TheHarpyEagle
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I agree that most people won’t care but take issue with calling them “dumb”. Everyone has a limited amount of time on this planet to build skills and chase hobbies. A lot of people on this site have tech-related jobs and hobbies, so of course this matters to us. I might expect someone who buys pre-built gaming PCs to keep this on their radar, but the vast majority of folks who use computers as email and social media machines, including those who only use it for data entry type jobs, have little reason to care about the specifics of their CPU or any other single component of their computer. If their computer breaks, that’s annoying, but that’s life. They’ll spend the same amount on a new laptop as we might spend on a new CPU and get on with their day.
I don’t know what brand of spark plugs are in my car, and maybe a mechanic or car enthusiast would find that dumb. But hey, I’m too busy caring about my CPU to spend time worrying about my car unless it breaks.
I had someone with a super long scarf play basically the entire second half of the game with me. So fun to find ways to communicate with just the little pulses we had.
!Also absolutely heartbreaking when wet froze together at the end!<
I also played their other game Flower, on the PS3. Probably the only time I’ve enjoyed using motion controls on that system.
To be fair, it’s a pretty common play. Company makes unpopular decision, walks it back, tries again a little later once the novelty has worn off and the MSM doesn’t care to pick it up again.
I think this particular move is pretty ballsy with how egregious it is (especially considering that starfield didn’t do anything particularly outstanding to overshadow it), but I don’t doubt they’ll try it again. If people keep buying their games, where’s the risk? At worst they’ll still get a few dollars from those who, for whatever reason, buy it, and then it’s forgotten by the next time a game comes out.
Nobody would want to get into a game that requires hundreds of hours of homework before they can finally start to become good at the game.
This is a huge issue I have with a lot of established online games. A lot of the advice is just “watch this video, follow this guide, use this meta build or we’re not going to play with you.” I play games to have fun learning mechanics, experimenting with builds, and organically exploring the world. I may eventually use guides to get caught up, but the game has to be fun at its core before then. At least in smash, you’re the only one who has to worry about your performance.
I remember trying out the beginner mode on DotA a few years ago. Good idea in theory, but in practice I made a single mistake and was blamed for the loss of the entire game. They probably weren’t wrong that I tipped the balance towards the enemy side, but it would’ve been nice to get some pointers or guidance instead of just “GG Harpy”. Made me not want to touch the game again.
Moderators will never be able to fully eliminate this problem because it is an inherent part of the behavior of a subset of humanity and humans are involved in the activities where this harassment takes place
I’m not suggesting they can, I don’t think anyone is.
If you expect every person you meet, online or in person, to respect the rules you are going to be disappointed
I don’t, but I expect if someone starts yelling rape threats at a restaurant that they’ll be kicked out, rather than the waiter saying “well why didn’t you just move to another table?” The rules are there for a reason, there should be consequences if they are broken.
Well yeah, that’s why part of Riot’s solution seems to be adding more mods. I’d be more understanding if Riot didn’t have the resources to add more paid mod support, but I truly don’t think that’s the case. So yeah, pay more mods and use more advanced technology to flag communication, I think that’s an attainable goal.
I’m not saying that people shouldn’t still protect themselves by blocking harassment, but I believe it’s perfectly within devs’ abilities to at least attempt to remove the most heinous bullies from the game.
I cannot get behind the sentiment of “online communication is awful so we shouldn’t even attempt to do anything about it.” Yeah at some point you have to learn to shake it off to protect yourself, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make any effort to moderate online spaces as well. Don’t give assholes quarter in your game if you want to retain your community.
You can’t remove the suck from people, but you can remove the people from your community.
Why do game makers need to be the responsible party? I’ve never played a game that didn’t let you block and/or mute people you’re playing with. That doesn’t make assholes disappear but it stops the problem from impacting you. Why add a middleman to the equation?
Because the devs/mods have the power to at least attempt to remove the person from the game before anyone else has to suffer their comments.
It’s much simpler to let players decide what they will tolerate on their own.
It’s pretty simple to enable mod actions, too. Game devs make a list of rules about what you can and can’t say. You agree to those rules when you start playing the game. Breaking the rules earns you a punishment. If you don’t like it, you don’t play the game. If the rules are unfairly restrictive then people won’t play the game and it will fail. This is how internet moderation has worked since forever.
Yeah, this same article can be written for Mini Golf games, or shmups, or visual novels, or any other genre that’s relatively easy to develop for. Once one gets popular, others will jump on because the barrier to entry is fairly low. Lots will be low effort clones, but some will really try to build something new.
Everyone and their mother is playing Balatro, and for good reason. Super fun deck builder based on a normal playing card deck and poker hands. Great music and visuals, too.
Also, check out Inscryption. Truth be told, it’s not really a true roguelike deckbuilder, rather it uses the genre as a storytelling medium. Still, really fun game with solid core gameplay and an engaging story. There’s also DLC that lets you play more of the deckbuilder part indefinitely.
Undertale and Deltarune are easy recs, emotional and fun to dig into the lore and details. Deltarune in particular is an ongoing series, so there’s lots of speculation and theory crafting if that’s your thing. Amazing soundtrack as well. Undertale should be played first, though. Deltarune isn’t necessarily a sequel, but Undertale gives some context to certain things. Both are best played blind.
Inscryption is a really fun deck builder with a very intriguing story and some surprising twists and turns. Even if you’re not much into deck builders, the game is structured such that it’s pretty much impossible not to get a winning deck over repeated runs. The atmosphere is also top notch.
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective isn’t on steam, but it’s definitely worth a buy on one of its supported systems if you have them. Great puzzle game with a lot of humor and mystery. Not quite as emotional, but very strong characters and an ongoing mystery that kept me invested.
