Initial scrolling of the Steam Summer Sale seems pretty lackluster, but digging through the comments sections in other threads, a few gems have stood out, and it doesn't appear we have a thread dedicated to this yet, so post what you think are the best deals here!...
It's a great game, but it's hard to argue that it didn't change the genre, and all of multiplayer video games, for the worse. Multiplayer games can no longer be designed to just be fun. They must also be addictive, they must retain players, they must keep them coming back, etc. using every manipulative trick in the book like XP bars and unlocks. You might say MMORPGs did this first, but this was the application of that feedback loop to a competitive action game.
Potentially true. Or it was an accident that proved more lucrative than they thought it would. At the very least, it got there first and showed everyone else how to ruin multiplayer games.
I just picked up Dread Delusion, Shadows of Doubt, and Stellar Tactics. I played demos of Dread Delusion and Shadows of Doubt a while back, and both of them blew me away; the former just launched out of early access and the latter is supposed to do so before the end of the year. Stellar Tactics is one that's intriguing, but I haven't played it yet. I've been playing Fallout 2 lately, and it made me want to find a CRPG that was more successful at what Starfield was trying to do; I typed in some tags into the Steam search, Stellar Tactics was what I found, and I think it'll scratch that itch. Stellar Tactics is also in early access, and it's been in early access since 2016 with no end in sight, but it's very systems driven, so I'll likely be okay with playing it early anyway.
Coming to modern platforms August 1st, from Aspyr. Nice to see all these old games from 5th and 6th gen consoles getting re-released on modern platforms when emulation was basically our only option before.
That line about "only 20% stick around for the multiplayer" isn't exclusive to RTS. Usually I hear a number like 30%, even for other RTS games, but that's the case across every genre, even for games like fighting games that you think are only there for multiplayer. Only about 30% of people of any game's player base will stick around to play online matches against other people.
StarCraft II is one of my favorite games, but to get back into RTSes, for me personally, I'm looking for two solutions: I want it to work well with a controller, and I think I want to get rid of the fog of war. The controller thing, done well, solves the APM complaint already, since there's usually a speed limit on it. Tooth & Tail, Cannon Brawl, Brutal Legend, etc. give you a "cursor" character such that it doesn't matter what input device you're on, since that character can only move at a set speed. This isn't the only way to do it though; it isn't coded to use controllers, but Northgard operates on distinct tiles and things move at a slower pace such that a game like it could work on a controller without compromise. One of those compromises that games like Halo Wars or Battle Aces have made is that you can't really place buildings strategically, and that feels like they've gone too far. As for the fog of war, I recognize its strategic value, but it wrecks me mentally and emotionally. It's just so stress-inducing, even when I understand how to thoroughly scout. Cannon Brawl does without it entirely, and I can enjoy that game in a way that I can't other RTSes. You still have to split your attention paying attention to all of the different attacks in motion that your opponent has thrown at you, and so it doesn't feel like it's missing something. I'm the star of my own story, so these things definitely feel important to me, but I do feel like both of these things would do wonders for making the genre feel more approachable.
And of course, for me, it's a non-starter if the game is online-only. The two big RTS revivals with the most marketing right now are Stormforge and Battle Aces, and both are online-only, as is that Beyond All Reason game right now. These games have been cooking for a long time, and they're going to be launching into a live service game crash. Their lead developers may take away the lesson that the genre can't be saved when I hope that the actual reason is that customers hate putting time and money into a game that will likely be deleted off the face of the earth in a matter of months, not even years.
As far as I can tell, it was the original creators that they handed the franchise back to that fumbled it. I think there was a rumor that a classics collection was in development a while back, but that could be one of dozens of projects that got cut when Embracer lost that Saudi deal.
Thus far, Obsidian has been very good at creating games within reasonable constraints, which means they're typically not overscoped relative to the size of the game's actual audience. And they do all of this while being a multi project studio that's allegedly good to its employees.
Microsoft is a wrench in the works, but they're not building a game any larger than they've been doing for some years now. This is still a game that is scoped so that it doesn't need to sell 10 million copies to break even.
Nintendo: Actively standing against game preservation and ownership in an attempt to rent you their back catalog forever; their outdated hardware exclusivity model also stands in the way of future-proofing preservation. They hate their fans, and don't forget it. They'll sue you for playing Super Smash Bros.
