Valve is the only one of mine that’s still around as more than just a brand name used by EA.
Bioware, Maxis, Bullfrog, Westwood, and more… All gobbled up and turned into shit by Electronic Farts.
Others that just died on their own include Black Isle and Interplay, Sierra and LucasArts. Some of these might be around in some capacity, though afaik they’re just used for the names.
If you think the driving sucks now, you shoulda seen how it was at launch. Half the cars would just slide around like you were on ice whenever you tried to stop. They’re at least servicable now. Which is good, since they also removed the exploit that allowed you to stack momentum while on foot by dashing while slowing down time. Still nowhere near as good as driving in GTA but better than driving in an Ubisoft open world game.
I love how the solution to all the issues most users have with the physical Switch are solved through emulation, and Nintendo, instead of simply giving people these features they want (which are entirely software dependent not hardware dependent) they wanna incorporate Denovu to try and stop the emulation scene.
I don’t know how that is cheaper or easier than just, you know… Letting saves be moved to the SD card and making a better, more navigable and curated store.
You control when you gain stats. You don’t have to level up. You can literally do 100% of the content and stay a level 1 Wretch the entire time. It’s one of the most common challenge runs.
The best game I could describe as merely an interactive movie has been The Quarry. The game itself is pretty meh (but I’m not a big fan of these personally), however the movie part is amazing. It could easily be just a kick ass horror movie. And you can even play it that way with Movie Mode, where you pick the best outcome, the worst outcome, or set up some sliders to give a mix of outcomes at every interaction and just watch shit unfold.
Detroit: Become Human is also in this vein, with an even wilder array of possible outcomes as well as some more real gameplay and puzzle solving.
The studio behind this one (Prophecy Games) is independent from them now, but still contains some developers who also worked on Ascend. I know from hanging around the forums at the height of that game that there was at least 2 headstrong devs in the company that legitimately wanted to do the game justice (and one of the best updates to the game was headed up by them), but they ultimately were at the mercy of the execs. I’m hoping without the same constraints, they might deliver a kick ass game without the bullshit.
I only have the new one, that was made for VR. It can be played in flat space, but you can tell they did very little to make it work. The text is so small on a regular screen I can’t read a god damn thing.
I never played the original, but I suspect it’s probably better in every way except for the visuals (other than having readable text I mean).
Dwarf Fortress is my favorite game of all time now, though. It’s not old, but it just uses ASCII or tilesets. And I’ve been playing since version 3, using the default ASCII because I think it looks more interesting than the tiles.
If a significant amount of people “misunderstood” you, it’s not their fault, but yours for not clearly communicating or not tailoring your communication for the target audience.
I find this ironic, because even the tutorials in the game only communicate half of the information you need. A lot of them just outright expect you to have played one of their games before. I could imagine if this was someone’s first Bethesda RPG, they’d be confused as hell. Plus there are a few things unique to Starfield that are confusing even if you’ve played every one of their games before.