Some dungeon crawlers I enjoyed: Hades, Enter the Gungeon, Torchlight 1 & 2, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Legend of Grimrock, The Binding of Isaac Rebirth
Neverwinter Nights has 20+ years of custom content, runs on almost anything, is still getting graphical & engine updates and has modules & persistent world servers that cover both of those genres & more.
Not exactly a minor indie game by any means, but bloons td6 is the game I’ve player the most on mobile by some distance. It’s £6 with no microtransactions and a shit load of content. If you like TD games this is a home run.
Yeah, CrossCode is absolutely amazing. I didn’t hear about it until recently. I’m so glad I didn’t completely miss out on it. It’s like my number 1 favourite game now and I almost missed it.
I like to make sure I bring it up anytime people ask about good games they may not have heard of.
Welcome to the CC simps, because you're certainly not the only one who does that. It's generally a no brainer considering that they also still offer a demo to just try it out. Of course that doesn't tell you much about the great story and characters, but I think the fluidity of the movement and combat system definitely can convince people over already.
This list is utterly fantastic, but if you haven’t given Dave The Diver a chance you definitely should. It’s by far my favorite release from this year, and the devs seem to have even more content planned.
Ignore the pre-release hype (I mean hype before anyone gets to try the game, early access hype is good). If the game is hyped after people get to play it, then I find it’s safer to trust, though personal preferences can still make it miss the mark.
I’d like to add Ardor to the list. It’s a free turn based deck building game where you face off against hexagon creatures on a hexagon board. It’s pretty polished for an actual free to play game.
I would. But I didn’t play a lot of their games. Bastion is kind of unique. Story is pretty linear but its structure is quite a novelty. There’s an awesome narrator that is telling the story, but he reacts to everything you do and has a snarky sense of humor. Game is well designed action RPG with a good variety of weapons and in my eyes very little replay value. Still worth the asking price though.
Yea, I wouldn’t give them any money, though. The actual creators got fucked and any purchases of the game go to the people that fucked them. Great game, but I’d sail the seas for it.
A few of those games form my core of things I’ll go back to every so often, though my list isn’t all Indies. I’d probably throw CDDA, Dwarf Fortress and KSP in there too though, off the top of my head. Surprised to see foxhole in there but I suppose it’s in a relatively decent state at the moment and it’s somehow claimed 1400 hours from me on steam now.
Sea of Stars recently came out if you liked older SNES RPGs. Reminiscent of Chrono Trigger, they even snagged one of the music producers from it. Great story IMO. I got about 45 hours out of it.
Hollow Knight if you like metroidvanias. Played through it 2 or 3 times now. My son and I are excited for the sequel if it ever releases.
Tricky Towers is a family fun Tetris type multi-player game.
Blue Fire, 3D platformer/metroidvania.
Hacknet, OS UI hacking sim.
Crab Champions (early access coded by EDM producer Noisestorm), 3D bullet hell/loot&shoot where you play as you guessed it… a crab. Has an amazing soundtrack.
Darkside Detective, 2D point and click puzzle solver with a hilarious storyline.
Kingdom Come Deliverance is easily in my top 3 favourite games ever, counting as far back as home world 1 (which also ranks in those 3.) If you give KCD a go be warned though, it will relentlessly punish you for any foolishness early on. It’ll make you work for every thing, no starting out as some warrior running down mobs of bandits. But it pays out with a true RPG experience that rewards incremental skill progress.
In the last decade, apart from the witcher 3, only Indy studios have produced truly memorable experiences for me.
That article completely misses the forrest for the trees.
It’s a complete game. It was created with vision, passion, love, and complete creative freedom. It has a great story and interesting characters. It provides lots of player agency. It is unflinchingly candid, mature, and uncensored. Your choices, actions, and inaction ACTUALLY MATTERS. There is no DRM. There are no live service strings. You can play alone and/or with friends. There are no strangers or PvP to ruin your game. And yes, there are also no micro-transactions.
The lesson that BG3 offers isn’t just one thing… it’s a LOT of things. But the best way to sum it up is: it’s a great game and it treats players/customers with respect.
