Kobolds with a keyboard.
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I got you, fam. It’s not exactly the same - more narrative focused, and slower paced - but it will scratch that same itch.
As someone who just has no interest whatsoever in competitive multiplayer games (even ‘passive’ competitive, like this sounds to be), or live service titles, I feel completely left behind by AAA developers. It’s a good thing the indie scene is so vibrant, or I’d just have to find a new hobby at this point.
Even if there weren’t a million examples of prior art, the fact that patents on game mechanics are even allowed is just awful for the industry as a whole, and we as players should absolutely rail against this. Every game borrows from other games’ ideas and mechanics - I’d bet money that there hasn’t been a single fully “original” game in 20+ years. If companies are allowed to patent every little mechanic (even ones they didn’t come up with), the industry as a whole will just become impossible to operate in.
Halo Infinite: Post-season 5, battle passes are now free during their introductory season, but cost $5 to unlock afterward
Marvel Rivals: Battle passes will not expire if you bought the $10 Luxury pass during the season
These are not FOMO-less. Marvel Rivals sounds like the worst of the three in that regard. The ‘old’ method incentivized you to skip buying a battle pass if you weren’t going to finish it (because you’d lose rewards); MR’s system gives you a FOMO CTA to make that purchase to stop you from losing rewards.
Compare this to, say, Dead By Daylight, where there’s “seasons” with unlockable rewards, you can get them for free, and you can keep unlocking them after the season ends.
There’s also a wide range of player skill levels to consider. If you aim to make a game not be frustrating for most players, it’s going to be boring for a large percentage of the best players. If you aim to make a game challenging for the best players, it’s going to be unapproachable for most. Different difficulty tiers of the same fight helps to address that but still alienates players if they find even the lower difficulties too challenging. It’s a delicate dance.
My understanding (again only based on articles from the past 2+ years that this lawsuit has been in the works) is that it isn’t codified in their agreements at all, but that they can / have either removed games from the store, or removed them from promotion (meaning you could find the game if you searched for it, but it would never show up on the storefront, for instance) in response to games being listed elsewhere cheaper. That’s kind of part of the basis for this lawsuit, by my understanding - I’ve read that they’re using those examples as evidence against Steam that they’re acting anti-competitively.
There’s been a lot of articles and discussion about it since this lawsuit first showed up, and the general gist that I’ve seen is that:
- It’s not codified in their agreements, but
- They can / have in the past either removed products from the Steam store entirely or removed them from curated marketing and promotion in response to the game being listed elsewhere at a lower price.
They seem to handle it on a case by case basis, but in those cases it’s definitely not been restricted only to the sale of Steam keys. They just don’t have any firm legalese to refer to here that I’m aware of.
I haven’t seen the agreement itself, but I’ve never seen anything to lead me to believe it didn’t apply to non-steam key sales. EGS doesn’t sell Steam keys but games still can’t be listed for cheaper on EGS than Steam without violating Steam’s terms, for example.
I really don’t think there’s any way to reasonably argue that Steam should have to give out Steam keys for cheaper sale elsewhere. They’re paying for the servers, they’re paying for the Steam features, they’re paying for the advertising; it stands to reason that people shouldn’t be able to take advantage of that. Even if it was ruled this way, all Steam would have to do is discontinue the free Steam key distribution and instead charge 30% of the game’s price to generate keys, then remove the MFN clause. They’d still get their cut.
I feel like Steam could remove their most favored nation clause (which is what this lawsuit is about) for any storefront that isn’t selling Steam keys specifically, and the amount of sales they’d lose would be effectively a rounding error. I don’t care if a game is 10% cheaper on EGS or itch.io or wherever else; I’m still buying it on Steam because I want to use the services Steam provides. The sole exception is GoG - but even with GoG, I still find it much less reliable than Steam for just being able to get the game working without problems (on linux specifically).
If the product being sold is a Steam key, I don’t think there’s any argument that could stand up against the MFN clause… the fact that Steam allows developers to generate Steam keys for their games for free and sell them elsewhere is pretty generous as it is now.
FromSoft’s games have been on my ‘I will buy anything they release’ list for quite some time, and I’ve never been disappointed with one. There’s not much at this point that would get me to stop buying their stuff on release, but a PlayStation account sign-in requirement on PC would definitely accomplish it.
From another article talking about this:
For years, Sen. Warner, a former tech entrepreneur, has been raising the alarm about rise of hate-fueled content proliferating online, as well as the threat posed by domestic and foreign bad actors circulating disinformation. Recently, he pressed directly for action from Discord, another video game-based social networking site that is hosting violent predatory groups that coerce minors into self-harm and suicide. He has also called attention to the rise of pro-eating disorder content on AI platforms. A leader in the tech space, Sen. Warner has also lead the charge for broad Section 230 reform to allow social media companies to be held accountable for enabling cyber-stalking, harassment, and discrimination on their platforms.
The linked Section 230 Reform details
He’s targeting all kinds of social media, not just gaming platforms.
Who is in charge of defining what is hate speech and extremist behaviour?
