Mossy Feathers (She/They)
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Sauna2000 (it’s not out yet, but there are some demos floating around).
Squirrel stapler
Cruelty Squad - depends on the kinda person you are. If you’re super open-minded about game presentation then I’d tell you to go into it blind. If not, then I’ll happily try to sell you on it. If it helps, the game looks the way that it does because of how fucking confident it is in itself; and that confidence is fully justified. Give it time, even if the first level doesn’t hook you, give it time because in my experience it will eventually hook you and reel you in and leave you thinking it’s one of the best games of all time.
Undertale
Hypnospace Outlaw
Jet Set Radio, Jet Set Radio Future, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. Give the first two a try, and if you don’t like either one, skip BRC; it’s a spiritual successor to JSRF and if you didn’t like JSRF then you probably won’t like BRC.
Hylics. If you liked that and wanted more, Hylics 2. Hylics 2 actually does something throughout the game that I’ve only ever seen as a gimmick in other games. It’s really cool and it’ll probably catch you off-guard every time it does it.
Katamari Damacy. If you liked that, there’s also We <3 Katamari.
Myst. The newest version has VR support. If you liked that, the recent Riven remaster also has VR support.
S C O R N (if you like Myst, give it a try. It feels very myst-like)
Hrot (boomer shooter, but if you like boomer shooters then you should give it a go).
If you’re at a place in your life where you’re trying to still find yourself: Night in the Woods. Especially if you’re a furry. This game is really fucking good. It’ll make you laugh. It’ll make you cry. It’ll make you miss home but also be glad you aren’t there anymore. It’ll make you question your place in life and who you are. Also, you can interact with things multiple times, make sure you don’t miss out on dialogue, you’ll regret it.
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl - This is hard to go into blind because it’s buggy as fuck and most people recommend some form of community patch even for your first playthrough. That said, play it on the highest difficulty. It’s unironically more fun once you get used to it. If it’s too hard though, don’t be fooled into thinking that dropping the difficulty will make it easier, the hardest difficulty is special (you can only take a few hits, but the same is true for most enemies), and dropping it down will result in enemy difficulty scaling becoming more traditional (buffing health and damage).
Portal (and Portal 2).
Bugsnax.
If I can throw in a movie too:
Willy’s Wonderland. It’s a Nicolas Cage movie and that’s all I’ll tell you. DO NOT LOOK UP THE TRAILER. I wouldn’t have watched it if I hadn’t seen the trailer, but the trailer also has huge spoilers. I’m not a huge movie person and I had to watch it after seeing the trailer, but again the trailer has spoilers. It is on my top-10 movies list now.
I disagree with FEAR simply because I’d say to play it on the hardest difficulty and go balls to the wall because the AI will fuck you over if it gets the chance; and the longer you take to clear a room, the more time the AI has to organize and execute a plan. If it weren’t for the fact that I’ve seen plenty of people get stuck on FEAR because they tried to play it like a cover shooter, I’d fully agree with you.
Factorio, Warframe, Minecraft, Dota 2. However, the only two I’d still recommend are Factorio and Minecraft. Warframe’s grind seems to have finally burned me out for good, Dota 2 is bad. You’re not gonna have fun with Dota 2. The game concept is good, but like most competitive online games, the community fucking sucks.
In addition to Factorio and Minecraft, try Voices of the Void, The Long Drive, WEBFISHING, and Balatro.
Edit: oh yeah, and personally I have both Sims 2 and Sims 4 w/ all DLC (yeah, I toootally bought all the dlc) installed on my steam deck. Both fun games with their own ups and downs. Sims 2 is great vanilla, Sims 4 is great when heavily modded. Don’t bother downloading the F2P version of Sims 4 from Origin if you’re wanting to mod it with stuff like sacrificial’s mods. Those’ll break with every major update (and sometimes minor updates too!) and you can’t pause updates anymore. So, you’ll have to find alternative methods.
Yes, but indie games helped fix that. Dunno how deep you’ve gotten into indie games, but here’s a list of them to try:
Cruelty Squad (it is unironically one of the best games I’ve ever played. Give it a chance, it’ll grow on you)
Balatro
Buckshot Roulette
WEBFISHING
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk (++if you enjoyed Jet Set Radio (Future))
Abiotic Factor
Lethal Company (I personally wasn’t a fan, but I can see the appeal; I would be more into it if there was more random junk to pick up)
Hypnospace Outlaw
Factorio (just released an expansion! Also don’t wait for sales, you’ll be waiting forever)
Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley (edit: forgot to mention that this is basically “be gay, do crimes: the game”. It’s short so I highly recommend 100% it, but it’s also good).
