I've been hmming and hawing in answering this. But I'm out for dinner and bored. So alot games original vision is to be a single player experience but then online features or an online overhaul is shoved by the aboves. IE SimCity was considered unplayable by thr online features, anthem was originally designed to be single player but was completely redone, etc etc.
Yeah I see that. I remember the disappointment of sim city.
It could be I don't follow games close enough to see what I'm missing. I find more SP games popping up in my feeds / friend recommendations than I could ever hope to play.
I definitely feel like mainstream AAA/AAAA and even iii to a certain extent have been progressively enshittified. But I've been at this a while, so I've seen how it's gone this way as more and more money got brought to bare on games.
The moment someone who wasn't involved in actually making some part of the game was expecting a fat return on investment was the moment the wheel of shit started to turn.
I fucking love civ 6 and I'll fight anyone who tries to tell me it's bad. I tried playing 5 as my first civ game around the time it came out but I don't think I had the attention span for it and I never got into it. Got 6 as part of a humble bundle thing and didn't touch it for years, randomly decided to give it a go and gyatdamn.
Civ 5 sunk it's teeth into me deep. I could never stand 6. I only managed about 41 hours into 6, but 5 I have well over a thousand in (even if steam only reports 600 of it)
I just hate the pathetic effort they put into the quotes. Sean Bean was a weird choice anyway ("what do people universally and forever like? Game Of Thrones I suppose!") but then they had him read quotes from literal blogs and often quotes that shat all over the technology you'd just researched. Oh! I completed a wonder! I definitely want to hear a quote about how it's obsolete now and its abandonment caused immense poverty in the Ruhr valley.
That and the movement towards nations instead of, yknow, Civilizations. Sorry Australia, you are not a Civilisation. Nor is Canada. Nor Scotland. How do we have Scotland - an independent country for less than 300 years - and not the fucking Celts.
It’s not the standard tho. Every style guide says this is an error it with the optional exception of single-character capital letters …such as Oakland A’s.
Same here. I spent about 30 minutes trying to play one (DoTA I think?) and figured out:
Each hero has a zillion upgrades and abilities
Each hero is basically on their own roguelite style upgrade path
The game has a dozen or more such heroes
icons and text too small to play on livingroom TV, controller play out of the question
at mercy of online match-making algorithm if I'm not in a league/clan/whatever
From this I could deduce:
There's no way in hell this is perfectly balanced - too many variables, it may as well be MttG
Going to take 20 or more hours to dial in a personal play style
Going to take probably 50-100 to develop a play style that can adapt to most situations
League play will probably kick my ass, requiring another 50-100 hours of practice/training
Causal play is out; likely can't pick up and play immediately due to lobby, variable match times
I'm not knocking the genre as a whole, but this is not for me. It's too far outside my typical mode of gaming and is likely to just frustrate me more than anything else. I'm familiar with hard to play online games like Quake, TF2, and even Soldat. But those have small power systems that, even with gross imbalances, were still playable because there were usually only one or two scenarios you couldn't overcome. Adding more on every axis just sounds like a wildly unbalanced system where the skill curve isn't steep enough, costing a lot of time invested in bad strategies before you figure it all out.
The appeal would be with a limited albeit large set of characters, items, & rules, you can have effectively an infinite set of outcomes due to the dice rolls of teammates but also champions/heroes chosen on team. It is almost impossible to see the same game twice unlike. There is skill expression & build mechanics that allow a player to outplay or recover matchups & adjust to the state of the game on the fly. With every game starting over at zero, you don’t get invested in building a specific character, but in mastering the gameplay which can go from micro mechanics to macro. I think a lot of folks liked it coincidentally at a time with better broadband for communications for this style of game, developers doing frequent patches to force meta shakeups & e-sports + streaming also taking off. But also a sunk cost fallacy of having invested the time to git gud not bothering to learn any game too similar.
Should I play Noita if it mostly caught my eye because of the cool physics? Hades and Vampire Survivors are the two roguelikes that finally clicked for me.
Haven't tried the other two, but I would say yes if you do roguelikes. The physics and reactions are the half of it, the wandbuilding mechanics let you build some completely bizzare and powerful wands, and with a little luck can start getting a godrun fairly quick.. but you're always vulnerable.
Highly recommend going in blind, there are a lot of secrets to find, different sidequests, etc, winning the game once is a milestone.
I typically buy all the "best game of the year" games at steep discounts. Some of them really embrace a "live" game service and require hundreds of hours a season, which isn't my thing.
But my most played game last year was Vampire Survivors, A single player game that looks like it came from the SNES era.
My absolutely most favorite single player and gaming experiences in general are:
Outer Wilds
Tunic
Their replayability is 0 but man do these experiences stay with you. I still think about outer wilds daily and i finished it last year.
Also a word of caution:
Both these games function with knowledge-based progression, so almost everything you look up about these games can be considered a spoiler and will lessen your experience with them!
I'm happy with a 17" laptop, though I'm having to use a usb keyboard. Also playing a game from 2015, Rebel Galaxy. Nothing really stands out, but it's interesting enough for my tastes.
It's an ok game, I think the first and biggest letdown is the 2D movement. While broadsides are fun, automatic turrets are taking care of everything for me so I only need to keep turning around to keep shields up.
I was so anti gaming laptop for years but my wife swears by them. I think I just got burned from crappy laptops around the 2000s - 2010s, because her latest laptop is a beast. Not to mention most PC games aren't trying to push to cutting edge specs anymore.
So I've turned around and I think gaming laptops are great!
I can relate. For a long time, I was all about a tower desktop, because I could upgrade it as needed. Last one I had I built in 2014, but didn't upgrade it in any capacity until 2017, when I gave it to my brother. If I wanted a better graphics card, I'd have to get a new PSU, and I also needed a better screen over my then 12 year old, 15" LCD screen. I didn't buy anything new outright as I was short on cash, so I spent the next 2 years using a laptop I bought back in 2012, which even played Fallout 4 on medium! That time with it really made me appreciate the form factor and portability
I moved to towers for the same reason years ago, but I basically never do major component swaps like I thought I would.
I've since realized that having a tower is really nice for other things though, namely maintenance and cleaning/airflow. My rtx 2060 seemed like it was on its way out a year ago (thermal throttling, even on way lower settings than it used to be able to run just fine), so I took it apart and replaced the thermal paste. Runs better than when I first got it. Got some new case fans recently as well and the whole thing runs cooler, quieter, and they use less power than my stock ones, which is nice.
Obviously the thermal paste thing applies to laptops as well, but laptops can be very tough to get open and dig around in.
Gaming laptops are great for those who don't understand they're getting a slower, harder to upgrade and more expensive system than a desktop.
Unless a college student in Tokyo with half a square foot of desk space, or travel a lot and like to game at the hotel, there are very few reasonable justifications for a gaming laptop. And even with those justifications they are a less-than-ideal situation. A desktop is always a better solution when feasible.
The thing I don't like about laptops are 1. Noise and 2. The bursty CPUs just don't mesh well if I want to run a swarm of VMs or need to just run a big compress/decompress process. I watched one laptop slowly throttle itself all the way down to 700mhz while I was messing with a bunch of VMs and it really made me miss having a desktop where it can just chill at 5x the speed at 100% utilization and chew through whatever is being thrown at it
Don't forget the needless implementation of always-online single player games. Even for single/multiplayer games like PoE or anything Diablo, there's literally no technical need to have a connection. It's just fancy DRM for Blizzard and an excuse to milk you more microtransactions for PoE.
And before anyone regurgitates Blizzard's BS about anti-cheat, it's very possible to keep multiplayer characters on the server and single player on your computer and never have them interact or permit single player loot to be sold on their marketplace. Not to mention their regular online check for D2R. Blizzard has ALWAYS used aggressively hostile DRM. If they could virus bomb thieves' computers then they absolutely would.
They never took it from me! Animal Well and Dread Delusion are phenomenal experiences just from the last couple of months. Indies are always generating good games, even when AAA is just following trends.
