PC. We played through all of the 3+ player ones around a year or two ago in chronological order and it was stupid fun, what we liked about it and are hoping to find elsewhere is it being a shooter with an emphasis on movement and it’s physics sandbox (AKA CHAOS) while still having at least 3 full campaigns to play through in a...
The Half-Life franchise, maybe. Half-Life 2 and up has a lot of physics stuff including the Gravity Gun, but considering HL1 is free to play via Sven Co-op it wouldn’t hurt to start there. You’ll need something like Synergy or Obsidian Conflict to play HL2 cooperatively.
The Rocket League Racing, Rock Band clone, and LEGO survival mode are wild additions that I honestly really appreciate. BR got old ages ago, but now there’s a whole swathe of new free stuff to play.
So much to play that’s free nonetheless. If I’m going to get screwed by live service nonsense, it’s gonna be a game like Fortnite or the upcoming Skate or even Genshin Impact, not a full-priced title. All this means to me is that they just announced that there’s no reason to buy at launch, like with Shadow of War from ages ago with now-removed singleplayer loot boxes.
Basically one year after the game was said to be never updated again, this giant bug fix and balance update just drops without any warning. And this happens just as the Microsoft deal is finalized and Bobby is leaving Activision at the end of the year....
Microsoft works in mysterious ways. Another oddity is how the Microsoft Store version of The Evil Within is a more-updated, more-featured version of the game than every other version including on console, and I don’t think they’ve ever acknowledged it. It only released when they bought Bethesda, so maybe it’s a similar story here where they’re just putting out some unreleased work.
So yeah, I want to discuss or point out why I think Valve needs to fix Anti-Cheat issues. They have VAC but apparently its doing jackshit, be it Counter Strike 2 (any previous iterations) or something like Hunt: Showdown the prevalence of cheating players is non deniable. For me personally it has come to a point that I am not...
People used to form “gaming-clans” in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.
Unlikely imo, because modern game devs have been killing the viability of that for years. User-hosted servers are gone, crossplay is reliant on SBMM to be realistically possible, and private matches often block players from receiving XP and rewards because they’re worried about FOMO and people getting too much fun without spending enough. Even CSGO got an update in the months leading up to CS2 where they removed the ability to earn drops on community servers, driving another nail into the coffin as one of the last kinds of these games that still retain the mere ability to run servers of our own.
Not new management, but they definitely changed direction. From Portal 2 to Half-Life Alyx was a dark age of live service titles and hardware. Fortunately, it seems like they’re finally getting back to their old selves?
Alyx was supposedly their re-entry into releasing games (hopeful that HLX is good), the Steam Deck caused them to go back and fix several of their titles (plus do the huge Half-Life update we just got), and while they’re not exactly making their games as open as they used to, they’re letting the community handle things like TF2 events and L4D2 patches.
So, I dunno, cautiously optimistic for their future. At least as long as Gabe is running the company.
I wouldn’t play Web3 games, I don’t really see a future for web3
There’s no future for these because the big players that could pull it off have no reason to do so. Game publishers love FOMO and thus hate trading, and platform owners would probably look at Valve’s success with the Steam Marketplace instead of the continued failure of crypto.
I also don’t really see a future for VR/AR.
This one doesn’t have that same sort of constraint where it fundamentally doesn’t make sense.
VR has a future as an entertainment system for sure. Probably not as widespread as simply grabbing a PS5 and playing Madden, but there’s a ton of potential especially as older hardware drops in price and game libraries continue to expand. Porn is gonna keep this concept alive forever either way.
As for AR, its future is utility. Seeing map directions on the road itself, interactive models during meetings, having real life Shadowplay built into your glasses since they’re camera peripherals, etc. Or porn but in your room with your own parts idk.
Oh boy a slow moving camera panning over some NPCs to show the scenery and some cutscene shots of a game launching a year from now, two years if on PC.
I’m Rockstar disillusioned, that’s the problem with waiting over a decade to put out a sequel, I went from 15 to 25.
“What’s more frustrating for those working on SCP, and the wider Starfield modding community, is how difficult it is to work with Starfield’s code without official modding tools and support. This isn’t helped by the delayed mod tools from Bethesda, which the company says are coming at some point next year.”
I’ve been thinking about making this thread for a few days. Sometimes, I play a game and it has some very basic features that are just not in every other game and I think to myself: Why is this not standard?! and I wanted to know what were yours....
LET ME TURN OFF THE CLAUSTROPHOBIC VIGNETTE, PLEEEAAASSEEEE. Even games like Cyberpunk 2077 that have gained countless features over the years and have individual HUD on/off switches still ignore this.
UGC as a whole. I grew up on Half-Life mods, custom Counter-Strike: Source maps, and LittleBigPlanet. The fact that we’ve pretty much abandoned that outside of Halo, Counter-Strike (just barely, mind you), and more recently Fortnite with proper Unreal Engine support is a terrible thing. It makes more sense than ever in an era of live service where you want players to never stop playing.
“Good” is subjective. I know CoD is mangled corporate moneygrab trash, but it’s still really fun, so I play it. The only reason I bought Cyberpunk was because I knew everyone was going to be talking about it and I wanted to be able to be part of the conversation, and it didn’t disappoint.
And yet some of my favorite indie games are games practically nobody’s ever heard of. Most recent was Metal Unit, a game that I don’t know how I have in my Steam library and somehow evades the internet’s favorite rule despite the main character being an anime girl in a bodysuit. At time of writing there are 17 players in-game.
So while good games are good and bad games are bad, the good ones may not necessarily be sustainable.
Mainly AI Dungeon because I’ve been hella tired and it requires minimal input compared to other games, but I loaded up my three year old Cyberpunk 2077 save and started playing again with 2.0, and Counter-Strike 2 just dropped so I’ve been giving that some of my time.
The fad isn’t over until there’s something to replace it. Right now, I’m pretty sure we’re securely in the era of “PvPvE extraction shooters” now that the top three Battle Royale podium has ended up Fortnite, Call of Duty, and PUBG.
Though, frankly, CoD DMZ is probably going to win Extraction Shooters for no reason other than that it’s free and all the stuff carries over into CoD BR and the standard multiplayer. If they don’t kill carry forward next year, they’re in a position for some serious success. I’ve given it a play for no reason other than that it’s the easiest mode to get battlepass progression in and the M13B was locked behind playing it.
I imagine this is a mix of things. UE5 has officially been out for a while, their biggest competitor just offed themselves, Fortnite’s UE editor support is out and thus Fortnite probably doesn’t need as many devs now with UGC to pick up the slack, etc.
That’s still a huge chunk of people though. Wonder if all these financial gambles they’ve taken are starting to add up.
It was a “ground-up” rebuild on Source 2, so while it carries forward all the CSGO content and aims to “play the same” in terms of movement and gunplay (with the exception of improvements like subtick actions), I’d say it’s way more of an actual “2.” New engine with all kinds of fancy lighting and other improvements, new assets (including weapon and character models, some of which were still originally in the 2013 CSGO launch), remakes and retouches of maps, vastly improved map-making tools, some nifty accessibility features (your walking sounds appearing on the radar) and quality of life features (selling back misbought items, or the picture-in-picture grenade throw practice camera), and some huge balance changes (games are now shorter, players now need to more strategically choose their weapons, smoke grenades are voxel-based and can be cleared out with gunfire and grenades, skyboxes are now open for grenade tosses, etc.)
It looks the same but with some lighting changes on the surface, but it’s actually huge.
Not to mention accessibility settings in games themselves. Fortnite has an option to visually show sounds and their directions on the HUD and it was amazing when I spent a month with no audio solution, I can’t imagine what a breath of fresh air it is for deaf gamers. The Last of Us Pt2 is also wildly player-friendly, and recently I’ve even been seeing some indie titles like Metal Unit do their best to assist players and let them enjoy the game.
Accessibility is only getting better, and I think this cynicism is unwarranted. We should certainly keep up the fight and demand for it, but you go back two decades and games didn’t even come with subtitles as standard. Doom 3 still pisses me off in that regard.
All other game developers in the history of games have understood the concept of making the lowest-powered device you’re launching on the baseline for development. We’ve dealt with crippled titles on more powerful consoles for ages, I’m sure Larian’ll figure it out for their next game.
Sony management didn’t even see a point to backwards compatibility until recently and still can’t be bothered to figure out PS3 emulation. It’s easily the console’s greatest flaw imo.
it really was just “another Saints Row game” but with better characters.
