Good point. I remember needing a pretty beefy PC to run Civ V at launch. Even coming back to it after a hardware upgrade, the game could get pretty chuggy towards the end of a playthrough.

When I buy a game from GOG, it comes with the presumption that I will download the installer in a timely manner and store a copy on my local storage device. Assuming I have good backup practices, that’s really the end of the story. I can build a 100 new computers and install the game I bought on each one. GOG went bankrupt ten years ago? That’s a shame, but my installer works just as well as when they were kicking.

When I “buy a game” on Steam, I technically get an installer, but Steam isn’t going to help me keep it. Those 100 new computers are going to download that installer a 100 times. And if the 51st install comes around and Steam isn’t around anymore? Or Steam decides not enough people play this game anymore and it no longer makes financial sense to host the installer? Well, at that point I guess I’ll just regret not buying the game on GOG.

State of Decay is one of my guilty pleasure series. I know it’s got its faults, but I keep going back to it once every couple years or so.

The standard difficulty just nails that dopamine cycle of grinding and reward, until you’ve got a thriving community that can hold off all threats until the resources in the map are totally depleted and it’s time to move on.

I could probably get a bit better at the game and tackle the harder modes, but that would up the stress factor and make me more likely to put it back down faster.

I’m glad Microsoft is dropping their internal releases on competing platforms now, because otherwise I’d probably never play the upcoming third one as a Linux and PS5 player.

Electronics have lifespans. With refurbished parts, it’s hard to tell if you’re buying something that someone else whoopsie-bought and sent right back, or waited until a day before the end of the return period before sending back. And that return period might be long if they had an extended warranty through the manufacturer.

I’m generally pretty comfortable diagnosing hardware failures and isolating components, but so many electronics are a massive headache to break down and service, you often have to toss them as soon as one crucial component fails. For those, I’d rather spend a bit more and improve my chances of getting the most lifespan out of the whole.

For the Steam Deck, if I didn’t already have a good desktop PC and wanted to get into PC gaming, I would be happy to spend the full price on a new OLED. Just having it for travel and light usage around the house, I don’t mind holding out for a better price breakdown.

And this is of course also assuming that the refurbishing process is on the up-and-up. That’s not always the case

Ooh. Normally I stay away from refurbished hardware, but the Steam Deck has really good repairability reviews. The base OLED price is just a bit higher than what I would want to spend, so I’ll really have to consider this.

I started playing around 2022, so I don’t have a point of reference for some of your points. They did overhaul space stations visually, but they are mostly the same functionally system to system. I can’t remember if they made multi biome planets because frankly, I rarely land on the same planet twice. Again, they did revamp the appearances of land and water biomes to make them more interesting as well.

To me, No Man’s Sky is more about breadth and discovery rather than depth and simulation. I have come back to the game a number of times because of interesting expeditions or the addition of new mechanics like piracy or organic ships.

It’s not a game for everyone, and it doesn’t do any one thing better than any other game, but it’s a great experience if you want a solo space sandbox experience.

Corrupted Blood taught us that we needed to add the vital “I’m a malicious/selfish asshole” variable to our calculations.

Good catch. I was drunk when I wrote that comment on my phone. Either I misread the release date or I mistyped it.

Meh, the best way to play RDR was back in May 2014 2010 on an Xbox 360.

Remake RDR1 in the sequel’s engine you lazy bastards.

I think you misunderstand their point. PostIdent would only be useful AFTER someone took the time to rate the game. Steam does not require any official content/maturity rating in their store, just some subjective content descriptors. To do so would pass an additional cost onto developers. The US-based ESRB process, for example, can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to rate a title.

Further to your point, I try to limit the number of times I provide my personal ID online. It’s one thing when you show your ID at a bar and the bartender gives it back to you after a glance. It’s another when I’m sending a photocopy over the internet and trusting a remote, distant party to use the data once and discard it. Even worse if they save it for future use and risk leaking it later.

The PS3 also had damn few games to play at launch. If it wasn’t for Sony’s decision to ship it with a BD-ROM drive it probably would have been a total flop. Home theater nerds saved the PS3.

I like this. I’m not stealing it, just copying it for personal use.

Outer Worlds is way closer to a Fallout spiritual sequel (or beat Starfield to the punch) than an Elder Scrolls game.

Did they ever fix the reputation system? I managed to instantly piss off an entire city while I was in the middle of it because I accumulated one too many “We don’t like you” points in the middle of a quest. Completely ruined my immersion and was a hard stop for me.

I also don’t buy his take that the game started development in 2016, this is what was big culturally in 2016, and the team just retreated into a bunker until launch and didn’t have any way to course correct.

That’s not how game development works. I guarantee the headcount for this project didn’t peak in 2016 and stay steady. This was a low-priority item on a few people’s kanban boards for a couple years, probably had multiple starts, dead-ends, and reinventions.

I have to think Sony saw the writing on the wall, pushed the project out the door because they didn’t think it would get any better barring significant reinvestment, and braced for the impact. I credit them just a tiny bit for not writing it off on their taxes and canning the project like Hollywood has been doing lately.

Mostly unrelated, but I was curious what the other series were featured in Secret Level and found this list.

Ooh, Unreal Tournament. I would love it if this generated some buzz and brought Epic back to the Unreal franchise.

Also oof, I thought God of War was getting a whole episode based on the trailer, but it looks like it’s going to be part of a Playstation mix-up. Because who wasn’t dying to see Kratos trade quips with Nathan Drake.

I don’t have downvote arrows in either my browser or Jerboa on Android.

Fair points, but I can’t participate in this thread because I’m on an instance that doesn’t allow down votes. The up vote solution is at least a bit more inclusive

You, like the author, are just falling for console war nonsense

You are sprinting to the defense of a multi-billion dollar company to call me a console war partisan. That is some American-politics level projection right there. I was a Sega kid. We lost the console war at the turn of the century. Now I go where the games are.

If the Xbox is a console for people to play games, it’s not the only console on the market, so it needs to compete. If it gains feature parity with its direct competition…except that said competition has a quality stable of exclusive titles, then the console is going to struggle. Like say, moving 20% of the volume that their competitor does. Microsoft’s answer to this seems to be to forego adding the value of console exclusives to their own platform and instead releasing more of their first-party titles on Playstation and PC.

That’s good for gamers, yes. It also flies in the face of any attempt to develop the Xbox as a platform choice. If I can afford one console per generation, why would I choose the Xbox over a Playstation? If I can afford multiple consoles, what does the Xbox offer that I don’t get already with the Playstation?

You’re calling Jason Schrier, a dumb author. He is one of, if not the most respected games journalists in the industry. You might want to take a moment and consider his words.

For my part, I do well enough that I could easily afford a good PC and 2-3 consoles per generation, and I’ve bought an Xbox and PlayStation since the start of both product lines. My Xbox One S was by far my least utilized console, to the point where I just couldn’t justify buying one in the current generation.

I just don’t know who the Xbox is even FOR anymore. If they put out a good exclusive, I’ll think about getting it… on PC, but even then, that’s probably money going to Steam or even EGS, because fuck the Windows Store, and most of the time I don’t even bother buying it there because something else on PC or PS5/PS Plus has caught my eye and I don’t feel enough FOMO to go back looking for it.

I should be one of Xbox’s core customers. But they stopped giving me the time of day when they spent an entire E3 blathering on about being a media console back in 2013. They’ve done precious little to try to win me back in the decade since.

I don’t think many adult games can afford mocap though. Typically the adult content is purely animated models.

I just had flashbacks to Dead State. It was a AA title written by one of the guys from Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines so I was watching it closely during development.

Suddenly, it went from EA to full release. I was surprised, but picked it up without reading many reviews.

I enjoyed the game and put maybe 15 hours into it, but then I had to move and had to pack up my PC for a few weeks. By the time I got settled and booted it up, it had gotten a massive patch which fixed a ton of bugs, filled in missing content like item descriptions and a bunch of other polish that would typically be done during pre-launch.

Meanwhile, one of the devs had gotten into a high profile pissing match with the community over accusations they had rushed it out the door. I normally try to sympathize with devs over a reactive community, but I couldn’t help feel like I got punished for buying the game at launch and experiencing those relatively non-replayable opening hours in a non-optimal (Dead) state.

Because many of us remember before that, when Valve revolutionized the single player first person genre again and again with the Portal and mainline Half-Life games.

Any other dev would have capitalized on the massive interest in a sequel or at least sold off the property so someone else could have continued those franchises.

On old gen consoles, yes. On PC, it was merely a rough launch, not the industry shattering event it was made out to be.

(First off, the last gen versions were a shit show and I fully believe CDPR should have bit the bullet and cancelled those preorders. That was a failure at the high levels, not with the devs. This is about the PC version:)

Hey yo, I’m one of those idiots that gave it a good review, and that was day one. Yeah, it had a bad launch, but I’d argue it was no worse than No Man’s Sky, or Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, or The Witcher 3. All of the above are some of my favorite games of all time.

If you don’t like the core game, cool. Agree to disagree. But the things that people love about the game now have been in there since 1.0. Sure, there are genuine criticisms to be made, but most of the hate this game got has either been patched out or was pure bandwagon hate to begin with.

As a gamer who has owned every Xbox from the OG to a Xbox One S, I just don’t understand Microsoft’s strategy for this generation. Vanishingly few console exclusives, and most of those shipped on PC, too. As someone with a decent PC and enough income to buy 2-3 consoles per gen, they just haven’t given me a reason to buy an Xbox Series console.

I know they hoped to sell Game Pass to PC only players, but without the lock-in of a console, there’s just no incentive to buy it over a PS Plus subscription and individually buying the exclusives I want on PC.

Now they’re burning bridges with players by closing down beloved developers, even if their last title was successful. I wonder what Ninja Theory devs are thinking with Hellblade 2 a couple weeks out.

I’m curious how the stats look for 76 vs the rest of the games. I was thinking about it this morning, and I still have no desire to play 76. I don’t want a multiplayer experience in my Fallout, and the fact that I’m not free to heavily mod the game because of that forced multiplayer experience just kills any interest I have in trying it solo.

Given the popularity of the show, I just feel like the chances of us seeing another Fallout game without an Always-Online requirement and the freedom to mod it (without paywalls or outright charging for mods) get slimmer every day. I’d be willing to put up with that decrepit engine for one more game if it meant we could get a good mod scene going for it.

There’s also the Wasteland 2/3 engine which would be a good fit. A lot of the assets from 2 would probably drop right into Fallout, given the similarity in tone and setting.

… Well, I say that, but now that I look it up, the Wasteland games used the Unity engine so… Yeah, a BG3 total conversion would be fun

This is the mouse that 30 year old boomer gamers refer to when they say, ‘They don’t make them like they used to’.

Fuck. When she mentioned the MX518, I started typing a comment about how great a mouse it was when I heard her say the above. 30 year old boomer? I’m a 37-year old millennial, dammit. Get off my virtual lawn, child.

For real though, the MX518 and G15 were an iconic pair for me. I got the G15 back when I worked IT for a game developer. I pulled it out of a tech recycling bin with the WASD keys completely worn off and probably over a million keypresses logged since it was unboxed. I used that keyboard for another million, easy.

Nowadays, I still use a G910 keyboard because I map PS scripts and Windows hotkeys to the macro buttons, but I gave up on Logitech mice because the buttons kept failing after a couple years. I’m currently using a Razer Basilisk.

3DRealms ran out of money and Gearbox bought the rights in 2010 ahead of the 2011 release, but according to Wikipedia, several of the 3DRealms developers were brought on board as a part of that process.

Duke Nukem Forever devs over in the corner hoping everyone continues to think BL3 was the worst game Gearbox ever made.

I recently plugged my PC up to my TV so I could game on the couch. It works well, but I had some kinks to iron out. Big Picture Mode can play a bit of hell with multiple monitors, and I’ve sat down on the couch with a controller just to realize Steam wasn’t the app in focus and had to go back to work the mouse enough times that I’ve got a wireless keyboard with trackpad on order. I also wrote a Powershell script to switch audio and display settings and bound it to a keyboard macro on my G910.

I’m happy with it now, but Steam Big Picture Mode is not quite plug ‘n’ play yet.

This has been going on for at least five years now.

The actors don’t look like they’re having fun. I commented in another thread that they seem to be attempting to make a Guardians of the Galaxy style movie, but chemistry between the actors and director were critical for those movies.

