After being in development for over 10 years, Hytale, a sandbox game from the Hypixel Studios team with support from Riot, has officially been cancelled. Hypixel Studios’ CEO, Noxy, announced the cancellation on X on June 23, with the official Hytale forums following suit.
Honestly less frantic gameplay sounds good to me, I got sick of the “oh god they’re after me now I fell oh well try again” parts of the gameplay. I might take a look. Thanks!
I actually really appreciate someone clarifying the chronology of these games, I’ve got them all in my steam library and can never remember the order they go in.
Do the OS remakes have any QoL improvements? I tried playing through them recently and had a very hard time with the manual save system since I’m used to autosave points in linear games like that.
Honestly anything to deal with the horrendous friction and instability of the original would be welcome. Even modded I think I had to stick with 4:3 which even with black bars was still not quite right on my modern system. It would have to be a better experience, even if I have to re-learn manual quicksaves.
Got them working, and was pleasantly surprised to find most of them had flatpak installers! Manual saving is still a pain but the engines running smoothly does make a big difference.
Although the dark forces installer doesn’t work with the steam install so you have to copy the game data to the data folder to make it work.
We’ve all played them. Backtracking, not knowing where to go. Going back and forth. Name some of these games from your memory. I’ll start: Final Fantasy XIII-2, RE1
Wait, open world, specific upgrades needed to access new areas and progress the story… I think Subnautica is a secret metroidvania. It’s just most of the upgrades are “you can go deeper now”.
Last few years I’ve been excitedly waiting for sequels from several small-to-medium sized studios that made highly acclaimed original games—I’m talking about Cities: Skylines, Kerbal Space Program, Planet Coaster, Frostpunk, etc.—yet each sequel was very poorly received to the point I wasn’t willing to risk my money...
Yup, and honestly even according to that anti-art logic it was a strategic failure. Funny meme gifs were part of how the game gained notoriety, but you don’t maintain a game long term on meme status alone.
Even if “haha funni physics glitches” were still the in thing - I think people got over them fast, like with any comedy style - the longevity of the game came from the deep mechanics and impressive missions people could do, and the community support.
I actually think that sequels to breakout sandbox games are always doomed to fail. Like what if they tried to release Minecraft 2? It would be awful, and I think we all instinctively know it would be, which is kind of a self fullfulling prophecy.
Minecraft doesn’t have a monopoly on the special sauce that makes their game good. It has a decade and a half of support and cultural recognition from a dedicated following. You can’t make that happen a second time. I don’t like what’s been done with the franchise commercially, but they figured out how to milk it without doing a direct sequel, which I think is part of why it’s still relevant.
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. I liked ksp2 1, cities skylines 1, age of empires 2, baldurs gate 3 a lot, I just finished Divinity original sin 2. I like rpgs and management / factory games like workers and resources,...
If you like factory designing games, I can recommend anything by Zachtronics.
They’re all esoteric programming/automation type puzzle games, and they all have their own unique solitaire games built-in for whenever you get tired of the main game.
My personal favourites are SpaceChem - scifi molecule factories - and Opus Magnum - steampunk alchemical molecule factories. Something about the molecules just works for me, don’t know why. Plus the Opus Magnum solitaire game is really unique and fun, and it has a user-made level feature, so you can keep playing.
Last Call BBS is a collection of minigames they made as their final release before shutting up shop, so it’s a lot more casual than the others, but a lot of fun.
I would say the marketplace is a form of enshittification. They’re not burrowing headfirst into the shit like some platforms, but it’s an inevitable trend regardless.
Plus who knows what happens when gabe isn’t around any more. Best case scenario is he leaves the company to the workers as a co-op and then it has a chance to be a lasting legacy, but maybe it goes to someone who puts it up to be publicly traded and that’s game over.
You can’t do whatever you want with open source either. One big stipulation of copyleft licenses is the share-alike clause, which means you can’t make modifications and then decide your program is now closed-source, so it protects the code from being enclosed again.
I mean yes you can make whatever modifications you want, generally, but it’s not totally unrestricted.
The steam marketplace is an attempt to monetise the user base by creating a bunch of microtransactions and taking a cut for the store. They have created a speculative market, which is essentially gambling, and made it available to minors. This market is designed to exploit people’s psychological weaknesses.
Yes, users and devs get a cut too, and that’s better than some sites will do to you, but creating a market also has a bunch of externalities - extra problems that are offloaded onto other people and not borne by valve.
So suddenly we’ve got a bunch of scammers creating accounts to make money, which obviously can scam users, plus it generats spam, and it creates a need for user-hostile security. Now I can’t friend my kid’s account without spending money on it for instance,
Also there’s the item spam. Now when I get a notification I don’t know if it’s a community forum reply, or just more worthless junk in my inventory. The inventory could have just been a way to store game gifts and other things of actual value, now I never look at it because it’s just full of trash.
