if it didn’t invent grip buttons it was my first exposure to them

Ironically, I think it was those very buttons that infringed on a preexisting patent and led to Valve getting sued

Worth noting is that you can also get factorio DRM-free on the website, and then downloading mods is locked behind logging in with your account - same as playing multiplayer on online-mode servers. But mods are also just zip files that you can also download from the website (still need to log in and own the game), so same as games with steam workshop, people will share mods same as they share game files.

If that’s too inconvenient for you to pirate, well, “piracy is a service issue” ;)

I miss the Watcher, and still suck with the new characters (and defect apparently), but it definitely is fun. Love that they officially included multiplayer in the game, it works great (though it either makes the game considerably easier, or my friend is just carrying me :D)

The optimistic approach is that they have a unified VR runtime that is straight up missing features on Linux, so hopefully they’ll fix that up and improve it to work better.

Ended up ranting about metaprogression, oh well.

I appreciate games that know what they want to be, and have an intended difficulty for you to experience/master (I also have nothing against adjustable difficulty and/or accessibility options, but I like knowing what the devs expected). I also appreciate roguelikes’ uncompromising approach, with the original concepts like non-modality, and expecting you to face challenges to get rewarded instead of bypassing them.

Metaprogression… Goes three ways. There are games which get easier as you upgrade across runs (which either get easier than they should or start too difficult), games where beating them at a difficulty unlocks harder difficulties (love that, as long as there aren’t too many things to separately unlock, since it lets you ramp things up to your comfortable difficulty while providing a ultimate challenge to reach), and games where you unlock content as you play (can be good for easing players into the game, but take it too far and you’re back to having to put X hours into the game to get the full experience)

Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, Luck be a Landlord do the second (StS has ascensions, Dead Cells has IIRC boss cells, LbaL has floors), but they do things differently in other regards. StS has you unlocking content based on accumulated score across runs with a specific character, but it doesn’t take too long. It also has a true ending that you can’t do on your first runs. Dead Cells seems to have a ton of content and upgrades that take a long time to unlock. LbaL doesn’t have any other metaprogression IIRC, but it does lock at least two important mechanics to specific floors (and up).

Heaven’s Vault.

I gave the game multiple tries, because I love the idea of a language puzzle game where you have to figure out the language bit by bit, based on context, environmental clues, and similarities between words. I also like the story and lore I’ve seen so far, and would like to see more.

But I just can’t get past how the gameplay is built. It feels like the game is trying to do multiple things at once and failing at all of them. Every part of the gameplay is slow, with long animations and slow cutscenes everywhere.

While playing you get dialogue opportunities with your robot, but taking them means you need to either stop what you’re doing or risk missing things, or even interrupt them through an arbitrarily placed cutscene/dialogue trigger. And if you don’t take them, you don’t know what you’ll miss.

Traveling between locations in your ship looks fun, but it’s also slow, while also having dialogues happen during it. It also has the option to have your robot take over steering, skipping the navigation sending you to your destination… An option that shows up according to the developers’ whims, so you don’t know how long it might take to show up.

On my last playthrough I decided to try using a mod, I think it was called RuinVault, which speeds up animations and dialogue, lets you skip navigation immediately, and even has a button to straight up speed up time - and what killed that playthrough was when I was leaving a location and my character went “Hmmm, I think I have some of my translations wrong”, and straight up forced me to pick a different option for some of my translations. It made me realize the game is basically forcing me to get the puzzles done “on time”, instead of letting me actually figure them out. I thought I was playing a puzzle game, but if the game decides you’re having trouble with a puzzle, it slowly forces you into the correct solution?

In the meanwhile Chants of Sennaar came out, and while it seemed simplistic compared to Heaven’s Vault’s language, it also felt like an actual puzzle that the game let me solve, and it could still tell a story through both environments and the text I had to translate.

I reckon I might just need to find a playthrough video to watch because playing the damn game is just endlessly frustrating.

Huh, it’s been a long time since my playthrough, but I feel like the game was very “emotionally engaging”, what with the struggles of all the characters, both the Hearthians you can talk to and the Nomai whose writing you get to read. I found the story really moving, and the nonlinear way it’s told and the way it’s weaved with the progression to be amazing.

I’m going to say yes, but if you just can’t enjoy the “proper” experience, but you enjoy it with the slight “cheat”, then that could be better than not playing.

Worth noting is that the time it takes to start raining varies, food respawns, creatures move around. If you can’t make it to the next shelter and die, you restart the cycle in the same way - but if you grab enough food to hibernate and go back to the same shelter, you might find it easier to progress on the next cycle.

That’s funny, I like Terraria, but I kinda feel the opposite way, because building stuff serves little to no purpose, progress is generally dictated by going to specific places and talking to specific NPCs, killing specific bosses, finding/grinding specific items. It all feels relatively on-rails, whereas in Factorio everything I build has a purpose and no predefined way I have to do, and there are a lot of choices and optional things I can do.

Of course I’m not saying that to dismiss your opinion, just wanted to share my side.

Pretty sure twitch has deals with streamers that restricts how they can stream. I think SimpleFlips had a video explaining why he stopped streaming on YouTube, he didn’t realize the twitch partner contract required him to stream exclusively on twitch at the time. I’ve also heard some things about how you can stream simultaneously, but twitch doesn’t allow you merging chats from different platforms, so if you want to show chat in the stream itself, each platform might need a separate box.

I don’t think the line is that fine in that case, considering all random mechanics in Balatro give ephemeral rewards that only last until the end of a run, which is an isolated instance of a game with limited playtime, those mechanics cannot be paid for with real money, the resulting rewards cannot be sold for real money or traded with other players, and generally cannot affect any other players in any way, not even visually through cosmetics.

As far as I know, Balatro is only really being targeted because it’s stylized after poker, with the enforcement having no actual understanding of what the gameplay looks like.

I think at bigger risk from actual laws would be MMORPGs where you can get random loot drops from enemies/chests, and those also tend to have markets where people grind valuable drops and use in-game trading to transfer them to other players in exchange for real money.

Edit: possibly relevant, apparently the game had some pretty bad bugs with the navigations on launch. I played it after those got patched, so my experience may have been different to yours

Unfortunately not the issue, I didn’t play it early after release, and tried playing multiple times over the years. The ship navigation alone isn’t too bad, but it can absolutely get tedious, and I feel like the game acknowledges it by giving you the option to skip it after some time… But you’re not in control of when that option to skip appears, and when the game dripfeeds you dialogue instead.

It mostly feels like good ideas that just don’t work well together for me, or are ruined by a few decisions that I find annoying, like slow animations everywhere.

I tried multiple times to get into heaven’s vault, last time with a mod to speed up gameplay (speeding up game time, faster cutscenes, skipping ship navigation), but it still feels so painfully slow, and the thing that killed the last of the fun for me was when I realized the game occasionally making you “review” translations is basically forcing you to lock in the correct solution by eliminating any wrong ones you got.

Like dammit, is it supposed to be an on-rails walking simulator, or an open-ended puzzle game? Because it feels like it’s trying to be both, and failing on both counts.

That’s just the thing - the publicly visible rules are about the keys, but the email that’s part of evidence isn’t about the keys. (Also, steam isn’t just distributing the game, but providing other services for workshop, cloud saves, multiplayer, forums)

Valve gives you free steam keys for your game on request, which you can sell off steam, without paying Valve a cut. This has a specific rule that disallows selling those keys for a lower price. However, not sure if it’s this case, there was an email from a Valve employee submitted as evidence telling a game developer that selling their game for less in general would be undercutting steam, and something they wouldn’t want. If the email is real and not a misinterpretation, Valve indeed was/is pressuring developers to not sell games cheaper elsewhere.

Also, sales and giveaways are exempt from the steam key price parity rule, which I would assume epic’s free games would fall under, if you applied the rule to that despite not involving steam keys.

I don’t think the example at the end of your comment is relevant, since to my knowledge it’s the publisher deciding on pricing and doing sales, and steam is still taking the same cut.

I also think it’s generally not a great thing, since it basically puts the value of the game at $5, making it not worth getting off-sale, while also creating urgency to do so during a sale. I respect Factorio developers’ choice to just not do sales at all, and state so, so that buyers know exactly what the price is.

Yup, and this kind of stuff is why I support the lawsuits against Valve - in the sense that I do want oversight and fair judgement on the issues being raised, especially since one included an email from a Valve employee saying a developer isn’t allowed to sell their game cheaper than on steam.

I imagine if Valve isn’t doing anything wrong, it’ll just waste some time - but it could also do good for game developers and players, by reducing the cut, but also potentially by opening up Steam’s tools for networking, input, workshop to not be locked into their platform (since that can definitely keep devs on steam in cases where they might want to diversify)

Larian has been adding free content to BG3 over time

I think they said the content updates are done, in the last content update?

modding support

As far as I know, terraria only supports resource packs, changing textures, sounds, text, that kinda stuff, right? tModLoader is a community project made by fans, and the game devs’ contributions to that are in the domain of being receptive, supporting it being on steam, and potentially answering questions or making small changes to facilitate mods.

But on the topic of changes, can’t forget how they added new content and put it behind a new difficulty, and then ended up doing that again. And then they added a special seed that has new content that bumps up the difficulty another level.

I’m on the fence about the topic, but you’ve gotta be dense to believe CSAM has nothing to do here. The accusation is one of CSAM, so the argument is whether the scene is CSAM or not.

In a perfect world the question would be simple, but in the reality we live in, you have to consider if the art will be misused - and that’s assuming the artist is honest about their intentions in the first place.

Unless something changed, players who don’t own DLC can’t play as the DLC characters. I believe they can interact with all the rest of the content normally, just locked to the vanilla character selection (which is still broad and fun enough, and further expandable with mods).

I’ll add Luck be a Landlord as a game that’s surprisingly fun, has no time pressure, and lets you save and quit anytime.

Also worth noting is that FTL has a great mod, Multiverse, adding new features and lots of new content. I’m not sure how well FTL works when you have little time, but if it works, there’s a lot of unique content to see.

