wombatula

wombatula, 11 miesięcy temu

new games

It’s a decade old lol.

wombatula, rok temu (edited 11 miesięcy temu)

I finally played Mass Effect 3, I’d played 1 and 2 but after all the stink about 3 and it being on Origin / EA Play for years I never bothered until a recent $1 sale on a month of that EA subscription, which has ME3 on it.

I spent 90%+ of the game going “Wow this isn’t bad at all, I am really impressed! This really is a good game!”

…until I got to the ending sequence, when it felt like the game had taken crazy pills all of a sudden. I understood why everyone was mad about it, and totally agree that it ruined the game. It wasn’t that Shepherd died, it wasn’t the Red/Blue(/Green) choice they gave you, it was a combination of 3 factors though:

1. Crippling your character and making you limp along, unable to use any of your powers, forced to slog through a bunch of token combat EDIT with only pistol, and all your cosmetic choices were erased as you drag around at half speed through corridors just to get further in the chain of conversations.
2. Except for the pass/fail check on the conversation with the Illusive Man (which is very easy to miss the requirements for without expecting it), none of what you did before entering that final sequence matters, it really was just press a button to receive ending. On that same note, you can have all 3 endings regardless of what you did, spent the entire trilogy making nothing but Renegade choices? Don’t worry you can still press the Blue button! Hail Mary deathbed confession!
3. I found the child avatar kind of out of place and a bit weird, yes I know it was a reference to the kid that died, but it was not really immersive and it made this gigantic long conversation that makes up “the last boss” really awkward, especially since half the conversation is just explaining the story for people that weren’t paying attention or missed all the side quests.

wombatula, rok temu

Nearly every MMO should be on here, it’s basically a dead genre but zombified 20+ year old MMO still keep going. Ultima Online got an update last month, WoW keeps pushing xpacs on the regular, even ones that do get killed 50/50 get brought back as private servers like SWG, CoH, and many more.

If an MMO hasn’t already been closed, chances are it will still be here in another 5 or even 10 years, because there is a diehard MMO fanbase out there that regularly or even exclusively plays MMO (and often the same MMO they’ve been playing all these years). Surprisingly there are tons of new players showing up, as children and younger relatives of existing players or just curious people that heard the legends of some weird niche game come to check it out, so although the player base is declining as they age out (or die, come on gamers we’re getting old) it will still be there for a long time.

Mark my words, the first truly decent MMO to come out in the next decade is gonna hit it off big, we’ve had lots of disappointments in the genre in the last decade, and niche or region specific games that didn’t really hit it off, but if we got a well made MMO especially one connected to a big IP (no, Dune is probably not it, sorry guys I wish it was) it would knock it right out of the park.

wombatula, rok temu

There are a lot of great single playthrough MMORPG, but very few have a steady enough update cycle to keep a proper endgame. If you want to just play through a story and putter around, SWTOR, GW2, FF14, and others are a lot of fun for at least a while.

wombatula, rok temu

GaaS took all the profitable pieces of the MMO model, and left the entire genre a desiccated husk populated with zombie games that refuse to die from the 90s, 00s, and 10s. Other than a couple Asian market games (because that market is a lot more accepting of extreme monetization in MMO), Lost Ark, and New World, I literally cannot think of a single MMO released in the 2020s that wasn’t just a kickstarter scam, and even those are less common now.

wombatula, rok temu

Wtf is “atompunk” and why does every single sci fi genre have to be called somethingpunk now? Cyberpunk had a reason to be called that, I really don’t see the reasoning behind every other somethingpunk moniker.

wombatula, rok temu

Discounting Steam because otherwise I’d be here typing for an hour listing all the cheap games I enjoyed from there.

Lufia 2 for the SNES, which was great because it was a prequel to Lufia 1, though it took me a couple years to finally track down a copy in the pre-internet days. I was pleasantly surprised to find out it was a prequel, and there are actually massive spoilers for the 2nd game in the intro for the 1st one, so I unintentionally played them in the right order!

wombatula, rok temu

store.steampowered.com/app/…/Ninja_Kiwi_Archive/

If you want you can play all the Bloons games up to 5 with this!

wombatula, rok temu

A modern take on the (pre-NGE) Star Wars Galaxies style MMO, mainly the social aspects like player housing and player driven crafting system it had. We have still not seen such a deep crafting and resource system as SWG had in any game since.

While there are still private servers around in abundance, they are all too small to properly support the social aspects properly, and the dated engine really hold it back. A newer game engine and some modern QOL and UI changes is all you really need, and although the Star Wars IP would be great it would be fine with a lesser IP or fully unique setting.

There have been a few indie attempts at this but none have finished development, with the most recent one pivoting to AI and then going dark earlier this year, though to be fair indie MMO have a pretty bad track record for actually completing.

wombatula, rok temu

There are a LOT of these, especially from the 8/16/32 bit era.

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/…/UnintentionallyUnwinnable

wombatula, rok temu

I don’t see a unique core mechanic in that, there are lots of RTS / FPS hybrids, both single and multiplayer.