The only game I preorder is GW2’s yearly expansions. Everything else is c/patientgamers material, waiting a few years and paying just a small fraction of the release price to get all DLC, fixed bugs, and tons of fan resources that were created meanwhile 👌
I used to buy Steam games without a care in the world. Now to spend even 5 bucks I make myself go through a quality control checklist so vast it would impress a space shuttle commander. There's just been too many abandoned games, terrible sequels, fake reviews, unnecessary game launchers and disappointing Steam sales. That's not to say there isn't still an excellent bunch of games on there, but they're all hidden deep in the forest and I have to go sniff em out like a basset hound.
Well ok but I did say it was long. Tbh, my checklist is almost a minigame itself now 🤣
So once I've found a game that looks interesting, I do the following:
Google video search for the game's title and filter to past week, then month, then year and that shows me how many people are actually talking about this game right now and who's doing the talking.
I look at the Steam reviews and initially filter to only show negative ones. I find it's a lot easier to see if the game's been review bombed that way. Also, a lot of negative reviews complain about features I find positive so that's helpful too "This game was way too easy! I finished it in 30 hours and I still had all my hair at the end, harumph!". I also check phrases like "Abandoned by the devs" or "Yet another asset flip" or "Beware! The EULA is a privacy nightmare".
I then switch to positive reviews and read the short ones. The dissertations are just way too much detail at this stage (or any stage really for me).
At some point early on I check the Steam update history. If the last update was years ago I factor that in. I also try to keep on top of relevant news like that time the entire staff of Annapurna Interactive quit, making a sequel to Stray unlikely.
Also, if it hasn't had that many recent updates I'll join the Discord and see how active that is. That's usually so revealing. Often in a positive way like with the G-Rebels devs.
Then I go through my top YT game reviewers like Raptor, Scarlett Seeker, Splattercat Gaming, Orbital Potato and Nookrium and see if they've talked about the game.
I look for the title on Allkeyshop to see if there's a cheaper EU unlockable Steam game key available.
I check for trainers in case I need an escape hatch if it turns out to be too grindy or tedious but still worth playing.
If all the searches have been positive so far I'll wishlist it around this point. If there's a demo I'll play it. If it looks amazing from the start I'll install the demo after looking at a couple of gameplay videos.
I also have a 21:9 monitor so I hop into the Steam discussion group for the game and look for confirmation that it's compatible.
If it's too expensive I'll check SteamDB and look at it's price history. My personal limit is <7 bucks for an old game and <18 for a relatively new one (unless something exceptional suddenly appears like Eriksholm).
I'll check if there any Steam sales coming and if the theme is likely to match the game I'm looking at.
I really do actually do all this by the way. It's the only way I've been able to get more sensible about the games I buy.
Actually that’s not a bad list at all. But reading this I am asking myself: isn’t that more a list to detain YOURSELF from adding too much on your pile of shame :D
Oh yeah definitely :) Also I've noticed there's kind of a new feeling of satisfaction when a game does somehow make it through this assault course and I buy it finally. It feels like an achievement in itself.
I would throw in isthereanydeals and gg.deals into the mix. Those provide good historical tracking of multiple stores for games, so you can really be sure you are getting the historical low during a sale.
If I spend a fiver on a game and it entertains me for two nights I still consider that fine value to entertainment ratio. If I went out somewhere in real life with the boys I’d be spending a minimum of $50 and that’s for a single night out. So I buy a lot of indie games in the $5-10 range without much guilt over it. Weird single-dev projects with pixel art and a 5 year span in early access are my favorite kind of art.
Now if you’re asking me more than about $20 for your game then yeah the quality control checklist comes out. But my standards are much lower for the $10-tier and I’ve found some really good games in that tier. Not ones that I’m still playing, maybe, but ones that I had a good time with for a few days to a few weeks and that I remember fondly.
I’m more of the just stick to the indie goats type of guy, those which give you unlimited replay ability, but reading your comment made me fondly remember Yes your Grace!
A little game which i got through in two days and probably never touch again but absolutely loved. It made feel more like a King (of a really small realm) than a crusader kings or civilisation.
I pretty much only buy games that are either very well-known to be good (famous on the level of Skyrim, Stardew Valley, etc.), or that I saw a “let’s play” of.
I’ve started just waiting a bit. If a game is actually good, waiting a few months won’t really matter. If the game is dead by then, it was never worth the money in the first place.
Same. I’ve got a huge library of rpg games I can play, don’t really play games that I need to have day 1, I just watch a few hours of someone play it and I’m good.
No man’s sky did make a full 180 recovery though, I bought it after the fix for me, my kid and some friends so we could play together.
Any time I realize the optimal path is really boring or tedious.
Like, imagine you could sell junk to vendors for money, but for some reason you get more money if you sell them one at a time. Spending five minutes splitting inventory stacks sucks, but it’s 30% more gold and that’s the difference between the cool sword or the basic sword.
A made up example, but hopefully gets the point across.
Related: long travel times with nothing interesting or challenging happening. I remember playing some shitty MMO and you had to like run through a building, go up an elevator, and down a long hallway every time you wanted to learn skills. Just five minutes of nothing. Gotta juice those playtime stats, I guess.
It’s different if there’s stuff to do en route. Monsters to fight or whatever. But when it’s just jogging? Very disappointing.