This is certainly an odd suggestion, and not what you’re really asking for, but makes me think of Space Station 13. It’s a janky round-based multiplayer roleplay/social intrigue game. It’s free, and the game is opensource (though not the engine), which also leads to there being many servers with unique variations. It’s cheating to suggest a multiplayer game when talking about single player natural language processing games, but using actual players is probably the easiest way to pull it off.

The reason it reminds me is because on a roleplay server, you’ve got something like 20 people, each with their job to do, talking to each other, talking on common radio, etc. - and if you’re lucky, a player playing as the station AI, complete with a (modifiable) lawset they have to follow, Asimov’s laws style. And of course, a few antagonists that have objectives to do.

If you’re curious, I personally recommend BeeStation, though there are a lot of fine choices for the server, just maybe stay away from the 18+ ones.

I disagree, runbacks are as much difficulty as having to recover your currency after death, or even having to recover your items after dying in Minecraft. It’s a punishment for dying, and a way to make you treat it seriously.

It can incentivise the wrong things, punish experimentation and make players stick with what they know, even if better options exist. You’re free to dislike it, and it has downsides, but dismissing it as “not difficulty” is just dishonest.

I really hope not, that feels like crypto all over again, with inconsistent payouts and varying electricity prices… And on top of that probably awful service since people tend to have the weirdest internet connections.

Though if you remove the part where it’s used to stream games to other players, that sounds too niche to be viable, but could be cool. If going in that direction, I’d imagine it more likely to be gaming servers for businesses, like VR gaming spots, where they have multiple gaming computers hooked up to headsets.

I’m not a soulslike fan myself, but I don’t think hollow knight is very soulslike - the combat is very snappy, avoiding locking you into animations or making you consider your momentum, and I have the impression soulslikes also tend to be way more environmentally lethal, so to speak.

It might have some of that visual/lore/exploration vibe though.

It’s “of out hot” and “eat the food” - if we interpret “of in” (derived from “oven”) to be putting in the food, then “of out” would mean to take the food out, and thus “of out hot” would mean you take it out hot, and eat it

I don’t know about making fun of a dialect, but it’s not quite utter nonsense - “oven” sounds like “of in”, so it can be interpreted to mean that it shouldn’t be called oven, because when you put the food in it’s cold, you only eat it when taking the food out, when it’s hot.

The sentence structure is so absurdly wrong it makes me wonder if somebody was genuinely trying to make a pun and ended up with that, or if it was intentionally butchered.

Having a FP4 myself, I do suspect it’s significantly slower than alternatives at similar prices - not a problem for most uses, only things that would actually stress the CPU, but it could bother some people.

Developers already care about it. Not all of them, not all the way, but many are aiming for steam deck compatibility via proton. It’s not perfect, and some devs are vehemently holding out, but it’s progress!

What? It shows up as a footer under the description, and inside is the game developer’s description of how they used AI. Look at Stellaris for example, I remember they claim to use it minimally (in very vague words), but they certainly get to say their piece.

Sure, but the point is to be realistic and not put undue weight on the developers, right? Binaries can generally be much more permissive than source code when proprietary dependencies are involved, and easier to release “clean” than source code.

I’m not sure which puzzles you’re referring to - do you mean stuff to reach an ending, or the obscure, very much optional, deep secrets?

It’s been a while since I played it, but I don’t remember grindy puzzles in the main content, bar the big one, but that one felt exhilarating to figure out and solve.

As for combat, it is difficult, but I remember beating the whole game without turning down the difficulty (which I remember being a thing), so it seemed fine to me… But yeah, people misrepresenting a game is always a risk.

I will point out that (IIRC) Tunic does have significantly more mechanical progression than some other examples, like Outer Wilds or Toki Tori 2, but they’re all lovely games

Is it? Or did they choose Arch because of the ease of setting it up with all the latest software the community was already packaging?

The steam version of trackmania is quite weird - I looked for a way to pay for it through steam for a while before resignedly going into the Ubisoft payment in the overlay… Only to be directed to steam for payment. I’m not sure if it’s even possible to pay through Ubisoft when launching it from steam.

Outer Wilds. The game isn’t very text-heavy, but what there is feels important and personal. With the way the story is told, it is quite possibly my favorite story overall. I don’t want to say too much, since knowledge is key in that game, but I would highly recommend it.

As for android games… If you like puzzles like sudoku, check out Simon Tatham’s Puzzle collection. Simple ad-free online experience with a varied collection of puzzle games.

Ah, seems you’re partially correct - steam has a command for downloading a specific depot version. You need to know the specific ID to download, and notably games can use multiple depots to form the game files, but I thought you needed to use something like SteamCMD or DepotDownloader for that.

I’m still upholding the fact that it’s not a “proper” feature, while I appreciate having those kind of utilities put in the user’s control, this isn’t something most people could figure out themselves.

It’s not like they have to create the compatibility layers from scratch; Valve did it for them.

I do just want to point out, Valve didn’t do that - Proton is mostly just pre-existing software that they packaged together into an officially supported feature. I love that they did it, and having it in the biggest PC game platform presumably did wonders for Linux gaming, but it was most certainly not made from scratch.