Hylics 1 & 2
The Long Drive (looks like YouTube bait, and it kinda is, but it’s also the best driving game I’ve ever seen. Literally you, a car and 5000km of road. Any engine can go into any vehicle, so yes, you can put a bus engine on a moped. I love it. There haven’t been any big updates lately though because the dev is rewriting the game to fix spaghetti code).
QT (cutesy PT parody that’s all about secret hunting. Also has two extra levels with more secrets. It’s kinda like i-spy but in first-person 3d)
Voices of the Void (I adore this game, it’s a sci-fi pseudo-horror game styled after some weird mix of gmod and Half-Life. The premise is that you’re a researcher who’s been shipped off to a radio telescope array, alone. Your goal is to search the sky for signals and learn more about the cosmos. It takes itself just seriously enough and has lots of secrets and surprises to find.)
That’s great. But how long until I can play Balatro on my iPod Classic?
(I love that indie devs occasionally port their games to nonsensical or obsolete platforms)
Edit: I actually think Balatro would translate fairly well; assuming the iPod Classic has enough ram and CPU to run a visually stripped-down version. When I had an iPod Nano I played solitaire almost obsessively. The controls were a bit slow due to the limitations of using a clickwheel, but they actually worked really well.
On a side note: does anyone know if capacitive clickwheels still under patent, trademark or whatever was keeping other companies from using them? I loved the way the iPod clickwheel felt and it sucked that no one else had a 1:1 replication of it.
I swear I’ve come across an indie game that had great thunderstorms, but I can’t remember what it was for the life of me.
That said, imo The Sims as a series has had good thunderstorms. Being outside can result in your Sim being hit by lightning, and iirc there are things that’ll increase the chance of getting hit, like being wet, being in a pool, holding an umbrella, etc. I’m not sure which game has the best thunderstorms though.
VRchat has some worlds with really good ambience, and typically they include rain and/or thunderstorms to some extent. You don’t actually need VR, you can play VRC on a normal monitor.
I’ve just realized that one of the things that Risk of Rain 2 is missing, is a persistent thunderstorm that gets stronger as the difficulty gets higher, lowering your visibility over time.
IO acquired the license voluntarily and had to convince the Bond owners to let them license the IP. So they’re not swinging in the dark. Furthermore, Hitman is basically James Bond with a different coat of paint. I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if all IO did for a tech demo to convince them was reskin Agent 47 and then play through the game as-is.
I was reading your definition as being too specific. Imo enshittification is any time the relative average quality of a class of products or services decreases, either due to increased prices or decreased quality at the same price. This can be applied to a specific product or service, but can also describe a decline in quality across an industry.
Without some serious mental gymnastics, forced stealth sections tend to just be bad design choices. Not every bad thing is the same kind of bad thing.
While I disagree with your comment on the definition of “enshittification”, I agree that forced stealth sections are just bad design. I remember those have been a thing for a long time now, and before then it was ice levels.
Copying from a later reply: I was reading their definition as being too specific. Imo enshittification is any time the relative average quality of a class of products or services decreases, either due to increased prices or decreased quality at the same price. This can be applied to a specific product or service, but can also describe a decline in quality across an industry.
I couldn’t get through Halo 4’s campaign when it was released as part of the MCC, nor was I able to get though Halo Infinite’s (it wasn’t bad, just… meh; nowhere near as good as the Bungie campaigns but not trash either, just not as good). I would still like the option to play Halo 5 on PC just so I have the ability to play the main campaign, plus I’ve heard it’s the best multiplayer Halo? But yeah. Even if I never actually play it, it’s nice to have the option.
On a tangential note, I think 343’s Halo games would have been considered good if it wasn’t for Bungie’s Halo. I don’t think their campaigns are honestly bad, per se (though again, haven’t tried to play H5), they’re just bad in comparison to the “OG” games.
