“Valve is the savior of gaming” as they invented micro transactions and neglect as many IPs as EA and Ubisoft do, but its okay since they have so many fun sales to tie to your account.
Valve is cool some of the time, TF2 is my most played game, but the moment GabeN keels over, is the moment a lot of people are going to notice that “owning” all your games on a digital storefront was a bad idea, like when Playstation and Microsoft remove games people bought with their hard earned money.
I finally kicked my Destiny 2 habit by installing Linux, and while I absolutely miss the gameplay and my team, I haven’t really looked back. I’m involved and interested in so many other things now. I still see the odd post that gives ma a pang of FOMO, but the thought of booting into my windows install makes me want to peel my skin off with tweezers.
Not an MMORPG by any means, but I’ve been really enjoying a “Minecraft like” called Vintage Story that is giving me the same feeling. The commodification of Minecraft has finally frustrated me enough and I’m jumping ship.
You should try Old School Runescape if you want an MMORPG without any microtransactions or FOMO/daily grind mechanics.
The cool part with OSRS is that every new feature or update has to pass the player polls, meaning they are unable to add stuff no one asked for. This includes microtransactions, partnerships, battlepasses, etc.
I mean… They have grown. The studio is bigger, they don’t have other revenue sources like Blizzard does really (also Activision Blizzard is owned by Microsoft, if you’re worried about a games company being owned by someone else that just wants profit…), and shit costs more now than it did 10 or 20 years ago. I wish it didn’t but inflation is a thing, and that thing affects the food and housing bills of the employees at companies.
For what it’s worth, OSRS has made some absolutely amazing improvements in the last couple years. Almost every single update has hit perfectly with nothing but minor errors or complaints. New expansions and regions, new quests, new raid, weapon and damage rebalances, new bosses, new community events and special game modes, new updates to their clients both mobile and desktop, and most importantly a significantly better bot-busting system over the last few months.
This shit isn’t cheap. That’s a LOT of parallel systems and work, and OSRS continues to have 0 micro transactions outside of membership. True, RS3 and its cesspool of mtx helps fund OSRS, but I don’t know how far that goes since the player count there is stagnant.
Now your opinion and choice to not support a company is always valid, that is up to you. But I don’t think it really is a “bullshit” price increase. I’m OK with OSRS costing $2 more per month if it means that this current cadence of content of QOL updates marches on. Jagex has been absolutely nailing it and I’m very happy with them, and that’s worth money to me.
Thing that cured me of my destiny 2 fomo was to get the transmog system to make my character look like a year 1 day 1 player (the broken armor you get when Ghaul takes your light) and then that’s my “look” I’m the guy who looks like they’ve never change their armor. Then I picked one ship and one emblem I liked (Xûr’s rock ship, and Strange Coin emblem) and that’s it. no more MTX.
Perfect, thanks so much! I kind of thought this but wanted to make sure. I’m not super familiar with them but have always been curious. Maybe somebody has ported it to Android
The colonists you are given all have character traits and there is a social aspect of the game. Colonists can start relationships, start families, break up, start social fights and end up in infirmarry… Sometimes, family members of your colonists come to your colony as raiders. All these stories forming during gameplay is the real strength of the game for me.
For example, there was this one colonist woman in one of my playthroughs. She was the tough, soldier type. She started one or two relationships in the colony but ended them. Then she tried to go back to them. It started creating some complicated feelings among the colony so I sent her to scavenge a nearby abandoned base.
Before she can leave, a band of raiders popped in. One of the raiders was her teenage son! So I start getting so invested in saving the son and bringing him back to the colony. I’m not that skilled in combat or tactics so I save the game multiple times until a trap injures the boy so his mom can snatch him without fighting. She takes him into one of the intact rooms in the ruin and patches up his wound, shares her food. (She takes him prisoner and you can keep talking to prisoners and convert them into your colonists. )
Here is a scene where raiders running around outside, raiding. And a mother and son, hunkered down in a room, trying to reconnect.
While the boy is recovering in the impromptu prison room, she gets out and shoots the raiders one by one. Rest of the raiders leave the map after losing enough members.