The specific behavior that’s being called out here - antisemitic, Nazi, sexuality- or gender-based hate, and white supremacist content - are pretty common definitions of hate speech and extremist behavior. Either way, he calls out Valve’s own internally written content policies - which he states aren’t being enforced - as the point of contention; he doesn’t seem to be imposing outside views on them.
What if it were the people who don’t agree with your definitions is in charge of setting the definitions?
Then Steam becomes X or Truth Social, I guess? I think the chances of that happening are incredibly slim. A more likely negative outcome would be the terms being interpreted to broadly and positive speech being limited along with the negative, but to your point
Slippery slope.
Aren’t you the one committing the slippery slope fallacy here? You’re seemingly suggesting that a crackdown on hate speech will lead to or open the door to a bunch of negative outcomes.
Free speech is one of those things that is absolute. You are either for it or not, any encroachment is going to be the anti position. Obviously popular speech isn’t something that needs to be protected.
If you’re defining ‘free speech’ as the ability to say whatever you want, wherever you want (including on private platforms), without facing consequences, then no, I don’t support (your rigid definition of) free speech. I think that’s a ridiculous definition to use, though, and I don’t think it should be viewed as black or white. ‘Free speech absolutism’ is what leads to misinformation on the scale we’re currently seeing (in the US). Furthermore, ‘free speech’ as outlined in the first amendment doesn’t apply here at all.
Regardless, I don’t like the idea of my kid (or any kids) being exposed to Nazi, white supremacist, or discriminatory rhetoric when he’s on a gaming platform. Since that’s specifically what Warner claims to be addressing here, I support calling it into question.
As Black Friday and the holiday buying season approaches, the American public should know that not only is Steam an unsafe place for teens and young adults to purchase and play online games, but also that, absent a change in Valve’s approach to user moderation and the type of behavior that it welcomes on its platform, Steam is playing a clear role in allowing harmful ideologies to spread and take root among the next generation.
Asking Valve to crack down on hate-speech and extremist behavior? Sounds great. There’s some really awful shit on there and I’d love it if they’d do something about it before it becomes fully entrenched as a Nazi bar.
Edit: I’d also love to hear why the folks who apparently disagree feel that way. Is it because other platforms are worse? Because they are, but that doesn’t mean our platform should be allowed to be bad, too. Is it because it’s a gaming platform and you want to keep the politics out of our hobby? I’m with you, but this isn’t really political per se, and it’s not like he’s specifically targeting Steam - as the article notes, he’s been drawing attention to this sort of thing on a variety of platforms, so why is it suddenly objectionable to you that he’s calling Steam out?
I guess what I’m getting at is, why not engage in a discussion about it? The downvotes here suggest that you have an opinion on the topic, so why not share it?
The only downside is that the participants need to be familiar enough with their chosen game to do a randomizer which means roping in casual players is difficult.
Casual players can be fine with some games. Some actually become easier with Archipelago (e.g. Noita, Risk of Rain 2) since you’re getting meta-progression between runs that normally wouldn’t be there. Others though are especially punishing for new players (Doom comes to mind - you have to be pretty intimately familiar with the levels. There’s keys hidden in secret areas sometimes, for example, and ammo can be very scarce.)
I use the default config with the sensitivity turned up to 225% (which makes the touchpad’s left-right width equate to a bit more than the full screen width); that works fine for me. I play a lot of deckbuilders, point-and-click style games, isometric RPGs, tactics games, or just generally older / indie titles that don’t have good native controller support, and it’s been a lifesaver for those.
It doesn’t feel as good as a mouse, I won’t claim that it does, but it makes those games go from “unplayable” to “playable” and that’s the jump I was looking for.
The omission of the thumb touchpad the Deck has is a huge blow. A lot of PC games aren’t built for gamepads, and being restricted only to things that are (or to using an analog stick as a pointing device) is really limiting.
Also, that price point, holy shit. That’s like, high-end desktop PC price range. I guess there’s got to be people who are looking for this, but it’s like… the crowd who would be choosing between a $1500 gaming laptop or this; that’s not really the demographic I’d expect to be in the market for a handheld, but maybe I’m just wrong on that.
One brother is on an Xbox One is on a PC One is on a steam deck with WiFi hotspot.
That’s going to be the limiting factor.
Are you specifically looking for something to play against each other? There’s some pretty good options for co-op games with crossplay, and that might make for a more friendly experience, but if you’re in the mood for something competitive, options are a little more limited.
Some potential options:
- Destiny 2
- Monster Hunter Rise
- The Ascent
- Borderlands 3
- Warframe
- Remnant 2
If you all had a PC, you’d have a lot more options. Maybe two of you should consider going in on a Steam Deck for Brother #3 for Christmas!
The user is able to enter the rewind mode from the live game play using one or more controller inputs to view recent game play (e.g. rewinding, fast-forwarding, playing, etc.) and returning to live game play afterwards.
(Emphasis mine)
This doesn’t sound like it’s actually rewinding gameplay (as in like, Prince of Persia Sands of TIme style rewinding), which is what they seem to be trying to imply, but rather it sounds like it will just let you watch a replay of your gameplay to review it and see what you did wrong, which you can already do. I think all modern consoles (and Steam, etc.) have a ‘Save last 30 seconds of gameplay’ style feature. This is just adding a button to the controller to view that recording, from the sound of it.
