I’d think these people probably make up a single number digit of the amount of games bought and never played.
It would be interesting to have a breakdown of which games werr bought and never played. How many of them were gifts ? What’s the share by rating ? Even better : When were the copies the most bought but never played ? This could bring up some interesting partterns.
Which ones were ever present in humble bundles or other key bundles, what is the age of the purchase vs the age of the game, etc. I agree, a deeper understanding of the data would be great.
You’ll miss out on some spider-lore, but it’s possible to jump into Spider Solitaire for the Windows XP home computor system without having played its predecessor, Spider Solitaire for the Windows 98 home computor system
Exactly this is why current copyright rules are BS. Having multiple studios with pressure from competitors results in better games (and less micro transactions shit to sqeeze franchises to death)
… I’m imaging the natural extreme conclusion to this. There are 16 sequels to masseffect and you need to research which games you need to play before you play the newest one. This also leads to conflicting cannon and infighting
Like the F.E.A.R. games. There are four sequels but not all are in the same timeline. At least with Drakengard, the sequels in the different timeline have completely different names.
I would still prefer the extreme outcome over what we have today.
And I think the community will know and happily share which line to take and if you want sell in the franchise, you got to look out that the community is happy with what you create, which includes plot holes / inconsistencies.
The big corporations just want you to believe that franchises dies if other studios can use it, when it only is about earnings the last penny out of a franchise with the least effort possible. They happily save on production cost and invest a lot in lawsuits (or similar) to maintain their monopoly position.
I mean, that kind of stuff already exists today with the current copyright laws. I remember as a kid reading all sorts of X-Men books and wondering why the characters in the cartoon were so different. Did Han shoot first in Star Wars?
I played the Ratchet and Clank (2016) game this year that’s like… Kind of a re-make ish of the first game? Except the story is quite a bit different, there’s new characters added and some old ones removed. Half the old levels are gone and there’s a couple of new ones added. Mechanically it’s a completely different game. And yet that’s even from the same studio.
thats not really what happens tho before disney was the big evil king of intellectual property and they were running around adapting other works their stuff was stand alone despite being based on existing stories or being adaptations of existing stories. When superman became more or less public domain we didnt see this happen despite his popularity people just did their own unique adaptation/retelling of the story rather than a mess of sequels. What i think would actually happen is that people would retell masseeffects story with their own takes on it and make new stories in that universe or with the original characters (tho im sure it would happen idk why they are all so fucking bland).
And even if there were unofficial sequels the original studio can always slap a “from the original creators of” label to theirs so people obsessed with the official telling of fictional stories know what to obsess over.
Hold up, “enshitification” is just turning into a buzzword now.
Enshitification has from the beginning described a service or product which is first released one way, and then over time is made worse for the users in ways designed to squeeze more profit out of them.
Without some serious mental gymnastics, forced stealth sections tend to just be bad design choices. Not every bad thing is the same kind of bad thing.
Without some serious mental gymnastics, forced stealth sections tend to just be bad design choices. Not every bad thing is the same kind of bad thing.
While I disagree with your comment on the definition of “enshittification”, I agree that forced stealth sections are just bad design. I remember those have been a thing for a long time now, and before then it was ice levels.
Copying from a later reply: I was reading their definition as being too specific. Imo enshittification is any time the relative average quality of a class of products or services decreases, either due to increased prices or decreased quality at the same price. This can be applied to a specific product or service, but can also describe a decline in quality across an industry.
Wikipedia isn’t the end all, but in this case I think it provides a working definition.
Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
I was reading your definition as being too specific. Imo enshittification is any time the relative average quality of a class of products or services decreases, either due to increased prices or decreased quality at the same price. This can be applied to a specific product or service, but can also describe a decline in quality across an industry.
Enshittification refers to a process with specific phases that ensure services will degrade at the expense of users, and then business customers, so that shareholders can extract as much profit as possible from both of those groups. It was coined by Cory Doctorow, who explains it here:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
On the one hand I get where you’re coming from, those sections are very thematically different from the rest of the game, but realistically it’s just a couple of minutes of very easy stealth.
I actually looked into this, part of the explanation is that in the 80s, Sweden entered a public/private partnership to subsidize the purchase of home computers, which otherwise would have been prohibitively expensive. This helped create a relatively wide local consumer base for software entertainment as well as have a jump start on computer literacy and software development.
