Well…except the next installations of Fallout and Elder Scrolls. Let’s be honest, that’s what Microsoft were really buying, and neither are anywhere near a release.
Judging by how Starfield turned out, will missing either of those games (which are almost certainly going to be using the same incredibly outdated engine) be much of a loss?
For those of us that miss the lore and story/atmosphere of this games, absolutely.
Don’t get me wrong, Starfield has made me truly worried about the next installment, and I truly believe that milking Skyrim has ultimately left Bethesda in a position where open world gaming just leapfrogged them. The likes of TOTK and Elden Ring have absolutely shattered what they can show to deliver in a supposedly improved generation.
All I can hope is that Bethesda really look at the feedback they received, and take the time to make the necessary changes to their engine. That alone might be enough to at least give a retro feel to the games. I’ll still eagerly await them, but my hopes for them being GOTY are long gone.
The engine isn’t why Starfield sucks. Sure, the constant loading isn’t great but it isn’t the reason there’s nothing fun or interesting to do. It’s also a solvable issue, but they haven’t made the investments they need in the engine.
Starfield is just soulless. The characters are boring, the stories aren’t interesting and don’t let the player choose fun options. The universe is static and nothing matters. There’s just no reason to be involved in the world, so there’s no reason to want to be in it.
They could fix this. I’d say the way they need to go to do so is to stop targeting literally every player. They need to figure out who they’re making the game for and target them. I’m a big sci-fi fan, and I like older Bethesda games. I should have been an easy target for Starfield, but I hated it, not because of the engine but because the stories, characters, and universe weren’t engaging. The engine is an easy target to complain about, but it isn’t what’s holding them back. Indie games can do more with worse engines.
The engine really isn’t suited for the kind of game Starfield wants to be, so it really works against it. But you’re right, even if it were a new shiny engine with the same writing and characters, it would still suck. Likewise, if it had the same creaky engine but actual good stories and characters the constant loading would be easier to overlook. It just has the worst of both worlds.
Bethesda’s game design is just too old. Playing Starfield felt like playing an RPG from a decade ago. Bethesda just got complacent from back when they were one of the only companies that could seriously do an open-world RPG, now we have CD Projekt-Red and FromSoftware with wildly different, significantly more innovative gameplay experiences. Hell, even other AAA devs like Capcom have been able to outperform in the open world space, Dragon’s Dogma 2 was a ton of fun.
No, sadly I think the design is too new. Morrowind was 22 years ago. It is the direction I’d like to see them go again. A complex world that feels lived in, and actually gives players options to play how they want and figure things out for themselves. The newer boring “design for everyone” approach sucks. There’s no soul and nothing interesting.
FromSoft is somewhat notoriously old-school. Their game design has directly evolved from their older games. Look at King’s Field and then look at Dark Souls. There’s so much similarity. Yeah, ER is more cleaned up with a fuck-ton more money and technology available, but it’s essentially the same design.
Obviously Balder’s Gate 3 is just an evolution of classic RPG design, and it did very well. I’d argue CDPR also has taken classic RPG inspiration more than modern ones. A modern RPG design wouldn’t do half the stuff Cyberpunk did, because it’s not targeting everyone (and no one).
Modern AAA design doesn’t pick a target. Their target is everyone and everything, so they do nothing well. Classic design is knowing who your game is for and making a game for them and not anyone else. Bethesda is doing the former.
Holy fuck gamers really do have the worst memories. Cyberpunk is still a shit game after 4 fucking years of patches. CDPR has like 5 titles and one of them is pretty good. FromSoftware has a legacy of bangers a mile long. These 2 companies aren’t even in the same wheelhouse.
Cyberpunk is very much not a shit game, it’s a pretty good RPG with a great variety of character builds and fantastic writing. The devs did an absurd amount of work in order to make the gameplay significantly more fun. I’d also make the argument that Witcher 2 is a really good game, and is what popularized the series enough for Witcher 3 to be such a colossally known hit. The two companies make very different RPGs to one another, for sure, but you’re just being a contrarian if you think the pedigree of the two companies is vastly different.
but you’re just being a contrarian if you think the pedigree of the two companies is vastly different.
