For me it’s first person puzzle games. I can think of maybe a dozen off the top of my head that came out in the last decade. I especially enjoy when they’re open world. The ability to just quit a puzzle that’s stumped you and go try something else for a little bit is incredibly refreshing.
First-person shooters, the way they were made in the 6th and 7th gens. A campaign, probably co-op, probably with split-screen or LAN, with some versus multiplayer that repurposed some slightly-remixed locations from the campaign that you can play with approximately 4-8 players. That's all you need. Sometimes we still get some great FPS campaigns, like Half-Life: Alyx, but I haven't really gotten the kind of co-op or versus multiplayer I've been looking for for over a decade. Not everything needs to be a live service. It can be a flash in the pan multiplayer that's so good that you break it out when you have a few friends over or in a Discord call. Not every multiplayer FPS needs to be an e-sport with an online population of tens of thousands of players to matchmake with in ranked.
I also don't really get racing games for me anymore. Star Wars: Episode One Racer, Burnout Revenge, and F-Zero GX truly spoke to me, and there were a few others that were close, but for the most part, if your racing game isn't basically Mario Kart or full of real licensed cars in real places, it doesn't get made. And the ones that aren't Mario Kart don't usually get split-screen multiplayer either, which is a must-have for me. I did get Trail Out in the recent past, which is very good, and there's that game Aero GPX on the horizon to potentially give me my F-Zero fix, but the actual racing games I'm looking for are so few and far between.
Fortunately, this list used to be much longer, and all the other holdouts, like Advance Wars-esque tactics games, Resident Evil 1-esque survival horror games, Commandos-esque stealth tactics games, and a few others have all gotten their itches scratched.
If you're looking for the Quake brand of arena shooters, I feel like you're getting a lot of those these days. If you're looking for the era just after that, which Halo would fall in, I'm also looking for that type of game, so the nostalgia that fuels indie game design is probably only a few years away from delivering us that sort of game again. Maybe that new TimeSplitters or Perfect Dark game will be good.
The upgraded mobile chip they use will likely be as powerful as our current Steam Decks but with better power draw, since they're mobile architectures and not x64. That said, you couldn't pay me to buy another Nintendo console at this point.
I love hearing about unique takes on game mechanics. Someone recently convinced me that limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
Traveling in Death Stranding is the game though. Enemies are only one part of the challenge; there's also terrain and how much cargo you can carry on the way, even if you've taken that route before.
There are online modes in most of those games, besides Sekiro, that difficulty options would have an effect on, particularly invasions. Fortunately, invasions have been getting scaled back as time goes on, and the games have gotten easier in general, so we might converge on a game with difficulty options.
Have you ever tried Skullgirls? You can form a team of up to three characters, and you can select just about any move they have as an assist, forming some wild synergies.
The annoying part in Zelda was where you'd acquire and destroy your weapon in just a small handful of swings, like the kingdom of Hyrule had the world's worst blacksmiths.
Doom was interesting because it was a solution to both of those problems at once. Doom shouldn't be a cover shooter, but hunting for health packs is not action packed or fun, so the enemies became health packs.
I found Death Stranding to be a game that, even though it has combat in it, it's a solid demonstration of how many different types of mechanics we could be building a game around besides combat, even with a story and high production value.
I guess the combat was the weakest part, but it composes such a small part of the game that it made plenty of sense. From that perspective, I found it weird that it had any boss battles at all.
STS does allow you to cheese the game with its save system, which is why most roguelikes also delete the save file after they load it, only saving the game when you need to put a bookmark in it to come back later.
It's a problem when cheating changes people's opinions on how fun the game is. If the game forces you to use a certain mechanic that you otherwise would have ignored, that often gives you a better appreciation for the game. In the case of a roguelike, if you can cheese the save system, you're no longer required to actually get good at the game systems and can instead keep reloading until the memorize the solution, which is the entire problem the genre is out to solve.