Oxenfree is a really intriguing mystery game with some horror elements and a great soundtrack (I originally checked it out after hearing Beacon Beach and loving it). Overall the game really scratched the itch of that feeling of reading horror stories before bed.
There’s also a free, short Silent Hill game on PS5 called The Short Message. It has mixed reviews, but my friends and I found it surprisingly engaging. At first it seems pretty on the nose with its message, but things get a little deeper as you go on. Aside from some cartoonishly evil characters and a somewhat frustrating final sequence, it’s worth a look.
Mostly just “keep moving”. If you spread out a bit, generally one person or group will take most of the heat while things are relatively quiet for the others. Heat team basically just has to keep running while the other team does the objective. If a bug hole opens up on the objective, run away and circle back. Chargers and hunters seem the most capable of catching up, but the hunters are pretty easy to kill. For the chargers, they seem almost hard coded to take a longer stagger if you dive out of the way instead of just moving out of their turn radius, so you can dodge a charge and gain a little more time to escape.
Don’t underestimate smoke, it can be pretty handy in keeping things off your back. Call down supplies often, even if you can’t necessarily get to them all. They have a pretty short cool down so don’t be afraid to waste a few or take multiple if no one else is nearby. Honestly I wouldn’t worry about bile titans too much unless they’re on an objective (or are an objective). They can be outrun and will eventually lose interest, and their attacks have fairly limited range with a big windup.
Granted I haven’t tried all this since the update so take it with a grain of salt. I do plan to try it again this weekend so I’ll report back.
I don’t think it’s arrogant, I think it’s actually really interesting how they talk about the “fantasy” of the game. I get not everyone plays the game for the same reason, but I understand the devs’ vision of the game really being about the feel of being a hero against the odds, not having the most effecient loadout or unlocking everything as fast as possible.
Meh, I disagree. With the “meta” loadout of breaker, shield, and railgun, even helldiver difficulty can be relatively easy as long as you can avoid getting surrounded. If the goal is to always feel like you need to work together and barely make it out alive, these changes make sense. I personally prefer that there isn’t one correct way to play the higher difficulties.
The marketing oversold how much gunplay is in the game. A handful of pals have craftable weapons that enable their special ability, whether that’s shooting a rocket launcher or throwing a grenade. You can also craft a gun for yourself, but that doesn’t really open up until 2/3rds of the way down the tech tree. Honestly you can go most of the game without using guns at all, only encountering them when attacked by the human NPCs. Even then, their damage tends to pale in comparison to the other attacks Pals have.
For the most part, Pals auto-battle with very Pokémon-esque moves. A good half of them just have a mount special ability, the ones with guns are relatively uncommon.
It’s a pretty standard survival crafting game, I’ve seen it describes as Ark + Pokémon (particularly Legends Arceus if you’ve played it) . The game actually doesn’t have much of the wild shooting combat until much later levels. For the most part, you focus on catching “pals” for xp while putting them to work on your base. Like Pokémon, you get wild pals’ hp down to increase the chance of catching them and then throw balls like your life depends on it.
The combat with your pals is pretty basic, you can command them to help you in battle but they really do their own thing beyond that (including kill the things you were trying to catch). That being said, managing large battles while throwing out balls and trying not to die can be pretty fun.
The real appeal is setting up your base and putting your pals to work. Each type of pal has a different set of jobs they can perform, so you have to plan somewhat carefully to make your base as efficient as possible. Generally, the jobs involve either resource gathering or crafting. Crafting lets you queue up items for your pals to work on so you can start cranking out supplies pretty quick. Really, though, the appeal is getting to see a couple dozen guys running around working like a well oiled machine, and they have some fun animations to keep things interesting.
It is pretty playable, though there’s definitely a few bugs (mostly pals disappearing into the terrain). The amount of damage various pals do with attacks seems almost divorced from their level, so you can be blindsided by something half your level if you don’t dump a lot of upgrade points into your health. Also, you currently have to run your own server to play multi-player, so it’s tough for people who don’t know their way around port forwarding and stuff like that.
All that being said, I’ve put about 10 hours into it so far and am having quite a bit of fun with it. It feels like there’s still a lot to explore and do.
Valve devotes only a small percentage of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam Store, and dedicates very few employees to that effort.
Okay yeah I was annoyed that it took Epic’s store to make Valve update their ancient UI, but Proton has gone a long way to improving my opinion of them (and it’s open source to boot).
Also is a shame that the court won’t have the background to know that invoking EA’s complaints about anti-competitiveness and price gouging is so completely laughable.
Monopolies are bad, but is it a monopoly if they naturally gained market share because their product was first and better?
Honestly I’d be fine with them removing the “PMFN” clause, but I’d rather it be a law that it can’t be enforced because you know Valve isn’t the only one to include it. But even if they did get rid of it, I don’t think they’d see a major shift away from their platform.
Meh, at least as far as the games industry goes, we’ve been here before. Really the past few years have been incredible for games, now it’s time to settle into another stretch of mediocrity as companies learn the same lessons over again. Super sucks for the devs, though, seems they always get the shortest end of the stick.
Possibly puzzle games like Return of the Obra Dinn or Antichamber where she can help solve things without needing to play. Portal may be good, too, though it may be hard to play along without control of the camera.
Also, though they’re not necessarily good stories, Supermassive Games stuff (Until Dawn and The Quarry) bring all the fun of watching cheesy horror movies together with the added bonus of controlling who dies! Granted, those may also be a bit violent for her taste.
Imagine being upset that someone is having this much fun with like the first level of your game
https://youtu.be/gWqnz-7iQbY?si=vIQXYfX1jwGvT3-2