Even if we ignore all the other bootlicking and fanboying in the above comment, this statement alone is completely absurd. FromSoftware has developed over 50 games and CDPR has…4? Maybe 10 if you count mobile trash? By the year 2000 FromSoftware had released more successful games than CDPR has released total, good or bad, to date.
It’s no wonder that cyberpunk is such a piece of garbage really when you realize every other game CDPR ever developed has “the witcher” somewhere in the title.
Sure, but, technically, without Gacha games I would t have discovered my ex wife sexting another dude. Because she was attempting to hide the money she spent in credit cards I didn’t have access to, then wanted me to pay.
Which led me to digging around, discovering the unaltered statement, then she got drunk and the phone was open in her hand playing some stupid virtual bingo and a snap popped up and wouldnt you know it
Personally, I really liked Papers, Please. You play as a customs agent checking people’s paperwork as they seek entry into your country. The idea of the game is very simple but it’s surprisingly good at telling a story and putting you in situations that are morally difficult.
The 2d platforming world and top-down world have smashed together. You control one hero from each dimension, who share the same space in the levels. You switch between platformer and top-down modes and must get both characters to the goal. The boss levels are hard but very cool, combining action and puzzles.
Also features local 2-player co-op and a generous assist mode.
Abiotic Factor has been really fun for my buddy and me. Especially with the new update that came out last week. It’s a Half Life themed survival game.
Others that get my vote:
Valheim - Norse mythology themed survival game with Playstationesque graphics
Phasmophobia - THE ghost hunting game(see also Ghost Exile, Ghost Exorcism Inc., Forewarned)
Left 4 Dead - the original Zombie FPS series (see also Back 4 Blood, it’s kinda alright) PILLS HERE!
Risk of Rain - Pretty tough shooter series
Stardew Valley - A modern Harvest Moon, farming/life sim
Don’t Starve Together - If you played Stardew valley in hell, but everyone’s name started with a W
Factorio/Satisfactory - Resource harvesting and logistics sims. One’s isometric, ones first person, one has zerg rushes
Grounded - Honey I Shrunk The Kids: the survival game
Deep Rock Galactic - Left 4 Dead for Dwarves. ROCK AND STONE!!!
Overcooked - cooking and serving game, lots of communication required
Portal 2 - First person puzzle game, also lots of communication required
Barotrauma - Submarine sim on Europa, requires marriage levels of communication
Binding of Isaac - Roguelike shooter that’s sort of Zelda inspired, multiplayer was a little janky last time I tried it, but that was a while ago
The Forest - Excellent horror survival series
Starbound - Terraria in space
Trine series - A modern Lost Vikings, side scrolling puzzles and platforming
Subnautica 2 - A beautiful and terrifying diving/exploration game, original game has a coop mod 8 years in development, but it’s been very buggy
Diablo - First and second games are still very solid experiences and there are some excellent mods out for both
Escape Simulator - Literally an escape room simulator. Has workshop support on steam for even more puzzles.
Green Hell - The Forest, but in the jungle, much more focus on the reality of being stranded in a place where just about everything is likely to kill you.
No Man’s Sky - Space/planetary exploration sim
Dead Island - another zombie FPS
Dying Light - a zombie game with parkour
20XX/30XX - Megaman X styled platformers with roguelite elements
GTFO - Extremely hard, stealth based, alien FPS
Most “Souls” games - Very fun coop summoning, if you don’t mind the sometimes extreme difficulty
Goat Simulator series - Goofy exploration games
Magicka series - Isometric action adventure games where you combine different elements to cast spells
Barony - a true roguelike FPS RPG, voxel based, very hard
Void Crew - Space sim, mission based, sort of Egyptian mythos themed, meant for up to 4 players but definitely possible with just 2
Human Fall Flat - Puzzle/exploration game
Half Dead series - Cube: the game
Orcs Must Die series - Tower defense
Dungeon Defenders series - also tower defense, but with class based
Secret of Mana - One of the first action JRPGS, the remake has drop in coop just like the original, but I believe it’s couch coop, so if you’re not right next to each other, you’ll need something like Parsec to play it
Have a ton more, but those are the ones I can recall having the most fun. Others have probably listed a bunch of them and I probably missed a few good ones, but hopefully a few of them are new.