No, no it wouldn’t. You’re still using math, you’re just using a different language. If apple bananas becomes apple pears after being hit by a bullet, you’ve changed the value. That is what math describes. You cannot avoid this. This is how computers work, and math is just another language to describe things. Even if every health value is a string, you still need to keep track of which string is currently in use so that you know when to kill the player. That requires math. That is what they’re talking about. It is not the in-game health indicator that is public domain, it is the actual health value in RAM that is generated and modified during gameplay.
It is better this way. Copyright is already abused to hell and back, if they expanded copyright to cover this kinda stuff then it would potentially destroy things like right-to-repair as companies could claim copyright infringement on anything that modifies their code.
What this is saying is that the Minecraft world would not be under copyright, but anything the player built in that world would be. So you can’t copyright the world itself, but you can copyright any human-made constructions in that world.
This is wholly preferable to the alternative options which could result in things like being able to copyright AI-generated works (applying his logic to AI, they’re basically saying you can copyright any edits to an AI-gen image, but not the image itself because that was AI-gen).
I mean, this is a pretty normal distinction afaik (human vs non-human creations; afaik non-human creations almost always have any human copyright claims voided when challenged).
Imo what makes this special is how precise he’s being. If I understand correctly, he’s basically saying that the code for the health bar is a human creation and protected by copyright, but while the code to change the health value might be human-made, the actual values are machine-made and not under copyright (there’s probably a lot of nuance I’m skipping over, but my understanding is that’s the gist of it).
I was curious enough that I looked into it a bit and it sounds like the difference is negligible at this point because they added keyboard binds for partial presses in response to analog keyboards(?). Again, I haven’t played TM2 or anything after, last game I played was TMUF/TMNF, so I haven’t tried using them myself, however when I was looking to see what the kb/controller/wheel split was I found a lot of people saying that there isn’t a strong reason to use one over the other anymore due to the new binds.
Edit: it actually makes me kinda happy to talk about this. I loved the games as a teenager, but they were too niche and I never had anyone to talk to about them.
Edit 2: damn, I remember finding the OG game at Fry’s and thinking it looked like the coolest game ever and getting confused when no one else thought it was sick as fuck (everyone was into Halo and CoD, and tbf, I was into them too; but I had patrician tastes that spanned multiple genres, not like the casuals I grew up around u.u)
Huh, I was under the impression that high level players used keyboards and that gamepads were unusual. I was almost certain I’d read that keyboards were considered better because they were full-on/full-off instead of analog; the logic being that it let you respond faster. Where an analog stick would have some ramp-up time when you switch directions, a keyboard would register a full press the moment the key is pressed far enough to complete the circuit. Meanwhile, the physics of Nations were made with keyboards in mind, so analog controls wouldn’t offer that much of an improvement.
At least, I was sure that’s what I’d read.
Edit: that may have been before TrackMania 2, I’m not even sure if Nations supports analog controls. I haven’t played any of the games after Nations/United.
TrackMania – I recommend Nations Forever if you’re starting out; it’s free and Nations was the “meta” environment (different environments have different physics) for a long time, so there’s a fuckton of custom content for it.
As for what it is: it’s like the racing genre’s Quake equivalent. It’s also like super hot wheels. And it’s like Mario Maker. You make all kinds of crazy tracks with it, like Mario Maker. The tracks feature all kinds of wall rides, half-pipes, jumps, loops, and so on, with nothing more than inertia holding you to the track; like hot wheels. And finally, like Quake (and Mario Maker), the high-level players are bat shit insane.
This is the game where you get people who can hit a jump at just the right angle so they thread the needle through a series of holes barely larger than the car while travelling at speeds well above 300mph (welcome to TrackMania, I don’t think there’s a speed cap). They also do it using keyboards. Seriously. High-level TrackMania players use keyboards, not gamepads or, god forbid, racing wheels.
All of that said, no pressure because you’re mainly racing yourself, even in multiplayer. You’re trying to get the best time on a track, and multiplayer is basically the same, except your time is being compared with everyone else’s. There isn’t even any vehicle collision (strangely, there’s an option for it, but it doesn’t seem to do anything).
Play TrackMania. Is fun.
The binding of Isaac has shit ton of them.
Do old build-engine shooters like Blood, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, etc count?
Sapienza, Italy in Hitman has outfits for red and green plumbers.
Sam and Max has references to all kinds of things.
Hypnospace Outlaw has a ton of references to pre-y2k pop culture.
