They’ve also bought up a ton of quality studios. I’m half expecting Krafton to go bankrupt due to incompetence and end up pulling an Embracer and take everyone else down with them.
If they end up torpedoing Hi-Fi Rush 2, I may start a riot.
RimWorld also releases a huge list of polish and quality of life changes for free with each expansion. The latest patch that released alongside the Odyssey expansion obviated the need for about half of the QoL mods I considered mandatory before then.
A lot of indie devs are good about that. Squad, KSP’s original devs, even mandated to their buyer that all DLCs existing and future had to be free for backers since they’d listed that as a promise on their original Kickstarter.
“We wanted a fresh new debacle instead!”
Edit:
"As Unknown Worlds’ sole stockholder, Krafton had invested $500 million in the success of not only Subnautica 2, but also Subnautica 3, Subnautica 4, and any other future Subnautica franchise product.”
Ew. Survival games benefit more than most genres from iteration, but that’s better done as updates and expansions unless they make a truly qualitative leap, which I doubt will happen under their leadership. This reeks of them wanting to pump out as many full-priced titles as possible, probably with an ever-higher price tag as Subnautica becomes an established IP.
It’s a little unwieldy but if you view your profile and go to the hidden posts section, you should be able to edit or reset the list there.
Smacking other racers in the face with a metal chain never got old. I was terrible at the actual racing but at least nobody could overtake me!
Self-hosted servers with active moderation and a consistent, vetted player list? What are you, a communist?
I second the Kinetica recommendation. It’s an amazing arcade-style racing game that will have people look at you like you’re crazy if you try to describe it to them (racers wear skintight suits and strap rollerblades to their limbs and use themselves as the vehicles).
It feels a lot like F-Zero for those familiar.
The quality of life features around base building are sublime. Being able to upgrade structures in-place and freely move stations and chests around has ruined most other base building games for me. Inventory management and crafting aren’t great, but I can count on one hand the number of games that do those right (and at least there are mods to fix the worst of it).
The one thing I dislike about companions is how many bad ones you end up with. Especially with taming - a 20-30% chance at best of raising an elite tame means my bases are littered with regular hyenas/bears/rhinos who wouldn’t survive if they accompanied me. And I’m only just now leaving the desert - I can only imagine how many reject animals I’ll have by endgame!
Luckily with humans you can see what class and level they are before deciding to capture them, and there’s a dungeon filled with medium-tier recruits right in the starting area. It’s nice that making a full working base isn’t restricted to late game like it is in other games.
I’ve been playing Conan Exiles, a survival crafting game that’s been out for several years but still receives regular major updates.
It’s a bit generic - there’s little I haven’t already seen in another survival game - but it’s more polished than most due to having a major developer behind it. There’s a lot of content, bespoke animations for nearly every weapon, and the base building is a delight. Exploration is also great due to diverse biomes and the game’s climbing system, which also lets you grab the wall while falling and slowly slide to a halt - this looks and feels great and turns avoiding falling damage from a headache into a cinematic moment. It’s not parkour, but it tugs the same strings.
The game has an unfortunate tendency to crash when messing with companion inventories, though that may be due to a Steam Workshop mod I’m using (one I can’t bring myself to remove because it makes inventory and companion management so much easier). Aside from that hiccup - which only triggers once every few hours, which is tolerable for me - and knocked out enemies occasionally falling through the ground (you need to drag them back to your base to recruit them as NPCs), the game has been rock-solid.
I’m somewhat tempted to buy the new Dune game by the same devs, but I’ve heard mixed things about the solo experience.
Luckily I also have crippling social anxiety, so this isn’t a problem for me.
It does not, but at $8 buying two copies is still cheaper than a single copy of even most indie games.
And Kerrigan should have stayed evil. That’s my “Han shot first” of the franchise.
Agreed 100%, how Kerrigan was handled was the worst of StarCraft 2’s many sins against prior characterization. They spent an entire expansion setting her up as an irredeemable monster and the new big bad of the setting alongside Mengsk and whatever Duran was up to, only to undo it all because NuBlizzard wanted their waifu.
And there is no way Jim Raynor as of the end of Brood War would ever ally with Kerrigan again after her betrayal, yet he goes from having sworn to get revenge for Fenix’s death to helping Kerrigan “redeem” herself with little more than a mention of past grievances.
StarCraft and Brood War were amazing, but the writing quality took a nosedive in the sequel. StarCraft 2 felt like poorly written fanfiction that didn’t understand the existing characters or their motivations at all.
MMOs and live service ruin lore. They’ll twist the existing story into knots so that players can fight or recruit every popular character from the series, even if it makes no sense. Even if they’re dead. Gotta keep those players engaged, even if it comes at the expense of the integrity of the world and writing that drew them in in the first place!
Thanks for the detailed response!
Would you say any of them are worth picking up from a gameplay perspective? I know the first is a Devil-May-Cry clone (no idea what the genre is properly called) that takes heavy influence from pre-BotW 3d Zelda for its world and dungeon designs, 2 is an action game with random loot (the randomness is why I dropped it), and I’ve heard 3 described as a Soulslike, but are they good examples of their respective genres?
Considering one of the common refrains about the most famous game in the series, Silent Hill 2, is that the combat being crap is an important part of making you feel like a regular guy way out of your depth, I’d say they have right to feel concerned. There’s a serious incongruity between “horror game” and “detailed combat system”.
Though the mention of durability and weapon degradation implies that maybe you won’t be able to smack your way out of every encounter.
“Hopefully they pull a Bloober and prove me wrong.”
Is this a Gen Z reference I’m too Millennial to understand? Is this what getting old feels like?
How was Genesis?
I own the whole series but I’ve only played the first (which I loved) and a bit of the second. I dropped it since the devs didn’t seem interested in continuing from the sequel hook in the first game. Now that they are finally getting around to that, is it worth playing the rest before 4 comes out? Do the other Riders’ stories contribute to the plotline of War’s campaign, or are they all just kind of doing their own thing?
After all this time we’re finally getting a direct sequel to the first game? I never thought I’d see the day.
The patch was worth it for the load time reduction alone.