You could always tinker with some emulators for some retro coop games!
The overcooked series is definitely fun and always comes up cheap on sales for like 3 bucks. It’s definitely one to add to any co-op rotation because it’s easy to learn but hard to execute so you’ll always be going back to get those extra stars you missed.
Note about Overcooked is that the new version that combines 1 & 2 (Overcooked All You Can Eat) seems to have major issues with online multiplayer that never got fixed. You’re better off just buying Overcooked 2.
I’m so nostalgia-driven, I can’t bring myself to play most MMOs because I feel like they’ll die and I’ll losev access to that “world”. If I knew that I could run a private server once the official ones shut down, it would completely change my outlook.
At the very least, a save game editor wouldn’t be too hard to create when running your own server.
Though that got me thinking if there’s some kind of GDPR shenanigans one could already utilize to get all your account data. I kind of doubt it, but it would be hilarious.
GDPR protects user data, not virtual data associated with an avatar you control. We might get there someday, but as of now, you’d only be able to request copies of stuff directly associated with yourself.
It’s funny because a lot of the things that bug you are immersion features that gamers of 20 years ago would be blown away by, regardless of how badly they were implemented. Goes to show how spoiled we are for immersive games these days. But interestingly, it sounds like RDR2 was less immersive for you because of those additional immersion features, because it always had little hitches that completely shattered your immersion. I guess realism has an uncanny valley in games - a game with more simulated elements also needs a higher degree of polish on those elements, as the errors become more obvious the closer you get to reality.
The game isn’t immersive to me because watching one button perform a 20 second interaction just isn’t engaging. Which to me is the forefront of the difference between “immersion” and “engagement”.
That on top of all the little frustrations that OP mentioned. Hitching your horse is a huge pain and takes you out of the moment every time, for example.
Tbh, the entirety of RDR2 feels like that to me. It’s been critically acclaimed as the most immersive game ever, but it just is so far from actually being that for me because of all of these little things that actively take away from it.
Overall, it’s fine. It’s not really a great game IMO, but a prolonged interactive story. The gameplay aspects are sporadic and mostly require you to mash the A button to keep your horse on the trail, else you don’t move along it. With the advertising and gamers both claiming it to be an immersive game, things like these really detract. I went in expecting a cinematic experience and came out of it with the saddest GTA jank and repetitive grinding for time sensitive unlocks.
Add in the senseless unskippable animal skinning and it just results in a good 70% of the game being unenjoyable for me. I played through the story, which was mostly pretty good, and the rest of the game was waiting to get to a destination to do one thing or see one event, then waiting til I got to the next destination. The gunplay is alright, the spontaneous events are funny, sometimes a little shallow but mostly are good. but man… I was disappointed with the game, as a game.
Of course, this is all my personal preference too. I just don’t find watching multiple extended cutscenes and multiple sub-scenes every few interactions. I don’t blame it all on these sorts of things, but I have a really hard time agreeing that it deserves the acclaim it’s gotten when these are pretty significant shortcomings for a game, specifically advertised to be immersive.
Sometimes you want to ride around on a horse and take on the sights, and it sure does to a good job at that. There’s some good tools and gunplay which are pretty fun to play with and… Well, that’s about where the fun ends.
Proton is steam’s compatibility tool, these “medals” basically indicate how well a game works through it. Platnium and gold mean work without troubleshooting. Silver means a little tinkering with settings. Bronze means it can work with effort, and borked means it just doesn’t work.
So, 84% working with 0 effort, and 11% working with light tinkering.
The post is kind of incomprehensible if you’re not already familiar with proton and the troubleshooting website proton DB.
i mean, basically everything works so long as it doesn’t use certain anti cheat systems. But knowing what they play would have been more useful for the sake of discussion.
yah, it’s a bummer, but most people who play games on PC aren’t playing such tittles. The current online player count for league is about 2.5 million as supposed to the total steam active player count of 25 million. A lot of people play league, but, like, it’s hardly a problem that everyone has.