I have avoided reading much about the game. I am loving it, but I have no idea at what point in the game that I currently am. It could end in the next ten minutes and I’ll be satisfied with my purchase, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s another 10+ hours. This is what I was waiting for Bethesda to release as the next Skyrim successor if they hadn’t decided to milk that cow until troll cheese came out. It’s everything I want in a game. Story, gameplay, length, affordability, fun, and no microtransactions making my efforts feel worthless.
I legitimately have no idea how much more game I have. I finally got to the edge of Baldurs Gate and have been chilling here for like 10 hours, haven’t even gotten inside the city proper yet.
I think the most important part is that it launched without DRM on GOG and was able to be pirated from day 1 and it STILL was a huge success because people knew that the game isn’t trying anything shady to get even more money from you
It’s just something people actually want to support and not like people feel like even if they buy the game they only have half an experience if they don’t spend more money later
I really hope the next financial report from Larian is making people think differently about the necessity of putting aggressive DRM in their games
People don’t pirate because they don’t want to pay - they pirate because they don’t trust the game to bit pull more shady shit later and not be worth it in the end
So far, every article I’ve seen about Baldur’s Gate 3’s effect on the gaming industry has been horse shit. Other studios and publishers are not “panicking,” they’re not going to rethink microtransactions, and they’re not going to be daunted by this release; some devs have said as much already along the lines of “Yeah don’t expect this breadth and scope from us going forward, because it doesn’t work for our games.”
This game is not the industry-spanning “gotcha” these writers have been trying to make it out to be. AAA devs or publishers are going to continue their nonsense because people will continue to buy their shit anyway, and they know it.
All that said, BG3 is the best game I’ve played in a number of years and hands-down the best cRPG I’ve ever played. It smokes Divinity, Icewind Dale, the previous BG games, NWN, etc. So if any studios do happen to have a positive takeaway from this, maybe we’ll see at least some of that polish in games down the line.
It’s also a rare example of where a massive budget without restrictions (relatively speaking) can lead to amazing results.
Usually one of two things happens: the publisher is tired of dumping money into a project then force it to market too early, or scope creep happens and the developers bite off way more than they can chew and there’s nothing they can do past a certain point.
Larian managed to dodge both of these bullets. Not by luck, of course. But they dodged them nonetheless.
The problem is an hour of what. Me wandering around trying to find something described vaguely and being frustrated, is not the same as an hour of well written and interesting dialogue.
Morrowind has good writing in it too, though. I think we can all agree nobody should be paying ‘dollars per hour’ while wandering completely lost and annoyed ;)
Returning to a feudal economy is a sensible idea, lighting with renewable materials, making hay while the sun shines and executing traitors is much more productive than playing games
That was before they started diarrhea shitting themselves since the founders left. GTA Trilogy, GTA+, and removing cars people paid for in Online is just a taste of things to come.
Yeah, they left and the change was IMMEDIATE. Holy moly the shit show that was RDO. If you were playing that game back then, you could see the crumbling of the company happening in real time, it was wild. RDO being left to rot is my Roman empire, and I wonder if the founders feel regret at all with how their creation was treated by the company they left. Or if they just dry their tears with hundos these days?
Heck, I don’t even feel like RDR2 lived up to it’s full potential before they left, what with post-game being the most buggy and unfinished-feeling part of the whole game. It felt like it was just waiting for DLC content to be added, since it was a huge patch of map with hardly anything going on. Sigh, who knows.
It’s Rockstar Games, they love microtransactions and Sharkcards and will more than likely implement more greed tactics into their next big game (GTA 6). I’m still pissed off over the bilking they did with the bunker series in GTA 5. They’re a ruthless, greedy company. And don’t forget those times they went after those fanboys/talented game designers who were revamping their old games like GTA 4. Those kids were super talented and Rockstar busted their asses like the mobsters they are. Fuck Rockstar and their next GTA greed fest.
First thing that comes to mind for me is Far Cry 6, where there is a few missions you have to find certain things without the aid of any quest markers.
Imagine a game like that with absolutely no markers and they take your map as well. At best you’d spend 3 times as long trying to finish the same game, and now they think they can charge you 3 times as much? Fuck that noise.
Reject the idea of an absolute GOTY, normalize a Mt. Rushmore style "Best of the Year" selection.
