I’ve been pretty vocal about my annoyance with the roguelike genre. I even have the tag blocked on Steam so they’re never recommended to me - my hope is that Steam shares metrics on tag-blocking statistics.
But, I would guess there are enough fans of them to keep being made.
I enjoyed Class of 09, one of few VNs designed around English VA and auto-continuation, as well as having very tight comedic timing.
That last one is key that so many games utterly fail at - waiting until the line is completely finished from the VA’s laborious delivery and they’ve completely trailed off before reading the next one.
What exactly would that entail? I “own” Hades, thus I can depict Zagreus in my own works, as his likeness is my property? I’m allowed to copy the game to a dozen thumb drives and sell them on the street?
After playing World of Warcraft for 15 years, I started becoming increasingly bored and disgruntled with the game. The game being grindy and repetitive is no real surprise, I mean it’s an MMO. But the one thing that was really frustrating was paying monthly for a subscription and a huge chunk of cash for an expansion, but...
I’m able to keep these games around because I’m pretty good at ignoring FOMO and microtransactions. I don’t need everything. One fun skin that I like when I’ve already enjoyed the game more than I’ve paid? I’ll consider it. But I don’t need everything from events - sometimes they’re just a good reason to play it together with friends at that time, like when the carnival is in town.
Still, there’s enough games out there that no one really needs to consider those types of baited experiences, especially if you know you’re susceptible.
So I just read this book on history of games called “Blood, Sweat and Pixels” and was fascinated by the chapter on The Witcher 3 and mostly how the team put in so much thought and care in every single side quest. And seems that there are a lot of moral decision to be made on each adventure. So I finally decided to give it a...
I’ve been playing a bunch of Rusted Moss lately. It’s a Twin Stick Shooter Metroidvania, which is appreciably different from the Hack and Slash type I normally play. Getting used to mouse-and-keyboarding a platform heavy game took a bit. And boy are there platforms....
Funny thing is, I’ve enjoyed a lot of Metroidvanias, but…never enjoyed Symphony of the Night. There’s so much forceful encounter repetition, so many dead end items that don’t actually help you “unlock any doors”, and it’s so easy to get into a rut of wandering the castle unsure where you can go next.
That’s the thing. I even remember trying to use a guide, but it’s difficult to work past all the “Here are 18 secrets that don’t do anything you can get from the beginning” as well as all the bits you can do out of order. Locating the part of the guide that gives you just enough to keep playing on your own is really difficult.
Many other Metroidvanias are sort of more clearly delineated between story beats, or major powerups you’re meant to get in order, all of which allow you to go places you couldn’t before.
I’m really frustrated with how almost every new game these days is being forced into this “live service” model. It seems like no matter what type of game you want to play—whether it’s an RPG, shooter, or even something traditionally single-player—you’re stuck with always-online requirements. And for what? It adds...
I genuinely fault gamers for some of this too, though.
There’s a very small indie game out called “Liar’s Bar”. It’s simple and fun. But, there were still people in forums savagely complaining that the game’s pointless XP system didn’t save correctly after a match - and that it didn’t have skins/emotes to earn for investing time into it.
There’s also MP games I play that I find fun, where I see popular, level-headed streamers complain that there’s been “nothing new” in its past two months. For most players, this wouldn’t even matter because they’re not able to play it nearly as often.
Then there’s games like Back 4 Blood, the late-grown attempt to reinvigorate Left 4 Dead’s magic. For those who don’t know; the game is still fully playable right now. It’s still fun. The developers just don’t add more to it anymore. Yet, as soon as they made this announcement that they were moving on to other games, there were conclusive, prophetic statements out about “Why Back 4 Blood DIED” as though the game is completely gone.
It’s wrong to claim that publishers moved to the constant-update, live-service model forcefully in their own decision-making vacuum. People (maybe not even the people in this thread) asked for this.
Reminds me of many “The reason why Call of Duty sucks” arguments I heard as a kid.
