Never forget what they took from us...

And people wonder why I still play Factorio, Parkitect, ATS, or RCT. People suck and being able to ignore them is great.

I've been playing Planet Crafter waaay too much. Check it out if you like Factorio, Satisfactory, etc. It's fun and super addictive. At least to me.
- Dyson Sphere Program
bruh factorio is literally in active development and has a huge active community, who would even think twice seeing someone playing it.
I absolutely love rollercoaster Tycoon. There really isn't a game like it.
- Have you tried Planet Coaster? Might be up your alley.
Here I am playing games from the 90s and 00s. Crazy that Quake III and Unreal Tournament are still active.
- I often use UT, Q3 and CS 1.6 as examples of how long a game can stay active when players are given tools to setup their own servers, as opposed to companies handling multiplayer themselves (and often killing it off in a few years).
- When they’re good, they’re good. Good gameplay beats good graphics every day
You might like Oxygen Not Included as well

Single player is the best.

yes but i do miss co-op gaming.
- Couch co-op, split-screen, hotseat; Kingdom Two Crowns is nice. So is Darksiders Genesis, For The King, Moon Hunters, Trine, etc.
  
  Always on the lookout for other good co-op couch games, especially with a good story, but I feel that they are few and far between. :(
- Deep Rock Galactic.
  
  Rock and Stone, Miner!
- Powerwash Simulator.
- A few games that are great single player can also be played with friends such as Terraria, Stardew Valley, Factorio and Minecraft.
10 year old games on a 4k OLED with maxed out settings is the best. Especially if it's a game you can run above 60 fps.
100% Online gaming is pretty toxic and I love being able to play at my own pace.

Only exception to this for me was stardew with my wife.
- Toxicity is one thing for sure but I don't like how the commercialization of MP has shaped it.
  
  Indie games have a very different feel in their online gameplay compared to "commercial" games.
  
  Even way back, HL1 online and those online experiences felt so different because it was designed to be about the group experience rather than level up and get a skin, buy a weapon, our skill tree is massive. Sure technology was holding it back but I wish I could see what it would've been without the massive push for $$$.
I only want to play single player games. I’m not a super big gamer, but I just want campaigns. I recently got a PS5 and I’ve been struggling to find newer games that have a great single player campaign. RDR2 is my style, it’s my favorite game. The gameplay itself is a little problematic, but it’s gorgeous and the story just gets me where I live. And that’s what I want.

I only play single player games, but couldn't care less about achievements. It is all about exploration, story, game mechanics and modding for me.

People treat achievements as if they are a status symbol. I mean sure, if you don't know what else to do in a game, they can give you some goal, but IMO the game itself should encourage you to reach the goal, not some external badge. The experience doing the task should be the reward in of itself.

Achievement unlocked! You've completed the tutorial!
- What's even funnier is "14.39% of players have gotten this far before uninstalling the game and forgetting about it forever"
- Achievement unlocked! You opened the game!
depends on the game, achievement hunting can be a lot of fun in a game u already love its just more stuff to do and more reasons to play, sure if all the achievements in a game are things like getting all of a collectible or beating certain story missions/quests they are pretty boring but in pdx map simulators for example many of the are interesting run ideas or they indicate where the hand crafted content is at. And despite how much i love the game i dont think i would have played as much of Tyranny as i did if i hadnt decide to get all the achievements.
- Sure there are some interesting achievment, like the Stanley parable ones. For instance: 'Go outside: Don't play the game for 5 years' (https://thestanleyparable.fandom.com/wiki/Achievements)
Only silly people flaunt achievements. I use them as a meta-gaming guideline, which in a good game leads to interesting and fun challenges. In an RPG, it's like a check box for getting every ultimate weapon, fighting every boss, etc.

