I've got a friend who waits for a sale and then buys games like this for White Elephant parties at the end of the year. Often times he buys them for himself because he just has a burning curiosity for bad games.
This will probably be similar to the switch from small, limited world maps in games to expansive open-worlds.
Interesting comparison, because I'd argue that that switch has, lately, been worse more often than it's been better, and that a lot of games would have been far better off if they stuck to the more limited equivalent.
I would love for some other store to give me a reason to shop with them instead. GOG is closest, and they still can't be bothered to give me a Galaxy client on Linux.
My fiance and I just finished the DLC for The Case of the Golden Idol, and not only is that game awesome, but the story hooks for the DLC were a pleasant surprise. We can't wait for the sequel.
I've been playing a lot of Pillars of Eternity, and I made it to Act 2. It's impressive how insanely good this game is. And then on top of that, it's impressive that I think everything I like about it is done better in Baldur's Gate 3.
I finally made it to Master rank in Street Fighter 6! Still some input frustrations until the game can get a season 2 patch, but I'm just happy to finally have something like an Elo rather than the superficial league system, even though my master rating settled slightly below the default 1500 value.
EDIT: Missed the bonus question. Of the games I'm confident are coming out in 2024, I'd say Avowed, which is why I'm playing Pillars of Eternity now.
I wish I could get into it. I'm into games that are inspired by Monster Hunter but not so much Monster Hunter itself. The monsters are too tanky, and you and the monster trade turns rendering each other unable to attack rather than having the proper push and pull of a boss fight. Plus MHW in particular (the only one I spent I any real time with) waits until you're in "the end game" before it lets you start setting your objectives by hunting something because you want its parts. Before that point, the latest thing you found is always objectively better than any other thing you found, regardless of weaknesses.
I enjoy Cyberpunk quite a lot too, but if you're going to criticize the depth of the game, it's not necessarily because the writing is subpar or anything. It would just be a reflection of how differently the game can play out with different builds. It's a little better now with the 2.0 update, but the designers still very explicitly allowed for a hacking option here, a strength option there, and so on. Compare that against something like Baldur's Gate 3 where you're free to break all sorts of rules by just casting flight or invisibility on your party and solving a problem in a way that you came up with that the designers didn't go out of their way to plan for. The latter is real depth. A deep RPG should probably feel like your experience was pretty different from others' experience.
A victory isn't the totality of Netflix as a company sinking in the ground. It's every step along the way, including directing your money toward those that respect you as a customer. Pretty much unanimously the best game of last year went to a game that's sold DRM-free, with no DLC, with the ability to play mulitplayer without some stupid live service strings attached, and it sold about 10M copies. Rewarding those games is the other side of the coin of voting with your wallet.
Don't play big games using it then. That's how you shop your way out of it. If you think every game is full of bad monetization practices, you're not looking very hard for your video games. There's an asterisk there on the addiction that a lot of them prey on, but if you're sick of playing a game where they keep asking you for money instead of letting you enjoy the game, play a different game. There are too many great games that don't bother with that nonsense.
If the only games you acknowledge are the big games committing the offense, that's why the market is taking us there. You're part of the market. Reward the other games.
The fact that you call it ever-shrinking when there is too much to play that doesn't fit into that bucket is exactly what I was talking about. Plus you must have missed the bottom falling out of live service games this past year, perhaps due to a lack of consumer trust in the product lasting long enough to justify their time or money. Sega just spent $70M on a game that they decided was better to never even launch. Sony shrunk their live service portfolio forecast from a dozen down to half of that. These are the microtransaction-driven games.
What I suggested is not ignoring the problem. Ignoring bad products makes bad products less financially viable. Buying good products instead creates more supply of good products, because producers want the money coming from consumers who only buy good products. This is not a binary boycott vs. no boycott. There is every minute step along the way. Half the industry by revenue is not coming from half the customers.
Sega’s $70M whoopsie-daisy evidently hasn’t ruined the company.
Nor does it need to. It just shows that they don't think the live service business model they made was going to work; so much so that they flushed their most expensive game to date down the toilet.
Nor has it seemed to stop their plans for Dreamcast-era nostalgia-bait games with the same abusive business model as their hilariously-late-to-the-party battle royale cancellation.
There is zero information on their nostalgic franchises play regarding business model. Many of which came from a different era of predatory monetization that came to an end without legislation (the arcades).
There is no sufficient back-pressure against publishers asking, ‘but what if more money?’
There is when you stop buying their games in the first place.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe there's a precedent for this: a pirate MMO server has been granted an official license to continue operating legally. At the moment, it sounds like this is a deal applying to this one City of Heroes server, but hey, baby steps. City of Heroes was the only MMO I ever got...
As in the title - its on sale on all consoles at the moment for a very good price and I was wondering what console should I get it on. I like the idea of playing it on the go and I thought as it looks like it should run no difference what console im playing it. But I heard some mixed reviews regarding the performance on Switch.
