Definitely not the oldest, FFXI and EQ are still alive and getting updates, and Anarchy Online is in maintenance mode because it’s presumably still turning a profit for Funcom.
I left in February of 2021, but at the time it was competent but unexceptional. Rival Wings and Conquest(?) were the two big battle types, and I think overall Rival Wings was more interesting, while Conquest usually devolved to a round robin rotation of objectives or endless stalemates unless you had a competent caller directing your nation’s team. I didn’t like it at all, but Rival Wings was always dead outside of events. Rival Wings was like a “MOBA mode” plus vehicles, so a big thing was objective and resource management so you could push an organised vehicle fleet down one of the lanes. Engagements were also typically smaller than in Conquest.
5v5s were very unbalanced but fun for casual play due to job variety, although the high end was being griefed by some notorious hackers around November of last year (which is when I lost touch with the PVP community on Twitter).
In terms of activity levels, I could basically always get a Conquest match or a 5v5 match, but I basically finished my 5v5 achievements and then only ever played Rival Wings when there were enough players to start a match. They’ve recently introduced a reward track for all PVP, so maybe Rival Wings has finally seen its Revival Wings.
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....
I have cognitive impairments and it does my head in that it’s still hit or miss whether games have rewindable text and voiceovers. Definitely my favourite thing in a game is eing ale to open a dialogue log and even replay voiced lines. Should be in every game, it’s such a small accessibility thing.
I just started playing COD Black Ops Cold War because I got it through my PlayStation Plus subscription and wanted to try it out. I’ve previously played some others like Modern Warfare (1 and 2) and WWII. While it always felt a bit over the top and propaganda-ish, I really liked it for the blockbuster feeling and just turning...
Old game, but Cannon Fodder was an anti-war satire, and also self-aware about the ridiculousness of making a fun game in the context of the horrors of war.
Yasumi Matsuno’s career was also built on quite rich and sophisticated crypto-Marxist critiques of superstructures and warfare, although he slid it under the radar via medieval fantasy. Tactics Ogre is probably the most famous Japanese game about genocide and class struggle. Probably the double whammy for why Western games criticism tried so hard to make it flop.
Yeah, the thing with neural nets is they’re neuron-like. Saying they’re mind-like is like trying to say your visual or auditory cortices have consciousness. Intelligence, sure; but that’s a low bar. Single-celled organisms have cognitions about the environment. So do plants. They’re both intelligent, in the same way that a lot of the low level machinery in your brain is intelligent, the same way that neuron-like software and hardware is intelligent.
Just another example of hierarchies embedded in capitalism. Artists have no rights, humanities are disdained; but big businesses that treat people as “resources” and “consumers” are privileged.
Just when I was giving Bungie credit for taking Destiny 2 armor out of Eververse this season and making it an earned, in-game reward, we now have a situation I’d describe as pretty baffling.
I remember when I thought that Bungie self-publishing would make them less evil. But no, they’ve actually become innovators in being the actual shittiest company that isn’t Plarium Games. Maybe they have their eyes on the top spot though? Is that what they’re building up to?
What I mean by this, is instead of when you fail and are met with a game over, the game finds some way to keep it going. Instead of being forced to reset to a previous save or an autosave checkpoint, the game’s story continues in an interesting path. Are there any games like this?...
Yeah, there’s a “back path” that was originally intended to be found with a breadcrumb left if you went rogue and killed Vivec, but thanks to UESP’s documentation, you can find your way there at any point. Very fun for roleplay.
Odd Giants is based on the old MMO Glitch, and in that, when your character succumbs to empty stamina, you go to the underworld to recover. It’s a truly special game.
Kind of sad. I got some EPOS mic+phones for pretty cheap, albeit not as good value as just micless Sennies, and I think the space saving is actually really good. I barely have room for my mic, and it gets worse when I’m somewhere with very little desk space to work with. It seems very difficult to get something that combines all the needs of: flat frequency response and an adequate quality mic, very little by way of space requirements, and a not-outrageous price. I just fold the mic up and put it where I have space for my headset, ezpz.
I’m open to suggestions for replacements, of course.
