And how exactly does a free fly invalidate the article about refunds requiring an NDA? Nobody is questioning whether there’s is some semblance of a game in a project that has been in development for over a decade, it would be a massive red flag if there’s wasn’t. What people are questioning is why is there a secret shop page that players can access ONLY after they’ve spent a thousand dollars on the game, and then another secret shop page after they’ve spent 10k? What’s up with the predatory practices?

Is your response “No no no, don’t look at those controversies. Look at how pretty the game is”? A free fly event doesn’t invalidate the claim that you might need to sign an NDA to get a refund. It doesn’t invalidate the claim that the devs had to pull 7 day work weeks. There are loads of criticism that the free fly does not address at all. These articles would exist even if everyone tried the free fly.

From my experience games that get “hate articles” are games that are already doing questionable things. You don’t get such articles circulating about good games because that shit just won’t stick. When it comes to SC and CI that shit does stick.

Please no. Something faster than a cyclops. I enjoyed cyclops being a mobile base, but my god was it slow. I don’t remember what issues I had with the sea truck but I’d probably still prefer the truck to the cyclops.

I don’t mean less casual in that sense. I actually had 3 main points in mind that make satisfactory more casual.

First are the aliens. The evolution and pollution doesn’t stop which means in a way you are fighting against time. If you don’t keep up with it the aliens will attack and destroy your base. I know they can be turned off but the game is designed with their attacks in mind and you’re skipping entire production lines if you turn them off.

The second reason is factory building. I think the extra dimension in Satisfactory makes factory building much easier. If you run out of space horizontally, build up. In Factorio you better plan out how big your factory is going to be because if you run out of space you’re probably going to start spaghettifying your factory or you need to start tearing down parts of your factory to make more space. In my current satisfactory factory I just built a whole new level ontop of my old factory because I couldn’t be bothered to clean it up.

And the last point goes together with the previous point. You have so many things you need to produce. The entire belt production thing for example. If you want express belts you need to build the fast belts which needs the basic belts. If you want express splitters you’re going to have to build the fast splitter, which needs the basic splitter which requires basic belts. Meanwhile in Satisfactory if you want a faster belt you just need the new material for the belt. Factorio production pipelines are like a deep well while Satisfactory production lines are more like a wide puddle (that only towards the very end can go deep, like ficsonium fuel rods). Satisfactory has overall a wider variety of things to produce (if we exclude the tiered items in Factorio), but they’re much less dependent on each other. For example if your industrial beam production isn’t at peak performance that not going to stop you from getting the higher tier belts because they need aluminum which are built from a completely different raw material. Solve aluminum production and you get new belts. Compare that to Factorio where, lets say you want to start using express belts but you’ve been kinda winging your belt production. Well first you need to fix your fast belt production, which then means you need to fix your basic belt production which means you need to fix your iron production which means you have to scale up your iron mining.

The factory can grow over your head but Satisfactory still has easier production pipelines, easier factory planning and you can take however long you want to figure out how to build your factory. To me all of those things indicate that Satisfactory is a more casual experience.

I would personally recommend Satisfactory over Factorio. I think it’s a more casual experience while still scratching that factory building itch.

The controller experience is really well thought through and the game is definitely playable with the controller. That said, I still chose kb+m because I felt like I got a better overview of a situation and the options I had in that situation, but I could see why someone would think the controller option is more immersive.

Pretty much what I’ve been saying for almost a decade, mostly in response to “game development is expensive, that’s why AAA games need *insert extra revenue streams*”. My response has always been that games are bloated with feature creep and if there was an actual issue with development costs the first thing you can cut are features that don’t really add to the game. Not only do you cut development costs but you arguably make a better product.

Nice to get some validation because it’s been a rather controversial opinion. People have argued nobody would buy AAA if it’s not an open world with XP, skills and crafting. Or a competitive hero based online shooter with XP, unlockables, season pass and 5 different game modes. I guess now people don’t buy those even if they are all those things

Everybody doing it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a bad thing for customers and a reason for piracy.

But that’s on Nintendo. For those people the game doesn’t cost $70, it costs $200+ even if they buy a used Switch lite. Nintendo is deliberately leveraging their games to make people buy their console when those people just want to buy the game.

They want to have their cake and eat it too, and that is most likely one of the biggest reasons people pirated TOTK.

For movement I would take something like a HOTAS over keyboard. For example in games with multiple movement speeds finding the right speed is rather cumbersome on keyboard because the key press is an on/off and not a scale.