Games can be great in so many different ways, many of which are somewhat exclusive with each other, that I've never understood the concept of saying that one was absolutely better than the rest.
Not exactly, though I see your point. I think it would be more accurate if McDonald’s charged for ketchup, mustard, salt, drink cups, lids, straws etc.
The big difference with physical goods is that it’s much harder to steal a McDonald’s burger that it is to crack a single player, offline game. Furthermore, once you ate your burger, if you want more, you have to buy another because it’s a consumables.
On the other hand games are prone to piracy, expecially on pc, you pay once but can play anytime while patched and updates require prolonged work after you purchase.
It isn’t strange that developers look at dlc, microtransanction or game as a service with subscription, because they allow a stable flow of income that can support development, and it’s harder to avoid paying when the game is always online and stuff like that.
Furthermore, once you ate your burger, if you want more, you have to buy another because it’s a consumables.
The same goes for single-player offline games, though. There’s only so much entertainment you can get out of one before you’ve seen everything, get bored, and look for another one.
you pay once but can play anytime while patched and updates require prolonged work after you purchase
If a studio fails to budget for that and make sure those costs are included in the price of the game, it frankly deserves to go bust.
There’s only so much entertainment you can get out of one before you’ve seen everything, get bored, and look for another one.
You’re absolutely right, but that’s true from “your perspective”. For you the fame might last 50 hours and that’s all, but the developers still need to work on big patches, content and fixes even years after release.
If a studio fails to budget for that and make sure those costs are included in the price of the game, it frankly deserves to go bust
And this introduces another topic I think. Would the average consumer willing to spend more for a game with everything in it? AAA already cost 70$ at launch, would the average consumer accept further price increases, or would selling plummet in comparison with reduced price+dlc or free to play with microtransanction?
At the end companies are not inherently “evil” they just look for what works and what doesn’t by trial and error
the developers still need to work on big patches, content and fixes even years after release
Why would they need to do that? If it’s years down the line, there shouldn’t be any bugs left to fix by that point. And offline single-player games don’t need regular content drops. Sure, an expansion or two might be nice, but those don’t come free. Only online games need to constantly feed their players new content in order to keep them hooked and coming back to buy more MTX.
Would the average consumer willing to spend more for a game with everything in it? AAA already cost 70$ at launch, would the average consumer accept further price increases, or would selling plummet in comparison with reduced price+dlc or free to play with microtransanction?
Oh sales would plummet for sure, but it would still make a profit, just not as much. If From Soft and Larian can do it, everyone can. They just don’t wanna. (see below)
At the end companies are not inherently “evil” they just look for what works and what doesn’t by trial and error
That really depends on your definition of “works”. Sure, it’s a business, but what’s the goal? To me there seems to be a noticeable difference between companies that want to make good games, for which the business side of things is just a means to an end, and companies that want to make as much money as possible, where the games are the means to that end. Is that latter category ‘evil’? Maybe not strictly speaking, but I have no concern for those companies whatsoever, they can go fuck themselves.
Movies and books exist and they are one time purchases that you use once and stop interacting with. Why do games get special excuses for being extremely exploitative and shitty to their players? I don’t have to pay for a book chapter by chapter or pay extra for a character to appear, but authors and filmmakers still make TONS of money.
The game industry makes lots of excuses for it’s shitty behavior but none of them hold water.
but authors and filmmakers still make TONS of money.
This is an affirmation many writers would find offensive lol
The editorial sector is in deep crisis, it’s really hard to live off as a writer unless you’re ridiculously famous.
Same thing for the filmmaking industry, look at protest of screenwriters and actors, and to companies terrible financial sheets, and to movie theaters basically bankrupting as maybe their time is over. Also we both agree there’s been a shift from movies to tv series and one of the reason is that you “buy the product piece by piece”?
Ps: funnily enough, period publication of chapters were a thing until not long ago, and still are in somewhere (for example manga in Japan)
Webnovel sites in Korea and China sell books one chapter at a time, and some of their publishers are trying to break into the Western market with the same structure (ie Wattpad bought by naver, Webnovel.com owned by Qidian). They also like using virtual currency for buying chapters. Korean and Chinese web comics are also sold this way. Publishers really like the microtransaction money no matter the industry. If they could figure out how to sell microtransactions for movies I bet they would do it.
