I’m a very recent fan of loot games, and I only briefly tried Torchlight 1 as more of an academic exercise to see how the genre evolved over time. There was some special sauce that I observed starting around Borderlands 3 or Pre-Sequel (that I suspect originated in Diablo 3) around class design that was still absent from Torchlight. Other than that, I didn’t form much of an opinion on it.
I’d argue that a game like Fallout, 1 or 3, is not 99% combat, and that’s probably where the disconnect is. They intend for you to do some detective work and even solve problems without combat plenty of times too, even when you have a combat-heavy build. Pokemon is a strange one here too, because that series is built around a rock paper scissors system such that you should be regularly be switching up which attacks you’re using. I’d love to see if your complaints hold up to Larian’s games on tactician difficulty.
Would you mind listing some of the ones you’ve tried? Describing melee as spam clicking sounds like you’ve either only played real-time RPGs or didn’t understand the tactics that come with the trade-offs on your character sheet. Fallout itself comes in a ton of different flavors across the series.
Diablo III and IV don’t have a monopoly on the genre. There’s Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and the Borderlands games, all playable offline, even in multiplayer. They’re not exactly Diablo, but you’ll hardly get closer than Grim Dawn, and there’s no reason you need to be married to the Diablo IP anyway. That kind of brand stickiness is how you get taken advantage of.
Personally, when something like that doesn’t respect my values, I’m not even finding myself tempted by them these days. Oh, it’s always online? It’s dead to me. There’s a deluge of other stuff to play, including games that are similar but respect my values.
If consumers’ regular buying habits at the time were not to buy on Steam by default (which they weren’t), then it’s unimpressive, and not a feasible poster child, for one’s game’s ability to survive in the modern market without Steam. That’s the point I was making. Brick and mortar was the de facto storefront for PC games at the time that most of those games came out, so it was not strange for an always-online game to sell itself online-only on their own web sites. These days, skipping Steam is not a path most will take, and for good reason.
Steam was a launcher for games most people still bought on discs back then. I remember 2007 was the first time I bought a game on Steam, and it wasn’t a regular habit for years after that. It wasn’t about which other digital store you used; it was that, as a digital store, it held no power in the market compared to brick and mortar. Plus, back then, PC gaming was definitively second fiddle to consoles.
Of course, but…broken clock, you know? A large percentage of personal computers will be freed from Windows in large part because of Valve, even though they profit off of legalized child gambling addiction. And walled gardens in mobile will be broken down in large part because of Epic, which uses dark patterns to trick people out of their money in pursuit of a cultural hodge podge of nonsense that won’t even exist in a few decades.
To be honest, Epic is doing a good job of tearing down walled gardens in places like mobile, and we’ll probably be better off for it. But yeah, they’ve done a terrible job of competing with Steam.
In 2005 when Roblox came out? No. League of Legends came out in 2009, and I had barely started shopping on Steam for non-Valve games back then. Most of us were still buying games on disc at Walmart. Minecraft was doing early access before Steam had the feature.
A software company can run its own store, and make its own launcher. Just look at so many of the big titles over the last two decades: Minecraft, League, Tarkov, War Thunder, Roblox, and more recently Hytale.
This is also survivorship and selection bias though. Not only would you not have heard of the ones that failed, but these are the games confident enough to not launch on Steam in the first place. Several of them are so old that Steam was in its infancy and not the de facto storefront when they came out.
Plenty of great games are not immune to failing even when they’re on Steam. The market is tough. But at the same time, it makes perfect sense that Steam has a rule preventing you from taking advantage of their infrastructure for marketing and communicating with customers while you make it available on Epic first for less money.