Might not be your cup of tea, but I feel like there’s overlap with puzzle games: roguelike deckbuilding games. I got hooked on Slay the Spire on PC a few years ago, and they had it on Playstation Plus recently so I’m hooked again. In similar genre I can recommend Monster Train. They’re mostly pick up and play, there’s no timer counting down… and they’re often on sale.
It’s hard to see something that gets in the way of my ability to enjoy games as not evil. After all, I’m not getting paid and profiting from my inconvenience of the product I bought. Why would I care about some corporate spiel justifying why to make the product worse for me. Pay me and then I’ll nod my head. Otherwise I just want my product to work unhindered. It’s not an act of charity that I bought the game.
Until then using handheld like the steam deck and encountering issues like license renewals getting in the way of playing offline reminds me my product is inferior to cracked versions. Or stuff like denuvo getting in the way of some people playing their games due to activation limitations.
Whats next. Phone manufacturers actually expecting me to believe they are looking out for me by making third party replacements impossible, and have to opt for first party service that makes fixing my old phone more expensive than buying a new one?
I think you've just played too many games. You know how they work now, you have a sense of what's behind the curtain. You can see the way the dev is trying to talk to you through specific camera angles and lighting placements, and you resent it and wish for the days you didn't notice that stuff.
I get it. It's valid. But it's a personal thing. Games didn't get less fun, you just aren't enjoying them anymore. They've always been like that.
May I suggest cheating? No, seriously: Download some mods, cheat tables, or trainers. Play the game the way you want to play it. Break out of the devs' carefully-packaged little box, even if it makes the game easier or makes people sneer at you. Go out of bounds. Give yourself infinite health and see how long it takes to beat the last boss naked and unarmed or using a DDR pad.
Don't cheat in multiplayer though. There's a special hell reserved for those who ruin others' experiences.
I've been cheating since the days of hand writing them from the internet for snes games. Once it gets boring, fuck it. But wholeheartedly, DO NOT CHEAT IN MULTIPLAYER. There's just no reason, either you like playing or you don't. I'm trash at Siege, but I still play without hacks cuz I still find it fun even when I lose.
As I got older, I learned to love easier difficulties. Like I can't imagine going back to any Fire Emblem game with permadeath on. That's just not fun anymore, its a giant timesink to carefully play a level to make sure no one dies. These day I kinda just go yee-haw with my team see who makes it through.
Same. Challenge just isn't meaningful the way it used to be. Unless the entire point of a game is challenge (your soulslikes and whatnot), I'm not that interested anymore. Especially not in an RPG where the story and character development are the main draw for me.
But of course, to each their own - mods and cheat tables can be used to make a game harder too if that's what tickles OP! An extreme difficulty or a no-money run or some such - something the devs excluded because there's no way it would gain mass appeal.
just grabbed god of war, disco elysium, and hellblade senuas sacrifice...
as far as recommendations go, Mass Effect legendary edition and dragon age are very enjoyable if you like RPG with a focus on lore, story and characters. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a wonder and a steal at $20. Witcher 3 for $12. Horizon Zero Dawn for $16.50
I love GOG and their anti-DRM stance but I just can't bring myself to buy games there when they don't even have a native Linux launcher. Steam, on the other hand, just works.
When the game is available on both platforms the Steam version is frequently (not always) DRM free as well. In this case both Disco Elysium and The Witcher 3 are DRM free on Steam.
It's easily anticheat for me; I'd still like to play genshin or paladins but their anticheat either makes it very difficult/risky (bans) or just impossible
Yeah the anticheat issue is very annoying. These games would run great on Linux if devs didn’t implement kernel level anticheat or would enable EAC / BattleEye support for proton. From what I can tell (just reading the docs) it seems extremely easy for devs to enable it. Maybe 1-2 hours of work.
I would third control. I picked it up from the Humble female protagonist bundle and it was fantastic, loved everything about it.
Once you unlock all the powers the combat and exploration really open up, and the game still has a significant bit of story left giving you time to have some fun with them.
Also loved the environmental lore, all the notes and the vids with Dr. Darling are great. Highly recommend the game.
Amazing game, definitely one of my all-time favorites and the most fun I've had with a combat system. The atmosphere of the game is fantastic as well, pulling so much tension out of every new supernatural office space you discover. I'm absolutely thrilled they confirmed a Control 2 recently, I can't wait to get back into that world with all its lore to discover. I feel like I need to play Alan Wake now too since they're connected.