My son loves the adrenaline rush of getting scared, particularly with jump scares, however, I have a lot of difficulty finding a game or show which is appropriate for him. He is prone to nightmares, and more adult-oriented “kid horror” is too much (Poppy’s Playtime, Cartoon Cat?) And others like Siren Head. His peers...
If Super Metroid is on the Nintendo Switch emulator, that’s a good spooky game, including an explicitly horror-themed level, the Wrecked Ship. There’s a layer of removal since it’s 2D and zoomed out. Not all of the game is all that spooky, I think it’s mainly Wrecked Ship and the end of the game.
Metroid Fusion is much spookier, including sequences where you’re being hunted by a Samus clone. Very creepy vibes throughout too. Other M has a lot of thrills as well. And Metroid Dread is, of course, dread-inducing. Actually it was the first Metroid game I couldn’t play because the stealth sequences were too much for me, lol.
Majora’s Mask is mostly more eerie, but there are some good high tension moments as well.
Was playing Wayfinder, but they broke most of the game’s farms in an attempt to fix a “bug” that was allowing people to actually level up in a reasonable amount of time.
If it is “Deckard” I hope they fix the current snares with inside-out tracking. Also hope I don’t have to wait two years between EB Games restocks here in Aus.
So far, Starfield is an awesome game, but now I have an urge to pick up my character on no man sky, and I’m having trouble putting that game down right now....
I think it can’t be overstated how good VR is in NMS too. There’s so much attention to immersion, even some things that bugged me at first like the mime controls for ground vehicles.
For me it’s probably Jazzpunk, but I liked Disco Elysium too. I’ve been looking for something to scratch that “Jazzpunk surrealist comedy itch” for a while and not many games have come even close.
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
Octopath Traveler. The UI was terrible, the loot was nothing but stat sticks, and most of the dungeons, of which there were too many, were just long tree walk with potions at the leaves. Genuinely the worst game I’ve ever played. The three-directional sprites were also extremely lazy. I think I lost my mind right at the start when the lazy script response saw one of the characters’ childhood friend suddenly develop amnesia and treat him like a stranger because everyone needs generic dialogue.
The music and cast of thousands worldbuilding was fantastic, but otherwise, I hated almost every single of the 80 hours I put into it trying to give ti a fair shake.
Yeah, the game had severe balance issues too with classes not scaling properly and consequently being either completely dominant or totally useless based on what level you were.
More concerning than Bethesda’s decision to withhold early review codes from certain outlets is how heavily some sites are relying on the game to drive their business.
Commercial media has always been collaborative with whatever power structures or industries it’s associated with. Only good media is independent, and even then you get some really shitty journalists, and sometimes entire rotten publications.
Find an independent critic you respect and listen to the tenor of why they say a game is good. Or ignore critics and develop your own taste and sense of which studios, directors, artists, composers, or otherwise will compel you to buy a game.
and I am really not impressed. I don’t want to know more about the story, don’t want to build a spaceship that I can fast travel with, don’t want to explore the universe....
And it has VR too! I think NMS and having actual Daggerfall doesn’t leave me any room to particularly care about Starfield. I don’t get the hype at all.
Would you tell me what games you have as a point of reference that the combat feels stiff and clunky? I think I generally play games with similar kinds of pacing so I haven’t personally noticed anything. It’s not as fast, fluid and flashy as say PSO2 New Genesis, but I wouldn’t say it feels stiff or clunky to me.
Agreed the UI is awful though. There’s a lot of missing functionality too… like there’s just no way to manage echoes in their own screen.
I think Austin’s review actually missed the amount of mechanical depth that exists in the game already. One of his complaints was that there’s seemingly no reason to put melee on “ranged” characters or vice-versa, but I can say that’s definitely wrong. I’ve primarily been playing Venomess with a Sword and Shield, since it pushes her to near-guaranteed critical hits. One of the SnS options has a potion interaction that lets it oneshot enemy guard meters, which puts them in a state of vulnerability and stunlocks them until they recover. I will say Gungrave is a bit lacking since his skills have extremely low multipliers, so his ability to clear dungeons with a gun is extremely lacking until you get the railgun with infinite body and terrain punchthrough.