Some of these are minor inconveniences, but that’s how enshittification happens. It’s little, creeping annoyances that get worse and worse until it starts to make people look for alternatives.
And like I said, it’s not as bad as other places. Steam is still the best distribution platform out there, but it has enshittified a little bit. It has to, because the interests of the owners and the interests of the users are fundamentally at odds - more money spent means more money for the owners.
That’s one way it happens, but in general the term appears to be about decline in quality for the purposes of profit-seeking, regardless of whether services were offered for free or not.
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
Other articles I looked at seem to agree with this basic concept.
And like I said, spam from scammers and inbox spam are examples of shittiness that seep in regardless of if you engage or not. There is no “no marketplace plz” option, and even if there were scammers can still send you friend request spam.
Yes, I’m so angry and salty that I checks notes wrote a detailed and even-handed analysis of the situation with appropriate caveats. How dare I state facts with sources and explanations of my reasoning.
I’m just absolutely raging. It’s embarrassing, frankly. I’m making a fool of myself. I can’t believe I lost control like that and said words that I believe to be true. Who does that? Unhinged behaviour. Just wild. I should be banned.
Sure, if you ignore the worst parts of it that I explicitly laid out and only focus on how it makes you feel personally, then I can see how you might feel that way.
Okay, I don’t understand how and you haven’t explained it, you’ve just said that you don’t personally care about it, which isn’t an argument I can respond to. You’re free to have your opinion, but I don’t see how it’s relevant here.
Yes, you ignored the worst parts of it in favour of things you could dismiss for yourself, and then you ignored me pointing that out. I’m not going to keep explaining this to you any further.
Oh my god we need John Brown simulator. Old western setting, open world, muskets, horses and hand-drawn maps, tracking down slavers and stalking them across the prairie and conducting raids on their properties.
I think the last two games I bought at some high premium launch price were GTAV and Cyberpunk 2077.
That second one still stings. I played it longer than I should’ve probably because of the price, and I’ve not bothered with the DLC, even though people said it fixed the game. The price just left a bad taste in my mouth.
I’ve sunk probably a thousand hours into Slay the Spire, have beaten Hades, and just finished Cult of the Lamb. Looking for something else to scratch that itch- preferably on switch. Any suggestions?...
Beware though, it’s quite different to other roguelites in that the world it creates is suprisingly expansive. You can get lost in it, mentally. There are quests that can take you dozens of hours to complete, all on the same run, and even if you become so absurdly overpowered that nothing can threaten you directly, till you can fly inside the sun, you can still get turned into a sheep and die in a single hit.
Also the wand-building is complex, it’s like a programming language. People have built wands that can teleport you to parallel worlds, and the developers did not intend for that to be possible. And in a way I’ve never seen magic be done before, you can screw up and kill yourself with your wands, just like a discworld wizard. It’s so easy to do, it’s a rite of passage for any new player.
Some people don’t like spoilers on this game so here you go, but honestly getting just a little spoiled made me get properly into it to understand what the hell people were talking about.
Tap for spoilerI was maybe 8 or 9 hours into reaching the hardest boss in the game, up to NG+24 or so, just a couple of hours away from my destination. I was teleporting, had hundreds of thousands of hit points, had immunity to every kind of damage, could tear through the terrain like it wasn’t there, had weapons that would evaporate any enemy in the blink of an eye even as they became exponentially more powerful with each NG+ level, and I was being careful. I had even pacified the world so nobody would attack. Then some asshole dropped in from off-screen with a wand of transmogrification, got hit by the chainsaw on my tele wand and retaliated while something exploded nearby throwing fire over us, and I, now a sheep, flopped around impotently for a few seconds on fire then just fucking died.
I… stopped playing after that one, I’ll be honest. But I will return.
And rather than simply being repetitive, the way the world loops creates an ennui that’s kind of haunting to me. The whole game is littered with versions of people trying to achieve immortality, and if you manage to reach a point where you actually can’t die, you feel like you’ve soft-locked yourself, because dying is how you get to the end-screen. You can just end the run from the menu, but it feels fake somehow.
10/10 would try to kill god and confront my mortality again.
I mean, I don’t know how much they anticipated. There are a lot of projectile path modifications that are clearly meant for tinkering, but the idea that they knew their players would do this is hard to tease out. It’s a simulation game built very much on “Things are what they are,” and they know this has deep implications.
