The X-COM series is pretty much these choices all the time, though less in a moral sense and more a strategic risk and reward sense. What do you use your limited time and resources on, how much do you risk when the stakes are high, etc. It’s a little different than the sorts of decisions you’re thinking of, but quite interesting.
I would second Xcom and add: unlike other strategy games, where each character is a nameless unit, Xcom names your units. Not a big deal, but it is a big enough change where you start to create your own stories, even in your head, for the characters. Playing the game in a not easy game mode, causes you to lose soldier from time to time. This really heightens tension when certain characters die, whom you remember, and when some miraculously live. Its a very small, yet somehow meaningful addition to what would otherwise be an endless sea of soldiers.
Are names unusual? The only other tactical game like that that I’ve played is Final Fantasy Tactics and they all have names.
But I agree. In XCom you just accept that you’ll have losses. But they still hurt. My first run-in with Chryssalids was especially brutal. I escaped with two of my men and a failed mission. The rest were one-shotted or eaten by their own.
You bring up a good point, what I was lacking in my post was the combination of names, permanent death, and the very real threat of death. Not certain if Tactics works in a similar way.
It does work the same. The biggest difference is that there’s one or two player characters at any time that will give you a game over if they perma-die. But most of your crew are blank slates (with a name) that you build up, give a specific role, and can perma-die. The roles are more distinct, and there are more roles, so losing them feels like losing a party of your team. Like, your summoner might die, and that was the only summoner you had. You have to put in some effort to replace them.
Now, there is a difference of feel. Random mobs feel like they are for grinding rather than an actual threat. So deaths outside of the story feel like you should just reload your last save to save you the trouble. XCom generally felt like a person died, but it was easier to replace their role with the next man up.
And on a similar note, Massive Chalice is a Kingdom under attack from an otherworldly source. Do you choose to defend point A and let point B and C receive corruption points? Do you take your party of developed, well leveled but older than dirt characters into the fight to guarantee success, ensuring they die of old age while your young upstarts grow old and feeble from lack of combat experience?
The ending choice of the Yennefer romance is underrated. You get to decide the meaning of their long, tumultuous story. Both the heart break and the happily ever after are cathartic, satisfying conclusions.
Though maybe you need to read the books for the full weight of it to land, especially for the heart break option.
I’m a big fan of Tyranny by Obsidian Entertainment. Classic CRPG, isomorphic for the majority of it. The game starts with you making decisions that set the initial state of the world as you lead the army that finishes your evil overlord’s conquest of the world. Then the game truly starts and goes on to be one of my favourite CRPGs of all time.
One of the few games where I gravitated towards the lawful evil route because it just felt so natural. It’s such a shame we will probably never see a sequel.
Prey gives you the choices up front, tells you they don’t matter, then gives you a really good game to play.
plot twistThe way you play is entirely up to you, but that’s the point. Are you who you say you are? It’s easy to say whether you’ll flip a switch or push a person when you’re answering questions at a desk, but it’s suddenly much harder when you’re actually faced with the problem. What will you choose?
Owning physical editions of games can be a problem for patient gamers. As digital distribution continues to expand (even in previously resistant markets such as Japan), we’re again getting to a point where pre-orders may be necessary if you want a physical copy for small releases.
NIS America has also increased prices on their games, although, unlike Factorio, they have sales. Also unlike Factorio, they don’t spout nonsense like “inflation” for the increase. That doesn’t track on a game that already has virtually zero marginal cost and sunk development costs now that development has moved to a paid expansion. Dude would have been better off just announcing the increase and keeping his mouth shut on the rest.
Any sort of fighting game if you’re planning to play online. It doesn’t matter how cheap Rivals of Aether or Street Fighter 6 is, if you’re not playing near release you’ll only be fighting against people with 500+ hours of experience.
I mostly agree, but I feel like Street Fighter 6(Going to throw Tekken 7/8 out as an option as well) has a good enough ranking system that you will be able to get people around your skill level years down the line. I didnt jump on Street Fighter 5 till Arcade Edition released, and never had an issue with learning and getting matches in Ranked, and I feel like that will be the same for SF6.
You will have to catch up with knowledge of characters, but I feel lower ranks are much easier in that regard.
However, the Street Fighter 6 Battle Hub is merciless and full of Master ranked players, and that is where turning up late is going to be painful and soul crushing(and I will be one of those people contributing to that).
This also highlights a huge advantage that popular fighting games have: the constant arrival of new players. You don't want to be the only person who picked up the game that week.
Thankfully, there are multiple really popular fighting games out right now (at least, really popular compared to how the genre was doing a few years ago), which is great.
In addition to this there is also occasionally the case where playing an extremely popular game right at launch lets you participate in the zeitgeist in a way you can’t really do if you wait a year and a half for a sale. I imagine whether this matters to you is extremely subjective, but I remember this being a big thing for me with both Elden Ring and BG3; being able to participate in discussions and discovery at the point in time when not everything about the game has been mapped out. Watercooler talk or chatting on Discord with others and sharing your respective findings during that early time when the Wikis aren’t filled in yet.
While that’s true, specifically avoiding the zeitgeist (read: hype) is the stated goal for patient gaming communities (at least the ones on Reddit and here on Lemmy at !patientgamers). It’s why people pay too much for games that are released unfinished in the first place. And there’s always a popular game out or right around the corner.
For me, the only reason to jump on a game early is if it's necessary for there to be a thriving multiplayer community to enjoy the game. That's something you would miss out on by waiting for a sale. That early stage, where everyone is still figuring out how the game works and finding new strategies, can be fun. But I rarely play multiplayer games now, so I just skip that and I don't mind.