I mean, if you're knowingly turning on cheat codes in a game, you know you're deviating from the intended experience, but if you're doing something the software lets you do, that's something the designer is trying to tune to steer you toward having a better time. Often times you can take a dominant strategy and think less of the game for it being too easy or one-note, which can and does happen when you can exploit a save system like this. I got through the first Witcher game mostly by save scumming, and I didn't think particularly highly of it, but the sequels did a much better job of introducing me to the potions, oils, and monster hunting mechanics that would have made the game easier and more solvable without save scumming. Had I known for the first game what I knew of the sequels, I might have enjoyed the game more, but that first game especially didn't force me into learning those systems.
I'm neither assuming that a game is perfect or that the designer's vision is always correct, but the designer is intending for you to experience a game a certain way, and it's often most fun that way. If certain strategies are dominant such that they invalidate large portions of the game that are there, it usually results in that game being boring. Your mileage may vary, of course, but that's how these things tend to go. The Witcher is a much more interesting game for me when you utilize potions, oils, and monster manuals, and I found the combat to be quite boring when I didn't know how to interact with those systems and instead just reloaded saves for better dice rolls. By forcing you to play a certain way, like by omitting certain save systems, they're making sure you play the way they intended, and if the game is as good as they hoped to have made it, it will result in the most people having the best time.
Here's another example. Batman: Arkham combat is an amazing replication of what Batman is in video game form. It's one man taking on dozens of others, usually more lethally armed than he is, with some athleticism and a bunch of gadgets. You're incentivized via the scoring/XP system to never button mash, use every move in your arsenal at least once, never get hit, and to take out every enemy in the room in a single flowing combo. However, it didn't steer most players into playing that way very effectively (at least on normal difficulty), and many leave the combat system disappointed that they can beat it just by attacking with X and countering with Y.
Unless it was part of a Call of Duty contract with Microsoft or something. Or the Sony deal was only for a few years, or it would cancel when FF16 failed to sell a certain number of copies.
I don't think Modern Warfare 2 ever had fan servers. It's the one that infamously had a "boycott" over the lack of dedicated servers (which is different than private servers) because it was all peer to peer multiplayer.
Oh, that's cool. Cool that the alternate networks ever existed, I mean. Not cool that they got shut down, but this is from the same people who shut down vanilla WoW to sell it back to you again.
"Today, PlayStation revealed that its PS5 has sold 40 million units. Microsoft doesn’t share hardware numbers typically, but court documents, math, and slides from an ID@Xbox in Brazil seem to suggest the Xbox Series X|S line-up is around 20-23 million units sold globally. That essentially puts the PS5 at a 2:1 advantage...
I don’t think it’s hardware. It’s a differentiator. Tell me why I (or whoever) should pick an Xbox over a PlayStation?
They know it's a losing battle to try to build the same product as an entrenched competitor after they burned themselves with the Xbox One, which is why they much prefer you're a subscriber to Game Pass, with an Xbox or not.
Some people may love Game Pass, but most people I know either never subscribed to it or only tested it when it was like 1,-€ for a month or whatever.
They've got like 25-30 million subscribers, so it's quite popular. Probably half or a third as popular as Microsoft would like, but it's popular. I myself have plenty of friends who want to play more games than they can afford, and now they can afford them because of Game Pass. Especially the flash in the pan zeitgeist stuff like Exoprimal or Rainbow Six: Extraction that they can say they've played but will never touch again.
What else differentiates it from the PS5 in a positive way?
Quick resume. To be honest, what sets the PS5 apart from the Xbox hardware in a positive way? The SSD speeds that ended up not even mattering much for Ratchet & Clank, from what I hear of the PC port.
The controller is…well, a decent controller. It doesn’t do anything special like adaptive triggers, yet it costs almost the same as a DualSense, and if you count in the optional (!) battery pack, it’s quite a bit more expensive even.