I dunno, I haven’t been able to get Subnautica to work for some reason. It’s likely due to the games own spaghetti code barely being functional on the intended OS’s as is…
If they go off to form their own studio, they probably have to take out a business loan to pay themselves for the time being. Interest rates are high right now, and rent and food are both expensive. It’s a huge gamble to make a game and put it out on the assumption you’ll be able to pay back 6%+ interest on whatever you took out. Games are not a reliable money maker. Especially from new studios.
Even if you get some sort of deal with a publisher to fund your first endeavor, there will still be strings attached to that, and publishers are pretty tight with the purse strings right now.
Which means really the only viable option, assuming you’re not already independently wealthy, is that you have to work another job to work on the game in the meantime, which means it will take even longer to come out.
the only viable option, assuming you’re not already independently wealthy, is that you have to work another job to work on the game in the meantime, which means it will take even longer to come out.
So many Indie developers are making the mistake of thinking they’ll be the next [insert currently successful one-man dev here] and banking their careers and life savings on it. 99.999% of them are not.
Ain’t no way a brand new game studio is getting a loan at 6%. If they can even get a business loan at all (good luck!), it would be at a much higher interest rate due to the risk, and/or require assets to be held in collateral (only an option if you’re already wealthy to begin with…)
The themes, camera angle, and method of delivering rewards (loot) don’t really affect something being an action RPG or not. The focus on action over storytelling does.
I haven’t played Morrowind, but I hear that you can connect to an enemy with a hit, and then a die roll determines whether that actually happens. It seems to me that while such a feature would be good for making a character with their own unique strengths, it would be damaging to the immersion required to inhabit that character. Thus, immersion building features that make the character do what the player does, can easily be considered roleplaying features.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a roguelike, well suited to the touch interface and small screen. Offline. Constantly expanded. Free, open source, and on F-Droid.
Developer also appears to have a presence on the Threadiverse, think he came over when Reddit went to hell. Lemme find the community.
Unciv is a reimplementation of Civilization V for Android. Obviously, less-elaborate graphics, but same gameplay. Free, open-source, available on F-Droid.
Catacalysm: Dark Days Ahead is an open-world roguelike. The good news is that it is deep, has ridiculous amounts of functionality. Very free-form – you can build camps with NPCs, mutate your character, acquire bionic implants, construct buildings and vehicles, etc. Some extensive mods to do things like add fantasy content. The bad news is that it also has a very steep learning curve – think Dwarf Fortress, say. The UI was also designed for a PC, and while the Android port dev did a reasonable job of adapting it for a touchscreen, it’s still awkward compared to a keyboard – not like Shattered Pixel Dungeon. If you’re willing to carry a keyboard – you say that you’re okay with a controller, so I assume that you’re okay lugging some kind of gear bag – then it becomes a very good option. There are some folding keyboards aimed at phone use that can be pretty small, certainly smaller than a game controller, if you don’t want a more-traditional keyboard. CPU-intensive, though – in heavily-monster-infested areas, it can load down a PC, and it’s probably less-gentle on less-powerful Android devices. Offline. Free, open-source, but nobody has packaged it for F-Droid.
Download links for both the stable and experimental builds here:
There’s an essentially-inactive community on the Threadiverse at !cataclysmdda
There is a whole genre of older text-based interactive fiction games that are free and offline for simple virtual machines; the major ones here are glulx, TADS, and Inform/z5. Android has such virtual machine ports; it looks like https://f-droid.org/packages/io.davidar.fabularium/ in F-Droid can run them. These involve a lot of typing, as they were designed for the PC, and IMHO are not well-suited to a virtual keyboard, but if you’re willing to take a physical keyboard, they can be pretty good. You’ll need to learn the (English-like) syntax that the game engines understand. I personally enjoyed https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=z5xgyw0jbt9r3ah1 and https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1gn1tjqmjt7. Two sites that have large collections of free games made by volunteers for download:
I’ll be honest, though – when I first got an Android device, I was pretty disappointed with the game situation. This is greatly-exacerbated by the fact that I’m not willing to get a Google account and let Google more-readily monitor me, which rules out most commercial games…but I wasn’t blown away by even commercial game availability in the Google Play Store, and the open-source situation is kind of sparse compared to Linux, what I’m normally on. Linux is IMHO generally a preferable gaming platform, unless one specifically wants to do touch-based games (which can be important).
