SSTF

To put the headline in perspective:

Despite all the numbers being down, Black Ops 7 was still the best-selling game in terms of units and revenue in Europe for the week ending November 16 (its launch week). Battlefield 6, it’s main competition right now, came in fourth in both units sold and overall revenue.

Even with huge drop, COD is still raking in cash. While I personally think the current direction of COD is terrible, these sales numbers are unlikely to be some kind of fundamental course correction wakeup call to the publishers.

No I only played 3.

It very much appeals to what I like, so that’s a big help for it.

Star Control 3 is really good.

The Blake Stone games are unexpected and kind of a random choice, but now I may get to experience what Civvie was ranting about.

I buy and play a bunch of old games from an EBay seller who sends both the original disc and a disc with a copy of the game that loads dosbox stuff or whatever else to make it work easily on a modern system without fiddling around. It’s pretty great.

I have a bunch of strategy and sim games.

The original version of Crysis is available right now on GOG and the EA store. PC isn’t a single vendor ecosystem where the only store also owns the hardware to play it.

We also don’t know who decided to pull it. I’d still wager it is unlikely Valve made a unilateral choice or pressured the game off the platform. Look at EA for answers.

It’s unlikely Valve forced the game off the page. Even so, the supposed issue has always been if Steam were to pull games from you that are already in your library (which AFAIK they haven’t) or a future hypothetical where Steam closes down and if people would be able to offline save their libraries.

The last time I bought a game for $40 was in 2014, the last time I paid $60 was in 2011 (and it was a mistake).

While there will always be an endless surge of people willing to pay whatever price game companies demand and those people can’t be convinced to care enough to change, if you’re reading this I hope you’re the kind of person who can look into the effectively infinite backlog of games that already exist and into the indie and AA space for new games at decent prices done with some actual passion.

Oh boy a Star Citizen thread.

I understanding removing the ability for publishing reasons. It is the apparently mandatory apology which I find a bit humorous and pointless. “We’re sorry because of unforeseen player actions which were obviously not an intended part of design.”

Perhaps I’m just so deadened to the hollow “We will do better.” apologies belted out by companies and public personalities, where the apology reads the same regardless of the amount of actual fault.

Sims type games have always had that kind of appeal to be able to go full sociopath in a harmless way. Drowning Sims in pools is a classic of gaming. The devs can do what they want with their game, but (unless this was something they had to do for publishing reasons) it strikes me as strange that they apologized for players being able to hit kids with cars in game, or abusing interactions to kidnap NPCs.

As someone who prefers HL1 it was nice to be vindicated somewhat by a YouTube person agreeing.

I bet the creator of this lazy asset flip is thrilled about this publicity.

Edit: for some reason replies think I’m being sarcastic.

I did a written review of it a while ago, and my conclusion was that a lot of the gameplay was serviceable but not particularly standout, which made it feel a bit bland. There were a number of small things that piled up, with one example being that any time you told a companion to special attack you had to sit through a short cutscene. It had great writing and characters, which makes it the first game I’d reccomend in spite of the so so gameplay, because I thought the character and world stuff was so strong.

While I didn’t have expectations, I think the marketing also greatly mislead other people. The game is structured like a classic BioWare RPG, rather than a modern Fallout game. I also found the marketing connection with Fallout New Vegas to be misleading because there was no connection of actual lead development staff with those games, but instead it was with Fallout 1 and 2. If you know that, and are familiar with the writing and design habits you can feel that difference. Some people may have felt it and been confused or disappointed that it didn’t have the New Vegas vibe.

I’m incredibly curious if the pulled A-Life 2.0 code is still in the game somewhere. If modders implement it and get it populating in a sufficiently large radius it will really cement this game as a mainstay for a long time.

You probably won’t understand entirely what is happening in the setting, but it’s not like you fully understood what was happening for most of Shadow Of Chernobyl.

You play as a brand new character with no relation to the past games in STALKER 2.

If you can pick up on implications and make informed guesses you can understand the world well enough. STALKER games have always succeeded with atmosphere and vibes rather than tight plot.

to get Stalker 2 into a decent place performance wise across PC and Xbox Series X and S

Consoles, and bugs stemming from optimizing for consoles.

They replaced map specific factions with one type of each team (SAS vs Phoenix terrorists) globally in CS2. Which is pretty lame but probably makes it easier to theme buyable skins.

Skins, especially CT skins have long represented real organizations. The game isn’t coordinated with them.

CS:GO they’ve been the CT team for the Dust maps.