Like when I was turned into a sheep, I wasn’t “noita (sheep)”, I was just “sheep”. The noita I had been playing as was effectively stored in a state of nonexistence until the transmogrification wore off, then the sheep was replaced with the noita. So transforming yourself - or simply causing yourself to temporarily cease to exist - can be a way to eliminate side effects of certain things.
If there is one thing that it might be worth spoiling yourself on, if you’re struggling to finish a run, is in the next spoiler.
Tap for spoilerLearn to escape the Holy Mountain without collapsing it. Being able to return to edit wands, go back up in the world, and access health is a game-changer. Finishing the game without that trick is something I don’t think I’ve ever done. All the big lore stuff is discovered after finishing your first run anyway as far as I can tell.
Other than that, I would look up how to design good wands. This can be a good thing to learn by doing for a while, but there are deep interactions that you could soend a thousand runs not learning. I think the shared science is a big part of what makes this game great.
I said Noita is my favourite roguelite, but actually Heat Signature is probably tied with it. It has a completely different philosophy of soft failure.
If your character dies in space, they’re dead, but they can also be captured, then another character can rescue them. And if a mission is going sideways, you can huck a wrench through a window and fling yourself into space, as long as you’re confident you can pick yourself up with your space pod before you pass out.
It’s very fast-paced with quick runs. Each character that comes along has different traits, and you can have 4 different people on the go at once. Each character has their individual quest - which can be rescuing another character - and when that’s done you can retire them or keep them going.
It’s very open to how you want to play.
Oh! Also, if you’re trying to do your character’s big final mission and it goes wrong, usually you can bail and try again. I lost quite a few characters before I realised that.
You know why villagers cause so much lag if there’s too many and they’re allowed to roam free? Well, rather than optimise their pathfinding logic they just… recalculate their paths every goddamn frame. They also take shortcuts in calculating their paths to reduce this overhead, so their movement is derpy and frequently kills them.
You could make the path then record all the blocks they will interact with, and only recalculate if one of those blocks changes. Boom, millions of operations eliminated, and you’ve got some spare time to make sure the paths will actually work. You could also stagger pathfinding so if a bunch of villagers need a path all at once - like you just blocked a path to where they were all going - you could spread out that load, and prevent lag spikes.
But they don’t do that, so people end up sticking them in tiny boxes on top of carpets so they stop trying to pathfind. Just absurd stuff.
It’s by the same guy that made The Stanley Parable, but it’s more serious.
It’s the same themes from Stanley Parable except made into an actual story instead of one long recurring joke.
I’m not saying the long recurring joke is bad - someone will probably hate that I said that - but they’re just two different things that both do their different things very well. The Stanley Parable explicitly never builds to any kind of conclusion.
I’ll be straight with you - I never played Ricochet. I was just doing the joke from that one guy who asked Gabe about it that one time. But the fact you ported it to the Source engine is honestly really cool.
The combat may not have been the most interesting versus basic grunts, but it never got stale. I’ve never played another game where the core gameplay changed so much so frequently.
Physics interactions -> Basic FPS -> Fan Boat -> Mounted Gun -> Gravity Gun -> Zombies & Traps -> Car -> THE CRANE FIGHT -> Rockets & Gunships -> Ant Lions -> Ant Lion Minions -> Turrets -> Resistance Squads -> Striders -> Super Gravity Gun
Honestly the HL1 combat may have been somewhat more challengjng, but it was a grind. Fights were often just frustrating. I’ve abandonded playthroughs because I didn’t feel like spending another 10 hours beating my head against the endless amounts of enemies just to get to the end of… whatever I was doing I forgot.
HL1’s big innovation was never removing control from the player just to tell the story. Beyond that they also had some interesting AI behaviour and weapons. It was a game with old-school length and old-school difficulty.
HL2’s big innovation was the physics engine, and they played with it in so many ways, while polishing every other aspect of the design. They kept the gameplay tight and did something just long enough to explore it and then they moved on. They never forced you to hang out just repeating the same loop over and over to pad the length.
Had to downvote, but the game is great. I play it with my kids and it is reliably hilarious. There are so many interactions that something surprising happens with amazing regularity.
I think it might be more subtle than that, unions exist so that when negotiations happen they can fuck back, but we know Microsoft can strategise longer term than that. They pioneered “embrace, extend, extinguish”. Embracing a union then trying to infiltrate and turn it into a corporatised union is another version of that exact same play.
I suspect subcontracting is how they get around the lasseiz-faire nature of employment there. There’s a famously open policy where nobody tells anyone what to do.
But I imagine that policy can’t extend to subcontractors. There it’s “here’s money, make the servers happen”.
Are there any good casual/low-stress mobile games that aren’t filled with microtransactions? For example: easy puzzle games, match-3 games, low-difficulty adventure games, or clicker-style games....
