For what it’s worth, Robin Walker and his team are working on the next half life after Alyx. Will that ever come out? I have no idea and I’m not expecting anything. Deadlock however is a game designed by one of the grandfathers of the moba genre, and has had over 20k concurrent players at any given time, and it wasn’t even announced with it’s existence only known through word of mouth. That’s insanely impressive and shows how huge the moba genre really is and how those players are thirsty for a new game from a big company. It sucks and I wish we had more sp valve games but I’m content with the work they’ve done on proton, steamos, the steam deck, steam itself, and half life alyx. They haven’t been sitting on their hands not doing anything, they’ve been putting their focus on more technical areas versus making games and that’s ok.
It’s called HLX, and it’s apparently a traditional non-vr game. Robin Walker was leading the Alyx team, it’s a safe bet he’s leading this team or working with this team on the sequel.
Having HL:A Alyx be VR was super cool. The game was so immersive and for a while afterwards, I was convinced that any furure HL game had to be VR. Then the novelty wore off and the VR market basically is basically dead. Now I’m excited for another flat screen HL game.
I honestly couldn’t even tell you what it’s about, but it’s one of my favourite games ever. You can die from reading a book that’s too sad and if you do it right, you can smell communism.
Incredible game that can be a little jarring for people who are probably expecting something like Baldur’s Gate 1&2, Fallout 1&2, or some other kind of isometric killfest RPG. It essentially turns the dialogue into 90% of the game, but the dialogue is so damn good that it doesn’t matter.
It also takes getting used to damage, as sometimes you can “die” in seemingly random ways. I was on a rooftop, I think trying to reach for a scarf or something, and failed my roll. That caused me to apparently get so depressed that I lost the game. I can’t remember which stat/trait it was but I think there’s a morale or mental trait you have to watch out for too.
Pirate this game if you wanna give it a try, don’t ever buy it. This is what the developers have advocated for and it actually fits right in with parts of the game itself.
Doom Eternal. I don’t usually enjoy FPS games and I’m not very good at them but I absolutely loved Doom (2016) as it took out most of the things I hate about FPS games. But in Eternal I just felt like I was constantly out of ammo, and there was too much focus on using specific weapons against specific weak points on enemies which I couldn’t get the hang of
Yeah I also couldn’t get the hang on Doom Eternal. Loved the first one but the second one cramped so many unnecessary elements into it and made it too complicated. The first one was a simple but highly effective shooter, but the second one was just bloated with stuff nobody asked for.
I quite enjoy Doom Eternal, but it's true it's a very different game from Doom (2016). You either vibe with the combat flow the game enforces or you don't. There is exactly one way to play it, by rotating between all the abilities as they go off their cooldowns, so you can keep restoring your ammo, HP and armor respectively.
I agree, when I first picked it up I couldn’t get into the rhythm of the game and hated it, but once it clicked it was a lot of fun. You can’t really go in expecting to play exactly like Doom (2016).
I didn’t even like Doom (2016). It was ugly, dull and I hated the finisher system. Really disappointed because I’m old enough to have played the other Doom games as a kid and I mostly enjoyed the new wave of boomer shooters. Great soundtrack though.
The only thing I really hated about Eternal was the Marauder. As a mini boss it was fine, but as a recurring enemy it absolutely kills the pace. I tried the DLC and as soon as I encountered another Marauder early on I turned it off and haven’t gone back.
It’s a shame because I really enjoy the lore, and contrary to yourself I liked most of the other changes Eternal made to nu-Doom. Fewer rooms where you get locked in until you defeat all enemies, mainly.
I agree with the Marauder bit. As a boss it was fine, but as a recurring enemy it just killed the pace of the game.
As for ammo, the game gives you so much chainsaw fuel that if ever you run out of ammo, you just chainsaw the next enemy and you’re back to shooting with your preferred weapon.
The problem I had was that their way of making the game harder was just to throw more enemies at you. Some of the battles were just way too long, fighting dozens of the same enemies that spawned in as you killed the previous ones. It just got so tedious at some point, and rather than being excited for what was coming next, I was just hoping the fight would end so I could move on.
