Uncharted, especially the final installment. On normal and higher difficulty dealing with the enemies becomes a bit of a chore: they force you to hide a lot, as well as waste entire clips of ammo on a single guy. On easy the game becomes forgiving enough food you too start pulling off cool stunts: swinging on ropes, shooting during a climb/jump, etc.
Finished Pseudoregalia yesterday. Really a special platformer with iconic goat-bunny-cat lady mc, a lot of gradually unlocked trick moves, parkour puzzles, and zero hand-holding in freely traversable non-linear interconnected game world. It’s only like 10h of gameplay in average, but it’s perfect size for its format really. Not too small to feel really small and not too big for wandering around to become annoying.
Been going through my third play-through of Baldur’s Gate 3 recently. Its crazy that I’m still finding things I somehow missed or took a different path to get
Just when the new season in World of Warcraft starts, I stop playing. I had a lot of fun, but also played a lot these last couple of months. WoW is also not a game I just play on the side. If I play it, I basically play nothing else. No idea when I’ll be back, probably if my best friend starts again, but who knows if that happens.
I wanted to check out the latest re-release of Doom with Doom + Doom II, and look at the new episode, but decided to try and play through all the levels of the first two games on Ultra-Violence, Pistol Start, and no save scumming. I’m halfway through episode three of Doom, and it’s not been too difficult so far. Three levels took me a few tries, the rest wasn’t too bad. The main thing is a lack of ammo, especially at the start of a level, so you either got to get comfortable punching things or cause infighting. I usually choose the former, so the Berserk power-up is always a welcome sight.
Then I started Lies of P. I killed three major bosses so far and it’s alright. I play on KB+M, and as always controls are just so-so. It’s not like you have 60-100 keys available, so better put two or three abilities on the same button or force players to cycle through item shortcuts.
I just started Astro Bot a couple days ago. I’m completely hooked, it’s so much fun. Looking forward to the new Zelda as well.
And started a co-op run of Baldur’s Gate 3 with a friend who hasn’t finished it yet. I can’t get enough of that game. Got into the modding scene recently too.
Countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have already banned loot boxes and gacha systems
Did they really? I certainly know that the lootboxes aren’t allowed here (rip my TF2 weapon paints), but I still could spend 10 euros on Genshin Impact, even if I had to use MasterCard.
I have zero interest in paying for lootboxes or other gambling crap paid with real money in games.
But games like Lost Ark were banned in The Netherlands and it took me a while to figure out why it didn’t show in my Steam store.
I wish there were other means instead of just outright banning games from stores (like Diablo Immortal for mobile also isn’t available in The Netherlands). It didn’t take me much to get around the ban and install Lost Ark anyway, so I figured if I can do that, then what’s stopping people with gambling problems from doing the same as well.
Also it seems wildly inconsistent when games are and aren’t allowed for us to download. Why should I be limited to the regulated games accessible because of other people’s gambling addictions? Feels like half the Steam library could be Thanos-snapped if it were just for lootboxes and transactions being present in games.
How about both? Writing your elected reps is definitely smart, but will be much more effective if there are numerous people calling for the same. I appreciate OP sharing their views, and catloaf sharing a specific action step all of us can do it we are concerned about this matter.
I worked for a few years as a gambling addiction counselor, and these types of games definitely prime people for addiction to gambling. Also, it’s worth noting that the demographic with the highest rates of gambling addiction are young men, aged 18-24.
Anyone that’s been to a casino can attest that major video game companies also make slot machines. The industry are aware of what they’re doing.
Companies aren’t innovative. Once they land on a formula they just keep using it. Eventually it gets stale and the company crashes or buys another company that had a good idea and runs it into the ground. Innovative games happen when a AAA company happens to acquire an indie studio at the right time to give them runway to properly polish their game.
we really need to archive archive.org tbh. If there was an open source fediverse alternative that would be great. The hard part would be the amount of storage needed for the whole thing.
How much innovation can you get when you have to spend millions of dollars on large teams to develop games now, compared to even 10 years ago? It’s not really all that surprising that companies want to play it safe. It’s a large investment, and they don’t know if there will be a return on it.
That doesn’t even get into the fact that there’s only so many combinations of things you can do in a video game.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne