I actually enjoyed Outer Worlds a decent bit, but I would consider it much less of a space game than Starfield. For all that people rag on Starfield about the ships just being loading screens, you got to manually assemble spaceships, and then walk around inside of them. Outer Worlds was really just spaceships as loading screens.
I don’t really go in for Annapurna games, for a number of reasons.
Starbound is I think very much reliant on you wanting to play it as a sandbox. It definitely has a lot of shortcomings. It sounds like you didn’t play it with mods, or at least with Frackin’ Universe, because FU solves most of the QoL pain points from the vanilla game (like movement being slow). The boss arenas actually used to allow you to build in them, but it completely ruined the difficulty; you could go into any boss room, build a box around yourself, and just whittle them down imperviously. While that might be someone’s preference, I don’t fault the devs for not wanting that, and that’s pretty standard for games to remove ‘cheesing’ exploits for bosses.
Starsector is really interesting to me, because I don’t feel that way about it at all.
I almost never end up running out of command points, if only because I only need to re-task ships if something is going wrong. Usually if I’m running low on them, it’s because I’m trying to kill off incoming DPS by focusing fire on one ship at a time, and at that point I should probably be retreating anyways. I can’t speak to the skill tree changes in detail, because honestly I mostly rely on them for the larger fleet bonuses, or tech unlocks (e.g. AI). They never struck me as being impactful enough to make my ship into a ‘hero unit’, so I never tried to see if they could.
The combat is definitely (imho) about fleet composition rather than fleet control.
But really, combat is only one small part of the game to me. Exploration, missions, building up colonies, looting ruins, etc etc. That’s what I really love about Starsector, and what sets it apart to me.
That is actually #5 on my Small Games list. It sort of straddles the line in terms of size and complexity, but in the end I think it really falls under being a small, Indie game, being as it’s FOSS and community-developed and all.
Hey everyone, I’m a big player of Space Games of all forms, and this mini-genre (or ‘theme’, if you prefer) really has a TON of range and depth, and is a very fertile ground for indie and unique projects. I was recently playing a game called Avorion, after owning it for years without ever really engaging with it, and...
Yeah, Freelancer is very special. I really think it’s completely unappreciated for how open the world really is, because it’s very easy just to follow the storyline and never just sod off and explore the world. I recently was replaying it with a bunch of mods, and I went exploring the ice asteroid fields in the south end of New York system, and it’s so atmospheric and cool.
I’ve never actually played Warframe, mostly because I’m not really into competitive arena shooters (with CS:GO and Apex being notable exceptions, though I’ve long since left them behind), and from my short glances that’s how it appeared to me. Does it take place in space?
Haha, I admit that is my personal bias. I was burned in several ways as an E:D Kickstarter backer, especially when the “all updates” part turned out not to include… all updates.
But honestly, I just lost interest. I was doing rare goods trading routes and Frontier nuked them into the ground, and it became very obvious to me that they wanted to force people to play a certain way.
Wrt Mass Effect, I personally think that “space game” shouldn’t just be limited to “flying a spaceship”. I think it’s fair to say spaceships should be part of it, but Halo or KOTOR or any number of other RPGs that are literally all about space aliens and other planets wouldn’t qualify.
I think that Space Sim or certainly Space Combat sub-genres are fair to require actually flying the spacecraft yourself, but Space Games ought to be a big house, imho, to include RPGs and tactics games and even just Alien Planets, so long as the alien part is really the point (which is why I’d consider Stranded: Alien Dawn more of a space game than Rimworld, though it’s a pretty subjective position to be sure).
Yeah, it’s definitely very intimidating to get into, and I don’t think I could start now just because it feels like it’s too late; already 21 years old as a game.
If you want a space game that is very similar to Eve, but not online, check out Astrox Imperium. Be warned, it is very janky and indie.
I’ve got a bunch of other recommendations, but I’ll save those for my med/small posts, so I can write more about them.
I think that I was probably spoiled by Eve in that regard. It has a lot of “wow” moments too. Or SC, though obviously that came after E:D. I’m also just not sure it really had the impact on the genre that the others have, though some of their impacts have not all been positive, obviously.
Yeah, I still play it. I’m based down in Eldjaerin in Minmatar space, right near losec where I do my capital production.
