If you're looking for a shooter, co-op campaigns for those things dried up a while back, so you're mostly looking at older games. My friends and I are playing Quake and Quake II to scratch that itch, but those old shooters are also very maze-like. If you're open to suggestions beyond shooters, I'd recommend a couple of roguelikes, namely Streets of Rogue and Vagante. Both are very chaotic, sandbox-y, challenging, and scale really well for co-op.
The Half-Life franchise, maybe. Half-Life 2 and up has a lot of physics stuff including the Gravity Gun, but considering HL1 is free to play via Sven Co-op it wouldn’t hurt to start there. You’ll need something like Synergy or Obsidian Conflict to play HL2 cooperatively.
The Rocket League Racing, Rock Band clone, and LEGO survival mode are wild additions that I honestly really appreciate. BR got old ages ago, but now there’s a whole swathe of new free stuff to play.
The Rock Band Clone you are talking about is actually made by the Rock Band Developers.
Love what Fortnite is doing with joining with all different sorts of games and making it work on Fortnite allowing you to have your Locker have all the items between games.
Gears of War comes to mind, not much physics but a lot of emphasis on movement but in a different way from Halo, still stupid fun to play the campaign Co-op!
My opinion: Follow the Apex Legends one. Don’t tell the public literally anything. Build up zero hype, and then release it out of nowhere and let the game speak for itself. No hype = no overinflated expectations or impatient gamers. Obviously not every studio should do this, but I wish more would. I enjoy being pleasantly surprised, rather than wait for a game for years, only for it to be overpromised and DOA.
I see what you’re saying, but it’s unviable for much of the industry, and Apex seems to be a rare case where it found success despite the competition of overwatch, counter strike etc and despite being unknown (unlike valorant, which had significant brand recognition behind it).
But it’s unviable. Large studios need to market their games early to recover development costs through pre purchases and get people excited enough to buy day 1 (and to convince investors that there is enough excitement behind the title).
Small studios already do this - they don’t have brand recognition and therefore no money or need to market their games extensively (except on free platforms like Lemmy, Reddit etc), and hope their game somehow gets picked up by twitch and does well (e.g. Among Us). For many, many indie titles, their games die in obscurity, or get just enough attention to cover costs.
In general, what you’re asking for is the following: Don’t tell the public anything. Build a game that’s good enough but has an unknown IP (so that people who are hunting for registered URLs or LinkedIn hires don’t spot anything that could hint at a game), and then release it suddenly, but be absolutely confident that it is genuinely fun, it’s watertight (free from major bugs) and chef’s kiss optimised so incredibly well, that it gets nothing but glowing reviews on day 1 and word of mouth alone, through Twitch and YouTube is enough to propel it into the mainstream and make it an instant hit.
Or be Starfield lmao. If Bethesda is unable to do to Starfield what No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk did, then there’s absolutely no confidence that Elder Scrolls 6 will be a good game.
I think you can learn a lot from apex even if it’s not the obvious choice. For Counterstrike 2 the trailer was dropped, aggressively marketed and a beta was put in people’s hands basically at the same time solidifying the game is good. Then it disappeared until launch. It very clearly worked because there were no complaints about the game. No question how good it is because the streamers played it. Then it’s just a waiting game. BG3 not quite the same but putting the game into people’s hands meant that people knew it was solid, before launch. Access creates buzz, especially if a game is enjoyable. It’s the through line between all the success stories. Let people play good game, then other people want to play the good game.
We’re competative I suppose. Grew up playing and nothing ever replaced it. There’s probably other arcade games we’d enjoy but the closest we’ve come was the Tetris Effect - but we haven’t picked that up again for a while. Tricky is one of those games that has a huge skill difference between being good and actually practicing. It’s fun, a bit janky - maybe it’s just what we know. My brother has a couple high scores on my steam deck and writing this has inspired me to go spend some time trying to beat them lol
Glad you are enjoying it. Any advice on getting it up and running on a steam deck? Just got one a few months ago and havent looked into emulation yet but intended to, life just got in the way and havent gone back to it yet. Maybe you can inspire me to get my some old tony hawk games running. Loved the ps era skater games
Yeah, there’s something called Emudeck, it makes setup super easy. Even comes with tools to add emulated games into your steam library to launch like a regular game.
