The Half-Life franchise, maybe. Half-Life 2 and up has a lot of physics stuff including the Gravity Gun, but considering HL1 is free to play via Sven Co-op it wouldn’t hurt to start there. You’ll need something like Synergy or Obsidian Conflict to play HL2 cooperatively.

So much to play that’s free nonetheless. If I’m going to get screwed by live service nonsense, it’s gonna be a game like Fortnite or the upcoming Skate or even Genshin Impact, not a full-priced title. All this means to me is that they just announced that there’s no reason to buy at launch, like with Shadow of War from ages ago with now-removed singleplayer loot boxes.

Fortnite, but like, not the battle royale part.

The Rocket League Racing, Rock Band clone, and LEGO survival mode are wild additions that I honestly really appreciate. BR got old ages ago, but now there’s a whole swathe of new free stuff to play.

Microsoft works in mysterious ways. Another oddity is how the Microsoft Store version of The Evil Within is a more-updated, more-featured version of the game than every other version including on console, and I don’t think they’ve ever acknowledged it. It only released when they bought Bethesda, so maybe it’s a similar story here where they’re just putting out some unreleased work.

Or maybe not idk I’m not omniscient

My $300 Brother laser printer that does everything works just fine because it wasn’t designed to be a money-siphoning piece of shit.

People used to form “gaming-clans” in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.

Unlikely imo, because modern game devs have been killing the viability of that for years. User-hosted servers are gone, crossplay is reliant on SBMM to be realistically possible, and private matches often block players from receiving XP and rewards because they’re worried about FOMO and people getting too much fun without spending enough. Even CSGO got an update in the months leading up to CS2 where they removed the ability to earn drops on community servers, driving another nail into the coffin as one of the last kinds of these games that still retain the mere ability to run servers of our own.

Valve.

Not new management, but they definitely changed direction. From Portal 2 to Half-Life Alyx was a dark age of live service titles and hardware. Fortunately, it seems like they’re finally getting back to their old selves?

Alyx was supposedly their re-entry into releasing games (hopeful that HLX is good), the Steam Deck caused them to go back and fix several of their titles (plus do the huge Half-Life update we just got), and while they’re not exactly making their games as open as they used to, they’re letting the community handle things like TF2 events and L4D2 patches.

So, I dunno, cautiously optimistic for their future. At least as long as Gabe is running the company.

I wouldn’t play Web3 games, I don’t really see a future for web3

There’s no future for these because the big players that could pull it off have no reason to do so. Game publishers love FOMO and thus hate trading, and platform owners would probably look at Valve’s success with the Steam Marketplace instead of the continued failure of crypto.

I also don’t really see a future for VR/AR.

This one doesn’t have that same sort of constraint where it fundamentally doesn’t make sense.

VR has a future as an entertainment system for sure. Probably not as widespread as simply grabbing a PS5 and playing Madden, but there’s a ton of potential especially as older hardware drops in price and game libraries continue to expand. Porn is gonna keep this concept alive forever either way.

As for AR, its future is utility. Seeing map directions on the road itself, interactive models during meetings, having real life Shadowplay built into your glasses since they’re camera peripherals, etc. Or porn but in your room with your own parts idk.

Watch the video.

Family plan split three ways comes out to about $7 a person per month, if I’m remembering right.

To be honest, Google is poor enough these days that I just use Bing for the Microsoft Rewards points.

T-Mobile

So it’s useless if I go on a road trip?

Depends on what the public wants. Apple kills backwards compatibility every couple of decades and they have an even more minute gaming presence than Linux does. Like, , their most popular title, even as a company deathly afraid of the Windows monopoly.

You could make arguments for consoles and such, but that doesn’t solve the problem of Macs being particularly costly.

Oh boy a slow moving camera panning over some NPCs to show the scenery and some cutscene shots of a game launching a year from now, two years if on PC.

I’m Rockstar disillusioned, that’s the problem with waiting over a decade to put out a sequel, I went from 15 to 25.

I don’t understand how people hang out in these places. It just doesn’t seem like a system conducive to discussion. The forum/link aggregator format works much better imo

I see that as a net positive, because the alternative is likely them killing mod support altogether.

Well, when someone else can make a shooter that scratches the same itch, I’ll play something else.

It’s a singleplayer/co-op title, why should I care about updates?

I actually use Bing so that I get Microsoft Rewards points, meaning I gain money by not using Google.

But I understand privacy homies going DuckDuckGo or something else.

• LET ME TURN OFF THE CLAUSTROPHOBIC VIGNETTE, PLEEEAAASSEEEE. Even games like Cyberpunk 2077 that have gained countless features over the years and have individual HUD on/off switches still ignore this.
• UGC as a whole. I grew up on Half-Life mods, custom Counter-Strike: Source maps, and LittleBigPlanet. The fact that we’ve pretty much abandoned that outside of Halo, Counter-Strike (just barely, mind you), and more recently Fortnite with proper Unreal Engine support is a terrible thing. It makes more sense than ever in an era of live service where you want players to never stop playing.

