I’m not sure about anyone else, but I found there to be a lot of homogeneity here. The games that were the most up my alley were the ones I’d already heard of, but there were a lot of Vampire Survivors-inspired games and city builders.
So the thing is, regardless of current campaigns to stop killing games, this is like the definition of throwing good money after bad…unless they actually offered customers assurances that they’ll get their money’s worth out of an up front payment to play the game. Because without that assurance, however long your free to play multiplayer game sustained an audience, the version where you have to buy the game up front will be worse off.
And what’s to stop this game from dying all over again? There’s still no way to run the game server yourself, right? Why do the work if they’re not going to future proof it against an outcome they couldn’t avoid the last time?
He looks really cool. Unfortunately, this game needs some big system changes that I hope, but don’t expect, they’ll make some day. The way burst works, in particular, would be at the top at the list, and as long as there are good universal defensive options, more kameos can have ambush assists (the ones that can be done at any time), which would really open up the freedom of the game, where MK1 is at its best.
It would be one thing if I knew how much I had to do ahead of time, but until I’ve seen most of it before, I have no idea. There was some upgrade I could get only after finishing the entire goron temple, race, and some such, and I was on the final step of it when I ran out of time. I can’t do just the last step of it; I had to repeat at least the race, maybe the temple, in order to get to that spot again. I decided instead, “Nah, I’m good,” and put the game down. I respect that they tried to do a lot with a little on the development side, but it introduced tedium for me, the player, to be within those constraints.
That’s probably the Zelda game I had the most negative reaction to. Oh, you’re going to undo all of my progress because I didn’t know how much more there was to do in this quest line before the world reset? No, I’m not going to do all of that again.
Mortal Kombat 9, also known as “Mortal Kombat” or “Mortal Kombat (2011)” is where the modern canon starts. It’s also delisted from sale, so you’ll need to find a used copy for consoles or pirate it for PC. It’s a soft reboot of the story and also establishes the bar for what fighting game story modes should be. It’s campy and leans into it, and that’s the tone that MK always has when it’s at its best.
Mortal Kombat X and Mortal Kombat 11 are sequels to that, and they escalate the ridiculousness. These are direct sequels, so while they make efforts to ensure you can understand what’s happening even if you haven’t played the games before, MKX is best enjoyed after playing MK9, and MK11 is best enjoyed after playing MKX.
Mortal Kombat 1 is another soft reboot, but (slight spoiler) it also does this while preserving the canon of, and sequeling, MK9, MKX, and MK11.
MK9 is a throwback to your favorite characters with modern (at the time) mechanics.
MKX brings back the run button and tries to keep all of the different versions of each character over the years in the same game via its “variation” system.
MK11 tries to do away with some superfluous features of MKX while adding more defensive options.
MK1 introduces “kameos”, which is like a Marvel vs. Capcom 1 style assist system.
There’s reason to believe that the next Xbox will just be a PC with a coat of paint, the same way that the Steam Deck is, and so this preservation team would, in that case, probably be built to legitimately emulate the Xbox 360 on PC, because that’s where the biggest compatibility gap is.
No. As others have said, there’s just a lack of information about what’s coming out. Basically starting last year, companies got fed up with announcing release dates that they can’t meet, which has a tangible marketing expense on their side, among other problems. So now we basically only hear about games’ release dates when they’re imminent. This year, we’ve gotten:
Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore
Balatro
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
Penny’s Big Breakaway
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Tekken 8
The Thaumaturge
Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes
…and while it’s divisive, I quite liked Alone in the Dark.
We’ve got the likes of Palworld and Enshrouded in early access, with No Rest for the Wicked to join them shortly.
There are a couple of games from smaller developers and publishers I’ve got my eye on with likely or confirmed 2024 release dates. They may have a wide spread in quality when reviews hit, but some of them could be winners, especially since they’re in genres currently underrepresented by the wider market:
Aero GPX
Agent 64: Spies Never Die
Big Boy Boxing
Broken Roads
Conscript
Commandos: Origins
Core Decay
Fallen Aces
Kingmakers
Phantom Fury
The Plucky Squire
Streets of Rogue 2
Tempest Rising
Titan Quest II
V Rising (1.0 release)
Warside
Then some other noteworthy games that are likely going to be very good and have a real shot at releasing this year:
Avowed
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
Dragon Age: Dreadwolf
Gears 6
Hollow Knight: Silksong
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Judas
Mina the Hollower
The Rise of the Golden Idol
What this year doesn’t have, at least so far, is a clear front runner like Baldur’s Gate 3 or God of War, but there’s more than half of the year left.
It is an excuse for Valve, because their business is selling thousands of games that do not have ARM-native builds. No action of Valve’s made Steam worse for Mac users. An action of Apple’s did that. At some point, it’s not worth it for Valve to update their application to be better for a platform that’s actively hostile to its business partners.
Is it perhaps a slow, laggy mess because Apple decided to break from the same convention that everyone else uses and has used for decades and now has to emulate a different processor architecture? Apple is the one who made gaming shittier on Macs, and they’re going to point to Death Stranding and Resident Evil 4, expecting the flood gates to be open, and now everyone’s going to port their games to Mac. Except they’re not. Apple won’t understand why not, but once again, as they’ve always done, breaking from convention and establishing your own standard that doesn’t play nice with what everyone else is building around is bad for developers. Before this, they were still making developers’ lives harder by not supporting certain graphics APIs. Valve made a Vulkan translation layer to Apple’s Metal, since Apple wouldn’t officially allow for Vulkan, and that was shortly before the architecture change.