Mother and son talk about family, son talks about some childhood memories. Eventually, he is no longer a prisoner but a newly recruited member of the colony. Woman comes back with her son. Son turns out to be a psychopath but that’s ok. At the Rim, we love psychopaths, they do gruesome task of disposing raider corpses, for example, without getting emotional strain.
Mother stopped creating drama in the colony after son joined.
…
If you read people’s stories in the steam comments (there are a lot of war crime simulator stories, too, be warned) you may get why it’s so addictive.
I knew a guy who got real into it and started an “Accidental Cannibal Cult”. It was fun to listen to, if nothing else - I don’t get into those games much. Kinda like hearing EVE Online or Dwarf Fortress stories.
Rimworld is a great Colony Sim if you love the idea of Dwarf Fortress but want a gameplay experience that’s much more accessible with a much softer learning curve.
It plays into the chaotic post apocalyptic Mad Max style hellscape fantasy really well, and does not attempt to police your morality. You can love and care for your colonists, meeting their needs and growing to know them as individual people with their own unique stories, or you can play as efficiently or sadistically as you like, throwing ethics out the window and following the Geneva Suggestions wherever you deem prudent.
The base game is good for hundreds of hours of play, and expansions bump that up to thousands of hours of fun, but it also has a very healthy modding community if that’s still not enough.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Colony Sim genre, the basic idea is that you start with a set of semi-randomized colonists on a randomized map and need to build up a functioning Colony to survive. You the player take the role of a manager or overlord and set tasks for your colonists to complete, which they then take time to carry out while you watch and plan the next set of tasks. You need to gather materials, build shelter, grow or hunt food, defend yourself from wildlife and raiders, and recruit new colonists.
Rimworld in particular has fun building mechanics with an emphasis on building power grids and heat management (air conditioning and heating to keep your colonists comfy and keep food from spoiling). It’s a lot like a top-down Oxygen Not Included, but with simpler mechanics and more focus on its (procedurally generated) story.
Neat! Thank you for taking the time to make such a comprehensive review. Sounds like it’s up my alley! I enjoyed Frostpunk and the Tropico series (as well as Banished although I thought it was sort of boring after a while).
Team Fortress, I’m assuming you mean TF2, was one of the very first games to have microtransactions. They aren’t required for play but they’re definitely there.
Welcome to capitalism. Big gaming companies do not care about games anymore, they care about how to maximise profits. Their games are manipulative and developed together with psychologists solely to get your hard earned money at any opportunity. They got so good at it, that they are able to release pieces of software which are looking like games but actually are milking machines and no games at all.
You just have to take a step back and you will be able to easily differentiate between products of corporate greed and games.
Games once were supposed to be entertaining and even art. And there are still some, mostly indies.
May I recommend taking it a step further and going for games that have no cycle in them at all? That is, finite games that you can play and actually finish, for good. That’s what I’ve been looking for a lot lately.
Some recommendations:
The Talos Principle (puzzles with a story)
Outer Wilds (best to go in blind, read absolutely nothing about it, not even the steam description)
CrossCode (fast paced fun combat and a cool story and characters. Somewhat grindy but still finite)
Beacon Pines (short and sweet visual novel)
Chants of Sennaar (language translation game, surprisingly fun and satisfying)
Chants of Sennaar is absolutely one of my favorite games. It’s one of the few games I’ve played where the mechanics of the game and the themes of the game were in perfect harmony.
Not every game needs a story or campaign you can finish to be enjoyable. Playing random skirmishes in Age of Empires 2 or Supreme Commander can be loads of fun. Civilization 5 has scenarios that I suspect most players don’t even know exist (also, you can play Unciv for free). You can pick up and put down much like you’d do to boardgames.
Then there’s “infinite” games like Cities Skyline, RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, Satisfactory. It’s ok to want once and done games, but games that you want to replay when they lack any mtx or dark patterns speaks something about your enjoyment
Definitely, not disagreeing with that. I’ve played plenty of those games too. I just find that “enjoyment per hour” is actually better with shorter, finite games. But I also find myself spending a lot of time playing Civ or Stellaris haha
Outer Wilds is a gem of a 3D first-person indie game. Other games might have you find required items so you can progress (like Pokemon or Zelda games), but in this game it’s all about the knowledge you learn while playing (like Tunic). You explore, learn, and puzzle solve. By looking up anything about the game, or by looking up a solution to a puzzle, you essentially lock yourself out of experiencing that piece of content. It’s all about the journey.
It’s a game you can only really play once, but it is so worth it. It’s my favorite video game and I wish I could forget everything about it so I can play it again for the first time.
Well… Without spoiling anything I would say, you are a member of an alien species on another planet. You are also an aspiring astronaut about to take your first journey into space. Let’s just say your journey is quite remarkable.
When I did this quitting thing from MMOs and FOMO inducing gachas that you describe, I suddenly
got a non-dead-end job
got a girlfriend
got a promotion
travelled around Europe
girlfriend died
travelled around Europe some more
got another girlfriend
ended up in Canada
got married
got kids
stuck in dead-end job again without promotion for the past five years
I still think it was worth it to quit though. My mind just gets stimuli from the seemingly simplest things, like looking at a beautiful tree on the roadside, brutalist architecture, interesting conversations that I focus on instead of my mind wandering onto the next mount or raid boss I will have to tackle.
And when it comes to gaming, if I want to satisfy my itch for twitch and a bit of adrenaline, roguelites scratch it the best, without the long term commitment to playing them for days or even hours.
But what works best to keep sanity is exercise, and with riding a road bike at least twice a day I can combine elevated heart rate with zoning out and Zen for stress relief really well. It’s simply meditative.
I think of the twelve years I’ve spent playing MMOs fondly, lots of memories were made. But I would never do it again. And it has nothing to do with self-control, and willpower to not start it again, although quitting cold turkey definitely required both. But it had everything to do with the realization that it’s a trap that’s a poor substitute for real life, even if real life has dealt you shitty cards.
I can spot the hazy, reality-disconnected look of addicts from a mile away. The self-deluding statements when the topic somehow gets brought up. And I can do nothing but feel a bit sad for them, and hope that somewhere, someone manages to gently nudge them on a path that helps them escape from this trap.
Ads are not required to play the game. If you want to watch them, the incentive is coin. There is no battle pass or anything. It’s genuinely a fun game.
I mean, it could be very fun and perhaps even worth playing, but surely you understand that a game that on-paper doesn’t require the viewing of ads, but heavily incentivizes just that is still problematic?
It’s like one of those “free-to-play” particularly grindy MMOs, sure, you don’t have to pay, just grind the “kill 10 goblin rats in a basement quest” for 250 hours and you’ll have all the loot you need to get to level 2, but the option to pay is there if you so-choose it.
In such a case it is fairly obvious that there is not actually a choice when you are heavily incentivized towards one end.
Not really because it’s not one of those “you need to watch ads to get coins to advance” kind of games. It’s ability to enjoy without ads is still amazing. I also believe that ads in games are OK with minimal disruption, a perfect example is this game. Non intrusive, no banners, no season pass, no ads after or before a round, etc.
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No shit. Micro transactions have completely turned me off from gaming, starting with TF2.
“Valve is the savior of gaming” as they invented micro transactions and neglect as many IPs as EA and Ubisoft do, but its okay since they have so many fun sales to tie to your account.
Valve is cool some of the time, TF2 is my most played game, but the moment GabeN keels over, is the moment a lot of people are going to notice that “owning” all your games on a digital storefront was a bad idea, like when Playstation and Microsoft remove games people bought with their hard earned money.
If everyone was following your path, micro transactions wouldn’t be there anymore.
I finally kicked my Destiny 2 habit by installing Linux, and while I absolutely miss the gameplay and my team, I haven’t really looked back. I’m involved and interested in so many other things now. I still see the odd post that gives ma a pang of FOMO, but the thought of booting into my windows install makes me want to peel my skin off with tweezers.
Not an MMORPG by any means, but I’ve been really enjoying a “Minecraft like” called Vintage Story that is giving me the same feeling. The commodification of Minecraft has finally frustrated me enough and I’m jumping ship.
You should try Old School Runescape if you want an MMORPG without any microtransactions or FOMO/daily grind mechanics.