Similarly on keyboard movement is restricted to 8 directions. If you need to move in some other direction most people actually use a mouse to compensate for the lack of movement options because it’s too cumbersome with a keyboard.

There are benefits to using keyboards but there are places where you can use something better. Analogue input simply gives better movement options.

There are some exceptions but I generally agree. The keyboard isn’t anywhere as precise as an analogue stick. Ideally I would use something like HOTAS for movement and mouse for aiming.

I second Shadows of doubt. I haven’t played the release version yet (I’m still building factories in Satisfactory) but I can give my most memorable detective work from early access. I was doing side jobs because my murder case had gone cold. I had a gig where I needed to find proof that the clients partner is having an affair. The information I got about the potential lover were some vague physical traits like eye color and shoe size. But the key information was that the lover’s partner worked as Wait staff. So I

1. went through every restaurant, bar, diner etc in the city.
2. Got a list of every wait staff member.
3. Found out where they live.
4. Broke into their house.
5. Found their partner information.
6. Found the potential lover.
7. Started looking for key evidence to tie them to the affair.

The last step is where my gig ended up in a roadblock. I’m not 100% sure but I think it was bugged because I did everything I could come up with. I went through the clients partner personal stuff and found nothing. I went to their work and found nothing. I went through the lovers personal stuff and found nothing. I went to lovers work and found nothing. I even planted a tracker on both of them and followed them around to see if I missed something and I still found nothing. I even checked the mailboxes. So the key evidence was probably bugged and I couldn’t find it.

Despite that I haven’t had such a unique experience in any other game. It’s up there in my backlog waiting for me to return, but first the factory must grow.

To be fair, Windows is getting worse every year as well and Linux isn’t officially supported by most developers so you kinda need to compromise somewhere.

I personally went with Linux because I got fed up with Windows bullshit and the games I can’t play are mostly games I’m not really interested in playing in the first place.

They do exist and some of them swear Mac has better workflows (than windows because most of the time your options are Windows or Mac). I would call them loonies but I’ve seen some smart people use Macs.

Acting like Death Star interceptor and Vader Immortal don’t exist.

So another 5 years? IMO HDR is the perfect example why protocol development needs to be sped up. HDR is roughly a decade old at this point and (if we exclude custom implementations) we’re still in the process of working it out.

Erm, most games? You’re better off asking which games people might remember 20 years from now. You ask me what games released in 2004 off the to of my head I could only remember Halo 2, Half-life 2 and Doom 3 (and this one I remember because of Half-life 2). I’m 100% certain I’m forgetting some huge release from 2004. But that’s the thing, only the really memorable games will be remembered.

I could probably mention 20-30 games from the 00s (maybe 50-60 because some series released a lot of games in that time frame. For example Half-life 2, episode 1 and episode 2 make up 3 games, but I remember all of them because of Half-life 2), but over a decade thousands of games were released. The vast majority of games will be forgotten.

20 years from now maybe some old man like myself remembers Space Marine 2, but it will get wiped from the collective memory.

So all subscription games are gambling? What about Fallout 76? It’s not gambling if you just buy the game but if you buy the subscription the game becomes gambling despite the game fundamentally stays the same and the subscription doesn’t add any RNG to the game?

In that case aren’t most games gambling? You fight a boss and you die. You have failed and you lose progress of the boss fight which means the failed fight was a waste of time. Gambling.

My actual point is that despite us having a relatively good intuition on what is gambling, defining what gambling really is is pretty hard. Be too broad and you will end up marking non-gambling things as gambling, be too narrow and you get things like lootboxes that definitely feel like gambling but don’t actually fit most legal definitions of gambling.

Your definition is so broad it encompasses almost all games and as such is useless when you want to use it to regulate gambling on games.

Kinda hard to make a solid catalogue when you follow the live service trend and your projects flop one after another.

I agree the genre isn’t exactly for me, but I don’t think that’s really relevant. Stardew Valley and Sims more or less fall in the same genre and I loved Stardew Valley and could see the appeal of Sims. I don’t have an issue with those games being on the list but New Horizons just felt shallow. Outside of collecting things for the Museum there really wasn’t anything that engaging. I remember also checking if I’m just playing it wrong and the sentiment from the AC vets was that the gameplay of New Leaf is better.

I did a quick check to see New Horizon is still in the same state as I remember and some people are claiming the 2.0 update made the game better so I guess I’ll give it another shot one day. Maybe my opinion is dated because I haven’t really played since 1.3 update.