux didn’t start as a major competitor to Windows in the desktop/gaming space. We’d all love the Linux marketshare to increase, but largely there isn’t a huge economic driver behind it. So Linux will increase or not and the world will keep on turning. We’re not risking being delegated to history like OS/2. The second: the compatibility layer is being made as an open source project, and this isn’t MS trying to embrace-extend-extinguish in the same way that their assistance to IBM implementing that layer was. (We could quibble about .Net and Mono and others though.)
So I don’t think it’ll play out the same way. Linux will be okay. It’s already a vast improvement from prior years.
Historically, there was nothing like a killer hardware situation for OS/2 – no equivalent of the Steam Deck – that was driving wide hardware adoption to encourage additional native apps. Valve has done more for linux desktop adoption in the last few years than anyone that came prior.
I remember it well. I think the biggest difference between OS/2 then and Linux today is that OS/2 wasn't all that much better than Windows in any easily understood way for the average non-technical user.
Some games lend themselves better to modding. Some are much more complicated to mod. Some games need a mod manager to do conflict checks and some games can just have mods piled on top of each other endlessly without issues.
Mods within certain game engines can pretty much be moved between games ofln the same engine often with very little adjustment.
I would say in modern modding it is usually fairly straightforward, but some games and some older mods definitely require some deep computer fuckery.
Stick to things you’re comfortable with and skip the ones you aren’t.
It also depends where you get the mod from as different sites offers different amount of help. On some sites you need to download, un zip, drag and drop files in different places and change files both in the mod and outside it, and other sites you just press a button and your good to go. Even when it is the same or similar mods.
It got a lot of flak back then, mostly because people were sick to shit of Peter Molyneux promising THE WORLD and delivering, like, JUST A GAME.
But here’s the thing. I didn’t follow gaming news. I didn’t know what a Peter molyneux was. I just know I got a fun little action RPG where I get to be royalty, and that scratched a very specific itch for me.
Beware though, it’s quite different to other roguelites in that the world it creates is suprisingly expansive. You can get lost in it, mentally. There are quests that can take you dozens of hours to complete, all on the same run, and even if you become so absurdly overpowered that nothing can threaten you directly, till you can fly inside the sun, you can still get turned into a sheep and die in a single hit.
Also the wand-building is complex, it’s like a programming language. People have built wands that can teleport you to parallel worlds, and the developers did not intend for that to be possible. And in a way I’ve never seen magic be done before, you can screw up and kill yourself with your wands, just like a discworld wizard. It’s so easy to do, it’s a rite of passage for any new player.
Some people don’t like spoilers on this game so here you go, but honestly getting just a little spoiled made me get properly into it to understand what the hell people were talking about.
Tap for spoilerI was maybe 8 or 9 hours into reaching the hardest boss in the game, up to NG+24 or so, just a couple of hours away from my destination. I was teleporting, had hundreds of thousands of hit points, had immunity to every kind of damage, could tear through the terrain like it wasn’t there, had weapons that would evaporate any enemy in the blink of an eye even as they became exponentially more powerful with each NG+ level, and I was being careful. I had even pacified the world so nobody would attack. Then some asshole dropped in from off-screen with a wand of transmogrification, got hit by the chainsaw on my tele wand and retaliated while something exploded nearby throwing fire over us, and I, now a sheep, flopped around impotently for a few seconds on fire then just fucking died.
I… stopped playing after that one, I’ll be honest. But I will return.
And rather than simply being repetitive, the way the world loops creates an ennui that’s kind of haunting to me. The whole game is littered with versions of people trying to achieve immortality, and if you manage to reach a point where you actually can’t die, you feel like you’ve soft-locked yourself, because dying is how you get to the end-screen. You can just end the run from the menu, but it feels fake somehow.
10/10 would try to kill god and confront my mortality again.
Thank you for the in-depth explanation! I’ve wishlisted it and will pick it up when it goes on sale. The art is absolutely beautiful, I can see how it could get haunting and lonely.
I mean, I don’t know how much they anticipated. There are a lot of projectile path modifications that are clearly meant for tinkering, but the idea that they knew their players would do this is hard to tease out. It’s a simulation game built very much on “Things are what they are,” and they know this has deep implications.