Pick Your Path: Character creation is just the beginning. The Nameless One can change his class, alignment, and even gain new abilities based on your choices.
It says nothing about Gender, and it specifically refers to ‘his’. This perfectly describes what you can do, so it certainly belongs in the ‘Features’ section. It also doesn’t mention Race or Species; I’d much rather play as a non-human, but I’m not winging about it, because nowhere did the game tell me I could play as a non-human. I’m not going to keep arguing with you about it, because clearly neither of us are making any headway.
The games clearly aren’t the same, but the premise of Planescape: Torment is that the game is telling you a predefined story about a specific character. That character happens to have lived many, many unique lives. You aren’t deciding who he is on a fundamental level, just what his skillset is right now, similar to spending ability points in Witcher. Unlike e.g. Baldur’s Gate, where you are a Bhaalspawn but you get to decide the specifics, Torment’s protagonist is largely predefined.
Well, since you’ve invited us to argue…
Drag is absolutely fine if a game has a male protagonist you can’t customise. The Master Chief is fine. Geralt is fine. But when drag is supposed to create a character and put part of dragself into the character, drag doesn’t want to do that with a man.
The Nameless One is not much different from The Master Chief or Geralt. The game is telling the story of a specific character. In this case, that character is a man. The fact that it’s based on D&D is kind of irrelevant; it sounds like you made an assumption that wasn’t stated anywhere, and are now trying to finagle a refund far outside of the refund window as a result.
While I certainly understand and sympathize with not wanting to play a character that doesn’t match your gender, it strikes me as kind of hypocritical to be okay with doing so for some games but not others. Personally I’d say, don’t play it if you feel strongly about it, but it’s not grounds for a refund.
Not only WoW, but most old MMOs were built around being social experiences. The really old ones (Everquest, most notably) were basically chat rooms with games attached. The gameplay was very slow, and you relied heavily on other players to progress, so you spent a lot of time just chatting with people, either in zone chat or in groups or in guilds. Over time, you started to recognize the same names showing up in the same places, or as you progressed, the same players would be progressing at the same pace so you’d keep seeing them as you moved from zone to zone.
It was also a lot easier to build friendships for otherwise socially awkward people. You had an immediate common interest and common goal (advancing in the game), so you had common ground to talk about, and a common activity to enjoy together, but during the downtime, conversation would often shift to other things - where you lived, how old you were, what your hobbies were… so you’d get to know people ‘outside the game’, too.
Nowadays, WoW and other MMOs are much more fast-paced, and much more solo play oriented. There’s still group-required content, but it’s very action-heavy; you don’t have a lot of time that you’re just sitting around chatting, and groups are much more short-term things. 15 or 20 minutes, whereas once upon a time, it was 3+ hours as standard.
I met my oldest friend in an MMO about 24 or 25 years ago… we accompanied each other to a few different games over the years, and now we aren’t playing anything together, but we still talk. I flew across the country to attend his wedding a couple years ago. Similarly, I met my wife in WoW. Our first “date” was killing bugs in Silithus together. We’ve been together for about 18 years.
Old (as in, early-late 2000s) MMOs generated a lot of friendships; this isn’t at all an uncommon story to hear from people who played them at that time.
Which begs the question, why use the IP in the first place?
It’s especially weird because they just recently gave the green light for the Aleph One developers to release the originals on Steam, so it’s probably more well-known now than ever before. Even though it’s still relatively obscure, why do that now? It just doesn’t make sense.
Vampire Survivors’ genre has been coined ‘Bullet Heaven’, literally the opposite of bullet hell. The fact that it has the tag on Steam is kind of meaningless. Monster Hunter: Wilds’ Steam Page has the Dating Sim tag, but I’m willing to bet I won’t get to romance a Rathalos.
“[Horse Armor] must have been [sold] in the millions, it had to be millions,” Nesmith said. “I don’t know the actual number, I probably did at one point, I just no longer remember that. And that was kind of a head shaker for us: you’re all making fun of it and yet you buy it.”
And that right there is the reason why the industry is absolutely saturated with this shit now. If people had just chilled the fuck out when this shit was first introduced, made sure it was an absolute flop from a sales perspective (not only for this one, but for others that were released back then, too), we might be in a better place now.
I’m not going to purchase the document to find out, and the abstract doesn’t really cover it, but I’m curious what the methodology was here. I seriously doubt that piracy is that prevalent. It’s possible that people are upset with certain companies and aim to pirate their games, and the fact that those companies are the same ones that use Denuvo is happenstance. It’s also possible that they’re using total downloads of pirated copies vs. total sales as their statistic, which is misleading, because I’d wager the majority of folks who pirate the game would not have purchased it if it wasn’t available to download for free.
I’d also be curious if the price of the game was a factor; I imagine more people are looking to pirate a game priced at $70 than one priced at $40, for example.
Really, there’s too many factors to consider here and I don’t think there’s a reasonable way to say how many folks who pirated a given game actually would have purchased it.
In this same vein, Backpack Hero is quite good, too! If you like one, maybe check out the other.