Riot: They normalized rootkit anti-cheats, and for something that extreme, it had better render cheating impossible, but it doesn't. Purveyors of live service games, which also stand in the way of preservation and ownership by putting an expiration date on the game. For the sake of brevity, I won't expand on the live service concept again in later bullet points.
EA: Making billions of dollars off of legalized gambling for children. Always-online DRM on games that otherwise never even need to touch the internet.
From here, you can put most companies that have reduced their library down to live service games for similar reasons as the above.
These companies piss me off, but...:
Sony: Clinging slightly less to the outdated hardware exclusivity model and pivoted largely to live service games, but the writing is on the wall, so they may abandon one or both of those things in the not-too-distant future. Their new shenanigans with requiring PSN accounts on PC shakes my faith in that though.
Microsoft: Layoffs to rival Embracer, and not even a successful, acclaimed game will save the developer. Purveyors of live service games, not just from classic Microsoft studios but also from Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda, etc. Still, they eventually bent to the whims of the market rejecting their Windows storefront for anything outside of Game Pass, and they did a ton to make PC gaming as good as it is today, including standardizing a good controller for it.
Epic: Exclusivity that's actively hostile to what customers really want, purveyors of live service games, removing their classic games from sale from other stores and their own for basically no reason. But Tim Sweeney, in pursuing his own self interest to become king of the world, sometimes cries loudly enough to score a win for consumers, and Epic is going to be instrumental in any kind of change, in any country, for destroying walled gardens in tech.
Valve: Making untold amounts of money off of legalized gambling for children, purveyors of live service games, but they're also basically the only ones creating open ecosystems and allowing them to flourish.
Embracer's pretty low on the "piss me off, but..." list. They made a horrible gambler's bet and were surprised to have to pay the bill later, and they do have a few live service games in the bunch too, but outside of that, what they were going for is something I really wanted to see succeed. The big publishers stopped making a lot of types of games that they used to make as they honed in on a select few money makers, and Embracer was picking up old, discarded, forgotten properties or subgenres and trying to show that there can still be a market for those. The fact that the bet has failed could be up to their execution, since as Keighley reminded us at SGF, customers do in fact respond when the right games show up outside of those AAA publishers, and Embracer had a vision. They pursued that vision irresponsibly.
I never had a Dreamcast, but this was always the game mentioned in the same breath as Smash Melee back then when we were all getting competitive. These days, I'm a Skullgirls player, and MvC2 is a huge influence on it. The Fightcade implementation has issues, but even if the main player base ends up there for online play, it will be nice to learn the game with a better training mode and to boot it up without emulator jank. It's worth noting that cross play comes with its own downsides.
Concise, entertaining, and backed up by math. The editing is on point here, and it's an interesting way to frame a situation I've been in myself thousands of times.
Greetings fay folk of the fediverse, It's the #SteamNextFest , to honor this celebration of the indie spirit, let's share our mutual experiences, and talk about the games that impressed you the most today
The winners of this Next Fest for me so far have been:
Aero GPX
Someone finally made a new F-Zero. It just wasn't Nintendo. It feels like a proper modern version of F-Zero GX, but I don't think it's going to have online play. At least it'll have local multiplayer, which is far more important to me in a racing game.
Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age
This is a 2v2 fighting game that I'm far more likely to play than 2XKO, since that one will almost certainly have no true offline mode and require installing a rootkit to play. No thanks. This one operates on 3 lanes, so all four teammates can be playing simultaneously. The art is gorgeous, the netcode feels great, and I could see myself getting really into this. The only problem is I don't know all of the game's mechanics, since the tutorial for the game really only teaches you about the 3 lanes. I can figure some stuff out in its best-in-class training mode, but without banging my head against the wall, I won't figure it all out. I'm sure the tutorial will be more robust at release.
Tactical Breach Wizards
This is probably the most high-profile of the three, so I don't need to say much about it. It's a tactics game with magical powers and a good sense of humor, from the maker of Gunpoint and Heat Signature. I'll be playing the full release for sure.
Also, I'd recommend Big Boy Boxing, a game inspired by Punch-Out, which I've played at PAX already, and now I'm just waiting for a release date. It's that good.
They finally just let you put points into the primary attributes on level up! Hopefully they carry it through to the next (hopefully) Pillars of Eternity game, because I always took issue with the flat bonuses you got to offense and defense on each level up. Plus the rest of this looks good too.
If I was Microsoft and I saw Baldur's Gate 3 pop off, and I owned Obsidian and Pillars of Eternity, I would leverage the work they're doing with Avowed to prop up Pillars of Eternity III as "our Baldur's Gate 3". In a worst case, I'd imagine Obsidian would continue to intelligently manage their development resources to work more efficiently and release games more regularly than basically any other developer their size.
Then again, if I was Microsoft, I wouldn't shutter the studio that just made a game of the year contender, so who knows?
You think Pillars of Eternity II was only made for $5M? I'd be shocked. But still, assets made for Avowed could be ported right over to a theoretical PoE3, and that saves time and money. Here's hoping. I'll bet it happens, even if it isn't the BG3 competitor version.
Could be. If so, they did fantastic work for only $4.4M. The entire console business is in the process of being turned on its head, so nothing is predictable anymore, but if the world still worked now the way it did a few years ago, you'd eat the cost of making a must-play game knowing that you weren't going to make your money back just to get eyes on your brand and console. Two years ago, Microsoft might have agreed. Now it's anyone's guess.
Pillars 2 was already fully voiced, give or take some narration, and RPGs are more evergreen than a subgenre of first-person shooter. And I'll never forgive reviewers for dinging Outer Worlds for its scope. That's not a bug; it's a feature.
Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were “losing out” a bit to support the VO. Because… we were.
It's funny, because I thought POE2 proved quite handily that we very much were not losing out. Yeah, it raises the cost, but we've had a decade now of CRPGs bucking the trends of the AAA RPGs that motivated them, most of them fully voiced at this point if they didn't launch that way. POE2 launched fully voiced, and it's still one of the best of those.
A simulation sandbox game that seems like it's got potential. I hope it's got more of an objective than something like Dwarf Fortress with tons of ways to get there, personally.
I can't even think of a mobile game in the ballpark of what this is doing, but its closest competitors are Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld, which aren't exactly known for being lookers either.
Not according to the voice over or description in the video. It's also why they quote a Dwarf Fortress developer in the opening seconds, talking about how impressive the simulation is. Dwarf Fortress in that it's simulating this entire city for you to mess with, but the different take being that you seem to only control one person in it.
That was the comparison they're establishing, not that it's a colony management game, yes. But neither is this game indicating it's anything like the Sims; Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld would have more in common with that.
I don't need much. Shadows of Doubt's objective is "solve this murder", and for this game, maybe it's "amass a ton of money so that you can X". Just something to propel me forward to come up with a way to achieve it, because I won't be a baker for the sake of being a baker, probably.
Now let's see how they screw up the multiplayer. The world could use more FPS games closer to the original Perfect Dark than what we typically get out of the genre now.
The examples of games that made a comeback were No Man's Sky, a sandbox game missing features where, development-wise, it's very feasible to add in missing promised features; and Cyberpunk, a game with good bones that didn't function a lot of the time. Starfield's problems are deeper than that, at least from my perspective.
The tech tree and leveling system is "improve by doing", which runs into the same problems those systems always run into, which is why no one else does them anymore. It incentivizes me to get shot in combat on purpose so that I can improve my healing, and other stupid behaviors like that. So many of the quests are thoughtless fetch quests with nothing interesting along the way, and the game would actually be better with their omission than their inclusion. The endgame mechanic is an interesting one on paper, but seeing as the major quest lines only really play out one or two slightly different ways, there's not much that's interesting about going back to them, and you can also do all of them in a single playthrough, so there's no need to engage in the endgame mechanic to see it. These are some of the problems that can be fixed but will likely be so costly and time consuming when there are Elder Scrolls and Fallout games to be made that I doubt it'll ever happen.
The more fundamental flaws are that you can't spec your character to interact with the world in wildly different ways and get clever with its systems; the universe doesn't flow together the way that one of their terrestrial open worlds from before do, and fast travel is now mandatory; and the story walks right up to an interesting sci-fi story and stops just short of being good. To change these things sounds a lot like making an entirely different game.
As I've gotten older as a player, I have found myself dropping some eras of gaming that I used to be nostalgic for. One of them is the 8-bit era, the NES days. I have played some of the best that system had to offer and I will never say that system didn't have any good games....
I've been fairly nostalgic for 6th gen consoles lately. Not that it was some magic time for video games, but there were certainly genres that were well represented back then that aren't so much today, like stealth games, arcade racing games, and campaign first person shooters with co-op and split-screen deathmatch. These days, every multiplayer game is designed to be played forever or not at all, rather than being designed to be fun with friends a handful of times.
Games also came out at a rapid clip, with most sequels coming out only a year later. Sure, some of that was due to crunch that we were oblivious to, but even if that cadence were twice as long, it would still be a huge improvement over development cycles today. Most single player games these days are open world by default, as though that's the natural goal for all video games, no matter how many of them it's made worse and no matter how much time and money it takes to make them.
Edit: I was half-awake enough while typing this that I ended up going almost opposite of the prompt, but so much to say that no era was all sunshine and rainbows, so I'll never be fully nostalgic for any era.
There were more than 10 great games on the N64, but you have to put yourself in the context of the late 90s. You excused the horrible controller designed for humans with 3 hands, because you got to play some amazing games, many designed to be played in four player multiplayer. Even if PS1 supported the feature, it may as well not have, since it was rare and required a peripheral no one had. Tony Hawk may have been butchered in some ways, but it wasn't butchered in the way that every PS1 game without pre-rendered backgrounds was butchered; even at the time, some of us couldn't stand that floating point rounding problem that made every 3D environment on the PS1 look like you were looking at it under water. I probably had 30 N64 games back in the day, and maybe history doesn't make as much note about Bomberman 64, Dr. Mario 64, or Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball, but there was nothing like it at the time.
Without consumers willing (and able) to make sacrifices (like paying higher prices) to reward good corporate behavior, and to avoid companies with purely short-term profit motivated behavior, this is what we can and should expect.
I think consumers have spoken, at least in part. What money can be made doing this job is more easily made on YouTube.
I get my gaming news from YouTube podcasts, mostly; at least those two do employ people actually doing some of that same type of work. It doesn't really matter how good Schreier is at his job when I'm not going pay for a Bloomberg subscription and someone else can more cheaply copy the same content and tell me what it said. The video format gives me more of a dialogue with the person who did the work. Plus ads are much more easily defeated on a web page than on YouTube, though they are still partially defeated.
As already leaked, the game is a 6v6 third-person hero-based shooter. Heroes include magicians, robots, creatures, humans, and more. There are currently 19 different heroes, each with different abilities and playstyles that you’d come to expect from a MOBA including ranged, healers, tanks, assassins, etc....
The one from Accursed Farms that set off this entire campaign. It's not about supporting a game forever. It's about not killing them intentionally when support ends.
What part of that petition says that it's to support games indefinitely? It explicitly requests action to protect customers after support ends. That inherently means it won't be supported indefinitely.
Now those online services are supported by digital sales, like on PC storefronts. Digital makes up the majority of console purchases now too, but they still continue to charge for online, so it's no wonder PC market share grew in the interim.
Huge W. Maybe the Stop Killing Games campaign, combined with some very real market realities, will save more games like this from companies with the liberty to do so. Unfortunately, it sounds like multiplayer will likely still depend on Steam servers rather than supporting LAN (I'd be happy to be proven wrong), but this is way...
You are asking if it could be same experience as an MMO-lite without being online. Think about it.
No, I'm asking if it could be the same experience without running it on someone else's machine. V Rising does not have an online requirement, but you can play it online on a server you control, perhaps even the same machine you use to play yourself, with up to like 60 players. Destiny is an MMO lite, is it not? For the most part, you're only playing that game 3 players at a time too, just like this one. Is there something that this game was already doing that it won't be able to do now that it's peer to peer?
No, I meant things that people would miss. I guess matchmaking fits that bill, but we'll have to see what it looks like outside of direct invites once this new version exists. Each platform provides free matchmaking services, so I'd be surprised if it didn't exist at all.
Gotcha. As I said in the original blurb, I'd prefer some way to play the game LAN that it seems like they're not doing. V Rising and most survival games, for all that I can tell, preserve all of those elements of MMOs or MMO lites, and it exposes how unnecessary it is to take away the ability for the player to host their own servers. Even in a best-case scenario where the game is super successful, you can run into things like login queues or server maintenance, so having the ability to play the game no matter what is a must for me. Survival games tend to lean into the use case of people who want to PVP and grief other players, which isn't for me, and I'd much rather co-op with some friends, but since I control the server, I absolutely have the ability to tune it that way. And since these games account for dozens of players on the same instance (Factorio goes up to 255), you're capable of replicating all of those random interactions, for as rare as they actually are in a game like Destiny or Warframe, which are my frame of reference for MMO lite games, because they have you spend most of your time in instances for only a few players.
Have you played Wayfinder before to say how much of the game up to this point was built on those larger scale random interactions as opposed to small instances with a few players?
Steam Summer Sale - Top Deals
Initial scrolling of the Steam Summer Sale seems pretty lackluster, but digging through the comments sections in other threads, a few gems have stood out, and it doesn't appear we have a thread dedicated to this yet, so post what you think are the best deals here!...
MODERN WARFARE: How Call of Duty 4 Changed a Genre Forever ( www.youtube.com )
The Steam Summer Sale is live now! ( store.steampowered.com )
Star Wars Bounty Hunter - Official Announcement Trailer ( www.youtube.com )
Coming to modern platforms August 1st, from Aspyr. Nice to see all these old games from 5th and 6th gen consoles getting re-released on modern platforms when emulation was basically our only option before.
Real-Time Strategy is incredible and you should play it ( youtu.be )
Timesplitters rated for PS4 and PS5, suggesting a PS Classics release ( wolfsgamingblog.com )
Avowed's Creators On Why Romance Was Considered, But Ultimately Not Included And Skyrim Comparisons ( www.gameinformer.com )
Embracer rolls out new AI policy to 'massively enhance game development' | Game Developer ( www.gamedeveloper.com )
Article textNewly-restructured Swedish conglomerate, Embracer Group, will leverage AI models to bolster game production....
Marvel Vs Capcom Collection
Oh this one I'm excited for, especially MVC2 since it's been in legal la la land for a while until now....
GOG Summer Sale has arrived ( www.gog.com )
How To Guess Correctly In Fighting Games ( www.youtube.com )
Concise, entertaining, and backed up by math. The editing is on point here, and it's an interesting way to frame a situation I've been in myself thousands of times.
Xbox Games Showcase Deep Dive | Avowed ( www.youtube.com )
They finally just let you put points into the primary attributes on level up! Hopefully they carry it through to the next (hopefully) Pillars of Eternity game, because I always took issue with the flat bonuses you got to offense and defense on each level up. Plus the rest of this looks good too.
Streets of Fortuna- Announcement Trailer ( www.youtube.com )
A simulation sandbox game that seems like it's got potential. I hope it's got more of an objective than something like Dwarf Fortress with tons of ways to get there, personally.
Perfect Dark - Gameplay Reveal - Xbox Games Showcase 2024 ( www.youtube.com )
Starfield: Shattered Space - Official Trailer ( www.youtube.com )
They're still trying to make Starfield a thing
Street Fighter 6 - Year 2 Character Reveal Trailer ( www.youtube.com )
The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered on PC has been ready for at least seven months, it’s claimed | VGC ( www.videogameschronicle.com )
What are some eras of gaming that you've stopped feeling nostalgic for? ( kbin.social )
As I've gotten older as a player, I have found myself dropping some eras of gaming that I used to be nostalgic for. One of them is the 8-bit era, the NES days. I have played some of the best that system had to offer and I will never say that system didn't have any good games....
IGN immediately lays off every non-UK person at their newly bought sites, including some key members like deputy editor Alice Bell ( aftermath.site )
Welp, this didn't take long....
New Details on Valve's New Game 'Deadlock' - Insider Gaming ( insider-gaming.com )
As already leaked, the game is a 6v6 third-person hero-based shooter. Heroes include magicians, robots, creatures, humans, and more. There are currently 19 different heroes, each with different abilities and playstyles that you’d come to expect from a MOBA including ranged, healers, tanks, assassins, etc....
Larian Studios has two major games in development and opens new studio in Warsaw ( files.catbox.moe )
Source: https://x.com/larianstudios/status/1792495491256664211
UK petition of "Require videogame publishers to keep games they have sold in a working state" just got thrown back to the Government
I just received this email saying that the response "did not respond directly to the request of the petition"...
Microsoft to release next 'Call of Duty' game on subscription service, source says ( www.reuters.com )
Announcing Wayfinder Echoes - Forging Our Own Path (online-only game soon to be playable offline) ( steamcommunity.com )
Huge W. Maybe the Stop Killing Games campaign, combined with some very real market realities, will save more games like this from companies with the liberty to do so. Unfortunately, it sounds like multiplayer will likely still depend on Steam servers rather than supporting LAN (I'd be happy to be proven wrong), but this is way...