I played a long while ago and a string of similar incidents eventually made me leave.
I came back ~6months ago, and it was more chill, but still not great.
I will say that if you’re in a group of 3 or more non-toxic people, you almost never get toxic players. Not only because you’ve only got 2 chances to roll low rather than 4, but also because they’re more aware that probably won’t get anywhere.
Free to play with microtransactions is just the way to go for games that can be monetized in that manner. The lower barrier to entry means far more downloads and the piecemeal monetization means that players will frequently end up paying more than $60 alongside the larger player base.
a situation where your character would get killed for a bad dialogue choice.
I think this is a ridiculous thing to criticize too. Dialogue is important in a game like this and it has (sometimes lethal) consequences.
Imagine if this argument were applied to combat. It turns out that it is impossible to beat some encounters by role-playing a loner wizard who refuses to cast spells. Nobody in their right mind would actually believe that is a valid criticism.
The most they’ll have to pay is 20 cents. And that’s only with the 200,000th to 210,000th download for developers who are using the free version of Unity (provided that the developer is also making more then $200k/yr in revenue). After that, the developer will probably get Unity Pro and the download fees will start up at $1 million/yr in revenue and more than 1 million downloads. At that point, I don’t think that the 15 cents to 0.1 cents that will be charged will hurt too badly.
Dwarf Fortress (before the Steam edition.) There was no in-game tutorial. I found a 2 hour long fanmade tutorial on Youtube, and even after that I had to learn a lot of stuff from the wiki.
At 16x, you will get 72MB/s read speed. My SSD has a 560MB/s read speed. Because of this discrepancy, loading a game from a blu-ray disc will take roughly 7.7 times longer. A 20 second loading screen becomes a 2.5 minute loading screen. This alone justifies the cost of keeping it on my SSD. Especially because if I want to remove it I don’t lose permanent access to the game, I can download it again in a couple hours.
Prosperous Universe is quite different from a typical incremental game, but it scratches the same itch for me. The game is very complex, and other players drive the economy, leading to some price/availability unpredictability that is interesting. Gotta keep your bases fueled, but you also want to wait for prices to rise or fall, and potentially use your ships to trade at other markets.
It’s quite nonlinear in progression and there’s a lot of ways to expand.
If you have infinite inventory space, then you need a way to navigate through infinite items. Towards the end of the game, a player could easily have nearly every item in the game. For some games, that would be fine, but for many, that would make the list of items prohibitively long. Filtering and searching would help, but if you’re looking for an item that you forgot the name of, a search doesn’t necessarily do much.
Then there’s balance reasons. Some games use their inventory system to limit the player, making sure they don’t start a level with enough health potions and grenades to cheese every fight.
In survival games, a finite inventory sets the gameplay loop: you go exploring/mining and then return to base, drop off your stuff and head out again. It makes your base valuable, if only because that’s where you keep most of your resources and moving would be hard. It also gives the player a break from one task. I played a Minecraft mod that gave me an effectively infinite inventory. I went mining for so long that it started to feel like an awful slog. Because my mine shafts went on too long, getting back was itself a hassle. When I reverted back to a more typical inventory size, I could feel how a full inventory breaks up the grind and prevents mining from getting out of hand.
I feel that the line is not nearly as sharp. I play a lot of freeform games for extrinsic reasons. Building a cool castle in Minecraft is probably an extrinsic motivation, for example.
When I played Minecraft a whole ton, It was because I was on a server, and I was motivated by impressing my friends, a clear extrinsic motivation.
In WoW, I’m largely motivated to master the game so that I can keep up with my boyfriend, running 20+ dungeons and Heroic (soon Mythic) raids. Another extrinsic motivation.
Etterna, a rhythm game is probably my most intrinsically motivated game. I play it mostly because I enjoy the feeling of mastering a new skill. But even that is extrinsic to some degree, because what most clearly shows my skill? The game praising me with AAs and big streaks. I wouldn’t enjoy Etterna without those things, so I wouldn’t play a gradeless version.
There is world PvP. With the world population being so low, and the world size being so large it’s pretty rare. There’s also a lot of ways to avoid it, but whenever you’re outside your own base it’s always a risk. If you play smart, it’s almost always possible to get away from a player, even if they’re very highly geared. Most clans are pretty insular, a group of friends who have been playing for a long time. I’ve never joined a clan, personally, so I have no idea what they’re like.
Haven and Hearth is a slow base building MMO. You build up skill points exploring and finding new items, spend the skill points to unlock more stuff, build a base and start upgrading your stuff from there. It’s honestly really cool.
Ori and Ori: Will of the Wisps. These games are beautiful and atmospheric. The story is basic, but it’s a world to get lost in.
All of the supergiant games (except for maybe Hades). So Bastion, Transistor and Pyre. Dripping with style, Bastion and Transistor have a pretty straightforward story, but it’s well told. Pyre’s story is a bit more complex, with a heavy focus on characters and your choices with them.