Like, my own tastes agree with you. But you don’t bring that argument into game industry discussion because fact is, the game is doing very well financially and obviously many players disagree with you. So you have to take that data, and work back to decide what the logical conclusion is.
I’ve heard this often, but most of the games I see people consume live updates for weren’t initially planned to get such constant updates.
Ex: Dead by Daylight. Released as dumb party horror game with low shelf life. Now on its 8th plus year. Fortnite: Epic’s base building game that pivoted to follow the battle royale trend, then ten other trends. DOTA 2: First released as a Warcraft map. GTA V: First released as a singleplayer game before tons of expansion went into online. Same with Minecraft.
It just doesn’t make sense to pour $500M into something before everyone agrees it’s a fun idea. There’s obviously nothing gained in planning out the “constant content cycle” before a game’s first public release.
Battlefield 2042 is $60 right now. One of my friends on Steam plays Battlefield 2042 and I thought hey, that would be pretty cool to play with him. I’m sure it wouldn’t be that much because that game came out a long time ago and was extremely poorly received and like, I’m sure it would be really easy to buy that game or...
As well as OP’s problems getting dud keys, I would warn that key resellers often contribute to the pickpocketing industry.
Tourist gets lost in Indonesia, kid grabs his wallet. In the time between then and when the tourist calls their bank, the kid buys as many legitimate keys of Game XYZ as he can using the tourist’s credit card, and sells them to G2A.
The bank refunds the fraudulent transactions, but even if the key retailer (eg, Greenmangaming) reports the transactions to the game dev, the dev is often pressured to not revoke the keys since it just leads to poor press off later customers that believe themselves “legitimate” for spending money on the game.
Sites like isthereanydeal.com give more legitimate tracking info and avoid key-sharing sites; the copies sold were obtained directly from publishers. They can also give price history to give you an idea of whether the game will go on sale again soon.
There’s still a bit of market force, but it comes in the form of other game developers.
Imagine you went to the grocery store, and saw Hardin McCombsky’s Super-Premium Dry Seasoned Cheese was $1000 a wedge. How ridiculous! How do they expect us to pay that much for that cheese?
Only…Shaw’s Bargain Dry Cheese is $4. And it’s not the same thing - but it’s still pretty good.
Basically, this kind of thing works out in many other industries. Sometimes on rare occasion, one producer makes things MUCH better than competitors and can demand a much higher price because no one else comes close.
To give a more game-relevant example, BattleBit is $15 and compared favorably to Battlefield. In other cases where there’s no competitor and the developer hasn’t lowered their price for sales, it may be because they’re confident they did good work and made a good game. Factorio is famous for this.
Starfield steam page for the DLC currently shows eight user review score of 41%, making this one of the worst Bethesda DLC’s released of all time. This is so horribly, shockingly bad for Bethesda, because it shows as a gaming company, they are no longer capable of delivering a really good gaming experience as they had in the...
From what I understand, things like squeezing through walls were supposed to go away with the PS5. But, Ragnarok is still available on PS4 to cater to mass audiences, so they need that extra bit of time for loading.
Ironically, one game that’s handled open worlds a bit better is on a console less capable of handling them. Breath of the Wild uses it to promote exploring towards vantage points and then interesting sights.
Sea of Thieves does something similar. You start a session, and want treasure, so you take a basic and boring assignment with a treasure map. BUT, you spy a bunch of interesting happenings throughout the ocean and beaches on your way, and so your adventure becomes more complex. Coming across those at random feels a lot more fun than picking them as a targeted assignment on an objective board.
To be fair, even if the open world is not well used, it can provide a sense of connection for the world. It can be more fun than just having a mission select screen.
I’m always surprised Ubisoft gets so much flak when other developers are doing much the same thing.
That said, my main annoyance with Tsushima is: You’re not a hero. 99% of side quests end with the people you were helping ending up dead, and possibly some other nameless NPCs rescued. It just feels tragic.
It’s a perpetual issue where it’s easier to code in 20 more enemies than 2 or 3 more innocent, living people to have conversations with.
Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana for PS Vita. Fishing edition. Some random fishing pics I grabbed. I liked the fishing part of the game. It even slightly contributes to the story and progress if you catch them all....
