ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

My wife loves Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing, and she’s been way into Hello Kitty: Island Adventure lately. It seems to split the difference between those things and add some of its own spice on top.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

If you like puzzle games, you might try a game that’s not technically multiplayer but that the two of you can work on solving together, which is what my wife and I do. Good candidates for that are Case/Rise of the Golden Idol, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, and we’re currently playing Blue Prince.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I’d say check out Case of the Golden Idol on a deep sale to test the waters. Lorelei is definitely hard mode if you’re not sure if this is something you’d want, but we found that having two people to approach solving the puzzles helped a lot.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

This one’s on Steam.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Playing through those old games now, I feel like they could use some kind of dodge move to get an escape from guaranteed damage, so if the movement does that, I’ll be happy. But those games are also littered with level designs that make you take the long way around due to a single ledge being too high, so hopefully it alleviates that problem a bit too. The Destiny personal vehicle seems like a departure from Catch a Ride, but maybe those already weren’t in 3 for all I know, and being able to spawn it out of nowhere probably is an improvement.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

They can’t lay people off, so they just put them in a room with no work to do until they get so bored that they quit. It’s the same thing but different.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

The new normal for what?

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Live service, sure, since that’s the entire point of live service, but we’re spoiled for choice of fantastic games across different scopes and scales that don’t have any microtransactions at all.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

If you think the only way to find fantastic games without microtransactions is to pirate, then you’re missing tons of great games.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I think you’re having trouble finding the good stuff in the first place then. We’re flooded with more great games than ever. And microtransactions are one thing, but something like a DLC expansion isn’t pressuring you to buy it if you like the base game. Even still, if you had a problem with the existence of any DLC for a game whatsoever, there’s still tons to play.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

Is DLC a problem if a game had been “finished” for years and then they go back and make one for an old game? It’s been known to happen. I don’t see it as a problem, because it’s arbitrary. In many ways, a DLC can be reactionary for what a game needs after they’ve had time to observe the completed thing. It also depends on your definition of indie, since there’s as wide of a range in production value among games called “indie” as there is among “AAA”. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II probably cost one tenth what the next Grand Theft Auto cost to make, and a game like Indika or Clair Obscur could fool plenty of people into thinking they were made by enormous teams.

But like I said, even if I filtered for games without any sort of DLC, there’s still tons to play.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

That depends on what you’re looking for. From this year alone, there’s Split Fiction, Avowed, and Knights in Tight Spaces, and I haven’t finished Blue Prince yet, but it’s pretty cool so far. What is it about indie titles, however you define that term, that doesn’t interest you? Because at this point, it’s most video games (AAA games take a long, long time to make these days), and that would go a long way toward explaining how you feel most good games have microtransactions, if you’re willing to ignore most good games.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

You’re not accepting more expensive entertainment either. You’re pirating it. None of these games were made with less effort; they’re typically just made by fewer people. Adding more people to the project doesn’t make the game any better, or else Ubisoft games would be the greatest games ever made. I think I see why you’ve got this perspective that’s completely divorced from reality. Yes, most games have microtransactions if you completely disregard most games. I’d encourage you to give some of those games you’re ignoring a try.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

It’s fine if you’re completely ignorant of the great games that have come out lately, but I wouldn’t consider it admirable to be proud of being this ignorant about great games or how they’re made.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

As an alternate perspective, early access isn’t some sad, new state of gaming. Done right, it’s a way to hone in on perfecting a systems-driven game that probably doesn’t really have an end. It’s been used to great effect in roguelikes, Kerbal Space Program, and Baldur’s Gate 3. If anything, the problem with the program now is that there are so many finished games to choose from that it’s a harder sell to try out an early access game.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

FF7 remake is cool for a lot of reasons, but we’ve got countless reasons to support the idea that turn-based combat isn’t the barrier to playing those old games.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

From Jeff Grubb:

To clarify, I’ve been told the layoffs are more than just Respawn and are similar to last year’s February layoff where 670 people were cut. I don’t know the exact number.