Side note: I downloaded this chinese app for downloading region locked games on mobile and they somehow figured out how to put gacha in it. Publishers seem to do anything for money no matter how little sense it makes.
Sorry for not combing through every major release since tetris and making a perfectly objective list of every good game of which most them I’ve never even seen gameplay of.
Salty? I listed a bunch of games that are clearly made by passionate developers and have been part of defining of defining the space in recent history. You are the one leaving a snarky comment that I listed less than 1 percent of games as if that proves anything.
How could you learn anything about what people think of microtransactions from the success of a game that doesn’t have them? If a beloved franchise added a sequel with microtransactions in it and that sequel tanked, then maybe you’d have a case. From the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 the most you could conclude is “people will still buy a game that doesn’t have microtransactions,” which is not particularly revelatory.
A bunch of AAA games that heavily feature microtransactions are smash hits and made millions of dollars. Sure, people complain about it, but they also purchase tons of them (may not be the same people, mind you). I’m pretty sure we can conclude that not all people hate microtransactions. Hell, publishers will look at Baldur’s Gate 3 and probably go “man, this game is good but if they put some paid cosmetics in there they could have made even more money.”
All 100% correct unfortunately. These companies put in micro transactions because they make a boatload of money off of them. End of story. Til that changes, they will continue to shoehorn them into games to sustain the unsustainable infinite growth/profit model. Until pissing us off costs them more than they gain from it, it ain’t gonna change.
Then fuck it. All the people who want microtransactions, or don’t care about the quality of the medium enough to stop engaging with shitty practices, can have them. There are plenty of developers making games that care enough about the things they make that I’ll be happy to buy from. We’ve reached a point where the big studios will spend three years and a quarter of a billion dollars putting out 7/10 games that look great in trailers and don’t function on PC that exist alongside solo devs who make the games that look at home on PS1 and offer a better experience than anything Blizzard has made in the last decade. Even if my wallet’s vote doesn’t matter to the big guys, it doesn’t have to as long as it’s enough to support people whose passion isn’t exploited to make a just barely par product.
Don’t get hyped, don’t preorder, don’t buy games until they’re fixed. You can’t change the industry but you don’t have to support it.
It’s kinda crazy how quickly people just… stopped talking about Starfield after release. Like, even if it ended up being bad or disappointing, people would’ve at least still been talking about it in that capacity.
Starfield was one of the most hyped releases in years, at least since Cyberpunk, yet when it finally released, it seems like the entire gaming world played it for a few days, collectively decided, “eh, this is alright I guess,” then moved on. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the mood towards a game shift so rapidly from massive hype to complete indifference…
I think discussion around it just became toxic, you can’t really say anything about Starfield without a bunch of people hijacking the conversation to talk about how much they hate it.
I watched some videos on it after it released and for about a week after my whole YouTube frontpage was full of Starfield-bashing (many with several hundred thousand views) so it’s definitely out there.
Yeah a couple of streamers I watch made it a point to stream “starfield bad” streams and then stream literally anything else while talking about how it was better than starfield
Lemmy was filled with posts linking to clickbait articles from PcGamer bashing the game.
YouTube just flooded my feed with videos about how Starfield was the worst game ever made, modern gaming was dying or something of the sort after watching a couple positive reviews.
Even in comment sections, whenever I mentioned some nitpic I had about the game, I’d get answers bashing the game as if I had said it was terrible.
It was pretty much everywhere for a month and a half to the point I just decided to stop trying to find discussions on it.
I don’t hate it, I’m mostly just ambivalent to it. It felt like Bethesda’s Ubisoft moment, where they went from being a company that had been doing something really well and switched to doing something really safe…which is iust boring and generic nowadays. For the first ten or fifteen hours it was like ooh my first Bethesda game in ages! And then I put it down and never felt compelled to go back. I don’t hate it, I don’t love it, I don’t really feel anything towards it. Skyrim grabbed me from jump street and I was all in, same with FO…idk I really wanted to like Starfield…but I just never really felt anything towards it.
