Apparently Path of Exile 2 has very serious performance issues on Windows 11 24H2, to the point of being unplayable.

Tower Unite is like this, with a bunch of social games too. VR is not needed.

Wurm Unlimited tends to be my go-to winter game to get stuck into.

Yeah I keep falling off Elite Dangerous, despite loving it.

Same. I want to like it but that engineering grind is absurd.

This shit is why I stopped playing Rust, Eve Online, and a bunch of other games. I can’t do the time sink anymore and to be honest, I’m not sure why I ever tolerated it.

I’ve been playing Abiotic Factor and Journey to the Savage Planet with my wife and enjoying them a lot, and a big part of why is that I don’t need to log in every day. With my guys I also occasionally hop into Dinkum, Volcanoids, Darktide (post-progression update), Helldivers 2… Even Darktide and Helldivers 2 are borderline too grindy for me.

Okay so I don’t have an example that matches IRL time like Animal Crossing but a game with similar style I can do. If you’re down with time progression like Stardew Valley, check out Dinkum, best summarized as “Outback Animal Crossing”

Vermintide and Left 4 Dead’s rolling commentary works because they use it strategically rather than filling every moment of time up with bullshit. Borderlands just got worse with each game until the third one went off the rails.

Earth Defense Force 5 ends with you fighting a god. EDF 6 basically starts and ends with this.

Generally speaking there is an inverse relationship between average review scores and the quality of the game. Considering the game is probably going to be another open-world collectathon, I’m going to wait.

Abiotic Factor. It’s like playing through the Black Mesa facility but as a survival game, something I never knew I wanted until I experienced it.

Had some friends try to get me to play. Gave it a good 20 hours or so, spent most of it just trying to get anywhere. About a quarter of the time some random guy would zoom along and blow me up before he even showed up on radar, and now I was on a timer waiting for my ship to come back. Another 10% of the time I’d get sucked through my ship when I tried to use FTL, there goes another ship recovery timer.

The time consumption even when things go right is absolutely ridiculous, and they often go wrong. The random PK shit feels so fucking awful that I’d really rather just play something else.

I have played and enjoyed games that require patience, like Wurm Online and EVE Online. Star Citizen is on a level above even those and I’m not sure I would have liked it even before I had kids, but now? Forget it.

Now that we have viable PC handhelds I no longer have a reason to care about Nintendo. Blast the pirates or don’t, I’m not buying their shit either way. On the other hand I’ve got a lot of friends who actually have decent money in Nintendo’s ecosystem who use emulators to play the games they own in a way they prefer. This has left a bad taste in their mouths…

Given the nature of their matchmaking approach, this is probably the best option.

Would be easier if we could choose our lobbies out of a list…

Not sure if you played the original version but the remaster adds new attacks to some enemies and changes some of their behaviours. It also seems to have changed some enemy spawns, I think. It made the game feel fresh in a way I wasn’t expecting for something I probably played through a few dozen times lol.

Mankind Divided has some too close to home moments but the first game? That shit was almost like a playbook of the next two decades, it’s actually nuts.

You probably would have liked Guild Wars 1 as well. You get to max level (level 20) well before you finish the content, and the rest of your advancement is farming mats for high level equipment and stealing elite attacks from enemies to unlock them for yourself.

ADL report

Opinion discarded. Those ADL fucks lie about damn near everything.

Oh that is uncanny, I was just thinking about this game today. Really a surprisingly unique car combat game, I still haven’t played anything like it.

I respect the trolling.

Same. In fact were I playing webfishing knowing that this many people from all sides would be this upset about the title, I would 100% gun for it and enjoy the fireworks.

People’s reactions to things like this are hilariously overblown, both the anger that some straight person would dare to ask for representation and that some dev would gently troll them.

OBS is the big one, but it comes with a learning curve. That said there is so much flexibility like breaking out game, desktop, and discord into separate audio channels you can adjust in the recording.

It’s more better lol

Seriously though it’s really well thought out actually. Each planet has unique challenges you will have to deal with and it’s clear they put a lot of effort into designing these challenges and their solutions. Each planet grants new features that give you options you wouldn’t otherwise have to help solve other problems. Lots of quality of life changes and an ever-improving user experience.

It won’t win over people who didn’t like Factorio but fans of the game will get more of what they love.