But yeah, I’m sure continuing to chase live service as though you’ll ever get Apex Legends to be as successful as it once was will totally work out.

EDIT: furthermore, he says:

Apex Legends and EA Sports FC both missed harder than people realize. Dragon Age barely registers in this.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

The decline of a live service game is so inevitable that it seems silly to me to ascribe a reason to it. Eventually, people just want something newer than regular content updates can provide.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

In chasing infinite growth (of the same game), you have potentially infinite spend as well.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Not to be too much of a bummer, but the gaming industry seemingly grew too fast, and the end result is going to be that there just aren’t as many jobs in the industry to be filled by any team once the layoffs are done. Maybe a handful of the people laid off here go on to work together again.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

League is too.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

They sold 1 million copies in a couple of days on top of a Game Pass deal, and their team is leaner than most. They’re surely financially successful.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

And that trend will continue, which is why console sales are well behind where they were last generation, and it’s why the next Xbox will just run Windows.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

They ought to patch out the need for Ubisoft’s launcher. Same goes for EA’s back catalog, for that matter. At least EA’s newest releases don’t come with the launcher.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Even when you buy their games on Steam, there’s an EA launcher there in addition to Steam. This is the case for It Takes Two, for instance, but not for Split Fiction. Split Fiction only uses Steam if you bought it on Steam.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Jedi Fallen Order says right on the Steam page that it incorporates EA DRM.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Only the newest ones. They haven’t gone back to remove the requirement from their back catalog, but Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Split Fiction don’t require it now. Meanwhile, Madden 26 still requires it, so I guess it isn’t universal.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I believe it was added after launch. I distinctly remember trying to play this game on the Steam Deck on a train with no internet, and the EA app complained about it and wouldn’t let me launch the game. It’s quite possible that this can be sidestepped by specifically putting the Steam Deck in offline mode, rather than just severing the internet connection, but I didn’t know to try that at the time, and it’s definitely DRM.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Split Fiction is definitely a game people care about, and disappointing numbers for a Dragon Age title is still several million people.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Right, but that extra launcher causes problems, so I tend to avoid games that still have it. It’s why I still haven’t played A Way Out but played Split Fiction.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

It’s my thought as well, but Ghost of Yotei was scheduled for October already, and Sony would surely know when GTA comes out, so maybe it’s a November game? Borderlands will likely be enough of a time sink that you might want a few months after it before releasing a GTA.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Does BL3 still have respec stations like the earlier games?

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

This isn’t a “do you guys not have phones” moment. This is a “Diablo Immortal made a boatload of money” moment.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I play Fantasy Critic with some friends. We allow remakes in our league but not remasters. This one counts as a remake for purposes of this site, with a flag on it to note that it was contentious. This game definitely blurs some lines on some definitions.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

The story was the most interesting thing about Starfield, since like me, the writers of Starfield also really loved the movie Interstellar. Unfortunately, nearly every plot line sort of wrapped up in an unfulfilling way for one reason or another.

I think the gist of Bethesda games is that what they did was truly impressive 20 years ago, but each individual piece of them is kind of bad. The combat is bad, the story is bad, the RPG systems are way worse than their pen and paper roots, the NPC schedules tend to do little more than make quest givers just appear in slightly different locations, and what should be dynamic uses of physics and NPC line of sight never manifests in anything more interesting than putting a bucket on a shop keeper’s head to steal things.

There’s nothing quite like a Bethesda game, because I think when another developer sits down to make a new game, they try to make one or more of those pieces way better than a Bethesda game rather than implementing everything that Bethesda implements, because plenty of it is bad and will be bad without being able to focus on it.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