This is the real explanation. Couple that with a push in the late 90s/early 2000s to roll out high-speed unmetered internet in the form of ADSL and later fiber.
Finland also has a disproportionate amount of highly successful games compared to the population. I guess one theory is that good social safety nets make it more feasible for people to take a risk starting an indie game studio that might not yield any money for years instead of working for a big corporation for a guaranteed paycheck.
Quebec also has a disproportionate amount of successful games for similar circumstances. Video game salaries are pretty well subsidized (although it was originally only meant to encourage Ubisoft to open a studio then other companies joined or got created so they kept it). The current government is threatening that though. That’s on top of socialized healthcare, low electricity cost, and the Canadian Media Fund but those all apply to the rest of Canada as well.
Quick list on top of my head: Indies: Outlast, Dead by Daylight, The Messenger, Spiritfarer, Ultimate Chicken Horse, Fez… AAA: Deus Ex, R6 Siege, For Honor, some of the better Assassin’s Creed and Farcry, Batman Arkham Origins
To be fair, BG3 is one of the most remarkable games I have ever played. Like ever. I have struggled to find other games like that which I really enjoy. Divinity original sin 2 I haven’t tried yet but I’m tempted to. Just really struggling to find stuff that’s decent and enjoyable I guess
The graphics are much simpler than BG3, but Owlcat has done some fantastic work with their Pathfinder games.
Wrath of the Righteous is much more polished and expanded than Kingmaker, but they’re both great. They both have the option to play in turn-based like BG3, or real time with pause like the old BG games.
I’ve heard a lot of concerning things about Pathfinder being way, WAY more complex and challenging than BG3, like absurdly, crazy complex combat and game systems that I’d probably struggle with and bar me from getting really into their game.
That’s a fair assessment. There are a ridiculous number of classes and subclasses each with their own quirks. And that’s without getting into multiclassing or Wrath’s mythic path system. I’ve definitely spent 20+ minutes leveling up before.
Do you like JRPGs? Yakuza: Like a Dragon is fairly recent and has a sequel (that I haven’t gotten to play yet). The story is NOT your typical RPG fare, it’s a modern drama about an ex-gangster trying to get back on his feet after prison (it gets emotional, I cried). But the combat is a classic turn-based RPG and it’s fun, stylish, and just barely complex enough to stay engaging.
That’s what the difficulty settings are for. No joke. Nearly any trash build can cruise through the easy difficulties with no more than a basic understanding of how turn based combat operates, and you’ll need to be a sweatlord with three spreadsheets open to reliably pose a threat to the hardest difficulty. Personally, I like to play in the middle but still overoptimize my party, so the early game is a challenge and then I just completely steamroll the final third of the game once we really get cooking with mythic levels.
If you already know DnD then you can play pathfinder with minimal confusion. An hour’s worth of reading a couple good build guides will give you a good idea where the differences lie and why certain choices are commonly made (Point-Blank/Precise Shot feats for instance). If you don’t already know DnD and you’re coming from something like Pillars of Eternity or Divinity Original Sin, you might have a little bit of a rough landing. But that’s what a wiki is for, or just straight up following a build guide if you’re timid.
Pathfinder also has fairly detailed difficulty settings panel, you can tailor the difficulty to your liking. Story mode difficulty and auto level up presets makes the game beatable for even your grandma, so you can ease into the system.
There are also some great guides out there for different builds for both companions and main character.
Wrath of the Righteous is hands down a better game than Baldur’s Gate 3 in every observable metric except for graphics and I will gladly die on this hill.
Much as I love WOTR, hard disagree there. BG 3 is much better in terms of reactivity and consequences, polish, and all of its mechanics work properly. Meanwhile WOTR has the stumps that are 50% of its mythic paths, the not particularly well received crusade mode, and one of the worst dungeons I can remember in rpg history (I will freely admit that this last point is not as objective as the rest of my argument, but I know I am far from alone with this opinion).
Sulphur Nimbus: Hel’s Elixir, a $6 (currently) game on itch.io. It started from the idea of an MLP fangame, but early in development evolved into an original setting.