By contrast, I know tons of people who hate the PS5 controller, not the least of which for its short battery life and inability to swap batteries like you can for Xbox. As a fighting game player, I know competitive players who hate the d-pad, and Sony did everyone dirty by requiring the use of a PS5 controller only even though the entire scene has had controllers for a decade that would work just fine, and even work on the PS5 when running a "PS4 game" on a PS5. Xbox's controllers are backward and forward compatible. If Sony had some kind of reason for requiring the functionality of the new controller, sure, have at it, but they put this requirement in place for games that make no use of the new controller's features at all, which is a dick move.
If you want to win market share, deliver a better product. With better services. With better conditions. For lower prices.
I think they did exactly that, but as far as which console sells more units, it's still PlayStation, because they have a couple of games that, at least for a couple of years, you can only play on PlayStation. But I think Microsoft saw that they were never going to be able to compete with that directly, at least before their acquisition spree, so the Xbox is just a low-cost machine that gets you into Game Pass, long-term.
The problem is that development times exploded upward, so it takes so, so long to get a game out the door, and it appears as if they've done nothing. The first game from the Zenimax acquisition that started development under Microsoft leadership likely won't come out until 2026, for example. Sony already released most of their heavy hitters, and the next big Sony first-party game similar to God of War, Horizon, Uncharted, or The Last of Us is likely several years away still (Wolverine, maybe). The next one after that will probably be a PlayStation 6 game.
As for Killer Instinct, rumor has it we'll see another one in the near future, probably from Bandai Namco now that they're not working on Soul Calibur or Smash.
If I've got money to invest now, I'm going to invest in two things that are likely to make money rather than waiting to see if the first one makes money over a couple of years. Especially when ActiBlizz was on a fire sale.
That's true of PlayStation now too. Sure, it takes a couple of years, but I'm fine with that if it means saving hundreds of dollars and not having a machine next to my TV that only collects dust after playing 3 games on it.
Do you think the Bethesda acquisition by itself, before Activision, would have been enough to turn PlayStation's 2:1 market lead into something far more even? Because I don't. And I think that's why the deal didn't get blocked. There's also tons and tons of third party competition in the gaming industry worldwide, so I don't think they're a threat to competition there either.
Not only Microsoft as a whole is already a much larger company to Sony
With regards to this industry, it really doesn't matter.
On top of that, it seems like a remnant of Console War mindset to consider the ideal of the market to be a 50/50 or a 33/33/33 split.
That is the ideal. It means each one has to try their damnedest to earn the dollar of their consumer. Like you, I'd prefer that it was achieved by any means other than exclusives, but as long as it's a legal business practice, it will be an effective one.
It's not fine just because Microsoft is #4 rather than #2. Being #4 is not such an insignificant position in first place, and it's weird that it's assumed that Microsoft is owed an even position.
They need to be successful enough that they don't leave the console market entirely. Otherwise you create a monopoly in that space. There are some industries that are just colossally difficult for a new competitor to enter, and the console market is one of them. If you lose a competitor, it ruins the market for everyone.
If they want to make their platform more appealing, they should make better games for it.
Yeah, they've got this game Starfield coming out, plus Hellblade II, Fable, Clockwork Revolution, South of Midnight, etc. But games just take so long to make that it takes forever to make up for a deficit they created last generation. It doesn't make the market better for the customer, but it's far worse if Sony's lead is so immense that a console manufacturer doesn't profit from making consoles. That is, unless the entire console market disappears, but I don't think that'll happen for several decades at the earliest.
Yes it does matter. It still gives them advantages
Which haven't manifested in market share.
This makes it harder for upcoming innovators to compete, when that is what they have to face (or be bought out by).
It's shortsighted to assume Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo is what this industry will ever be and it's the most competitive we can expect it to be.
No, it's the only thing one can reasonably expect short an absolutely unpredictable paradigm shift. The longer this market has existed, the more difficult it is for a competitor to get into because the stakes and production values have been raised so high. There's a reason you don't see companies lining up to get into the microprocessor business, and it's because working with silicon requires an enormous capital investment. The only new players who emerged in this industry did so when mobile processors became that paradigm shift to shake things up. While these things are pretty much inherently unpredictable, the only one I can see happening is if consoles disappear entirely in favor of a more unified, open format akin to a PC, which means these three players are no longer in the industry for the reasons they are now.