We both know tariffs have little to do with this game, but it was very possible to see them coming 2-3 years ago if you listened to that man speak.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I hear this rhetoric a lot, which shows me that a ton of people have a much harder time than me finding the good stuff, even though there’s so much of it out there.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I don’t know. As far as I can tell, it’s only searchable for the current calendar year, and we can view games we had on our roster in the same league in previous years. No one had any of those games on their roster. The site differentiates between remasters, remakes, and reimaginings, with a reimagining being something like Resident Evil 2 or Final Fantasy VII Remake. We used to not allow remakes, but we changed the rules for our league starting last year (personally, I voted against it, but I was outvoted). The league commissioner can always override a decision that the site makes when categorizing a game.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Yes, it is fantasy sports but with video games. You draft games, and your points are determined by their score on Open Critic. Over 70 gains points, under 70 loses points. Every point over 90 is worth double. The way my friends and I structure our league, we have one counter pick during the draft, and the counter picker gets the inverse of the points of that game; so if I have a friend who drafts Kirby Air Riders, and I counter pick it, and it scores 67, my friend loses 3 points and I gain 3 points. If I counter pick a game that scores positive points, I lose those points instead.

The only game on my roster that has released so far is Knights in Tight Spaces, which only got me 6 points (I aim for about 13 points per game), because it scored a 76 on Open Critic, and I was perhaps a bit too risky when I drafted Pony Island 2: Panda Circus, because I got counter picked on it, and it doesn’t have a release date, so I might be stuck with a game that scores 0 points due to not releasing this year.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Correct, you don’t know that. You can speculate on releases, like I did with Pony Island 2, and get counter picked as a punishment for the risk. As long as it’s in the site’s database, it’s fair game. I drafted “Unannounced 3D Mario Game” this year, but then I picked up “Unannounced 3D Donkey Kong Game” after the draft for 1 in-game dollar (no one else put in a bid for it), as a hedge, since the rumor was that either a Mario or a Donkey Kong game would be made by the Mario Odyssey team for the Switch 2 launch. No one counter-picked Mario, so I’m allowed to drop it, and the Donkey Kong entry automatically updated to Bananza. The “season” is a calendar year. We do our draft early in January, and typically the first release of the year will be like halfway through the month, and the score that each game earns is whatever score it has at the stroke of midnight on January 1st.

Because we don’t know every release a year in advance, A) this game got a lot harder starting back in 2022, because that’s when game marketing cycles got way shorter, and B) some of the best reviewing games of 2025 probably won’t even be announced until this coming June.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

They have their own database. If there’s a release or a rumor they don’t know about, you can suggest one, but they ask you to cite your sources. If it’s got a Steam page and you provide that link, they’ll basically add it right away, which is what happened when I got Total Chaos added. Fantasy Critic also gives league commissioners a lot of power to house rule just about anything.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I’m no professional, I just love gaming news

Judging by how these posts are taken here, I think once you’re done vacationing, you could look into doing this professionally.

It’s cool that Breath of Fire IV has that tag saying that the game was picked up due to the dream list, but I’ve got some concerns about what GOG will or won’t touch. Someone here on Lemmy pointed out correctly that these are always the PC versions of games in the Good Old Games program. Several of the games they’ve picked up recently are games that I only ever thought of as console games and didn’t know that they had PC versions. The problem with that is that up until approximately a few years into the life of the Xbox 360, it was quite common to have a PC version that didn’t resemble the console versions of the same title at all. For instance, the Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter games on PC have the same stories and voice lines, but the levels and gameplay mechanics are totally different. Spider-Man 2, based on the movie, is immensely important in video game history, but only the console version; the PC version is widely considered to be garbage. 007: Nightfire is on the dream list, but everyone there is sure to mention that the one people want is the console version. Anyway, I hope they can figure this out and start getting some classic console games saved just as well as the PC versions, and I hope that the PC versions they’re choosing aren’t compromised compared to the ones that are so fondly remembered.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Nor me either, but I’m going to start packing my parachute now. You probably said the same about Reddit a few times before you ended up here, too.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Indies are making now what would have been AAA back then. And as many great games as there were back then, we get more now. Back then, it was possible to keep up with just about every major release as it came out. Now I’ve got a backlog of 9 games that piqued my interest and came out this year that I haven’t had time to get around to yet, and it’s only April.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Including in this interview, but not in my summary.