I feel like the same thing thing happened with FO4 until the new mod tools came out. Like I bought starfield, it’s ok, but IMO it won’t hit it’s stride as a game I play frequently until there are a bunch of mods to improve QoL
That’s what hype does. Hype can be good if the end product lives up to it, or the hype isn’t so potent. Tears of the Kingdom comes to my mind for this. The hype was more like “it’s coming, we think it’s going to be cool” and a couple of gameplay vids. Then their reputation combined with the understatement of how good the game actually was created a wildfire of good hype.
Starfield was like “PREPARE YOURSELVES FOR THE BEST GAME EVER MADE, IN THE WORKS FOR HALF A DECADE, YOU’LL NEVER PUT IT DOWN, GAME OF THE YEAR GUARANTEED” and created a ton of bad hype. Bad hype is good for sales, but creates unrealistic expectations and makes a lot more people go “meh” once they find out what it is.
Let me tell you a secret: bad hype is intentional. All that matters to a studio is how much they sell, not that players continue playing.
Bad hype makes players stop talking about a game pretty quickly.
But didn't TOTK also have the issue that to some it felt like an "expansion pack" (Probably closer to a switch's version of Majora's Mask, where many assets are reused and remixed with a new gameplay element added). While it was a good game its probably not as revolutionary as BOTW. It also doesn't help it was the switch's first 70$ title.
I’m not really commenting on how the actual game was, just the hype building up to it. Nintendo consistently teaches a masterclass on hyping their IPs. Whether or not the game was good, or worth the money, is an opinion beside the point.
In the same vein, people call starfield “fallout but in space” and “fast travel simulator 2023”. There are plenty of things to criticize there too. But I honestly think the reason those criticisms weren’t taken in stride like totk was is because of all of bad hype surrounding the release. People expected a lot more.
Also, “as revolutionary as the last one” is probably not the standard we should hold all sequels to. Changing the fundamental design of a series is important to do periodically to keep it fresh, but well executed iteration is also really important. I definitely feel I’ve gotten my time outta totk, and I’m not done with it, tho I have gotten a little distracted by life, bg3, and picking ror2 back up.
Also for anyone looking at full price switch games as too expensive, you can pretty frequently find $100 eshop cards for $90, which you can use to buy a 2pack of game vouchers, and effectively get any switch game for $45, including totk.
I mean, the only game on the GOTY list where the hype is still going is Baldurs Gate 3. At least thats how it feels to me. Granted Im not into nintendo games as I once was both the new Zelda and Mario felt like they flew by me. Maybe it was the stacked year. maybe I didnt have as much time for gaming or maybe Im not seeing them much on the internet. BG3 sure feels like its cementing itself into the 2023 zeitgeist.
This is where I was. Decent game, just lost interest after like 2 weeks. There was a bit too much fishing around in the inventory and clicking through menus.
There were definitely a few cool moments in it, but I think they got to engrossed in the procgen planets to really give it all that handcrafted feel. Having 1000 planets forced the content to be too spread out. And other games have been out for years that handle the procgen better.
7/10 review guy was right. Decent game with some cool parts, but also a lot of issues and annoyances.
Yeah this about sums up my feelings on it. The main story seemed alright from what I experienced, and the characters seemed fairly interesting. Better-written than FO4, at least. I was particularly charmed by the PC’s parents that you get when you take that one perk at character creation.
But the exploration just feels… dull and empty. Surveying planets just felt like a chore, and any particular landing spot on a planet was just a few cookie cutter lairs scattered among a bunch of nothing. Didn’t feel like you were actually discovering anything interesting.
Funny thing is that when Morrowind came out using the grandfather of their current engine, they even advertised how every single stone was hand-placed and how that made the world feel more alive compared to a procedurally generated world. Guess some things still hold true.
Well calling Starfield impressive but also immediately-boring would be a massive understatement.
It almost feels like a benchmark. With all the gameplay depth and immersion that goes along with running one. It’s not bad at what it does, quite the opposite in fact. It’s stellar. But there’s just so little to it, despite the massive world fulll of blips and bits. It’s Skyrim driven to an insane extreme: Even wider, even grander, even more impressive. And even more shallow. Much more shallow.
Apparently not enough of one if he is saying shit like this out loud. I would assume the GTA6 Online efforts will attempt to make their “+” more attractive.
