While on a side I agree with you, on the other I see everytime people complaining about subscription fatigue and they never, ever would pay a recurring amount for a game.
I figured savvy sports fans would find a good simulation game without the license and just mod in the updated rosters, but that never seemed to happen.
There are no other football games that are even respectable efforts, and despite the rhetoric, Madden is actually a very good football sim that continually gets developed from year to year.
I suppose I implied but didn't explicitly state that my expectation is that someone would develop that competent football game. There's an early access game now, arguably 15 years too late, called Football Simulator that could be that game. If it's well-made, hopefully it serves that audience. But I don't think it's just rhetoric. Madden review scores have been falling in later years, and that's to be expected when they have a monopoly on the NFL license.
Reviews are extremely lazily done and about game modes. The game modes have seen minimal development since the emergence of ultimate team, and people are justifiably unhappy with that.
Literally not one major outlet is evaluating the actual simulation of the sport, which very clearly has massive investment from year to year and sees serious improvements to complexity and fidelity in each instance, with stagnation only coming when it hits the wall of what console hardware can do.
I've seen football simulator. It might maybe be competitive on physics with decade ago Madden, but even that's generous. If you just want a vehicle for franchise mode it might work for you, but if you want to play football it's just not close. Madden isn't perfect as a football sim either, because the physics of football are insanely complex, but there's nothing out there that's better than "kind of close to a decade ago" technically. You're much more likely to make something tolerable leaning into the discrepancy and making an arcade-y NFL Street knockoff, and that isn't there either.
Value for money is a great thing to evaluate in a review, and the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years, hence the lower scores.
the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years,
This is a ridiculous lie. It's not even in the general vicinity of reality.
The absolute best mainstream review of Madden in existence is a many times less competent version of that platformer review where the guy couldn't get through the tutorial. You unconditionally are not qualified to give any opinion in any context if you don't understand the mechanics and strategy of the sport.
Fine. I don't play Madden. But I know with the sources I follow on games news, this is what gets echoed back. Giant Bomb does a quick look for the game, say up front that they don't expect to get through it without encountering bugs, and then they encounter bugs. The kinds of bugs you'd recognize no matter how into football you are.
EDIT: Yup, bugs are mentioned in many reviews for the last several years of Madden. Seems to be the reality.
There will always be bugs. It's the nature of a complex simulation with emergent gameplay.
But anyone telling you that they're increasing doesn't know what they're talking about. They're increasingly small edge cases as the simulation gets very obviously more advanced and complex every iteration. It's not minor and it's not subtle. If you play ten hours a year with a middle school football level of understanding the improvements are impossible to miss.
Any review from someone who doesn't watch football every week all season is the exact same quality of someone who's never played an FPS reviewing a tactical shooter. it has literally zero value in any possible context and it's an embarrassment to your organization to publish it.
I can't speak for every reviewer, but a good number of them do watch football every week. Plenty of games have advanced simulations and don't have texture bugs and T posing. I'm glad you enjoy the games, but the reviews are what they are for a reason. I'm also not sure how you went from, "Anyone saying these games are buggy is lying" to "Of course it will have bugs!"
The reviews are what they are because there are literally zero gaming outlets who respect the existence of sports games or cover them the way they cover anything else.
I play hundreds of games a year and have literally never once seen a player t pose on the field. It's not a thing that's a normal or frequent occurrence, and anyone who tells you it is isn't just incompetent. They're deliberately and maliciously lying to you, and in and of itself it's incontrovertible proof that their entire review is fraud.
If you’re paying for a new version every year, is all that different than paying for a service? At the very least, with the yearly release model, you can simply decide not to pay for a year and keep playing the old one.
ROFL! Dude asks why people “still play that shit” without offering an argument for discussion and you’re telling me I’m aggressive and that I should offer reasons before posting??
Sure. I’ll play along-
How about…. People play it because they enjoy sports games. Is that’s a good reason? And for the record… if I wanted to be aggressive,I would have countered with “why do people play shit like Pokémon, or DBZ games? I didn’t do this because it’s not for me to decide what others play or why. Nor do I judge anyone for what they play regardless of my opinion.
Perhaps this is not a sentiment shared often in this community.
I make a difference between referring to an inanimate object as „shit“ and getting up in someones face about it.
This is why I say it’s aggressive. And yes, you would have been right to call them out and say „because people enjoy it.“ or something along those lines.
It’s not worth discussing this at length. Dude has a point that many people have a problem with the software for different reasons and you have a point that people enjoy that stuff. All I‘m saying is please be kind to eachother.
A lot of people are only passingly interested in video games. For people that just want to sit down and play something having to learn about the game and how it’s played is work, not entertainment. I can see how someone who only games maybe once a week could have some real fun playing a sports game. It’s very easy to pick up because they already know the rules. I don’t agree personally, for me games are the most fun when I’m interacting with a new mechanic, but I am also willing to grind for hours optimizing and learning to push the game to its limits. If you don’t have the time for all that, but you still want to game, sports games are a perfect entry point. Not even I can come up with a justification for the pricing though.
