“A solid dude of hidden depths whose fate was sealed the moment he crossed paths with V.”. Um I think that is a bit backward. V did not push to do that mission. Its funny though they could do a pretty neat twist to reuse the assets and plot but where the chip stays in jackies head.
It’s a stupid take and the reasoning is equally stupid. Luke doesn’t really get involved in the Jedi stuff until Episode V which means he implies A New Hope is not worth watching. Except Episode V doesn’t really make sense without Episode IV now does it?
As for CP77 I think Act 1 100% should’ve been expanded because what is V-s motivation? To get to the top. We never get to experience the climb to the top. We just get the heist and then we get the downfall of trying to fly too close to the sun and into the storyline of what we’ll do with our remaining time? There’s no real buildup for the ending of act 1 because V-s desire to get to the top is never really explored. We have no established motivation to succeed with the heist and as such also no real stakes when it goes sideways.
Now imagine if the story was restructured into 5 acts:
Introduction to night city - more or less the walled off section that we currently get in Act 1.
Rise to the top - the city opens up, you get to do the side quests, hustles, etc etc and you get some additional “main missions” that defines your rise to the top and your relationship to Jackie. The rescue mission (which is the first mission in the game) would be the final mission of act 2 as that solidifies your reputation for bigger jobs.
The heist - more or less what the main missions of current Act 1 are.
Terminal illness - Act 2 but with the feeling of actual urgency as you’ve tied up whatever loose ends you had in act 2. The only exception to the urgency would be dogtown as this is the point you access Phantom Liberty because the main story of the DLC ties back into the main story of the base game. All the Johnny and Samurai missions would also be in this act because this act is about Johnny.
The finale - The current act 3.
In that sense act 2 would be the biggest act, act 4 would be a bit smaller act and the rest more or less stays the same. This fixes the ludonarrative dissonance of having limited time due to the sickness but also infinite time to do all the shit you want. It gives space to introduce and flesh out characters instead of bombarding you with new characters as you’re going to a personal tragedy. It also gives a more rising tension to the story because you’ve actually established V-s motivations and all the setbacks bounce against the established motivation (who you lose along the way, will you even make it, if you do at what cost etc). The story would instantly be far better paced with actual stakes in play.
I actually think that was their original idea but they wanted more Keanu Reeves in the game so they reworked the story to have more reasons for him to be there. The only way to do that was to cut almost everything before the heist and move it to after the heist.
Yeah. The game is what it is, I don’t have any expectations of them reworking CP77 story. But the way the creative director responded comes across like he didn’t really understand what they did wrong with CP77.
I’m a big fan of the “the mentor dies to push the student forward” trope, so it makes sense to me that Jackie dies and that pushes us into Johnny’s camp, for better or worse. And Johnny is a worse Jackie in every way (except that he’s modeled after and voiced by Keanu Reeves), until he’s not, which takes a while.
Still, I felt it would have fit to have more time bonding with Jackie. They imply it in the opening movie after the prologue, but it would be nice to actually go through with all of it. I feel like it makes more sense if you’re playing a guy, but since they let you play a woman and they got such a damn good voice actor to voice her, not using her makes about as much sense as replacing Keanu Reeves with some rando for whatever reason. As a nerd, pairing Asuna (SAO) with Neo (The Matrix) is just too freakin’ cool to pass up. So anyway, girls tend to have it rough in Night City, so it would stand to reason it would take longer for V(alerie) to trust Jackie, not just one mission and then a montage of hanging out. Mass Effect, I think 2 or maybe 3, did this so much better, especially if you were romancing Liara (the blue chick), you had all this extra time to build a solid friendship with Garrus (the tall greyish, blueish alien with the ridged forehead). You could altneratively romance him, but if you weren’t going for that, the game made a hell of a friendship between him and FemShep that was believable, you could fully expect Garrus to follow you to Hell and back at the end of the trilogy. (Granted, that is a whole trilogy and not just a first act. Still, Mass Effect laid the foundation a decade prior.)
I really disliked Jackie. No matter what option you take, he’s kind of an asshole in the beginning of the game and your only option is to become his friend.
