Nelots

https://www.acehardware.com/departments/tools/power-tool-accessories/screwdriver-bits/2105807

Would you still defend it if they added porn to the platform?

They added a temporary mode called Overwatch: Classic a few years ago that was basically just launch OW1. Then later on they added a permanent 6v6 open-queue (2 tanks max though) gamemode. Better than 5v5 imo, but it’s nothing game-changing and it split the playerbase so I’m not sure it was worth it. Funny enough, my friends tell me they even removed the “2” from the game again and restarted back at “season 1” as of a few days ago. I guess it’s no longer a sequel anymore somehow.

Haha, that’s funny, I was also a Zarya player on the off chance I did play tank. Bubbling others was always fun.

Alright, here’s a long one. Overwatch.

I’ve never been a fan of PvP games, but hero shooters might be my one exception. Even then, I almost exclusively play support because I prefer helping my team to fighting the enemy. But the better I got at the game, the more I realized support was just the damage role but you also attack your team sometimes. A Lucio with only 1,000 damage or with 80% healing uptime by the end is a bad Lucio. I guess what I was looking for was a healer role, not a support role.

This pushed me more and more into just playing my favorite character, Mercy, because she kinda lives in her own world and rarely interacts with the enemy team. Her movement is fun, and I genuinely enjoy playing her. So I’d be more than happy to pick OW back up as a Mercy one-trick, but that brings up several other problems.

First of all she’s straight up ass in high-level play. Which is fine I guess, I don’t need to play comp, but the more consistent matchmaking than what shows up in quickplay was appreciated. Secondly, people expect you to switch if things aren’t going well… the game’s been called counter-watch for a reason. This is also fair enough, I understand my team shouldn’t need to baby me if I’m hard-countered, but like… I don’t want to. At this point I’m here to play Mercy, not OW, so I’d rather just lose than switch. Which can make me a useless teammate.

The biggest issue though is their expensive and greedy monetization and abusive use of FOMO. Anybody that has played the game before knows Mercy is one of a few characters that gets beautiful limited-time skins every season, because they sell extremely well. Most of them cost $20, and some can only be bought in $45+ bundles. Unfortunately I’m a sucker for pretty Mercy cosmetics and struggle to stop myself from buying a lot of them. So I stopped playing entirely, because hating myself for spending $20 on pretty Mercy skin #37 is bad for my health and wallet.

I’m in a similar boat with BO2 and BO3 Zombies. Except in my case, it’s because I don’t have any friends even remotely interested in the game anymore. And holy shit is training a group of zombies in circles for hours boring when you’re alone. It’s a shame because I do really like the early game setup still. Buying perks, finding and upgrading weapons, and opening up the map. Especially on high quality custom maps I’ve never explored before.

I still find easter eggs fun to do, but most require a group which completely kills my chances of doing them. Origins is my favorite vanilla map though, and at least that one can be completed solo.

Yeah, I’m a big fan of the friendly fire personally. It causes some hilarious moments. I’ve been in a lot of situations where I get knocked over by a stray rocket or something right as I planned to throw a stratagem, causing me to drop it at my feet and napalm the entire team.

I didn’t know Starship Troopers was based on pro-military propaganda, that’s pretty interesting. And a clean 5,000 friendly damage but only one accidental? Pink likely killed somebody by shooting a damaged hellbomb at some point.

It’s quite different considering Roblox is a platform for hosting user-generated content, not a game itself. When 99.99% of the content on your website is user-generated, you can’t use that as a shield anymore.

Uh… no. That is just factually wrong and it’s not even close. I don’t know what world you live in, but I could go through my steam library of 300+ games and probably count on my hands the number of them that have a demo.

Edit: Ah. By “demo” I’m guessing you mean pirating? Unfortunately that’s not going to help most people.

At that point a cheat code to enable godmode achieves the same purpose and still gives you player agency, unlike an AI taking over. Or just an accessibility option to skip boss fights. We really don’t need to reinvent the wheel here with AI.

To be clear, the original comment I responded to said:

looks at Hytale doing quite well without even touching Steam

In response to a comment that said:

There are laws that say that abusing a monopoly is illegal. Steam is objectively a monopoly in pc games. Sure, you don’t have to use it, but it is basically impossible for indie developers to make a living without it.

I never moved the goalposts; modern indie devs were always the goalpost.

Notably, almost none of those are indie games, and almost any indie game that you did list came out in the 2000s like Roblox, before Steam was the behemoth it is today. Half of them are games by the same sets of AAA studios like Epic Games, Blizzard, and MiHoYo, and most Blizzard games have an entire franchise of games older than Steam itself to piggyback off of. Speaking of, anything by Blizzard isn’t even true… their most recent games like Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 are both on Steam. Tarkov is also on Steam now, but I’ll admit I’m splitting hairs here since it spent nearly a decade off of it. Though the fact that it released on Steam with its 1.0 update does say something.

So I really don’t think any of those games aside from debatably Tarkov shows that the average modern indie dev can be successful outside of Steam.

Got any other modern examples than just the one game that had a massive following for the last 7 years of development?

You’re telling me chocolate isn’t some natural pre-existing resource? Smh. Next you’re going to tell me chocolate milk doesn’t come from chocolate milk cows.

I’m not into photography so I could be mistaken. But from what I’ve gathered, power points are the four points where the lines intersect in the rule of thirds (or the four corners of the middle box). Supposedly the eye is drawn to these four points of an image.

I will say that, while the other comment comparing it to Minecraft isn’t wrong to do so, you shouldn’t go in expecting some 1:1, 2D Minecraft experience. Because while they have plenty of similar features, the core of each game is quite different. Minecraft for example is primarily a sandbox game, with lite survival elements sprinkled in. You’re mostly just there to build and farm and do whatever the hell you want, and the game doesn’t differ greatly between peaceful and hard. Terraria on the other hand is primarily an action game with some survival elements. Sure, you can build huge, beautiful cathedrals if you’d like, but unlike Minecraft that’s not really where the game shines at all. Terraria instead shines in it’s exploration (especially when you’re new to the game) and combat.

Edit: Oh also, unlike Minecraft, world difficulties change things drastically. Difficulty isn’t just a damage and health slider for enemies, instead it also modifies general enemy AI (in honestly annoying ways sometimes - looking at you lava slimes), and bosses all get major changes including new attack patterns. I’d stick with classic or journey mode at first, even if you normally tend to try harder difficulties when playing new games.

A welcome change imo. The morality system in the Fable games were always heavily lopsided, with one side being strictly superior than the other. Though I will say that I did like the cosmetic changes it made.

They do want to be more focused on the gamer. That is, more focused on how to extract as much money from gamers as possible with as little work on their end as they can get away with.

I picked up Lawnchair when I de-googled my phone a bit more than a year ago. There were a couple launchers I considered, but honestly the name is what sold me. And I haven’t missed Nova since.