What did they take from us? I haven’t played an online game in years now.
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.
And people wonder why I still play Factorio, Parkitect, ATS, or RCT. People suck and being able to ignore them is great.
I’ve been playing Planet Crafter waaay too much. Check it out if you like Factorio, Satisfactory, etc. It’s fun and super addictive. At least to me.
Dyson Sphere Program
I’ve played DSP, it’s a great game too. I’ll probably jump back to that when I burn out on Planet Crafter. The thing I don’t like about it and Satisfactory is conveyor belt management. The constant battle to rewire the spaghetti.
DSP recently got localized small distribution drones, you can convert any storage box into a tiny logistics station now. It’s pretty sweet, really reduces the spaghetti early on in recent playthroughs
bruh factorio is literally in active development and has a huge active community, who would even think twice seeing someone playing it.
I absolutely love rollercoaster Tycoon. There really isn’t a game like it.
Have you tried Planet Coaster? Might be up your alley.
You might like Oxygen Not Included as well
Here I am playing games from the 90s and 00s. Crazy that Quake III and Unreal Tournament are still active.
I often use UT, Q3 and CS 1.6 as examples of how long a game can stay active when players are given tools to setup their own servers, as opposed to companies handling multiplayer themselves (and often killing it off in a few years).
Single player is the best.
yes but i do miss co-op gaming.
Couch co-op, split-screen, hotseat; Kingdom Two Crowns is nice. So is Darksiders Genesis, For The King, Moon Hunters, Trine, etc.
Always on the lookout for other good co-op couch games, especially with a good story, but I feel that they are few and far between. :(
Brothers, It takes two and A way out.
A way out I really liked.
It takes two is absolutely amazing in every aspect.
Powerwash Simulator.
Deep Rock Galactic.
Rock and Stone, Miner!
A few games that are great single player can also be played with friends such as Terraria, Stardew Valley, Factorio and Minecraft.
10 year old games on a 4k OLED with maxed out settings is the best. Especially if it’s a game you can run above 60 fps.
100% Online gaming is pretty toxic and I love being able to play at my own pace.
Only exception to this for me was stardew with my wife.
Toxicity is one thing for sure but I don’t like how the commercialization of MP has shaped it.
Indie games have a very different feel in their online gameplay compared to “commercial” games.
Even way back, HL1 online and those online experiences felt so different because it was designed to be about the group experience rather than level up and get a skin, buy a weapon, our skill tree is massive. Sure technology was holding it back but I wish I could see what it would’ve been without the massive push for $$$.
I only want to play single player games. I’m not a super big gamer, but I just want campaigns. I recently got a PS5 and I’ve been struggling to find newer games that have a great single player campaign. RDR2 is my style, it’s my favorite game. The gameplay itself is a little problematic, but it’s gorgeous and the story just gets me where I live. And that’s what I want.
I only play single player games, but couldn’t care less about achievements. It is all about exploration, story, game mechanics and modding for me.
People treat achievements as if they are a status symbol. I mean sure, if you don’t know what else to do in a game, they can give you some goal, but IMO the game itself should encourage you to reach the goal, not some external badge. The experience doing the task should be the reward in of itself.
Achievement unlocked! You’ve completed the tutorial!
What’s even funnier is “14.39% of players have gotten this far before uninstalling the game and forgetting about it forever”
Achievement unlocked! You opened the game!
I feel like even that would have only like a 60% achievement rate.
depends on the game, achievement hunting can be a lot of fun in a game u already love its just more stuff to do and more reasons to play, sure if all the achievements in a game are things like getting all of a collectible or beating certain story missions/quests they are pretty boring but in pdx map simulators for example many of the are interesting run ideas or they indicate where the hand crafted content is at. And despite how much i love the game i dont think i would have played as much of Tyranny as i did if i hadnt decide to get all the achievements.
Sure there are some interesting achievment, like the Stanley parable ones. For instance: ‘Go outside: Don’t play the game for 5 years’ (https://thestanleyparable.fandom.com/wiki/Achievements)
Only silly people flaunt achievements. I use them as a meta-gaming guideline, which in a good game leads to interesting and fun challenges. In an RPG, it’s like a check box for getting every ultimate weapon, fighting every boss, etc.
Can also give me something to do in a game I’ve played but loved. Retroachevements for instance encouraged me replay SaGa (aka Final Fantasy Legend) with only one character in the team. Wasn’t too hard, but definitely a second playthrough thing.
Well, the issue with that is that achievements are global over all playthroughs, so it doesn’t really work as a checklist.
