yeah, it had solo. you’d case the area by yourself while 3 bots stayed behind, until alarms triggered. you could also configure who the bots were and what their loadout was
It does, but as far as I know PD3 still requires an online connection for single player. I've read issues of people lagging in single player, that's crazy.
same way they monetized Payday 2 since it was already pretty live-service-esque in it’s monetization, at least on PC. if they wanted to, they could have just added a battlepass with limited cosmetics alongside the steam marketplace cosmetics of Payday 2
The fact that the same user reinstalling the game counts as 2 installs makes this doubly absurd. The decision is already baffling by itself but the idea that you could take a financial hit for an install that didn't net you any additional income is... Jesus.
The best times I had with any PVP shooter were always in the middle of the day on weekdays. It was always a bunch of working age guys like myself and that was the only time they had to play. Dudes were always friendly, games were always fun. 3pm Eastern hit and the fun was over, if it was Friday you were done playing for the weekendb unless you stayed up really late, even then, it was never as good.
I blame matchmaking and the death of the server browser. Having a regular server you’d join to play for fun, rather than every game being an arranged esports sweat fest really, was the peak of FPS multiplayer.
Being able to host your own game and tweak the rules however you like is a feature that’s sadly lacking from most console games nowadays, Halo 3 was the peak with Forge
Yep. Joining your favorite TF2 server on a Saturday afternoon and seeing that half of the server playing sandvich heavies, doing a conga line, having a full on philosophical discussion in the spectator chat, or annoying the engineers as a group of spycrabs was peak gaming
Edit : also trying to make the highest tower of players by jumping on each other (until some guy inevitably pulls up with a ulapool caber and blows up everyone)
I was anticipating Killing Floor 3 which was a killer PvE in first 2 games, but third one was ass during beta so they postponed it until they fix stuff. KF is one of more fun PvE games out there.
KF2 has some amazing animations for guns handling (and great feeling when shooting) that still hold up to this day. Such a shame that they ruined the art direction with all the shiny shit.
You see, this community just really hates PvP for some reason. Apparently playing games with other people rather than with yourself is an inconceivable concept to some. Unless it‘s coop that is. And I too love a good coop experience but PvP is quite literally the mother of all game types so it‘s strange to see how much hate it gets in this particular corner of the internet.
you know I generally do not like pvp but I would not mind something like shadowbane resurfacing. With the city building and minimal rewarding of pvp it was not bad despite the fact that once you left the gates of one of the three safe npc cities you had snipers galore. Yeah most player cities were dicks but there was a few guilds that actually tried to make something for people to visit (of course then they got player griefers coming in to)
Its a competitive shooter/moba, basically none of the game would remain if it was transitioned into a PvE game.
There arent AI bots sprinkled in, there’s just troopers and jungle camps, which either dont move or walk in a straight line down their lane. They aren’t meant to be a challenge, theyre just tools for gaining souls and creating map pressure.
PvP is only rage inducing when you let it be. Mute whiny people and just enjoy yourself.
I very much don’t think RoR 2 feels like Deadlock. The movement is so much faster, missions so much longer, amount of enemies so much greater, and the camera shows so much more it’s incomparable.
The closest game I can think of to Deadlock I’ve played is Monday Night Combat but is like apples to oranges. Deadlock feels unique to me.
the game is a moba, the pve sections are there to facilitate pvp play, like farming and map control.
id be pretty down for a coop pve shooter in the style of the old hero sieges from wc3 though: fighting off waves and waves of creeps until you get strong enough to push into their base while defending key objectives.
I love the concept of tower defense games where you essentially deal with waves of stronger and stronger enemies. Or Killing Floor with same concept, but in form of first person shooter. Games like this are super fun and entirely devoid of stupid sweaty pros that fuck up every PvP game ever.
Witcher 3 did it really well by having the “end of the world” stuff being centered around Ciri, and Geralt is just kind of along for the ride and isn’t really entirely sure what is happening, and his impact on whether she succeeds is rooted in whether he supports her as a father figure. Most of the game is Geralt not really having any idea that this end of the world stuff is happening to Ciri at all, until near the end.
On the other hand, it would be nice to have an RPG with lower stakes. Like I’ve always imagined a modern-day RPG where you have to do things like scrounge through your couch for change to buy a soda. The mundane RPG.
I feel that. I’ve been playing satisfactory since way before 1.0 released, and my head canon was “Boring Interplanetary Camp Job”. but when 1.0 came out suddenly I have to sAvE tHe WoRLd too. gah.
It’s one of the great things about Deep Rock Galactic, in so many ways there’s very little story other than deep lore, and the Dwarves aren’t saving the world, they’re getting drunk and doing their dayjobs.
