I played both CK2 and CK3 and have to say I love CK3. The create your religion system is so awesome and the events are great. I dont even feel like touching CK2 anymore aside from some mods
For CK and Vic they changed their design philosophy to be more “sandbox with realistic parameters” vs older games’ “sandbox with prescripted events” to make historical events happen. It’s an ambitious idea but so far the results have been pretty mixed. I’m hopefully they get it right eventually. Stellaris has really only gotten to be as polished as it very recently.
That's disappointing. Some level of unmet expectations are to be, well, expected for a sequel to such a cultural behemoth as Cities: Skylines, but it sounds like Colossal Order made some sacrifices on the release date altar. Such a shame.
Left handed mode. I didn’t realise how much I liked it until no man’s sky. It moves the body of the character to the right hand side of the screen. So you can see the character holding the items in the left hand.
Most games just mirror the item into the other hand and that’s it.
Sonic (just about every game in the series): even during the “dark age of Sonic” ('06 through Unleashed) and in flops like Forces, the one thing the series has consistently gotten right is the music. Jun Senoe will rarely steer you wrong.
Ace Attorney (also the whole series): has it all - some fun melodies, tracks that fit the mood whatever it might be, great character themes, and just about every Pursuit theme is an awesome hype track.
Octopath Traveler (the original): I love the instrumentation, more wonderful themes for characters as well as locations, and the Battle II music has to be my favorite battle music in any JRPG ever. I’m a sucker for good string music.
I think this might be a thing in modern games, but I don’t play enough new releases to be sure: Changing the accessibility settings before anything else in the game. The first time I encountered this was on The Division 2, a Ubisoft game of all things, and being able to tune my subtitles, visual cues, sound options, among others before even the Press Start to begin the game is an incredibly comfortable feeling.
A minor feature that is unfortunately underused is having an archive/library/compendium of characters, plot events and the like. The Yakuza series has entries for its major characters, which is a bliss in games that are essentially soap operas introducing new families and plot twists every with every new installment, and being able to catch up after a few days/weeks without playing is a relief.
It’s a thing… here and there. Far Cry 6 by default has voice reader accessibility feature turned on, which is nice. Say what you will about Ubisoft, they’re good with accessibility stuff.
LAN, direct IP connections, private servers, and when it makes sense, same-screen multiplayer. Several of these used to be standard. Games as a service are creating a dark age in video game history where lots of these works will arbitrarily disappear, and they don't have to.
While I don’t disagree, if part of the game runs on the server and the game publisher is the only one with the server, it makes the game hard to pirate, so they’ve a potent incentive to do this.
And I've got a potent incentive to not buy it when it's got a built-in expiration date. Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 are both available DRM-free and sold through millions of copies. BG3 has LAN, split-screen, and direct IP connections for its multiplayer, even.
If you have access to the server code you can reverse engineer it to look for vulnerability, and you can test it without having to worry about anticheat catching you.
Security through obscurity isn't real security, and I'd argue that for some genres, especially FPSes, cheating is just going to be a fact of life due to how many software and hardware layers there are between human and game. So I'd rather be able to run my own server and only invite people who I know aren't going to cheat rather than say that the company should be able to sell me a worse version of the game (where I don't get to run the server) under some false pretenses that we're better off.
I'm still waiting for split-screen coop on the PC version of the Master Chief Collection. Something they managed to achieve easily enough when Halo CE launched on PC 22 years ago still eludes developers today...
Having played Halo CE for PC recently…no, it doesn’t have split screen at all. That was only on the Xbox version (which is technically superior in quite a few ways). The only way to have split screen on Halo CE on PC is via console commands/mods. That said, I do agree with your overall point and I would love to be able to do split screen MCC on my PC without mods.
I suppose that if you were hellbent on specifically setting this up, you could maybe do multiple VMs split onscreen, though last I looked, the situation for sharing 3d hardware across multiple VMs wasn’t great, and I am sure that it would be horribly inefficient, since each VM would be storing a duplicate copy of textures in VRAM. I have no idea how the PC version of Halo CE deals with weird aspect ratios.
It also wouldn’t have some integration like switching to a single large screen for cutscenes or the menu. But if you were just specifically hellbent on creating a multiplayer, single-screen Halo experience on the PC, you might be able to pull it off like that.
Another approach, if the hardware cost is acceptable, would be to have a laptop per player and then stream the output video to some multiplexing hardware that puts multiple screens on one TV. That would buy you per-player audio, which I don’t believe was possible on the original XBox release.
Call of Duty games are terrible for this. You can't just play split screen Spec Ops or multiplayer anymore unless you play on a console or you emulate it.