I feel like the anime art style can make women of any age look pretty cute - which makes it hard for me to understand why they choose to make all of their combat-experienced, leader-professionals just entering high school or even earlier.
Dana is some sort of friggin leader-priest, and hasn’t even hit puberty. Japan is so weird sometimes.
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake from the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection, Volume 1. Mostly played streaming to my TV via Steam Link, but also played a bit on Steam Deck. I think this is an English dub of the MSX version. This isn’t the NES version. It was an excellent game for its time....
If you like the random irrelevant conversations of Metal Gear, you might like Tales of Berseria. It’s basically a band of pirates, lead by an edgelord but with many people that are very world-traveled, so you get a lot of encyclopedic explanations of why the world is the way it is, or what kind of pet they’d prefer. Certainly much less happy-go-lucky conversation than the rest of the Tales games.
If nothing else, it is kind of fun that they’ve merged universes a bit.
In Watch Dogs Legion, DedSec is contacted by the Assassin Order who needs their help taking down Templars that are working with Albion - basically merging protagonists/villains of both series.
Ghost Recon has also previously guest starred Sam Fisher and operators from Siege.
The Lutris launcher has helped me successfully play purchased Ubisoft games well. It sucks to rely on third party tools, but that’s much of what Linux is based around.
Easy to forget both Sony and Microsoft had nothing to do with gaming previously. Even MS had terrible inroads in spite of games for PC being written in DirectX.
I felt like Amazon and Google had pretty good chances. It was only due to terrible direction both managed to screw it up.
Same for me. I enjoy the Hitman games, but they have a bit more guidance towards suggesting possibilities for you.
I’d almost like it if I could investigate just as a master hacker that can skip the breaking in portion to try checking XYZ company’s records while sitting at the crime scene, instead of going down a 2 hour rabbit hole at risk of being caught to realize “Oh, that was the victim’s ID, not the killer’s, so nothing I’m investigating has anything to do with the case.”
I am curious if the games community has anything positive to say about major publishers at this point.
It’s fun to laugh at one failure, and it’s nice we still get occasional great indie hits. But when most major publishers fail to turn out anything of interest, and even Sony is kind of reaching vanishing expectations amid remasters of remasters, it becomes hard to even suggest what to buy an unknowledgeable kid for Christmas.
The point is that it’s not just them paying the price, though. With continuous years of NO publishers putting out anything interesting, we’re at a point where people are just less interested in anything that’s coming out.
It’s a carrot and stick problem to some degree. They know now we hate microtransaction-laden live service games, but it’s harder to define what players would enjoy. Keep in mind, there’s many cases of simply letting the developers cook that haven’t worked out either.
I agree when it comes to taste-specific stuff. I’m playing Steamworld Heist 2 and have Tactical Breach Wizards in my wishlist, so indie tactics games have been satisfying me - they’re certainly good and interesting, as you say.
But, those aren’t games I’d recommend to everyone. It does mean not much water cooler discussion since no one is playing the “same” games in most social circles. It used to be, a big release like Halo came out and everyone was talking about it, playing it, and discovering things together.
I don’t think there’s that many big-budget releases you can invest in if you care about Denuvo. Even the Ace Attorney games, re-releases of old DS visual novels, have been getting Denuvo’d.
I think I remember Just Cause 2 had it so the top achievement in the game was only for 70% completion because they knew they had such a ridiculously huge map.
Breath of the Wild aims the same way - they like having you come across a bunch of Korok seeds while traveling, but not scouring the land with a magnifying glass looking for them.
Ideally, Sony would handle the legal hurdles needed to allow PSN in multiple countries. But I imagine, as the publishers have invested tons of money into producing those singleplayer games, part of what they want in return is investment into the “PlayStation ecosystem”. Much like how Microsoft doesn’t care if people play their games on an Xbox, they just want an account.
Basically, I don’t think Sony is really in the business of putting down huge financial risks just to get the $60 entry tag of the rare singleplayer game they put out. Those games are meant to get you buying other Sony content as well.