If it's a singleplayer game, there's no reason to jump on it early -- and certainly not to enjoy it as a technical spectacle. It'll look just as good five years from now.
I remember replaying the original Half-Life in 2008 for its ten year anniversary, and thinking, "This is still fun, but the graphics are almost distractingly outdated." But when I replayed the original Mass Effect from 2007 just a couple years ago -- which was more than ten years old then -- I thought it looked just fine.
That's a really good point. Sometimes the fun you can have with the game's "multi player" community isn't in the game itself.
Baldur's Gate 3 is probably the best example I can think of. (And I don't have it, and it is really tempting for the reason you just gave.) I actually overheard two people talking about it at a coffee shop today, and three people talking about it on the train a couple weeks ago. I can't think of any other game that has been like this.
The late 90s and early 2000s were a time of rapid increases in game graphics.
We went from DOOM in 1993 with sprite enemies, abstract textures, and technical limits like not even being able to have second story rooms on top of each other to Half Life in 1998 with full 3D characters and objects, physics, and much higher resolution textures.
Jumps in graphics back then could be huge. As graphics get better though, improvements on them become diminishing returns. It stops being going from 2D to 3D or going from block head models with textures pasted on to modeled faces, and starts becoming things like subcutaneous light scattering. Things will keep looking better and better but we’ve long ago hit a baseline with graphics.
Mass Effect was made on Unreal 3. While we are currently on Unreal 5, there have been lots of games released in the intervening years that either used Unreal 3 or a modified version of it.
Yeah, while there is an improvement in graphics, it largely plateaued after the PS3/360 “HD” era. We’re fast approaching a time when a 20 year old game will still look pretty good by modern standards instead of hopelessly outdated.
We’ve also reached a point where the novelty of ultra realism has worn off. People expect certain AAA games to look realistic, but nobody is wowed by it anymore.
(Anecdote time: Personally the last time I was wowed by realistic graphics was Battlefield 3. The Frostbite 2 engine was a noticeable and impressive step up, but ever since then I haven’t felt a sense of visceral awe even if I know graphics keep getting better).
In my mind the graphics themselves barely matter as much as aspect ratio, controls (for some genres), and stability on modern hardware when it comes to judging if a game is “hopeless outdated”.
Since this comment chain started with Half-Life, I admit there’s no way around it looking dated, but it doesn’t hurt my eyes or confuse me as some really old games do (Goldeneye 64 sadly falls into this category). I understand what the game is showing me, and the gameplay, art direction, and tone hold it up for me.
The last time I can recall being wowed by graphics was when I finally got an HDTV in 2008 and saw Oblivion on it (the environment, not the ugly lump of clay people). The jump to HD was huge, but ever since then it’s been incremental advancements.
It seems like it would have been a lot more friendly to have reached out personally first instead of via lawyers initially. Seems like these guys would have been receptive.
Maybe there’s some legal reason they couldn’t, but doesn’t seem like it to me.
I guess I don’t. I would have assumed the team would have mentioned it. Especially if there was communication, but it moved forward to DMCA request anyway (i.e. there was a disagreement or something). But seems like the team would have responded pretty quickly.
But yeah, I don’t know for sure.
Still, it seems way more likely that Valve legal just went straight to DMCA.
But this isn’t the formula for all games. While we might agree that games from 2000 or even 2010 are “showing their age”, at this point 5 to 8-year-old games are less and less likely to be seen as ‘too old’ by comparison to hot releases.
As someone that grew up in the '80s and '90s, it’s wild how much different the pace of change in games was then compared to now.
In 1991 I was playing NES games and 256-color VGA MS-DOS games, in 1998 I was playing Half-Life. Every single thing about the experience of video games changed in that span.
In 2017 I was playing Breath of the Wild, in 2024 I’m playing more or less the same game in Tears of the Kingdom.
To be fair, emulation and patching is even improving on late 90s to early 10s console games. Sure, you can’t evade hardware limitations, but having, for example, ps2 games not slowing down on a CRT with weird motion blur and giving you a big headache makes for an already much more compelling experience.
Well, that is a sign of the medium maturing. We’ve figured out most basic technological limitations and many design conventions to make games that are as close to the vision of the creators as we want them to be. Until some new great discovery drastically changes how games are made, now it’s just a matter of building up on existing ideas, with new twists.
Making a Portal mod is much different than possessing and using the original source code of a game. I don’t understand why they thought they could get away with such a high-profile title as TF.
Chyba możemy już przyjąć że do ekstremów nie doszło. Pewnie ratusz podający 35k jest bliżej prawdy niż 300k. Niby sporo osób ale co to jest w porównaniu z protestami z ostatnich 4 lat.
Dokładnie, tyle to na dowolny Marsz Niepodległości zwozili. Pewnie sami po tym zrozumieją, ze słabo u nic z mobilizacją i zaczną szukać albo nowych tematów, albo nowych wyznawców…
Flash-in-the-pan multiplayer games that may not have anyone left to play with if you don’t join in while the pan is still hot. Heck even ones that stick around a while just get harder to start in when most players have built up skill in the game and know all the little nuances. It’s a lot easier to grow along with everyone when a game first drops, IMO if you care at all about the competitive side.
It would be interesting to see how many 'patient gamers' are actually into multiplayer games at all because of this reason. I wouldn't call myself one per se, but I probably fit the criteria, and most of the games I wait to come on sale are single player campaign.
I’m patient for SP games, but I also sometimes jump on bandwagons for MP games from time to time. Especially when they’re cheap, like Lethal Company or Fall Guys.
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