It’s not that bizarre when you think about it. As a technical piece of software, Sims is actually quite complex.

You need a sophisticated character editor with a vast array of clothing options. You need a house editor that allows you to build any house you can imagine. You need a huge array of possible interactions between people and all kinds of objects. You also need lots of randomized interaction and AI (as in traditional game AI) to control NPCs. You need to have all these things be affected by the characters traits and you need them to go through life stages while still being interesting.

It’s a whole lot. It’s basically impossible to build a game like that as an indie developer. You really need a large team and that means funding. And that’s where it gets hard cause you are up against Sims and I don’t imagine many sources of funding want to make that bet.

Damn! If only someone could’ve predicted that Meta would eventually do something stupid like this! If only we had defederated from them from the start /s

All the time i spent playing Dota, Starcraft, battlefield and smash melee says nope.

Sure, if your metric is hours of gameplay per dollar spent. But that’s no way to rate a video game if you ask me.

For instance I would rate The Talos Principle or Disco Elysium as much better games than, say, World of Warcraft, despite the fact that I played wow much more than the former two. But the story of those two games are just far more interesting and the games have left a much more impactful, lasting impression on me even though I don’t play them any more.

Disagree, story is definitely more important than replayability for me.

Why is this only a problem on mobile? Why doesn’t desktop have similar requirements?

I started and almost finished The Forgotten City. It’s really good, if you like mystery.

So aside from Baldurs gate 3, who’s actually making good RPGs these days?

So as far as I gather, it’s still just as open source as before but you just can’t sell it on the Confluence marketplace? Seems fair.

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

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.

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)

In other riveting news, water is wet.

I know you’re being sarcastic but if we actually look on the bright side, then tools like this could make indie games easier to produce. More and better indie games could in theory bring more competition to companies like EA and that could actually pressure them to make games cheaper.

So is it an emulator? Or does “translation layer” mean something else?

Same, that part was really annoying

CrossCode, great characters and great story. Really good game.

To shreds, you say?

A major Danish news site recently said they’d delete their accounts on Twitter :)

Although no plans for making a Mastodon account instead :(

the reality is such that the vast majority will go with the flow

This also works the other way though - once a critical mass moves elsewhere, the mob is quick to follow. I would encourage you to be part of that early snowball that starts the avalanche - be the change.

mostly my local police, fire department, and local govt are only on xitter

The thing is, they are there because the users are there. After all, they want to reach the most people with their important official messaging.

You have to leave to make them leave.

No problem 😇

Also the second one is lighter on the reading and has more character dialog and such, so definitely play that too!

In the game, you’ll find various philosophical texts. These are entirely optional and serve as a kind of background set and things to think about. So you can just not read them if you don’t want to or find them boring. I’m guessing when you say you don’t enjoy philosophy, you’d find it boring to read those texts, so just skip them.

You’ll also find snippets of other texts that aren’t philosophical that give clues to the story. These can also be skipped but you’ll miss out on a significant chunk of the story then. There are other story bits that require no reading so you’ll still get an idea of it and might still get the gist mostly.

But you can play just the puzzles and not worry about the philosophical background or the story at all. They actually deliberately designed the game this way so that you can enjoy the puzzles alone if that’s your jam 🙂. The puzzles are very good so even if you just want some good puzzles, I’d still recommend it.

Personally I have to mention The Talos Principle and its sequel. It has helped me formulate a kind of philosophy of mind that I couldn’t entirely grasp before. It’s also just an absolute masterpiece of a puzzle game. If you’ve played portal, you’ll enjoy Talos too most likely.

Also for anyone looking to play it, don’t read anything about it! Not even the Steam description! It’s best experienced completely blind.

Talos Principle is a master piece. Kinda hoping they make a third one, but would be interested to see what Croteam does after even if it’s not Talos 3.

Let me tell you what to do when the game drops on steam:

1. Buy it at full price as soon as it releases.
2. Press play, get to the PSN login screen or whatever it is.
3. Close it.
4. Immediately post a negative review saying it requires a PSN account.
5. Request a refund from Steam, you’ll basically get it automatically as you played less than 2 hours.
6. …
7. Profit! Watch Sony squirm with those reviews.

It honestly amazes me that people still give EA money. “Vote with your wallet” doesn’t really work when 90% of “voters” don’t care.

I think they actually recently stopped doing that, unless the mail comes from a contact.

At the time, it said it’d made much of Slay the Spire II in Unity, but would still migrate to a different engine if Unity stuck to its guns.

Good on them for switching even when they had already started development!

What an absolutely insane amount of changes. Kudos to the dev still working on so many improvements.

Considering Red dead redemption 2. Also Heaven’s Vault

Great minds think alike 😜

I kind of got bored of manifold garden. I guess it was the lack of any story. I just had no motivation to continue.

I mean there’s games like… Minecraft that I certainly have played many, many times for many hours with lots of different combinations of mods. That’s repayable to the max.

Got any particular examples? :)

every single linear / story type game

Which ones are your favourites among those? :)

Much like the gameplay itself, the story is another puzzle. You assemble the story from bits of emails and voice recordings that you find around the place.

There’s some reading required to appreciate it, as you find the emails and the various philosophical texts around the place. If you get bored, maybe that just isn’t for you. But I’d encourage you to give it a shot and see the story as another puzzle.

I’ll give it a shot!

My favourite game of all time, hands down.

I considered it as well, but this review made me reconsider. Would you say it is as bad as that review makes it seem?