I once made this argument to a game dev community on Reddit and was called crazy for it. There are games where I literally have to remove my headsets when they open. Devs that make games for pc should understand that pc users don’t just use their pc to play games, but also for other things. So volume control is obviously tied to each individual app/program.

I would like it if all games launched a simplified settings menu first thing after you open them up, before any cutscenes or intros.

I haven’t played it yet, still unsure if I will, but everything I’ve seen of it is nudging me towards not playing it. The dialogues I’ve watched were poorly written, cutscenes were okay at best, and the new companions seemed all to be obnoxious teenagers.

To me, Dragon Age Origins is the only game in the franchise that’s worth playing. The Warden is your character as the player, and that, to me, is the hallmark of a good rpg. None of the other Dragon Age games put as much effort into allowing you to choose and make your own character. The fact that DA:O had entirely different intros, that were both long, well written, and nuanced, based on your combination of class + race was the thing that sold me into that game. Hawke is not your character, but a character they wanted you to play for a reason, but I’ll give it a pass since the idea of Hawke’s story was fairly good, just not as well implemented (DA2 should have been a spin off and not part of the main series). The Inquisitor is even worse, it could have been your character, but it’s some weird generic character that’s there just to perform a function in the world. I’ve played most of DA2, but only a couple of hours of Inquisition, and it was enough to know that both those games fell short of Origins, and this one is looking even worse.

An RPG needs excellent writing above all else. Good gameplay comes as a close second, but it should be mostly about allowing players to forge their own path and have their own interpretations of the world. RPGs need nuance and subtlety, you can’t just constantly regurgitate something to someone’s face and expect them not to be annoyed by it.

They are in the same universe, and they are both FPS, and that seems as far as similarities go. But maybe it won’t be just that, maybe they’ll tie the plot of the new game to the old ones somehow, maybe the ship marathon crashed in the alien planet where the whole extraction thing happens, and maybe that’s the reason? I’ve never played the original games, but recently watched a youtube video about them and it seems that it was really loved by bungie, and they took many of the lessons from it to make Halo. My bet is that someone at Bungie has always kept those games in a corner of their memory, thinking about how they could revive them one day. Usually, when old franchises are revived, it’s because of some execs trying to make use of their popularity. But it doesn’t seem to be the case here, as Marathon was quite an obscure game.

It knows it wants to be an AAA game in 2024, and we all know what that means…

And paid expansions.

Yeah, I guess that would be the ideal. But starting with just non-commercial use is already way better than what we have today. People could use those resources to learn how to make games, and also to preserve videogames for the future.

They can dick about as much as they want, piracy will make sure to preserve the things they want gone. The reason they don’t want older games to be preserved is that new generations, whilst playing them, may come to realize that you don’t need gacha mechanics, stupid fomo, micro transactions, 6 different currencies, 3 different shop menus, 2 battlepasses and so forth to have a good game.

I’ve played twelve hours of the demo, ten of those last Sunday. Had a lot of fun. Was playing the game with a friend, and we loved the pvp part. The coolest thing about the game is that you can make and design your own trampler, using buildpieces. After we made our first trampler, we went around the servers trampling on everyone. We won a fight 2v3 and another one just after that in a 2v4 situation. Our trampler was designed from the ground up to be run as a two-men team, and it worked like a charm. I was above running guns and engines, and my friend was below piloting and running repairs, in a fully enclosed box of steel.

Ladder climbing is important, but most ladders are short ones. You only need to climb the radio tower once every hour or longer. It’s only when you extract.

I bought that game many years ago, played two matches, never could find a game anymore after that. Still have found memories of it though.

It’s Steam Next Fest rn, so I’m trying my hand at a bunch of demos. The ones that caught my attention so far were the demos for SAND and Sulfur. Sand was surprisingly fun despite the absolute god-awful performance. And Sulfur is just uniquely charming.

It took me a second to compute that Rare boss was talking about the boss of the game studio Rare and not a rare occurring boss in a game.

Baller move from the devs. I wish we lived in a world where the source code of older games were all released and freely available for non-commercial uses.

I like watching his reviews of new mmos and games, usually mine and his taste in gaming align, but I have known for a long time he is an asshole. But this one was a new public low for him (don’t doubt he has said way worse shit in private though).

Honestly, very few of the indie games release with microsoft and Epic banking are truly good. The best indie games right now are the ones released and self-published through steam, you just have to find the ones you like. Steam Next Fest is a good start if you don’t know where to look. The next one starts next monday, October 14th.

I mean, RIOT has been under Tencent for years at this point and they are mostly doing the same things they did back when they were independent. Only thing you could say that they probably changed is to focus even more on making “cute characters” that sell really well.

Have you ever played Diablo 1? Graphics in HoT straight up look like they were ripped from the og diablo 1. Also, both of them have a very similar loop: you go to the dungeon, you kill a bunch of stuff, you come back to the hub area. I never fancied Vampire Survivors before I had the chance to play HoT more than a year ago, and the similarities in graphics and gameplay loop between it and the first diablo were THE reason that made me buy and play the game.

EDIT: yes, Halls of Torment is the actual best in the genre. I’ve played most of the famous ones (Vampire Survivors, Soulstone Survivors, Holocure, Death must Die, Deep Rock Survivor, Pathfinder Gallows something…), and HoT is clearly a cut above the others in how solid it is built and how great it iterates on the ‘survivors’ trope. A game that is technically not a survivors but scratches a similar itch and has been hogging a lot of my time right now is Kill Knight.

I had some vague idea that it was bad, but holy shit…

It’s not what I’m saying either. I don’t know where you found any such claims in my comment. All I said is that games are supposed to be games, and failing is supposed to be part of games. You can fail even in a chill game like Stardew Valley, and you probably will on your first playthrough if you don’t look anything up. The game won’t game over because of it, but you will spend your entire second year suffering and trying to fix the mistakes you made in your first year. I can’t remember a single game I played where failing was not something that could happen that felt better because of it. Case in point: I was playing Jusant and was interested in the game, until I realized I couldn’t truly fail in that game, and all of the mechanics in place that looked like they were game mechanics, were actually just smoke and mirrors.

I can understand why most of the titles made it onto the list, but I can’t agree at all with the order of the list. The order was clearly made by some people who are heavily nostalgic towards older games. I’ve played Dragon Age Origins and The Witcher 3, and there’s not even a question in my mind that DAO is the better RPG out of the two. And, to me, also the better game (I can’t even understand how people find that the hours of cutscenes right in the beginning of TW3 is somehow fine). And don’t get me wrong, I love Dark Souls, but DS can’t be classified as a pc rpg unless you’re tripping. It’s an action game with rpg elements. I’ve also played Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2, and those games are not that good if you remove your nostalgia glasses. And I played both of those when I was a kid, so you can’t tell me it’s because I didn’t experience them in their time period. The writers of this list seem to love clunkyness and perceived potential above all else. The clunkier a game, the better. As seen on that high of an evaluation of Kingmaker, another game I played, can see as cool, but can’t bring myself to truly respect when they made the stupid decision to make combat spells like web last for their real 10 minutes time even after combat has ended, so that I had to stare at my screen for 10 minutes while my stupid dwarf failed check after check to get out of the web, and I had to actually wait 10 whole minutes for the spell to end. As an actual DM for TRPGs for 20+ years, taking rules from tabletop rpgs and porting them to videogames 1:1 just shows a lacking understanding of game design. A game with such an obvious flaw makes no sense to be placed that high into the list.