The unanimous game of the year last year is a turn-based RPG, and I can promise you Metaphor: ReFantazio this year will do well critically and commercially, just like Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth did earlier this year. There are plenty of turn-based RPGs to go around. If you meant turn-based tactics or strategy, same thing; plenty of those to go around as well.
RTS sort of peaked with StarCraft II, at least in terms of popularity, but you find some here and there. Battle Aces and Stormgate are both from ex-Blizzard devs chasing that high, and both are live service, so those two will soon be dead, but there are others out there that are less popular that come out from time to time.
That may be true, but you can also see, for instance, that there are a ton of Chinese users who only play Dota 2 or only play PUBG. You’ll see the percentage of Simplified Chinese users ebb and flow with a similar cadence to just those two games.
20 years ago, we paid for online because it was better than what you got for free on PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo. Now an online subscription is probably one of several reasons that people are moving to PC.
GTA V is second only to Minecraft in copies sold across all of video games, and it still appears in the top 10 for copies sold on most months, 11 years after its initial release. It’s also available on other stores and consoles, so Steam is not a complete picture.
Those games are played by a demographic that only plays that game, or close enough. They’d consider themselves a Dota player before they consider themselves a video game player in general. These games aren’t played exclusively by that type of person, but a large part of their audience is the type of player who just plays that game. I’m having trouble digging it up, but the person who created Steamspy a number of years ago, before privacy laws made public profiles opt-in and interfered with its ability to collect data, found that the majority of Steam accounts only had a single game in their libraries.
#4: No early access games, except for games that were in early access and hit v1.0 this year. Even if it’s a great game this year, odds are it’ll be a better game when it’s done, so I made this thread to call out games that are done.
I can see that. I was pretty happy with my ending though, and I have a feeling there’s no way to make everyone happy. The game does let you know right at the beginning that the player character is no saint.
Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore (Steam, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox X/S)
Arzette is a very specific joke for nerds like me who know too much about the history of video games. It’s designed to look and sound just like a Phillips CD-i Legend of Zelda game; a cursory glance at the credits seems to indicate that someone from Digital Foundry may have consulted on it to get it right. A friend of mine has a CD-i that he allowed me to play some time ago, and you have no idea how badly games like those play, especially on that awful controller. Fortunately, this game plays totally acceptably while still having a slight metroidvania angle to its 2D action platforming levels. It’s got a bit of a slow start, but after that, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, so if you’re in on the joke, you’ll likely have a good time.
Duck Detective: The Secret Salami (Steam, GOG, Switch)
If you liked The Case of the Golden Idol and want more of it ahead of the launch of its sequel, Duck Detective is a miniature version of that that’s suitable for children and still fun for adults. I won’t say it’s quite as good as Golden Idol, and it’s definitely not as long, but it’s priced accordingly, and it’s a good way to spend a weekend afternoon.
Penny’s Big Breakaway (Steam, PS5, Switch, Xbox X/S)
Penny’s Big Breakaway is a 3D platformer somewhere between Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario 3D Land, I suppose, though that’s not a perfectly accurate picture of it either, and it’s also got a lot of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater DNA. You’ve got a yo-yo that you can use to attack, swing, or ride for mobility and speed. It’s very close to being one of my favorite platformers ever, but there’s just a bit too much jank around how the game handles certain edge cases with its physics system, and it can break the flow of an otherwise very good game. If you’re anything like me though, that won’t stop you from having a lot of fun with it.
This is a puzzle-driven metroidvania with a simple retro-inspired aesthetic that aims to teach you how to interact with it wordlessly, and it usually succeeds at it. I’m honestly not sure how to fill out the rest of this blurb without ruining the intended experience, but while I wasn’t this game’s biggest fan and wasn’t interested in digging into its secrets post-credits, I did enjoy my time with it.
I’ve played the Witcher games before, but this RPG is the most Polish game I’ve ever played, in a very good way. The RPG systems are fairly light, and the progression system is very atypical, but probably the best way to describe this is a narrative adventure game like Life is Strange but with a turn based combat system along the lines of what I understand Child of Light to be, where each action takes a certain amount of time, and it displays that order at the top. The combat is fun, and the RPG systems and branching paths offer some replayability, but I think the real star of the show here is that the story is just so different than basically any other game I can think of. It takes place in 1905 Warsaw, where national boundaries are constantly redrawn around an expanding Russian empire, what that means for the citizens and their politics, and how the superstitions of their day play into that.