Something that's been cool to see over the past few years is the emergence of more non-combat focused building/strategy(?) games like Islanders and Autonauts.
I think maybe Dorfromantik fits into that category too? Not played it but that's the gist I've gotten about it.
Should look into more of'em tbh. They manage a nice slow-burn pace without as much tedium as games that try to explicitly slow you down (i.e. many RPGs).
Never really understood competitive games, for a mixture of reasons, and among those reasons is:
if you excel at a game, you kinda narrow down who you can enjoyably play against, and doesn't that kinda suck?
Personally I've never found it much fun to wipe the floor with opponents, AI or otherwise, so I don't get wanting to excel at a competitive game. In my mind you're undermining your own enjoyment of it somewhat.
This was brought to mind again as I played several rounds of Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition online for the first time, despite having played the original off and on for a long time, and as I expected, I got wrecked each time.
I let my opponents smash up what little I'd managed to build since that's some of the fun, but I can't imagine steamrolling me was much fun otherwise.
So, given the kinda joke about people hating phone calls, yet using voice chat in games, I can't help wondering what people's preferences may be on chatting in games.
When you play online games, which do you lean towards when it comes to text/voice chat, or other options I didn't fit here, contextual pinging (e.g. Apex Legends), emotes, or voice/chat commands (e.g. Team Fortress 2/AoE 2)?
the surest sign someone has successfully stayed away from entertainment communities is when they describe a massive hit as a "hidden gem", e.g. read a comment calling Witcher 3 a hidden gem ๐
i sometimes wish i was better at being like that so i could talk about games more at ease
but i know just enough about how the sausage is made so i can't
Does Proton for games on Linux work without using Steam? ๐ค
I know vaguely of stuff like Lutris, so I'm still wondering how gaming on Linux looks if you're not completely bought into Valve's pseudo-monopoly. That should be in line with Linux thinking, right?
If it does, hell yeah. Then the other trick might be controller stuff outside of Steam, but one step at a time.
@gmr_leon Phew! Not suggesting that you specifically were, but there have been many times where Lutris + getting away from Steam tend to result in the "Thank Goodness for Tiny Underdog Epic".
Every once in a while I forget that Lutris supports more than just EA/UBI/Epic because of it. No harm meant!
My favorite part of watching videos of people trying lesser known games on Steam is seeing the wide range of quality/polish.
It's encouraging in an, "If people are willing to put their work out like this, what's stopping me?" way. Like just go for it, everyone's already throwing everything at the wall so why not?
I feel like I need a site or some way to easily relate in any post concerning big video games/video game companies how despite whatever interesting/decent experiences may be found in their games their publishers/owners also flatly suck.
Yes there may be exceptions, but this would be applied to those making the rule that they broadly suck.
Something like web3isgoinggreat but for bad games industry behavior.
As I was doing a little more digging around for discussions of note-taking and games, I found a forum that was still online, and one of the posters mentioning they'd written on their blog about their habit of note-taking in games.
Despite the thread only being 13 years old, I expected the link to be dead. To my pleasant surprise?
Also in case anyone else happens upon this thread somewhen down the line, I've found where the person writing RVGFanatic is still around!
They've since switched their blogging over to Wordpress, which is a mild bummer (none of that classic web style, sadly), but cool to see they're still active!
I've noticed there are some folks writing at length here on their experiences playing games, so this felt like a good place to ask. Do you take notes as you play, and/or after each session, then write out full thoughts upon completing a game?
Or are your reflections compiled only after finishing a game, no notes?
I've dabbled with different approaches, and haven't really settled on a consistent process personally.
I keep a gaming journal, but itโs only for thoughts afterward. I keep it much simpler than I used to, as thereโs a point where writing at length becomes work, and gaming shouldnโt be work. Thatโs the same reason I donโt keep a backlog. In my longer posts here and elsewhere, it tends to just be stream-of-consciousness writing derived from those journals entries, just cleaned up a little bit.
As for note-taking, I will almost never take notes on opinion/criticism during a play. Pretty sure that again, itโd feel like work if I took notes. I also rarely write about games I donโt finish unless Iโve played most of them (I tend to bounce off a lot of games lately). Other than that, my journal has the occasional random thought on larger industry trends, or a quick sort, like a toplist or the latest tier-making meme I saw. Itโs interesting to see how my tastes change over the years.
I personally like to write some general things I end up enjoying about a game, while Iโm playing (or during pauses), mostly because I plan on making a YT channel, but also because I like to leave useful reviews on GOG and Steam. The thing about making notes during early on is that you can check them later and see if anything overstayed its welcome. Itโs also great to remember story details, if theyโre relevant
The good thing about simply writing down, even generic notes like โgood musicโ and โcontrols really wellโ can help create that memory path to the actual experience. You donโt need to be a โcriticโ to understand when something is great, good, bad or โjust thereโ, but it can take some skill to write in a way that makes sense to other people, so writing about the games youโve been playing is a good way to train that!
It may seem simple, but if taking notes during play, the stop and start of it seems distracting, and it's not really viable with many online games.
So I'd guess for those writing about their experiences with games it's probably primarily reflective with few notes from during play depending on the games involved?