That is the business that they are in. Lets see how they are doing and how much they need more when these come out. Why should they acquire more if it isn't even proven that they are handling the others well?
The fact that they didn't become a runaway success immediately after acquiring all of those other companies, including Mojang and Bethesda, is why the merger was allowed to go through. If we're talking about breaking up Microsoft, as a non-expert, I imagine the gaming arm of it stays in one piece.
If anything, those layoffs are not a good indication.
Everyone in tech had layoffs. Not only is it common after a merger, it's also common when credit becomes more expensive and the economy contracts.
Worse for who? Nintendo's consoles are profitable and Microsoft can definitely afford to sell units at a loss so that they can sell games, which is the same that Sony does.
It's worse for the consumer if Sony doesn't have a Microsoft to keep them in check. Now if you want a console that plays Grand Theft Auto VI, there's one place to go (because you're not playing that game on a Switch). The market is cornered. Microsoft can only sell consoles at a loss and stay in the market if their install base is large enough to make that money back later. No one knows what their break-even point is, but if they don't sell enough consoles, they're not getting enough game sales or Game Pass subscriptions to make that math make sense, and they have no incentive to continue producing consoles.
I see a lot of these arguments are ultimately taking pity on Microsoft
Don't mistake anything I'm saying as pity for Microsoft. They are where they are in the market because they tried to sell a horrible product back in 2013, for more money than their competitor did, and they divested themselves of a lot of studios that, long-term, could have dug them out of that hole in favor of some bad bets for where the market was headed. Also, I'm a Linux nerd. I could hardly be less interested in seeing Microsoft succeed. What I would hate more though is if Sony ran away with an entire sector of the market when they're doing a lot of nasty anti-consumer stuff too, including trying to acquire exclusivity of a lot of the stuff Microsoft just bought.
Once again you talk about it like the are owed the #1 place rather than having to, you know, compete for it.
Not at all. I'm saying they have little chance of making Sony even sweat without the acquisition or something like it. Even after this deal, they will not be the #1 console. It will just be closer, and close enough that they decide to stay in the console business.
By the way, a paradigm shift is already happening. For a lot of people their phones are their primary computing and gaming platform, and while I'm not a fan of the practices in it, a significant change in the market is anything but unpredictable.
That seems to be a parallel market rather than one that would overtake it. There's a non-zero amount of overlap, and you can find plenty of examples, but there seem to be games built for mobile and games that aren't. If this is the paradigm shift you expect to shake things up, are you saying you expect Apple or Samsung to enter the console market?
It would be a false dichotomy to treat acquisition and leaving the gaming market as the only two options. After all, aren't all the other companies they already acquired appealing enough? Or weren't they worth it? And if they weren't, why would this fix anything?
You know how Spotify has exclusives besides Joe Rogan but still got Joe Rogan exclusive? It's the same answer. A bunch of smaller acquisitions move the needle a little bit each. One large acquisition moves the needle a lot on its own. In aggregate, they all make the product desirable. Microsoft needs to move the needle a lot to catch up to Sony.
Sony cannot relax or they could catch up
Maybe now after this deal they can't relax, but they've been going down this path of requiring arbitrary upgrades from PS4 to PS5 in a way that Microsoft had not been, which is the kind of move you only make when you're relaxed enough to take advantage of your customers. Plus their own exclusivity deals.
If you think it's shady that Sony paid to have FF16 as an exclusive, why are you defending that Microsoft does that to Starfield? At least when it comes to Sony, Microsoft could have outbid Square for exclusivity
Defending is the wrong word. Why do you think Microsoft has Starfield? Because they outbid Sony. This acquisition happened because they outbid Sony as well. At the scale that Microsoft is operating at, they may as well buy them outright; and word on the street was that Zenimax and Square Enix were both seeking to be acquired. Activision only makes like 4-6 franchises anymore anyway, so it's basically the same thing as buying exclusivity to those franchises but with more upside.