A Dance of Fire and Ice is an incredible rhythm game that you buy once and that’s it. I think there’s an expansion pack but it’s a single purchase. Whether that’s your idea of “casual” really depends on what you like. You can always play chill low difficulty levels when you need to zone out, and high difficulty levels when you want a challenge. It can get stupidly hard.
You can try a demo online at that link. It told me webgl wasn’t supported on mobile, but it worked pretty well for me just now on firefox, even if it was a bit laggy. It should work fine on PC.
I pirated it on PC after my kids told me about it and ended up buying it three times on Steam and twice on mobile. It’s just that good. I’ve built a custom digital drum to play it and I’m now making a custom MIDI controller, so we’ll see if that does better when connected to the game.
The game works as well on mobile, if not better because the touchscreen is so responsive.
Yup, if you’ve played Obduction it’s like that. Full 3d environments made with modern rendering. I tried the latest Myst remake and this one feels like a modern game, although I imagine most of the early 90s design foibles are still there.
I haven’t played many of the other remakes of the original, there have probably been too many, but it’s nice to see the later games getting this treatment.
Hytale, once touted as the Minecraft killer, is ceasing development (www.destructoid.com) angielski
After being in development for over 10 years, Hytale, a sandbox game from the Hypixel Studios team with support from Riot, has officially been cancelled. Hypixel Studios’ CEO, Noxy, announced the cancellation on X on June 23, with the official Hytale forums following suit.
A game you "didn't know it was bad 'til people told you so"? angielski
I’m talking about games that you still like but you had no idea were criticized so much....
List of Fan (OpenSource) Ports/Remakes of Games angielski
Disclaimer: I changed a little the layout and thanks for the contributions!...
Half-Life 3 is reportedly playable in its entirety and could be announced this year (www.engadget.com) angielski
What are some good examples of "Where the fuck do you go" kind of games? angielski
We’ve all played them. Backtracking, not knowing where to go. Going back and forth. Name some of these games from your memory. I’ll start: Final Fantasy XIII-2, RE1
Cities Skylines 2, Kerbal Space 2, Planet Coaster 2, Frostpunk 2... What Went Wrong? angielski
Last few years I’ve been excitedly waiting for sequels from several small-to-medium sized studios that made highly acclaimed original games—I’m talking about Cities: Skylines, Kerbal Space Program, Planet Coaster, Frostpunk, etc.—yet each sequel was very poorly received to the point I wasn’t willing to risk my money...
I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game angielski
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. I liked ksp2 1, cities skylines 1, age of empires 2, baldurs gate 3 a lot, I just finished Divinity original sin 2. I like rpgs and management / factory games like workers and resources,...
Valve adds "all the Team Fortress 2 client and server game code" to its Source mod tools, letting modders "build completely new games based on TF2" and publish them on Steam (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Anyone else suddenly itching to blast Nazis in Wolfenstein for no reason at all? angielski
Something about those awkward hand gestures really gets me going.
GTA VI Might Inspire Other AAA Developers to Price Their Games at $100 (80.lv) angielski
Any Roguelike/Roguelite suggestions? angielski
I’ve sunk probably a thousand hours into Slay the Spire, have beaten Hades, and just finished Cult of the Lamb. Looking for something else to scratch that itch- preferably on switch. Any suggestions?...
What's the greatest joy you have gotten from a video game? angielski
Notch says he will work on a spiritual successor to Minecraft (x.com) angielski
Valve is fixin' to start some arguments over the holidays because 'All adult members in a Steam Family' can see your Steam Replay page (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
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What are your favorite "gotta go in blind" games? angielski
Which games blow your mind, but only if you know nothing about them in advance?...
Half-Life 2 peaks at 52,000 concurrent players, 20 years after its release (steamdb.info) angielski
λ ☣ ☢️ (λ)²
'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary by Valve
Recommendation engine: Downvote any game you've heard of before angielski
This might be a slightly unusual attempt at a prompt, but might draw some appealing unusual options....
Shadows of Doubt, the procgen private-eye immersive sim, is leaving early access next month (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/18591054
Bethesda Game Studios developers form 'wall to wall' union that includes artists, designers, and programmers (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Steam Is Run By Fewer Than 80 Staff, Lawsuit Docs Reveal (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Are there any good casual/low-stress mobile games that aren't filled with microtransactions? angielski
Are there any good casual/low-stress mobile games that aren’t filled with microtransactions? For example: easy puzzle games, match-3 games, low-difficulty adventure games, or clicker-style games....
Riven | Official Launch Trailer | Available June 25th (www.youtube.com) angielski