I’m on my second playthrough of Baldurs Gate 3, this time with a Dragonborn Fighter ( Half Elf Gloomstalker was my first ). I’m still not sick of the game even if I already have 100 hours in it.
Also picked up Remnant From the Ashes to play together with my SO. So far it’s a fun game even if the story is still very confusing and we had trouble joining each others session. Had to set the session to public, Friends Only didn’t work. Thankfully it is possible to change it back to Friends Only afterwards.
It used to not be. FPS games were run by players, not corporations. The ability to run your own dedicated server was baked into the game. Today you can still setup a Quake 2 server without having to rely on the publisher or a 3rd party. It doesn’t have to be that way today, but people accept it.
I absolutely will accept it because it brings better gameplay. FPS games are more fun when there’s constant balancing changes and new content on a schedule. It’s infinitely better than older game models where if one thing is broken you’re stuck with it for the entire lifetime of the game.
Being able to run my own dedicated server isn’t even something I’d want to do, nor would I want to play on player hosted servers.
When games go EoL, sure, require them to open source the multiplayer engine. But really, it’s not a big deal that an individual can’t host a Battle Royale server.
I absolutely will accept it because it brings better gameplay. FPS games are more fun when there’s constant balancing changes and new content on a schedule. It’s infinitely better than older game models where if one thing is broken you’re stuck with it for the entire lifetime of the game.
How is this different than Valve continuing to patch Team Fortress 2 decades after its release? There’s no Live Service model here.
Being able to run my own dedicated server isn’t even something I’d want to do, nor would I want to play on player hosted servers.
I think that’s true for most people, but a small number of a community can support the vast majority. It would ensure a game isn’t dependent on a company to exist, either.
When games go EoL, sure, require them to open source the multiplayer engine. But really, it’s not a big deal that an individual can’t host a Battle Royale server.
If that was an actual practice that’d be great. There’s no incentive for the publisher to do this, however, and they’re profit driven.
TF2 was technically a Live Service when it was actively receiving updates. The fixes that are added by valve are an outlier, and doesn’t change game balance. Constant balance changes are a necessary part of any competitive game. I’ve got no interest in something that isn’t being updated semi-frequently.
Self hosted servers don’t make sense in most of these games anymore. Communities like this vastly overestimate the want for custom servers. Most gamers don’t really care, for better or worse.
~~I’ll humbly ask one more thing. This is fine on desktop with Brave, but on iOS with any browser or stream, I can’t avoid a VPN popup. Anything I can do to troubleshoot? I do have a content blocker. ~~
It really depends on the type of game and how it presents itself.
Some games have a very long and complex story but others might have a shorter story told more indirectly, then there are also multi-ending games which might take longer than a regular story game since you have to replay them. Then there are sandbox games which don’t necessarily have a limit on how long they can be since it’s dependent on how much you want to put into them.
Ultimately in my opinion there’s not really a required amount of time for completion, the thing that I think is most important is whether the games are fun and enjoyable. In the case of story games they can be as long or short as needed depending on how they tell a story.
then there are also multi-ending games which might take longer than a regular story game since you have to replay them.
That’s something I have a hard time doing depending on the game. Sometimes you can get a wildly different experience like in Fallout NV and see your actions having consequences while you play but a lot of the games I have been playing only are linear up until the ending cut scene.
Yeah a lot of times the multi-ending ones don’t offer many unique experiences.
Though there was this one game I played that largely did, it was a Horror RPGmaker game called Red Haze, by far one of the more expansive multi-ending games (so much so that it’s actually not finished, there’s supposed to be 26, possibly 27 endings but only about 3/4 of them are there) the endings might be short or require a lot of steps, and some changes propagate into later playthroughs, some of the endings also require you to have done other endings for them to work.
It’s a very interesting concept but unfortunately not many games implement multi-ending in this way since it takes a lot more work to do.
