I’d imagine people who are really into “Choices Matter” and some people who are really into story would.
I play !visualnovels and half the fun is seeing what decisions lead to different outcomes. And getting different outcomes for different choices, especially if they are big choices, makes me feel like my choices matter and impact the world, as opposed to if all these supposedly important choices can only ever get me 2 or 3 different endings.
Although I do share your question about how popular my opinion is with other gamers.
Big appreciation for Undertale, which has 3 major endings but hundreds of variations for each. It’s nice to have the game acknowledge what you did and give you resolution.
Definitely not. Test Drive Unlimited 2 leaps to mind, which while it certainly had racing events and racing related content in it, you could also just drive around doing nothing in particular as much as you wanted.
There are several other racing oriented games that nevertheless had open worlds and you’re never actually forced to race anybody in any of them, albeit usually at the expense of sacrificing any game progression and thus having a rather limited vehicle selection. Need For Speed Underground 2 and Forza Horizon, for instance.
The same is true for almost any open world game with vehicles. Casually driving a car in GTA while obeying the traffic rules has been a thing from the very beginning.
I had an intense love affair with this one earlier in the year that fizzled out quickly once the credits rolled. Solid game, but the only thing that keeps it from being in my collection of 1000-hour games is that it’s a little too dense for my taste. Keeping track of what builds what (and which build I had currently unlocked) was taking up a smidge more brain power than I’d like once the difficulty started demanding it. By the end I’d started layering in how to evaluate cornerstones, the best way to do trade, map modifiers, and it became too much. Ironically, I’d probably get to a level of comfort just by putting more time into the game but it’ll just feel like work.
Looks like it was October, so I’m guessing after? The production controls did help once I figured them out but I realized once I was digging through the UI every time I was making a building or cornerstone decision I wasn’t getting into the flow state I wanted.
I don’t get the bitching. Is it brutally expensive? Yes. Do you have to buy it? No. In terms of stats the gun is nothing special, the armor is quite good, but not essential. For a one time crossover, it’s fine.
They hire psychologists to explicitly figure out how to better make sales. Logical thinking will not win. Microtransactions, which consists of crap you don’t need, is a billion dollar industry and has bankrupted numerous homes.
No but your argument that no-one is forced to buy cigarettes is equally valid to arguing that for micro-transactions. One is chemically adictive, the other uses physchological tricks and is almost entirely unregulated.
It generates FOMO though. I remember when you didn’t have to pay for stuff in games, so I personally still find it very shitty to have to buy skins etc.
I’d much rather buy a full game from the get go and have everything available with no time limit on when i need to buy it.
There is no FOMO if you can leave it for years, actually get the game with all dlc cheaper second hand for a couple of quid and still finding a thriving community online that isn’t focused on completing timed challenges for various currencies to get cosmetics you like the look of before they disappear from the store or the deal for the cheaper price runs out.
I’m still a bit unsure how plausible it is to make a multiplayer game, keep it updated, and not sell content within the game.
The good devs restrict it to cosmetic options, but I can’t say I’ve moralistically stuck to that kind of perfection - I’m okay with new weapons/characters as long as they stay balanced against old ones. It becomes a sort of hazy issue.
Oh, I don’t think they messed up at all. I think it was intentional and calculated. Business decisions don’t just materialize out of happenstance, they are written, proposed, and approved by multiple people. They came up with and implemented the pricing and the bait-and-switching of components. Their lawyers wrote, reviewed, and approved the contract. Their public relations personnel came up with the untrue statements that should be said in sponsored videos. And now that the shift has left the ass, the CEO wants to pretend it was all a mistake? Fuck off.
Their lawyers wrote, reviewed, and approved the contract.
This is what most people, who’ve never worked for a large business, never seem to get.
As an employee I can never say anything about my company unless I want to be fired. For people farther up the chain who have responsibility for making public statements, everything is first vetted by the legal team.
Hell, at times we peons are given stock responses to give to certain questions.
I’ll stick with my Steam cloud saves and game notes and community forums and community guides and custom controller configurations and community controller configurations and overlay and workshop and screenshots and steam deck and steam link and …
Also, the very first game I ever bought on Steam was almost 15 years ago, and it was delisted and has not been available on Steam for over 10 years. Yet I can still re-download and play it right now.
