It looks like a Facebook game, ngl.

Yeah, “micromanagement” wasn’t really the right choice of word, and I never beat a lot of the more difficult SP scenarios anyway, so I can’t really say that I’m GOOD good at it. I just appreciate that it doesn’t make you deal with managing the positioning of individual units, which is something that usually overwhelms me pretty quickly in traditional RTSes when things start to scale up.

Love Majesty. It’s such a different and unique take on an RTS. The hands-off approach to unit management has a nice side effect in that it doesn’t require a heavy focus on APM and micromanagement to be good at it.

The DLC car packs contain exclusive cars that cannot be obtained elsewhere. The weekly cars are often “hard-to-find” in that they are generally not available elsewhere until they re-run them, but apparently, now that the game is late in its content cycle, they’ve also added a “backstage pass” thing recently, which allows for easier acquisition of some previous “hard-to-find” vehicles.

There are a ton of base-game vehicles that are not exclusive to any particular time or event. Many can be obtained in the Autoshow, which you spend in-game credits to buy cars outright, or in wheelspins, which are basically lootboxes, but they hand out free spins like candy, to the point where I never felt any pressure to buy more. Most spin reward cars are pretty cheap on the auction house anyway (which also uses in-game currency, no IRL money or anything).

When did that happen? I thought the paid DLCs were the Hot Wheels and Rally expansions, plus the car packs. I don’t remember them locking out previously free content, unless that happened within the last year or two since I stopped playing…

I actually had a lot of fun at first with FH5 in the exact same position. The unlocks flow fast and there’s a ton of stuff to tinker around with and explore, and the racing itself is very beginner-friendly. The difficulty settings and assists are very granular and can be fine-tuned to suit your skill level.

I particularly appreciated that it avoided a linear progression system and didn’t make you start off on the slowest cars and slowly work your way up to the good ones, as it’ll give you some insane hypercars right off the bat. The upgrade system and vehicle tiering also ensures that the “slower” cars are never truly obsolete. You can drive what your like, and the game never punishes you for it (in singleplayer, at least).

However, once I got through most of the single player content available, I started to sour on it at a certain point. The constant drip feed of new content in the weekly challenges was fun at first, but felt like a chore after a while, and it definitely takes advantage of FOMO, as the new unlocks in a given week are exclusive to that week and can’t be obtained anywhere else, unless buying them from another player at often exorbitant rates. They do re-run previous exclusive vehicles in the secondary challenges sometimes, but there’s no telling how long you’ll have to wait for a particular car to come around again if you miss it the first time.

So yeah, your mileage may vary, so to speak, but I did put something like 300-400 hours into it before I dropped it for good, and I don’t regret most of that.

The Wii might’ve had higher sales at its peak, but PS2 had a lot of longevity.

Lack of adoption of ray tracing is one thing, but halting development on a 6-year-old tech demo is completely reasonable on all fronts. They aren’t even delisting it from Steam or anything, it’s still fully playable.

I didn’t even realize they even had any active development on Q2RTX up to this point… Six years is a long time to support what’s basically a novelty tech demo.

I was always disappointed that they bound the skillbar to weapon types and removed secondary professions in GW2. The possibilities for character builds were virtually endless in GW1’s system, and you could make your character really feel like your own. I did play GW2 for a while, and it was fun in its own ways, but the original still holds much more nostalgia for me.

Yeah, I was already iffy on the writing up to that point, but at that moment I could only assume that the writers unironically believed Rick & Morty was the peak of highbrow humor.

It still enrages me to this day that IGN literally bought out a charity because they wanted to make money off of it. I will never forgive them for ruining Humble.

I love the gameplay of Dead Rising, but the time limits and save point restrictions really do not mesh well with how I want to play it. The game has the perfect setup to be a sandbox where you could just fuck around with finding silly ways to kill zombies, but the time limits - even if they are as generous as people say - just give me constant anxiety and I can’t really relax and screw around with it like I’d want to.

He was speaking of someone else’s game that did that, not Heartbound.

It was a self-imposed challenge.

I’ve always been curious about Arma, but I’m not sure if I’d like it… It appears to have a lot of depth, but the learning curve always seemed rather steep.

Starfield faked me out for a bit when I took the character creation perk that gave my character living parents that I could go visit and would show up from time to time. They were funny and adorably charming, and I thought it was an inspired touch. Little did I know that was the absolute best part of that game…

This is one of those things where it’s something weird published April 1st, but it doesn’t feel over-the-top enough to absolutely be a joke. I have no idea if this is real or not lol

I don’t think Morrowind needs a remake. A remake would likely try to smooth over the game’s rough edges, but the rough edges are a big part of what makes the game actually work, imo.

Now, at this point I don’t think I trust Bethesda enough to get an Oblivion remake right, either, but Oblivion was very much held back by technological limitations of the time, and in my opinion it hasn’t aged very well. I can at least see the potential of an Oblivion remake where they don’t have to be concerned about how much they can fit on an Xbox 360 disc.

If a game hasn’t been fully bugtested, I wouldn’t consider it “done…”

The spread of “skill-based” matchmaking and ranked competitive ladders largely took away a valuable communal aspect of online multiplayer games, IMO. Getting dropped into a match with a bunch of random people you’ll probably never see again just makes things so impersonal, which can cultivate a lot of toxicity.

Some of the best times I’ve ever had with online gaming were from finding a dedicated server with settings I liked, hanging out there often, gradually getting to know the regulars, and becoming part of a community. I’ve never had that kind of feeling from a game with automated matchmaking.

Yeah, he led the design. The whole thing was his brainchild, iirc.

Yeah, I’m… skeptical, to say the least. I don’t think any of these sprawling, massively-scoped “everything games” have ever actually lived up to the hype. It’s a problem of pure logistics. Making a game with so many different segments each with entirely unique gameplay loops is essentially like developing more than half a dozen games at once. It’s the problem Spore had - the scope was just too broad, and even with EA and Will Wright behind it, it eventually released as a pretty decent creature creator stapled to four shallow, rushed game stages.

No studio has the resources or inclination to commit to the 10-15+ year development cycle for a single game needed to fit that much scope, and even if they did, the entire game design landscape would have changed between the beginning and the end of the project, which would make major technical and design components of the game obsolete before it was even finished.

I’d put money on this game either becoming vaporware or releasing as a chaotic, disjointed mess with the depth of a puddle. I’d love to see them prove me wrong, but I just don’t see how anyone could overcome those kinds of logistical hurdles.

No need, actually, I originally assumed this was a past code that I missed, but it’s currently up on Prime right now, so I’ll grab it myself

Is RIOT - Civil Unrest still available?

The most that I have proof of is Europa Universalis IV at a little over 1k hours, but I wouldn’t be surprised if my time on Guitar Hero 3 in high school surpassed that by quite a bit. I played a lot of Guitar Hero in high school…

I mean, sure, you’re not wrong. It’s just that cyberpunk as a genre is pretty strongly linked to anti-capitalist and anti-corporate themes, and I think a triple-A game published by a big corporation is not very likely to adhere to the spirit of the genre.

You know, I had heard a lot about how much Cyberpunk had improved since launch, but I still couldn’t really convince myself to try it. “Cyberpunk game made by big corporate studio” always just struck me as something of an oxymoron.

I mean, Christianity kinda does, too, but gay Christians definitely exist. Islam and its interpretations/practices aren’t monolithic.

That’s not to say that I think she actually exists - all evidence seems to point to Coty Craven being a con artist - but “gay muslim” isn’t necessarily a red flag.

Humble used to be an event that celebrated and showcased indie developers while at the same time raising many millions for charities. Then IGN bought it and rapidly enshittified it into a bog-standard, for-profit corporate enterprise like any other, and I’ll never forgive them for it.

Do they even give any of the profits to charity any more? If they do, I bet they only keep it around to take advantage of the tax writeoffs.

“Product Degradation” has been the modus operandi for nearly every online service for like 10-15 years now, but it’s the Gamepass price increase is what got the FTC’s attention? Where was the FTC when the movie/TV streaming service market balkanized itself in an arms race to reinvent cable?

Granted, I doubt the FTC could really do anything meaningful to stop enshittification given that corporations are effectively above the law these days, but it’s been blatantly obvious that this was going to be Gamepass’ strategy from day one. If this actually surprised anyone at the FTC, they really haven’t been paying attention.

In that case, I’m still not sure what the Intellivision brand even has left that Atari would want… I guess they could do one of those nostalgia re-release collections of old Intellivision games, but I feel like the nostalgia market for a nearly 50-year-old console mostly known for being a failed competitor to the 2600 is… very niche.

Huh, first I’m hearing of this Amico thing. I don’t know if it really has the support to capture enough of the market it seems to be going for… It looks like it’s trying to go for the “family-friendly, easy-to-use” concept that the Wii had, but the Wii had Nintendo behind it, along with other major publishers making games for it. The games included also look rather… basic.

…Annnnd it’s also a Tommy Tallarico thing. Of course it is. Why on earth does Atari want this?

Oh, so I guess the “uncompleted level count” just refers to “uncompleted by anyone except the creator.”

Did Mario Maker have any kind of safeguards against users publishing troll levels that were just physically impossible to beat? Since there’s only one uncleared level left, I assume so, but I would’ve thought that the easiest way to verify a level could be beaten would be to make the creator beat it themselves before it could be uploaded.

I would’ve expected either loads of unbeaten levels or no unbeaten levels at all, but having only one unbeaten level is interesting…

Id, Bioware, and Bethesda have all been mentioned, and are strong contenders.

Ludeon Studios and Ghost Ship Games each only really have one game (RimWorld and Deep Rock Galactic, respectively), but they’re so damn good and they both have such a strong relationship with their communities that they’re definitely among my favorites at the moment.

I have a love/hate relationship with Paradox Interactive. Their DLC model… leaves a lot to be desired, but I have yet to find much else that scratches the grand strategy itch in the same way they do, and the level of mod support they provide is impressive. I don’t know if I can call them my favorite, but I’ve logged over 1000 hours into EU4 alone, so I have to at least mention it, I feel.

Warframe.

As far as the ethics of it, whatever, there are games where you can do worse. I just think it’s annoying that the devs went this far out of their way to cynically controversy-bait up attention for themselves. There was no need for this - it adds nothing to the gameplay beyond shock value.

We don’t currently foresee any changes to our funding model, as Homecoming is not required to pay any up-front or recurring license fees. We continue to be overwhelmed by the generosity of the community when it comes to keeping the server online.

It doesn’t seem like Homecoming is having to pay anything for the license, at least. It’s not like NCSoft is able to make any money from CoH anymore, so they may just be taking an opportunity to build some community goodwill for little opportunity cost. If they demanded any revenue for the license, it’d cause community backlash, and a donation-funded fan server of a long-dead MMO almost certainly wouldn’t be able to afford any meaningful licensing costs, anyway.

Unless it’s Madden, in which case the exclusive license to use the NFL’s trademarks means there’s no competition, so they can just release a $60 roster update every year and still make bank from the people with gambling addictions to Ultimate Team.