I started playing at the end of 2015. I saw the game go through a bunch of different forms. The people pulling higher tier weapons into lower tier bots were mostly doing all-in strategies around that weapon, because they didn’t have enough budget left for much else, IIRC. But it was going to be mathematically impossible to support to 10 tiers of 10v10 matches as the game went on anyway, and it became a really fun competitive game with no tiers in early 2017. Then they went for some kind of half-assed return to tiers at the end of 2018 that made no one happy.

The presence of tiers at all was what bothered me. The version I liked most did have light and heavy blocks with tradeoffs so you could have that depth without wreaking havoc on matchmaking by splitting your player base into 10 different pools.

The loot boxes came along with the beginning of the changes that really spoke to me. Not the loot boxes themselves, but the pivot away from grinding for objectively better parts and toward a flatter structure where everything had its use case. Of course, it sucks that neither of us can play either of those versions anymore.

Such is live service.

Two of my favorites are Vagante and Streets of Rogue. Vagante is a great challenge with all sorts of build variety and interesting choices to make along the way. Streets of Rogue is comedy and chaos. Both are a great time either single player or in co-op, either local or online.

Sure, but that’s tangential to their market position relative to their competitors. CS2 loot boxes are a problem, but they’re not responsible for Steam being the biggest PC game store.

Krafton only got Hi-Fi Rush in the sale.

Neither of them has even tried to distribute their own store as a Flatpak. That doesn’t strike me as Valve abusing a monopoly position.

Discord is a bad place to put archived information that ought to be on a forum, but it’s just fine for this use case.

The new C&C is Tempest Rising. The new Neverwinter Nights has a variety of answers, from Baldur’s Gate 3 to Solasta to Pillars of Eternity, depending on what you’re looking for. Commandos has spawned an entire genre at this point; not only is there a new Commandos coming soon that looks good, we just had a series of three and a half games from the sadly-now-defunct Mimimi that all fit the bill, as well as that game Sumerian Six just last year.

Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll check it out. I’ve got Phantom Fury from this past year, and even with a ton of criticism heaped toward it, it was still in the ballpark of what I wanted to scratch this itch.

Games of that era were frequently made a dozen or so people in 18 months. Whether that passes some arbitrary line in the sand for what counts as “indie” or not, I don’t much care; it’s just a market segment that’s been left behind by AAA that I’m waiting for someone to pick up the mantle on. Most genres that AAA have left behind have been filled by now, but FPS games that fit the mold of what we got between ~1998 and ~2016 are still an itch I need scratched. From what I can see on the horizon, there’s Fallen Aces in early access that I’d like to see once it’s 1.0, Core Decay going for a Deus Ex sort of thing, and then Mouse: P.I. for Hire, but I’d still like to see the full package with co-op and deathmatch modes like we got back in the day.

This time it did.

I can only speak for the games I’m most familiar with, and apparently that same problem exists with how these nominees are chosen too, just like the Keighleys. For a second, I thought perhaps the people suggesting the nominees had not heard of Indika, because Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was nominated for narrative and Indika was not. The fighting game category doesn’t hold up very well either, because while the Khaos Reigns expansion is a bit of a stretch, Underdogs is even more of a stretch. Sure, maybe the people submitting nominees haven’t heard of Diesel Legacy (which would be my pick for fighting game of the year), but could you at least be aware of Rivals of Aether II? They didn’t even get Under Night on the list!

Man, I wish we still got FPS games off an assembly line, and I’m waiting for indies to get out of the Quake era.

They wanted to release it 6 months ago, rumor has it. But they postponed it to shore up supply to meet launch demand, give extra development time to its key launch games, or to squeeze the last bit of juice out of the Switch 1 – or some combination of those things.

The Switch 2 will do just fine, better even, compared to its next closest competition.

I’m not hoping for regulation to catch up. I’m no lawyer, but I don’t think it counts as a monopoly when you reach your market saturation by just being better than your competitors without putting your thumb on the scale. If it did count as a monopoly, I’d hate to break up the best market actor as punishment for giving people what they want. I’m hoping for the competitors to actually compete. Right now, I’d say the only option out there other than Steam is GOG, and there’s a lot I’d like to see them improve too.