On a related note, I wouldn’t say the itemisation is lacking either. They’re taking the modern Warframe approach of every weapon doing something cool. There are basic store-bought weapons, but all of the crafted weapons do something interesting that changes your playstyle. One pair of daggers is unusually good at breaking guard meters, and also places a unique buff on you that boosts all damage, including ability damage, which is totally unique to that weapon and that weapon alone. Another pair poison enemies, which lets one of the two “ranged” Wayfinders (Silo in this case) keep a damage vulnerability debuff rolling on the enemy.
Also disagree with the comment about buildcraft being lacking. Different weapons and weapon types interact with the heroes in different ways, so there’s quite a good loop of doing some theorycraft to find your optimal stat ratios for particular combinations, and what your playstyle is. Two weeks in, and the Venomess community on the official Discord are still debating whether to focus on weapon attacks or abilities, which weapons to use, how to balance crit vs base damage, etc.
Also being a huge Warframe fan, this is scratching that JRPG fiend itch for games with weird synergies and interactions and a really rich character building space to experiment in. Haven’t had this much fun since the first six weeks of the Incarnon launch.
Fighters Megamix is a classic. I love the weird old games with big rosters and a cheerful vibe. I don’t think any other game lets you pit a Daytona car against a giant mascot sculpture.
Cozy Soulslike is a great concept honestly. I loved the first Dark Souls because it mostly facilitated slow and tactical combat. Favourite build was a pyromancer with a high stability shield. Tweak the numbers to add more tolerance to errors (like the boss demonstration showed) and you do get a much more relaxed Soulslike.
Apparently the main thing that’s been holding Monolith back from remastering X has been trouble updating the engine for Switch. More powerful hardware might enable it… let’s hope.
With their dev cycle and work culture I don’t think we’re getting a launch Xenoblade though, or even anything.
I’ll buy any CyberConnect2 original IPs. Fuga 3 for the Switch 2, babeyyyyyy! I see they also have a couple of other games cooking with no release date.
Smash Remix is a mod for Super Smash Bros for the Nintendo 64. Very easy to emulate on basically any device you can plug into your TV. It’s all the fun of Smash Bros with all the weirdness, jank, and accessible hype combos of Smash 64.
If your device can handle it, the port of Sonic The Fighters for PS3 is also very cute and fun. It also has an active netplay community.
Would be nice if there were some kind of open source, cross-platform, low-level graphics API, maybe overseen by some kind of pan-industry group (or “consortium” if you’re feeling fancy). Just spitballing but you could call it “Cape” or “Hephaestos” or something.
Would be great too if there were one or two open-source, MIT- or dual-licensed game engines that target this API. Maybe even some runtimes so you could target PC and the big three console platforms.
Some of that is on GNOME. I had to swap back to KDE after a couple years on GNOME due to lack of VR compatibility. GNOME is good for newbies and productivity, but completely unusable for gaming.
While Baldur's Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.
Wasn’t the whole thing with Redfall that it was Bethesda mismanagement? I’m not going to put that on the Redfall team. Does make me completely disinterested in buying any Bethesda games that aren’t mainline TES though.
I think of it like this: my own personal boycotts do nothing individually, but I am doing a very small something by refusing to be a bridge to grossly evil companies into my communities, and raising the ethical concerns with egregiously bad corporate cultures and business models. And for my own personal comfort, I just can’t engage with products that fill me with disgust due to the taint of who will ultimately profit from my purchase.
On that, when my personal attachment to a creator, studio, or individual game supercedes my disgust or frustration with a publisher’s business models or revenue streams, I try and keep that in the conversation. I play a lot of Warframe, which has some mildly manipulative monetisation like algorithmic discounts and crippleware elements; and PSO2 which is published by a corporation with a large gambling revenue stream, and the game itself has gambling elements in it, albeit surprisingly low on the evil anti-player scale.
And that’s the thing, sometimes I love something enough that I can’t bear to part with it. I find Yoshi-P’s transphobia and support of NFTs to be sufficiently revolting that I can’t play FFXIV anymore, nor will I ever buy anything or even positively talk about anything associated with him ever again; but I’m still subscribed to FFXI. I still plan to buy new mainline Dragon Quest games despite the fact that Square-Enix treats its customers with absolute contempt and has committed to a path of ecological violence against the Pacific.
