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.
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, play the story and sidequests but don’t do any of the collectibles that are often necessary for 100%.
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.
And people wonder why I still play Factorio, Parkitect, ATS, or RCT. People suck and being able to ignore them is great.
bruh factorio is literally in active development and has a huge active community, who would even think twice seeing someone playing it.
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
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.
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.
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 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
10/10 setup. Only disappointment is that the PC is running Windows, and not GNU+Linux.
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
Well it’s an AI generated picture
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
Friends don’t let friends play League of Legends
That’s why I play DotA 😎
(Yes, this is a cry for help)
The rage-inducing MOBA’s what? Real cliffhanger at the end of this meme.
I also hate that the grammatical standard for all cap pluralization is to include an apostrophe. What is it the Oakland A’s possess!?
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.
should it be MOBAs?
💯
Even if it was the law I would fight it.
The DoTAs and League of Legends kinda games.
Never understood the appeal honestly.
They were joking about the apostrophe in
MOBA'sNever understood the appeal honestly.
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.
Rage-inducing Noita is my cup of tea ☕
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.
I started playing because of the physics.
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 just had a nice cup of Thai white tea, which induced the opposite of rage 🍵
I read this in Steve Austin’s voice
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?”
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.
“$3,000 setup to play a game from 2010.”
I have an RTX 4070 that I’ve been using to play Half Life. I’ve owned my copy for a while, but have never played it.
Drives my wife crazy lol
You can play it at “accurately model the thermal vibration of molecules” framerates.
Gimme dat visible Brownian Motion!
Isn’t there an RTX Version?
There’s a fan made mod for the original, but HL2 has official RTX support I believe
I upgraded to a 3070 from a 1080 just to play grim Dawn. Good games are good games
$5 Black Mesa brother. It looks phenomenal now.
If he never played the original I think it’s good he starts with it. Black Mess is great, but the original Half Life has a certain historical value (and is still a great game).
New Black Mesa is Half Life…
You are saying the third party remake in another engine from 2020 is the same as the original from 1998?
Black Mesa is literally just better looking Half-Life approved by Valve. I can really only say the same thing so many times before you understand that what I’m saying is what it is lol.
And you’re saying there’s no difference between playing Black Mesa today vs playing Half life today, and therefore he might as well start out with Black Mesa? Or what is the meaning of your reply?
Hard disagree. Games like Half life have a huge historical value for their impact. Playing the original is worth it. Especially if one takes the medium itself seriously. You wouldn’t say an original movie and a 22 years younger remake are “the same”, right? I think you’re playing dumb with me.
Love the Wikipedia link btw. I’ve played Black Mesa in its early access phase already and then later on again when they released Xen.
No, I just think you’re kinda dumb now looking for a pedantic fight on Lemmy of all places trying to argue that Half-Life and Black Mesa aren’t the same story and essential game lol.
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.
