I know the occasional game has released a demo here and there every other year or so, but I think I remember the last demo I played was Skate 3’s back in 2010.
That’s… pretty on-you, I have to say. Something like 2/3 of my gaming time is free demos off steam or the nintendo eshop. Steam just had their yearly Next Fest, with over 900 games dropping demos this month.
It's mostly AAA games that don't bother. A lot of smaller games do, because they know it's worth it unless you're riding a crazy hype train with wild expectations.
And even if they don’t have a demo, Steam’s refund system makes basically any game a demo; since you can refund for any reason in the first 2 hours, you can play the first ~90 minutes for free
My point is that you implied it’s that the game industry isn’t putting out demos. “The occasional game here and there every other year or so”. But that’s a false statement, the lack of demos in your life is your own doing
Just on the topic of demos, I feel like they are making a comeback these last few years (speaking as a PC gamer).
Steam has their Next Fest, which is all about demos, and I’ve found a few games there I bought later or put on my wishlist.
As for Talos 2, while I haven’t checked out the demo, I really liked the first game, so I was gonna get the sequel anyway eventually, unless the reviews thrash it for some reason.
I did clans a bit. Some message boards were similar. I was a mod of a small guitar-oriented message board and we knew each other's real names, there were occasional real-life meet-ups where people drove from other states, etc... I miss that.
I was in a bf2 clan that was pretty tight knit. I have good memories of that. I was also in another clan when I was 14 and one of the older guys tried to groom me. No DoT, I don’t want to masturbate with you
The first time I run a game, before anything else, before a developer logo, a splash screen, ANYTHING: I want a screen with volume sliders. This setting needs to be saved upon completion and then ask if you want to see this screen on every launch, or just this one.
I know I am not alone. I am tired of having my eardrums blasted to hell every time I launch a newly installed game. Some games even go back to eardrum-destruction every launch until it loads the user settings.
This shit needs to be standardized. A lot of us wear headphones and are on voice chat or listening to music or whatever when we launch a game, and the deafening EA logo or whatever it may be is NOT welcome.
The best time I had in Warcraft was forming a new guild that had splintered off of an existing one (leadership was unpleasant). It was pretty scary at first, not knowing how it was going to turn out, but we had enough of the guild come with us that we managed top 50 raid progression on the realm the following year. It was super validating to have that kind of success in a casual raiding guild after all the turmoil.
I stayed in contact with our GM, and she and I still play on and off (we’re playing Baldur’s Gate 3 lately).
I was in a counter-strike clan for a long time. We were all varying levels of dork. Clan members doubled as mods for our server, and we ran a server with classic rules and kept it tight. Almost always had a full server (12 people) between ourselves and the randos that joined our community. Spent soooo many hours bullshitting about our stupid teenage lives while headshotting each other. We had ventrilo, a old sql forum, and steam.
Everyone is still on steam friends but don’t talk like we used to. None of us play counter-strike anymore after it moved to CS:GO, so we lost that common thread. I’m mainly focused on my WoW guild and community there now.
Back in the day, around the time of CS 1.6, some co-worker friends and I would have LAN parties. This was when everyone still had CRT monitors so we had to be careful not to trip circuit breakers.
When StarCraft was still relatively new the Blizzard games had a Chat function that spanned all of their games. If they belonged to another game you would see that Chatter’s game as an icon to the right of their name. You could speak to someone playing Diablo at any time. The social setup drove high engagement between players who regularly used to seek playing at a time when the gameplay was typically hosted on a player’s computer rather than on a server.
Clans didn’t have a ready in-game functionality, but fortunately Blizzard had allowed Chatters not only the freedom to change their username quite easily, but to also create Chat Rooms with custom names. By holding the Chat room, you could maintain Administrator rights over the channel.
Early Guilds had to have their users change their names to include the tags in their names, which meant virtually anyone could edit their name to include the tag they wanted. The expanded tag would be used as the name for the Chat Room, which allowed both members and non-members to find it easily enough.
The advent of bots using a Battle.Net login to hold the Chat Rooms and provide admin rights regularly to specific users spiked a new age as Clans became more stable. The bot would be used to blacklist trolls, recognize officers in the Clans, and create rosters to stop people from masquerading.
It created a boom, and in these early days clans rose and fell like the sun. Smaller clans were quicker to join other larger clans and conglomerate into new structures that would require testing and vetting of player skills. Friendships between real players, who formed clans only to incorporate better players from absorbing other clans, were sorely tested as some friends found their skills did not allow them to play regularly any more.
I was in one of these early guilds at the time, a group called the Silver Arrows. I had recently proved that while I lacked strategy for unit construction (as we were playing StarCraft) and combat, I was methodically organized in base construction and could start generating Protoss Scouts while Zerg players were still searching for others to conduct Zergling raids. I was still new to the game at that time and was flounderIng my way through the Campaign. As part of the Clan I found myself playing more often and seeking out games if only to spend time with my clanmates.
I was a member of the -[SA]- clan for about a month when the Silent Assassins {SA} entered into talks with our clan. Different clans with the same initials claimed different forms of their tags. We folded into their ranks and with the additional experience under my belt I found myself joining their first line. I played for a while, but as the boom/bust cycle continued it wasn’t long before I found myself playing relatively alone. Without a support group I gravitated towards Diablo and ultimately Diablo 2, only playing StarCraft socially with my real life friends.
I played a ton of StarCraft back in the day! I was never too serious about joining a clan (just dabbled), but I now remember some of the things you mentioned with the chat rooms, and clan “tags”. I might be imagining it, but wasn’t there also some way to set colors on letters in names too (holding down alt and pressing numbers or something…) That might have honestly been my first experience with “bots” for things adjacent to games.
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