I think it’s a textbook Your Mileage May Vary game (pun mildly intended if you’ve played it). You have to have the tolerance for Kojima running wild and doing his thing, and it only works if you are engaged in the core gameplay loop, but if both are true, it’s easily a 70+ hour game. The Director’s Cut was the second game I ever took the time to Platinum.

I don’t think this trailer will sell many new players on the experience if they weren’t down for the first one, but I’m excited to play the sequel. Seems like it’s going to land some real gut punches.

There’s also an extended Gameplay Reveal on WoD’s Youtube Channel. I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, but the trailer hasn’t blown my mind. That dialog interaction looked so flat. Still, VtMB 1 had its own share of jank.

I’ll still reserve judgement until I can get my hands on it.

Remember that a huge number of Steam accounts exclusively play Free to Play games and spend no money at all. 6 of the Top 10 Most Played on Steam right now are F2P games and only one is from this year.

Going to second Midnight Suns. I’m a big XCOM fan, and while there were a lot of differences, it still scratched that same multi-genre itch.

I also played (in no specific order):

Hitman - World of Assassination - A whole hell of a lot of game in one package. Definitely the highlight of the series if it is your type of game.

Horizon Burning Shores - A worthwhile reason to go back to Horizon Forbidden West, though it was over sooner than I’d like. I’d feel better about the length if it was easier to miss the story, but anyone who goes from Forbidden West to the next game without playing Burning Shores might be caught off guard by the new character. (And I’mma be mad if they don’t bring back the new character!)

Death Stranding: Director’s Cut - Another YMMV game that will suck you in if you like good progression mechanics and don’t mind a slightly slower pace. And Hideo Kojima being Hideo Kojima.

Crisis Core - FFVII Reunion - You know the old school parenting style of making your kid smoke a pack of cigarettes so they want to wretch every time they catch a whiff of them? I accidentally did that to myself with JRPGs during the PS1 era. I thought maybe Crisis Core could coast by on nostalgia factor because I was able to enjoy FFVII Remake. Crisis Core was a big stinker though. The story hits every bad JRPG/anime trope you can think of (fucking Genesis… WOOF), and the quest design seems designed to embrace pointless backtracking and tedium.

Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty - I will argue until I’m blue in the face that while the PS4 and Xbox Series Whatever was a shitshow, the PC launch of CP2077 in 2020 was only a bit rocky. All the praises that people have been singing about the game since 2.0 and Phantom Liberty? They’re praising the same elements that have made the game great since Day 1. It’s just not sandwiched between T-poses and occasional CTDs any more. PC veterans who lived through rough launches of great games (like Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines or, hell, Witcher 3!) were right at home. The Phantom Liberty Expansion was a great excuse to revisit Night City and remember why I fell in love with the game three years ago.

Slay the Spire - Because I’m going to hit A20 and kill the Heart with Silent eventually, goddammit.

Baldur’s Gate 3 - Because best $50 I spent in 2020.

No Man’s Sky - I waited until this year to pick up NMS and this was another one that sucked me in for a solid couple months. Hello Games has sunk years into making this game a great bang for your buck if you like exploration and building.

I played the balls out of the Dead Rising series through the third game. Definitely check out 2 if you like the first one. Off the Record is a fun retread of the second game if you take a break before playing it. 3 was a bit poorer received at launch, but on an SSD, it’s still a damn fun game.

Never got around to the 4th game. It sounded pretty soulless from the reviews

He will not be the first. Here is a good run down. Ironically, Ali isn’t even the first Luke Cage villain to get a second role. Alfre Woodard played the grieving mother who convinced Tony to kick off the events of Civil War.

Gemma Chan was arguably highest profile in terms of plot importance if you don’t count Agents of Shield and the Netflix shows… She played a named bad guy in Captain Marvel, then Sersi in Eternals. You’ve also Michelle Yeoh who played a Ravager in Guardians 2, and Shang Chi’s aunt. A bunch more had voice/CGI roles for their second appearance, like Linda Cardellini or Benedict Cumberbatch.

Well, half-elf. But yeah, pointy ears are a bit more appealing than green skin and short noses or red skin and horns, I guess. People are boring.