Alan Wake is pretty interesting from a female perspective, because it's a male hero but it's good a pretty good female supporting character in the Sheriff and the plot with Alice is really interesting in light of the idea of fridging. Also, the sequel will have a second playable protagonist that's a woman.
It sounds like you're dating the wrong women. Why do you need to add someone that’s going to make judgements of you based on a hobby? Date people that improve your life; not make you question it.
I don't think there's an age cut off, I just think you got into the hobby when it was niche and your peers didn't. I'm an NES-generation video game player and I don't really know anyone my age who doesn't at least have a gamer in their household. On the other end, I don't know a single person who has a cable subscription.
Agreed. Gaming has become a lot more acceptable over time and with younger generations. This is also true for the gender gap in gamers, which factors into the dating scene.
It's not clear to me that I could ever listen to podcasts while playing most of my library, but I'll do my best to list some with which I might try:
Euro Truck Simulator 2 (and, by corollary, American Truck Simulator). If you can listen to podcasts in your car, this is basically a similar experience :)
Super Hexagon. This is not a game about making conscious decisions, it's too fast for that. You'd have to turn off the music, and determine whether you can retain stuff you're listening to at the same time.
Race The Sun. This is somewhere in the middle of the above two.
Solace Crafting. This is a relatively bare-bones sandbox RPG with harvesting, crafting, and building elements, that doesn't require all that much decision making, and can be played at any pace.
Minecraft (the Java edition). You've probably heard of it! I recommend the Java edition due to the rich modding ecosystem; you can usually find a flavor of content that suits any purpose.
Cities: Skylines (and, by corollary, SimCity 4). These are both world-class genre-defining city builders, which can be played at your own pace, don't require a whole lot of active involvement, and pair well with background listening of your choice.
This season's mechanic is neat! For those not in the know, it basically gives weapons a passive skill tree that's randomly generated per item, that you get experience by charging up and then activating pillars that spawn monsters.
The season mechanics can be pretty hit or miss but as long as they spawn a bunch of monsters people tend to be happy enough with them lol
I'm torn, because normally I wouldn't want a company like microsoft to buy such a big publisher, but what Activision did to Blizzard was so bad that Microsoft would be an improvement.
I think Microsoft as a company is trying to pivot away from game development and instead becoming game publisher. Which all things considered, isn't a bad thing. WIth improvements to AI, I imagine being a game creator is going to become much easier, so much easier, that AAA game studios just won't be able to compete.
So being in charge of the marketplace is a good business strategy in that context.
I'm not sure Microsoft could really save Blizzard at this point in time. Microsoft also does not have the greatest trackrecord of buying other game publishers. Instead of it becoming a toxic environment, it often just slowly becomes less and less of what made it unique and fun in the first place. So yeah. torn as well. I really like your take.
This is exactly my take. I can't in good conscious buy a Blizzard game right now, so I kind of wanted this to go through.
Every other part of me did not want this to go through. With how popular game pass is, and how many studios they're buying, this is just a recipe for a bait and switch and a bad situation for gamers down the road.
Very much in the same boat. Can't stomach their shitty policies and their garbage CEO aynmore. If MS purged these people after buying, I could finally think about going back to their products. And I don't see that happening without MS. Even with MS it'd be only a tiny chance.
Right, I was actually hoping it would go through so I could potentially lift my boycott of ActiBlizz that I started during the Blitzchung incident and only solidified as more information came out about the horrible things going on at Blizzard with some of their employees. Weirdly enough, I really want to play Heroes of the Storm again.
Microsoft bought Bungie and that gave us Halo. Valve has bought a number of studios that went on to produce great games. Those are more the exceptions than the rule though, and I agree it usually goes poorly.
Microsoft might improve Blizzard and the rest of Activision, but it will be a net loss for the industry. Microsoft has too much power in the market already, and that will only grow over time as they use their power from other segments to take over more. I see it in the business world already. They basically took over the entire market for business email, then pretty much dropped their self hosting options, leaving most business with only the option of M365. Which is great, until they decided to change partner terms on a dime and increase prices and there wasn't a damn thing we could do to stop it. Our options are either leave for Google(who's business tools absolutely suck), or look to FOSS, which has a rather high maintenance cost. Microsoft has that industry captured, and it is almost impossible to break out of.
gaming
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.