I just want to have fun, no matter the length. I love Titanfall 2’s campaign and it only takes a couple hours to complete, even shorter than most shooters. People complain that it’s too short but I think that’s its strength. But a lot of AAA games I’ve played just feel stretched and bloated like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, where it’s just not fun at all between all the tedious things I have to do.
Some games like Ultrakill are short and sweet, but others like Factorio can keep you busy for weeks. Both of them felt right for me, but then again I have quite a bit of free time.
If you like shooters, check out anything from New Blood, Turbo Overkill and Postal brain danaged. Those games are segmented into individual levels, which is great for when you just have half an hour.
I think it can’t be overstated how good VR is in NMS too. There’s so much attention to immersion, even some things that bugged me at first like the mime controls for ground vehicles.
It wasn’t that great at first, but they did an update for vr that improved it so much. I don’t play it on VR, but my partner does and I’ve peeked in on his game not long ago and was kind of amazed at how much better it is now. Really feels like being in a ship flying around.
I really hope starfield lights a bit of a fire under the NMS folks to fix some of their half-finished systems along those lines. NMS has procedurally generated ships, we’re just not allowed to tinker with the procedural generator to make our own for some reason.
I totally agree. I do genuinely enjoy NMS too. Plus the procedurally generated appearances also have different stats so you have to be twice as lucky to get what you want.
And here I am deliberately working my way though Origins->Odyssey->Valhalla so that I can completely ignore Starfield for a while until the hype train settles down and some bugs are fixed :-). I keep my eye on NMS (I was a Day 1ish player) but I feel it is soooo wide and soooo shallow it would just bore me to tears now.
If you don’t like base building, you’re opinion on NMS probably won’t change. I still enjoy it and fire it up a couple times a year, but the gameplay loops haven’t fundamentally changed and the survival elements are still pretty loose. I haven’t played the most recent updates from this year yet though.
From some of the games you mentioned I think you’ll appreciate some of these games. All of them are the sort of games that have very rich stories that you will want to talk to people about, remember how you wanted to get your friend to play MGS blind just so you could see him face Psycho Mantis and have his mind blown and then you had someone to talk to about it? I had the same feeling for each of these games (which means I won’t tell you much about them, and you should try to avoid spoilers):
SOMA
Spec Ops: The Line
Life is Strange
I also think the Stanley Parable deserves an honorary spot it’s not exactly story rich but it’s a neat experience that I found quite unique.
NieR: Automata has the same effect for me. That game made me have some thoughts, I tell you what, that once-in-a-lifetime experience you wish you could erase your memory of to experience it for the first time again.
I use a ip link checker - to verify the vpn is working like it should. They're a dime a dozen but this one is the one that showed up first on my search.
basically, you download a unique-to-you magnet torrent, and then the torrent / website will tell you what ip is being shown to the outside world. if you leave it in your client you can see at a glance what ip you are actually using in your client.
I have a couple kinda unique things to suggest. There is a small indie game called Eversion that you can find on Steam. The core mechanic is about shifting to these different planes of existence to finish levels. You can only shift at certain places and shifting opens up pathways that weren’t there before. Its retro style graphics and otherwise very simple controls. The Turing Test is a puzzle game like Portal, but instead of portals, you have a gun that can be used to move energy orbs from around the rooms to unlock doors. The game feels like it encourages creative problem solving a lot more than most puzzle games. Catherine. Catherine is a game in a few styles. You spend part of the time at a diner/bar interacting with people. Then you go to sleep and in the dream world you ascend towers using moveable blocks that you must climb. Sometimes you are chased up the tower by a boss enemy. There is no combat in the game. It’s about ascending the tower as fast as possible at night and progressing the story by day.
The Turing Test is a puzzle game like Portal, but instead of portals, you have a gun that can be used to move energy orbs from around the rooms to unlock doors. The game feels like it encourages creative problem solving a lot more than most puzzle games.
Along those lines I’d want to recommend the Talos Principle as well.
And also the Witness, which does fantastic things with environmental puzzles.
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