This is a 3D physics platformer adventure with an unhindered flying character. Your hippogriff, Sulphur Nimbus, is an aerial photographer aboard a cargo ship, which is passing a mysterious atoll on the way to their destination. The crew want you to get pictures of the island, which has a castle that’s been abandoned for decades. Unfortunately, after flying over there, a nasty storm builds up and you get zapped by lightning. After a flashback tutorial on how to fly, you wake up on the island shores, your wing is injured, and you have to run to safety, finding out this place is dangerous… so dangerous a resident dogicorn (like a hippogriff, but it’s half dog and half unicorn instead of half bird half pony) has to rescue you when a lovecraftian horror tries to take you down into presumably Hel. Waking up in a castle room, your wing is healed, and you can fly again.
Now the game begins. Clear the boss monsters and rout them out of this island, area by area. Break the curse that binds you to this island. Find out what happened here.
What’s unique about Sulphur Nimbus is the movement. Running, fighting, and jumping has physics to it, allowing for some parkour stuff to be possible, like running up steep inclines and wall jumping. Flight is realistic. There are no arbitrary limitations, other than a regenerating “flap” stamina. If you can get enough speed to take off, and if there’s enough room to maneuver, you can fly. Level designs include lots of caves and enclosed spaces, but also lots of open areas, so being able to fly is a requirement to get through it, while also a challenge. While the game is designed for kb and mouse controls, honestly, a gamepad works very well with this game and is preferred. It also is cross platform, as it is made in java, and includes Windows, Mac, and Linux. The source code is on sourceforge and allows you to build the whole game yourself if you are so inclined.
There’s no other platforming adventure game that attempts this, and I have tried every “become birb” game out there. They all are either bird simulators or use flight as a fast travel, but not as a core gameplay mechanic like this.
Maize, a point and click/walking simulator/puzzle game about a secret military project to create sentient corn. Quite possibly the silliest game I’ve ever played.
Voices of the Void a free (likely while it's in pre-alpha) light simulational game about receiving outer space signals and recording them to sell. You use the currency to clean up, upgrade, and decorate your small facility while moving around the Swiss forest valley you're in to repair and upkeep the satellite dishes that make the operation function.
It sounds very purely simulational, but there are a lot of secrets and interesting signals that are more than signals. It's also an Unreal engine game, but features a lot of Source engine love, for example the art style is reminiscent of Half-Life 1, all of the sound effects are EXTREMELY Source game nostalgic, and there's crouch jumping.
Avorion - In which you command and build a spaceship designed by yourself (or others on the internet). Soon you have AIs you command and space stations you own. The game allows you to lean as much or as little as you want into the fleet command and economy aspects. If you want, you can just pilot one big-ass ship and do it all alone.
I had a good amount of fun with this game, it's a shame I have to downvote it. It was a little difficult to get into at first, but I stuck with it and had a lot of fun. I chose to develop a big-ass ship like you speak of and eventually became a lumpy Death Star knockoff.
Cyberpunk scratched that itch for me to a surprising degree. It’s not a perfect match, but it felt closer to the original than the sequels did somehow.
Hot take: Nintendo Switch Joycons. They’re a nice and clever concept but in reality they’re bad.
Too small even for casual games. The Wiimote was much better at it.
Very expensive at 80 € per set. Yes, you get two of them but in most games outside of Mario Kart you also need both. And even then they’re fine at best.
4 out of 4 of my controllers got stick drift. Nintendo had to be sued into repairing them.
It’s a conventional GameSir controller that has a Switch mode among others. The split design of the Joycons rarely plays out, most of the time it makes the controllers unnecessarily complex and thus expensive IMHO.
You mean both hands have to grip one controller opposed to having a Joycon in each hand? That split-design can be an advantage, but IMHO doesn’t cancel out the shortcomings of the Joycons. I find them still too small and not grippy at all.
Single joycon is barely usable, but the Wiimote was terrible for sideways holding.
Its shape was clearly never intended for it, and the d-pad was absolutely awful, one of the worst I’ve used.
The d-pad worked as buttons (which was how most games used it, in vertical mode), but for movement it was very stiff and almost impossible to get diagonals. For a console that featured virtual console heavily and needed a lot of classic controls, that was very bad design.
I hate the Joycons so much. The clicky buttons are terrible, the split dpad sucks for games that use it for movement, the sticks aren’t great either for precision (ignoring the drift issues), and I find them painful to hold.
I know people who like them exist given the sales. But not only do I not play or like sports games - no one that plays games in my social circle does either.
It’s like the Venn diagram for people who play RPGs and those who play sports games is just two circles.
I do find it kind of odd that some people only play the latest sports games and nothing else. Also NFL Blitz on the Dreamcast is one of the best games and I’ve never watch a game irl.
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