There’s the divinity series. Original sin 1&2 are the more recent ones, but the old stuff is playable.
There’s dragon age.
Fable is a bit light, but fun. Medievil if you have Playstation. Bard’s Tale is more comical dark.
I just stopped playing games with grinding for the sake of grinding. I don’t have time for that shit anymore. If I can’t make the grind go away with mods, I’ll just play something else.
Unfortunately lots of modern games have added tons of grinding as a way to drive “engagement” and add monetization. I rarely have time to play multiple days in a row and I’m not spending it doing daily challenge bullshit to get 1/100 cards needed to upgrade whatever.
I mean the industry is already a cesspool. The consolidation is troubling from a failure of regulators. The games Industry deserves what it gets here though.
Personally I deleted blizzard games after the sexual harassment lawsuit/investigation by the California AG, but many hate Diablo specifically for the immortal mobile game. Diablo 4 also increased the grind after launch to pad content further, it’s a $70 game with cosmetic macrotransactions, and it has season passes and other garbage.
Game prices are already pushing $100+ when you factor in season passes, special editions, and microtransactions. Basically every AAA game has some combo of all of these.
You also have to ignore economies of scale. Nintendo was a huge consumer of chips globally just for gaming. That market is now mature, and gaming isn’t as big of a piece as it used to be. There’s also way more games being sold now, call of duty gets more day one sales than most n64 games ever sold, which made disc’s super cheap. Now you have digital distribution which is practically free, and companies are getting more of a games price than ever before and it’s still not enough.
The ability to patch games has been a huge improvement, but it has also caused most games to release in state that is worse than older games ever were. Maybe after 6 months to anyear a modern game is at a comparable level of finish to older games, but only if it sold well. Lots of games don’t get the patching they need.
Yes Mario 64 has a lot of glitches, but it’s playable all the way through. Similarly superman 64 is notable for being a buggy Ness because it was uncommon. BG3 released with multiple game breaking bugs, same with Stanfield. Payday 3 has several crashing bugs, but nothing gamebreaking beyond overloaded servers.
Developers care about steamworks, making cloud saves, multi-player, matchmaking, voice chat, anti cheat, drm, microtransactions, user authentication, and more significantly easier than doing it yourself, it’s also basically free to use where many alternatives only support some features for significant fees.
My vote is monk from age of empires 2. These dudes can walk up and stare at your friend chanting for a bit, then suddenly they turn around and attack you. That’s horrifying.
6 years isn’t that long in pc specs anymore. Companies are intentionally keeping generations shorter than they need to be ever since 360/ps3 era ended up being so long.
ME2 vastly expanded the universe of mass effect from the very bare bones level of the first game. It makes the reapers into more than vague robot threat that kills the universe every so often. It established other races as more than basic caricatures. You can keep the basic narrative intact without it, but you lose the sense of payoff in 3 without seeing krogan as a dying race, geth as a sentient race that deserves equality, and the truly desperate nature of the nomadic quarians.
3 was pretty good until the final ending that was clearly rushed in establishing the full reasoning behind each choice. Yes it had multi-player tacked on, but it was clearly a rushed effort and cutting it wouldn’t have fixed the story. The multi-player is also the best coop gameplay I’ve ever played and nothing has came close to the feel. You’re problems with 3 and other Bioware releases seem directly related to the broad direction EA was forcing everyone down.
Seriously steam really needs to add a quality gate, the amount of garbage they have in the store is absurd and eventually it’s not going to be worth the tiny fee they make from these games.
The content discovery on steam is being built up by massive community effort. It’s maybe difficult to find the most egregious asset flips, but it’s trivial to find tons of rpg maker games or similar, especially with the discovery queue.
Then find a way to purchase or otherwise create 2 out of every 10 assets you do use. You likely need some level of customization to make your idea a reality.
Adding minimal requirements isn’t going to block any indie game the average gamer has heard of. In fact blocking asset flip games may actually help devs get more exposure in the new release lists. Heck just banning people that upload only asset flip garbage would probably be a big help.
I used to like open world games that would take 50+ hours to beat but I feel like as I get older these games can be intimidating to even start and I often get sidetracked with other games frequently only getting half to three quarters of the way through....
Similar for me. I get maybe 2 hours on a good day that I can actually play games. I’m not wasting that grinding levels or hunting down 200 feathers. I also don’t like games that spoonfeed advancement way to slowly in the beginning, I don’t want to spend 15 hours in a game just to get to the point where the combat system is actually fleshed out fully.
