If we’re talking stuff on F-Droid, the big one there for me is UnCiv. It’s an excellent fully-free reimplementation of Civ V… with all the nightmarish one-more-turn-oh-God-is-it-dawn addictive problems that implies. Only real flaw is that by adapting Civ V, it also adapts Civ V’s big flaw: traffic jams. Unciv units neither stack nor combine so waging war in an obstacle-rich landscape is hellishly tedious. Also the higher difficulties feel just abusively random and unfair because the hard-level AIs get free resources, but that’s normal for a Civ game.
Zero-K. It’s a competitive online RTS loosely based on the classic Total Annihilation (which led to Planetary Annihilation and Supreme Commander). Some of its features are a bit overcomplicated, but it does an amazing job innovating within the RTS genre.
It’s fast, aggressive, and fun. You spam units, claim territory (in the form of metal-extractors and energy-grid that upgrades their output, and building defenses to protect that) and raid and assault your opponents.
It abandons the hoary old concept of factions, instead giving you your choice of starting factories… and as the game progresses, you can expand into other factories to access the synergy of units. So you start a battle with a narrow slice of the unit-pie, but ultimately can access the whole inventory in a single match. There is no “teching” really, besides constructing resource-buildings, which keeps the focus on resources, construction, and combat.
It has a full single-player campaign that introduces the game’s complexity bit-by-bit… but the campaign does have some difficulty spikes, particularly since the units do get rebalanced once in a while and so an old mission will become suddenly easier or harder as the developers patch the game.
The game has a Lua-based GUI plug-in architecture if you like WoW-style UI mods as well.
I mean a wireless wearable computer would have network lag but the important lag – between the rendering GPU and the screen – would be nil.
I mean streaming the video data to the headset Miracast-style would be dumb, I agree, but afaik all the rendering hardware in the new Apple headset is inside the headset.
The new Steam Deck and its copycats have proven that a compact gaming-grade PC is doable. If not fully contained in the headset, then make a little fannypack with a cable up to vr headset, but you can walk around untethered otherwise.
I miss the early AC games where skating cost energy so mechs’ walking speeds actually mattered. Then you had a much deeper and more profound difference between a huge tanky mech compared to a fast sprinter. The motion models between quads, tanks, and bipeds were deeper too.
Ah. I never got far enough in the classic games to see those weapons. It’s just the new games had a serious tonal problem with “this is serious movie game and killing has real gravity now massacre 30 guys with an AR”. It just feels like it would have managed to capture the grounded tone it was going for better if it’d stuck to the pistols and bow.
Not only can UE do the exact same thing, but Epic doesn’t need small indies as much since they have a more diverse clientbase of heavy-hitters. Epic is much more able to absorb the damage if they make a pricing change that loses them the indie market.
Tomb Raider 2013 is an excellent M-rated take on Uncharted that happens to star Lara Croft. While the actual “tomb raiding” is present, the tombs are physics puzzles that are side-quests and are distinct from the core plot, which is mostly combat and the occasional puzzles and exploration.
Also, Lara using a shotgun and assault-rifle seems wrong.
Yes, but in this case? The users are being migrated to a new authentication account and have been notified for many years that they needed to move over - it’s been like 5 years, right? The servers are staying up. And if you’ve got a Mojang account, any possibility of this still being under even the most generous warranty is long gone.
If you want to participate in a community where you control the software, you should be getting into open-source games. Minetest is great! It has a better modding system than Java edition! But ultimately, if you’re playing commercial games, you have to deal with a reality that the company owns it and there’s no guarantee what will happen to their servers after the warranty is expired.
The players still have their stuff and their user ID, just under a new login process. They’ve been pestering users to make this migration for years and years.
Edit: also, this is Java edition, meaning the worlds they built are just Minecraft save files that a new user could access. The cloud-based one was Bedrock Edition, that’s the one where you’d have cloud-based worlds that you could lose if you lost your account.
Authentication servers do not run themselves, they need babysitting and patching and upgrading because this is users’ passwords and secrets. Microsoft obviously does not want to keep managing this old login system because it’s miserable unrewarding janitorial work for a sysadmin or a developer.