Because the gunplay is really good. I never had a shred of interest in the story.
I don’t still play because the level and enemy design tanked when they went into expansion treadmill mode, but “a path forward” was never something I cared even a little bit about. “The path forward” is what killed my fun.
The gunplay is SO good. There’s just something about the way it feels that makes it so distinct from any other shooter.
I haven’t touched Destiny in two years. And every shooter I played (first person and the gears of war third person), nothing has yet scratched my Destiny 2 itch.
I could pop cabal heads with [insert high impact scout, bonus if firefly] for days. Hell, I pretty much did on D1. Then D2, in addition to all the other bad design stuff to satisfy live service, also decided they wanted to try to dictate your gun choice in certain game modes with all the bullshit seasonal modifiers on untouchable enemies without specific perks.
All I want to do is run strikes on the basic races by myself. But they can’t milk me for money like that.
Generally shorthand for animation, sound, and somewhat game balance. As for what’s good about it I couldn’t tell you because I came into the game jaded. IMO the visual design is nothing standout and the aim assist on mouse aim makes the entire experience sleep inducing.
Confirmed. The gunplay is amazing. I haven’t played for a year or two but I would jump back in today if The Final Shape included all the catch-up/prior DLC packs.
I like the DualSense controller. Yes, it’s “for playstation” but all controllers work on PC nowadays. Especially on Linux, the driver for PS controllers is in the kernel, and they can work both wired and via Bluetooth.
It even supports using the special features of the DualSense in some games, like the adaptive triggers when playing Rift Apart or Forbidden West.
And the touchpad works as a mouse, which is handy.
I had a Dualsense and I loved it. it served me well until it met its end to a can of Soda and my Cat. Now I use my Childhood DualShock 3 to game. It has no where near as many QoL features as its younger brother (like the touchpad). But it’s so fucking durable.
Why does this billion dollar company not do exaxtly what I expect them to😡 They made great games because those are the ones I like and now they make shitty games because I dont like them.
I percieve them as different to your run of the mill EA or Ubisoft, so I expect more from them. That’s on me I guess. I’m not angry though, just disappointed.
Artifact has good scores from critics, as does CS2, nothing from Zombies. Not sure one game from 20 years ago says much when it’s just 1.6 with bots. The game isn’t bad, people just expected more than that.
Because, as I said, it is the same game with bots on top. The game isn’t suddenly bad because of that, so look at reviews of 1.6 instead of cherry picking convenient information. Artifact was review bombed, which I also mentioned.
Again (third time), it was review bombed. Steam reviews, if you actually look at them, are generally positive, except for people who “played” it for 0.1 - 0.3 hours, or over 100 and jokingly clicked to not recommend. CS was 1.6, and thus obviously not a bad game.
I kind of quit Overwatch after they sucked the soul out of it and called it a sequel. It’s not entirely a replacement, but as a fun shooter to play with friends/ family, I’ve mostly moved to playing Deep Rock Galactic. In some ways it scratches the itch: various classes/ roles, weapons, abilities, cooperation and teamwork to accomplish objectives, clicking heads and making things die, and purely cosmetic skins. It doesn’t quite have the satisfaction of a good back and forth grudge match (on account of being a PvE game), but the community is super chill, the game design about as far from predatory as you can get (while there are a handful of exclusive fomo items, it’s mostly just annual anniversary hats, or gifts to commemorate steam award nominations and such, there’s no collection interface to mock you or rub it in for not having them), and the devs are just all around great. Bonus points for being able to spin up or join missions pretty much whenever.
Same, friends and me went to DRG instead. While of course it gets rote after a whole the procedural generation helps, and it’s the chill background game to play while voice chatting that Overwatch 1 was in its early days before its balance shifted to high-end competition.
It doesn’t quite have the satisfaction of a good back and forth grudge match (on account of being a PvE game),
Heh… It’s not designed for it, but I’ve had some pretty grudge-like experiences joining public games, as some teammates turned out to be hostile.
To be clear, I don’t recommend that experience. It’s not fun to be antagonized with deliberate friendly fire throughout a mission, bullied by a group when you eventually shoot back, and left for dead when the ship leaves. (It’s easily avoidable by playing with friends, of course.)
You can always refund it. Even if you’ve gone over the 2 hours for an auto-accept refund, if you explain the issues in the ticket Steam will always accept it in my experience.
Even got a refund for a game after 20 hours of game time due to them adding aggressive client-side anti-cheat.
The reason why everyone doesn’t do it is because it requires significant capital to be able to support a dev team through production for a number of years.
Not to mention they will still have to deal with publishers potentially fucking them over, as shown with the Helldivers 2 PSN fiasco.