Power Wash simulator has a number of official crossovers with IPs like SpongeBob, Warhammer, Laura Croft, Final Fantasy VII, etc. (oh shit I just checked and there’s a Shrek one coming out soon).
Eh, reputation is still a thing and they probably aren’t getting to keep any of the IPs they worked on, like Stray or Outer Wilds. They also won’t get to keep whatever cash the company might have had in reserve. My understanding is that the idea of spinning off a studio to be indie is that you get to keep developing your IPs to some extent, you still have your brand and your reputation, etc. Otherwise they probably would have done this at the beginning.
So, no, they didn’t really spin it off heh.
Okay, keep digging your own grave Nintendo. Twitch streamers and YouTubers are a major source of advertising for you, even for back-catalog stuff. The only reason why I see Nintendo directs is because a streamer I enjoy watches them. My interest in Nintendo stuff is pretty low but I’ve been persuaded to buy a few Nintendo games as a result of YouTube or twitch videos. But here’s the thing: these guys have no filter. They swear constantly and love innuendo. They will probably get caught in Nintendo’s net and stop streaming Nintendo stuff. As a result, I will no longer be paying attention to what Nintendo’s doing.
Maybe the most significant issue is that, for some reason, the Seekers of the Storm update has tied Risk of Rain 2’s physics systems to its frame rate. When asked about it on Discord, Gearbox developer GBX-Preston said FPS-related issues, “and all the ramifications on balance/physics/attack speed/movement/etc. were not intentional. This is in our top handful of issues we’re investigating.” As a stopgap, he said players experiencing issues should lock the game at 60 fps.
Amazing. How the fuck did you do that?
First, to make something clear, I’m not necessarily arguing for or against banning macros, I’m mainly addressing the snap tap/rapid movement change and saying that you could effectively reproduce it with a macro.
It is as you say in that 1 and -1 result in 0, but this is done in the game’s movement code, intentionally, to force players to learn to only press one of the two opposing keys at once, as a skill.
What I’m saying is that I don’t think that was originally a skill choice, but done out of necessity. It may have eventually become associated with skill, but that the choice likely wasn’t originally intended to increase skill.
Theres a reason many pc FPS players consider the source engine to be the gold standard for control responsiveness and player movement design/feel, and this is one of them.
They should play more gzdoom then. Source feels laggy and unresponsive in comparison. :p
Also I am fairly sure the macro set up you are describing to allow for the strafe cancelling is a null bind, which Valve has also banned.
Only because valve banned it in response to hardware manufacturers.
This is different than just setting your mouse dpi to be more sensitive, or your analog sticks to be more sensitive, or your whole keyboard to have less travel time.
What about deadzones? Those are used for analog buttons and sticks so players can customize how far the player has to press the buttons or tilt the sticks to register a press.
Valve’s own software allows you to set different deadzones for analog sticks and triggers. I mean, their software on steam deck lets you trigger different actions based on whether the trigger is a full press or partial press. You can have the sticks trigger things based on whether they’re being touched, pressed, or tilted.
When the steam controller was released, they made a big deal about how you could chord button presses, create macros, create action sets (which change what the buttons do) and so on. Valve’s own system allows for it.
Its getting banned now because now we have keyboard manufacturers just straight up releasing keyboards with features that exceed in speed what used to only be done by a handful of people with too much time on their hands.
And what I’m saying is that it doesn’t require a special keyboard, it just lowered the barrier of entry. As such, I see it as a skill issue, not a cheating issue. What? The player in front of you is wiggling too fast for you to track? Get good. That’s the entire point of the game. It’s not like they’re seeing through walls or automatically locking onto your head.
Then, what if everyone had these keyboards, or if windows had macro support built-in? Would you still see it as cheating?
Finally what if someone had a seemingly unnatural ability to press A/D alternating in a way that resulted in <10ms of delay/overlap between inputs, who owned a hyper-sensitive keyboard that triggers keypresses the moment a key moves? They’re able to “wiggle” almost as well as someone using one of these keyboards; except they’re just inherently that good, and their keyboard has no other special abilities except that it’s super sensitive.
Are they cheating because their natural, unskilled ability rivals that of a so-called cheat device? Would it be more fair to handicap the player with freakish ability, or to allow other players to use devices that negate the inherent difference them?
