Me too, pretty much, but I’m fine with that. Every couple of months we get a new content drop (for free!) and I go experience the new stuff, max out everything new there is to be maxed out, and then I can put it down and play something else. I appreciate that NMS doesn’t try to make itself my full time job or require such an asinine time investment that it forces you not to play anything else.
I think the only FOMO aspect built in to NMS at all is the expeditions, and even then you can replay them any time you want with a third party tool (on PC, anyway).
It really says something that like the first mod that was ever published after release was the one that eliminates the damn hold-to-confirm mechanic that is on every. Single. Stupid. Interaction. (At least this became an official feature and you can natively disable it on most interaction prompts now.)
The fact that basically none of the inventory and crafting screens are consistent with each other is one of the main things that still bugs the hell out of me with NMS. Especially when you’re using refiners and so forth, because the dumb popup they give you that only shows you like four options at a time doesn’t even arrange the items within it in the same order as they are in your main inventory. They should have just stolen the paradigm from Minecraft and used it for everything.
It’s a melee oriented Metroidvania. Think Ori And The Blind Forest but with more insects and inexplicable frilly faux-Victorian edifices, and less pokey combat. You could play it on a SNES pad if you wanted to. I got to 100% on it back when using a cheap wireless keyboard from my couch.
I don’t know about you, but Hollow Knight’s main contribution to my household is that my wife and I still call any filigree wrought ironwork benches we see “save points.”
+1 for a Chrono Trigger ranking. For as popular as it still is in retrospect, I think people still don’t quite give it the full recognition it’s due for smashing pretty much every dreary console RPG convention that the genre had been persistently saddled with up until that point, while still remaining a console RPG. Believe it or not the developers had plans to make it even more ambitious at the beginning but they weren’t able to pull it off in the time allotted.
There are a lot of subsequent RPG titles (like even Final Fantasy goddamned Seven, not to mention Pokémon) that should have learned a bevvy of lessons from Chrono Trigger, but still didn’t. It was well ahead of its time.
Those are what’s known as knowledge gated games, where your progression as a player is either wholly or mostly tied to your own personal knowledge of how the game world works. Indeed, many of the mechanics may make no sense due to being crude mockeries of how the real world works. But some of them have become so ingrained in the popular consciousness that developers of later Indie Crafty Survival Sandboxy games can rely on the notion that most players will reflexively begin their adventure by punching a tree, and can probably accurately guess what the crafting shape of a pickaxe will be. This is no doubt down to the Earth-shattering popularity of Minecraft itself.
If you ask me, these games refusing to handhold the player and letting them discover things for themselves is part of their appeal. Expecting to be able to dive right in and know everything right from the starting block really rather misses the point. You have to admit that if you’ve been playing, say, Minecraft since the alpha days, your experience and approach to the game if you spun up a new world right now would be vastly different from your first playthrough, and none of the wonder or sense of discovery would be present.
Gating progression by knowledge (byzantine knowledge though it may be, e.g. in the case of specifically knowing not only how to construct a portal out of obsidian but also activate it by lighting it on fire) mirrors real life in an ineffable way that skill or time/microtransaction/XP accrual gated games can’t.
Some games do both. For instance, ask any Dark Souls player. The Souls games are both knowledge gated and very, infamously, exasperatingly skill gated.
Concur. I’m still banned from PayPal and I have been since the early 2000’s because I used it to buy a “high capacity magazine,” which PayPal declared was “illegal activity” with no appeal.
…An airsoft magazine. Not a single state in the union where that’s illegal (or at least certainly not at the time).
Payment processors attempting to police the nature of online transactions should expose them to liability, not the other way around.
And if you know anything about what he’s talking about, you quickly realize that in fact he does not know it all.
Can I be a big time Twitch celebrity too if I doodle a series of completely nondescriptive boxes and link them with little lines in MS Paint as I talk?
They’ll release a “New!” version in a year with an improved screen as one of its bullet points, in a bid to get you to buy it again. And people will. See also:
Pretty much all of those are characters from franchises that quickly jumped to consoles, or had the intention of multiplatform releases from the very start. I’m not sure any of them are very fitting.
So on that note, the least nonsensical mascot for PC gaming in particular I can think of is that dwarf, whoever he is, from the box art of World of Warcraft. Or possibly the orc from the alternate version. WoW is earth-shatteringly popular and has basically defined the entire private lives of a depressing number of people, not to mention it’s the sole and singular thing even non-gamers think of when you mention MMORPGs. And it has only appeared on home computers. Never consoles. Other Warcraft properties have, but not WoW.
Define “long.” I disagree with the Doomguy proposal explicitly, because Doom appeared on the Sega 32x in November of 1994 which was barely a year after the initial PC release. One of the defining aspects of gaming in the mid '90s was the monumentally cynical gold rush of trying to cram Doom onto any damn fool console as fast as possible, in a vain attempt to capture part of the lightning and make those sales. And until the Playstation and arguably the N64, every attempt failed spectacularly in various ways.
The definitive Doom experience remaining locked to the PC for those few years was absolutely not for a lack of trying. Every greedy video game exec on the planet wanted Doom on their system. id themselves assisted with several of these ports in various ways and they had absolutely no intention of leaving Doom only on PC, either, if they could help it.