This is sarcasm, right? If it were even close to that we all would’ve loved it. To me, it felt like the worst parts of later SR games mashed up with a desperate attempt to replicate Watch_Dogs 2’s vibe. I don’t play Saints Row to play as a dude trying to pay off their student loans while fighting “gangs” that have access to random bullshit technology like neon batons that spin real fast and deflect bullets. That’s the type of stuff that should’ve stayed in Agents of Mayhem with its far less grounded setting.
I cannot extract a silver lining out of this announcement no matter how hard I try. This is like Activision announcing that the next Call of Duty will be made by Mojang, they’re just so fucking grossly incompatible with each other that it makes absolutely zero sense.
To be frank I hate survival horror. Zombies don’t do it for me. I got recommended this game as “well made” and “tests your decision making skills”, and my backlog was running thin so I said sure, what the hell, let’s out-decision-make some zombies....
Honestly, you’d probably like a reasonable chunk of other RE games for the reasons you listed. Several of them also have randomizer mods if you’re playing on PC, which can change the locations of item spawns, enemies, and even what room is on the other side of the door (for the older games) so you really have no idea what’s around the next corner.
4, 5, and 6 are more linear, but 4 and 5 are great for inventory and economy management (with the caveat that you should play 5 in co-op) and 6 is definitely a skip. 0, 1, 3, Code Veronica, and Village are all recommendations from me, though RE2 is one of the most beloved games in the franchise for a reason.
I didn’t grow up playing FF, but bought 15 on Steam on a whim because “road trip with the bros” sounded cool. I enjoyed it, but then when FF7R came out, they made so many exclusivity deals among other stuff like iirc being the first dev to sell a game on PC at $70 that all my interest kinda waned. Square Enix surrounds these games with so much bullshit that it’s just not worth trying to follow it anymore as someone who doesn’t mainly play on PS.
Considering their subscription competitor costs $204 a year while they were at $120/yr, I think it’s pretty clear why they boosted the upper tiers so much. Even with this price increase, it’s still $44 cheaper than Ultimate and imo a better overall value in terms of game quality.
What’s really trash is that they’re increasing the price of the base PS+ membership, and by so much. It now costs $150 a year to play just Madden, CoD, or EA Soccer, on top of a minimum $400 console purchase. That’s absurd. I would say this is a W for Xbox, but they already tried to increase the price of Gold and they’ll definitely try again now that they know there’s no escaping it.
Gonna be real with you, this is a terrible take. I’d much rather have games pushing boundaries at the cost of some bugs rather than a bunch of the same old regurgitated elements over and over to be safe.
GTA3 had plenty of bugs, the Purple Nines glitch being particularly infamous. Literally nobody out there is saying “wow, I wish they’d stuck with the top-down style games instead of going 3D because this bug has seriously inconvenienced me.”
It’s the same as when Elden Ring dropped. Even people who never played Souls games prior were picking it up because it was just a complete, solid open world RPG.
I’ve never played Baldur’s Gate before, but I’m probably gonna pick 3 up to play with my roommate in splitscreen.
Don’t forget the games that were already pulled. This includes every Valve game that isn’t Portal: Still Alive (which is arguably a better version of the game than the version that came with the now-delisted Orange Box but whatever) and Portal 2, as well as other major titles like Skate 2 and Jet Set Radio.
Microsoft has the money to figure this out, they just don’t actually care enough to. I mean for fuck’s sake, they own Bethesda and we still can’t even play Quake 4 on modern Xboxes. What’s the excuse there, Phil?
After years of dealing with his PR statements one after another, I just switched back to PlayStation for the first time since around 2015 since they don’t yank my chain about features. I still think they’ve put less effort and freedom into their platform, but they never say something positive like this and then just forget about it.
Howdy pardners, this is a cheeky self-plug for !freegames, a community I’ve created to post limited-time full-game free giveaways. It’s been going a month or two and I’m already claiming games faster than I can play them, so come and join me and make your what-game-to-play choice paralysis worse!
Amazon is a storefront, not the subscription. They actually do give out free stuff once in a blue moon, so just saying [Amazon] is not clarification enough. On reddit, subs like this would say “complimentary with Prime” or something like that.
Some definitely do have DRM. I explicitly ended up buying Devil May Cry on Steam despite getting it with Prime because it opened the Twitch launcher every time I tried to play, which messed up Steam Input or whatever I was trying to use at the time.