True, if and when I ever get around to replaying things that could be a problem (although the industry has seen to remaking everything I cared about, sometimes poorly, but that’s another problem).
Another shout-out to the nerds running retroachevements though because they thought it that; they have an encore mode that let’s you redo achievements. Although honestly you could just make a second account, that stuff is for emulated content anyway and it’s not like it’s DRMed, haha.
There used to be an effort made with how you play a game to get achievements. The Orange box was a great example of this. The ‘Little Rocket Man’ and ‘The One Free bullet’ achievements both made you play the game in a different way. Sadly now it’s mostly just ‘play the game’ ‘collect all the things’.
I love any game with a handcrafted map and some exploration. Even Satisfactory, a factory building game, does an excellent job at that. Procedural generation has its uses but lacks soul I guess.
Don’t care about achievements play games till like 70% then drop them. If it stops being fun I’m done, finishing a game is never a requirement don’t have time for that
I got to like 98% in RDR2 before I realized the gambling ones were going to be a giant pain in the ass. At that point I was in too deep to give up. I watched all 3 Robocop movies in one sitting and still didn’t complete the last blackjack one. Eventually got it but that was a frustrating experience.
The truly infuriating part is there’s likely lots of people out there that got them on the first try or by accident
Yea I was like looking for a solution online because I was like “there’s no way you’re just supposed to brute force this” and came across so many people that were like “no there’s no trick but I got in like 30 minutes”
Yeah unless the story is good I’m rarely going to stick around for the last bit, which is usually just padding. Actually, good difficulty levels / other accessibility options have been a nice development.
Lets you turn down the volume on the gameplay so you can finish for the story.
Yeah, play the story and sidequests but don’t do any of the collectibles that are often necessary for 100%.
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.
Patient Gamers stay winning.
Vampire Survivors is so much better than it has any right to be. It’s a great way to kill time if I have my Steam Deck around.
It never went away.
Yeah, single player games are nowhere near dead. If they ever did go the way of the dodo, I would probably stop playing altogether, because for the most part I just don’t like multiplayer games.
Was gonna say, nobody took shit, lol
And then you play Xcom 2 and realize that Dota 2 was meditative by comparison
99%? Are you sure?
I feel like I can handle being shot at by aliens better than most xcom operatives
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Well it’s an AI generated picture
How do you know he doesn’t have a dual boot
He’d have told you.
hes also calm instead of RAGING because windows has YET AGAIN overwritten his linux bootloader.
He didn’t spend half of the meme writing about the hours spent on forums trying to get each game to work.
Lol
I got Max Max on steam for $5 a few years ago. Worth it.
Steam version has Denuvo. GOG version doesn’t. Other than that they should be the same. I noticed only differences in load times.
It’s a fun game and runs great on a potato. $5 is definitely worth it.
Friends don’t let friends play League of Legends
That’s why I play DotA 😎
(Yes, this is a cry for help)
Or play factorio… Look at the time, ah it hasn’t changed, then an hour later notices the date incremented. Oh
Or Civilization, where one more turn becomes five hours where you’ve barely moved.
Gods I was strong then.
That’s when you find yourself asking the important question, “What day is 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.
Sometimes I even set the difficulty to Easy to really chill.
Wait, you play games to have fun and not as a duty? What about “pride and accomplishment”? ;)
The moment I embraced easy mode was when Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was like: “Is the gameplay we designed for our single player game too tedious? Then buy some legendary items with IRL money or maybe our XP cheat!”
I hate that games started designing around microtransactions. Like who thought “hey let’s take the worst parts of MMOs and put them into single player”. I loved AC origins and was so looking forward to odyssey and then I just bounced off it within a few hours because so much of it just felt like doing chores.
Extra bonus: Odyssey was supposed to feature a female lead, rather than the choice, but a misogynistic Ubisoft exec vetoed it, which I can only assume was reason for the absolutely garbage dialog.
The suits did. You know, so the line goes up. Because we’re all gonna die otherwise or something.
And replay games I already know by heart. I can start a new game or… play Starfox 64 again. “Do a barrel roll”.
StarFox 64 is so perfect in that arcade-game way, where you can technically finish it in a sitting but it’s so cool to figure out different paths and stuff. :D
“Okay guys, let’s ROCK N’ ROLL!”
In case you haven’t seen it, this video might make you very happy.
I had not seen it, that was pretty cool.
I’m glad I’m not the only one! Though if I play something for a second time I do tend to up the difficulty a bit.
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.
Rebel galaxy is awesome. Broadside combat with a smile. I hope you’re enjoying it.
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
Rebel Galaxy rocks. Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is also amazing.