I don't think the OP was really looking for a review of the game, and given the accolades it received for writing, calling the game "badly written" likely makes your review an outlier.
This recent game needs so much more recognition than it got, and Im here to talk about this hidden gem. The game is called Head Bangers Rhythm Royale, a very fun rhythm pigeon party mini-game type. Face other players in a variety of rhythm-challenging activities with your pigeon character.
I just got an ergonomic mouse after struggling with wrist pain for most of the year, so I'm putting it through its paces in Pillars of Eternity. I'm loving it so far, but it gives you vague notions of "this is really tough, so come back later" for a few different areas, but I don't know how much later they mean. I'm nearly level 6, and I know the level cap for the game before the DLC was 12. Do they mean come back at level 8? Or level 12? Or 14? I've still got plenty of other areas to explore first, but I'd still like to know...you know? I've also only got 5 party members, so I'm on the lookout for a sixth.
I'm still trying to hit master rank in Street Fighter 6. Inching closer, in diamond 4 now.
I beat Wargroove 2. It's a solid iteration on the previous game, and I'd recommend it if you want more Advance Wars with the bonus of being able to play it on better hardware than a Switch.
Baldur's Gate 3 was my favorite for the year and one of my favorites ever. It was just too hard to top.
Thanks for the tip! I actually heard from some friends that the combat was pretty tough in this game, and so far it's manageable, but I will absolutely take a level advantage that I've earned if the game gives me that prompt, lol.
I'm with you on Dark Souls 3. The invasion mechanic was a fun experiment, but in practice, it just kinda blows. It would be nice to have a game with the good combat and level design of Dark Souls, without the invasions, that just lets you summon people from a damn menu like a normal video game.
Yeah, it's on my to-do list. "Seamless" co-op was never really my problem with FromSoft's mulitplayer design, as they implemented really cool mechanics to make strangers want to help each other. The unfortunate part is that they put in additional mechanics to deter them from helping each other (invasions). The summon sign system is also neat but is prone to race conditions where the sign disappears before you can summon the person because someone else got there first. Things like that are why menus may not only be simpler but also better.
I regret to admit I have never played any of their games despite having Desperados 3 on my list for a while. I feel some relief on their behalf though that their closure was evidently a deliberate choice rather than a market failure.
I'd personally recommend Shadow Tactics and Desperados III first, and Shadow Gambit only when you're still itching for more or if you just really love the ghost pirate setting. Shadow Gambit throws in some unnecessary repetition that I felt dragged the game down a bit compared to its predecessors.
The title is a bit clickbait, and I don't even necessarily agree with all of the points that Danny O'Dwyer makes here, but it's a good look back and forward at FPS games....
I feel like there's been a glut of clickbait articles being submitted lately. It would be nice if these posts could be taken down and allow the user to resubmit it with a more accurate title?
Got examples? I feel like there were a handful of users submitting the offending articles, probably a site that user is affiliated with, and because the moderators had no rules against it, I just ended up having to block those users. I'm not seeing a lot of clickbait, personally.
I'm coming up on the end of Wargroove 2. It's a solid iteration on the first game, with a few new units and mechanics. It's some solid Advance Wars gameplay, and arguably better.
I started playing The Outer Worlds basically right after Starfield, and it's hard to come up with anything that Starfield did better, honestly. This is just a better version of that, for the most part, and with a good sense of humor on top of that.
I've been trying to get to Master rank in Street Fighter 6, and I'm in Diamond 3, inching closer. I'll get there in due time. This game is great for a first version, but it sure would be nice if the input reader was more consistent and if Zangief's lariat hit behind him.
"Antiquated" is certainly not a word I've heard anyone describe BG3 with until now. Personally, this is the first year in a long time that AAA has spoken to me, because they haven't been catering to me much for the past number of years.
I'd consider them a AAA studio, at least at this point. BG3 had a budget of $100M, a team of 400 people, and if I remember correctly, a 30% stake from Tencent. I think they count now.
As for antiquated, they added emergent design elements on top of a solid CRPG foundation and married that with a level of production value that we typically associate with RPGs that had to tone down their RPG systems, like Mass Effect or Cyberpunk, which is why I'm having a hard time meeting you on that word. If I was going to assign reasons to why CRPGs died off (only for about 10 years at that), I'd say it was because people were chasing that production value, but the audience still hungered for the depth that their predecessors offered. I had a ton of fun in the BG3 combat encounters with 20+ enemies. I love XCOM, and I thought BG3's combat encounters were more fun than anything I played in XCOM.
Real-time isn't an option at all in BG3, and RTWP always felt messy to me anyway, even as I'm now playing Pillars of Eternity. Especially in a lot of those old Infinity Engine games, it felt like it incentivized devs to add more trash mobs, as opposed to paying closer attention to pacing and encounter design.
