Given its open world nature, I would bet the difficulty of the game varies greatly depending on where someone randomly decides to explore.
And, any repeat attempts won’t reveal much because on a second go the player will have experience with systems that will keep them safe or at least better conditioned around their losses.
Unfortunately, I feel like only console developers that long ago released their games for arcane bi-flagonal deprucified CPUs get to put out expensive anniversary editions. Everyone who owns Steam copies can still run it just fine.
I like the reactiveness of RTS, but if they can somehow negate the need to be “FAST” about it, I’d enjoy it more. It’s the eternal struggle of, if pressing a button does a good thing, how do you avoid a meta that involves hitting 8 buttons a second.
Something that could have potential is putting an in-game “communications limit” that limits/punishes you for enacting too many Actions Per Minute, and encourages you to find ways to delegate broad tasks to your AI units. eg: “Please make a base at this spot, focused on building Archers”
I think RPGs are a lot better at telling a story, but many of them don’t have interesting stories to tell. It’s also admittedly hard to develop that hook. So, while my most memorable games are RPGs, I usually get drawn more to FPSs.
The one exception to this feel is Half-Life 2. Something about the lack of ceremony behind level transitions, lack of objective markers or excess UI, and being “in” the environment in which characters are trying to accomplish their goals helps it feel more immersive. Sadly, not many AAA games have aimed to have expressive faces during gameplay since then to help sell the visuals.
I definitely play a few horny games, and don’t recommend them to anyone. In the other hand, I have actually skipped certain games, and hated some others, because they were trying to tell an engaging story and got hung up on cringey sexualization of their female leads.
As you said, it’s all up to consumer preference. It isn’t just watch-dogging and shaming of sexualization, it’s also that there’s a lot of people that find lazy sexualization to be disengaging and hardly unique. Plenty of the time getting the characters to look unique and interesting is also a challenge; and diversity often helps with that.
Supposedly the real-life SAS has had a very successful nonlethal career going many deployments without any shots fired. Their main way of operating is to flood a building with CS Gas and go in with masks - I don’t know if that makes for a good game though.
The funniest thing is, there are billionaires out there that agree tax laws are messed up and think they should be paying more taxes. For them it’s just a stressful hassle to work out which charities should take their money.
But Infinite growth!! How do you affirm the ability for a new CEO to make tough decisions without going on insane hiring sprees to show growth, and then firing those same people to cut corners and also show growth!? The economy needs blood!
Oh wait, they’re not publically traded? I thought only corner shops were allowed to stay off the market.
I’m still glad I paid for it when it was a good deal. It’s not like I was committed. The unsubscribe button is pretty easy, and I don’t need to play a lot of those singleplayer games anymore.
I can’t claim I’ve never been part of a live service trend. I played a lot of Dead by Daylight (probably still will, just feeling it’s in a downturn) and bought into cosmetics and new characters - likely for a decent amount of money over time.
Honestly, once a dev has a formula that’s successful, it does make sense to just slowly iterate on the formula, give it out for free, and sell cosmetics, instead of trying to find a reason to write 8 new levels/characters and call it a “sequel”. But I can also admit most games have applied at least a few scummy practices to get that in place, and it victimizes a lot of players.
I will also remind people not every single DLC item is scummy. It’s worth evaluating each for yourself, as well as using basic consideration to ignore the ones you don’t want (and don’t complain about them if the game never visibly advertised them to you). For instance, Witcher 3’s extra story content would technically count as DLC - and most say it’s worth it.