Can also give me something to do in a game I've played but loved. Retroachevements for instance encouraged me replay SaGa (aka Final Fantasy Legend) with only one character in the team. Wasn't too hard, but definitely a second playthrough thing.
- Well, the issue with that is that achievements are global over all playthroughs, so it doesn't really work as a checklist.
There used to be an effort made with how you play a game to get achievements. The Orange box was a great example of this. The 'Little Rocket Man' and 'The One Free bullet' achievements both made you play the game in a different way. Sadly now it's mostly just 'play the game' 'collect all the things'.
I love any game with a handcrafted map and some exploration. Even Satisfactory, a factory building game, does an excellent job at that. Procedural generation has its uses but lacks soul I guess.

It never went away.

Was gonna say, nobody took shit, lol
Yeah, single player games are nowhere near dead. If they ever did go the way of the dodo, I would probably stop playing altogether, because for the most part I just don't like multiplayer games.

"$3,000 setup to play a game from 2010."

I have an RTX 4070 that I've been using to play Half Life. I've owned my copy for a while, but have never played it.

Drives my wife crazy lol

You can play it at "accurately model the thermal vibration of molecules" framerates.
- Gimme dat visible Brownian Motion!
Isn't there an RTX Version?
- There’s a fan made mod for the original, but HL2 has official RTX support I believe
I upgraded to a 3070 from a 1080 just to play grim Dawn. Good games are good games
$5 Black Mesa brother. It looks phenomenal now.
- If he never played the original I think it’s good he starts with it. Black Mess is great, but the original Half Life has a certain historical value (and is still a great game).

Sometimes I even set the difficulty to Easy to really chill.

Wait, you play games to have fun and not as a duty? What about "pride and accomplishment"? ;)

The moment I embraced easy mode was when Assassin's Creed Odyssey was like: "Is the gameplay we designed for our single player game too tedious? Then buy some legendary items with IRL money or maybe our XP cheat!"
- I hate that games started designing around microtransactions. Like who thought "hey let's take the worst parts of MMOs and put them into single player". I loved AC origins and was so looking forward to odyssey and then I just bounced off it within a few hours because so much of it just felt like doing chores.
And replay games I already know by heart. I can start a new game or....... play Starfox 64 again. "Do a barrel roll".
- StarFox 64 is so perfect in that arcade-game way, where you can technically finish it in a sitting but it's so cool to figure out different paths and stuff. :D
  
  "Okay guys, let's ROCK N' ROLL!"
  
  In case you haven't seen it, this video might make you very happy.
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXLmDRwxAUU
if game difficulty gets to the point the tedium takes the joy out of it, nothing wrong with easy mode.
A lot of times I start out with Normal difficulty, and a game eventually escalates its difficulty past what I am capable of delivering. At which point I find that the only way to change the difficulty is to start over, so I uninstall it.
Sometimes I'll get the trainer so I can chill and feel like a badass. I could "Git gud" or better yet ill take infinite ammo and no reload and relaxingly kill everything
I'm glad I'm not the only one! Though if I play something for a second time I do tend to up the difficulty a bit.

Or play factorio... Look at the time, ah it hasn't changed, then an hour later notices the date incremented. Oh

Or Civilization, where one more turn becomes five hours where you've barely moved.

Gods I was strong then.
- That's when you find yourself asking the important question, "What day is it?"

Don't care about achievements play games till like 70% then drop them. If it stops being fun I'm done, finishing a game is never a requirement don't have time for that

I got to like 98% in RDR2 before I realized the gambling ones were going to be a giant pain in the ass. At that point I was in too deep to give up. I watched all 3 Robocop movies in one sitting and still didn't complete the last blackjack one. Eventually got it but that was a frustrating experience.
- The truly infuriating part is there's likely lots of people out there that got them on the first try or by accident
Yeah, play the story and sidequests but don't do any of the collectibles that are often necessary for 100%.
Yeah unless the story is good I'm rarely going to stick around for the last bit, which is usually just padding. Actually, good difficulty levels / other accessibility options have been a nice development.

Lets you turn down the volume on the gameplay so you can finish for the story.