“Good” is subjective. I know CoD is mangled corporate moneygrab trash, but it’s still really fun, so I play it. The only reason I bought Cyberpunk was because I knew everyone was going to be talking about it and I wanted to be able to be part of the conversation, and it didn’t disappoint.

I mean, not really. They had it working out great for years.

Then they killed the API.

Sony confirms cyber-attack exposed details of nearly 7000 current and former

😳

employees

😴

It’s an eight year old smartwatch. I feel like most of the target audience already has a newer model.

And yet some of my favorite indie games are games practically nobody’s ever heard of. Most recent was Metal Unit, a game that I don’t know how I have in my Steam library and somehow evades the internet’s favorite rule despite the main character being an anime girl in a bodysuit. At time of writing there are 17 players in-game.

So while good games are good and bad games are bad, the good ones may not necessarily be sustainable.

Mainly AI Dungeon because I’ve been hella tired and it requires minimal input compared to other games, but I loaded up my three year old Cyberpunk 2077 save and started playing again with 2.0, and Counter-Strike 2 just dropped so I’ve been giving that some of my time.

The fad isn’t over until there’s something to replace it. Right now, I’m pretty sure we’re securely in the era of “PvPvE extraction shooters” now that the top three Battle Royale podium has ended up Fortnite, Call of Duty, and PUBG.

Though, frankly, CoD DMZ is probably going to win Extraction Shooters for no reason other than that it’s free and all the stuff carries over into CoD BR and the standard multiplayer. If they don’t kill carry forward next year, they’re in a position for some serious success. I’ve given it a play for no reason other than that it’s the easiest mode to get battlepass progression in and the M13B was locked behind playing it.

Considering HZD is, to my knowledge, the only Sony game on GOG, I’d say they gave it a shot and it didn’t pan out.

No they can’t. We all found out during the Quest 2 era that their elite straps are fragile and prone to snapping. 100% of the advice in the community is to buy third-party.

I imagine this is a mix of things. UE5 has officially been out for a while, their biggest competitor just offed themselves, Fortnite’s UE editor support is out and thus Fortnite probably doesn’t need as many devs now with UGC to pick up the slack, etc.

That’s still a huge chunk of people though. Wonder if all these financial gambles they’ve taken are starting to add up.

Just update a current game and put a 2 on it?

It was a “ground-up” rebuild on Source 2, so while it carries forward all the CSGO content and aims to “play the same” in terms of movement and gunplay (with the exception of improvements like subtick actions), I’d say it’s way more of an actual “2.” New engine with all kinds of fancy lighting and other improvements, new assets (including weapon and character models, some of which were still originally in the 2013 CSGO launch), remakes and retouches of maps, vastly improved map-making tools, some nifty accessibility features (your walking sounds appearing on the radar) and quality of life features (selling back misbought items, or the picture-in-picture grenade throw practice camera), and some huge balance changes (games are now shorter, players now need to more strategically choose their weapons, smoke grenades are voxel-based and can be cleared out with gunfire and grenades, skyboxes are now open for grenade tosses, etc.)

It looks the same but with some lighting changes on the surface, but it’s actually huge.

Not allowing to ship out paid orders is not forgivable no matter the situation imo.

Not to mention accessibility settings in games themselves. Fortnite has an option to visually show sounds and their directions on the HUD and it was amazing when I spent a month with no audio solution, I can’t imagine what a breath of fresh air it is for deaf gamers. The Last of Us Pt2 is also wildly player-friendly, and recently I’ve even been seeing some indie titles like Metal Unit do their best to assist players and let them enjoy the game.

Accessibility is only getting better, and I think this cynicism is unwarranted. We should certainly keep up the fight and demand for it, but you go back two decades and games didn’t even come with subtitles as standard. Doom 3 still pisses me off in that regard.

I believe the originals are restored now

Nope. They temporarily made it so that buying Definitive Edition on the Rockstar Launcher granted the originals until outrage died down, but the original versions of the games still require either a disc or piracy now that they seemingly removed even that. I can confirm that the PS4 versions of the games that were the PS2 versions in an emulator are still missing, too.

Because Chrome just stopped working on my PC one day like a decade ago.

Damn, guess I’ll finally need to upgrade.

Why? Guardians of the Galaxy is what they were working on. This game is why Shadow of the Tomb Raider was mid.

Sony management didn’t even see a point to backwards compatibility until recently and still can’t be bothered to figure out PS3 emulation. It’s easily the console’s greatest flaw imo.

All other game developers in the history of games have understood the concept of making the lowest-powered device you’re launching on the baseline for development. We’ve dealt with crippled titles on more powerful consoles for ages, I’m sure Larian’ll figure it out for their next game.

it really was just “another Saints Row game” but with better characters.

This is sarcasm, right? If it were even close to that we all would’ve loved it. To me, it felt like the worst parts of later SR games mashed up with a desperate attempt to replicate Watch_Dogs 2’s vibe. I don’t play Saints Row to play as a dude trying to pay off their student loans while fighting “gangs” that have access to random bullshit technology like neon batons that spin real fast and deflect bullets. That’s the type of stuff that should’ve stayed in Agents of Mayhem with its far less grounded setting.