Not much to add, but this was true from the beginning for me. I have “Roguelike” excluded from my Steam searches because around the time Hades got popular it was a source of so much slop where you’d spend most of your hours in the first two levels. Many of those games I hated were highly regarded.
Call this what you like. Echo effect (previous entry was bad, and so people avoid the very good sequel), $70 price tag…in my case, it was Microsoft nosediving harder than usual on all fronts, including literally bombing children, making it an easy decision to boycott them.
I was always grossed/weirded out at all the social media presence wanting this game to fail. I agree it seems to suck out of the gate, but I’m never happy about it. The world needs more good games.
The suspicion I have with 3v3 is they know it feels empty, but had little choice due to performance issues, since effects/CPU usage scale with the number of players. If they keep optimizing, maybe someday we see 12v12 as our Heavy, Engineer, and Pyro gods intended?
In the time since Quake released, common rendering systems and resolution options on monitors have changed. ID’s solution to put it back on Steam was some gargantuan monolith wrapper that might’ve used Unity or something, and ties to an online ID, so that it could release on consoles. The open source community’s solution was to take the original, open-source engine release, and port it upwards. Playing through the recent Quake Brutalist Jam 3, a map pack using a set of reinvented weapons and altered enemies, they recommend you use the “ironwail” source port, which even has a native Linux build.
I stopped Nier Automata midway because it felt completely awful. Then I was sternly motivated by someone to give it a full go and finish it all the way, and it got EVEN WORSE.
Stellar Blade, though, made the gameplay very enjoyable; and its writing, while following a very similar theme, didn’t feel nearly so excessively ultra-grimdark. It kept some core reveals for close to the end (I guess unless you were paying attention to what few audio logs amounted to more than just “They’re coming…! Agh! We’re all dead.”) but I liked the dilemma it posed.
My issue was, I did not feel the expected experience of “Each loop, you learn something new.” It was more like, every 7 loops, I might get into the thing I was repeatedly trying to enter; and then it might just be a bunch of random ancient messages that don’t teach me anything. On top of that, I really hated the ship controls, especially when they veer AWAY from the autopilot path to pull me directly into the sun. If the game had been remade without any physics system, and simple direct puzzle mechanics, I might’ve enjoyed it more.
I love the story of Final Fantasy XIV, but it can easily categorize as “One of the most expensive singleplayer games of all time”. On top of buying the expansions, you’ll need to pay for each month you play; and unless someone’s really speedrunning, that will start to add up. Worse, for a first timer setting up their account, their website and payment system is really stuck in 1998, making giving them money an obtuse task. And, while the story has its great moments and excellent side content, a depressing amount of it is extensive polite dialog with just simple quests where you move to a location and right-click on someone. I’ve finished Dawntrail, and am glad I experienced it, but I can’t blame anyone who sees it all as beyond them.
Not quite the same dillema, but I have a similar issue. I have many singleplayer games I know I want to finish, but when I start my vegout state, it often defaults to a few known multiplayer games, even knowing I’ve had many sessions that leave me infuriated.
I’d say a big part of that is that no major player in the video game industry is still interested in investing long-term into building something. Games like FFXIV started out with huge losses, and they kept with it. Any worthwhile MMO is going to have falterings like that at some point in its life, and they’d need investors that can actually stay calm about that. In today’s markets, where they expect development time to be something like 1-2 years for something that must follow every monetizing trend (battle pass, loot boxes, etc) it’s extremely unlikely. It’s probably not consumer expectations making it impossible.
I think Valve does get some say in the amount and timing of sales. It’s something they need to control to arrange the big seasonal sales, and something publishers must agree to, or set an acceptable range, when first signing up.
Sure, you could say that, but Windows is also a general distribution. Much as people say they’d like a “Gaming OS”, it should be usable for everything else too. Bazzite wasn’t necessarily “incapable” of the other things I tried to do with it, but the UI remained a bit obtuse.
I recently published my novel, and at the last minute I had this panic about what was appropriate. There’s one bigoted character who calls gay people “f***ot” multiple times, as well as many characters that drop F-bombs on numerous occasions. There’s a (semi-magical) event similar to a mass shooting, many references to torture, and someone’s hand is chopped off. To be really safe, I put a content warning on the first page just to make some of that clear. Surely, that puts it a level beyond the Young Adult region, right? But…possibly not, given what I tend to hear offhand of some series.
Other cases that have happened relate to failure to upkeep services needed to access content. Companies stop supporting devices, close down servers, etc. Many consumer rights orgs fail to protect in those cases, but they could easily defeat any measure to introduce a conscious, intentional, mandatory monthly fee.
On Linux, running an exe isn’t often as simple as “wine frog-fracker.exe”. It’s usually “proton PREFIX=~/steam-proton-10/ TRICKS=b DXIMPL=1.7.8 blah blah … frog-fracker.exe”
As a result, Linux gamers tend to have launchers even for hobby games they downloaded. Arcade launchers for emulated games are especially common now.