It really just requires a single step of indirection. Instead of indie dev using AI directly, they pay Joe’s Asset Shack for their assets which may or may not be generated.
Japanese gamers have continued to embrace the PC as a platform at staggering rates, jumping up 43% from 131.3 billion yen to 189.2 billion yen in 2022. That's a total size of about $1.3 billion US. The data comes from the latest report by Kadokawa ASCII Research Laboratories, an industry think tank which compiles yearly material...
Pc has also become a better value proposition. You get more games, generally better pricing, great support for older games, and it can do more than games. You also get console or better performance with similarly priced hardware, or if you spend a lot you can probably get something better than next gen consoles will be.
Monster train is very good. It’s probably a bit easier than others in the genre. It’s more about how many modifiers you use to make the game more difficult than simply finishing. You can generally always beat the game on any given run, you aren’t as dependent on getting the exact right cards or unlocking more powerful cards.
I can’t speak too much to the dlc, I don’t have a ton of experience with it, but my friend has literally unlocked and completed everything and still enjoys the game.
Smaller subscription deals and the underperformance of certain titles have had a severe impact on Devolver and TinyBuild, says stockbroking firm Goodbody....
After 5 years in development and heavily pushing Unreal Engine 5 technologies, Immortals of Aveum was met with a whopping 751 player peak. For reference, Forspoken was considered a flop but still had over 12,000 players peak total. This may be the biggest flop of the year.
While it requires setting up your on site to take money, Steam has always allowed developers to create keys for free. They can sell or give those away for 100% of the revenue indefinitely.
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Microsoft’s CEO say it’s ‘doubling down’ on being a game producer and publisher | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
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Twitter sleuths suggest a new Steam Deck is on its way, but any updates are likely to be for Valve's benefit not ours (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
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A new report from has claimed that Microsoft is planning to close its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard next week.
Diablo® IV is coming to Steam (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Capcom President Thinks Game Prices Are 'Too Low' - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Capcom president Harushiro Tsujimoto claims that the prices of video games need to increase to meet ballooning development costs.
Game prices are too low, says Capcom exec (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Capcom's president and chief operating officer has said he thinks game prices should go up....
Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com) angielski
What is the most terrifying RTS game unit to be up against?
My vote is monk from age of empires 2. These dudes can walk up and stare at your friend chanting for a bit, then suddenly they turn around and attack you. That’s horrifying.
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What are some great open source games? angielski
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/3160775...
BioWare vet says Mass Effect and Dragon Age got "too homogenous," wishes Dragon Age had been more "Neverwinter-like" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Over 50% of all steam games have never made over $1000 (gamalytic.com) angielski
What do you think is a good required completion time for video games? What examples come to mind of games that felt just right? angielski
I used to like open world games that would take 50+ hours to beat but I feel like as I get older these games can be intimidating to even start and I often get sidetracked with other games frequently only getting half to three quarters of the way through....
Diablo 4 GM confirms “annual expansions” for the game (www.dexerto.com) angielski
Tim Sweeney says Epic Games Store is open to devs using generative AI (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Japanese PC gaming saw another year of explosive growth (www.pcgamer.com)
Japanese gamers have continued to embrace the PC as a platform at staggering rates, jumping up 43% from 131.3 billion yen to 189.2 billion yen in 2022. That's a total size of about $1.3 billion US. The data comes from the latest report by Kadokawa ASCII Research Laboratories, an industry think tank which compiles yearly material...
Should I get Monster Train or Inscryption? angielski
TL;DR: Which game you like better, Monster Train or Inscryption?...
Weaker subscription deals have hit indie publishers, says analyst | GamesIndustry.biz (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
Smaller subscription deals and the underperformance of certain titles have had a severe impact on Devolver and TinyBuild, says stockbroking firm Goodbody....
In its first week, Immortals of Aveum had a peak count of just 751 players on Steam. (steamdb.info) angielski
After 5 years in development and heavily pushing Unreal Engine 5 technologies, Immortals of Aveum was met with a whopping 751 player peak. For reference, Forspoken was considered a flop but still had over 12,000 players peak total. This may be the biggest flop of the year.
Epic First Run: six-month exclusivity for 100% revenue share for developers (store.epicgames.com) angielski
Introducing the Epic First Run program (store.epicgames.com) angielski