Because everyone here is just reacting to the terrible Forbes headline because that’s all people do. Here’s the actual content that you can pick apart, instead of picking apart the headline that some Forbes editor wrote.
he thinks GTA is one of the best values on the market. Here’s what he said:
“In terms of our pricing for any entertainment property, basically the algorithm is the value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say the per hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value that’s perceived by the customer in ownership, if the title is owned rather than rented or subscribed to.”
So he was just saying that gta is good value for money given their metrics
He can still go fuck himself. I was promised single player DLC in GTA 5 and instead they put their entire focus on GTA online which I’m sure will continue with 6. I’ll probably pirate it because, as much as I hate to admit it I’m still a fan, but I’m not giving them another cent.
I agree with the general sentiment of boo for not making dlc. but if your proposition is “i’m going to pirate your next game” then you’re probably just pushing them further into a direction you don’t want them to go.
If you think that companies look at social media more than their own sales metrics, then Ive probably already sold you a bridge and have a loyalty program for you to sign up for, to get 15% off your next purchase
I can deflect the doxxing slightly by saying it’s more than one. The first rhymes with Wicrosoft and the other is too small and would definitely doxx me. However I have friends all over the industry, and can confirm identical reactions from places with names similar to Acti… mizion, Sledge…wammer Ztudios, 434… endustries, Pioware… Grames?
That really only could be considered even remotely plausible if everyone played online, but most people quickly discovered it was a trash money grab. Otherwise it’s no better value than any other story driven single player game.
gta games are typically pretty competitive with everyone else in terms of value for money on the base game. it’s been a while since there has been a new GTA game, and the other game they have produced - red dead redemption - was incredible value for money given the content and length.
we can complain about a lot, I’ll be the first to say their online is a money sucking low effort playground. But the quality of their single-player experiences is at worst “very very competitive”.
Ah but see, that may only be due to GTA V actually having the development time and releasing as a single player game because Online wasn’t near being ready when the game launched. Now that Online is out and that’s where their focus has been, we will most likely see the base single player game quality suffer dramatically. Look at games like Call of Duty. They used to have phenomenal single player experiences, and now you’re lucky if you get something worth playing at all.
So I would point at rdr2. That came out long after gta v online made mountains of money. Large single-player experience. Online existed, didn’t detract.
Cool, so could the makers of the software they use to make these games do the same to them? They should pay them all for the per hour value times the expected hours of development plus the terminal value perceived by expected income from sales! Yes, good business model. Maximize them profits!!!
Yeah, and I bet they’re affordable. What Strauss is proposing is a massive increase in initial purchase price for those that aren’t paying subscriptions. $70 is borderline affordable for a lot of people as is and that will now be a higher entry price. I’m not in that boat, personally, but I can see how it would be detrimental to the gaming industry as a whole.
Then again, there is the flip side where people are now forced to choose the games they can afford that year even more carefully (1-2 vs 6-7 or more as an example) and if a game fails expectations and someone misses out on something else, then maybe it’ll start putting some shitty developers out of business.
They aren’t proposing increasing the price. Did you read the article or my initial comment about how people just read the bad headline and argue against it at all?
Of course I read the article. It specifically says, “… value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say the per hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value that’s perceived by the customer in ownership, if the title is owned rather than rented or subscribed to…”
I’m beginning to wonder if you read the article. They want to charge off of one value and add it to an initial base value. If you think this idea has nothing to do with increasing profits then I have a bridge in the Sahara to sell you.
Nothing in that is about raising the price, the whole thing is about him showing off what great value the series is by their metrics.
Here’s where you say “of course it is! I’ve imagined that this leads to the next thing which is raised prices”. Cool, go make these comments on the thread about them raising prices, or proposing raising prices. That isn’t what is happening here.
That may be true for many, but I’m willing to bet most of those “hours” they count are for GTA Online. Have they ever mentioned what percentage of players play Online versus all sales? Because that is something many of us have never and will never touch so it isn’t included at all in my value consideration other than a negative for the company to focus on INSTEAD of additional single player content.
If they want to turn GTA into an always online Game as a Service, that is their prerogative, but don’t try and hide it stuffed alongside a single player game they’ll ignore after release, and don’t be surprised when some people stop buying and playing when the only option is online multiplayer.
forbes.com
Ważne