The only time I will find acceptable the presence of an online service in a mostly single player game is when it complements it, and will still operate gracefully if disconnected.
Fuck these games that just stops working when they pull the plug on the servers.
Fallout: New Vegas, Caves of Qud, Project Zomboid, Minecraft, Terraria, Morrowind, Skyrim, Dwarf Fortress, Kenshi, Rimworld, Elden Ring, and so much more.
The detail in Kenshi is pretty amazing. I don’t normally get sucked into single player games, but the design really does give the impression of nearly unlimited freedom, every different starting scenario feels genuinely unique. The slave start particularly was a ton of fun.
It’s pretty amazing that it was designed by basically one guy. He was really efficient in how he chose what game elements to invest his limited development time into and clearly had a really strong vision. I hope he can get a few more devs onboard to develop a second one, I feel like even two or three other people would make so much more possible.
Absolutely, it’s one of the few games that genuinely give the player absolute freedom, but does so in a hand-crafted world with detailed lore and worldbuilding. It’s great.
They do it because if you have to be online, connected to their servers, you have to look at their store and be tempted to buy something else for the game. It’s also just straight DRM. The industry spent the better part of 20 years complaining about piracy and used game sales, and now they’ve found a way to defeat them by just designing their games to disappear when the servers are gone. That does come with a catch though. Building and maintaining the online infrastructure costs a lot of money, and given how many of these games just instantly flop and die, customers are less willing to invest their time and money into a game unless they know it’s a winner, which has less to do with the game’s quality and more of how many other people perceive it to be quality. This looks to me to be why the industry is crashing right now.
As egregious as horse armor was decades ago, that doesn’t offend me the way server requirements do (you can always just choose not to buy the horse armor and still have the game you bought in perpetuity). If the game requires an online connection, don’t buy it. There’s always another game out there like it without the requirement. A game that requires an internet connection is just a worse version of a game they could have sold you without it, and the online requirement gives it an expiration date. If multiplayer requires an online connection, make sure it supports LAN, split-screen, direct IP connections, or private servers. This information is very hard to find just by store pages, perhaps intentionally so, but I usually check on the PC Gaming Wiki these days; otherwise you have to hope the developer responds to a question about those features in the Steam forums.
This is one of many reasons why I boycott a lot of AAA gaming companies nowadays. Not going to name names here, but they know who they are. I prefer indie devs/pubs, and stay the fuck away from anyone pushing FOMO crap, especially pre-order/early access DLC packages.
The one I never get tired of replaying is Mafia 2. Maybe a weird choice since it’s very linear and every play through is pretty much the same. But the story is just perfect for me. The gameplay perfectly suits the story, nothing especially clever, just well executed.
Then there’s games like Binding of Isaac or Dead Cells where every play through is different.
Even if one gets bored of the game itself, there’s a practically infinite number of mods and community content out there. New game modes like skyblock, mods that turn it into an RPG with magic systems, mods that make it an in-depth factory building game, mods that take you to new realms and thousands of items to discover… There’s a lot to enjoy.
Adventure maps are also fairly underrated. There are tons of community-made maps that can turn it into a different game. Notably, there was a huge Hogwarts campaign with quests and spells that turns it into a harry potter game: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKcsoE5X4fc
Was looking for this. The crossover randomiser of Link to the Past and Super Metroid is a masterpiece, and if you like one or both of the games it provides you with a new way to have the complete the game every time you play it.
Add in the different flavours like entrance randomiser (where not only are the items shuffled but the doors you enter don’t go where they normally go), or keysanity (where keys don’t stay in their dungeons and can instead be anywhere) and it turns what was already a great SNES area game into something you can play over and over again.
For me, Noita. I don’t recommend it unconditionally, but for me that game will forever be the only permanent game in my library. I expect it’s possible that I could finish Elden Ring. I know I will never finish Noita.
I basically 100%ed Hades over a span of 2 weeks and never touched it again. Great game, but there is little reason to continue playing when you’ve unlocked everything.
If you don’t mind top down colony managers, rimworld is an absolute gem. The base game itself is infinitely replayable because every game is basically a story. Think dwarf fortress with graphics (well, df has graphics now but). Also incredibly easy to mod to customize or completely change your game experience.
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Aktywne