Two groups will 10/10 this game: access journalists and agenda-driven journalists. Everyone else is going to be a bit more critical, especially considering Baldur’s Gate 3 exists and is still fresh.

For me it was Valheim, but BotW is a banger. They make it hard to enjoy games even when they’re actually decent, like Enshrouded and Smalland. You can’t help but feel it’s been done better.

Fair lol. There are other games with good support but it’s the one I played the most in VR

To all the “boycotts don’t matter” people: lol owned. Protest is good and just, and people do notice. Taking action makes a different so get out there and be fucking heard people.

Flight in VR is truly something else. Not even a simpit can provide that level of immersion. You think jumping into a white dwarf system is spooky in Elite Dangerous? Try doing it with a headset on. When your cockpit is smoking, alarms are blaring, and the panic sets in, you will finally understand.

My Steam Deck plays a lot of games, more than I even expected it to. Honestly I’m not sure where this “iffy library” crap comes from.

People are still playing? That’s tempting, I still haven’t found something that hits the spot this game did.

I still strongly dislike limiting cosmetics so much, especially in a setting where they can mean so much. Darktide’s $20 skins pissed me right off: role-playing is 100% part of the game and that price is absurd.

I’m not buying this game at launch but could be convinced to do so after private servers come out.

I used to be a heavy industrial player in EVE Online and Foxhole fills the hole, surprisingly. Each faction has at least one group whose sole purpose is logistics, and they’re both decent.

How the hell are League of Legends or Valorant considered MMOs? Are Rocket League or Team Fortress 2 MMOs? Is Battlefield 5 an MMO now?

The expansion of this term to include 5v5 games is never not going to piss me off.

No thanks.

Yeah it’s becoming a bit uncanny when I pickup a game and see Mandalore, SplatterCat, or AlphaBetaGamer covering it a few days later.

Even without Steam around, do you really think Average Joe is going to check a bunch of storefronts looking for a game? Nah, they’re going to see what comes up on Twitch/YouTube and then play that. That would have meant nothing but sponsored garbage forever. Steam saved us from that fate with Greenlight and later opening the door entirely (and favouring indies in their upcoming and new lists)

Do you remember Direct2Drive? Opened up in 2004, digital storefront for games run by IGN? No? That’s ok, neither does anyone else, and it had the pull of fucking IGN. That’s the market Steam was launching into at the time, a time when many people were openly exclaiming PC gaming was dying.

At the time gamer chat was a mostly text-based affair over several places and services, and voice was the realm of the few people with the skills to get TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble going or a connection to those people. Steam did something wild and brought the whole community together in one place. All the games, all the gamers, and all the developers in one place.

That’s how Steam ended up a monopoly, and with their collection of mature services no one is going to beat them at everything. If you want to beat them you’re going to need to focus on one aspect of their service, beat that, and then work with other people who have targeted other parts of the service and connect. In other words, you need to do the exact opposite of Battle.net/Epic/Uplay/Origin/etc. but none of those companies will do that because they are too selfish to give up any part of the profits.

Only the FOSS community would have the required mentality and why would they step on Steam? Linux gaming has never been this good. It’s almost like the only people who could take on Steam view it as an asset.

Oh and just to be clear: virtually no other service has even tried to do anything but be a worse version of Steam. GOG and Itch.io instead opted to focus on what made them different and thus occupy meaningful niches, but everyone else continues to be worthless to this day and they only have themselves to blame.

My library and tastes are pretty eclectic so I think Steam’s recommendation engine struggles with me lol. That said, I love how it sends me shit no one seems to know about at the time, like Kenshi, Volcanoids, PULSAR, etc.

As I understand it the issue is actually that people weren’t allowed to sell their game for less on other platforms, but they weren’t necessarily trying to sell Steam keys.

Oh wow I’ve owned this game for quite some time. Decent game but ultimately I think Starsector and Avorion are better.

What about GOG and its DRM-free games? What about Itch.io and its exceptionally low cut and pretty much completely open-door policy? There are other services that are good. Origin, UPlay, Epic, and other stuff sucking does not mean they’re all bad.

All I ever wanted was good fights and for that short time where SBMM was actually what it said on the tin, I got them. But then somehow devs started getting it in their heads that what people really want is noobstomping, and while I’m sure some people want that, they can go fuck themselves. That shit made me want to play less because it was too easy all the time, and then when the cheating became too rampant to ignore I just stopped playing competitive shooters.