Friends don't let friends play League of Legends

That's why I play DotA 😎

(Yes, this is a cry for help)

I want to play my character, not just play towards whatever the optimal setup is

I strive to ultimately be able to tank enemies and kill them with weak weapons like forks.
- If you want to be the Cutlery Colossus then you can

Please recommend me your favourite story games. This is me and I'm in need of a good 'book.' :)

Edit: I'm going to tell you all to play Night in the Woods. Now, it is set in my home region and felt like a game made for me, but I think it has messages anyone could relate to.

Disco Elysium
- The only run I haven't done is the fascist run because I cannot be a dick to Kim.
‘Outer wilds’ don’t look it up. The most fun is play ing it for the first time. It doesn’t hold your hand though.
- I've read that comment a lot and it makes me feel like there's something big that I might spoil if I ever Google about it. But like I'm a couple dozen hours in at this point... After how many hours of playtime would you say the "don't look it up" advice expires?
- YouTube started recommending Outer Wilds videos, intermixed with my Minecraft: Create mod videos and I was very confused what mod it was
Spiritfarer, To the Moon, Gris (no words in this one but still a good story imo), anything SuperGiant has ever made with my favorite being Transistor.
- Definitely anything SuperGiant. Bastion, Hades, and Transistor are some of the only games I've actually finished, and the sound tracks are incredible.
- Best response
I absolutely adored a low budget game called Firewatch. It’s first person and your only contact with another human is through a radio. You’re running away from your life and work for a summer in a fire watch tower in a national park.

The story is nice and the characters are interesting and flawed and relatable.

Buy it on sale and have a fun evening or two with it.
Sea of Stars.

I'm listening to the soundtrack right now and it's awesome. The story is decent and the graphics and design are top notch. It was so captivating that I pretty much didn't play anything else while I was working through the game.
- I have to say is this is clearly the closest gaming has come to a sequel to Chrono trigger
Bastion will make you feel like you're reading a book. It's one of my all-time favorites, by the developers now best known for Hades.
- "Proper story's s'posed to start at the beginning..."
  
  "Kid just rages for awhile."
  
  That game is still fantastic.
Oh sweet nobody's mentioned it yet! One of my personal favorite "book-feeling games" is an FPS series.

Linear, tightly focused, and feels like a novel because it's based on one:

Metro: 2033 and Metro: Last Light. (Haven't played Exodus yet)

You play a young fella named Artyom. Living in formerly-Russia's metro tunnels with other survivors after a nuclear apocalypse devastates the surface.

Your settlement comes under threat from seemingly psychic creatures called "the Dark Ones", and you're sent on a quest to go get help.

Across the way is a bit of a "coming of age" adventure. You run across really interesting and well-acted characters, sneak past hostile factions, contend with scary (and diversely behaviored) mutants, and risk dangerous excursions on the surface. This is a dark world where gasmask filters are precious and bullets are literally currency, but somehow it's still beautiful and fascinating.

(That intro guitar melody will stay with me forever.)

Like any good hero, Artyom finds himself in one bad situation after another, and along the way if you pick up on the hints, may even come to understand the world around him and the role he plays in it.

There's a morality system that's more subtle than "be boyscout or be a villain", and "ranger difficulty" is an amazing way to play because it makes gunfights feel tense and realistic.

You can only take a few hits in this mode, but unlike in most games, so can your enemies! It makes things feel much less "bullet spongey."

Everyone begged for an "open world" experience and we got Exodus which is supposed to be awesome, but something will always stay close to me about this post apocalypse story that takes you on a focused, well paced, and at times emotional ride to save a transformed world.

And that's just the first title mostly.

You won't be running between towns for hours or making rubber bands and glue into machineguns. You'll still feel like you're surviving, but know exactly where you're supposed to be going.

They go for super cheap on GoG and Steam all the time. Well worth the experience. :)
Mostly in alphabetical order going down my steam list:

Great stories great games: Tales of Symphonia and Vesperia, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky trilogy, Metal Gear Solid, 2, and 3, Subnautica, Secret of Mana, Legend of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Hollow Knight, Spec Ops: The Line, A Hat in Time, Hades, Doom, Deus Ex, Eternal Sonata, F.E.A.R., FF6, FF13-2, Nier Replicant & Automata, Sleeping Dogs, Undertale, Valkyria Chronicles (admittedly haven't beaten it though).

