I’d just as soon call this the death of co-op games. How many can be played without an internet connection? Split-screen, LAN, direct IP connections, and private servers are super rare now, and it sucks. Plenty of games in that chart from 2018 might not even be playable anymore, and plenty more can go down when Steam servers are down for maintenance or will be unplayable when you’re on a train or some other location without internet access.
It’s on GOG. Currently on sale for $3. It’s the non-remastered version, but I doubt that will hold people back much.
Gods Will Be Watching is the one that comes to mind for me. It’s a strategy game of sorts with about 7 or 8 totally different scenarios where you’re managing a very bad situation. In one, you’re holding hostages while executing a heist, and in another you’re wandering through a desert with limited resources. Each one is a balancing act, and a through line forms the narrative across them all. It was probably hamstrung by its punishing difficulty at launch, which was later addressed by additional difficulty modes, but there’s a lot of room to iterate on this concept without it ever getting old.
They’re not. This same curve happens with PvP games. The ones that don’t follow this trend are the exception, not the rule.
She was credited with a pseudonym. It happened plenty in the 90s, and this wasn’t long after. That means probably Hollywood talent. Someone prestigious who thought taking this role would be bad for her career, or maybe her agent thought that. But times have changed in the past 20 years, so maybe we can know who it is now.
But will they credit Eva’s voice actor by her real name this time? Whatever stigma there may have been in 2004 for being in a video game has got to be gone by now.
Better than the people giving it a bad review for difficulty, it would seem.
There’s a revolving door of hundreds of players in the community at any given time. You can find a game in quick match with absolutely no skill-based matchmaking at most times of the day, so it’s a total dice roll in that regard, or you can hit up the Skullgirls or Mix Masters Discord servers to find one at your skill level. Hunter Half Hands runs beginner tournaments, there are the Get Gr8 events to help learn the game, and there’s a community danisen league to fill in for the game’s lack of ranked mode that runs about 3 times per week in North America. This year, at Combo Breaker, the bracket was larger for Skullgirls than it was for Dragon Ball FighterZ. As far as I’m concerned, it’s more alive than I’d need it to be, but I’m happy it’s this alive.
The quest bugged out a few times, but with a bit of reloading old saves, I managed to transport some brahmin for about 3k caps, so I think I can afford that armor now.
They iterated on a stale formula in a way that those customers had wanted. Palworld is also far more competently designed than you’d expect from its premise, but that premise is the kind of satire that only people familiar with Pokemon would write in the first place.
I can’t speak to how Halo does it under the hood, but it’s very common to have a separate skill rating for unranked and to just not surface it, which is exactly what you’d want here, since that’s what prevents the brand new player from getting decimated in their early matches. You’re saying that the social playlists affected the same ranking as the competitive modes? That would be strange. In my experience though, a lot of new players bounce off a game when they get matched against people who are only marginally better than they are, which can be a matter of that other player understanding one thing that the loser does not. I’ve seen people call their opponents smurfs, and then when you check the replay, you realize, no, that player really is only a tiny bit better.
So sometime since I last played Call of Duty, they got rid of unranked modes?
No, I’m playing with the one that isn’t labeled “classic” in my GOG library. As far as I can tell, it may have cleaned up how that game interfaces with modern displays and maybe not much else. I’m level 7, and I just got to NCR with my posse of three companions. I had some encounters in the Wanamingo Mines and Vault 15 that wiped the floor with me, so I left them for now, though maybe with some guns I just picked up, Vault 15 would go better at this point. I’d love to get some better armor, but I have yet to find any in drops from enemies.
Is social matchmaking some synonym for skill based matchmaking? Because the latter is what it says they’re implementing, and it really shouldn’t be controversial.
Like everyone else, I’ve been playing Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. It is more challenging than the base game so far, but not dramatically so. The game gives you plenty of tools to deal with it, including situational loadouts to give you more damage or defense depending on what’s giving you trouble. Maybe a lot of people got too complacent with a single build that handled it all in the base game.
When I wasn’t playing that I was playing Fallout 2. It’s continued to be just what the doctor ordered after watching the Fallout TV show, but now I really feel bottlenecked by my gear. I don’t know if guns exist in the game that will do enough damage to take down some of the tankier enemies I’ve found, but if they do, I definitely can’t afford them. I haven’t even managed to find any armor to equip over my starting Vault 13 uniform, and there’s always a huge money sink for certain unique items or quests that eat into my savings just as I became a thousand-aire. I’ll have to find some ways to earn more caps quickly.
And when I wasn’t playing either of those, I was playing more Skullgirls, but I’m always playing Skullgirls, so that’s basically the free space on my bingo card.
Well, the reason I suspected it was this instead was because, with ray tracing turned on high, it looked like shader stutter, but that problem had actually been solved a long time ago.
They enabled ray tracing on high by default, after I hadn’t played it in months. It wasn’t there before. When I turned it off, performance was back to where it ought to be.
Nah, man, I’m a capitalist, and this is stupid.
It’s not the engines’ fault that game development got longer. It’s that most AAA games over scope and go open world when they don’t have to, which not only takes longer to make but often results in a worse game. Make games smaller and iterate on them quickly, like the industry did 20 years ago. That’s how you make this make sense.
I’m still moving forward slowly in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Not much else to report there without spoilers.
I beat Fallout 2 for the first time. It got off to a rough start by only really allowing you to use melee weapons, even if you didn’t spec for them. It also ended in a rough spot by similarly not giving you tons of options for how to get through the final area, and the ones that were there reminded me a lot of 90s adventure games, with very specific solutions that you’d wonder how on earth you were possibly supposed to know that. In fact, once you get to the final step of retrieving the GECK, through to the end of the game, the game suddenly does a very poor job of pointing you toward what you’re supposed to do next, which stood out because the game had been really good at it up to that point. The progression was also really strange. Most of the power progression is going to come from armor, but they’re really stingy with letting you amass enough money to buy better armor, and armor and weapons rarely drop from enemies at all. Your lack of ability to take on combat encounters for most of the game limits how much XP you can earn, to the point where I spent 3/4 of the game at or below level 8, and then the last quarter of the game very quickly got me to level 18. Those issues aside though, the middle chunk of the game that forms most of your time with it was some of the best RPG stuff I’ve seen in the genre.
I then immediately moved on to Fallout 3, which I had played before over 10 years ago, and the last time I played it was before I played the classic Fallout games. Especially with Starfield fresh in my mind, I was expecting this to have aged worse, but so far, it really hasn’t. Bethesda made a lot of smart choices with how they changed the progression, like giving you fewer SPECIAL points up front and letting you put points into what you want with every level up; plus they flattened the progression on big guns and lasers, which were previously (in Fallout 1 and 2) a stat you could put points into and then never use until the back part of the game. Plus, the quest design is miles better than Starfield. Sure you take a quest that looks like it’s just a simple fetch quest, but when you get there, not only are you in the middle of a minefield, which already throws a wrench into the works of how the game typically plays, but then there’s a sniper trying to detonate them on you too. Just purely by the game’s systems, I get into a shootout with this guy, and my bullet happens to shoot the sniper rifle out of his hand, really showing the power of the sandbox in Bethesda games when they’re at their best. That interesting thing that happens along the way in your quest is the thing Starfield needed so badly. Fallout 3 sure isn’t perfect; the shooting feels bad, and they’re too content to let you follow objective markers instead of using your head more, but it’s good to be back.
I also started Life is Strange: Before the Storm ahead of Double Exposure. The opening scene was so bad that I almost put the game down then and there, but I’m told it gets better soon, and I did like the original Life is Strange.