The two that makes the least sense are Street Kid and Corpo. Why is the Corpo one his best friend but the Street Kid has to meet him trying to steal the same car? It should have been reversed.
But, he’s less of an asshole when starting out as a Nomad. IMO, it’s the best of the three introductions.
Whaaaaaat?! Hell no! It would have been better for that whole montage scene after completing the prologue to have just been side quests you can do with him to get to know him more so his death hits even harder.
He’s right you know. Old yeller, Bambi’s mom and others need to die. Why?
Often the tragedy gets overlooked and people want to just get sugar in their diet. But a good story needs all the elements to come together as a cohesive experience.
When it comes to the tragic death, you should not retcon it or even try to exploit it after the fact. Death is ultimate and in the context of story needs to be given the respect it deserves.
But readers and viewers are fickle and shallow in regards to this context. Hollywood will placate to them all the time, but this is why Hollywood movies suck - because they placate to the viewer all the time.
Quit cheapening the tragedy, you ignant bastards. I swear.
Eh, kinda disagree. I played the game for the first time last year and imma be honest I didn’t really care about Jackie when he died.
He says you can spend a lot of time in the opening area, before doing the heist, which I did, but almost nothing of it is with Jackie. Even the couple of missions you do with him, you’re often doing your own stuff.
Of course you did, which is why you chose to attack my intellect and spelling* instead of addressing what I’m mocking.
It’s ok if people make fun of things you like, that doesn’t mean they’re dumb or anything. Assuming people are dumb for making fun of people who have fallen for the scam for over a decade says more about your intellect than mine.
I have never had anything to do with Star Citizen, and I don’t care that you’re mocking it. I just think you should pay more attention to your spelling if you’re going to do so. It makes you look foolish.
After Silksong, Lethal Company and Content Warning were my two most played games in 2025.
I agree that calling these low-poly multiplayer games “slop” is terrible, because there is clearly a ton of love and effort poured into them. I hope the name doesn’t catch on.
Yeah, I see many people using the name without apparent malice but it feels inappropriate. Slop is low effort bullshit designed to capture the biggest market for the lowest cost, with little artistic vision. I don’t get that impression from most, if any, of these games.
I’ve heard it previously, the first time I couldn’t help but crack up because the term was so petulant and asinine. ‘They’re playing cheap games with low res graphics with their friends and having fun, someone make them stop!!’ is the vibe I get every time I hear it, and it’s still a hilarious term to me.
I’ve heard it for a while now, and when I first heard it I know precisely what it meant with no explanation. It really is a “good” (linguistically only) word. The definition and usage is asenine and counter productive, however.
I think it comes from a different place, unrelated to graphics. “Old” or “traditional” gamers are more and more getting turned off by games like among us, fall guys, and the like. Those are some early examples which popped off during the pandemic, but the “genre” of similar games is what is referred to by friendslop. Playing games with friends is fine, but many of these games would be entirely unplayable without friends, and rely substantially on interactions with friends to provide entertainment with only a loose framework to support that.
That itself isn’t necessarily bad, but the point where this turns into a problem is when a lot of these games fail or do not try to actually make good gameplay beyond that. Again, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, I’m just describing why it exists.
There is a growing rift from the group of people that would be described as “gamers” in the 90’s, 2000’s and 10’s and the group of people that are described as gamers now, which is largely more casual than the first group. The former group is where most of the people who would use the term friendslop come from. They want games with substantial gameplay that doesn’t have to rely on social interaction, regardless if it relies on online multiplayer. The latter group is just having fun doing things with their friends, where 10, 20, or 30 years ago if they were the same age, they might have done in person while “gamers” at the time would still be playing video games.
So the “slop” part of it comes from the idea that game developers are churning out games that don’t provide much entertainment, and you’re supposed to “bring your own” fun in their framework. It also very much seems tied to the rise of youtubers or tick tockers playing these games, hyping up random social interactions and people see those 3 seconds and simply want to experience the (fake) reactions and emotions that are on display. The constant barrage of these games and reaction videos on social media is inescapable.
All of that being said, there’s no reason you can’t make a game that does all of that but does actually have good polished gameplay, but so many games chasing (and catching) this trend do not.
