Counterpoint, people love Overwatch, they hate what Blizzard did to it. There’s an audience out there hungry for this exact product if someone can do it right (or, at least, about 20% less wrong than Blizzard).
New System Shock probably isn’t happening. Warren Spector was working on it a while back, but the project got canned and the rights are with TenCent now. Since it’s not exactly the sort of thing you can turn into a live service micro transaction generator I really don’t see it going anywhere any time soon.
There’s a lot I could list here, but I’ll focus on a few that I’ve played recently, that don’t seem to be getting as much mention.
Slay The Princess - A literally flawless game. I genuinely mean that. There’s not a single thing about this that I can think of to criticise. The writing is fantastic, the art is beautiful, the voice acting is note perfect and the score is gorgeous and haunting. The concept is insanely inventive, and the execution even more so. I finished my first run in about 3 hours, and then looked at what other people were saying about the game and realised that I had only just scratched the surface. As in, other reviews seemed to be describing an almost entirely different game to the one I played, because literally every choice matters.
OTXO - Roguelike Hotline Miami with bullet time and a bartender who sells bottled superpowers. There’s really not much more to say than that. The soundtrack is like a Trent Reznor fever dream, and the whole thing has the feeling of encountering Quake for the first time. Just a mad demented bloodrush of insane violence coming at you non-stop.
Vampire Survivors - It’s super cheap, it’s super chill, it seems like absolutely nothing and then oops its 3am and you’re telling yourself you can still get in one more run (no, for real, this game actually fucked with my sleep for a while).
Shadows of Doubt - OK, this one is still early access and I don’t actually recommend buying it right now, but absolutely wishlist it for the 1.0 release. It’s rough around the edges at the moment, but GOD FUCKING DAMN WHAT A GAME. The sheer audacity of the idea behind this is unbelievable; a fully procedurally generated “city” (about a 3 x 4 block grid on medium size) where every room of every building can be entered and explored, and contains a business or a resident. Every person in the city (up to around a 1000 at the largest sizes) has a complete life; a job in the city that they go to at scheduled hours, places they like to hang out, relationships, maybe a partner, fingerprints, medication for medical conditions, a blood type, a shoe size, height, weight, age… And they do crimes, which you then get to solve for money. You’re a PI, in a demented alternate history 1979 (“The Bourbon Empire never fell and now Coca Cola is the President of a retro-cyberpunk dystopia”), down on your luck and taking any job to get by. And when I say “solve crimes” I mean it. This is, IMO, the first game ever to get detective work right. There’s no Arkham “Turn on detective vision and walk around until you see all the clues” going on here. You have to actively think about the crime and how to approach it. You can canvass witnesses, dig through government databases, gather prints and match them to a murder weapon, examine the corpse and make inferences about the time of death from which you can pull security footage and look for suspicious characters. You chase down leads, some of which end up as total dead-ends. You have a god damn pin board with string on which to put all your evidence, and then cover it with sticky notes. And it’s all you doing this. The game has a tonne of helpful quality of life elements designed to make the process of gathering and assessing evidence as frictionless as possible, but you’re the brains. It’s on you to actually make the deductions and connections and puzzle out what happened. This game is a work of demented genius and I’m slightly scared of the people who made it.
+1 for Insurgency. It’s more “mid shelf” than “indie”, but either way it’s an absolutely superb military shooter, and one that actually does a really good job of avoiding the usual MURICA bullshit that is so endemic to the genre. Combat is portrayed as genuinely scary. The voice actors all do an amazing job of displaying fear and panic in their line reads. Even the Russian voice is very obviously masking his fear behind a veneer of machismo, which is a refreshering change from the usual image of the macho badass soldier that these games present.
I also really appreciate that female characters are present, but only on the security forces, because the insurgents are clearly intended to be ISIL, and they’re not gonna whitewash how shitty those guys are to women. OTOH, the insurgents are still portrayed as (shitty) human beings who look out for each other, and react in very genuine ways to the scary situation they’re in. No one ever yells “Allah akbar” or whatever.
Embracer, actually, and while I do suspect that the blame for a lot of these problems lies with them (especially the lack of servers, which was almost certainly down to Embracer cheaping out), it’s hard to blame this particular failure on anyone but Aspyr. While Embracer almost certainly created the conditions by not giving them enough time and resources to deliver good work, it’s still on Aspyr that they used someone’s work without permission. There’s no real justification for that, even if you’re in a bind.
Sear the name Embracer into your mind. This is what’s going to happen with any studio owned by them. This is what ruthlessly taking a blowtorch to all of your studios headcounts gets you.
Generally speaking, game devs never like putting out a bad product. It’s a creative industry, and one that people go into because they love games (otherwise they’d be working in fintech where the pay is much better). I guarantee it was Embracer who made the call to launch this product in its current broken state, and probably also Embracer who put so little money aside for server infrastructure.
Divinity: Original Sin 2! It’s by the same devs and it’s absolutely incredible. Different classes and spells and stuff, but you’ll pick it all up very fast, and I actually think character building in Divinity is a lot more fun than D&D, because there’s a lot more flexibility about how you choose powers and abilities.
If you’d prefer to stick with something based on the D&D mechanics, Owlcats games are excellent (it’s Pathfinder, but Pathfinder is just a lightly modified D&D 3.5)
Oh, yeah, they completely failed to get what makes Tina an interesting character. She’s constantly putting up this mask of being the toughest, meanest badass who’s seen it all and done it all (all of which is an attempt to hide the fact that she’s a scared, traumatized child).
This is what happens when you have some combination of bad casting, a bad script, and bad direction. Even good actors have a hard time producing good work in a bad environment.
(“bad casting” in this case meaning “casting an actor who isn’t well suited to the role”)
Why, in the love of God, would you look at Roland, hulking, dour, tough as nails veteran soldier whose main character trait is being completely unflappable, and think “Kevin Hart”?
What were these people smoking?
Also the bits of writing we get in the trailer are just bad. Tina doesn’t even manage to feel like a poor imitation of herself. Even with better casting (seriously, you could literally just have Ashley Burch play Tina, you’re up-aging the character anyway, what’s the harm?), there would still be none of the vibrancy of the scripts from 2 and Pre-sequel. I’m not saying those games had flawless writing, but it was fun, funny, and generally managed to land on the right side of transgressive.
Honestly, the whole thing has this really awkward “We really wanted James Gunn but couldn’t afford him” feel to it.
No, it doesn’t, and you’re betraying your ignorance of the topic by making the suggestion.
First of all, when we refer to rootkits, we’re talking about the fact that NProtect, by design, gains an absolutely staggering amount of access to the kernel space of your computer. VAC, by comparison, does not demand anything like the same level of access. You’re making an apples to oranges comparison, and when questioned on it responding with “But they’re both citrus fruit, right?”
No, they’re not, and the fact that you think they are means you don’t know nearly as much about this subject as you think.
But putting that aside for a moment, suppose one day you went hang gliding. Then, upon telling me about how much you enjoyed it, I immediately demanded that you play Russian roulette with me, and got seriously offended when you refused. That would be insane, right?
So you see how a person consenting to one risk doesn’t obligate them to consent to others? It’s not an all or nothing state between “My computer is exposed to exactly zero vulnerabilities” and “My computer is exposed to literally every vulnerability ever”.
Every single program you install on your computer brings some potential amount of risk, but a) that risk is MUCH higher when the program demands the kind of kernel level access to resources like your memory that NProtect wants, and b) that risk has to be commensurate to the benefits offered, and it’s hard to see what benefit I’m being offered by a notably cheaply made kernel level anti-cheat in a purely cooperative gameplay experience.