In the U.S. circa 2016, so many kids were just finding pirate streaming sites for movies and such during class on school computers. I imagine it’s similar elsewhere for students who’ve finished their work and are bored, but boy, now they have the knowledge of how to get countless other types of media for free.
Piracy is a service problem. The goal shouldn’t be to indoctrinate our youth to avoid it, it should be to stop releasing subpar, overpriced products.
I’m pretty sure Dark Souls is intentionally obtuse, that’s like a core part of the game’s philosophy. It doesn’t explain them because it wants you to try and figure it out on your own or discuss with others.
Gears of War 1 in online co-op. If you take the tutorial path instead of the right-into-the-game path, you can end up softlocked because it expects you to throw grenades at one point but doesn’t explain it.
Pretty much meaningless after TLOUP1 launched as “Steam Deck Playable” and was nowhere near that. I don’t expect FromSoft to screw it up, but the label has been shown to not be a guarantee.
Not really though since Xbox has backwards compatibility and a new store for vast amounts of these games. While some have or will be lost thanks to licensing, Xenia is always making progress and is available on newer Xboxes via $20 dev access.
When the PS3 goes, emulation on PC or streaming is the only option
Microsoft has integrated Microsoft Teams with the Xbox Game Bar, allowing users to stream their gameplay in real-time to friends over Teams video calls. Up to 20 people can join a call to watch and chat together while gaming. The viewer can see both the game and overlaid video of friends. However, streaming performance is...
Unfortunately, no. I used to love Ubi games, played every single one following the formula because they’re fun and get cheap fast.
But in recent memory, all of their games have tried to shove annoying gimmicks in and take away from what made the games enjoyable. Far Cry 6 was one of the least bad ones, but games like New Dawn, Breakpoint, and WD Legion are disasters that have driven me off.
What are the best multiplayer games to try if me and my friends are looking for a similar experience to a Bungie Halo campaign marathon on Heroic+ difficulty? angielski
PC. We played through all of the 3+ player ones around a year or two ago in chronological order and it was stupid fun, what we liked about it and are hoping to find elsewhere is it being a shooter with an emphasis on movement and it’s physics sandbox (AKA CHAOS) while still having at least 3 full campaigns to play through in a...
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of December 10th
What have you all been playing!...
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Is Getting an Offline Mode After Release, Rocksteady Confirms - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
so do you think the rumors are true about Heroes of the Storm? angielski
Basically one year after the game was said to be never updated again, this giant bug fix and balance update just drops without any warning. And this happens just as the Microsoft deal is finalized and Bobby is leaving Activision at the end of the year....
Valve needs to step up on Anti-Cheat angielski
So yeah, I want to discuss or point out why I think Valve needs to fix Anti-Cheat issues. They have VAC but apparently its doing jackshit, be it Counter Strike 2 (any previous iterations) or something like Hunt: Showdown the prevalence of cheating players is non deniable. For me personally it has come to a point that I am not...
What game company from your childhood do you remember with fondness?
I was thinking about how I remember Maxis fondly, and I got to wondering what other people’s experiences were like!...
More than 75% of web3 games failed (www.coingecko.com)
I am actually shocked that 25% of those shitcoin “games” didn’t fail
YouTuber The Completionist's Open Hand Foundation Accused of Keeping Charitable Donations - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Karl Jobst’s video...
Official: New Grand Theft Auto Trailer Arriving in December (twitter.com)
Starfield group fixing Bethesda's bugs say their job is tough as mods feel an afterthought (www.eurogamer.net)
“What’s more frustrating for those working on SCP, and the wider Starfield modding community, is how difficult it is to work with Starfield’s code without official modding tools and support. This isn’t helped by the delayed mod tools from Bethesda, which the company says are coming at some point next year.”
Far Cry 6's online services will remain online, but don't expect any further updates (www.eurogamer.net)
You can't launch Modern Warfare 3 without first launching Modern Warfare 2 (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
What is something (feature, modes, settings...) you would like to see become a standard in video games? angielski
I’ve been thinking about making this thread for a few days. Sometimes, I play a game and it has some very basic features that are just not in every other game and I think to myself: Why is this not standard?! and I wanted to know what were yours....
CD Projekt Red devs unionise after its third round of layoffs in three months (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Sony confirms cyber-attack exposed details of nearly 7000 current and former employees (www.eurogamer.net)
Is there an indie games bubble? (roadmapmag.com) angielski
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of October 1st
Scary edition of the weekly thread 👻...