I’ll admit, I’ve kept no interest in the game or its sequel because the concept just sounds depressing. Similar to Dark Souls’ plot; “Life sucks, you accomplish nothing more than survival, and innocent people die anyway.”
Give me two months in Unity, and I can make a game that’s “harder” than every game on any one of these lists. It would also be unplayable trash, that would prompt hundreds of “How the fuck are you supposed to XXX” responses due to obscurity. Part of what makes those listed games enjoyable is having a decent difficulty curve, compelling progression of skill demonstration, and a good feeling of reward. They’re getting difficulty right.
I’m torn about them. On the one hand they free up the combat design to be as wildly different from the exploration as it wants. Which can result in really creative stuff. Favorite examples are Undertale, MegaMan Battle Network series, and Tales series....
I think there’s better patterns RPGs can use for them.
A lot of games now just put them wandering the world, and touching/attacking them prompts combat. Then, the game needs to invent various motivations for you to actually want to attack the enemy.
In a lot of games, they’re just genuinely in the way through tight corridors to a destination. A better approach can be to associate some kind of minor quest reward to directly pursuing the enemies.
But, then you get the problem that a lot of RPGs just have no interesting decisions to make in combat. And, participating in combat can lead to a slow wearing down of the party’s mana points, or the game’s equivalent. In many games, you only want to use the basic cure spell and auto-attack because you’ll survive fewer fights without mana rationing. It becomes counter-intuitive and less fun.
Some games resolve this well. Cosmic Star Heroine for instance, a short indie JRPG, heals you after every fight, and each combat is uniquely scripted in for pacing much like Chrono Triggwr.
$200M before the Sony acquisition and $200M after. It’s a little hard to believe. The story seems to only be coming from Colin Moriarty right now, but I trust Jordan Middler to consider it at least reasonably plausible if he wrote it up for VGC....
This is probably the biggest lesson against the gamer mindset of “Give the developers time to work, and they’ll polish it to a shine.” Sometimes, even time doesn’t improve the end product if the idea wasn’t great. It might even indicate that on some instances where publishers scrapped a ‘cool’ project that was in the works, it was actually the right call. It might have been a Concord waiting to happen.
So i kinda want to buy FFXVI but looking through the opinions and reviews it stands somewhere between the worst final fantasy game ever made and second coming of jesus wit plot ranging from infantile dark fantasy to great story with deep engaging dark themes....
FF14 has sort of an unwritten rule, that you should ignore all side quests that are represented with the plain gold circle. They’re not even worth the time for XP and rarely have anything interesting happen in them. It’d be interesting if the same rule applies for FF16.
It’s one of those series that has expanded so far, with favoritism towards its characters, that they even decided to drop the name “Yakuza” in favor of the Japanese title, since so much of it has little to do with being a Yakuza anymore. Honestly, I can’t remember any game in which you’ve done actual Yakuza-like actions such as shaking down businesses, running loan shark scams, or executing hits. When you do end up making money, it’s through perfectly legitimate businesses whose biggest problem is “thugs keep attacking us!”
Hi guys, I have the hunger for more history games. I have to say that usually I’m not a huge AC fan, but last summer I played Odyssey and I’m a huge ancient history nerd and I think that the game and the period were represented very well. (The Story was kinda meh, but serviceable). What other AC game would you recommend for...
I totally get disinterest, but I get rubbed the wrong way when people “want games to fail”. I want the world to have more games that are good - and yes, occasionally those would come from publishers we traditionally grumble about.
I had no interest in Concord, but I’m not making video content laughing at its failure. I think that practice is a bit weird sometimes, and even victimizes some of the game devs that didn’t do anything wrong. I would guess at least 80% of Concord’a devs did their job well - just based around a bad concept.
I sort of picture this happening more often at the graphical plateau. It used to be that these franchises needed big face lifts to stay relevant, but even that can sometimes happen with a lighting update.
The other reason might be if they want to do subtractive redesigns of the core concept but I’m still not sure what that should be for The Sims.