Mindless fun simple stories: Ys (almost any of them), My Time at Portia or Sandrock, Resident Evil games, Rune Factory 4 and 5, Harvest Moon 64 and Friends of Mineral Town, Stray, Amnesia, Armored Core 6, Have a Nice Death, I am Setsuna, Life is Strange, Neon White, Cyberpunk 2077.

If you had to twist my arm I'd give you these variations of top recommendations.

Best typical JRPG: Tales of Symphonia

Best Metroidvania: Hollow Knight

Best where choices matter: Undertale

Best fps: Spec Ops: The Line

Best comfy story: My Time at Portia

Best environmental storytelling: Subnautica

Best simple stories in stories: A Hat in Time

Best story with a bajillion endings and things to keep playing for: Nier Automata (play Replicant too!)
Tales of Vesperia. I like the combat system most, but the story's pretty good, and there's a lot of optional content.
Story first games: Tacoma, What Remains of Edith Finch, Life Is Strange, Botany Manor(more puzzle than story), Open Roads, Lake, Deliver Us The Moon, Firewatch, Kona, Day of the Tentacle (The remaster is incredible)

For more standard shoot or action games with good writing/story I love the remedy games, Alan Wake, Quantum Break, Control.

I was never a huge fan of Telltale style story games that much, but I really enjoyed the Back to the Future one that came out years back. Not sure if that’s still available anywhere though.
Nier automata, nier replicant, Yakuza like a dragon, FF7R, Baldurs Gate 3, Divinity Original Sin 2, Control, star wars fallen order/survivor
I recently got "Yakuza Like a Dragon" from my Humble Choice bundle and it's so good it's made me want to check the rest of the series.
- It's maybe my fav series in gaming. Kiryu is so much better than ichiban
- Yakuza 0 was absolutely fantastic, kiwami 1 was ok and kiwami 2 was also good
The Blackwell series, West of Loathing, Talos Principle II, To The Moon series.
- Seconding the Blackwell series, with a caveat. The earlier games can be a little rough around the edges, resulting in a few Guide Dang It! moments. Walkthroughs are your friends.
Star Wars Fallen Order has a great story and really fun gameplay.
Pillars of Eternity. I've owned the game for 8 years but finally sat down recently to learn how to play a classic CRPG. I haven't been this engrossed in a game since Mass Effect 2 or Skyrim.
Witcher 3. The story is insanely good, just remember: your decisions matter (but don't look anything up).

Some people say it's hard to get into it and to be fair it is a bit complicated first but you don't have to use all mechanics, and it's well worth getting into it.

It just got an official mod creator (yes, that game from... 2015? (graphics from 2022 since there was a huge graphics update) still got a new update in 2024) and the community still is strong so it'll get even better over the next years.
In Stars and Time is especially appropriate for Pride Month!

Disco Elysium is phenomenal as well.
"To the moon", it will take you 4h to finish and the story is awesome, it's worth playing in a single playthrough. I wish I could forget and play it again.
Favorite point and click adventure: Sam and Max. They recently remastered the first season. Funny/silly game.
I have played "The Invincibles" recently. It's a beautiful walking sim.
Don't know that they'll all be ported to PC but the Supermassive standalones (Until Dawn, The Quarry) and Dark Pictures Anthology are great, if you like horror movies. I prefer to watch my wife play them. They're literally like interactive/choose your own adventure films.
Steins;Gate. It starts slow, but once it picks up it's amazing and puts all that slow build up to good use. Not sure if it technically counts though. Visual novels are a weird middle ground that aren't really book or game, but there are some really good ones. Definitely the way to go if you're in more of a reading mood but want some art and music to go with it.
The Sea Will Claim Everything

https://store.steampowered.com/app/337720/The_Sea_Will_Claim_Everything/
Martha is Dead. A tragic and frightening story. Heed to the warnings they give at the start, tho. My wife literally got sick from playing it. No other game or movie has touched me that deep.
Just looking through my HLTB at things I've done recently:

The Ace Attorney series Sucker for Love Coffee Talk Haven (good for co-op)

If you want a bit more gameplay, but still chill:

Paradise Killer Braid Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

More gameplay focused:

Control Portal Wargroove Cat Quest Knack (I know it's a meme, but the games are actually pretty fun)
You got a lot of great recommendations already, but I want to add one more indie game: Lost Words Beyond the Page. Gameplay is simple and it’s not very long, but the writing is excellent.
Disco Elysium. Its an RPG, but most skills have an application both in the world but also in conversations (of which there are a lot, and very well written). Its got a very bitter-sweet vibe to it.

I almost never buy multiplayer-focused games anymore. Of course not all gamers are shitty, but enough are to matter. Having left those games behind I can see how they were taking more joy from my life than they added. If friends want to do private co-op that's cool, but it's also rarer now that we're all older.

As far as sales go, I love playing a year or two behind new releases. Patched games at a discount ftw and timing doesn't matter in single-player games.

To me, multiplayer video games should be about having fun with friends. Couch co-op, LAN parties, online multiplayer work for different genres and depending where your friends are. I don't care if they're older games, newer games, as long as it's fun and interesting.
Yeah I don't really care to play with strangers and none of my friends have ever asked to play so I also stick to single player games when I do play.
- Don't forget that you're also allowed to ask them to play, if you should feel like it

i have like 370 hours of factorio, and i've only really played it over the period of about. 4-5 months, though i've owned it for a year or two now.

Factorio is just one of those games. For anybody that likes open world sandbox games and technical stuff, you already own factorio, yell at me in the replies.

Have to agree. I've played through a couple of times myself and a couple times with friends. Always fun. If you've never touched mods on it I recommend taking a look. Will further diversify your playing time.
- absolutely. Personally i've just been enjoying varying my playstyles over time. It's added enough variety for me so far. I will presumably also enjoy building and design different base metas over time as well, though i have only done a few things so far, so i have hundreds if not thousands of hours to go before i start to get interesting things.
Ah the early times of factorio, learning everything for the first time. Those are long ago, 1700h+ now. The addiction is real.
- yeah, it's like that. Took me about a 100 hours to get fully acquainted. I've had several different play-styles through my various saves, all trying different things, and seeing how they go. I'm sure it'll continue for quite some time.
  
  Especially when the expansion with 2.0 drops.
Such a good game. Especially if you get a multiplayer game of people with different logistical strengths.
- absolutely, especially if you play with the various multiplayer scenarios.
I've hit 700 tonight and still have another 200 in my current playthrough
I like factorio but the game never even asks the question of whether destroying an entire planets ecosystem just so you, one person, can get home is ethical or right.

I don’t know, it is a small thing, I totally get why people get addicted to factorio’s gameplay loop not disputing how amazing that is it is just the basic premise of the game makes me uncomfortable in it’s disinterest in the planet you are on being anything but a resource to conquered and consumed or in thinking about how you are actually the villain in this situation from the planet’s perspective.
- I always felt like the fact that you get attacked by local fauna when you cause pollution was a comment on that. As in the planet recognises that you are not doing a good thing.
- I like factorio but the game never even asks the question of whether destroying an entire planets ecosystem just so you, one person, can get home is ethical or right.
  
  yeah, but the game isn't about social commentary, it's about logistics, factory building, and to some degree, tower defense. You don't like biters? You can just disable them, you don't actually need to play with them. You can just roleplay as if you're living on mars.
  
  I feel like if anything factorio does a great job of explaining why the human urge to industrialize exists, and makes you experience all of the negatives of it. If we're taking it like a social commentary sort of thing. Ultimately it's nothing worse than human history has done at any given point of time. By a large margin.
  