That said, I think it is a good mental exercise to get in the habit of thinking about who you’re giving your patronage to. Do they have good working conditions? Where do they make their money? Are the leaders shitheads? These things become part of a disposition, and you become part of a cultural conversation, one that’s clearly starting to engage more and more people. Start talking about good developers and especially workers’ coops like KO_OP (handily named) and Motion Twin; or studios with excellent working conditions like Supergiant, Hello Games, or Monolith Soft.
That said, this is all still part of the infamously ineffectual practice of lifestylism. At the end of the day I believe it’s about cultivating a particular set of values and trying to broach them to as many people as possible, and learning to effectively and respectfully communicate them. If you ever do get in the industry or can support people in the industry, that’s when you can actually do something material.
Yoshi-P is a very talented speaker, I’ll give him that. But you have to look at what he’s actually saying. There’s a very pretty preamble about “I’m sad that society, is this way, so my hands are tied…” which is a technique known as impersonation. Whether or not Yoshi-P himself is a transphobe, I guess I can’t say, but the entire speech itself is just straight up transphobia. He then provides a single sad vignette as if to say that can somehow be generalised across all of society, and not just a particular minority view. The ultimate thrust of things is that the small amount of transphobes in the audience are more important than making trans people feel comfortable or welcome.
After I stopped playing XIV, it got much more obvious in context. If I contrast the freedom of presentation in PSO2, which lets you have control over how masculine or feminine your bone structure is, what sex characteristics your character has, and whether you have a masculine or feminine face and to what extent. Beyond that, there’s also a diverse wardrobe for both “Type 1” and “Type 2” in the game’s parlance (which in itself is super cool) to facilitate how you want to present, even if you don’t want to change your body type.
In FFXIV, I was largely stuck using mods to make sure the clothes I wanted were possible. When the game started official porting previously male clothes to female models, they did so with the caveat that your character absolutely must have prominent breasts. Similarly, going in the opposite direction, all the previously-female gear was really revealing and I think meant to be more funny than serious. Bad luck if you wanted to present femme and not just dress up in obvious drag. This might be better now though, I haven’t played in a year and a half.
re: NFTs
I can’t find where he’s spoken against NFTs in general. “NFTs won’t be in FFXIV” is not a general statement of opposition to them. The most I’ve seen is “making a fun game around cryptocurrency would be difficult”, but no actual firm statement of opposition. If Square Enix is as democratic as they say they are, and given Yoshida is on the board of directors, I don’t think the Square Enix push to NFTs is just unilaterally Matsuda.
If you can get past the UI, I recommend at least trying FFXI. The stories are so good, the XIV writers spent half of SHB and EW adapting them. Kato did the scenario for the vanilla game and the first expansion, Rise of the Zilart, and his world building brilliance is at its best there. The world is so real and immersive, and there are all kinds of connections between world events and characters both big and small.
From a design perspective, I think you could safely pick anything from V to XII and say it’s the best one, honestly. VI and Chrono Trigger really stand out as the most refined in terms of game design and systems from that particular era.
Without spoiling anything, the episodic storytelling style is taken to its limit in the game’s “part II”, and it allows for some really clever writing. VI is one of those games that kept me thinking long after I finished it.
Anti-Idle: The Game is one of my all-time favourites. It’s got a ton of sub-games and some really interesting resource flows between them. And as per the title you can idle or not, but there are rewards for active play.
Blizzard announces World of Warcraft's next 3 expansions: 'We ain't screwin' around,' declares Chris Metzen (www.pcgamer.com)
cross-posted from: kbin.social/m/PCGaming/t/596090...
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....
Capcom President Says ‘Game Prices Are Too Low’ (kotaku.com) angielski
lol. lmao.
‘Call of Duty’ Doesn’t Just Depict Bad History—It’s Pro-War Propaganda (progressive.org)
I just started playing COD Black Ops Cold War because I got it through my PlayStation Plus subscription and wanted to try it out. I’ve previously played some others like Modern Warfare (1 and 2) and WWII. While it always felt a bit over the top and propaganda-ish, I really liked it for the blockbuster feeling and just turning...