Just got a Blood Mage (Witch) to maps in PoE2. I just need one damned unique gem to tie the build together and I’m golden. Sadly, the gem isn’t easy to get and very expensive to buy. :(
It’s rare, but there’s a few indie games where I did not wait for a sale, even knowing I wouldn’t play it for a while, because I wanted to be supportive to devs that made something I wanted.
I’ve even come across games, like If On A Winter’s Night, Four Travelers, that is free, but it’s such a great game, that I just had to buy the supporter pack :) (I even waited a bit for it to go off sale :) )
Moonring is another free game who had to add a $5 megadungeon DLC after being harassed by fans for months to give them a way to support the game monetarily
This thread has some bangers. Thanks for sharing!!!
I really like this “supporter DLC” model. And it legitimately warms my heart to see a lot of people saying they go out of their way to support indies this way.
I read the book’s wiki page, but it doesn’t seem to, besides the title. The game does have a narrative frame of strangers meeting at a masquerade ball on an odd train going through a winter landscape, but most of the game is the self-contained stories of 3 of these travellers, it doesn’t directly talk to the player.
Cutscenes that can’t be paused, especially if they’re longer than 10 seconds.
Do you have the slightest idea how frustrating it is to be mid-cutscene, something else requires my attention, and I cannot fucking pause it? Singlehandedly my biggest gripe with gaming.
Same with unskippable cutscenes, especially before a difficult boss. It’s no fun to have to sit through it over and over if I’m struggling with said boss, or have to sit through a cutscene I’ve seen several times in previous playthroughs. This also applies to the game’s credits.
The first and only humble bundle I’ve bought was the WB with all the Arkham and Injustice games in it. I already owned like a third of the games, but I wanted the rest because it also had Mad Max. And it was only $12.
Best humble bundle I ever bought was a $15 bundle that included Euro Truck Simulator 2 because I wasn’t sure if ETS2 would be fun enough. I’ve since purchased every map DLC, American Truck Simulator and every map DLC for that too, plus a smattering of the cargo, truck and paint scheme DLCs, and I’m very likely to continue purchasing the DLC that keeps the studio constantly updating these 10+ year old games at a really healthy pace
I kept waiting for Starfield to drop in price. Impatiently, I sailed the seas to see if it had improved since launch. Sadly, it’s still a HUGE turd and now it’s off my watch list. The first big Bethesda title I don’t own.
I beat it on game pass and had fun. The base building is kinda impressive but there’s little reason to spend a bunch of time on it because nobody will ever see it. It’s not amazing but I definitely don’t think it deserves turd rating. That said everyone should just play expedition 33 instead.
As a huge sci-fi fan, and fan of most of Bethesda’s games in the past, I disagree. Turd rating is accurate. It just all felt like a waste of time. Like you said, the base building seems like it could be good, but it is never relevant. It’s like this for almost every piece of content. They’re just all on islands that don’t interact.
My biggest issue though is the writing. It’s so boring. It’s like they watched a bunch of sci-fi and put tropes from them in the game, but then they never explore the consequences of them. They just exist for a quest and are gone. Why sci-fi is good is because it uses these stories to explore humanity, which would be made even better with an RPG where the player has agency. They just don’t though. You get a few boring options that don’t actually effect anything and everything goes on as normal. It’s just a bland game that doesn’t respect your time.
Again you’re describing a not excellent game but a turd, there are real turds out there but this is just a middling attempt which is particularly disappointing from a formerly excellent studio
You can disagree, but no, I feel it’s a turd. I felt like best thing I can say about it was that it was a waste of time —and that’s not a positive thing. I’ve played really bad games that I still feel respected my time more than Starfield, which in my opinion is one of the worst sins of video games. I’d put it up there with Ubisoft games for not respecting the player’s time, but at least their gameplay is good (or used to be, but I haven’t played one in a decade or more).
I agree with you. People have a tendency to be too kind to things in ratings, but anything that literally feels like a waste of time is not even worth a rating. Turd is accurate. I see this with movies and TV-shows a lot, where people say “it’s not very good and you feel like you wasted your time at the end of it but 5/10.” What???
In college I took some classes on Brecht (for those who don’t know: extremely important 20th century play-right and theater theorist), and one thing he wrote always stuck with me. I can’t quote because I have a shit memory, but it was something like this: if the guy sitting in the front row takes a cigar out during the beginning of your piece, by the end of the piece he should be sitting there with his cigar still unlit.
What he means by this is simple, and he says it more clearly in his Kleines Organon: the single most important thing, before anything else, is that what you make creates “Unterhaltung” for the audience. “Unterhaltung” is am interesting word choice; it can be translated as both entertainment and conversation. The old school of Brecht only saw the latter, but today it is believed that he meant both.
Thus, even the great Brecht agrees with your sentiment: if it is not entertaining and creating conversation, if you really feel like you wasted your time, it is a complete and utter failure!
Okay, that went on a little longer than I expected… but it’s all just to say that you’re well justified!
There’s a Star Trek Voyager game out at the moment which is basically what Starfield should have been, but set in the Star Trek universe.
I think the big problem Starfield has is that it tries to be really big, but they don’t really have that much content so it’s just all spread out. While at the same time you don’t actually get to feel that bigness because moving between locations is just a loading screen. You don’t get the long quiet sections like you do in something like Elite Dangerous. So they made a really big, really spread out world, with fast travel, it’s the most pointless game ever made.
Well France doesn’t even exist in the game so I think you’re safe. They even are tongue in cheek about it and you can literally dress like a baguette stereotype for the lolz
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