Sega has cancelled Hyenas "and some unannounced games in development" (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Epic Games Is Cutting About 900 Jobs, or 16% of Staff (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
Counter-Strike 2 is officially released (www.counter-strike.net)
Horizon Forbidden West: Complete Edition is coming to PS5 and PC (blog.playstation.com) angielski
Sony asking Gaming Heads to destroy all Playstation merchandises, including those have been paid and ready to be shipped (which Sony has received royalty payment for) (www.resetera.com) angielski
Here's the screenshot of the letter from Gaming Heads to the communityimage...
"They don’t care": Inside the triumphs and failures of accessible gaming hardware (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
deleted_by_author
Marvel's Avengers drops to $3.99 to make way for its delisting later this month (www.gamescensor.com) angielski
Lords of the Fallen: Developers worry about abundance of Soulslike games (gamerkick.com) angielski
In an interview, the developers of the upcoming Lords of the Fallen talked about how concerned they are about the abundance of games in the genre.
Baldur’s Gate 3 just made the future of Xbox Series S a bit more uncertain (www.polygon.com) angielski
Larian’s RPG may have set a tricky precedent for future chats with Microsoft
GameStop Boss Says Disc Drives Should Be Required On Game Consoles (www.gamespot.com) angielski
"It would be great if people had to buy more of the thing," says guy who makes money selling the thing.
Hi, I'm A Stupid Person Who Gets Mad At Review Scores (www.thegamer.com) angielski
A 7/10 is basically a complete failure, so why didn't reviewers take my feelings into account before publishing their scores?
The Chinese Room is developing Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
The 8 hours escaping the Police Station in RE2 Remake are maybe the best 8 hours of gaming I've ever experienced angielski
To be frank I hate survival horror. Zombies don’t do it for me. I got recommended this game as “well made” and “tests your decision making skills”, and my backlog was running thin so I said sure, what the hell, let’s out-decision-make some zombies....
Square Enix has confirmed Final Fantasy 16's PC version and DLC (www.gamescensor.com) angielski
'Saints Row' developer Volition shuts down only two months after its 30th anniversary (www.nme.com)
Sony raising PS Plus pricing by 33% (www.pushsquare.com) angielski
Tier Original Pricing. New Pricing...
Baldur's Gate 3: Act 3 Bugs and Missing Content Becoming a Problem as More Players Near End (www.ign.com) angielski
Elon Musk appearance at Valorant Champions tournament met with boos, crowd chanting 'bring back Twitter' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions.
Why did Baldur's Gate 3 blow up? Larian lead writer says it's thanks to "a big gamble" with CRPG standards (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
"We believe RPGs are big ... So we always believed the audience was there," says Adam Smith
Xbox boss would ‘love to find solutions’ so games aren’t lost when the 360 store closes | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Pssst, can I interest you in some free video games? (feddit.uk) angielski
Howdy pardners, this is a cheeky self-plug for !freegames, a community I’ve created to post limited-time full-game free giveaways. It’s been going a month or two and I’m already claiming games faster than I can play them, so come and join me and make your what-game-to-play choice paralysis worse!
Anti-Piracy Lessons Enter the School Curriculum: Are You a Thief? (ift.tt) angielski
Veteran Call of Duty designer David Vonderhaar has left Treyarch | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com)
What's a good game you played with an awful tutorial? angielski
Either it didn’t teach you anything at all, or it taught you the most irrelevant parts of the game.
ARMORED CORE VI FIRES OF RUBICON rated Steam Deck Playable ahead of release (www.gamingonlinux.com)
The Xbox 360 Store Will Close July 2024, But You Can Keep Playing Your Favorite Games - Xbox Wire (news.xbox.com)
I can’t imagine the PS3 will last much longer than this. Truly the end of an era. :(
Microsoft Teams is now part of the Xbox Game Bar so you can stream gameplay to friends - The Verge (www.theverge.com)
Microsoft has integrated Microsoft Teams with the Xbox Game Bar, allowing users to stream their gameplay in real-time to friends over Teams video calls. Up to 20 people can join a call to watch and chat together while gaming. The viewer can see both the game and overlaid video of friends. However, streaming performance is...
Far Cry has a new IP director (www.eurogamer.net)