The games I play do respect my time but boy are they a second job. From Rimworld to Satisfactory, from Space Engineers to modded Minecraft… My job is a second job.
I know you’re not talking about old school RPGs. The older games tended to pad playtime by having insane difficulty levels or by requiring grinds. Hell, my favorite JRPG (edit: Legend of Legaia) is specifically more grindy in America, because the devs decided to slash the experience and gold drop rates by like 50% for the American release, and make all of the enemies hit much harder. (Interestingly, the original enemy stats are still present in the game code, and then the game runs some “x1.25” math when the battle starts, to bump all of their stats up to the values that actually get used in combat.) So you need to be a higher level to be able to survive, and you need to grind twice as long to reach those higher levels and to be able to buy better gear. I like it despite the grind, not because of it; In most of my play throughs, I end up using cheats to avoid the grind.
and aren’t a glorified second job
I mean, games like Ultima Online, RuneScape, Diablo, and EverQuest have existed since the 90’s. Hell, RuneScape used to be extremely approachable for young players because it didn’t require a good computer or any installs; It just ran directly in your internet browser.
The bigger reason many adults feel this way is not because games have gotten longer or harder. Adults simply have less time to play. They don’t want to spend a bunch of time researching optimal builds or grinding rank in multiplayer matches. Instead, they want to fall back to the games that they already know how to play. They’re willing to ignore the fact that their favorite single player game requires 10-20 hours of grinding, because it doesn’t feel like work to them. Or if it does, they can just use cheats to get around it. They don’t need to research how to get a specific item, or how to approach a specific boss fight, because they have already done it a dozen times.
Why would you write this and then not say what your favorite jrpg that is specifically more grindy in America is? Do you write clickbait headlines for a living?
I like the game (as well as the similar https://store.steampowered.com/app/211820/Starbound/) but every time I play it, I wish that it had more ability to create stuff that does things. Like, more Noita-style interactions with the world or Factorio-style automation. The stuff you can make is mostly static.
This 100%. I looooove Noita and any deep systems-driven games where players explore, discover, and create content for years.
One of my favourite things is the sudden discovery that a game is much bigger and more open-ended than I thought. Especially when it happens dozens of hours in.
I’ve been playing a lot of terraria with my son recently, it’s been a lot of fun going back to it. Coincidentally, I just saw the trailer for Noita for the first time last night, and thought “woah, that looks cool as hell…”
I die too fast in Noita to get too deep into it… I liked what I played of it though. Something about Starbound made it feel like Temu Terraria… I can’t put my finger on why it feels so … fake? Like physics or the way the player model moves and interacts with blocks is off or something. Maybe it is just too close to Terraria and the many hours I spent in Terraria makes anything close feel off.
I suppose in a few months, after this current round of Minecraft, I’ll be pulled into Terraria again. I had a pretty good head of steam on the way to finishing my 2 year old run of BG3 when I made the mistake of opening Minecraft… Terraria is about the only thing that could rival minecraft in addictive qualities for me. It has the added benefit that I can talk my wife into playing Terraria but she won’t touch minecraft.
I want to agree but some games are really well done. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is a good example.
However
I feel like many people are so focused on graphics and looks, like raytracing for example, that gameplay/story has become less important? Sucks but it is what it is I guess…
A good story isn’t something groundbreaking that marketing teams can slap on the box in the same way they can with ray tracing dlss or whatever else I guess
Update: I assembled the stack, went in, fragged out. It’s got some stupid OP modifiers and there’s probably a meta to counter them, but it didn’t matter- the short rounds and short games meant even if you’re getting stomped it doesn’t hurt too much (looking at you, counterstrike).
Because crypto miners ruined gaming top end GPUs used to be $300 Max, now were looking in the thousands to have the best GPU for like 6 months, and you can’t buy a used one because it could be a clapped out card used in a crypto miner
Bitcoin switched to industrial ASICs a long time ago, and Ethereum has completely moved away from proof-of-work mining in 2022, see: ethereum.org/en/roadmap/merge/
The Merge was executed on September 15, 2022. This completed Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake consensus, officially deprecating proof-of-work and reducing energy consumption by ~99.95%.
