Diablo, dragon age, dynasty warriors/Hyrule warriors, monster hunter, the older lord of the rings games, vermintide 2.

The problem is a second launcher or library is a pain in the ass for a user. I already avoid GoG unless it’s massively cheaper, and there’s the no drm benefits there. I’m not even interested in free games on epic.

Epic is the latest example that’s trying. EA gave up that fight years ago, and probably had better shot than Epic ever will.

Most the article makes no sense, but the Mac stuff is really weird. This 18 year old YouTube video is still accurate about the Mac part. https://youtu.be/2B-ekl_cEWk?si=xWJ43QEO48O9t2oY

An article that could have discussed some actual problems with steam, but instead focused on non-issues like epic having a garbage store.

Retreating to PC makes sense, because PC won the console war.

The cheat weapons from mercenaries. The portable air strike was a great way to kill an entire screen and yourself if you weren’t careful. The street sweeper was aptly named.

Part of the problem is a lot of pokemon weren’t designed to live in a world, just be a sprite on a battle screen. It also got more egregious in later titles, but there’s always been some problematic pokemon. So not only do you have to make a ton of models, you have to fudge the scales a lot to make Pidgey vs Onix look remotely good. There’s really no way to make a decent looking game without drastically reducing the scope like pokemon snap did.

Pokemon has influence far beyond a genre. Palworld being called pokemon with guns is a good example.

Like I said in the other thread, I vote pokemon. I don’t think you can go too much older, because the audience was just so small relative to more modern games. Scale is a major factor to influence.

I’m saying pokemon. It’s still a dominant franchise today. It’s inspired countless spin offs and copy cats. It made gaming social and the connector for Gameboys a required accessory. Pokemon Go was a covid time revolution. The series is likely responsible for a sizable growth in the gaming market in the late 90s and early 2000s. People who never played a video game can identify Pikachu, and might even have a plushie. We are closing in on 30 years of pokemon being a dominant franchise.

It’s a new game. Unfortunately I think we are now in an era where we can expect new games to run like shit on release, and be improved over the first year.

You can be almost everything in Morrowind, just like Skyrim. If anything Skyrim actually locks a chosen play style in more due to talents. There’s a few more exclusive guilds in Morrowind, but they aren’t major for the most part. Just because you have spent the time to learn how to avoid the rough edges doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

The fact you have to start your comment with multiple don’t do X things proves my point. As a story it’s great, but as a game it’s got a lot of problems.

The level up system was bad. The thrust/chop/slash system for weapons is awkward. Every attack costing stamina is bad for early characters. The excessive number of weapon categories, combined with short and long blades being the only ones that were common. The persuasion system was just bribe people to get what you want, or taunt them for free murder. Run speed being a skill, jumping being faster than running and being a skill as well (combined with the level system this can cause problems). Item durability in general. The encumbrance system, and containers having weight limits. The spell making and enchantment system had some cool things, but it was also trivial to break the game in multiple ways. The quest tracking and journaling was garbage. Alchemy was undercooked. Merchants had way too little gold so selling became annoying by mid level. The haggling quickly got annoying as you could sell at extreme markup or buy for nothing fairly easy. Magicka didn’t regenerate, so being a mage was annoying at early levels until you had sufficient potion access.

There’s also some things that are more bugs I think than bad mechanics. Stealing from a merchant flagged every copy of an item as stolen from them. I once managed to make every redoran guard hostile to me on sight, which got really annoying.

Morrowind had a decent story and great world building but the mechanics were absolute shit.

Amazon launcher requires an internet connection for games, at least the free ones.

There was definitely heavy skepticism at first. Buying online was new when it launched and physical was still king. I remember thinking it was dumb to buy from a website that could disappear instead of good old CDs.

They offer keys which allows for third party sellers to exist, and there are a handful of legitimate sites that sell keys for steam.

Steam is a platform that happens to also have a storefront. Other companies are building storefronts and hoping that’s enough.

If you can’t provide fast downloads, cloud saves synced across devices, achievements, mod support, friends lists, and multiplayer support, it’s not a real option. Being cheaper or having some exclusives aren’t attractive. Gog already has the drm free angle to be a legitimate competitor.

There’s never been much content blocking in elder scrolls. You could always master every skill even in Morrowind. Morrowind had a few exclusive guilds, but even Skyrim had a couple. Role playing in Skyrim is self imposed.

It’s not the lack of exclusives, it’s that consoles are offering a lesser experience than PC now. Controller support on PC is amazing, that wasn’t always true. Hooking up a console to a TV is the same as a PC now. Hardware and graphic performance is stabilized, while a console might be slightly cheaper than an equivalent desktop, it’s much closer than it has ever been. The steam deck is a legitimate contender for consoles. PC doesn’t have the problem of game libraries going away with each upgrade. PC has mod support and a wider selection than console can dream of. PC often has free multiplayer, consoles require a subscription. Consoles don’t really support couch co-op or multiplayer anymore, which was an advantage over PC.

The only enforceable patents they have are Japanese. This is an attempt to get US ones.

I bought it with iceborne when it was on sale recently on steam, I had a copy for PS4 but I’ve transitioned to just PC games at this point.

That’s on you, civ hasn’t released a good game on launch in a very long time. You need at least the first expansion to have a complete game.

There two big differences to me are scale and value. A ccg has rare cards, but they aren’t actually that rare compared to loot boxes. Loot boxes tend to have both lower drop rates and pollute their drops with lots of garbage, even for rare drops. Secondly, physical cards have value, you can sell or trade them, you can buy singles of cards you want. You can use them for things other than the game as well.

Steam adding integrated support for hamachi would actually be nice.

As others have said start with 5. The rule of thumb for civ games is to wait for the expansion dlc to release and buy the game on sale. 7 is also a significant departure from the previous games, so it’s probably even more important to wait or outright skip it until they get it more polished.

Also it’s worth looking into endless legend or endless space 2 if you want to try more 4x games.

The PS5 doesn’t even have games and we are moving on to the 6? I guess that’s some innovation.

I haven’t actually played any of the old monster hunters before world, but from what I understand they are far more clunky, and you tend to fight the game almost as much as the monsters.

AOE 3 had a treaty mode that blocked attacking or building too close to an enemy before a certain time. It was a moderately popular mode.

Even in a shooter, you can make maps that encourage different play styles or have different interactive elements that can change the map. Not all of those may exist at launch, or more informed ideas can be used.

These graphs are the best counter to games have cost $60 for a decade argument.

Doing post release content can be good. It gives the devs a chance to do something after they are more familiar with the tools and what content players prefer.

Excited to see the new features of civ8.

I’ve tried a few space RTS games, and it’s not my favorite. They tend to be extremely slow paced to simulate the vastness of space. At super low prices it can be worth it to try out, but it’s definitely a different experience to consuming a map with an ork waaaagh.

Most the must haves are older, some aren’t on steam, but are worth checking out if you end up liking some others.

• dawn of war 1 and 2.
• StarCraft 1 and 2.
• Warcraft 3, 1 and 2 are very dated, but if you like the style/setting try them.
• AOE 2 and 3. Maybe 4, I find it a step backwards.
• age of mythology.
• Rise of nations and legends.
• beyond all reason

Most the successful MMOs are similar to that. Warcraft, final fantasy, elder scrolls, swtor…

The lack of plot can actually be helpful as it gives more freedom without upsetting any fans about breaking lore. Also battleship was a far better movie than it had any right to be.

There’s a balance to be managed and valve is on the extreme end of no release pressure.