Doom hit the right balance, but Eternal just overdid it.
From memory it respawns the low level enemies constantly, since they’re just ammo/health/armour pinatas. You needed to kill the big enemies to complete an arena.
Not really a fan of the design choice, but I had a decent amount of fun when I clicked with how the Devs wanted you to play.
Funnily enough, the Marauder is one of the only things I kind of liked about Eternal.
And the grapple hook on the super shotgun was fantastic, especially in that boss fight where you grapple and then punch the boss.
Other than that, I find 2016 so much better. Some of the things in Eternal were just not fun at all, like the enemies that are invulnerable except for 3 seconds while charging their super attack AND EVEN THEN ONLY THE HEAD TAKES DAMAGE. Felt just unfair rather than difficult.
Yeah, Doom 2016 is easily one of my favorite singleplayer fps games. Doom Eternal is just worse in every way, and I couldn't get through more than a few hours.
It completely breaks the combat flow state that made the original great
Instead of having the freedom to prioritize enemies and weapons, it wants you to do things a very specific way
Instead of the minimal but interesting story from the 2016, we get a convoluted mess, with random characters that we have no reason to care about.
Also, despite 2016 looking quite good, they decided to make Eternal garish and cartoony for some reason??
I could go on, but anyway I hope we get a proper 2016 sequel some day.
I’m replaying Doom Eternal right now and I feel this so hard. Even with ammo upgrades and judicious chainsaw use I’m constantly out of ammo. Really makes me wish for a melee weapon that doesn’t have limited fuel or whatever.
This is a few days old but I might be able to help. Are you switching weapons or just sticking to a single one?
A single chainsaw gives you something like 20 shotgun slugs and a bunch of ammo for every single other weapon, you shouldn’t have ammo problems unless you are trying to kill a heavy demon with the assault rifle primary fire.
IMO, it was more about how it forced you to focus on other elements than demon slaying. Especially with how some enemies are only really vulnerable to one weapon. So, if you even had a momentary lapse of planning, it was a, “shit! where’s the nearest scrub mob?!” when you ran out of certain ammo, which just completely pops the flow of combat.
It wasn’t so bad later on when you had enough weapons to cycle through, but early on when on Nightmare or worse, enemies just soaked up too much damage for how tiny the ammo capacity was. It was a game of inventory management, not demon slaying.
The only 2 enemies vulnerable to a single type of attack are DLC and you have your full arsenal by then.
I agree that the game is a bit weird during the second and third missions due to the limited tools you are given, but I think you might be exaggerating how the weaknesses work a bit.
No, it crops up plenty often when many of the big enemies who actually trigger the fight progression can soak up an entire set of an ammo type without dying.
Sure, there was usually plenty of options to eventually get back to slaying, but the point is you had to play a meta game of managing your ammo and weapons when by the game’s lore itself, the doom slayer is supposed to be a raging unstoppable beast.
It’s not about things literally becoming impossible, but the absolute interruption to “ripping and tearing” if you had even a momentary lapse of playing the meta game.
A complete downgrade from Doom 2016 in every way. Combat was complete madness, there’s no such thing as planning ahead. You can only endlessly dash away while insta-swapping weapons ad infinitum.
Doom 2016 made you think. Is this glory kill to risky? Is the gap wide enough to make it through, who do I have to kill first? Doom Eternal reduced that to a single repetitive four button loop.
Fully agreed. I HATED the game while going through on Nightmare, at least until I got all of the weapons so then I finally had enough freaking ammo. They should’ve left the weakpoint stuff as the motive for switching weapons, not literally fucking the player over with low ammo. I started enjoying it by the end when I could actually fully engage with how it was designed, but they royally failed to make that design work out for how the game progresses from the beginning.
I remember playing Far Cry 3 on Steam way back when… It opened up uPlay. I was not happy, but what can you do.
So I played for a bit, then… the game crashed. Nothing seemed to be wrong with the game, but the uPlay lost connection. Everything else worked just fine. Happened several times after that, never bought anything else from Ubisoft.
