Factorio doesn’t give a fuck and will let you play with up to 254 other people on the same server. Most survival crafting games have LAN, as a matter of fact. Somehow this is the only genre that will hold developers accountable on a regular basis and make them hurt for not having LAN and player-controlled servers. Not all of them will, but most will offer LAN.
All of Larian’s recent RPG efforts have LAN and direct IP connections: Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2, and Baldur’s Gate 3.
Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and the entire Borderlands series (outside of the GOTY edition of Borderlands 1) support LAN, surprisingly, if you want to get your loot game on.
Is Recharge RC the same as the upcoming Unreal engine racing game Recharge? If they don’t have the same lineage, they’ve at least got similar inspirations.
Warside is an upcoming turn-based strategy game inspired by (or ripping off wholesale?) Advance Wars, and it’s got LAN in its features list.
Streets of Rogue is an all-timer in the co-op roguelike department, and it too supports LAN.
A game that I download and install on a regular basis in the freeware realm is Armagetron. It’s the light cycles from Tron but in an open source LAN game. It doesn’t exactly have a ton of depth, but it’s good fun for about an hour every couple of years.
I imagine Minecraft played a large part in popularizing the concept of a player hosted server for survival games. It’s possible that the reason this genre in specific has so many titles where you can do this is because players coming from or otherwise largely influenced by Minecraft see this as a requirement if not just the standard, so devs wanting to appeal to these players may also see it as a standard/requirement.
Sure, but first person shooters always had LAN until they didn’t. Console games always had split screen until they didn’t. Those audiences largely let those features fall off in a way survival audiences didn’t.
It was such an evolutionary leap forward from the previous MM games. Everything was bigger and better. The graphics, the music, the controls. It blew my mind at the time.
I spent so many hours on this game. Probably replayed it hundreds of times. The boss battles were so epic. SIGMA! And then discovering the secret shouryuken move from Street Fighter! Wow!
Great list. But I love reading trough the reasoning behind the picks. What are yours?
Personally I think outer wilds is a one of a kind game which represents am artistic message about existence that cannot be conveyed the same way in any other medium.
I think the common denominator is a strong / immersive story and universe that appeals to me (big fan of sf), interesting mechanics and gameplay in a way that makes the game unique in its own way, and the artistic approach behind the game, so for each of those :
Outer Wilds was a fantastic experience that you can only live once, the freedom of exploration is crazy, the feelings you can go through in the span of a single minute make it so memorable, I connected with this game like no other
Death Stranding I played during one of the lockdowns, and after hiking in Iceland, it was a continuity of these two experiences that felt very personal. It was also my introduction to Kojima games. I found it to be such a premium experience and statement about video games, I loved the insanity of the plot, and once you dug deeper, you find all the artistic inspiration and process that went behind the game, it’s an insane work of interactive art
Disco Elysium I was already fully on board just learning about the game, I sympathise with the authors, the fact that it started as an rpg campaign, with immense lore behind it, love the art style, the narration, the story and its themes, I haven’t lived in post USSR Europe but the game make me nostalgic/melancholic for a time, aesthetic, struggles I didn’t know
They’re my absolute favourite but some games come close, Inscryption, Pyre, Spiritfarer…
Great points. One think I love about disco is how much expression it gives to the mundane. It’s not about firebreathing dragons but about trashcans. My most intense interaction I’ve had in this game was with a malfunctioning speaker on a office building.
I wish more people would play The Hex. I got more playtime out of Inscryption and loved it, but I played The Hex later on and I did not expect to like it more, but it’s fucking genius. I think it’s a legitimately better game.
+1 to Animal Crossing. Love the aesthetic of cozy games but sometimes a lack of a solid goal, for lack of a better word (casual games are games, not being judgy about that, they are just not to my personal preference) casual-ness/lack of complexity, or not-the-best gameplay drives me away. I enjoyed Animal Crossing a lot.
That’s why I think they’re great. Good standalone songs put in a fitting context.
Bought and played NFS heat recently. Game was surprisingly good, music, however had too much hip-hop/pop and stuff like that for my taste so that was disappointing.