Exactly. In fact, there are so many indie Devs that it’s nigh-impossible to break through the massive numbers of them. Occasionally there are breakthroughs like Stardew Valley, Hades, Vampires, etc.
On the other hand, you partner with a company like Microsoft or Sony and you’re basically guaranteed success. They put up all the capital to make sure you make it to release (albeit probably a rushed, half-baked one that you just fix later because why not). Even if your game blows ass and is completely broken, full of DRM, microtransactions and ads, gamers still buy that shit up.
When Google fired all of those staffers last year there was a report that there was a huge bump in startups being formed. That’s where actual innovation happens, not at large companies but the small startups. I see that happening now too. They’ll eventually get bought up, but the cycle will repeat.
Just be careful not to idealize the past as some golden age of gaming. During the SNES era, worthwhile titles were few and far between on top of spotty regional availability on account of profitability (supposedly). The bar to entry for gamedevs was huge: the dev tools were obtuse and the distribution methods were shit and centralized (toy stores, computer stores, magazines). The offer was also ridiculously sanitized, at least on consoles.
It’s great that we can still enjoy the good games of the past, but I absolutely love what indies come up with nowadays. There are so many and they’re so creative! ❤️ Some talented big studio devs even manage to release something nice once in a while despite the organizational structure they work in. I never want to go back to gaming in the 90’s. Furthermore, I’m of the opinion that there are many past titles being hailed as classics solely based on some unconscious nostalgia for youth (I’m looking at you GOG).
Its just like with idealizing music eras. People remember the stand outs and forget the bad and mediocre stuff so it seems like everything was better in whatever time.
Weird take, imo. Mobile games are probably the best they’ve ever been. They were traditionally a place for rampant p2w garbage gacha machines, and while those are still there, the platform has actual decent games nowadays. Real PC games are being ported to mobile and the platform is being taken seriously. Even in the world of micro transactions and gacha games, there are far more that are actually decent as games then there ever has been.
I’ve been playing Monster Hunter Now and I’ve been really impressed with it. The entirety of the Riot games are good games with reasonable microtransactions. Vampire Survivors, my go-to “I am offline” game, is the exact same game on mobile as PC, save the fact that it’s free and you have a choice to watch ads for marginal farming speedups (which can be disabled if you buy literally any of their ~$1.50 DLC expansions, which are hilariously large considering their price). Fucking Warframe is coming to/already on (?) mobile.
I genuinely can’t say mobile games have ever been in a better place than today, despite the existence of the shovelware P2W games that continue to roll out.
I’ll side with OP from a slightly different perspective here, because you’re not wrong but neither is OP. First and foremost I think the word missing here is innovation – mobile games in their very initial start were exactly what you are describing, but mobile games that OP are talking about took some time to find freedom to innovate. The very first mobile games, almost all of them, were PC ports. Solitare, poker, mahjong, snake, tetris… These were all games that had existed for years and were just now put into a 160x128 res screen and played with a circular slider (first iPod), or whatever the specs of the Blackberry was back then. Few unique games were created for these devices.
By late 2009 the iPod Touch 3g had released. It was this and the following few years where OP is talking about, where not only were old games like Spy Hunter being remade, and funnily enough, I’m pretty sure Rockstar also released a few GTA’s on this device. But there were also entirely new games like Doodle Jump, Canabalt, and to a lesser extent Pocket God. (Well, relatively new and unique, at least.) These of course paved the way for Temple Run and honestly I had so many amazing mobile games back then that remembering them all would be a trip down memory lane far too long for today.
Anyway, my point and I’m assuming OP’s point is that it’s harder to find truly unique and “new” experiences in the mobile game world. The idea of Talking Tom when he first came out was something truly unlike anything else available. Not that it was particularly good, or that being unique makes it good, but rather there were more games willing to take a risk on being different.
And yes, of course back then there were plenty of shovelware games trying to pine off another apps success. I think it’s simply a difference of mindset, for the good games that are available today generally seem to follow the same principles – a good game comes first, and if you accomplish that the expenses pay themselves. For your examples, the only games that didn’t already exist were semi-MH Now (Pokemon Go/Ingress, but I agree they are unique and fun) and the Riot mobile games. I agree that the other games you mentioned are good as well, I’d even include the fact that there are other full PC/console games like Monster Hunter Stories 1 and 2, Final Fantasy, and plenty of others.
But none of these were made specifically with the attributes of mobile gaming in mind. Where are the disjointed IRL vs. on screen games like Panoptic! There’s so much potential for mobile phone games of really wild and unique stuff, but it’s easier to make money by iterating and porting existing things to the platform.