Again, I don’t care much about macros being banned; I brought that up simply to state that the fast-tapping, wiggle thing could be at least mostly reproduced via macros. It’s the outrage about new keyboards making it easier to wiggle effectively that annoys me. It comes off as a bunch of people crying because the game suddenly got harder and they don’t want to learn how to aim better.
Imagine if people complained that racing wheels and peddles made racing games unfair against people using gamepads or keyboards; or that using a hotas setup was cheating in flying games.
Like, I don’t own one of these keyboards and I don’t play highly competitive fpses anymore, yet it’s still annoying. Like, analog keyboards have a lot of potential to be really cool devices, but I’m concerned they won’t get past the “fad” stage because the analog switches will be associated with cheating.
I understand how it works (or at least I think I do) and why people consider it cheating; what I’m saying is that that’s just how keyboards usually work and the reason why they don’t always work that way in games is an intentional decision.
Don’t believe me? Open up a word processor. Hold the A key. Notice how it starts entering a line of As? Now, while holding the A key, press and hold the D key. It should start entering a line of Ds. Then, when you release the D key but keep holding the A key, it should start entering a line of As again (at least that’s what used to happen). This is the most likely to work if your keyboard has true n-key rollover, but it may still work regardless.
If that doesn’t work, try a different key combo, your keyboard may be losing inputs due to conflicting inputs (or word processors may have changed how they deal with simultaneous keypresses). Cheap keyboards will combine sets of keys to cut down on complexity and cost, however it can result in some key combos becoming impossible to input. That’s why n-key rollover is awesome.
So why does holding strafe left/right (and forward/back) result in null combinations?
I suspect that it’s due to controller support. Instead of having a series of if-then statements which directly translate a keypress into movement (something a lot of new game developers do), they’re likely translating keypresses into a 2d vector which gets applied to your character’s movement speed. An “A” press would correspond to “1”, a “D” press would result in “-1”. These get combined and become “0”.
Why do it that way?
Because controllers use analog input, so you aren’t going to get a “1” or “-1” without fully tilting the stick. However, a half-tilt shouldn’t result in a “1”, it should result in a “(-)0.5”. That “0.5” is then multiplied by the player’s move speed and (optionally) the player’s current vector gets interpolated to the new vector.
So what is the keyboard doing that stops the null state (horizontal movement = 0) from occurring?
It’s basically overriding the A key when the D key is pressed (not sure if it’s actually “lifting” the A key or just throwing away the input, either works) or vice versa; and then pressing the A key again when the D key is released (assuming the A key is still being held). You can make a macro to simulate this behavior.
As far as sensitivity thresholds go, so what? People have been able to do that with analog sticks (and sometimes analog triggers, depending on the game) for like, forever. Hell, you used to be able to mix controller, keyboard and mouse controls to get analog movement and mouse control (like those standalone “macro/num pads” with the thumb stick). I dunno if it’s still possible or if driver changes have nullified it, but regardless, imo analog keyboards are overdue. Getting mad about it is like someone getting mad about mouse-look in the 90s.
It doesn’t require a fancy keyboard though. If anything, that’s how keyboards usually work, it takes conscious effort to stop them from working that way. Personally I had to learn how to program character controllers so they wouldn’t function like snap tap.
Even so though, I’m 90% sure you could use a macro to do the same exact thing so long as you have a keyboard with n-key rollover (afaik most keyboards have it nowadays)
Tbf, a lot of major AAA companies nowadays can probably afford to have a $500m loss. The thing that gets me, however, is that it wouldn’t even be a $500m loss. Just because you don’t make money doesn’t mean it’s a total loss, it just means you didn’t cover your costs.
At what point is the loss worth the knowledge of what did or didn’t work?
At what point is the loss worth having made the thing, because you were doing something no one else had done on a massive budget, even though you didn’t cover your original costs?
Is $50m a reasonable loss?
$100m?
That’s where things get complicated and if all you do is look at spreadsheets then you’re going to miss the fact that your attempt was still worth something, even if it didn’t actually make money.
These companies tend to have cash cows to offset the losses too. Keep developing and supporting your CoDs, Candy Crushes, and League of Legends so you can drop $500m on a high-risk, high-reward release. C’mon, do something interesting… Are you really unable to make up for a potential +$100m loss when you have Candy Crush making billions for you?