I was also kind of disappointed by the lack of choose-your-own-adventure/gamebook-style games on Android. These would avoid the typing in interactive fiction by just having a few choices to select from, which I thought would be a good fit for a touchscreen. There’s the large collection of text-based mostly-commercial games at Choice of Games – you can get their client on itch.io; Android has an itch.io package manager on F-Droid in the form of Mitch that can download it. Heh, though that’s downloading a package manager with a package manager to get a package manager. If I had to recommend a few, I’d try Tin Star, maybe Choice of Robots, and the Heroes trilogy; those are commercial, though they have a few free games, and IIRC their client keeps a few normally-commercial games for temporary free play.
While I like the Choice of Games writing, I find that a lot of the gameplay in the games fall flat, more-or-less trying to optimize for playing one character “type” or another; I feel like they’re written by novel authors and could benefit a lot from more game elements, and that new authors kind of copied the existing style.
There’s a once-commercial series of gamebooks, Lone Wolf, which I can’t really call a fantastic example of a gamebook and doesn’t have the most-amazing artwork, but which was a real 1980s/1990s series whose author said “go ahead and freely distribute them”, so various open-source and commercial projects have gone and done up clients to play the books, do stuff like the dice-rolling and hit-point tracking and so forth. I haven’t used Android clients, but they exist. One such project.
I still don’t have an open-source solitaire implementation that I’m blown away by, which seems like another surprising limitation. My guess is that you can probably find something non-open-source – though probably spyware – on the Google Play Store. PySolFC is on F-Droid. It…works, and it gets me my Eight Off fix (a particular solitaire game that I like but isn’t as widely-played as Klondike or Freecell) but it was really designed for desktop computer, and the Android adaptation could be better, IMHO. Small cards and such.
There’s a choose-your-own-adventure engine called Twine; games written in various languages – the most sophisticated such language is SugarCube – can be converted to Web-based games. That seems like it’d be ideal for Android, and the games are playable on Android, but authors don’t always create games that work well on the small screens of many Android devices. I don’t know of a single Twine-oriented game archive in the sense that the Interactive Fiction archive and the Interactive Fiction Database serve for interactive fiction games. However, many people who have made Twine games seem to distribute them in packaged form on itch.io. There doesn’t seem to be much of an open-source culture around these, unfortunately, so I don’t see people doing a lot by creating patches and such. I rarely play these on Android, mostly use the PC. Here’s a list of Twine games on itch.io packaged for Android:
There’s also a pretty extensive number of adult games for this platform, if that’s your cup of tea.
There are emulators for various old game systems for Android. I’ve used Retroarch on Linux, and it looks like they also have an Android build on F-Droid. I’ve never spent time using these on Android, because I just always would prefer to play on a desktop platform, but I’d imagine that if what you have is an Android device and using that is a constraint, they’re probably fine. That might be the more action-oriented sort of game you’re looking for, given that you’re talking about a controller. Not much by way of legitimately-free stuff there, though obviously piracy of old console games is widespread, and some people – such as myself – will sometimes just buy the game on another platform and conscience assuaged, go pirate it on the platform that we want to play it on. I think my favorite emulated games were probably the most-popular 2D ones on the Super Nintendo, stuff like Super Metroid or and Legend of Zelda 3. Oh, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the PS1. I imagine that a current Android device would have no trouble with any of those, if you’ve a controller.
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is a traditional roguelike that has a build for Android on F-Droid. This, again, is designed for a PC and is gonna be better-played with a keyboard. It’s not beautiful, nor as well-suited to the Android platform as the designed-for-the-platform Shattered Pixel Dungeon. But it has a game that is famous for being refined, with the developer constantly going back and cutting out cruft and grind/busywork, resulting in a very polished game from a gameplay sense. The author, Linley Henzel, has some famous quote about how any action that the player has to make in a game should be an interesting decision, and if it isn’t, it should be removed from the game.