You're thinking of High On Life, the FPS metroidvania from last year. Hi-Fi Rush is the cel shaded character action game where you're essentially playing a Saturday morning cartoon version of Devil May Cry in time with music.
I haven't played DA:O to know if it counted, but I do know it was at least trying to tap into that lineage a bit. I was mostly going from NWN/KOTOR-ish to the Kickstarter boom that birthed Shadowrun, Wasteland, and Torment successors, among others.
I've definitely been eyeing Solasta since BG3. Is it combat heavy enough that it could be a podcast game? It's unclear how story focused the base game is, and I get the sense that player made content is the draw.
No LAN is a no-go for me lately, for multiplayer games. I'm tired of games being designed with forced obsolescence. Sometimes you get lucky and the game has LAN but doesn't list it on the features, so I figured I'd ask.
The funny thing is, for all the acclaim Hades got, I felt it was pretty weak as a roguelike. It was just the combat system, with no room to get creative with it, like lots of other roguelikes would allow for.
Flawlessly. The default controller mappings aren't bad either, though I did tweak them a bit. It doesn't actually have controller support, so you're either using the right stick as a mouse or relying heavily on the trackpad, but you're going to want to use the buttons for a few things, like pause/unpause, for instance.
5+ man group games
Hi everyone, I have a group of friends (we are 5 in total) and we’re looking for some new games....
MSI demos a monitor that gives you an AI helping hand in League of Legends and it might stretch the boundaries of what's considered fair (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Xbox Developer Direct Will Feature Updates On Indiana Jones, Avowed, Hellblade 2, And Ara: History Untold (www.gameinformer.com)
Suicide Squad Boss Downplays Live-Service Elements Of Obviously Live-Service Game (kotaku.com)
Nvidia’s AI-powered NPCs are getting better, but still sound uncanny (www.polygon.com) angielski
Exclusive-Unity Software cutting 25% of staff in ‘company reset’ continuation (www.yahoo.com)
By Anna Tong...
Steam kicks off 2024 with its highest-ever concurrents and player count (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
The Steam train keeps a-rollin' down the tracks.
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of January 7th
Happy new year!...
Netflix might add in-app purchases and ads to its games no one plays (www.vg247.com)
After 5 years, NCSoft officially grants a licence to popular City of Heroes private server Homecoming: 'Your accounts and characters are safe' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe there's a precedent for this: a pirate MMO server has been granted an official license to continue operating legally. At the moment, it sounds like this is a deal applying to this one City of Heroes server, but hey, baby steps. City of Heroes was the only MMO I ever got...
Disco Elysium - Switch or Xbox/PS5
As in the title - its on sale on all consoles at the moment for a very good price and I was wondering what console should I get it on. I like the idea of playing it on the go and I thought as it looks like it should run no difference what console im playing it. But I heard some mixed reviews regarding the performance on Switch.
Star Wars Outlaws releasing "late" 2024, Disney says (www.eurogamer.net)
This game needs more recognition!! (playstationcouch.com) angielski
This recent game needs so much more recognition than it got, and Im here to talk about this hidden gem. The game is called Head Bangers Rhythm Royale, a very fun rhythm pigeon party mini-game type. Face other players in a variety of rhythm-challenging activities with your pigeon character.
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of December 31st
Last post of 2023! What have you all been playing?...
Activision Blizzard workers speak out after Bobby Kotick’s CEO exit (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
Mimimi Games revived a genre, pushed it forward, and then shut down (www.polygon.com)
I regret to admit I have never played any of their games despite having Desperados 3 on my list for a while. I feel some relief on their behalf though that their closure was evidently a deliberate choice rather than a market failure.
30 Years After DOOM — Is the FPS Genre Dead? (www.youtube.com) angielski
The title is a bit clickbait, and I don't even necessarily agree with all of the points that Danny O'Dwyer makes here, but it's a good look back and forward at FPS games....
Could we ban clickbait titles in posts? (kbin.social) angielski
I feel like there's been a glut of clickbait articles being submitted lately. It would be nice if these posts could be taken down and allow the user to resubmit it with a more accurate title?
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of December 24th
Merry Christmas!! 🎄 What have you all been playing!!
Was 2023 the Greatest Gaming Year of All Time? (www.theringer.com) angielski
it's the steam winter sales, what game did you enjoy playing and want to share?
The Steam winter sales are here, up to the 4rth of January....
The Steam Winter Sale 2023 is now live (www.destructoid.com) angielski
The Steam Winter Sale 2023 is now live bringing deals on thousands of games. Here's some of our recommendations from the sale!
All of Insomniac's upcoming titles have leaked (www.resetera.com) angielski
I believe Insomniac were hacked / ransomwared last week or something. Apparently here’s the leak of all their upcoming titles....
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of December 17th
What have you all been playing!...