Even if their launcher isn’t such piece of shit anymore, I don’t care.
Plus it works so smoothly I never even think of it as DRM
AFAIK SteamWorks DRM is something developers have to actively implement in their games. From what I understand, by default Steam is merely a delivery system without DRM.
As a linux gamer, a game that is not available on Steam is a game i won’t even bother checking. I can easily run non-steam game using lutris or heroic-game-launcher but I prefer to stick to my walled garden than step in their’s.
No, they should definitely be accountable for all the other shitty things too. This is just a game I was actually kind of excited for, hence why I’m upset about it.
In short, Epic is anti-consumer. They claim better support for developers, but in reality consumers are the one paying for that. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but you the consumer have no choice in it. You are forced through exclusives and other limitations to use inferior service for the same price. Even free games they give are there to drag you into their ecosystem and abuse.
This is why Valve doesn’t feel threatened, I assume, and is not likely to feel the pressure from Epic anytime soon. For that to happen, Epic would have to get on par with features and customer benefits equal or better than Steam and that’s not happening anytime soon. Epic would rather throw hundreds of millions on exclusive deal with some developer and force you the consumer to buy the game on EGS than actually improve the service.
As someone who used to run a louis rossman electronics repair business for a couple years before i burned out.
LG G5 was and still is my point to for perfectly fixable devices.
Motorola is trash because you have to dismantle the phone from the back layer by layer just to reach the front screen.
HTC was even worse with two tier motherboards and octopuss ribbon cables were a nightmare to navigate.
iPhone was/ is possibly the easiest fucking phone to fix, ironically…however by the iphone 8 and onwards apple found increasingly shitty ways to make 3rd party repairs nearly impossible.
windows phones, nokia, and others were hit or miss. tablets were long winded affairs but generally easy due to their inherent size.
ive been out of the game since 2019 when covid dropped. id really like to hear the inside baseball on any current operators running repair business.
i used Repair Shopr software to manage my customers. idk if thats still the go to or if another has bested it.
When I couldn’t repair my Nokia and replace the 5 € USB-Port because there happened to be a small crack in the screen (of course you have to remove the glued on screen to accese the innards), I caved and bought a Fairphone 3.
Worst decision ever. The stupid thing refuses to break to let me even use the better repairability.
Honestly, I think I’ve never dropped a phone as much as this one. And apart from a few scratches there’s nothing. I think it’s the battery cover that usually just pops off like on the indestructible Nokia phones of decades past.
Really funny how I can use Nokia as both a positive and a negative example.
All of the selfish things I’m learning from the comments in this thread about what Microsoft has been doing with their console such as banning aftermarket tech like controllers or generic SSDs is why I finally quit buying consoles entirely years ago and why I stopped paying for Xbox live. Enshitification is a real thing, my dudes.
yes, but mobile games now are literally casinos, with research going into making them as addictive as possible to maximise in app purchase and advertisement revenue
source: worked in ad tech for several years, specifically in the mobile gaming industry, monetisation/ad optimisation. a job I regret doing and which feels very scummy in retrospect.
Because they all come with microtransaction stores, including several of the ones you’re specifically lauding, ya numpty.
Just because YOU haven’t wasted money on microtransactions does not magically make them unsuccessful in getting many children to blow loads of their parents’ money.
No, they don’t. It’s not hard to find premium, paid mobile games without microtransactions—I’ve already listed examples. And I’ve cited hard data: there are 14,139 such games on iOS alone.
If you can’t find even one of them, the problem isn’t the platform. It’s that you’re not actually looking.
To be fair, the iOS app store will show the top 200 paid games, and that’s it. There are a bunch of categories for games, but ‘paid’ isn’t one of them; there is no other way to see or filter just paid games. It’s always sucked and Apple has never fixed it.
I honestly don’t know how any developer is supposed to be successful on there with a paid game, because if it’s not already in the top 200 list, most people will never be able to see it in the store without specifically searching the name.
Ah, the classic “world hunger is a myth, I have eaten today.”