If you really want a timesink and have a keyboard and you don’t mind online play except insofar as you don’t want some commercial company trying to data-mine your activity, there are a bunch of MUDs out there; these are run by volunteers who wanted to create and run their own worlds, and they’re always looking for more players. These are text-based, usually-but-not-always fantasy games. It looks like there are Android clients. I can’t specifically recommend any of the clients, as I haven’t tried them. Many combat-oriented MUDs allow one to configure a character to essentially fight on its own, so if your concern is being constrained to needing to be glued to a screen in a multi-user world, it does provide some ability to get up and leave.
I’m going to place the big caveat there that I haven’t played these in ages, and I don’t know if the gameplay has advanced much over the years – they tend to be grindy. But they are free, and there’s a lot of stuff out there, if you’re looking to spend time exploring. MUD clients tend to have features to help alleviate latency, like having a local buffer for editing the current line one is typing, but I don’t know how annoying a cell link with poor reception might be. They don’t send all that much data, but it is a real-time world, not turn-based. And they aren’t gonna impose ads on you, or have software that runs on your system, or data-mine you, or try to figure out how to sell you anything; they’re games where the people who make them just like playing them enough to set them up for their own enjoyment.
Battle for Wesnoth is a good turn-based hex wargame with a number of campaigns…think, oh, the kinds of games in the “Tactics” genre, if you’re familiar with those. However…it was designed for the PC. It’s definitely playable on Android, but the UI clearly wasn’t designed for Android; it benefits from some kind of pointing device. If you’re willing to haul a pointing device of some sort with you, I’d recommend it without reservation. Free, open-source, available on F-Droid.
Re: The MUD situation, I know from personal experience that Iron Realms has still been cranking out a few of them in the last few years. I was a big fan of Starmourn but that one just got demoted to Legacy recently, I guess because of lack of players. Shame because it was really neat and polished. But they’ve got a triumvirate of Lusternia, Achaea (my personal favorite) and Aetolia as active MUD worlds.
Now granted Iron Realms is a whole ass company, not just some nerd hosting a game off his basement server rack strictly out of love for the game, and open source self-hosting enthusiasts may not be super jazzed about that. But as far as I can tell they’re about as harmless as a company can be and do seem to still be in business more as a labor of love than anything else. At least as far as I’ve ever been able to find out. They mostly exist on donations so far as I know, I’ve never had to buy anything from them or been served an ad. And I do really, really like their Nexus client, the interface is really slick and it adds a lot of features and conveniences that I found lacking in other older MUD clients (though, granted, the only non-Iron Realms MUD I ever put any significant amount of time into was Aardwolf and I think I had to use a third party client for that).
All that said, MUD is a dying genre and any influx of new users would help revitalize many of these worlds. If it sounds interesting to you don’t hesitate to go check it out. Veteran users have always been universally helpful in my experience, unless they have an actual lore appropriate reason to be hostile to you - then, watch out! Although even most of those guys won’t stomp on a brand new noob without warning. Players who enjoy social roleplay will find themselves at home in a MUD. Players who enjoy social roleplay and have, or gain, a little bit of scripting knowledge will find themselves especially at home in a MUD. Give one a shot, they’re free and fun and it’ll raise your typing speed a lot.
Slay the Spire is the gold standard for me, at least. I haven’t played Monster Train – it doesn’t look that appealing to me, but I’ve heard good things.
It’s very similar in some ways in the surface, but pretty different in essence. I like both. STS is more hardcore and “strict” and choices matter more, MT is more chill, relying on a single good combo usually, but with very high ceiling for broken fun things. I prefer MT more to unwind.
You say that, but I never made a spreadsheet to optimize my Slay the Spire runs. Balatro is way harder and more random.
Still fun though. I’m 50 hours into Balatro and loving every minute of it. Just made a hand calc spreadsheet last night as I’m pushing into blue stakes and need to optimize every move to keep the numbers going up.
Playing on the gold stake, I think I don’t make it past the first ante like 80% of the time. I might be too greedy or just bad at the game, but in StS I can make a decent run on ascension 20 at a much higher rate.
You should be able to play Flushes, Straights, or Full Houses and win in the first Ante without any buffs. Does the -1 hand size from Gold Stake really hurt that much?
Supergiant might not be 3 dudes in an apartment, but it’s still an indie studio. They do put an impressive amount of effort into their games though, I agree on that
bin.pol.social
Ważne