The private equity that would control it after it goes private, in all likelihood, would be the same family who controls it today and always has controlled it. They’re not interested in stripping it for parts, but they’re also not interested in scaling their operations down and learning some hard lessons to make a sustainable video game company.

Ubisoft will likely be a private company soon, and I doubt the situation will change much in the aftermath.

The Steam Deck may have sold a few million copies (four or five from what I hear?), but it’s nowhere near the hundreds of millions of Switches, even in sale pace nowadays.

And yet monthly active Steam users are about the size of all Switches sold over its lifetime, including those who bought multiple Switches as new SKUs came out. I think what the Steam Deck and other handheld PCs capture are people who want to play PC games and play them handheld. Every Switch is handheld, but how many people are they capturing, or will they soon capture, that care very little about Nintendo games and just want to play games handheld? I have a feeling that the “port everything to the Switch” crowd won’t really exist anymore in a world where that game already plays on a similarly-priced PC handheld without having to beg the developers first.

A season pass is a bundle of several DLCs intended to release over a period of time, usually a year, and they usually come with a small discount for buying in bulk or maybe a few extras for buying them all together instead of separately. A battle pass will often have a “free tier” and a “paid tier”, and it’s basically a experience points progression meter that encourages you to keep playing the game longer (and they have an incentive to put the best rewards behind the paid tier to get you to pay for them). Typically battle passes are only available for a limited time, and if you don’t get them while they’re available, you missed out, which creates a greater sense of urgency to play longer during that period of time.

Is making the game live service a quality of life improvement? There’s still a market out there for Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and Borderlands, after all; a large one.

The best of Windows is running more than just games that got ported to Xbox, and at better settings.

It’s a lot more than that. SteamOS isn’t just Steam Big Picture Mode. There’s some special sauce in there to capture the active window so that you never lose focus of the game window and such. If you just run a Windows machine set to boot into Steam Big Picture on startup, you’ll find lots of times that you have to break out a keyboard to Alt+Tab for a variety of reasons that SteamOS never encounters. And given the other problems Windows has introduced over the past decade, that’s the least of their problems now.

The timing is because CES is happening right now. Microsoft has been eyeing this use case since at least the launch of the Steam Deck.

I like matchmaking. I never once found a “community” on a server browser and instead was just frustrated by teams changing rosters mid-match and such. Years later, I’d find that kind of community building in Discord servers and not the likes of de_dust 24/7. But regardless of personal preferences, it’s just about mathematically impossible that matchmaking will sustain a player base forever, so the player-hosted servers need to be there.

It sounds like you can.

I had the Win 2. You needed fairly large pockets, and I wouldn’t really trust its build quality there anyway.

A decade or more ago, I thought surely that was what the app was going to do, considering Humble would package Steam + Android keys in the same purchase back then.

One might argue (I might argue) that live service is just a worse version of some other form that game could take, like the old model of expansion packs, self-hosting servers, and such. They’re going to inevitably turn up the dial on monetization, just like Apex Legends did, once one line crosses another line and their current trajectory is no longer sustainable. Live service games have ongoing costs in a way that non-live service games do not, so they need more incoming revenue to justify it. When that revenue doesn’t make up for their spend, they shut the servers off, and the game is gone forever.

It’s quite a leap to go from WWE 2k to Ubisoft.

Once again, the opposite of “live service” is not “single player”.

Digital Extremes and Bungie were the first formerly singleplayer-focused studios to find major success making MMOs with more action-heavy gameplay

Both companies were known for making multiplayer games before making live service games. BioWare made plenty of multiplayer games before Mass Effect 3.

If you want a term for something that means “not a live service”, “single player” is a bad way to do it.

I think it’ll be softer for a number of reasons, but “softer than one of the most successful consoles of all time” is still a high bar to clear.

Rumor has it that’s exactly why this launch got delayed. It’s been in production for months now.

Yes, I think it’s going to be quite expensive. They’ve been saying it’s going to be an enormous leap in performance, and that’s not going to come cheap.

The Switch 2 and this console will be separated by about a year.

Optimus is sweating bullets right now.

Maybe they wouldn’t bother if they could get Game Pass on someone else’s console.

Is it Assassin’s Creed: Shadows? Because a failure by Assassin’s Creed standards is still pretty damn successful.

You can’t run a Windows executable on an Xbox as things stand. That’s the difference that a lot of us are expecting to go away.