I didn’t really have any kind of urgency based on the story, but I do think the story fell short of being a good story.
Spoiler warning: Satisfactory endgame and story
spoilerThey built up so much with the aliens talking to the pioneer and Ada acting as a translator, then towards the end it just stops happening. Then you build a ship and the story is done. Most anticlimactic ending for such a huge game
Funnily enough The Witcher 3 is one of the games I always think of for the trope of not following the plot. Often I think of the ludonarrative dissonance specifically between Gestalt’s paternal drive to find and protect Ciri Vs Gwent.
For large scale, AAA open world games, I mostly think of Breath of the Wild, which transparently sets itself up as being about taking as long as you need to get strong enough to save the world and Red Dead Redemption 2, which doesn’t care about the stakes of the world.
I sometimes can’t wrap my head around the fact that Witcher 3, BotW and RDR2 were each two years apart. I don’t feel any open world game has occupied the cultural space those games did since.
I wrote a short dnd campaign (4 or 5 sessions) with the main NPC who framed the adventure being a self important egomaniac, and the only world they saved was his world-sized ego. Making that NPC trusted by the players and breaking that trust by seeing the actual stakes of the adventure was a pretty neat idea, and it would have been a good start to my dming.
Unfortunately i ate the “save the world” pill and binned that idea for a shitty campaign about saving the world and it died the classic death of all campaigns: scheduling.
I think I might eventually run that game when I get back into DMing or start with a new group.
Are you DMing online or in the real world? I got to play a single campaign (well part of one) of Traveller until the DM didn’t have time for us anymore (because he was getting back into his actual job of being a military officer - go figure) and to say that I enjoyed it immensely was an understatement. I had a great time both learning how these games work and trying to find the limits of what’s possible. I’d love to do this again sometime.
I can only tolerate in person games, or hybrid games in the case where we live close enough to meet up only once in a while. But could play mote consistently online
Well, if you ever change your mind or need one additional player online on a short notice, even for a single session (perhaps for a specific NPC that you would normally play yourself), consider sending me a message.
If someone complains about buying a finished game and not getting more of it later, they’re idiots and there’s nothing you can do but ignore them.
Publishers that do ultra-early access/roadmaps/live services with promises of content/bug fixes/trust me we’re making the rest of the game later, are clearly to blame for the mess too. They’re the ones poisoning the well.
But plenty of games release in a final state and that’s okay. They have to be firm about it though.
It’s a tough line to walk. You want to create reasonable hype and you have an idea where you want to go, but as you correctly point out, it’s really easy to over promise and under deliver.
How fast do they think internet connections are? If the higher quality assets were that big compared to the 300 GB install no way they’re going to finish loading or fit in the memory while you’re playing the game
This article speaks right out of my soul, when comparing Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077 2.0.
The quest qualtiy itself is comparable, but the delivery of Starfield makes it solely my job to create immersion (which I can and will do), while Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 grabs me by my balls and drags me into the world.
Spoiler for a small quest in CyberpunkWhen the barkeeper leans slightly forward, looks carefully right and left to make sure no one is listening and then tells me he suspects his wife sees someone else, I smell his parfume and I notice he relaxes his hurting back by stemming his arms onto the desk, because he is doing a double shift. Having Silverhand commenting on every step of the quest and turning it into a noir detctive story, making fun of me, added more immersion to a “follow person, report back”-mission. That I then can just call the quest giver on the phone, as a normal being would feels life like.
A similar quest in Starfield:
I talked to the barkeeper in Starfield from the wrong angle and he only turned his head and it was very uncanny valley, because over the whole conversation I was questioning how he can still talk with a broken neck.
I talked to the barkeeper in Starfield from the wrong angle and he only turned his head and it was very uncanny valley, because over the whole conversation I was questioning how he can still talk with a broken neck.
They might have fixed it by now but a certain little fortune teller has a very similar issue in an elevator in cyberpunk.
After helping him out I had a certain Ripperdoc showing which arm he operates with by raising it. Only his arm rotated backwards as if his elbow was turned around 180 degrees, arm clipping through his biceps.
But at least in Cyberpunk I’ve got the feeling that a bug like this is an honest oversight, whereas Starfield gives me the feeling that Creation Engine (2.0 these days?) should have have been killed, burned and buried after Skyrim. Each game since (and including) Oblivion I’ve felt like I’m looking at limitations I already noticed in the previous game built with Creation Engine or NetImmerse/GameBryo.
I haven’t played starfield and don’t intend to but I played cyberpunk on launch thanks to a covid scare and even on launch it was a good game to me. Had it’s problems but I got 300 hours out of it before the year ended.