Let me reiterate 2 things: I don’t agree with the phrase. A game is a game and if it’s fun, it’s a good game. But also, it really has nothing to do with graphics. You can make friendslop with AAA graphics and it could fit in perfectly with all the other friendslop games.
I think your explanation is pretty accurate and I agree with your point that it has nothing to do with graphics. however..
there’s no reason you can’t make a game that does all of that but does actually have good polished gameplay, but so many games chasing (and catching) this trend do not.
Any time I see someone say this, they always fail to actually provide any examples of games that fit this description. I know you aren’t defending the term but I just noticed that parallel between your description and the explanations provided by people who criticize these sort of games.
The first time I heard of the term, and when it started getting popular, was around the time PEAK released. At first glance, it seemed like the game fit the term, but after a bit people started realizing that it actually was a fun and well designed game that has some longevity. Ever since then, people who use the term negatively always concede that their prime example doesn’t even fit their criticism, but fail to provide a list of other examples.
It really makes me feel like it’s just people complaining about things for being popular, without any actual basis for their criticism.
I think among us is a great example of this, to take the first one that got popular. It’s just a form of werewolf, blood on the clock tower, town of Salem, etc. Just distilled and simplified and put onto phones and made accessible. The “gameplay” is that of a board game, just with a few moving pngs. I’d much rather play one of the games I listed above which has more engaging mechanics with the same premise. Among us is hyper simplified, and I believe it relied on social media and the pandemic and an extremely low bar to entry to gain snowballing popularity.
It’s not a “good” game in comparison to most of its competitors at the time. But its competitors weren’t as conducive to social media reactions and didn’t have that spark of luck at just the right time to start snowballing, or lacked the accessibility of simple mechanics.
I typically do not play these games, but I see a new one on a daily basis. The problem with naming and shaming is that someone who sees something they don’t like doesn’t investigate further, but starts to notice trends and patterns over time of the same “type of stuff” on their social media feeds (or suggestions from friends). My friends keep suggesting games like this as well. A couple of them were space themed, a few were horror themed, but most of them (and I investigated every single one at the time since a friend personally suggested them, but promptly forgot about them) were in the same genre of “mediocre but fun game clearly conducive to inciting TikTok reactions”
Edit: just to make a point on the other end, I think lethal company is a pretty great game. It’s immersive, pretty scary sometimes, the “manned ship with a computer” mechanic is unique and impactful, and specific interactions with each monster, item, role, map, and weather make for a bit of emergent gameplay here and there between the normal gameplay. It’s very good, even if I think it has a shorter than average shelf life before it gets old compared to most games I like. It ALSO is conducive to TikTok reactions, but it provides new and interesting mechanics of its own.
I know this and that they didn’t specifically design for it, but it was the reason for its success, and the community instantly took notice and started designing to replicate that specific phenomenon. The success itself relied on social media, not the devs. I bet if social media in the lockdown didn’t launch it into the stratosphere it would have stayed at its original level of success.
Any time I see someone say this, they always fail to actually provide any examples of games that fit this description
Lethal Company is actually pretty fun if you’re playing it alone. That’s a positive example.
Another one is Don’t Starve Together. Great together, but Don’t Starve itself is also fun.
Among us on the other hand has no bots and you won’t have any fun without other players. However, you’d also not have fun without other players in Uno, Chess or Checkers.
Were these enough examples or did I misunderstand your point?
I don’t agree that you have to make games be good beyond the multiplayer experience. I’d love it to get my money’s worth, if I can play the game alone AND share the fun with friends I’ll gladly pay extra.
As it stands, many friendjank games only cost a few euros so I can live with them not being fun after a while or without friends. After all I used to buy cinema cards for my friends and I and didn’t have more than a few hours of fun, and cinema cards are often way more expensive than friendslop.
I agree that calling these low-poly multiplayer games “slop” is terrible, because there is clearly a ton of love and effort poured into them.
Depends on the game. Lethal Company? I wouldn’t call that slop at all. Content Warning? Yeah, no, that’s slop. It was a fun little jaunt to try it out for free, but that game felt so shallow and burned out on me so incredibly fast that if I had paid anything for it I’d probably have felt ripped off.