Terraforming Mars team defends AI use as Kickstarter hits $1.3 million (www.polygon.com) angielski
‘It’s too powerful a technology’
‘Destiny 2’ Is Now Reselling Old Seasonal Cosmetics For Nine Times The Price (www.forbes.com) angielski
Just when I was giving Bungie credit for taking Destiny 2 armor out of Eververse this season and making it an earned, in-game reward, we now have a situation I’d describe as pretty baffling.
Unity introducing new fee attached to game installs (www.gamedeveloper.com)
What are some games that "spin" failure states? angielski
What I mean by this, is instead of when you fail and are met with a game over, the game finds some way to keep it going. Instead of being forced to reset to a previous save or an autosave checkpoint, the game’s story continues in an interesting path. Are there any games like this?...
Sennheiser Exits Gaming Headphone Business (www.anandtech.com) angielski
Technically the successor owner of the gaming brand....
Does anyone know of any kid-friendly "horror" games out there for children ~7 years old?
My son loves the adrenaline rush of getting scared, particularly with jump scares, however, I have a lot of difficulty finding a game or show which is appropriate for him. He is prone to nightmares, and more adult-oriented “kid horror” is too much (Poppy’s Playtime, Cartoon Cat?) And others like Siren Head. His peers...
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of September 10th
New thread!...
Valve's next mystery gadget...
So much speculation! Given I haven’t bought a Steam Deck yet, I would love to see a refresh; though, highly unlikely. What are your thoughts?...
Starfield has made me obsessed with no man’s sky
So far, Starfield is an awesome game, but now I have an urge to pick up my character on no man sky, and I’m having trouble putting that game down right now....
State of gaming on immutable Linux distros?
I know SteamOS is “kind of” immutable to some degree, but how’s it going over on say Fedora Silverblue or openSUSE MicroOS or others?...
Starfield's planets aren't all interesting, but they're not all "supposed to be Disney World" (www.vg247.com) angielski
You'll probably find that a lot of planets in Starfield are pretty boring, but Bethesda says that's kind of the point.
What's the funniest game you've played? angielski
For me it’s probably Jazzpunk, but I liked Disco Elysium too. I’ve been looking for something to scratch that “Jazzpunk surrealist comedy itch” for a while and not many games have come even close.
Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun? (kbin.cafe) angielski
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
Starfield review controversy traces game journalism's orbital decay (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
More concerning than Bethesda’s decision to withhold early review codes from certain outlets is how heavily some sites are relying on the game to drive their business.
I watched 2 hours of starfield gameplay and an hour of review angielski
and I am really not impressed. I don’t want to know more about the story, don’t want to build a spaceship that I can fast travel with, don’t want to explore the universe....
Who's been playing Wayfinder?
The first four days were miserable, but having been playing since, and also having played over the second closed beta, it’s exactly what I wanted....
SkillUp: Right now, Austin cannot recommend: Wayfinder (Early Access Review) (www.youtube.com) angielski
Wayfinder has plenty of potential, but it's stretching the 'early access' label a little too far with this very, very rocky launch.
What are your favourite classic fighting games?
Looking for fourth to sixth generation console games, and old arcade and X68000 games. Saturn is out though....
Soulframe is Elden Ring meets Ghost of Tsushima, but with 'Disney princesses' - PCGamesN (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
Switch 2 - launch games?
Switch 2 is rumoured for 2024, but what could be launch titles? Metroid prime 4 would be a candidate, but might not a be a system seller....
Need some local coop recommendations
Hello! I’ve come here to ask you lovely people from Lemmy if you guys know of some fun local coop games for at least 2 player....
Final Fantasy 16 Producer Naoki Yoshida Wishes There Was Only One Console - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Final Fantasy 16 producer and 14 director Naoki Yoshida wishes everyone played games on the same console.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is Causing Some Developers to Panic (youtube.com) angielski
While Baldur's Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.
Rant: Frustration Related to Ethics of Games Companies
Hi, everybody! Sorry for the rant!...
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of August 6th angielski
Hey all! Another weekly thread is here....
What incremental games do you enjoy? angielski
I recently played through universal Paperclips. It was okay, looking for more to try.