The cool part with OSRS is that every new feature or update has to pass the player polls, meaning they are unable to add stuff no one asked for. This includes microtransactions, partnerships, battlepasses, etc.
deleted by creator
I mean… They have grown. The studio is bigger, they don’t have other revenue sources like Blizzard does really (also Activision Blizzard is owned by Microsoft, if you’re worried about a games company being owned by someone else that just wants profit…), and shit costs more now than it did 10 or 20 years ago. I wish it didn’t but inflation is a thing, and that thing affects the food and housing bills of the employees at companies.
For what it’s worth, OSRS has made some absolutely amazing improvements in the last couple years. Almost every single update has hit perfectly with nothing but minor errors or complaints. New expansions and regions, new quests, new raid, weapon and damage rebalances, new bosses, new community events and special game modes, new updates to their clients both mobile and desktop, and most importantly a significantly better bot-busting system over the last few months.
This shit isn’t cheap. That’s a LOT of parallel systems and work, and OSRS continues to have 0 micro transactions outside of membership. True, RS3 and its cesspool of mtx helps fund OSRS, but I don’t know how far that goes since the player count there is stagnant.
Now your opinion and choice to not support a company is always valid, that is up to you. But I don’t think it really is a “bullshit” price increase. I’m OK with OSRS costing $2 more per month if it means that this current cadence of content of QOL updates marches on. Jagex has been absolutely nailing it and I’m very happy with them, and that’s worth money to me.
You can’t really say Blizzard has not raised prices when they have added microtrans and mental health costs to the game.
Thing that cured me of my destiny 2 fomo was to get the transmog system to make my character look like a year 1 day 1 player (the broken armor you get when Ghaul takes your light) and then that’s my “look” I’m the guy who looks like they’ve never change their armor. Then I picked one ship and one emblem I liked (Xûr’s rock ship, and Strange Coin emblem) and that’s it. no more MTX.
0 A.D is an free open source age of strategy kind of game. Add it to your collection.
Are you able to elaborate a little bit on age of strategy?
I had huge age of empire nostalgia vibes,
My friend had the same feeling but age of mythology instead.
Neither of us played the “other” game but we both agreed the sound design in 0ad was almost identical to our different memories.
They are top down strategy games so i sort of gave it this umbrella term. “Age of … “ strategy games
Perfect, thanks so much! I kind of thought this but wanted to make sure. I’m not super familiar with them but have always been curious. Maybe somebody has ported it to Android
Just randomly browsing Lemmy and I get a whole ass game to check out for free.
I was thinking of Stardew Valley and Rimworld while reading your post, sure enough SDW was mentioned at the end :D
Sell me on rimworld! What do you like about it/what do ya like to do
The colonists you are given all have character traits and there is a social aspect of the game. Colonists can start relationships, start families, break up, start social fights and end up in infirmarry… Sometimes, family members of your colonists come to your colony as raiders. All these stories forming during gameplay is the real strength of the game for me.
For example, there was this one colonist woman in one of my playthroughs. She was the tough, soldier type. She started one or two relationships in the colony but ended them. Then she tried to go back to them. It started creating some complicated feelings among the colony so I sent her to scavenge a nearby abandoned base.
Before she can leave, a band of raiders popped in. One of the raiders was her teenage son! So I start getting so invested in saving the son and bringing him back to the colony. I’m not that skilled in combat or tactics so I save the game multiple times until a trap injures the boy so his mom can snatch him without fighting. She takes him into one of the intact rooms in the ruin and patches up his wound, shares her food. (She takes him prisoner and you can keep talking to prisoners and convert them into your colonists. )
Here is a scene where raiders running around outside, raiding. And a mother and son, hunkered down in a room, trying to reconnect.
While the boy is recovering in the impromptu prison room, she gets out and shoots the raiders one by one. Rest of the raiders leave the map after losing enough members.
Mother and son talk about family, son talks about some childhood memories. Eventually, he is no longer a prisoner but a newly recruited member of the colony. Woman comes back with her son. Son turns out to be a psychopath but that’s ok. At the Rim, we love psychopaths, they do gruesome task of disposing raider corpses, for example, without getting emotional strain.