Look, it may not run well, but you need to go back and take another look at PS3 games. If I wanted to say a new game looks like a PS3 game, I’d pick Earth Defense Force, not Monster Hunter (unless you mean Monster Hunter Rise).
It looks like a PS3 game with post processing or ReShade. The texture quality is actually sometimes worse than a PS3 game.
Looking at games like Demons Souls, Batman Arkham City, MGS 4 + V, NieR 2010, etc, Wilds does not look like much of an improvement. And some of those games released early in the life of the PS3, so they werent even using the maximum capabilities of the hardware. Sure, Wilds has SSAO and RayTracing (if your GPU can even handle running that at an acceptable framerate), but if you turn those effects off to get better performance the game looks like a PS3 game. And by better I mean you go from like 40fps to 55fps, with Frame Gen disabled.
The game is an unoptimized mess and it does not provide a graphical improvement to explain the bad performance. Its not like Cyberpunk 2077, with hundreds of NPCs or something. There like, 20 dudes in a box canyon village tanking your fps down to sub-30fps.
I cannot meet you on this. Seriously, put Meryl from MGS4 next to Monster Hunter Wilds Lady; it’s night and day. And Monster Hunter is operating at a scale that MGS4 cannot. MGS4, of course, also has performance problems trying to push what it did on that hardware.
Regarding the comparison to World, what I have said in the past is that while Wilds does look better, it doesn’t look nearly enough better to justify just how much worse it performs.
Mr Zaslav, the CEO of WB, the company who owns the rights, doesn’t want WB to be profitable so he can sell it off to a private equity firm and make out like a bandit with his CEO bonus intact
I just hope the little, fun and interesting things I love to share keep on being interesting to others! And its nice to be here, I was very sad to leave Reddit towards the end of last year, and the Steam Deck community I built up there. Nice to see an alternative like this exists here (with nicer folk, so far!)
I got the 3060, and returned it for the 3070. Upgraded from a 1070, a 10 year old card. But the 3060 performance wasn’t there, and for $100 more I stayed in the xx70 lane. Needed the 3070 for 1440p monitors, the 3060 was good at 1080p but choked on 1440p. Was worth the upgrade for me, was my Christmas present to myself after 10 years of my old equipment.
im going to go amd next time. i dont see it as a time to upgrade though, i stull use 1080p monitors with 180hz. to mee that’s better than 1440 at 60hz [similar prices]
Yeah I plan on buying PS5 probably if I do because I expect it to be more optimized for consoles at first. Hmm maybe I’ll sit on this one for a while, maybe wait for a sale or something.
Well if I could quickly check how all clothes would fit on me without going to the store and without having to change clothes, I’d probably spend the same effort. Having a character creator would also be neato
I am really enjoying it so far. I’m almost finished with the second map.
So many people seem to hate it for reasons I don’t quite understand. I also really liked Outer Worlds, though.
I’m enjoying the story, the characters, the inventory system - everything everyone else seems to hate. I really don’t understand why other people say the world feels dead. I guess I enjoy not having to run around to find NPCs who are always on the move? (Looking at you, Skyrim.)
Sure, most weapons in the game are exactly the same. But that makes the “unique” ones so much more interesting. I like that I can upgrade those unique weapons, so that they always stay useful. No more quest rewards that are already underleveled when I receive them! (Looking at you, Skyrim.)
I saw someone in this thread say they missed the “stolen item” mechanic. I’ll tell you what I don’t miss: becoming a wanted man because I took some food off a table in a common area or accidentally clicked and took one of the thousands of items lying around that are lootable.
I’m enjoying the Balder’s Gate 3 camping system, but I’m glad you don’t need to “spend” food for every night in camp.
My only “problem” is that it feels a little unoptimized. I get low frame rates sometimes that don’t go away even at the lowest settings, especially inside cities. But, it’s relatively minor. I can (and do) live with it.
It feels like a full game with no glitches on release, which is nice.
Although, if your glass textures all look frosted and weird, then turn “global Illumination” up to at least medium.
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