Like when I was turned into a sheep, I wasn’t “noita (sheep)”, I was just “sheep”. The noita I had been playing as was effectively stored in a state of nonexistence until the transmogrification wore off, then the sheep was replaced with the noita. So transforming yourself - or simply causing yourself to temporarily cease to exist - can be a way to eliminate side effects of certain things.
If there is one thing that it might be worth spoiling yourself on, if you’re struggling to finish a run, is in the next spoiler.
Tap for spoilerLearn to escape the Holy Mountain without collapsing it. Being able to return to edit wands, go back up in the world, and access health is a game-changer. Finishing the game without that trick is something I don’t think I’ve ever done. All the big lore stuff is discovered after finishing your first run anyway as far as I can tell.
Other than that, I would look up how to design good wands. This can be a good thing to learn by doing for a while, but there are deep interactions that you could soend a thousand runs not learning. I think the shared science is a big part of what makes this game great.
Like most others said. Dead Cells and Binding of Isaac are the top dogs. No matter what else I play I always circle back to one of those two eventually and get sucked in again. But some other lesser known ones that are good are:
Cursed to Golf - 2d golfing roguelike, no combat or anything. There’s a bunch of different cards to make the ball do different stuff. From a rocket ball you control after hitting to an ice ball that’ll freeze water hazards to a drill so you can tunnel through walls.
Oblivion Override - 2d with fast combat and a lot of perks and weapons that change things up. Perks from different “trees” have synergies that are a lot of fun.
Rogue Prince of Persia - 2d parkour style combat made by the folks that did most of Dead Cells post launch updates, still in early access but still fun.
Soundfall - not a true roguelike, top down rhythm shooter with random loot.
BlazBlue Entropy Effect - 2d with a boatload of different classes, different elemental perks that synergize and each class has different perks to add new melee combos
Curse of the Dead Gods - isometric with slower parry based combat, has some mechanics with light and dark that some folks don’t like. If there isn’t a light source nearby you can’t see traps and take extra damage but you can pull a torch out to light braziers or enemies on fire to illuminate the area.
Ravenswatch - same people that made Curse of the Dead Gods. Isometric with different classes and online co-op.
Voidigo - top down shooter with unique art and sound design. Lot of weapons and four or five different characters with unique abilities.
Have a Nice Death - 2d melee with nice movement, mechanics don’t seem as deep as others but still fun.
Dandy Ace - isometric with ranged combat. Magician that throws cards around, good selection of abilities.
Patch Quest - top down, hard to explain this one, might wanna watch a video to see how it plays.
Devil Slayer Raksasi - top down with a lot of elemental effects. Haven’t spent much time with it though.
Well this got a bit longer than I meant but they’re all solid, not sure if they’re all on Switch though.
One more, not a roguelike at all but Switch exclusive and a surprisingly awesome game. Golf Story, check it out.
Shows how much time I spent with that one. I just remembered enjoying it but started running into enemies that had all kinds of status effects and not liking getting blinded and slowed constantly. Need to get back to it eventually.
Highly recommended Roguelikes from personal experience or friend recommendations:
Binding of Isaac, FTL, Risk of Rain 2, Enter the Gungeon, Darkest Dungeon (my favorite)[not the second one], Monster Train, Crypt of the Necrodancer (another favorite).
It’s worth noting that Risk of Rain 1 and 2 are very different games (3rd person 3D vs. 2D side scroller), and both are good - so if 2 didn’t grab you, maybe check out 1 and see if that’s more your thing. (The remastered version has a lot of nice QOL stuff and some new game modes and items.)
Seems ironic for a project focused on access and preservation to adopt a closed messaging platform like Discord, that can and does lock people out on a whim.
I guess it might be a concession to reach as many gamers as possible. It’s an unfortunate situation, though. Maybe when we’ve stopped the killing of games, we can turn our attention to freeing ourselves from Discord.
the ending of outer wilds, figuring out that the treasure really was the friends we made along the way, will always stand out to me as the most magnificent, joy-filled moment in my 25+ year gaming experience.
Meeting [redacted] on the [redacted] was such an unexpected and powerful moment for me as well. I don’t even usually get into lore that much in games, but Outer Wilds is so well done I nearly cried in that moment.
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