Mother stopped creating drama in the colony after son joined.
…
If you read people’s stories in the steam comments (there are a lot of war crime simulator stories, too, be warned) you may get why it’s so addictive.
Wild.
Over 2000 hour of play and i never won once but had so much fun losing in some really stupid way and some tragic one too.
With the mod and dlc each new game are mostly unique
Cannibalism is a viable option. Do you need more?
Child labour was what got me into Frostpunk. Sold.
I knew a guy who got real into it and started an “Accidental Cannibal Cult”. It was fun to listen to, if nothing else - I don’t get into those games much. Kinda like hearing EVE Online or Dwarf Fortress stories.
Rimworld is a great Colony Sim if you love the idea of Dwarf Fortress but want a gameplay experience that’s much more accessible with a much softer learning curve.
It plays into the chaotic post apocalyptic Mad Max style hellscape fantasy really well, and does not attempt to police your morality. You can love and care for your colonists, meeting their needs and growing to know them as individual people with their own unique stories, or you can play as efficiently or sadistically as you like, throwing ethics out the window and following the Geneva Suggestions wherever you deem prudent.
The base game is good for hundreds of hours of play, and expansions bump that up to thousands of hours of fun, but it also has a very healthy modding community if that’s still not enough.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Colony Sim genre, the basic idea is that you start with a set of semi-randomized colonists on a randomized map and need to build up a functioning Colony to survive. You the player take the role of a manager or overlord and set tasks for your colonists to complete, which they then take time to carry out while you watch and plan the next set of tasks. You need to gather materials, build shelter, grow or hunt food, defend yourself from wildlife and raiders, and recruit new colonists.
Rimworld in particular has fun building mechanics with an emphasis on building power grids and heat management (air conditioning and heating to keep your colonists comfy and keep food from spoiling). It’s a lot like a top-down Oxygen Not Included, but with simpler mechanics and more focus on its (procedurally generated) story.
Neat! Thank you for taking the time to make such a comprehensive review. Sounds like it’s up my alley! I enjoyed Frostpunk and the Tropico series (as well as Banished although I thought it was sort of boring after a while).
Ooh. I’ve heard of Frostpunk and Tropico but never played them myself. If they’re similar to Rimworld I need to check them out.
They’re similar in that they’re colony builders :)
The Java edition of Minecraft is also pretty good for having no microtransactions.
And modpacks…all the modpacks! All of them turn the game into a whole new game.
Team Fortress, I’m assuming you mean TF2, was one of the very first games to have microtransactions. They aren’t required for play but they’re definitely there.
Welcome to capitalism. Big gaming companies do not care about games anymore, they care about how to maximise profits. Their games are manipulative and developed together with psychologists solely to get your hard earned money at any opportunity. They got so good at it, that they are able to release pieces of software which are looking like games but actually are milking machines and no games at all.
You just have to take a step back and you will be able to easily differentiate between products of corporate greed and games.
Games once were supposed to be entertaining and even art. And there are still some, mostly indies.
We’ll take cash, we’ll take checks,
We’ll take credit cards, we’ll take jewelry,
We’ll take your momma’s dentures if they got gold in them!
I started playing only arcade games for some months now and I’m so happy, this games are just gameplay and nothing more!
May I recommend taking it a step further and going for games that have no cycle in them at all? That is, finite games that you can play and actually finish, for good. That’s what I’ve been looking for a lot lately.
Some recommendations:
Chants of Sennaar is absolutely one of my favorite games. It’s one of the few games I’ve played where the mechanics of the game and the themes of the game were in perfect harmony.
Not every game needs a story or campaign you can finish to be enjoyable. Playing random skirmishes in Age of Empires 2 or Supreme Commander can be loads of fun. Civilization 5 has scenarios that I suspect most players don’t even know exist (also, you can play Unciv for free). You can pick up and put down much like you’d do to boardgames.
Then there’s “infinite” games like Cities Skyline, RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, Satisfactory. It’s ok to want once and done games, but games that you want to replay when they lack any mtx or dark patterns speaks something about your enjoyment
Definitely, not disagreeing with that. I’ve played plenty of those games too. I just find that “enjoyment per hour” is actually better with shorter, finite games. But I also find myself spending a lot of time playing Civ or Stellaris haha
What’s the SorteKanin description of Outer Wilds?