It could be funding new studios, it could be playing from Sony's handbook
Exclusivity and studio acquisitions are both out of Sony's handbook. Microsoft just has a bigger pocketbook.
The ideal solution here, is that Microsoft's acquisition should be blocked but Sony should also be punished for anti-consumer tactics.
The ideal solution here is one that forbids exclusivity, but I have no idea how to do that ethically.
To state one last time, my perspective is that all exclusivity sucks, but it's better that Microsoft buys them than for Sony to have an uncontested high-end console market. That is not me taking Microsoft's "side". It's me not wanting a monopoly.
It's for playing a PS4 game vs playing a PS5 game. If you want to play the PS4 version of Street Fighter 6 on a PS5, you can use PS4 controllers. If you want to play the PS5 version of Street Fighter 6 on PS5, you must use PS5 controllers. Basically just arbitrarily forcing you to buy new controllers when the others would have worked fine.
I'm not. Advance Wars isn't on there either. They're going to find a way to sell them to you for way more than the subscription of NSO, in addition to what you're paying for NSO.
Does even Sony utilize the gyro though? Returnal didn't when I played it on a friend's PS5, and that game really felt like it needed it to control comfortably.
That will tend to happen, but there are always ways to find beginners. Guilty Gear's floor system is pretty good at it; it's the higher ranks that have matchmaking issues. Tekken's ranking system is really good, but the netcode is really bad, so you'll have to wait for Tekken 8 to expand your pool of players that you can feasibly have a good match with. Anything that's on Game Pass, like Guilty Gear is now, will have a regular stream of low-level players. It made it really enjoyable to pick up Killer Instinct all these years later, even though I'm on the Steam version, because it's got cross play with Game Pass (note that KI is weird in this case, because only the casual queue is cross play). For a lot of other fighting games, you can usually just ping a beginner role on the game's Discord, which isn't tedious like it sounds, because you only need one other person to play with to enjoy a fighting game.
I also understand that $60-$70 can be steep, but I'd highly recommend you try playing at launch with one fighting game that interests you. Street Fighter 6 is still enjoying a larger online population (meaning more low-level players) than most fighting games, historically, have ever seen even at their peaks. Mortal Kombat 1 is launching in September and Tekken 8 will likely launch within a year, and both seem to be focused on making single player modes to make that launch price more worth it. Or you can hold out for Project L, but that might be more than a year or two away, and you've got several big opportunities to experience that launch day period between now and then.
I’ve been having some thoughts lately that I would have believed crazy just a few years ago. I’m starting to think it might be time to move on from my PS5 and triple A gaming as a whole. I’ve had a PlayStation from the PS2 all the way to the latest generation of consoles. I remember fondly time spent roaming the lands of...
I have a beefy PC because it plays nearly everything. I have a Steam Deck because it plays most of that stuff when I'm on a train. My favorite games of the past few years run the gamut when it comes to system requirements, and since about 2017 especially, I have largely not been impressed by AAA games, with some exceptions. There are some genres that see more love than others, but chances are whatever type of game you enjoy most is out there and just not getting the most marketing. I've found some of my favorite games ever by just checking boxes for features that were important to me in Steam's advanced search. You have no commitment to buy the biggest games just because they've got the most hype.
Vagante is the one I remember most clearly for that example. I really loved Streets of Rogue, and I wanted another 4-player, online and local multiplayer, action roguelike.
Dead Cells was billed as a metroidvania roguelike, but it's more like a Castlevania roguelike; pre-Symphony of the Night. So I searched for metroidvania roguelikes and came across A Robot Named Fight. You get a new version of Super Metroid every time you play. It's phenomenal.