I’m not saying there are not the rare gems in mobile games (just bought Don’t Starve on Android last month!), but like 99% of games for mobile are just s money making scheme using dark patterns to influence your brain to give them money.
And congrats on not spending on micro transactions! You do realize the world doesn’t revolve around how your perceive things, right? If young people are exposed to micro transactions like that, it alters their brains and not in a good way. And that’s science, there really isn’t much you can argue with.
You do realize that iOS alone has more paid premium games—without microtransactions—than the entire combined library of NES, SNES, N64, and GameCube, right?
Your premise would be true if kids were compelled to spend money. But I watch my kids’ spending habits like a hawk. If what you were saying were true, I’d notice transactions being made.
Which leads me to believe that you’re either exaggerating or deliberately engaging in moral panic because others are having fun in your non-preferred way.
My kid has spent more money on new Switch games than Roblox.
So because you do it correctly, everyone else should get fucked or what? Like, you know how many people have bad parents?
So, congrats, your kids won’t suffer from that (or maybe they will once they have their own money because the path way of “spend a $1, get an in-game item, get an instant rush of feel-good hormones” is forming even with moderation). But other kids may, unless of course you think that it’s somehow their fault they have shitty parents.
So no, I really don’t want this around kids whose lives will be ruined just so your kids can have a fun time (which they can have in other ways, including other games).
I just spent the last two weeks in San Diego and hated it.
I hated the freeways, the strip malls, and the car-centrism. More than that, I hated the complete and utter hostility towards walking.
There were places that were 0.5 miles away. It would take three minutes to drive there yet an hour to walk because the assholes who designed the city couldn’t be bothered to build a pedestrian overpass.
I feel very strongly that cities like this are everything wrong with the USA, and that the reason so much shit happens in the USA are because cities are simply unlivable.
But Americans—specifically American voters—have decided this is what they aspire towards, and being antagonistic towards the average American is ultimately unhelpful.
Now why do I mention this? Because there’s a host of things that suck, and there’s only so much bandwidth to give a damn.
The real problem you’re talking about isn’t games. It’s financial literacy. Schools don’t teach it. Employers are hostile towards it. Governments just want you to spend—they don’t want you to save.
Financial literacy is what saves people from making terrible financial decisions.
Specifically worth pointing out the research and refinement of the skinner boxes in mobile games today is a continuous and ongoing process, with revenue also being continuous and ongoing. Any games and moral panic of 80s to 2000s were about products that didn’t change after release and were one-time only purchases.
Modern mobile games vs. shareware are incomparable in terms of harm they could do, real or perceived.
Moral panic is unrelated to games having addictive elements.
A better comparison would be how retro games would be designed for you to die/lose over and over because they were based on arcade dynamics, where the customer has to keep putting in quarters to continue playing.
Because the games are intentionally made with micro transactions as the main feature.
Like, if you play Witcher or Control or whatever, the focus is on you enjoying the game. If you play Fortnite, the main focus is on getting you pay. The game is probably still fun, but every single thing in the game is meant to make you pay.
It’s absolutely not the same thing. I used to play a lot as a kid (still do) and I have no problem with today’s kids doing the same. But I want them to be able to enjoy games without constantly being manipulated into spending as much money as possible.
And it’s not just about kids either, I think these predatory tactics affect adults too.
It’s not a moral panic, the problem is capitalism.
I was going to say outer worlds as well (outer WILDS is a fantastic game IMO) the game was entirely competent, just unimpressive in every way. Except Pavarti, she is a precocious sugar dumpling and must be protected at all costs.
Actual conversation had with my wife, who was watching me play near the end:
“That chick is cute. I bet her romance is adorable!”
“She’s aromantic and asexual, you can’t romance her.”
“I bet her quest line is fun”
“Nope. It’s a really boring fetch quest where you set her up on a date with some bland woman old enough to be her mother. She is also very obviously sexually and romantically attracted to this woman.”
“…huh.”
I love Parvati but Drinking Sapphire Wine is a terrible quest.
