My dad helped me install the original Wolfenstein 3D on DOS when I was a kid. And he’s 100% a boomer (b.1947). So for that reason it always feels accurate to me.
IMO Mini Metro quickly becomes super stressful. I assume Motorways is the same.
Instead I would say Islanders is quite relaxing. Super minimal city building.
What I’d really like though is something for Steam Deck with a good flow state. Any suggestions? Lonely Mountains Downhill looks pretty good maybe. Someone else mentioned Superflight which is great but maybe too minimal.
EA, Activision, Ubisoft… their BS is on another level entirely and I generally don’t play their games because if it.
For NMS / Hello Games it’s more that I really want to like the game but find it immensely frustrating that after years and years of updates, they still haven’t fixed some of the most basic elements.
Like when your character sprints, the tiniest bump in terrain cancels the sprinting. This even happens in the Nexus where it looks like flat ground. Why?
Again for the alien languages… there’s no dictionary in this universe? I’m supposed to believe interstellar travel is commonplace, but they don’t have an app to translate the 3 ubiquitous languages? I have a device in my hand right now that can do that.
Space combat still isn’t balanced. If you alternate between the phase beam with the shield absorb upgrade and any other weapon, you can basically wear down any threat and win.
What has actually been improved about the core game of NMS? People keep telling me that in vague terms without saying what specifically was improved. I know the inventory system is better (but still kind of a mess IMO), but what else? Don’t say multiplayer because they promised that at the beginning.
Yeah I like the “go anywhere” feel and was happy when I found a dinosaur planet too. But it still all feels 2 inches deep in so many ways.
I’ve come back to it a bunch of times because people keep insisting it’s good or “no you just need to try X” or “but the latest update added so much”. Steam says over 300 hours now but a decent portion of that was standing around trade hubs waiting for ships I wanted in S or A class, or literally just walking away from my PC while refiners ran.
I’m not usually the type of player to use cheats/exploits but I actually had more fun when I started using a duplication glitch. No more limited inventory, money, or resources, I could just pick one ship and one multitool and max them out with all the storage and weapons and whatnot. I don’t enjoy grinding so this was a relief. But it still didn’t make up for all the bad underlying mechanics.
Playing the game felt like satire. Basic questions I would expect other devs of sci-fi games to ask themselves seemingly either went unanswered or got super lazy answers.
e.g. “Should we let players customize their spaceships?” to which HG apparently thinks their system of solely generating ships from a random permutation of parts is plenty. Or “Do you think different planets and galaxies would have different hostile flora?”, to which they decided “nah, the same 3 are fine everywhere”. “Should planets have biomes of any kind, at least ice caps maybe?”… “nah, players don’t care if planets are basically uniform.”
I really wanted to like NMS. The core concept is 100% up my alley, it looks pretty good, and it’s a neat sandbox. I suppose it’s not bad if you’re the kind of player who is happy mindlessly gathering resources so you can craft an ornate base. Hell, I played quite a bit because I was determined to collect one of every type of spaceship.
But I really do think the gameplay is objectively bad by almost any possible measure. The on-foot traversal is terrible, waiting around for refiners sucks (though at least they had the sense to give a backpack refiner), trying to get the actual spaceship you want is awful, flying towards the galactic center is a chore, and I could go on. I guess the gunplay is serviceable, but the enemies aren’t the least bit interesting aside from maybe the largest walker bots.
What are you talking about? The player literally learns nothing about the alien languages. All you do is walk up to a NPC, button mash through absolutely inconsequential filler text, and pick the option that says “teach me a word”. Then a popup says “You now know the Korvax word for ‘THE’”, except it doesn’t even tell you which alien word was translated or explain any grammar or context or conjugation or anything. Your character just does a magical substitution from that point forward.
Or you can do the same thing by walking up to the black pillars if you’d rather trudge around a planet surface for macguffins.
How in any way is that a good system? There’s zero skill or challenge or reward or even real gameplay here. A word search puzzle would have 100x more depth.
Unless they’ve fired the absolute moron(s) who designed the crafting and alien language system in NMS, I say stay far away.
I mean, combining dihydrogen and oxygen yields… NaCl? And you learn alien words literally one at a time? Oh but they have procedural generation! Except every single space station looks identical.
IMO This is a developer who does not respect their players. And somehow they’ve convinced a lot of people that periodically adding more shallow grindy fetch quests means the core gameplay isn’t garbage.
Meh. I’m seeing a lot of prices that aren’t even that close to historical lows. e.g. Mass Effect Legendary was $10 somewhere recently but now it’s $12 on Steam (though I’m not giving EA any money for it until they fix the stupid launcher for good on Steam Deck).
Prototype is like $4 though, might snag that if I don’t already own a copy elsewhere.
Mostly I’ve used the Deck to continue playing my primary games on the couch or on the go. Elden Ring and RDR2 look and play fantastically once you tweak them a bit.
Smaller games usually run perfectly out of the box. The only ones I’ve played exclusively on Deck so far are Super Pilot (indie F-Zero), Ultimate Chicken Horse (Mario Maker-ish), and Mark of the Ninja.