I think this is why it never quite clicked with me. It’s a gorgeous game and it’s really come such a long way, but personally I could use a bit more direction.

Silksong surprise dropped this September after 7 years with like a 2 month heads up

Clair Obscur Expedition 33 came out of absolutely nowhere and is a work of art in every way

Deltarune chapters 3 and 4 finally launched, 3 is fun but 4 is incredible.

I think Balatro came out in that timeframe, and CloverPit in a similar vein this year (though the latter’s most recent update is frankly terrible and hopefully most of the charges will be reverted in the next update)

Ball X Pit becomes more of an idle game once you make progress, but it’s a great little casual take on Breakout, with a fair bit of grinding for completion.

Eden Ring Nightreign is an interesting take on the formula and IMO a far better game than its original counterpart

Alan Wake 2 may have been 2023, my memory’s a bit fuzzy, but I think if anything they dropped a decent sized update last year.

Mycopunk is a fantastic early access FPS, coop emphasis and super chaotic

Path of Exile 2’s early access is phase is finally nearing its end. Game has solid bones

Ninja Gaiden Ragebound is pretty underrated, first modern game in the series that builds on the classic NES formula instead

Antonblast is a great little Wario-inspired platformer. Not as speedy as Pizza Tower, but really tight.

Yakuza Pirates I guess, though I’d argue it’s legitimately the worst game in the franchise. It’s not bad but it’s not good.

Witchfire is another early access FPS about to hit 1.0. It’s been out for a few years now but they’ve been really cracking down on the updates lately.

I Am Your Beast is an underrated one for sure, very fast paced speedrun-driven FPS about taking down a fascist private military. Strange Scaffold never disappoints.

These couple years saw a huge resurgence of casual party-based games. Lethal Company, REPO, and Peak are all fun with the right group, though popularity of the first two is dwindling last I checked. A bit of a fad but they’re fun.

I’ve definitely missed a handful here and got my years wrong in some places, but these have been some standouts for me lately.

I love the new area, I do think the bosses are a bit overtuned (especially the two new superbosses, but those should be a huge challenge), but I was also super rusty and on NG+5 so I can’t really say for certain.

Super cool stuff. All 5 new bosses kicked my shit in after I’d been steamrolling the rest of the game, only beat the new area boss and called it there - the new tower shit is way too much for me. Might edit my save back down to NG+ and see how they feel.

Not a fan of the Breaking Death nerf though, I will say that. It really cripples endgame autodeath builds. One of those changes where even if it were a bug, it’d been around so long that they should’ve let it stay as-is.

It feels like so many devs and studios have been trying to bring back the magic of that era but L4D was such a product of the times. Hard to imagine any similar games in that vein succeeding today.

Yeah this is the bigger issue here really. Fuck Google and their invasive bullshit, absolutely, but work devices should never be used for personal/private use, and vice versa. Keep that shit completely separate as much as possible.

After ditching D2 last year well past the 10k hour mark, I’ve been bouncing around a bunch of different games, mostly working through the backlog but also looking for a long-term grind to scratch that same itch. Out of everything I’ve tried, PoE2 and Warframe feel like the only ones doing live service “right”, especially the latter. Between both games, the only MTX gripe I have is PoE2’s stash tabs.

Last Epoch had a ton of potential but the team were in way over their heads and forced to start cashing in, and the Krafton buyout was the nail in the coffin. It feels like they just flat out didn’t have the budget to keep it going.

As soon as Krafton bought them out it wasn’t just downhill from there, it was a steep drop off a cliff. The game had so much promise but got royally fucked.

Everything is cosmetic last I checked aside from stash tabs, which granted should be earnable in-game, but it’s nothing like an entirely MTX-only class. I do wish the game had a transmog system though at least, even Diablo 4 does, and we all know how Blizzard is.

Could be better, could be worse.

For a bit it was Destiny Rising, I quit D2 over a year ago but DR does genuinely do a lot of things much better than the base game and directly addresses a lot of my core complaints that made me quit after 10k hours in the first place. Stupid mobile gacha game with predatory monetization out the ass, and I was shrugging aside the handful of AI NPC voicelines.

Needless to say I came to my senses and dropped it entirely on a whim. Can’t support the AI bullshit, I found I’d spent much more than I thought on the game already, and the endgame is entirely just p2w or get a handful of mats you need every 2 weeks. The core of the game and a lot of the systems are legitimately really good, but the gacha core really brings it way down.

That entire franchise is just a warehouse full of monkey paws.

I recently picked up Warframe which I’ve shrugged off for a long time because TPS almost never clicks for me, but it pulled me in hard, and it’s wild going from FOMO-ridden powercrept anti-player D2 and gacha hell DR to a game that actually treats the players with respect.

Unfortunately not, just something I hear a lot from folks.

Adobe software, autoCAD, and anticheat are the top 3 reasons I usually hear. While there are alternatives for the first two, people who need these specific tools professionally don’t really have the choice.

Anticheat for gaming is a big one too. Personally I didn’t even consider switching until I finally quit Destiny 2 for good. If the main game someone plays just doesn’t work, they’re not gonna switch.

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You know at first I didn’t really think it would be considered one, but looking back you’re absolutely right. I really need to replay those games.

I love how so many of these old games has custom servers up and running. Metroid Prime Hunters apparently has a thriving community too (though I left the biggest discord as soon as I joined because it looks the lead admin is literally a DHS nazi 💀)

The bigger hurdle really is the DS’s wifi compatibility since WEP is so outdated and insecure. I haven’t actually messed with it in ages, but seems like hotspots are the way to go and are super easy to set up on linux, so maybe I’ll dust mine off and give that a try.

Probably

Considering how much Bungie has fucked over their one game and its playerbase for years and seem to keep finding ways to double down on it, I never had any faith in Marathon from the beginning.

What’s wild is this is far from the first time that studio’s been caught for art theft too.

It was on the Lemmy.world selfhosted sub but I’d rather not link it as it’s likely still open because the OP wasn’t listening to anyone and there’s probably some awful shit on there now.

Any service or tool with obvious genAI in its branding or the developer’s profile is an instant “no” from me. Linkwarden is a big one. Any advertisement post clearly written by an LLM I’ll avoid like the plague. If you’re willing to use hallucinations based on theft that use unbelievable amounts of water and energy, then I’m flat out not going to trust that your software has any value.

Also seen a handful of random tools with “Proudly made in the USA” or some garbage on the readme, and sure enough the developer always follows all of today’s big fascists on social media. Shocker.

Tbh the marketing and price tag are what killed it. The game itself was actually pretty fun, played a lot like Destiny 1 pvp and really didn’t feel like a hero shooter at all (which is a good thing). The abilities complemented the gunplay, not the other way around, and movement was crisp.

Firewalk had a great core, but Sony fucked it up.

A bit of a tangent, but tbh I feel like Half-Life Alyx was a perfect example of where they can take the franchise, but being a PC VR title (and one that really leans heavily into the tech and loses a ton if played with non-VR mods), it didn’t have nearly the same impact as the rest of the franchise. It was definitely innovative but not in a way to appeal to the mass market. Not to mention it sets the stage for HL3 even more than Ep 2 did.