I honestly tried to get back into it with an old account. Apparently, the entire world went up in power level with no exceptions, but not my character - meaning there was literally not a single enemy I could kill across the PVE environment to gain better gear/levels to contend with enemies.
I did not feel like making a new character or redoing the tutorial so I decided to not even bother, taking it as a sign the game was poorly thought out.
As someone who grew up playing games like World of Warcraft and other AAA titles, I’ve seen how the gaming industry has evolved over the years—and not always for the better. One of the most disturbing trends is the rise of gacha games, which are, at their core, thinly veiled gambling systems targeting younger players. And I...
It’s a small measure, but I’d really like to see a law where gacha games need to publicly advertise their odds and allow independent verification.
The biggest effect it would have is, the odds would need to be static. Many gacha systems have been accused of putting a hand on the wheel, assuring someone “so close to their needed item” must keep going through a series of failures.
The article author honestly made a very valid point, but wrapped it up with a terrible headline.
I even feel like the PS4 and Xbox One currently serve the use case of being “the cheap consoles”. There are a number of games they cannot run or would run poorly - but for their price point they’re much more of an option for the non-wealthy, primarily in other countries. It’s like it’s all one console generation with no signs of ending, and a varying range of specs.
It's a Good Time To Be an Indie Game Fan (www.youtube.com) angielski
TIL Stein Gate is also a game angielski
Steam Now Warns Consumers That They're Buying a License, Not a Game During a Purchase (www.cgmagonline.com) angielski
My mental health has improved after deleting games that have microtransactions in them angielski
After playing World of Warcraft for 15 years, I started becoming increasingly bored and disgruntled with the game. The game being grindy and repetitive is no real surprise, I mean it’s an MMO. But the one thing that was really frustrating was paying monthly for a subscription and a huge chunk of cash for an expansion, but...
Currently downloading The Witcher 3 for the first time. Got any advice for me? (lemmy.world) angielski
So I just read this book on history of games called “Blood, Sweat and Pixels” and was fascinated by the chapter on The Witcher 3 and mostly how the team put in so much thought and care in every single side quest. And seems that there are a lot of moral decision to be made on each adventure. So I finally decided to give it a...
Until Dawn's PS5 debut 28% weaker than Sony’s 2024 disaster Concord (www.truetrophies.com) angielski
Rusted Moss is pretty good (Metroidvania) angielski
I’ve been playing a bunch of Rusted Moss lately. It’s a Twin Stick Shooter Metroidvania, which is appreciably different from the Hack and Slash type I normally play. Getting used to mouse-and-keyboarding a platform heavy game took a bit. And boy are there platforms....
I'm tired of every game being live service angielski
I’m really frustrated with how almost every new game these days is being forced into this “live service” model. It seems like no matter what type of game you want to play—whether it’s an RPG, shooter, or even something traditionally single-player—you’re stuck with always-online requirements. And for what? It adds...
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Dev Says Big Budget Games Are Failing in Part Because Teams Are Over-Scoping Their Projects (www.ign.com) angielski
Why does the PC gaming industry still use such deceptive pricing? angielski
Battlefield 2042 is $60 right now. One of my friends on Steam plays Battlefield 2042 and I thought hey, that would be pretty cool to play with him. I’m sure it wouldn’t be that much because that game came out a long time ago and was extremely poorly received and like, I’m sure it would be really easy to buy that game or...
Starfield's first DLC is one of the worst Bethesda DLCs of all time angielski
Starfield steam page for the DLC currently shows eight user review score of 41%, making this one of the worst Bethesda DLC’s released of all time. This is so horribly, shockingly bad for Bethesda, because it shows as a gaming company, they are no longer capable of delivering a really good gaming experience as they had in the...
Shower thought, traversal in open world games have turned from game mechanics to loading screens angielski
3 big ones recently, this year was God of War Ragnarok, FF7 Rebirth and Jedi Survivor...