There’s actually legitimately at least some functionality required there that exists on the console there that doesn’t on the PC. The consoles already have a console-level concept of a player-to-controller mapping. That doesn’t exist on the PC, so the individual game would need to implement it – it’s not entirely free.
A common approach on the PC to handling controllers is to assume that there is one player and that whichever controller is receiving input last is the controller to use. This deals nicely with the case where there are multiple specialized controllers used for different software packages, like “the user has a steering wheel, a flightstick, an XBox controller, a Playstation controller, and a Switch controller plugged in” case. Problem is, then you can’t go just assume that Controller 1 is the Player 1 controller, and Controller 2 is the Player 2 controller. That case doesn’t come up on consoles, because they constrain the controller situation so that you can’t do that, so the problem doesn’t arise on consoles.
For survival/crafting/whatever games - let me adjust drop rates and toggle things on and off individually, rather than just choosing a difficulty.
What I mean by this is looking at something like Ark versus Subnautica. Ark gives a super fine grained level of customization around spawn rates and other settings. You don’t even need to strictly enable or disable hunger but can set the decay rate, for example.
I’ve stopped playing Subnautica because it’s too grindy/stingy. Sometimes games get better about this further in, but I don’t wanna have to play 10 hours of garbage to get to the good stuff. (side note, I use Skip First Hour mod in factorio for this. Love it.)
Bit of an older game, but Don't Starve was great at this. At the beginning of a game you could set and customize the entire world/map that you were going to be dropped into, including how little or lot of each and every resource individually (eg, you could have a lot of trees, but few rocks, some carrots, but no berries, etc). IIRC you could also pick the world size, how much the land branched out into 'islands', weather patterns, the day length, stuff like that. It's essentially creating your own difficulty.
My biggest one is robust modding support. I understand it’s something that potentially needs a lot of extra effort to implement from the developers, but when I look at my collection of games that I love, almost all of them let me mod like crazy. Let me download 90 bugfixes and 40 QoL tweaks for a game from 2003.
One issue is that this can be a vector for malware. I kind of wish that game engines came standard with something like the Javascript engine in browsers, with some sort of sandbox for mods. I’m not saying that that’d solve everything – the game code that the mods invoke probably isn’t hardened – but it’d be better then just having arbitrary modifications go in. Especially with mod systems that auto-download new versions – even if the mod author is on the up-and-up, if someone compromises his account or computer, they’ve compromised all the computers using the mod.
EDIT: This isn’t just a problem specific to mods, either. A lot of online software library systems that provide auto-updates (pip for Python, rvm for Ruby, etc) can be a vector into systems. Providing auto-updates where many, many people have rights to push updates to computers is convenient in terms of getting software working, but unless the resulting code is running sandboxed, it’s creating an awful lot of vectors to attack someone’s system. This isn’t to impugn any one author – the vast bulk of people writing mods and open-source software are upstanding people. But it only takes one bad egg or one author who themselves has their system compromised to compromise a lot of other systems, and in practice, if you’re saying “subscribe to this mod”, you’re doing something that may have a lot of security implications for your system.
Consoles and phones already do a decent job of sandboxing games (well, as far as I know; I haven’t been working on security for either of them, but from what I’ve seen of the systems, they at least aim to achieve that). So maybe someone can compromise an app, but there’s a limited amount they can do aside from that. Maybe dump your name and location and such, but they can’t get control of your other software. However, Linux, Windows, and MacOS don’t have that kind of app sandboxing generally in place. I know that Linux has been working towards it – that’s one major reason for shifting to Wayland, among other things – but it’s definitely not there today.
For servers, I think that part of the way that sysadmins have been trying to deal with this is running containers or VMs on a per-service basis. Looking at !homelab, I see a lot of people talking about containers or VMs. But that’s not really an option today for desktop users who want to run games in a sandbox; it’s not set up automatically, and 3D card support spanning containers is not great today, or at least wasn’t last time I looked at it. I can run Ren’Py games in a firejail today successfully on Linux, but that’s not out-of-box behavior, Steam definitely doesn’t have it in place by default, I have no idea whether it’s possible for WINE (which is important for a lot of Windows games that run on Linux) and at least some if not all of the mechanisms firejail uses for graphics won’t permit for access to the 3D hardware.
Neither? Wildlands has some REALLY shitty depictions of South America and Breakpoint is that modern day ubi-Clancy of “Are they ironically spewing right wing propaganda or?”. And Ubi in general is a company with rampant employee abuse of a sexual nature.
That said: Wildlands is the much better game. Breakpoint “feels” better, but it is clear it was designed to be a co-op live game from the start with most of the missions not designed for AI. Whereas Wildlands was very much set up to just have three problematic bearded dudes lean out of a jeep and unload on anything you drive past.
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