  By the way, you might want to check out nullius, it's the inverse of the gameplay loop. The planet is barren, and you are analogous to god, you need to create everything in order for the "normal" gameplay loop to begin.
  
  It's also kind of interesting to consider the impacts of the biters themselves, they aren't really a life form, they're more akin to a bacteria, just on a macro, insect scale. They literally only do something productive for themselves once you get in their way. Their entire evolutionary lifeform is predicated on you being a negative influence on their environment. They consume your pollution, and use it to grow and become stronger. However, left to their own devices they seem to spread across the entire planet, almost like a cancer, just without the consumption of life that is typical, because biters seem to be magic?
  
  that's my two cents on it, i suppose.
- Don't worry, it's fiction. It's not real. No actual planets were harmed in the making of this game.
Good choice to fast-forward your time perception
- it truly is weird, how you can sit down and simply, play the game for 8 hours straight.
  
  That might have been the opioids i was on at the time more than anything (dental work) but regardless, i got a lot of work done.
I'm a big fps/3d spaces person. I gravitated to satisfactory. As far as I'm concerned, it's the same thing but 3D.
- Love satisfactory. It is super addictive to me though, especially with mods. It just provides multiple angles to play from.
  
  Sometimes I wanna build a factory, sometimes I wanna play homemaker, sometimes I just wanna organize shit/ make it more efficient.
  
  I'm currently enjoying Foundry right now. It is a nice blend of a few different games.
- i don't own satisfactory, though it does seem interesting, i feel like factorio is the precursor to satisfactory in a way.
  
  It's more primal to the human urge to industrialize.
I like the Shapez too
- i have shapez kicking around somewhere, seems interesting, havent played it though.
Satisfactory isn't bad either, but factorio wins in my book.

What did they take from us? I haven't played an online game in years now.

I've been hmming and hawing in answering this. But I'm out for dinner and bored. So alot games original vision is to be a single player experience but then online features or an online overhaul is shoved by the aboves. IE SimCity was considered unplayable by thr online features, anthem was originally designed to be single player but was completely redone, etc etc.
- Yeah I see that. I remember the disappointment of sim city.
  
  It could be I don't follow games close enough to see what I'm missing. I find more SP games popping up in my feeds / friend recommendations than I could ever hope to play.
  
  I definitely feel like mainstream AAA/AAAA and even iii to a certain extent have been progressively enshittified. But I've been at this a while, so I've seen how it's gone this way as more and more money got brought to bare on games.
  
  The moment someone who wasn't involved in actually making some part of the game was expecting a fat return on investment was the moment the wheel of shit started to turn.

Don’t forget that this also unlocks using Linux for a lot of folks now.

Achievement Unlocked: Mention Linux in a computer related thread!

100% of tech related posts have this achievement.

(Relax comrades, I too am a Linux disciple.)
- ~~shilling~~ FOSS advertising. It's the only way we can promote linux.

Indie games are absolutely killing it these days, I love em. In Stars and Time, Animal Well, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, so many are fantastic.

not a big gamer but saw the civ 6 was discounted to 2 usd had to get it ofc and enjoying the single player life

I fucking love civ 6 and I'll fight anyone who tries to tell me it's bad. I tried playing 5 as my first civ game around the time it came out but I don't think I had the attention span for it and I never got into it. Got 6 as part of a humble bundle thing and didn't touch it for years, randomly decided to give it a go and gyatdamn.
- I just hate the pathetic effort they put into the quotes. Sean Bean was a weird choice anyway ("what do people universally and forever like? Game Of Thrones I suppose!") but then they had him read quotes from literal blogs and often quotes that shat all over the technology you'd just researched. Oh! I completed a wonder! I definitely want to hear a quote about how it's obsolete now and its abandonment caused immense poverty in the Ruhr valley.
  