I got really into Fantasy Strike one summer and finally understood what made fighting games tick. I looked for other fighting games that worked on Linux. Today, the only fighting game I know that doesn't work on Linux is Dragon Ball FighterZ, but at the time, there was literally only one other fighting game that worked on Linux short of emulation, and that was Skullgirls. Skullgirls is now my favorite game ever.
PS5 Pro is expected late 2024, with the PS6 expected 2028. If Microsoft is to try to keep pace, as someone who doesn't have either console, it will be interesting to see if they also brand this as a mid-generation refresh or if they stick to their guns they've been touting for a while of being "beyond generations".
Cost to performance ebbs and flows with each console generation, and console generations are getting longer, or perhaps disappearing if Microsoft is to be believed. PC gaming's market share has been steadily rising for over a decade now, to the point where PC versions of some games that used to be console-only releases now outsell their console counterparts. There are a lot of reasons we could guess as to why this is, but I don't think they're wholly two different markets, and I don't think Sony thinks this either, regardless of what they said in court. They're preparing to set up their own PC storefront, probably without anything that will make people want to use it besides exclusives, even though that's failed for everyone else who tried it, but signs are pointing toward them preparing to do it.
Even if Microsoft wasn't bringing their games to PC for the longest time, there are other factors that would have pushed Sony in that direction. The games that they're making are immensely expensive to make, and they can't necessarily bank on console sales recouping that cost as guaranteed as they used to. And then there was also the supply shortages caused by the pandemic that prevented PS5s from being picked up by ready and willing customers.
What are some game genres / styles you like that aren't being made anymore, or are being mde but not very often? angielski
For me it’s first person puzzle games. I can think of maybe a dozen off the top of my head that came out in the last decade. I especially enjoy when they’re open world. The ability to just quit a puzzle that’s stumped you and go try something else for a little bit is incredibly refreshing.
Developers and Analysts Sound Off: Does the Next-Gen Nintendo Switch Need to Happen in 2024? (nordic.ign.com)
What game mechanics do you love and hate? angielski
I love hearing about unique takes on game mechanics. Someone recently convinced me that limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
Pet peeve, games that won't let you save
I wish all games would just let you save whenever you want to! Why is using checkpoints and auto saves so common?...
Square Enix promises better Xbox support going forward (www.gematsu.com) angielski
Hackers are infecting Call of Duty players with a self-spreading malware | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com) angielski
Activision said it brought the 2009-released game offline while it investigates "an issue."
Xbox's biggest crisis right now isn't games. It's hardware. (Opinion - Jez Corden) (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
"Today, PlayStation revealed that its PS5 has sold 40 million units. Microsoft doesn’t share hardware numbers typically, but court documents, math, and slides from an ID@Xbox in Brazil seem to suggest the Xbox Series X|S line-up is around 20-23 million units sold globally. That essentially puts the PS5 at a 2:1 advantage...
Two Classic Zelda Blockbusters Just Dropped For Switch (kotaku.com) angielski
Game Boy Color classics Oracle of Ages and Seasons come to Switch Online
PlayStation 5 sales surpass 40m worldwide (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
“PlayStation 5 has now sold 40 million consoles worldwide, Sony has announced.”
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I Played Project L [Maximilian Dood] (www.youtube.com) angielski
I'm not the biggest fan of air teching, but the rest of the game looks great. I just hope it's actually playable offline.
Time to Move on From PS5?
I’ve been having some thoughts lately that I would have believed crazy just a few years ago. I’m starting to think it might be time to move on from my PS5 and triple A gaming as a whole. I’ve had a PlayStation from the PS2 all the way to the latest generation of consoles. I remember fondly time spent roaming the lands of...
PlayStation 5 Pro ‘Project Trinity’ Details And Release Date (keytogaming.com) angielski
PS5 Pro is expected late 2024, with the PS6 expected 2028. If Microsoft is to try to keep pace, as someone who doesn't have either console, it will be interesting to see if they also brand this as a mid-generation refresh or if they stick to their guns they've been touting for a while of being "beyond generations".