Ghost of Yotei Will Feature a Less Repetitive Open World (wccftech.com) angielski
Good stuff. I didn’t get far in Ghosts of Tsushima because the open world felt very samey, but if they work on that I could probably try the sequel.
Day -10 of posting a screenshot from a game I've been playing until I also forget to post screenshots angielski
Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana for PS Vita. Fishing edition. Some random fishing pics I grabbed. I liked the fishing part of the game. It even slightly contributes to the story and progress if you catch them all....
Day 1 of someone finally posting screenshots from a screenshot-worthy game, until I forget to post screenshots (lemmy.world) angielski
Day -8 of posting a screenshot from a game I've been playing until I also forget to post screenshots angielski
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake from the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection, Volume 1. Mostly played streaming to my TV via Steam Link, but also played a bit on Steam Deck. I think this is an English dub of the MSX version. This isn’t the NES version. It was an excellent game for its time....
Ubisoft Says That XDefiant Has Fallen Behind Expectations (insider-gaming.com) angielski
"The father of PlayStation" says everyone at Sony thought the PS1 would fail when it was first pitched (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Shadows of Doubt v1.0 is Out Now! (steamcommunity.com) angielski
Ubisofts stock tanked this morning ahead of the markets opening angielski
Ubisoft's Board is Launching an Investigation Into The Company Struggles (insider-gaming.com) angielski
This is going to be one of those “Ubisoft investigates Ubisoft and found that Ubisoft did nothing wrong at Ubisoft”-situations, isn’t it?
God of War Ragnarok Mod Removes PSN Requirement and Creator Vows to Maintain It (questalerts.com) angielski
'Melts our frozen-solid hearts': Frostpunk 2 devs celebrate 350,000 copies sold—covering the production and marketing costs (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
The winner of every difficulty comparison (lemmy.world) angielski
What do you think about random encounters? angielski
I’m torn about them. On the one hand they free up the combat design to be as wildly different from the exploration as it wants. Which can result in really creative stuff. Favorite examples are Undertale, MegaMan Battle Network series, and Tales series....
Day -1 of posting a screenshot from a game I've been playing until I also forget to post screenshots angielski
PS Vita game Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. This is early into the game when you find your first castaway. Adol stumbled on her bathing in the stream....
Sony’s Concord reportedly cost $400M to develop | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
$200M before the Sony acquisition and $200M after. It’s a little hard to believe. The story seems to only be coming from Colin Moriarty right now, but I trust Jordan Middler to consider it at least reasonably plausible if he wrote it up for VGC....
how is final fantasy XVI angielski
So i kinda want to buy FFXVI but looking through the opinions and reviews it stands somewhere between the worst final fantasy game ever made and second coming of jesus wit plot ranging from infantile dark fantasy to great story with deep engaging dark themes....
Majima-Focused Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii Announced at RGG Summit as Next Yakuza Game (www.ign.com) angielski
What is your favorite Assassin's Creed game? angielski
Hi guys, I have the hunger for more history games. I have to say that usually I’m not a huge AC fan, but last summer I played Odyssey and I’m a huge ancient history nerd and I think that the game and the period were represented very well. (The Story was kinda meh, but serviceable). What other AC game would you recommend for...
Concord Director Steps Down As Studio Behind Historic PlayStation Flop Waits For Sony's Decision (kotaku.com) angielski
No 'Sims 5' Coming as EA Updates Franchise With Multiplayer (variety.com) angielski
People seem to really dislike Destiny 2. Why haven't they ended it yet? (lemmy.world) angielski
Gacha games are out of control. Gambling shouldn't be so widespread angielski
As someone who grew up playing games like World of Warcraft and other AAA titles, I’ve seen how the gaming industry has evolved over the years—and not always for the better. One of the most disturbing trends is the rise of gacha games, which are, at their core, thinly veiled gambling systems targeting younger players. And I...
Baby Blues Nightmares is a horror game I created alone inspired by The Shining where you play as a Baby On A Tricycle which you can customize, paint and upgrade while evading monsters! (www.youtube.com) angielski
Game consoles are now smartphones, and that's okay (www.spacebar.news) angielski