  That and the movement towards nations instead of, yknow, Civilizations. Sorry Australia, you are not a Civilisation. Nor is Canada. Nor Scotland. How do we have Scotland - an independent country for less than 300 years - and not the fucking Celts.
- Civ 5 sunk it's teeth into me deep. I could never stand 6. I only managed about 41 hours into 6, but 5 I have well over a thousand in (even if steam only reports 600 of it)

$3000 setup just to play a game from 2010

Modding. And you can play others with it too.

I typically buy all the "best game of the year" games at steep discounts. Some of them really embrace a "live" game service and require hundreds of hours a season, which isn't my thing.

But my most played game last year was Vampire Survivors, A single player game that looks like it came from the SNES era.

Patient Gamers stay winning.
Vampire Survivors is so much better than it has any right to be. It's a great way to kill time if I have my Steam Deck around.

My absolutely most favorite single player and gaming experiences in general are:

Outer Wilds
Tunic

Their replayability is 0 but man do these experiences stay with you. I still think about outer wilds daily and i finished it last year.

Also a word of caution:
Both these games function with knowledge-based progression, so almost everything you look up about these games can be considered a spoiler and will lessen your experience with them!

I bought outer wilds a while ago but haven't played it yet, I should probably give it a try

The rage-inducing MOBA’s what? Real cliffhanger at the end of this meme.

I also hate that the grammatical standard for all cap pluralization is to include an apostrophe. What is it the Oakland A's possess!?
- It’s not the standard tho. Every style guide says this is an error it with the optional exception of single-character capital letters …such as Oakland A’s.
The DoTAs and League of Legends kinda games.

Never understood the appeal honestly.
- They were joking about the apostrophe in MOBA's
- Never understood the appeal honestly.
  
  Same here. I spent about 30 minutes trying to play one (DoTA I think?) and figured out:
  
  Each hero has a zillion upgrades and abilities
  
  Each hero is basically on their own roguelite style upgrade path
  
  The game has a dozen or more such heroes
  
  icons and text too small to play on livingroom TV, controller play out of the question
  
  at mercy of online match-making algorithm if I'm not in a league/clan/whatever
  
  From this I could deduce:
  
  There's no way in hell this is perfectly balanced - too many variables, it may as well be MttG
  
  Going to take 20 or more hours to dial in a personal play style
  
  Going to take probably 50-100 to develop a play style that can adapt to most situations
  
  League play will probably kick my ass, requiring another 50-100 hours of practice/training
  
  Causal play is out; likely can't pick up and play immediately due to lobby, variable match times
  
  I'm not knocking the genre as a whole, but this is not for me. It's too far outside my typical mode of gaming and is likely to just frustrate me more than anything else. I'm familiar with hard to play online games like Quake, TF2, and even Soldat. But those have small power systems that, even with gross imbalances, were still playable because there were usually only one or two scenarios you couldn't overcome. Adding more on every axis just sounds like a wildly unbalanced system where the skill curve isn't steep enough, costing a lot of time invested in bad strategies before you figure it all out.
Rage-inducing Noita is my cup of tea ☕
- Should I play Noita if it mostly caught my eye because of the cool physics? Hades and Vampire Survivors are the two roguelikes that finally clicked for me.
- I just had a nice cup of Thai white tea, which induced the opposite of rage 🍵
I read this in Steve Austin’s voice

And then you play Xcom 2 and realize that Dota 2 was meditative by comparison

99%? Are you sure?
I feel like I can handle being shot at by aliens better than most xcom operatives

fuck MOBAs

I got Max Max on steam for $5 a few years ago. Worth it.

Steam version has Denuvo. GOG version doesn't. Other than that they should be the same. I noticed only differences in load times.

It's a fun game and runs great on a potato. $5 is definitely worth it.

Don't forget the needless implementation of always-online single player games. Even for single/multiplayer games like PoE or anything Diablo, there's literally no technical need to have a connection. It's just fancy DRM for Blizzard and an excuse to milk you more microtransactions for PoE.