To me, “friendslop” doesn’t necessarily mean the game isn’t fun or has “bad graphics,” it instead means that it 1) relies heavily on friends to be fun and 2) has some element of feeling like either a cash-in or a low-effort project. I don’t count Lethal Company because it doesn’t have either issue for me. Content Warning, meanwhile, was worthless to me in singleplayer and relied so thoroughly on the camera as a gimmick that it feels like the epitome of the term. Hell, it was literally made as a break from a larger project, so I think it cinches the “low-effort” part, at least relative to other games.
R.E.P.O., however – which you didn’t mention but which I still have thoughts on – I’m torn on. On one hand, the gameplay is a more detailed and engaging form of what Lethal Company has, and it can easily be fun alone. On the other, the way semiwork interacts with their community in their news videos feels like Youtube engagement rot so strongly that it taints the game for me by extension; it (and their emoji abuse) makes me feel like the game has the “love and passion” of a dorm room dildo prank, even though it’s well-put-together enough that there’s no way that’s the case.
Edit: I should probably also add that it is absolutely possible for me to feel that a game does have love & passion behind its development, and yet still qualify to me as friendslop. I think the best way to explain this would be to liken it to a Youtuber who makes engaging and deep videos, but who also uses a lot of clickbait and algorithm-hacks to drive engagement too. It’s not that so much that the developer is being a bad or careless person so much as it is that the game itself has an ick about it, which is unfortunately always going to be extremely subjective and ill-defined. As another example: I called PEAK friendslop when I first played, softened up on that feeling over time (especially when the very excellent Mesa update hit), and then the feeling came right back when they announced some concert or other occurring in the game like they were Fortnite.
I feel like this isn’t really a new development. Back when LAN parties and local multiplayer were still a thing, games like TeeWorlds, Worms etc. were popular, because they ran on potatoes and you could often get them for free.
The actual fun then came from dicking around with or competing against your friends. The game itself does not need to be ground-breaking for that.
Hell, it technically started even earlier than that, with physical card games and board games and such. Just play them with friends and it’s fun.
Quite on point. I’d add that it’s not only games but also other media like movies you can enjoy better with friends, even if they’re not particularly cinematographic masterpieces.
Hell, it technically started even earlier than that, with physical card games and board games and such. Just play them with friends and it’s fun.
Here I was, thinking people liked Uno for the deep game mechanics and story 🙃
People in this thread try to pull compliments for friendslop out of thin air because they can’t admit they like simple or bad games. If it’s fun, it must be genius, because obviously I won’t ever play a game which is bad, would I now? 🙃😅
I’d say people should enjoy what they enjoy. We should stop judging other people’s fun. And I think this is kind of also the point of the article: if people have fun in AAA games with micro transactions and battle passes, I let them and I’m happy they can have fun. I won’t touch that shit myself though, rather play a “friendslop” title 😅
A bright spot of 2025 was the continued rise of “friendslop,” a cringey internet-spawned label for a broad genre of cooperative games designed for groups of friends.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard “friendslop” and I knew exactly what it was talking about.
At least the same guy doesn’t also use “boomer shooter”
Which is funny, because “boomer shooter” is literally named after a generic, derogatory term for “older people”
I prefer something descriptive instead of the inside-joke brain-rot nature of “boomer shooter.” Though now I’m sure people just think it means “loud noises”
I mean, it refers to the games that are like those older shooters that old people used to play, I think it works well as a term to distinguish those games from more standard shooters. Also it’s catchy, which really helps
said older shooters are things like doom and quake, if you played those in your early twenties when they released you’d be nearing retirement, I think it’s a fair descriptor.
It feels like we’ve been stating the obvious for so long and it’s good to see it validated. But as others have said, this are no surprising news. Precise simulation and high end graphics make no sense if they don’t play a function in expanding the fun of the experience. We keep relearning the same thing over and over again. There’s a lot of fun to be had playing with friends, but also just having good game design.
Love to see any engine that isn’t Unity or Unreal get some support. I’m getting really tired of the absurdly bad performance that a lot of simple unity indie games have nowadays.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne