Might give CULTIC a try, then. It’s essentially a Build engine game along the lines of Blood with large maps that typically allow for some degree of nonlinearity and exploration. You end up with quiet periods of sneaking around and exploring to break up the combat segments.

Otherwise I’d say you can’t hardly beat the new Wolfenstein games. Varied gameplay, an actually decent plot, and when has shooting Nazis not been as American as apple pie? The first one hasn’t aged as well as the second on PC though. I get occasional frame drops and other oddities, but I suppose that could be an Intel drivers thing. Those idTech engines haven’t aged super great.

Yeah. Gabe Newell wasn’t wrong when he said he believed piracy was a service problem. Hell, I’d be giving Nintendo regular income if I could buy official ROMs for games I had legal copies of as a kid at a reasonable price and without needing to buy into the Switch ecosystem. I don’t know how you convince executives that they should change their tune, though.

Yeah, I get that. I’m on the opposite end where I want to be challenged and enjoy the feeling of beating a tough room or encounter. Sadly not all games are balanced well and increasing difficulty might not actually make much difference, in which case you might as well just play on easy.

We’re talking about food, not games.

How do you like boomer shooters?

Yeah, SC2 and RTS in general is - surprise surprise - about strategy way more than mechanical speed. You’ll see that with people taking a nostalgia trip in AOE2, too. You will eventually reach a point where lack of mechanical speed will hold you back in SC2 but that’s quite literally like the C and B tier professional bracket - you would already be at the point of being able to win a free dinner here and there in tournaments.

No real difference. Kind of a shit patch overall but I respect the effort. If they actually cared about the game’a economics they could have just re-read the essay written about it over at TL during the LotV beta. But Blizzard almost never admits fault, unfortunately.

The odd ways players come up with to communicate without text is definitely an endearing part of the design!

I mean, generally in those games you’ll pick up exactly where you stopped. You just have to take the extra step of quitting to the menu.

Difficulty doesn’t really have anything to do with story. Playing games on easy can even rob you of the enjoyment of the full gameplay mechanics. Noah Caldwell-Gervais’ recent video covering RE4R and RE9 is a good example, where some of their conclusions regarding gameplay design were only because they typically play on easier settings. Some of the things in question make more sense or have stronger legs when the game’s played on a reasonably challenging setting.

Tribes Ascend had at least two periods where it was good bordering on great and Hi-Rez fucked it up both times.

That company’s sheer incompetence is noteworthy. Global Agenda had serious first-mover potential and they bungled that too.

Being a meta slave is a mindset, not often reality. There are countless examples of players taking “useless” characters or builds far in the professional scene across many different genres and games.

The overwhelming majority of competitive games, across any genre, are determined predominantly via knowledge and skill rather than raw mechanical speed until the very highest level of play. Players who dedicate themselves to laddering will not get filtered by lack of mechanical speed until they’re already among the very best in the game.

Games that would be determined primarily by speed would become very boring to watch after the first few rounds. So developers generally don’t design games around it.

Twitch reaction time isn’t particularly important in most games. Quake and UT, sure, but even in those most twitchiest of shooters strategy will still carry you into the upper echelons of players.

Counterstrike is almost entirely based on spray control and map knowledge. Twitch reactions have only a minor role to play.

Even games like Starcraft are determined primarily by strategy and not mechanical speed. You could probably play at a professional level before a lack of speed compared to your peers would actually begin holding you back.

Plus… you can train reaction time and multitasking. An actual physical impairment like RSI might stop you, though.

The whole “ohhh I can’t do games because I have the olds” is such a nonsense cop-out. The rest of your post is pretty accurate, though.

It’s also why they keep dying. All of them operate off a walled garden model while simultaneously demanding “this is probably the only game you can play for a while” levels of time investment and using unlockables as the carrot.

So is it surprising that players don’t want to jump ship and leave all their skins and “look at me I’m special” shiny equipment behind for something that’s not much different than what they got already?

It’s the same thing as when every Tom, Dick, and Harry were sure they’d be the next WoW. Execs never learn.

Like so many things involving the internet, things were a lot better 15-20 years ago. Dedicated servers with active admins beat the pants off anonymous “skill based” matchmaking services we’re required to use now. Yeah, it’d take some time before you’d find a server that fits you but the search was worth it - and if you wanted to put in the money and effort yourself, you could just pay a service for server space and host your own!

No need to rely on AI chatbots to take out the trash, either. If someone was breaking the rules - which were set by the server! -, the admins would just ban them. Quick as you please. Players were anonymous like they are now, but you could ban their SteamID and it didn’t matter how many times they changed their name and thumbnail, and most other games had similar options. People that stuck around made friends and built a community, while others would move on and find a home somewhere better suited to them.

I miss it.

Co-op games pretty much always suffer from the fact that adding additional humans makes each player generally worse at paying attention and learning. So the game has to be designed as if it’s for a class of slow 8 year olds.

“Some effort” varies widely on how privileged you are to have wide selections to choose from where you get your groceries.

Sadly, the answer is probably that those creatives need to deprive the corporations of their products. Starve the beast. Hard to do that if you can’t afford rent, though…

I don’t mind people pirating ROMs or movies or music they’ve purchased previously and are no longer available in a reasonable manner. I do that myself from time to time. I don’t really “agree” with the concept of only buying a license instead of a copy, so I just see that behavior as addressing the obvious and IMO immoral imbalance.

I don’t have any sympathy for people who steal shit because they’re simultaneously unwilling to pay for it and unwilling to have the strength of character to walk away. I understand your points about social connections via game communities but I think that’s part of the cost of standing on principles. You can still stay in touch with friends from games without playing those games. I walked away from WoW and Blizzard in general for example due to their chain of bad decisions (like liquidating their QA and GM/CM staff in favor of chatbots that do a terrible job) but still occasionally touch base with people in those communities to see how they’re doing.

Lots of creators get bonuses or royalties based on sales.

My bigger point is that piracy is bullshit. Either pay the price asked because you want that game or movie so bad, or say the cost is too high and walk away entirely.

Pirating something you’re too much of a skinflint to buy is super immature “I want to have my cake and eat it too” mentality. People too spineless to make even a miniscule sacrifice for their beliefs.