Steam is not the evil corporation people pretend it is. Take your rage to Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.
Steam is not the evil corporation people pretend it is.
Indeed. They’re not saints either but for my personal demands, they offer the best arguments right now. I rank funding improvements to the FOSS Linux stack higher than a DRM-free pile of shame. That may change in the future but for now I prefer Steam over GOG. CD Project is a rich company. They could make a Linux version of Galaxy, put it onto Flathub, make it behave well under Steam Deck Game Mode, and put a tiny fraction of their revenue into Linux improvements.
GOG is funding the FOSS Heroic Games Launcher through an affiliate partnership
GOG has an affiliate links program. Heroic signed up for that. GOG isn’t specifically funding Heroic. Wake me up when CD Project / GOG is hiring a developer of Mesa or something along those lines. You know, an actual part of the technology foundation that’s being used by a wide range of Linux distributions.
An office worker sitting at a desk somewhere at a Linux-running PC is benefiting from technology advancements upstreamed by Valve as part of Steam Deck performance improvements.
Steam colludes with Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. It’s all one big club meant to extract as much profit as possible.
Steam could charge 2% and Gaben would still be able to afford the 75 to 100 million he spends every year to maintained his fleet of 6 mega yatchs, worth an estimated 1 billion.
Meanwhile I’m over here thinking about how I greatly prefer to put my saves in my own cloud storage (too many games these days not giving me as many slots as I’d like), the community forums are some of the most toxic places on the Internet right now, it’s a coin flip whether Steam’s going to give me a problem with my DualShock4, I hate how the Workshop is a walled garden, and I’m so much happier with my streaming now that I’ve dropped Steam Link and moved to Moonlight.
I guess the guides and Big Picture Mode can be nice?
Steam’s still the #2 best option for me on PC storefronts; the battle.net launcher has some aggressive advertising, as an example of hellscape we’re avoiding here. But Steam continues to not offer me much added value. I go there only because some of my games aren’t available on GOG.
I will say I appreciate what Valve is doing with the Steam Deck, and I’m really hoping it continues to grow an ecosystem that directly competes with Nintendo. They are actively burning up banked goodwill right now, and that segment of the market is getting unhealthy without someone keeping them in check.
Probably the same reason it’s happening all over the corporate web: fewer eyeballs moderating content. I was never enough of a regular on Steam communities to be sure, unlike GameFAQs (which I can tell you has always been that way).
I do agree the community discussions have gone to shit. But that’s true of the entire fucking internet. People are assholes when veiled behind anonymity. That’s not a Steam issue. It’s a human issue.
I picked up a Steam Deck to get into PC gaming and frankly, I don’t get it. So many games not even worth the bandwidth to download much less actually play.
i’m the exact opposite. all my computers are macs so I’ve been gaming on PS5 for years. picked up an sd oled mostly to play hades, but have finished dead island 2, ghsot of tsushima and hogwarts legacy on it. the barrier to entry to play a game is so low with the steamdecks suspend feature, I can just pick it up and be playing 5 seconds later.
I also am a Mac user who has a PS5 and a Steam Deck and honestly my SD is collecting dust. It’s a cool bit of hardware but it has too many compromises. The main problem is that it’s just not comfortable to play on. The screen is too small and the way you hold it you end up constantly looking down at is, which is just not ergonomic. The PS5 is also on in seconds from rest mode, and has the benefit of being hooked up to a 77” OLED and a nice 5.1.4 surround sound system.
Maybe you’ve just grown out of gaming. The Steam Deck has it’s issues, but the sheer amount of different great games playable on it is debatably it’s greatest strength. Hades, Armored Core, Persona, Dark Souls, pokemon romhacks, etc.
Steam is a platform that works best for word of mouth. Yes, 90% of it is crap if you just browse around. Hang around gaming forums and YouTube channels that highlight top indy games, and you’ll soon have more games than you can play in a lifetime.
Those of us who rave about it have been doing this for years and have a big backlog. Now that I think about it, it would be difficult to jump in cold.
Any novel idea that gets a modicum of success is immediately and repeatedly flogged to death by copy-cats, both indie and corporate, for the next several years until the gaming public is sick of seeing it. See any recent successful gaming trend for an example.
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