And before anyone regurgitates Blizzard's BS about anti-cheat, it's very possible to keep multiplayer characters on the server and single player on your computer and never have them interact or permit single player loot to be sold on their marketplace. Not to mention their regular online check for D2R. Blizzard has ALWAYS used aggressively hostile DRM. If they could virus bomb thieves' computers then they absolutely would.

They never took it from me! Animal Well and Dread Delusion are phenomenal experiences just from the last couple of months. Indies are always generating good games, even when AAA is just following trends.

I'm happy with a 17" laptop, though I'm having to use a usb keyboard. Also playing a game from 2015, Rebel Galaxy. Nothing really stands out, but it's interesting enough for my tastes.

I was so anti gaming laptop for years but my wife swears by them. I think I just got burned from crappy laptops around the 2000s - 2010s, because her latest laptop is a beast. Not to mention most PC games aren't trying to push to cutting edge specs anymore.

So I've turned around and I think gaming laptops are great!
- I can relate. For a long time, I was all about a tower desktop, because I could upgrade it as needed. Last one I had I built in 2014, but didn't upgrade it in any capacity until 2017, when I gave it to my brother. If I wanted a better graphics card, I'd have to get a new PSU, and I also needed a better screen over my then 12 year old, 15" LCD screen. I didn't buy anything new outright as I was short on cash, so I spent the next 2 years using a laptop I bought back in 2012, which even played Fallout 4 on medium! That time with it really made me appreciate the form factor and portability
- Gaming laptops are great for those who don't understand they're getting a slower, harder to upgrade and more expensive system than a desktop.
  
  Unless a college student in Tokyo with half a square foot of desk space, or travel a lot and like to game at the hotel, there are very few reasonable justifications for a gaming laptop. And even with those justifications they are a less-than-ideal situation. A desktop is always a better solution when feasible.
- The thing I don't like about laptops are 1. Noise and 2. The bursty CPUs just don't mesh well if I want to run a swarm of VMs or need to just run a big compress/decompress process. I watched one laptop slowly throttle itself all the way down to 700mhz while I was messing with a bunch of VMs and it really made me miss having a desktop where it can just chill at 5x the speed at 100% utilization and chew through whatever is being thrown at it
Rebel galaxy is awesome. Broadside combat with a smile. I hope you're enjoying it.
- It's an ok game, I think the first and biggest letdown is the 2D movement. While broadsides are fun, automatic turrets are taking care of everything for me so I only need to keep turning around to keep shields up.
Rebel Galaxy rocks. Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is also amazing.

I like both

reinstalls
- Why was it ever uninstalled? It's like 500mb
*smacks lips* what a shame

Me, spending hours on Age of Empires 2 and loving it

My favorite games are Euro Truck Simulator and Elite Dangerous (where I fly a space truck).
Just letting the scenery pass by, enjoying a couple surprises on the way, practicing my docking skills, decorating my cockpit and listening to some old school country or reggae is relaxing as hell after work.

where I fly a space truck

You may enjoy this Deep Purple song
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  
  You may enjoy this Deep Purple song
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Literally me, except I don't really care much about achievements.

Single player LYFE

And here I am raging because dead by daylight absolutely sucks.

This is a respectable pursuit.

Not a victim of GaaS FOMO

Gaming goals

Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

I have all that and then I don't play my games from 2010 for some reason

I am playing TOME4 on a high end setup. I could probably play that game on a calculator.

laughs in GOG

HotS has never made me rage

LoL OTOH.....

HotS?

Hornets of the Serengeti? Hotel of the Swans? Hardness of the Sexbots? Helping out the Seniors? Harsh or too Soft?
- Hardness of the Sexbots?
- It's Heroes of the Storm but I think I like your ideas better

Just avoid AAA slop from big publishers, problem solved.
Quite ironic you're using an AI generated image for it considering the same AAA publishers are considering using it. I really hope you don't think "DEI" and "wokeness" are responsible for these AAA publishers pushing multiplayer-first games on us.

You're making many assumptions over a meme.
- Typical multiplayer enjoyer
- Yeah this dude is an idiot.what the actual fuck is his reasoning here?