I recently bought the OG Dragon’s Dogma for $6. There are a ton of QoL and fun mods that improve gameplay, no DRM crap, and the game performs really well overall. Zero reasons IMO to buy DD2 right now and put up with an inferior experience and Denuvo.
Heh yeah Galactic Battlegrounds is so unfairly underrated IMO. People who knew of it brushed it off saying it’s just a reskinned AoE - but there’s so much more to it. I fell in love with it all over again last year, after I discovered a couple of excellent mods: the first being Expanding Fronts, which brings new civilizations, units, maps, music and QoL improvements. The other being cnc-ddraw - which fixes graphics/compatibility/resolutions and does some excellent upscaling. The game is so much fun with this, been playing local multiplayer with my friends using ZeroTier and we have massive battles against bots, its amazing.
I don’t know about second best, but it’s in the top 5 for sure. The other three for me being the Rogue Squadron series, Galactic Battlegrounds and tie between the two Episode I games (Phantom Menace and Racer).
What’s the story line like (if there’s any)? One of the reasons why I like Diablo (1&2) so much is because of the atmosphere, the world building, the lore, the attention to small details. Especially in Diablo 2, for instance, things like cool random names for mini-bossess, the personality of the all monsters (like how the fallen make cute grunts and scream “RAKANISHU!”) - it feels like you’re fighting against real creatures which are alive. It makes the world feel so much more alive and immersive, and increases the replay value.
Now compare this with Diablo 4, where all the mobs just feel so generic and unimaginative - like you’re fighting a big bear called “beast”… like wtf. Also, the biggest problem in Diablo 4 is that the difficulty scaling is whack - you never feel like you’ve become powerful, because the monsters become just as powerful as you and it just feels like an endless, soulless grind. Even so called “legendary” items are crap and meaningless, they don’t bear any excitement at all - like imagine how excited you’d be in D2 if you got a Tal Rasha’s or an SoJ or something, or heck, even just one of the upper runes. And finally, in D2 you have some very memorable NPCs with iconic dialogue and voice acting. Even more than two decades later, people reminisce fondly about Decard Cain and all his epic quotes like “Stay awhile and listen!” - and I bet any D2 fan reading this would’ve instantly read that quote in Cain’s voice. D4 has none of that, it’s a soulless game. So how does Last Epoch fare in regards to all that? Specifically, what I want to know is how’s the:
Another option is to get Grim Dawn, and then get the Reign of Terror mod. It’s basically Diablo 2 recreated almost completely + some extra content.
But since you’ve never played Diablo 2, I’d recommend playing it first in some form (D2R or PD2) so you can appreciate the storyline (and the epic cutscenes) - and then play the Grim Dawn mod.
My earliest would probably be Space Invaders on the Atari 400.
But I also did a lot of PC gaming around that time - Alley Cat, Paratrooper, Prince of Persia, Dangerous Dave, GORILLA.BAS, NIBBLES.BAS - these were some of the earliest DOS games I played and still remember them fondly.
When we got a NES later on, spent a lot of time on Duck Hunt. And Super Mario of course, but don’t think I ever managed to get past level 3. Still had fun though.
The core ideas remained the same, only difference is that they’ve got more roadblocks now which makes it considerably tricker (security measures in the OS + anti-cheat + encryption/DRM + server-side checks etc).
But modern day cheating goes beyond memory editing, for instance there are things like aimbots which can work at the GPU/driver level, or input automation/macros which work completely ouside of the game so normal anticheat measures may not prevent it.
Unlikely, unless the source code for the anti-cheat system and the server have been leaked as well.
The source code for just the game isn’t really going to help cheaters. Cheat makers typically don’t care about the code, they’d look at either altering the game files, and/or the memory space where the game variables are stored. Having access to the source doesn’t really help with that (well it may help them understand the compiled binaries a bit better, assuming they don’t know them inside-out already - we’re talking about a 10 year old game here).
But it may help modders for making mods and stuff. These mods may or may not be detected by the anti-cheat system though.
If Rockstar coded the game properly, the server won’t allow the client to connect if any of the files have been modified, or if the anti-cheat system is spooked/borked. So assuming that’s the case, any mods that may come out of this would be for offline gaming.
TL;DR: There’s nothing the worry about, online gaming (against randoms) will continue to suck as usual, best to stick to offline play or playing with/against a trusted friend circle.
My first memories of “LAN” parties was playing Doom, OMF2097 and other DOS IPX games over a null-modem cable (which I made myself by hacking up a regular serial cable - was so proud of myself when I got it to work lol). Of course, it was only limited to two PCs, but still fun nonetheless. After the DOS era, my first “proper” LAN party was over 10BASE-T (Cat3) during the Win 9x era, and then we quickly moved into the Cat5/100Mbps world. So somehow I completely skipped over coax LANs, even though I started with MSDOS, RS232 and BBS door games. Or maybe I used them unknowingly at school or something. But it feels really strange to hear others reminisce “fondly” about T-connectors and terminators, when even though I’m from the same era, I never even saw them. Or maybe I’m from an alternate timelime where they didn’t exist at all…
To add to this, I’d also like to recommend dos.zone - tons of cool, old school DOS games, playable right in your browser - and some of them even have mobile/touch controls, and even multiplayer support (like Doom, Warcraft etc)!