GPU mining is pretty much completely dead because after Ethereum switched the yields on everything else tanked, no one mines with GPUs anymore, at least not for any major blockchain. GPUs are mainly being used with AI now
That doesn’t mean that their effect on the GPU market will up and vanish overnight. Market correction doesn’t usually go down as fast as it goes up.
Edit: add to that the tariff situation and the standoff with China and Taiwan (where all the processors for gpus are made), and you have a situation where things are just going to get more expensive no matter what.
It’s AI at this point. Nvidia considers the gamer division to be vestigial. They were a $700B market cap company that was primarily known for gaming GPUs. They are now quadruple that with AI, and that’s even with some recent hits to their stock price.
The Merge was executed on September 15, 2022. This completed Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake consensus, officially deprecating proof-of-work and reducing energy consumption by ~99.95%.
I don’t follow crypto trends so I hadn’t heard about this either.
I had to look up proof-of-stake, and for Ethereum apparently is required to stake 32 coins to operate a node. Another google search shows me a single Ethereum coin is just north of $2k USD. So someone mining Etherium today needs to have more than $64k if Etherium to even run a node now?!
Not really to be honest, the power is in the decentralization, permissionless and opensource nature of the system. You can’t get that out of the traditional system
Of course not all networks are the same and there are always shit ones out there that compromise on those tenets, but if you do your due dilligence, you will see there is value in some of them
I don’t think it’s even necessarily that the GPU pricing has ballooned. I think the main reason is that that every new game has to compete with pretty much every other game ever made. For example I enjoyed Death Stranding and I am interested in Death Stranding 2, but I’m probably not getting in on launch because there’s a big chance I’ll probably start playing Stardew Valley for the n’th time, because I feel like that’s what I want to play. I’ll probably play DS2 when I get the Kojima itch.
IMO, GPU prices have an impact. Modern gaming has a bad habit of not optimizing games relying on people getting newer GPUs for performance.
Mix that with the pre-order/early access monetization, and we are to a point where games have made their money before release, and beans counters don’t want to put money in QA because there is no quantifiable ROI (there is a ROI, but it is hard to quantify), which is a no-no in their world.
Indie games have a tendancy to be less GPU demanding, and thus, usually have a better performance experience
Yep, that’s the thing. Games have to be bigger, better, more fun than ever before, and yet the publishers and management want it to be done quicker and quicker than ever before, so it’s a pretty difficult thing. That, combined with bad working conditions and the public shitting on you because “game devs are shitty/greedy/etc” with developers being used coloquially to absorb all the blame that should be reserved for management, and things are in a pretty tough spot.
Though, at the same time, it’s a better time now than ever before to actually be a gamer, because not only can you play any half-decent new games, but you can also play the entire library of older games, retro games, etc.
Much of my PC gaming, back in the day, was “oh this looks like a good game. Runs like dogshit on my PC though. Maybe I’ll wait until I get a better PC.” [wait 10 years] “My ADHD has gone worse, I can’t play all this stuff”
!newcommunities is a great place to discover new communities. As for big ones that already exist I’m sure there’s probably a list of big communities out there somewhere, otherwise browsing by All > Top 6 Hours or All > Hot will give you a good mix of everything. Then you can add communities you like from there
Edit: also lots of communities will shout out other communities in their sidebars. Check those too
Older games = more than 2 years old? Then the same goes for readers, movie and TV watchers, etc media consumption most isn’t from the current or previous years
@tonytins 6 years is old now? :< couldnt care less about the competitive/pvp stuff but im playing x4 foundations most of the time currently and some genres dont get that many new entries anyway, like open world action games like gta5. Thats from 2013 and most other titles like mafia 3 or just cause 4 arent much newer either
I play Rocket League and ~30,000 MAME games on a converted Arcade 1up. I’m waiting for my payment to go through for Vintage Story though – that one is fairly new!
pcgamer.com
Aktywne