Occasionally I like to try to bait the Russians in Frulegur and Konora (e.g. Coastal Brotherhood) into attacking my carriers or HAW dreads, but I think they’ve learned not to anymore. :P
I will probably add E:D to the list, but under protest. ;P
I kickstarted it, and I just honestly didn’t find it that much fun. Once Frontier started doing lots of “balance” changes that nerfed money accrual, I really bounced off. I’m not someone who plays any single game exclusively, but it felt like it was going to take 60+ hours just to move up each ship level, and I wasn’t gonna wait 6+ months realtime, or however long it would’ve taken, to buy an Anaconda (and not be able to afford insurance, and lose it anyways).
If you’re a fan of the procgen exploration, Avorion, Starbound, or Elite:Dangerous
If you’re a fan of the multiplayer interaction, Eve Online or Star Citizen.
If you’re a fan of the base-building, Space Engineers or X4.
If you’re a fan of the Alien interactions, that’s very tough, but probably X4 or Star Control 2/ The Ur Quan Masters. xD
There aren’t a lot of other single games that have as many systems as NMS does.
I think that I would probably say start to check out X4 if you want 3D, and Starbound if you don’t mind 2D. Be warned, X4 does not fit well with “not much time to play”, though.
Navok noted that if a game costs $100 million to make over five years, it has to beat what the company could have returned investing a similar amount in the stock market over the same period. “For the 5 years prior to Feb 2024, the stock market averaged a rate of return of 14.5%. Investing that $100m in the stock market would net you a return of $201m, so this is our ROI baseline,” he explained.
This is why capitalism ruins everything. So it’s not even about making art that is profitable, it’s about beating out other investment opportunities that someone could have chosen, even if it meant the art didn’t get made.
That is so ass-backwards.
Investment should be about wanting to grow a company whose products you believe in, both to see returns when those products perform well, but also to enjoy the future products.
Someone whose attitude is “I don’t care about your products at all, I just care about cash ROI” will turn around and short your stock and disparage you, if they think it’ll net them more money. In other words, they won’t actually look out for the best interests of the company, and will always be looking out for opportunities to plunder the business for more profit.
And this is supposed to create a healthy market for goods? Please.
“The free market makes goods compete to see what customers prefer.” Apparently not.
Apparently it creates a situation where the products can be profitable and amazing and well-loved, but a bunch of wealthy assholes who don’t care about the products at all can decide the company isn’t up to their standards, and punish or kill it.
There was another post here on Beehaw about housing costs, where someone noted that “voting with your wallet” doesn’t work because wealthy people can “out-vote” you, on a level that even collectively you can’t compete with, and this really illustrates their point well.
Late edit:
I think it bears saying that under this model of ROI calculation, depending on how well other industries are doing, it is entirely possible that no video game could feasibly outperform the market for a given timeframe… so should the whole games industry just fucking shut down in that case?
I don’t know how to encourage investment without the stock market
I invest in stuff that’s not stocks all the time. When I give money to someone so that they will hopefully create a cool new product in the future (e.g. a video), I’m not paying for an individual product, I’m investing in them as a creator in hopes for future ROI. That’s Patreon.
We treat the addiction to wealth accrual different from any other addiction, in that we laud it, but make no mistake that it is addictive. Watching numbers in your account go up gives you a rush, just as sure as watching numbers in a video game.
When other addictions cause harm, we push people to get treatment, or at very least condemn the addiction. When someone is addicted to the accrual of wealth, even to the detriment of others, we call them, ‘genius’, ‘savvy’, ‘visionary’, or ‘shrewd’.
That could work if these firms were somehow competitors, but these aren’t Sony-aligned studios they’re buying, these are studios that were releasing games on Xbox.
This is definitely a case of, “what makes stock line go up? New games, Big names, More stuff!” Then later, “uh oh, did that and stock price not going up. Layoffs mean less cost, now stock line go up again!”
As someone who used to really like Phil, I agree with this. He’s clearly banking on his popularity as a “celebrity” within the gaming community to put a smiling spin on what is a clearly horrible business record.
The question here is not whether Microsoft does the same things that all businesses do (i.e. be evil Capitalist monstrosities that run people’s livelihoods over in the name of investor greed)- that much is obvious.
The question is whether Phil Spencer is actively enabling this behavior and also covering for it- which he is.
And that is why, as the article suggests, people need to stop treating him as anything other than a corporate representative who wants to extract as much value as he can before it all runs into the ground.
The article didn’t say he needs to go, they said people need to stop treating him as though he is actually on the side of consumers and employees, rather than investors.
The literal last line of the article is
I hope moving forward Xbox fans and the media hold Spencer more accountable for future mistakes, cuts, and failures.
