I think the execs were always somewhat shit, even when they were making good games. It’s just their creative team miraculously managed to make good games despite the shitty execs.
I haven’t played TF2 in a while (before f2p?), my understanding is that community servers were mostly fine and how we’re mostly on random casual games?
At least this game has a dedicated server option, contrary to the other TF2.
Bring dedicated servers back.
Can’t have persistent server capacity issues if I can throw my own hardware at it.
This also gets rid of match making, which is whatever. Just give me a server browser and I’ll find a few favorites and hang on those.
It can also keep working long after the companies give up on them too.
At least back in the day, multiplayer games released with the server you could self host.
Or you’d find a chill one that you liked and it became its own little community of sorts with regulars and whatnot.
Now, some games make it genuinely hard to even play multiple rounds back to back with the same people.
The ranking system and match making superceded the lobby.
There’s still a lot of enjoyable games, gems even, but there’s a lot of hot garbage too.
I don’t think it’s (just) Internet’s fault.
Hell, we’d play Diablo over dial-up and it was amazing at the time.
I think it’s more the corpo greed making its way everywhere. No mTx, no subscription, no battle pass, no unlocking bs, no cosmetics, no unending daily grinds, just you, the game, maybe a buddy if your family didn’t need the phone.
DRM didn’t exist, they’d ask you questions about the game manual instead.
I remember bringing the Fallout manual on a trip and reading through it thinking about what character I’d make. Now everything is digital only, you’re almost lucky if it comes with a wallpaper.
Which is something super common in Metroid too.
Hell he probably hasn’t figured out you can shoot up and just tries to jump to fire horizontally at enemies instead.