Kingdom Come: Deliverance II did this really well just this year. Largely a story about contrasting a desire for adventure with the horrors and realities of war, it also has quests that are full of comedy. You can try to attract a pack of wolves using what the shepherd refers to as his absolute dumbest sheep; you can get blackout drunk with a band of mercenaries who may or may not have killed your childhood friends; you can clean up and decorate a crypt full of loose bones for a man who speaks only in rhymes, poorly, and might be a ghost.
Well, the difference is that now you’re paying for it by viewing ads and, down to personal preference, a worse product. With commercial interruptions, you’re saying how much your time is worth, if nothing else. In any case, yes, that’s worth it to a lot of people, and it gives niche creators power over their current or former bosses.
See, that’s just it. This entire business doesn’t survive on ad revenue anymore. Everything that isn’t Gamespot and IGN have folded, because the money that used to be there in ads isn’t there anymore. Subscriptions are what keep companies like this sustainable and afloat. Kinda Funny came from former IGN employees, and they knew the power they had to bring their audience to them rather than surrendering to the whims of IGN. Digital Foundry, Giant Bomb, Video Games Chronicle, MinnMax, GamesBeat, Aftermath…they all transitioned to doing this.
If people were powerless to the whims of a corporation, Kinda Funny wouldn’t exist, but if you believe you’re powerless, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Rainbow Six 1 (GOG) and 3 (Steam) are both playable via LAN and some of my favorite co-op games ever. The first game may require hacking some easy-to-read level config files to make them finishable, but 3 doesn’t have that problem. Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear isn’t available for purchase anymore. I hear SWAT 4 (GOG) is great for scratching this itch too, but I haven’t played it myself.
While not so story focused, you could also co-op Star Wars: Battlefront II; the good one, from 2005 (GOG).
As a cautionary tale, I said the same things about Embracer acquiring unused properties and underutilized studios in an attempt to revive more niche series for underserved segments of the market.
Wasn’t prediction baked into the netcode very early in the FPS genre? I wasn’t playing multiplayer in the Doom days, but by the late 90s, you wouldn’t have latency so much as you’d have rubberbanding. Games also use very little bandwidth, so 56K was no different than broadband, from my recollection.
Not just tariffs, but Trump is trying his damnedest to add more inflationary pressure to the economy by firing the people who are keeping interest rates high, counteracting the tariffs.
I have! I enjoyed it quite a bit. I’m not really so much looking for “boomer shooters”, but the style of shooters that postdated those from the late 90s through the 2010s, especially when they include a campaign and multiplayer in the same package, which is harder and harder to come by these days…and often times, they create a dependency on external servers when they do. I didn’t even have any appetite for Doom Eternal or The Dark Ages. But this was the extra layer on top of Doom 2016 that I wanted in order to keep it interesting.
I think I’m saying that what we changed from is better than what it changed into. Chasing ideas being the desired goal, because it leads to permutations of those ideas. So it has changed. It can change again.
I’m drowning in a deluge of great games to play, personally. The exception there being first-person shooters and racing games, and racing games are starting to fill in the gaps.
“Iterate quickly” isn’t corporate bullshit. It’s just English. There are always those that tag along to something successful and find success themselves, like Terraria and Starbound to Minecraft; or Apex Legends and Fortnite to PUBG. But if you spend 4 years chasing an idea that came out in 2017, you end up with Hyperscape or Concord, unless there’s truly such an insatiable appetite that customers can’t get enough. In a world of live service games, they look to retain those players for years. Decades ago, they didn’t. We had so many first person shooters coming out every year, single and multiplayer, that it would be a full time job to count them all. Most of them brought new ideas to the table, and across many releases it would take years of iteration trying things that are slightly different than the last idea that would eventually lead to things like aim down sights becoming a fairly standard feature of the genre.
Fortnite is a still-very-visible version of this exact concept. They were able to iterate quickly. Mostly because they just adapted their dud of a horde mode game into a completely new genre using the same mechanics, but they still did it quickly and found that success. We’re also seeing it in the likes of Getting Over It, Lethal Company, Vampire Survivors, and plenty of other games that spawned imitators.