PSP, followed by Gameboy Color, followed by Advance SP.
I recently got a Retroid4, and took an amazing trip down memory lane with Mana Khemia, MG:AC!D, FF Tactics Advanced/A2, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, and a bunch of pkmn ROM hacks. All of them easily held up today.
Unless SteamDeck counts, in which case it wins hands-down.
I think that calling BOtW similar to other full-scale console games of 2017 like Sniper Elite 4, Middle Earth: Shadow of War, Nier Automata, Prey, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, RE7, or AssCreed Origins, is a biiiiiiig stretch.
It was a huge jump for Nintendo (it was basically putting GameCube-level games on a handheld), but it was still far behind other consoles. Witcher 3 (2015) even eventually released on the Switch in 2019, and it was massively graphically gimped compared to ahemreal consoles.
I didn’t say it’s not good, I said it’s not equivalent to console releases of that year. Graphics isn’t everything, and I still enjoy playing Pax Imperia and Nox, but that doesn’t change that it was a handheld game, not a console game. Pokemon Red/Blue were also some of the best selling games the year they released, but that doesn’t make the Gameboy equivalent as a console to PSX or N64 either.
I fired up 7DTD a couple months ago, and I definitely did not feel like it was anywhere close to being done. Releasing out of EA feels like they just want to be done with it.
i avoid hype but as a massive fan of the original kcd and the honesty of this reveal, im hyped! wont be pre-ordering though, never pre-order its bad for the industry and consumers.
the consensus I’ve gotten is that the MTXs are largely meaningless because they’re so easy to get in-game
I would push back on this a bit. Some of these items are easy to acquire small quantities of, but are not available in infinite amounts, such as (as far as I know) the fast travel tokens. I am 20-ish hours in, and I think I have 8 fast travel tokens, which means that I really just don’t use them, and hoard them for emergencies.
Convenience is addictive, and people absolutely will have trouble not pouring tens or hundreds of dollars into MTX once they get a taste of the convenience it offers. Ask ESO users how many don’t have ESO Plus; it’s incredibly common to have, because it gives you free fast travel and a dedicated, infinite inventory for crafting materials. It’s weaponized convenience.
Other items in DD2 I’ve used CheatEngine to dupe, but I think most people (and obviously, no one on console) aren’t going to be able to figure out hex editors, and shouldn’t have to.
The media focusing on these fringe groups lends legitimacy to them and puts a spotlight on them, which in turn draws people on their side but unaware of them, to them.
By attacking it when your attacks can’t actually harm the group per se, all you’re really doing is giving it visibility. No one’s saying it’s creating racists/ bigots, but it is giving them a more powerful platform, since they’re no longer just a bunch of bigoted individuals, but are now Gamergate™, whose dumb ideas the media will publish articles about.
No one writes articles about stupid crap that people say on /b/ as individuals, but Gamergate, Q-Anon, Pizzagate, MAPs, etc all have had many tens if not hundreds of articles written about them, and they’re all just 4-chan campaigns.
These Right wing campaigns don’t have a platform on which to advance a narrative. 4-chan and Truth Social and 8-chan and Parlor/Gab/whatever aren’t frequented by most ‘normal’ folks, and the only reason these campaigns reached mass audience is because news media puffs them up for clicks.
There are many more hundreds of right-wing troll/ hate campaigns that go nowhere, because they never manage to catch the attention of the media.
It’s nice to see someone acknowledge that it started it as an actual, important conversation about the shady monetary influence that game publishers have on gaming news sites. That’s what made the hijacking and eventual media branding of Gamergate even worse, because the media bought into their narrative that there were the same conversations, by the same people, and everyone sort of threw the baby out with the 4-chan-brigaded bathwater.
If you look up histories of Gamergate now, sites like Vox actually talk how it began on 4-chan and later 8-chan as a troll campaign, but no one ever really talks about what it was they were hijacking.
I think a lot of those conversations, like publishers’ power over reviews via withholding review copies (as perhaps most famously, Bethesda did to Kotaku), and what it meant as a reader to trust the sites that hadn’t been blacklisted, got totally forgotten after the dust had settled.
It also says a lot about our mass media, and it’s willingness to elevate and legitimize troll campaigns for the clicks.
Who is talking about 1.0? The last Letter from the Chairman, published 4 days ago, is all about Alpha 4.0, not 1.0. All of the recent ISCs and SCLs have been about 3.23 and 4.0 features.
