When the future is crappy, yeah.

I don’t know if anyone else here read the books as kids, but I’m hopeful they’re leaning more into the lore of D’ni, which the older games were always (imo) too slow and puzzle-focused to deliver well.

what a horrible lineup.

“NEW IP” (2031)

TWENTY. THIRTY. ONE.

Where did he say he was smarter or wiser? I must have missed that quote.

Yeah, I can imagine the frustration of seeing people who don’t know anything about what happened during development blame you as a dev for something that may have been design decisions or budgetary or time constraints that you had no say in or control over.

“So sure, you can dislike parts of a game,” he concludes. “You can hate on a game entirely. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is (unless it’s somehow documented and verified), or how it got to be that way (good or bad).”

“Chances are, unless you’ve made a game yourself, you don’t know who made certain decisions; who did specific work; how many people were actually available to do that work; any time challenges faced; or how often you had to overcome technology itself (this one is HUGE).”

This is a totally fair take. He explicitly says it’s fine to not like the game, but just don’t try to pretend you know what happened on the back end to make it the way it was, because you’re probably gonna misplace blame.

Yeah, if you didn’t enjoy MTaP I wouldn’t recommend it. :)

My Time at Portia and My Time at Sandrock (sequel). They’re both on Switch.

I think MTaP and to a lesser extent MTaS both really carried over a lot of the complexity from Planet Explorers, Pathea’s first game they released internationally. It’s a survival crafting game, with a LOT of complexity (e.g. manual, voxel-based weapon and vehicle designs). I don’t think it worked well in combination with other systems like farming being very underdeveloped (in MTaP especially).

Why does “Stardew Valley” get it totally right, and the rest not get it right at all?

I am not an expert on SDV, but my wife plays basically every HM-like out there, and her take is that Barone focused so heavily on the ‘economy’ balance in SDV that all of the activities feel like they’re worth doing, so it doesn’t become “only farming”, or “only adventuring”, etc, like many others do. Even just picking up wild plants feels worth it when you drop them in the sale bin in the evening.

I really dislike that it’s game news outlets that get the vote, because they’re just plain gonna have a different outlook on games than people who don’t have to engage with ones they both do and don’t like as a job, and it really shows in the kind of games that get picked (shorter main storylines, narrative-driven), and the ones that don’t (sandboxes, open-world games, strategy, simulation games, etc).

And that’s only even when it’s not a selection of the 5 most well-known games, since just like the Academy Awards, not all of them have even played all the games they’re voting on.

I know very well what was shown and what was stated, versus what was there at launch, but I’m interested in what you were going to cite. And I specifically asked about what was being referred to, because there’s a huge gap between the validity or veracity of many of the claims of lies.

Because if it’s just about the multiplayer working like anyone would obviously expect multiplayer to work, rather than just being able to see message boxes left by other people, yes, he lied to players about that, and he’s apologized many times for that, and talked about and shown the development pitfalls they ran into while they were trying to build the multiplayer, and has since implemented what was originally promised.

But I see people make other claims, almost always based on the original cinematic E3 trailer, which usually boil down to, “x feature that was present didn’t look like it did in a pre-rendered eye-candy trailer”, or things like “the flight system wasn’t 6DoF” which never even got mentioned, but was just assumed because spaceship, etc, and years later players still lie about what was or wasnt promised for a game that has since grown into having more content than was ever promised.

Which lies were those, exactly? Please be precise so you can’t move your goalposts later.

This is the worst take I’ve seen in a LOOONG time. The language learning is one of the best systems in NMS. The developers literally spent YEARS adding to the game, completely for free, but they don’t “respect their players”?

Not every game has to be for you, bud.

It’s sad, but I think that the massive explosion of really high-quality smaller games means there’s ultimately less money to go around from buyers, all at the same time as big companies are consolidating funding into a few big-name series.

Anode Heart, Moonstone Island, Spirittea, My Time at Sandrock, Empty Shell, Quasimorph, Fae Farm, Sunkenland, Black Skylands, Techtonica, The Leviathan’s Fantasy, Forever Skies, Ghostlore, Roots of Pacha, Stranded: Alien Dawn, Homestead Arcana, Terra Nil, Sifu, Industries of Titan…

All of those released this year. That’s a LOT of really good small games (and that’s just from the games I got), even if they’re not all technically indie. I personally LOVE space games, as well as colony/group management sims, but Jumplight Odyssey just didn’t feel like my vibe, sadly.

I’d argue that any software that is adversarial towards the user/computer owner, and takes actions specifically to hinder an action by them, on their own machine, is malicious.

We’d be absolutely apoplectic if the government demanded we install a surveillance tool on our laptops in order to e.g. access the DMV website or file our taxes, but when someone tells us to in order to play a game, it’s okay? Nah.

I remember back in like 2016~2017 seeing one of those spinning aimbots with a wallhack, just sitting at CT spawn in Dust 2 and killing everyone on T. We all watched it for 5 minutes until it got VAC-banned. That one was hilarious.

I do wonder if West Coast US (where I am) is more heavily policed than other regions. That would make sense if Valve is doing some kind of post-match automated analysis of player behavior, which would probably be too compute-intensive to run everywhere.

I’m usually ranked either 3rd or 4th in FFA deathmatch matches, so if they’re hiding it so well that they’re not pushing the non-cheaters down, what is the point of cheating? And if they’re hiding it so well that they’re not actually even winning, how are they causing so much grief?

Maybe it’s a bigger issue in Ranked/ competitive, but if you’re not actually on an esports team I just don’t get caring about rankings and playing ranked (is it just for the ranked season profile badge? I did that one year to get to Gold Nova 3, and then never bothered again).

In CS:GO I have/had ~1600 hours. In CS2 only about 120 so far.

I have run into maybe 3 people that I legitimately think were cheating, in 6+ years of CS:GO, and now CS2.

Where the hell are you running into this many cheaters?

Ground Control is does not feature the base-building of WC/SC, but are excellent RTS mission-based games.

Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is another excellent one.

Earth 2150 includes the base-building, as well as a very cool “persistent homebase” mechanic for the singleplayer campaigns, where you build bases in the mission sites but also have a home base that you can transport units to/from, for use in future missions.