Questgiver: “Hello, I don’t know you stranger, and I don’t trust outsiders. Can I help you? Oh, you want a quest? This evil company in Neon does bad shit and I need you to inject this virus and make sure it doesn’t get back to me. Also, the mayor here is evil AF. Don’t say that out loud, he has ears everywhere. I trust you stranger with my life. Have 8000 creds for picking up my mail, and 2000 creds and a unique purple gun for blowing up half of the city.”
Unity had made their plans clear. Whether they backtrack a bit now or not doesn’t matter. We know what direction they are heading: squeeze more money out of indie devs
That's correct. Even with this backtrack, it's a safe bet that they'll likely re-introduce this same policy with different wording once they believe their consumers have calmed down.
The controlling shares of Unity are held by a trifecta of private equity and venture capital organizations. That’s why this is happening. It’s a classical presentation of the (short-term) profit über alles enshitification cycle.
The insider transaction history for Unity Software Inc shows a clear trend: over the past year, there have been 49 insider sells and no insider buys. This could be a red flag for potential investors, as it suggests that those with the most intimate knowledge of the company's operations and prospects are choosing to sell their shares
Or it just means they see it as compensation and are selling for taxes and expenses, not because they are worried about the long term direction of the company.
Ehh, the top folks at Google were all selling their maximum-permitted amount every window they got for a decade and the stock held up.
You typically don’t need to buy shares as an insider, the company just prints more gambling slips – er, I’m sorry, non-transferrable stock options – and hands them out.
Yes, but it doesn’t rise to the level of “insider trading,” which means using internal-only information to make trading decisions. If they sell these stocks regularly, on a schedule, in the same quantity, it’s not insider trading.
And that’s exactly what they’re doing, you can see their trades, and they’re consistent for about the same amount. So they’re not trading because of changes going on internally, they’re trading based on a schedule, probably because they need cash flow for some reason. My guess is taxes for their stock compensation.
I suspect Valve is truly refurbishing these, rather than blindly reselling returned units with a refurb label (as we sometimes see from certain retailers). Good for them!
Portable, Windows-free gaming just got more affordable. I love it.
The only real complaint I have with helldivers is the controls are a little muggy. They put out a polished product with good options that isn’t so paywalled as to be difficult to make progress with but still gives them a revenue stream to keep the live service, which actually adds value beyond “play the game”, running.
It's possible people could interpret the way that the reticle follows the actual barrel position of the gun as "muggy" because it can be quite unwieldy if you're not being careful about it, but it's a very deliberate choice and makes the chaos more chaotic and really accentuates how controlled you need to be even when shit gets wild
I didn’t realize it was happening until I used machine gun where it’s slow. I actually like it but if you didn’t realize I could see it being confusing.
Also the key binds aren’t super. There’s a lot of overlap and weird finger positioning for some stuff. The stratagems especially. I’m running, holding L1 and using my right hand to dial in the d pad like I’m hacking the matrix. It’s kinda fun and stressful but I could see complaints about it.
I play on PC so it's hard to say how that stuff feels comparatively. Can you move and use stratagems at the same time?! For me, WASD is both my movement and the stratagems, so if I press CTRL to pull up the menu I can't walk anymore.
And yeah, different guns have different aim speeds to balance them. That's where you may find the machine gun too unwieldy and want to try the stalwart LMG instead
Edit: by default on PC stratagems are done with WASD like the first game, and I just stuck with that. If I rebind to arrow keys then I can move and input stratagems at the same time, but I'll have to relearn all my Helldivers 1 muscle memory haha
The rebinding options are amazing, though. Being able to choose between tap, double tap, press, long press and hold for every input is fantastic. Two seconds after discovering this, press ctrl was crouch while double tap was prone and hold shift was dash while double tap was dive, and it feels so good.
Idk about controller, but keyboard support is amazing.
Personally there are a few UX issues with the controls. Like getting stuck after diving into prone (I believe it’s because you have to press run after you land to get back up, there’s no action queueing), climbing over stuff you didn’t want to climb over because of auto-climb, and a few other similar things. Both of the above have resulted in me and friends dying during intense moments, and because it’s caused by the game not listening to what you want to do, it doesn’t feel good to die that way.
Also not being able to jump over things you think you should be able to jump over because it’s a few pixels too tall. So you just run up against it and stop.
Also the trees are rigid so if you run into a tree it’s like a brick wall it doesn’t brush out of the way or snap like it obviously should when you’re charging at it.
The cross platform friend requests bugs mean I still havent been able to play with the friends who convinced me to buy the game in the first place. But yeah, otherwise quite fun.
Its 100x better of a starship troopers game than the actual starship troopers game that came out last year
eurogamer.net
Ważne