The Bluey run memed so hard. After the run, people were shouting “hooray!” after every significant event in other games, e.g. when collecting shines in Super Mario Sunshine.
The Super Mario Sunshine and Mario Kart 64 runs both had great commentary.
Super Mario 64 Drum% was great. CZR did a 16 star run with a drum kit.
This was my first time seeing Cocoon, and my mind was blown. Orb!
The Super Metroid TAS was awesome.
The Metroid Dread race was nail biting. 2s difference over a 1h50m race.
Go! Go! Hamster Chef. No spoilers. You should watch it.
Cyberpunk 2077 is the poster child for this. That game was easily 7/10 even when it came out as a buggy mess. Now that it’s had a few years of polish, it’s much better than 7/10.
But the public perception was bad mostly because of unmet expectations. I don’t know if I’d call them “unreasonable” a they were set by the devs themselves, but either way, the game was and is much better than a lot of people think.
Well you’re mostly right in your original post, game was a solid 7/10 on release, but the studio just did so much disservice to themselves by hyping it up for nearly a decade before release, and especially hyping a bunch of stuff that never made it into the final product, and on top of all that breaking their own promise to not release until it’s finished.
The whole reason people liked The Witcher 3 was people were convinced the multiple delays to release “made it a better game.” It was at that moment that CDPR built the image that they won’t release a game “until it’s done.” They now had their own studio history working against them when they made the promise of “It’s finished when it’s finished” and people were expecting that. People loved that CDPR was so dedicated to the gamers that they wouldn’t let pesky things like money-men push a game out too early when it’s half-baked. Oops, they did exactly that with their next game, which absolutely shot all that goodwill from the players right through the heart, especially after already waiting nearly a decade for it.
In the end, are the expectations really unreasonable if the studio themselves were the people who built the hype those expectations were based on?
I get it. I said I didn’t think the expectations were unreasonable.
I think you’re pretty much proving my point, though, that the game is unfairly maligned due to unmet expectations. The game they released, while buggy, was fun. You’re pissed off about a lot of things that aren’t how fun the game is to play.
I’m not really pissed off, I’m just listing off things that were unmet based on the studios own desires and their own promotional materials leading up to release.
There’s still videos out there from when they were hyping wall-running and the Ghostrunner class. *shrugs
I really don’t think it’s unfairly maligned when those expectations were set by the studios themselves.
I mean… sandy, optic camo/cool, blades? For some odd reason it took Edgerunners for people to give the sandy an honest spin, possibly due to “aw shucks doesn’t work with guns and I can’t hack”.
The problem is that they advertise it a certain way and sell preorders, and then the game doesn’t live up to what they advertised. Worse, they didn’t allow anyone to review the console versions which were so unplayable that Sony removed it from the store. It would have been fine if people knew exactly what they were paying for, but they were misled.
Sure, it was unmet expectations but even if the expectation was just 'it works", they still didn’t meet it. And that’s kind of the bare minimum to even be legal when you’re charging money for it. I disagree that the console versions were 7/10 on release - more like 1/10.
I don’t know what to tell you, I played it on Xbox just fine. Played the whole game through from start to finish and had fun. I believe the issue was with last gen consoles specifically.
And again, I think a lot of the criticism was reasonable. But my point is that the game itself was and is fun, but suffers because of the bad reputation it got at launch thanks to some ill-advised (intentional understatement alert!) decisions by CDPR.
Yes, the issue was with last gen consoles. I don’t think that matters to the point I am making, nor that it worked for you personally on your setup. It worked okay for me too, but I was on a high-end PC.
Seemed to me you called the console version unplayable. You said they didn’t work. I was just correcting that statement for anyone who wasn’t aware that your were bending the truth to make a point.
Sony literally pulled the game from the PlayStation Store because of the low quality. At that point it’s not just a subjective opinion but fact, so I resent the claim that I’m bending the truth.
I don’t see people mention Cross Codes often and no one has mentioned here yet so I think it’s “lesser known”.
It’s one of the games I got. I’m 20 hours in and the game is amazing so far.
The game can be pretty challenging sometimes so I’m not sure if it’s for everyone. I’d describe the game as a MMORPG but without the MMO. It has a lot less grinding than a MMO and a lot more puzzles.
I saw some people compare it to Zelda but I feel like that’s only accurate for some aspects.
Cross code won awards and was featured several times on Linus Tech tips. IDK how lesser known it could be then. It did come out a while ago. I agree that the game is good, but it is one of the few games I quit because of performance issues.
They don’t do gaming reviews, but Crosscode was always that game Linus tested on those handheld consoles up until and including the Steam Deck. I remember him playing it to test latency and stuff on displays and stuff.
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