I’m not them but…
Outer Wilds is a gem of a 3D first-person indie game. Other games might have you find required items so you can progress (like Pokemon or Zelda games), but in this game it’s all about the knowledge you learn while playing (like Tunic). You explore, learn, and puzzle solve. By looking up anything about the game, or by looking up a solution to a puzzle, you essentially lock yourself out of experiencing that piece of content. It’s all about the journey.
It’s a game you can only really play once, but it is so worth it. It’s my favorite video game and I wish I could forget everything about it so I can play it again for the first time.
Well… Without spoiling anything I would say, you are a member of an alien species on another planet. You are also an aspiring astronaut about to take your first journey into space. Let’s just say your journey is quite remarkable.
i just started playing on Ascension wow private server.
their take on classless is so nice.
If you want to scratch a similar itch, and have not already, try Guild Wars 2.
It does have microtransactions, but only because they have no subscription fee and they are mostly cosmetic with a few rare exceptions.
It also has no FOMO except cosmetics from certain festivals, which you can also buy in the next year.
It is still the best MMO on the market IMHO, because it values your time and money compared to other games in the genre.
You know I’m a true RS fan when I say stuff like “Jagex is a shit company run by morons.”
When I did this quitting thing from MMOs and FOMO inducing gachas that you describe, I suddenly
I still think it was worth it to quit though. My mind just gets stimuli from the seemingly simplest things, like looking at a beautiful tree on the roadside, brutalist architecture, interesting conversations that I focus on instead of my mind wandering onto the next mount or raid boss I will have to tackle.
And when it comes to gaming, if I want to satisfy my itch for twitch and a bit of adrenaline, roguelites scratch it the best, without the long term commitment to playing them for days or even hours.
But what works best to keep sanity is exercise, and with riding a road bike at least twice a day I can combine elevated heart rate with zoning out and Zen for stress relief really well. It’s simply meditative.
I think of the twelve years I’ve spent playing MMOs fondly, lots of memories were made. But I would never do it again. And it has nothing to do with self-control, and willpower to not start it again, although quitting cold turkey definitely required both. But it had everything to do with the realization that it’s a trap that’s a poor substitute for real life, even if real life has dealt you shitty cards.
I can spot the hazy, reality-disconnected look of addicts from a mile away. The self-deluding statements when the topic somehow gets brought up. And I can do nothing but feel a bit sad for them, and hope that somewhere, someone manages to gently nudge them on a path that helps them escape from this trap.
Wtf, is this some (copy) pasta?
If it isn’t it should be our Lemmy pasta with sauce IMO!
Recommendation: Survivor.io on mobile is freaking fun. Not really any ads either, unless you choose to watch them for more coin.
What. So are there or aren’t there
Why? Is there some sort of incentive?
So not only are there ads but you’re manipulated into watching them. That checks out for a mobile game.
Ads are not required to play the game. If you want to watch them, the incentive is coin. There is no battle pass or anything. It’s genuinely a fun game.
I mean, it could be very fun and perhaps even worth playing, but surely you understand that a game that on-paper doesn’t require the viewing of ads, but heavily incentivizes just that is still problematic?
It’s like one of those “free-to-play” particularly grindy MMOs, sure, you don’t have to pay, just grind the “kill 10 goblin rats in a basement quest” for 250 hours and you’ll have all the loot you need to get to level 2, but the option to pay is there if you so-choose it.
In such a case it is fairly obvious that there is not actually a choice when you are heavily incentivized towards one end.
Not really because it’s not one of those “you need to watch ads to get coins to advance” kind of games. It’s ability to enjoy without ads is still amazing. I also believe that ads in games are OK with minimal disruption, a perfect example is this game. Non intrusive, no banners, no season pass, no ads after or before a round, etc.
Yeah you’re gonna find this to not be a popular opinion in the non-mobile gaming spaces. I block all vidya from accessing the internet in any fashion.
I had the same confusion reading that recommendation. Seems to check all the red flags based on that sentence.