There is this one funky caveat - the PlayStation and Switch games I emulate didn’t run very well, after some research I found out that lowering the CPU cores helps a ton. And it did, they run great for me now. To do that I had to install a Deck extension called Powertools - super easy to do because Emudeck came with a user interface to install plugins, Powertools included. Anyway, with Powertools you turn off this thing called SMT and then can lower the CPU cores. Some people think it’s actually a bug in emulation or Steam Deck drivers because using less cores shouldn’t have a big impact on performance so it may not be necessary in the future.
Tons of video examples on YouTube make the install and setup super easy. Highly reccomend setting emulation up, I’ve been playing through games I never finished as a kid and it’s been great. The convenience makes it awesome
That’s why I could never get into these games, even at the start as a WC3 map. So little time to actually assess what your choices are. You either need a dozen sessions to actually read everything or just someone to tell you what the good characters and items are.
If you want to try a simpler MOBA, try Heroes of the Storm. The game does not get any love from Blizzard anymore, but out of all the MOBA’s I know, it has the least minimal knowledge required to play.
There’s a subreddit and discord called Summoners school. Going to drop the discord link below as a lot of us are on lemmy to avoid Reddit.
Mobas are hard because of fundamentals people know and you don’t. Learning some of the basics is a huge step up. Tons of YouTube and guides on summoners school will help with that. Don’t worry though too much about picking the best champion. Below emerald ELO (probably even after that), knowing fundamentals and really knowing “your” champion is a bigger deal. Pick a role you like. Then pick a champion that appeals to you playstyle wise within that role.
Finally don’t let failure get you in a negative headspace. It’s really easy and happens often where you are playing against champions you’ve never dealt with before. If the opponent knows the matchup, odds are you get spanked. That’s okay. Review each death and just note what you could have done different and the next time you play that matchup it will go a lot better. League is a game of who has the most experience in a particular scenario.
Take your time. Push your limits and don’t be afraid to die. People get stuck with this “play safe” mentality and you end up in a lot of games where people miss opportunities because they don’t want to risk a death.
The MOBA genre is based off a mod for Warcraft 3 called Defense of the Ancients. DotA, being a mod, had lots of “quirks” (aka bugs) in the game play that kind of just became part of the flavor of the game. LoL was the first standalone MOBA, based off DotA and (iirc) developed by some of the people who worked on the original mod. LoL was designed as a standalone game but it recreated all the quirks of the mod because they were believed to be so important to the game.
Blizzard, when they made HotS, looked at some of the wonky, quirky things and said “This is dumb, let’s strip that out and make it simpler.” The result is a MOBA that’s just as fun but less complex. I really enjoyed it a lot for that reason.
MOBA as a genre didn’t come from WC3. There were quite a lot of predecessors to DotA, both in WC3 itself and in first StarCraft, namely Aeon of Strife is believed to be the first popular MOBA custom map out there.
Blizzard didn’t decide that quirks of WC3 engine are dumb. Yes, they wanted to make a simpler MOBA, but the main reason for lack of funny stuff from WC3 is that they used Galaxy engine for the game, the same one StarCraft 2 was built upon.
And HotS feels less complex not because of Galaxy’s vs WC3’s quirks (the former has plenty, too), but because of lack of gold and shop, shared experience and an actual tutorial at the beginning of the game.
That’s actually where I started my moba journey. Was huge HotS player. Mained tanks like Mura, Etc and Garosh. Then Blizzard killed that esports scene 2 weeks after saying they were doubling down on it at blizzcon. Never have a been that mad at a company. I quit blizzard games after that.
Going to League of Legends was a tough switch. Really helped that the League esports scene is a ton of fun. Though it seems having the esports tied money is starting to make that scene die a slow death too.
I used to use PlayOnLinux for exactly this thing. It’s a front end/manager for WINE. Heroic and Lutris are similar, but have carried the concept further.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne