tal

tal, 4 miesiące temu

I was listening to an interview with a senior EU translator several years back, and he said that these days, he normally does the first pass with Google Translate, then manually cleans things up. My guess is that to some extent, most human translations likely incorporate some AI translation already.

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

• https://store.steampowered.com/app/457140/Oxygen_Not_Included/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/333640/Caves_of_Qud/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/377160/Fallout_4/. A lot of this is going to be due to mods.
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/251060/Wargame_Red_Dragon/. Intended to be played multiplayer; I played it single-player. Steel Division II is a far better single-player choice if you don’t mind the different setting, as the AI is much more interesting.
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/489830/The_Elder_Scrolls_V_Skyrim_Special_Edition/. A lot of this is going to be due to mods.
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/294100/RimWorld/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/8930/Sid_Meiers_Civilization_V/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/1151340/Fallout_76/, the only entry here I actually play multiplayer (and even that to a minimal degree; that game tends to have players having pretty minimal interaction with each other unless they’re actually trying to play with each other). I would recommend playing Fallout 4 over Fallout 76 unless you specifically want multiplayer; Fallout 76 is just the closest thing to “more Fallout” short of a Fallout 5.

Not run through Steam, so no Steam stats (though available on Steam) but I’m sure that they’re way up there:

• https://store.steampowered.com/app/2330750/Cataclysm_Dark_Days_Ahead/. Free and open-source, though there’s a commercial build on Steam if you want to effectively donate. If not, can download from their project page.
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/. Free, though there’s a commercial build on Steam with a fancier, more-approachable UI and such.
• https://crawl.develz.org/, though that’s going back a few years. Free and open-source.

Some others with a fair bit of playtime:

• https://store.steampowered.com/app/919640/Steel_Division_2/. Primarily a multiplayer game, but I only play single-player.
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/2810/X3_Reunion/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/48700/Mount__Blade_Warband/. The Prophesy of Pendor mod adds a fair bit of time to this.
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/359320/Elite_Dangerous/. Though I don’t remember how I accumulated that many hours. Wasn’t super-impressed with the game. Probably pretty in VR, though.
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/281990/Stellaris/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/881100/Noita/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/233860/Kenshi/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/858210/Nova_Drift/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/1716740/Starfield/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/47890/The_Sims_3/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/211820/Starbound/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/2008100/Rule_the_Waves_3/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/240760/Wasteland_2_Directors_Cut/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/22380/Fallout_New_Vegas/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/1489630/Carrier_Command_2/. Primarily intended to be played multiplayer, but I play single-player.
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/220200/Kerbal_Space_Program/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/594570/Total_War_WARHAMMER_II/

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Well I’m not them, but for me: KSP1: 1800.8 hours. Current cost $40 = $0.02 an hour

My electricity costs to run the game are higher than the cost of the game itself at that point.

EDIT: Keep in mind that some of these have DLC, and if you buy them, it increases the price. Kerbal Space Program with all DLC is $70; that’s still an extremely good value at 1800.8 hours, but does bump the number up. Fallout: New Vegas has (good) DLC that I would want; all DLC would take the game to $45. Civilization VI would go to $230 (and I assume that they’re still turning out DLC). I listed Stellaris myself, along with a lot of other people. I really liked the game, and even the base game is a good game, IMHO, but in typical Paradox game fashion, if you buy all the DLC, it adds up to quite a bit — $470 currently, and they’re still turning out DLC. Someone listed DCS, I have The Sims 3 on my list, Total War: Warhammer II. All of those games have pricey DLC libraries that, if purchased in total, run multiple hundreds or over a thousand dollars (with the Total War: Warhammer series using an unusual take on this, where prior games in the series also act as DLC for the current ones). They can still be pretty cost-competitive per hour with other games, but only if the person who buys them is actually playing them a a lot.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

and Terraria are all close to 500h as well.

If you like Terraria, have you tried Starbound?

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Obviously quality of gameplay matters, but point is that you need to take into account hours of gameplay, not just treat the game as a single unit, if you want to have a useful sense of what kind of value you’re getting, since the amount of fun gameplay you get from a game isn’t some sort of fixed quantity per game – it colossally varies.

If the way one rates a game is to simply use the price of the game, and disregard how much you’re going to play the thing, then what you incentivize developers to do is either (a) produce games coming out with enormous amounts of DLC, as Paradox does, if you don’t count DLC price, (b) short games sold in “chapter” format, where someone buys multiple games to play what really amounts to one “game”, (c) games with in-app purchases, data-harvesting or some form of way to generate an in-game revenue stream, or simply (d) short, small games.

I have a lot of games that I could grind for many hours — but I haven’t done so, never will do so, because I’ve lost interest; they’re no longer providing fun gameplay. I’ve gotten my hours out of the game, though that number is decoupled from the number of hours to complete the game. I have other games that I’ve played to completion a number of times, and some games — particularly roguelikes/roguelites — which aim for extreme replayability. The hours matter, but it’s not the hours to complete the game that’s relevant, but the hours I’m interested in playing the game and have fun with it.

For some genres, this doesn’t vary all that much. Adventure games, I think, are a pretty good example of a genre where a player has to keep consuming new art and audio and writing and all that. They aren’t usually all that replayable, though there are certainly adventure games that are significantly shorter or longer. But you won’t be likely to find an adventure game that has ten, much less a hundred times as much reasonable gameplay as another adventure game.

But there are other genres, like roguelikes, where I don’t really need new content from an artist to keep being thrown my way for the game to continue to provide fun gameplay. There, the hours of fun gameplay in a game can become absolutely enormous, vary by orders of magnitude across games in the genre and relative to games in other genres.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

There’s plenty of jrpgs half that price point with twice the length though.

Gotta like the JRPG genre for those hours to be fun, though.

I think the last major JRPG I was willing to play to completion was Final Fantasy V.

I’ll play the occasional CRPG, but JRPGs aren’t really my cup of tea.

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

I tend to like games that have lots of “levers” to play with and spend time figuring out, so I think that tends to be the unifying factor in the above games.

I don’t know of anything really comparable to Oxygen Not Included in terms of all the physics and stuff. I’d like something like it too (especially since Tencent bought ONI and now has some locked graphics for some in-game items that you can only get by enabling data-harvesting and then playing the game for a given amount of time, which I’m not willing to do. They don’t have an option to just buy that content. At least it’s optional.)

For Rimworld and Oygen Not Included, both are real-time colony sims. Of those, the closest stuff on my list is probably:

• Dwarf Fortress (note that the commercial Steam build looks quite different from the classic version, has graphics and a mouse-oriented UI and revamped the UI and such, which may-or-may-not matter to you; if the learning curve being steep is an issue, that makes it a tad gentler). Rimworld is, in many ways, a simplified Dwarf Fortress in a sci-fi setting and without a Z-axis.
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/233860/Kenshi/. Not a colony sim. You control a free-roaming squad (or squads) in an post-apocalyptic open world. That’s actually a bit like Rimworld. However, you can set up one or more outposts and set up automated production there. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth, and the early game is very difficult, as your character is weak and outclassed by almost everything. Focus is more on the characters, and less on the outpost-building – that’s more of a late-game goal. I find it to be pretty easy to go back and play more of. There’s a sequel in the works that’ll hopefully look prettier. Not really any other game I’m aware of in quite the same genre.

The other things on my list don’t really deal with building.

Oxygen Not Included has automated production. If you’re willing to go outside “colony sim”, there is a genre of “factory-building games” where one controls maybe a single character or base element and just tries to create a world of automated production stuff, maybe with tower defense elements. I’d probably recommend https://store.steampowered.com/app/526870/Satisfactory/ if you want 3D and a first-person view. I like it, but in my book, it doesn’t really compare with the games that I’ve racked up a ton of time on, winds up feeling a bit samey after a while, looks like I have thirty-some hours. https://mindustrygame.github.io/ is a free and open-source factory builder that you can grab off F-Droid for Android to play on-the-go; that and https://shatteredpixel.com/ are probably my open-source Android favorite games. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Program/ has outstanding ratings, but I have not gotten around to playing it.

There are a few colony sim games sort of like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress. I tried them, and none of them grabbed me as well as they did, but if you want to look at them:

• https://store.steampowered.com/app/328080/Rise_to_Ruins/ is a colony sim and does have combat, but less focus on individual characters than Rimworld. I don’t like it mostly because the game is not really designed to be winnable, which I find frustrating. There’s growing “corruption” coming in from the edges of the map, and the aim is to try to last as long as possible before becoming overwhelmed; you can flee from it to other colonies. Technically, there are some ways to defeat the corruption, but not really how the game is intended to be played.
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/233450/Prison_Architect/. This has somewhat-similar graphics to Rimworld. You build and manage a prison. It’s not a bad game, but it doesn’t really have the open-world scope of Rimworld.
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/1062090/Timberborn/. This was in fairly Early Access the last time I spent much time on it, so I’m kind of out-of-date, and it looks like it’s still in EA. Doesn’t have the combat elements from Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress.
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/224500/Gnomoria/ is kind of like a much-simplified Dwarf Fortress. It didn’t really grab me, but maybe it’s your cup of tea.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

I’m not going to say that there isn’t value there, but going from memory, I’m pretty sure that the engine has been open-source reimplemented.

kagis

Looks like there are a couple projects, but these seem to be actively-maintained and can run using the existing commercially-available game resources:

github.com/alexbatalov/fallout1-ce

Fallout Community Edition is a fully working re-implementation of Fallout, with the same original gameplay, engine bugfixes, and some quality of life improvements, that works (mostly) hassle-free on multiple platforms.

There is also Fallout 2 Community Edition.

Installation

You must own the game to play. Purchase your copy on GOG or Steam. Download latest release or build from source.

github.com/alexbatalov/fallout2-ce

github.com/nadult/FreeFT

FreeFT is an open-source, real-time, isometric action game engine inspired by Fallout Tactics, a game from 2001 created by an Australian company, Micro Forte.

Running

To run this program, resources from original Fallout Tactics are required. You can buy it on GOG or Steam.

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

No prob. I’m reasonably confident that there are other multiple projects that have also done this; I just tried to list what looked like the most-currently-viable ones.

kagis

The first I think I remember seeing chronologically was FIFE, which IIRC was renamed from some slightly-different acronym from when it was intended to only run Fallout games. It looks like they’ve focused on becoming a generic RPG engine:

www.fifengine.net

FIFE is a free, open-source cross-platform game engine. It features hardware-accelerated 2D graphics, integrated GUI, audio support, lighting, map editor supporting top-down and isometric maps, pathfinding, virtual filesystem and more!

The core is written in C++ which means that it is highly portable. FIFE currently supports Windows, Linux and Mac.

Games utilizing FIFE are programmed through Python scripting layer on top of the base C++ API. Games can be also programmed using the C++ layer directly.

FIFE is open-sourced under the terms of the LGPL license so you can freely use it in non-commercial and commercial projects.

It sounds like they may have not taken it to full playability of the first two games; IIRC, the original intention was to do so:

falloutmod.fandom.com/wiki/FIFE

FIFE stands for Flexible Isometric Fallout-like Engine and is an open source project for the creation of cross platform ISO/top-down 2D games (e.g. RPGs & RTS’). The assets of Interplay’s RPG classics Fallout 1 & 2 are supported as test implementation but are not required to work with FIFE. It is not a Fallout emulator and you cannot play Fallout with it. The project’s goal is more universial. You can read graphics from fallout data files and create your own mods or draw you own content and make a completely new game.

Then there’s Falltergeist:

github.com/falltergeist/falltergeist

Falltergeist is an opensource alternative for Fallout 2 and Fallout 1 game engines. It uses C++, SDL and OpenGL. Falltergeist requires original Fallout resources to work.

But the last GitHub commit was three years ago, and the main site’s last blog update was in 2018.

There’s darkfo:

github.com/darkf/darkfo

A post-nuclear RPG remake

This is a modern reimplementation of the engine of the video game Fallout 2, as well as a personal research project into the feasibility of doing such.

It is written primarily in TypeScript and Python, and targets a modern (HTML 5) Web browser.

However, the last commit was six years ago.

There’s Harold, which is apparently a project continuing darkfo:

github.com/OldGamesLab/Harold

The project is based on darkfo codebase, but is modernized for Python 3, potentially with more improvements and bug fixes coming in the future.

Its last commit was three years ago.

There’s Fallout Equestria Reloaded — which apparently is some sort of unholy mating between My Little Pony and Fallout:

https://falloutequestriarpg.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/image.png

github.com/Plaristote/fallout-equestria-reloaded

Qt-based game engine for Fallout-like RPGs, developed for the Fallout Equestria RPG project

I don’t think that the goal was so much to play Fallout as to use the assets to bootstrap a playable MLP RPG.

There have been commits in the past two months, so apparently someone is actually seriously plugging away.

Then there’s FOnline, another engine reimplementation, this one intended to be played multiplayer online:

github.com/cvet/fonline

Looks active.

www.fonline-reloaded.net

FOnline: Reloaded is a free to play post-nuclear MMORPG based on FOnline: 2238, an award-winning game set three years before the events of Fallout 2. FOnline: Reloaded provides you with a unique opportunity to revisit the ruins of California and explore the familiar locales from Fallout 1 and Fallout 2.

FOnline: Reloaded is a player-driven, persistent world MMORPG that allows you to participate in a wide range of activities, which range from faction wars to exploration, mining, scavenging for resources, caravan raids and more. The game puts a lot of emphasis on team play and dynamic, unscripted PvP action, but there is absolutely nothing to stop you from focusing on PvE dungeons or role-play.

FOnline: Reloaded is powered by the latest iteration of the FOnline Engine, which was created from scratch by Cvet and which is capable of utilizing assets imported from the original Fallout games, as well as Fallout: Tactics, Arcanum and Baldur’s Gate. The development of this engine started back in 2004 and continues to this day.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

I think that you guys may have been kids in different decades.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

gamesir.com/pages/brand-story

2013 Founding of GameSir by Yao Ma and the establishing of headquarter in Guangzhou, China.

I would assume that GameSir would also be affected by tariffs on China if 8bitdo is.

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Why do you think this happens when these developers already had a winning formula?

I mean, all series are going to have some point where they dick things up, else we’d have never-ending amazing video game series. I don’t think that the second game in the series is uniquely bad.

Some of it is just going to be luck. Like, hitting just the right combination of employees, market timing, consumer interest, design decisions, scoping a game’s development time and so forth isn’t a perfectly-understood science. Making the best game of the year probably means that a studio can make a good game, but that’s not the same thing as being able to consistently make the game of the year, year after year.

Some of it is novelty. I mean, part of most outstanding games is that they’re doing at least something that hasn’t been done before, and doing so again — especially if other studios are trying to copy and build on the winning formula as well — may not be enough.

Some of it is that most resources don’t always make a game better. I know that at least some past series have failed when a studio made a good game, (understandably) get more resources for the next game in the series, but then try to expand their scope and don’t do well at that new scope.

Engine rewrites are technically-risky, can get scope wrong, and a number of games that have really badly failed have happened because a studio tries to rebuild everything from the ground up rather than to do an incremental improvement.

You mention Cities: Skylines 2, and I think that “more resources don’t always help”, “luck”, and “engine rewrite” were all factors. When I play a city-builder, I really don’t care all that much about graphics; I’ve played and enjoyed some city-builders with really unimpressive graphics, like the original lincity. CS2 got a lot of budget and had a dev team that tried to use a lot of resources on graphics (which I think was already not a good idea, and not just due to my own preferences; reading player comments on things like Steam, what players were upset about were that they wanted more-interesting gameplay mechanics, not fancier graphics). Basically, trying to make the world’s prettiest city-builder with the money maybe wasn’t a good idea. Then they made some big internal technical shifts that involved some bad bets on how well some technology that they wanted to use for those graphics would work, and found that they’d dug themselves deeply into a hole.

Sometimes it’s a game trying to shift genres. To use the Fallout series as an example of both doing this what I’d call successfully and unsuccessfully, the Fallout series were originally isometric real-time-until-combat-then-turn-based games. With Fallout 3, Bethesda took the game to be a pausable 3D first-person-shooter series. That requires a whole lot of software and mechanics changes. That was, I think, successful — while the Wasteland series that the original Fallout games were based on continued the isometric turn-based model successfully, Fallout 3 became a really big hit. On the other hand, Fallout 76 was an attempt to take the series to be a live-action multiplayer game. That wasn’t the only problem — the game shipped in an extremely buggy state, after the team underestimated the technical challenges in taking their single-player game multiplayer. But some of it was just that the genre change took away some of what was nice about about the earlier games — lots of plot and story and scripted content and a world that the player was the center of and could change and an immersive environment that didn’t have other players acting out of character. The audience who loves a game in one genre isn’t necessarily a great fit for another genre. In that situation, it’s not so much that the developers don’t have a winning formula as that they’ve decided to toss their formula out and try to write a new one that’s as successful.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

KSP does what it does well. Any sequel comes with huge questions of why people would want another space program simulator

I think that there were pretty clear ways to expand KSP that I would have liked.

• There was limited capacity to build bases and springboard off resources from those.
• I’d have liked to be able to set up programmed flight sequences.
• More mechanics, like radiation, micrometeorite impacts, etc.
• The physics could definitely have been improved upon in a number of ways. I mean, I’ve watched a lot of rockets springily bouncing around at their joints.
• Some of the science-gathering stuff was kind of…grindy. I would have liked that part of the game to be revamped.
• I don’t think that graphics were a massive issue, but given how much time you spend looking at flames coming from rocket engines, it’d be nice to have improved on that somewhat. I’d have also liked some sort of procedural-terrain-generation system to permit for higher-resolution stuff when you’re on the ground; yeah, you’re mostly in the air or space, but when you’re on the ground, the fidelity isn’t all that great.

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

I’d kind of like Steam to have the ability to indicate games that can run offline in its Store and enforce this by running the game in a container without network access.

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

I wish that Steam would just unify all their damn search UIs. Like, take every criteria that they let a user search by all across their client and different parts of their website, and then make one unified UI for it and let a user search using that UI everywhere Steam permits for searches. Steam’s got the most-insanely-fragmented set of search UIs I’ve ever seen on an online service, which all have overlapping sets of functionality.

Among other things:

• Sometimes permitting searching by a Boolean value — but only for one of the values. For example, searching the Store in the Web UI lets you exclude games in your library, but not include only games in your library. This is despite the fact that for tags, there’s a tri-state (Yes, No, Ignore) checkbox (at least now they do…they didn’t used to permit for exclusion there either at one point).
• In the Store search, I can put an upper limit on the price I’m searching for, but not a lower limit.
• It’s easy to pull up a list of games by a particular developer or publisher by clicking on their name in a game’s store page, but then one can’t use the Store search criteria to filter that down, nor can one search by developer or publisher in the Store.
• Just today, I wanted to sort my games in the left-hand Library sidebar of the client by release date. The Steam client can’t do that…but you can create a shelf, another sort of search visible in the Library, sorted by Release Date.
• I can sort by User Rating in the Store, but not in my Library.
• I can sort by Release Date in the Store, but not search by it.

I want to have exactly the same set of search functionality in all locations that I can search. I want to be able to sort by all of those fields, search by all of those fields, and search for any value that a field might have.

That means:

• In the Store search.
• In the Library sidebar.
• “Virtual categories” in the Library sidebar, which are basically “saved” searches that are re-invoked to build the category in the sidebar.
• In Library “shelves”.
• When viewing lists of games available as part of a particular sale or promotion.
• When viewing lists of games from a particular developer or publisher.
• Any other places that I’ve missed.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

Yeah, that’s also an issue. It should be easier to get to the “advanced Store search”. Most websites have some kind of “advanced search” or “more options” button or dropdown or something next to the search field. On Steam, none of that is accessible for the Store search until you’ve actually done a search, and then it’s exposed with the results. So basically, put your cursor in the “search” field, whack your enter key, and you’ll get a list of all Steam games in the Store along with all the options to do tag searches and whatnot in the right sidebar.

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

I liked ksp2

If you’re saying that you liked the (unfinished, abandoned, poorly-rated) Kerbal Space Program 2, you might play the original, which is better-regarded.

On the “factory” side, maybe some colony simulators? Someone else mentioned https://store.steampowered.com/app/294100/RimWorld/. That’s got a bit of DLC, but I think that even the base game has pretty good value for money. https://store.steampowered.com/app/457140/Oxygen_Not_Included/ is another colony sim that focuses more on the building/automation/physics side; I think that you’ll get a lot of hours out of that.

Dwarf Fortress is another colony sim, has a freely-available classic version or a commercial graphical build on Steam. Steep learning curve, but lots of mechanics to explore.

I like https://cataclysmdda.org/, though it has a pretty punishing learning curve. Open-world roguelike. It touches on both the RPG (well, not much by way of plot, but in terms of building a character) and the factory (build buildings, faction camps with NPCs, and vehicles) side. You aren’t going to run out of gameplay complexity to explore any time soon on that. Open source and freely-available, though there’s also a commercial build on Steam.

I have not played https://store.steampowered.com/app/2135150/Elin/, the successor to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elona_%28video_game%29, but it might be worth a look too if you are looking for a game with both a sandbox aspect and RPG aspect.

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Always gonna recommend Project Zomboid.

It does have a sandbox aspect, but much as I want to like the game, I always find myself dropping it and playing Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead instead, which is a similar “zombie survival” genre game, but has vastly more stuff and game mechanics. The big selling point for Project Zomboid, in my book, is the far gentler learning curve and lower barrier to entry; it’s got an adorable tutorial racoon, and doesn’t hit you with too much at once, but…

• The combat in Project Zomboid frustrates me. It’s very simple, not a lot going on, but because a zombie infection is incurable, a single mistake in timing can have catastrophic effects, so it requires no errors.

• The character builds. Project Zomboid has a lot of perks and such. Cataclysm’s got vastly more, plus mutations, bionics, all that stuff.

• I prefer the Cataclysm turn-based play to the Project Zomboid real-time play. I don’t have to wait in the real world for actions to complete, and I can stop and think about what my next move is.

• To try to illustrate the game complexity difference, take firearms as an example. Project Zomboid has six handguns, four shotguns, and four rifles. Each has one type of ammunition. There are ten weapon mods, each of which can be placed on some of those weapons. There is a firearms skill.

  Cataclysm has, to look at just one firearm class and caliber category, 41 rifle-class weapons chambered in .223 (and that’s by default, as chambering can be modified). Each of these can take something like six different classes of weapon mods (replacing the stock, sticking things on the barrel, adding secondary weapons like underbarrel grenade launchers or flamethrowers, etc), multiple fire modes. There are 18 sight mods alone, and it’s possible to have multiple sights on a weapon. Recoil is modeled. Firearms can fit in various types of back/ankle/hip holsters, and draw time and encumbrance is a factor; these also have volume and longest-dimension characteristics, so that a large revolver can’t fit in a small holdout holster. For those .223-caliber rifles alone, there are 13 types of ammunition, including handloads, tracer rounds, armor-piercing rounds, etc. There are 63 different calibers of weapons. Energy weapons, flamethrower/incendiary weapons, chemical weapons, explosive projectile weapons, flechette weapons, illumination rounds, EMP weapons. There are multiple-barrel weapons, including some with barrels in different calibers. You can load specialized ammunition in a specified order. Different types of reloading mechanisms (revolver, tube magazine, detachable magazine, belt) are modeled. Some weapons use compatible magazines, and high-capacity and drum magazines exist. Speedloaders for revolvers exist. Weapons can be installed mounted on vehicles (fired manually from a mount position, or with an automated weapons targeting system installed, set up to fire automatically). NPCs (friendly, and hostile) can be armed with them. Bore fouling is modeled. When you fire a weapon without hearing protection, you’re temporarily deafened to some degree. There are multiple stances one can take when firing those weapons. Some of the game’s martial arts forms permit use of firearms. There are firearm melee modifications, like bayonets. There are skills for different types of weapons. The game has all sorts of exotic real-world firearms (e.g. to pick a random one, the American-180, a submachine gun firing .22 rounds with a 180-round pan magazine); the game probably has more real-world firearms than any other video game out there; my current source tree says that there are 555 in total.

And that’s before getting into stuff like sandbox vehicle design and construction (land, water, air, amphibious), power generation and storage, nutrition (weight and its various effects on physical capabilities, body fat, vitamins, calcium intake), artifacts, magic (if you turn on some of the various magic or psionic mods), bionics, mutations, local weather systems, temperature (air and body; you can set up heaters and air conditioners in vehicles), vision in various spectra, monsters tracking scent/vision/noise, fires and building structural failures, brewing, the ability to recruit NPCs and create faction camps, quests, aliens, disease modeling, various types of parasites, fungal infections, various types of poisonings and envenomings, various types of lights, devices with removable batteries, internal-batteries, USB-style (UPS) charging and power that can run off static, vehicle, bionic, or power stations. Solar/wind/gasoline/diesel/jet fuel/nuclear power generation. Multi-fuel engines. Multiple-engine vehicles (or, with appropriate electronic systems, hybrid vehicles that can automatically toggle an ICE engine to charge a battery to run electric motors). Seatbelts and harnesses (and being ejected from vehicles in crashes). Folding, portable vehicles. Bike and motorcycle racks on cars. Stimulants, depressants, alcohol. Acetylene and electrical welding. Tons of types of food to cook (looks 547 recipes currently available). The thing is just huge.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

Stellaris, in particular, might be up your alley.

I like Stellaris quite a bit, but I should note that OP mentioned how he didn’t like spending money on DLC. Stellaris follows the typical Paradox approach of creating a lot of DLC to expand and extend the game and its gameplay as long as people are interested in buying it, and winding up with a large game that’ll cost you a lot if you want all the DLC. It may be worthwhile, but if one wants to get all the DLC, it’s gonna add a fair bit to the price.

(checks Steam)

The base game is $40. Buying every available piece of DLC (and it looks like they’re still coming out with more stuff) is another $429.

That being said, I’ve also got a lot of hours of gameplay out of Stellaris, so that does bring the cost-per-hour down quite a lot. But it depends on how much someone is going to play the thing.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations.

Steam does many things well, but its recommendations system is one thing that, in my experience, really falls flat on its face (which surprises me, because they have enough information to do what I would think would be fantastic recommendations).

For finding games on Steam, I’ve had the most luck simply sorting by user rating (which is a pretty darn good metric of what I’ll like, in my experience), and then using the tags to look for games in a genre. There has been one or two times that it’s led me astray, but in general, an Overwhelmingly Positive game is something that I’ll get a ton of fun out of, and a low-ranked game will rarely be a lot of fun.

Sometimes I’ve had luck with looking at “similar games” to a game, which are shown on that game’s store page.

But the recommendations queue is just awful, in my experience.

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

In 2024 almost 19.000 games were released on Steam. I have yet to find a single title from 2024 worth playing.

looks at my own Steam library, adds a shelf sorted by Release Date, looks for notable games

Satisfactory was released in 2024. It was in Early Access for some time before that. You mentioned that you liked it.

Ditto for https://store.steampowered.com/app/333640/Caves_of_Qud/ and https://store.steampowered.com/app/858210/Nova_Drift/, games that I’ve played quite a bit — 2024 release following time in Early Access.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2511500/Dominions_6__Rise_of_the_Pantokrator/ is a pretty involved fantasy strategy game. I haven’t played 6 much, but I’ve played the series a lot in the past, and each game is a pretty direct expansion of prior games. Not sure if that’s up your alley, though. The game turns can get pretty long late-game, as there’s a lot going on.

I liked https://store.steampowered.com/app/2379780/Balatro/, a roguelike deckbuilder, quite a bit.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

I’d love to have and collect DRM free titles that last even after a platform is gone,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

M-DISC (Millennial Disc) is a write-once optical disc technology introduced in 2009 by Millenniata, Inc.[1] and available as DVD and Blu-ray discs.[2]

M-DISC’s design is intended to provide archival media longevity.[3][4] M-Disc claims that properly stored M-DISC DVD recordings will last up to 1000 years.[5] The M-DISC DVD looks like a standard disc, except it is almost transparent with later DVD and BD-R M-Disks having standard and inkjet printable labels.

Those will outlive you.

You can get an M-DISC-capable burner on Amazon for $35, and M-DISC media for about $3/pop, each of which will store 100GB.

GOG is probably more-suited than Steam for this, since it’s aimed around letting you download the installers, and they make a game being DRM-free a selling point and clearly indicate it in their store.

But you can just install a DRM-free Steam game — there are some games that don’t have any form of DRM on Steam, and don’t tie themselves to Steam running or anything, if you’re worried about Steam dying — and then archive and save the directory off somewhere. Might need a bit more effort if you’re on Linux and trying to save copies of Proton-using games, since there’s also a WINEPREFIX directory that needs to be saved. And then you can stuff that on whatever archival media you want.

I’ve copied https://store.steampowered.com/app/333640/Caves_of_Qud/ to my laptop, which doesn’t have Steam installed, for example. Just requires copying the directory.

Now, that’s not going to work if a game makes use of some kind of DRM, but you specified that you were looking for DRM-free titles, so should be okay on that front.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

So do I go back to end of now or never and change the answer? Do I go back further and leave novigrad when it was in chaos? Even further before the questline began?

If you think that you’d like to play The Witcher 3 more than once, one suggestion:

• The first pass through a game is the only time that you can play the game without foreknowledge. You can never experience that again. If you’re going to play without guidance from a wiki or anything like that, really sit in the main character’s shoes, I’d do it that time. Just don’t worry that much about getting your ideal outcome, because you can do another run. Maybe it’ll give some interesting variety, have you experience something you wouldn’t normally have done, with foreknowledge of the consequences of decisions.
• Then in subsequent runs, you’ve already experienced a number of “spoilers” from your prior runs, and you can try to use that knowledge (as well as knowledge from wikis or forums or whatever) to guide the plot to your desired outcome.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

Fair enough. All that’s contingent on whether you’re up for multiple runs through a game.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

The other elephant in the room is if steam refunds are meant as a demo for everything or just to check technical issues like FPS and network connection issues

I’m pretty sure that the refund window isn’t primarily intended to create an ad-hoc demo of games, but to let you return a game that doesn’t function correctly on your system.

Game developers who do want to create a demo can (though I’ll admit that it’s a less-common route than one might expect).

store.steampowered.com/demos/

I usually read review content, maybe watch a YouTube video of someone playing the game if I want to see gameplay.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KePY3IfxqOQ

tal, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

!gamemusic

Community for sharing game music.

On that note, !gameart for video game artwork.

Communities for Talos Principle and Resident Evil, but again, they aren’t active.

Yeah, there are a bunch of communities for individual video games, but they’re all pretty dead. I think that !pixeldungeon, where the dev actually shows up, posts, and moderates is probably one of the most alive.

This came up when I originally got on the Threadiverse — I remember suggesting that people post in generic gaming communities, then when the load became too high, move to genre-specific, and then when the load became too high, move to game-specific. Otherwise, the userbase in any one community just isn’t large enough to get much community activity.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

Another adjacent community that is seeing no real activity: !arcadesticks

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

sffa.community/c/sffgaming?dataType=Post&page=0

Sffagaming is for sci-fi games, but I haven’t seen a post in there in a while.

I can’t DNS-resolve sffa.community, either on IPv4 or IPv6. Google’s DNS root can’t see it either:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ host -t a sffa.community 8.8.8.8
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Using domain server:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Name: 8.8.8.8
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Address: 8.8.8.8#53
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Aliases: 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Host sffa.community not found: 2(SERVFAIL)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ host -t aaaa sffa.community 8.8.8.8
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Using domain server:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Name: 8.8.8.8
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Address: 8.8.8.8#53
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Aliases: 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Host sffa.community not found: 2(SERVFAIL)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$
</span>

It clearly existed at one point, because lemmy.world has local copies of some stuff from a year back:

lemmy.world/c/sffgaming@sffa.community?dataType=P…

But I think that the instance is gone now.

EDIT: The last time archive.org’s Wayback Machine was able to successfully index it was September 16, 2024:

web.archive.org/web/…/sffa.community/

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

Oh, and @PugJesus has kept a flow of material to !fallout, for one other game-specific community that has some activity.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

Black Isle Studios planned to include a dual-combat system in the game that allowed for the player to choose between real-time (Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout games and Micro Forté and 14° East’s Fallout Tactics) or turn-based combat (Fallout and Fallout 2) but real-time was only included due to Interplay’s demands.

I suppose you’re most-likely aware of them, but if you wanted more turn-based Fallout, have you looked into https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/240760/and https://store.steampowered.com/app/719040/Wasteland_3/?

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

The three best games in the series were Puyo Puyo 15th Anniversary (2006), Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary (2011), and Puyo Puyo Chronicle (2016, this game is 25th in all but name). None of these games were released outside of Japan

kagis

puyonexus.com/wiki/Puyo_Puyo_Chronicle

After being defeated, Satan joins the party and promises that the way back home lies at the top of the Color Tower, and all Arle would need to do now is scale it to return home.

Hmm.

I think “Satan as a playable character” might be one of those cultural-issue things that would come up when considering localization.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

That’s a lot of different categories.

I like naval warfare games, but I tend towards the sim side, not the “experience being someone there” sort.

The naval warfare game that I have played the most of recently is https://store.steampowered.com/app/2008100/Rule_the_Waves_3/. That’s definitely not an eye candy game, but it models the design and development of warships from 1880 into the Cold War, the construction of fleets, and the tactics when they meet, has a lot of flexibility to simulate different stuff.

The game that I’m most looking forward to being completed is https://store.steampowered.com/app/1286220/Sea_Power__Naval_Combat_in_the_Missile_Age/, which is presently still in Early Access and last time I played it still had a lot of unfinished work. Sort of a spiritual successor to https://store.steampowered.com/app/2910/Fleet_Command//Jane’s Fleet Command. Modern air and naval warfare.

It doesn’t work on Linux, so I can’t play it, but https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076160/Command_Modern_Operations/ is probably the most sim-oriented contemporary air/naval warfare program you can get.

Two other naval warfare games that I enjoy playing:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/541210/Cold_Waters/, which is a Cold War sub warfare game. It abstracts out a lot of the manual stuff that some other sub sims do. Covers the “hide, gather data, strike” bit.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1489630/Carrier_Command_2/. This is not a real-world oriented sim. You command an amphibious assault ship which can capture islands to gain resources, capture technology, and buy munitions, air and amphibious vehicles, and fight against another similar amphibious assault ship approaching you. I really like the untextured polygon aesthetic – they make stuff look pretty even with just that. Need to manage a ton of vehicles and aircraft and production and logistics vessels and support craft concurrently; as the game continues on, the load increases. If you’ve played https://store.steampowered.com/app/267980/Hostile_Waters_Antaeus_Rising/, sort of similar idea — both are based on Carrier Command. Not mission-oriented the way Hostile Waters is. It’s really intended to be played multiplayer, which I’ve no interest in, but you can play single-player if you can handle the load of doing all the tasks. I had a surprising amount of fun banging away with this one. I really think that this game would have benefited from some rebalancing and further development — some gear just isn’t all that useful, and I think that the game would make a magnificent base for a more-sophisticated-dynamic-campaign single-player-oriented game.

You mention https://store.steampowered.com/app/264710/Subnautica/. I enjoyed that, though unlike the other games here, that’s not really a naval warfare game, but it’s certainly got a sea theme. I think I own the sequel, https://store.steampowered.com/app/848450/Subnautica_Below_Zero/, but haven’t played it, but given that you don’t mention it, I thought I would, as I’d assume that if you like the first game, you’d also enjoy the second.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/304650/SUNLESS_SEA/ and its sequel https://store.steampowered.com/app/452530/Sunless_Sea__Zubmariner/ is…hard to describe, more about providing a dark British Empire fantasy naval-themed game. Not naval warfare, but exploring a subterranean world…but it’s got sea theming. Not much like everything else on here. Mostly about creating a mood — the gameplay isn’t terribly deep.

It’s not, strictly-speaking, a sea-based game, but https://store.steampowered.com/app/887570/NEBULOUS_Fleet_Command/ is a sci-fi space-based fleet warfare game. A lot of the elements that you might want in a sea-based fleet naval warfare game are there, sensors, electronic warfare, weapons and countermeasures and such.

I think that those are the sea- or sea-associated games that I’d probably most recommend, myself.

EDIT: I have not yet gotten around to playing https://store.steampowered.com/app/1562430/DREDGE/, but I’ve read enough positive comments on it that I’d suggest at least looking at it.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

I really wanted to like Raft, but the game just felt kind of shallow and on-rails in actual gameplay compared to Subnautica.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

Naval action for slow wooden ships in the Bahamas.

I haven’t seen this prior to now. The idea of a nice age-of-sail combat game sounds interesting, but…man, looking at the Steam description there has some surprises:

• That is an appallingly low Steam rating.
• It looks like the split is between players who think that the game is too-slow-paced and those who are fine with that, so I could see someone who wants a slow game being into it.
• Jesus Christ, the DLC prices. They’re selling each additional ship for ~$50? Like, the game with all ships is ~$700? I mean, I know that DCS World and Il-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad use that model, but I can’t imagine that the ships function as differently from ship-to-ship as the combat aircraft in those games, bring as much additional gameplay.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

There’s a lot more ships than the DLC ships. But yes, it’s almost inevitable you will end up buying a couple of them, because the DLCs let you spawn a ship for free every day.

In fairness, I didn’t notice that the game was F2P, no entry fee, so they have to get money from somewhere.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

If you’re super-into it, have you tried https://store.steampowered.com/app/12470/Port_Royale_2/, which also came out in 2004 and is kind of the same sort of game on the age-of-sail combat side?

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

There’s a sequel https://store.steampowered.com/app/848450/Subnautica_Below_Zero/, and apparently https://store.steampowered.com/app/1962700/Subnautica_2/ is in the works and headed for Early Access.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

A large proportion of games that have both mobile and PC releases are going to be designed around mouse-only use.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

No Mercy included “incest,” “blackmail,” and “unavoidable non-consensual sex,” according to its Steam page, which also promised players the opportunity to become “every woman’s worst nightmare” and “never take ‘no’ for an answer.”

This doesn’t bode well for Pale Carnations making it onto Steam.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

I’m currently scraping the Steam barrel

tomshardware.com/…/steam-released-a-record-number…

Steam released 18,825 new games in 2024, beating its previous record of 14,311 last year.

That’s a pretty deep barrel. For comparison:

www.mobygames.com/platform/playstation-4/

There are 11,274 video games on PlayStation 4. They were released between the years 2013 and 2025.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

Half Life

I don’t think that Half Life was all that influential. It was a successful game, had a story at a time when FPSes tended to barely bother. But I think that it was less that it was very innovative and more that it competently executed on mechanics and technology that already existed.

Minecraft

I don’t know if I can agree. Yes, it was successful and a sandbox game, but (a) Terraria, for example, came out earlier, and I don’t feel like it was that transformative. It certainly inspired some sandbox games, but I don’t think that this was really an incredibly broad shift.

The Sims

This one brought a lot of new mechanics, but I don’t know about influential. There wasn’t really a large Sims-like genre that it inspired.

Baldur’s Gate 3

It a 2023 release. How can it be influential? Hasn’t even been time for a generation of games influenced by it to come out.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

A point made by HP’s SVP and Division President of Gaming Solutions Josephine Tan when talking to XDA Developers, Tan mentioned “If you look at Windows, I struggle with the experience myself. If I don’t like it, I don’t know how to do a product for it.”. Tan continued “If I’m buying a handheld, I want a very simple setup. The minute I turn on my handheld, it will remember the last game I played. In the Windows environment, it doesn’t”.

Okay, I’m not saying that HP shouldn’t do a SteamOS handheld, but…this seems like such a bad rationale. Surely, surely it is possible to write a relatively-trivial piece of software for Windows that simply remembers the last game played? Especially if we’re just talking stuff running out of Steam?

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

remember when social media CEOs weren’t like… this?

I think that that’s just Elon.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

I got through the original NWN multiple times, as well as various mods.

I got bored partway through BG3, never finished. Barely touched NWN 2.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

We’re losing the next generation to TikTok. The competition for gaming isn’t Xbox and Nintendo. It’s everything else in the freaking zeitgeist that can take your time away from your gaming activity.

Round two: the television strikes back.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

There is no ending in Realmz. Its just a big open world. And as you dig, you find more, and more and it just keeps going. But there is no particular path to take. You just can go anywhere and find adventure along the way. There are a huge number of random encounters, and the combat style is basically top down tile based D&D, which BG3 is also, more or less.

Just to comment further, if you’re not a big fan of Baldur’s Gate 3 (or the Paths of Exile series, to name another popular modern RPG) for that reason, I wouldn’t recommend the Avadon series in the Spiderweb Software bundle, as it has the same sort of streamlined “move you through the world to the right places” thing. The Exile/Avernum series has the Realmz-style “go wherever and stumble onto stuff” model that you’re referring to.

Kind of reminds me of the difference between Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds. Like, both are…technically open world games, but there’s very little reason to ever backtrack in The Outer Worlds, and not much placed content to stumble on outside of cities, whereas in Fallout: New Vegas, I’m running all over the place and running into all sorts of stuff, without having the game really drive me in one direction.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

Are you familiar with the A Tale of Two Worlds mod, which inserts Fallout 3 into Fallout: New Vegas to make them one giant game? If not, it’s a way to add some new life to the thing.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

I’m aware.