Yeah I have a version of Madden from 2015 that works perfectly fine and seems to be more or less the same game, have been very happy with it. I refuse to pay $70 for a game that I know is riddled with microtransactions for really… nothing else changing
I am curious as to why you say the game riddled with microtransactions? The only microtransactions I have ever seen is the card pack shit and that is incredibly easy to not pay for by just playing the other 95% of gameplay features they offer in the game that are completely free of microtransactions.
Medieval Dynasty. The best way to describe it is a medieval crafting/survival game that later adds in building and town management. Your goal is to ensure your legacy by getting a wife and producing an heir. Honestly, this game is time consuming but quite relaxing (aside from aggressive animals and the occasional bandits). There’s plenty to do, such as hunting, gathering, fishing, farming, animal husbandry, tree felling, as well as building and decoration, managing villagers’ jobs and statuses, and building your dynasty. What’s more, they are currently in a closed beta testing multiplayer with a new map! Highly recommended!
Valheim. Just crafted iron scale armor for the first time with my wife and it looks bad-ass as fuck. If we weren’t playing this I’d either be playing STALKER (as usual) or taking a second stab at The Witcher 3.
Finished up (mostly) Tunic early this week. Still working on translating the manual, and trying to think up more ideas for the (presumably) final final post-game puzzle.
If you’re interested in exploration/discovery/puzzle games, I’ll recommend it, with 2 caveats:
A) The combat system is really not good. Particularly with regard to boss fights. I’ve played all the optional post-game stuff in some BRUTALLY difficult games: Hollow Knight, Celeste, Dark Souls, Elden Ring… but THIS game is the one that broke me. Not just cause it’s difficult, but it’s difficult for all the worst reasons. Point being, don’t hesitate to just drop the difficulty or turn on no-fail mode. It’s not worth it.
B) Don’t just write off the in-game language as puzzle only for puzzle enthusiasts. It is optional, but I wish I had been putting effort into solving it, little by little, since the beginnig. It would have been really satisfying to solve some of the other game puzzles that way.
I started Tunic yesterday and rang the first two bells (east and west). Loving it so far. Too bad work will get in the way for the most part of the week, I can’t wait to delve into the game again :)
If I had to pick a favorite FPS... It'd have to be the combination of the Bungie developed Halo games. The story may not always knock it out of the park, but even upon Halo CE's release the art design, world building, and slower paced mechanical leaning was unique and unparalleled in its execution.
I'll always be able to go back and play those games. The mix of ballistic and sci Fi weaponry kept things interesting and options varied. The high time to kill for both the player and enemies made experimentation easier and more rewarding. The enemy AI that never seemed to settle on trying the same strategy twice was the cherry on top that made discussing Halo's "combat sandbox" a household topic in the mouths of video game enthusiasts.
Of all the games that claim a difficulty level that the game was designed for, Halo's Heroic mode will always truly feel like what Halo was meant for. Challenging, but loose enough that you could mix up your loadout and approach, and make up the imperfections of your plan on the backend through execution. Absolutely an experience where I can say it is fun to lose, because there's always another cleverly intriguing idea for you to try and solve the combat puzzle with.
And a final shout-out to Bungie for creating some of the only games where it really feels like you're right at home with a controller in hand. Many shooters can feel pretty good with a controller, but only Halo's deliberate pace and seamless bullet magnetism make the walls melt away between the imprecision of joystick aiming and my mechanical intent.
And the online community these games bred is its own whole set of five paragraphs I won't type now. Hats off to Halo.
As I am quite inconsistent at aiming well and reacting to stuff quickly, I like shooters that don’t put a lot of emphasis on it and/or offer viable alternatives for the days I’m not in the groove. Overwatch and Gunfire Reborn both fall into this category for me, despite being different subgenres (competitive multiplayer and roguelite with coop options respectively).
Also, I enjoy puzzle games in all forms, so that includes first person puzzles like Portal games, The Talos Principle or The Turing Test
IMHO, Powerslave/Exhumed was one of the best first person shooters on the 5th generation consoles and the Powerslave engine (Slavedriver) enabled the Saturn to run an amazing port of both Duke Nukem 3d and Quake.
I remember being ecstatic that a game I could only play on a friends PC when I visited back in the day (Duke3d) was not only playable on my Saturn, it was a fantastic port too. DeathTank Zwei was a lovely hidden bonus game included on the D3D port.
Likewise, Quake was an impossible port, bought to a console that traditionally struggled with substandard 3d games vs the psx.
I remember seeing a psx owning buddy play a superb port of Doom on his psx, only for me to be burned by the absolute 💩port that Rage software put out on the Saturn. Even the 32x cartridge version of Doom was batter.
Console shooters have come on in leaps and bounds each generation but Exhumed on the Saturn was a real highlight for me in my younger years.
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