When games like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake were out, Boomers were what? 30 to 50 years old?
You mean, like most of us Millennial gamers are now (30+)? The youngest Millennials, born in 1996, will be 30 in 2 years.
These games clearly took inspiration from 90s FPS games, which 👌, but they were played mostly by Gen Xers and Millenials, not Boomers.
I’m a middle-Millennial (1988), and Doom was well before my time as a gamer. I was 5 years old in 1993. Halo (2001) was more my generation, just barely. The oldest Millennials in 1993 were 12 years old, which was not the target age group for Doom.
GenX? Sure, they played Doom, but Boomers were by far the larger age group playing “Mature” games at that time. Video games have never been just for children.
This is just the same thing EA did with Mass Effect: Andromeda. Exec management wanted out of AAA singleplayer games, so they set the ME:A team up for failure, and then used that failure to justify the change to the shareholders.
WB wants out of large budget games, so they created a flop to justify it.
Over on Hackernews, a dev from a German emulator project that Nintendo shut down was saying that their settlement included a similarly large sum of money, but it was only actually to be paid if the other conditions of the settlement weren’t met, and that if they were, the “debt” was dropped after x years, basically insurance to ensure compliance.
Thoughts on Space Games, Part 3: Too Many Tiny Games! angielski
Hi everyone, here’s the final post of my Space Game recommendations:...
Thoughts on Space Games, Part 2: Top-5 Medium-Sized Games + angielski
Hi everyone, here’s my list of Medium-sized, “Rise of the RTS” list:...
Thoughts on Space Games, Part 1: Top-5 AAA Games angielski
Hey everyone, I’m a big player of Space Games of all forms, and this mini-genre (or ‘theme’, if you prefer) really has a TON of range and depth, and is a very fertile ground for indie and unique projects. I was recently playing a game called Avorion, after owning it for years without ever really engaging with it, and...
For The First Time In A Decade, Nobody Is Working On Cyberpunk 2077 (kotaku.com)
I’ve been waiting for new game plus to replay, but it sounds like that just may not be in the works.
Former Square Enix exec on why Final Fantasy sales don’t meet expectations and chances of recouping insane AAA budgets | Game World Observer (gameworldobserver.com)
GamesIndustry.biz: Microsoft's mystifying mismanagement (www.gamesindustry.biz)
If you’re a developer working for Xbox, what can you do to secure your job?
It's Time To Stop Giving Xbox Boss Phil Spencer A Pass (Opinion) (kotaku.com)
What is your favourite game console?
It sounds dumb but my pick would be the SNES. There’s just something about 16 bit games I love....
Maybe hot take: as a handheld, the regular switch is an awful handheld
Have you ever held a switch? Its long, flat and the controllers suck. Awful dpad and bad sticks....
Why are there two different genres both called ARPG?
ARPG aka Action Role Playing Game....
7 Days to Die is finally leaving early access, but console players will have to buy the 1.0 version again (www.eurogamer.net)
kingdom come: deliverance II reveal (yt.drgnz.club)
i avoid hype but as a massive fan of the original kcd and the honesty of this reveal, im hyped! wont be pre-ordering though, never pre-order its bad for the industry and consumers.
Dragon's Dogma 2 MTX
So there’s obviously been a lot of existing discourse on DD2’s micro transactions, and I’m curious to get the thoughts of people here....
The return of Gamergate is smaller and sadder (www.theverge.com) angielski
Evidently on a posting tear today. What happens when you’re stuck in a Dr.'s waiting room, I guess…
Apex Legends finals got hacked; Star Citizen goes 1.0; Marcus Lehto: nothing positive about EA. (peervideo.club)
also Youtube
I hate the term "Boomer Shooter"
Not to say I hate the genre, I actually love me some Dusk or Turbo Overkill, but why, oh why are they called Boomer Shooters?...
New Rimworld DLC: Anomaly (twitter.com)
What are some good PSP games?
I wanna get into non Nintendo stuff. What are some good PSP games in generals....
The game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater (ff8isthe.best) angielski
“It‘s kind of depressing”: WB Discovery pulls indie game for “business changes” (arstechnica.com) angielski
Archive link: archive.ph/168Vn...
Warner Bros. Discusses "Volatile" AAA Console Games, Will Lean Into Free-To-Play And Mobile (www.gamespot.com) angielski
Switch emulator Yuzu shuts down as creator agrees to pay Nintendo $2.4m (www.eurogamer.net)
Citra will also be shutting down :(