I thought The Outer Worlds was violently mediocre, and yeah, its really long uninteresting fetch quest, but:
Parvati says she’s not interested in physical affection, but I don’t recall her ever saying she was aromantic. The closest thing I remember is that she feels like she’s better at dealing with machines than people, which definitely doesn’t mean the same thing.
I also don’t recall her ever saying anything sexual about Junlei?
how old does this woman look to you that you think she could have a 28 year old daughter?
The quest was nothing new sure, but the reason I’m doing the quest? I want her to have the best dam date ever. I just wanted to see her happy and help her get ready for her date. Not sure what they were talking about with her being aromatic, don’t remember that. And about the age thing? not sure what they meant by that either, she looks the same age as Pavarti to me.
Haha yea I always check out the negative reviews first - either they quickly show that I’d be wasting my time with the game, or the negatives they highlight are actually neutral or positive for me, either way I generally find them better value/time than positive reviews. (Especially when a significant portion of positive reviews are memes, award-begging copypasta, or “best game ever” with no further details.)
I do the same. If the negative reviews highlight a consistent issue that I have an issue with and hasn’t been fixed, then I doubt I’ll be buying the product. Doesn’t have to be distinct to steam, either
I think Valve severely escalated the problem when they introduced the award system. Now people are extra motivated to cash in a quick laugh, or provoke outrage for the Clown awards. What boggles my mind the most is that hundreds of people give awards to the same copypaste comments that appear under every major game. I sometimes try to report the reviews of the spammiest accounts, but Valve is really hands-off with their moderation. At the end of the day they profit from the points system, and as always, user experience takes a firm second seat to profits :/
Goldeneye. Revolutionized the FPS genre at the time. Nigh unplayable now. Tried recently using both NSO and on an original N64, it just hasn’t aged well when compared to something modern.
I played Goldeneye at an arcade recently that had an N64 set up and actually had a great time. But people who hadn’t grown up with it and tried to join in found it pretty frustrating. So I can see that going either way tbh.
Yeah it already had inferior controls at the time if you were familiar with FPS gaming on computers. But it was still a ton of fun and when I went back to it some years ago I fell back into the n64 controller muscle memory no problem
Yeah you can use two controllers to mimic the more modern twin stick ones that have become standard, but I don’t think too many people figured that out back then. Still though, controller will never be as good as mouse + keyboard for FPS games.
Perfect Dark, on the other hand, totally still holds up today in my opinion, and there’s a decompilation project that works great on PC and Steam Deck.
Yeah, I felt that way about GoldenEye after getting used to PD. GoldenEye was one of the GOATs in its day, but that day passed pretty quickly. Halo then further improved on the controls and CoD improved on the multiplayer mechanics.
When that GoldenEye for PC project released some years ago, I was excited to download and install it (because PC port meant it would get PC controls, which have always been superior to console controls, even after Halo fixed them) but I think I only played one game before remembering that you start with nothing and have to find guns and the port was more crowded than the 2-4 player games back in the day where you could at least spawn away from the action and get a chance to arm up before others made their way to where you were.
I love love love perfect dark. But it’s uhhh it does not hold up. The campaign starts fairly strong and craters pretty quick. It really feels like they just weren’t able to really… Finish the game when it came out.
Also, like GoldenEye, a huge component of Perfect Dark was multiplayer.
With the N64, it helps if you can hook it up to a TV from around that era too. Games like Goldeneye look terrible on a modern LCD. I had that experience myself - “Man, I know I’m used to modern games now, but I don’t remember these games looking this shitty”. Then I dragged out my old CRT and hooked it up, and instantly it was “Now this is how I remember these games looking like”.
Man, I managed to completely forget about that. My dad was really, really into that game. Like, that’s about all he did for most of 4 years and ended up leaving my mom for someone he met in game.
I guess SL wasn’t really any worse about that than any other game, plenty of people meet and get married in MMOs, but I think the raging custom-content sex parties in SL probably didn’t help matters at the time.
Wonder how that game is doing these days. Cursory web search says it’s still alive. I probably would have found it to be pretty interesting if I wasn’t so turned away from it by my family experience.
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