The Half-Life franchise, maybe. Half-Life 2 and up has a lot of physics stuff including the Gravity Gun, but considering HL1 is free to play via Sven Co-op it wouldn’t hurt to start there. You’ll need something like Synergy or Obsidian Conflict to play HL2 cooperatively.

So much to play that’s free nonetheless. If I’m going to get screwed by live service nonsense, it’s gonna be a game like Fortnite or the upcoming Skate or even Genshin Impact, not a full-priced title. All this means to me is that they just announced that there’s no reason to buy at launch, like with Shadow of War from ages ago with now-removed singleplayer loot boxes.

Fortnite, but like, not the battle royale part.

The Rocket League Racing, Rock Band clone, and LEGO survival mode are wild additions that I honestly really appreciate. BR got old ages ago, but now there’s a whole swathe of new free stuff to play.

Microsoft works in mysterious ways. Another oddity is how the Microsoft Store version of The Evil Within is a more-updated, more-featured version of the game than every other version including on console, and I don’t think they’ve ever acknowledged it. It only released when they bought Bethesda, so maybe it’s a similar story here where they’re just putting out some unreleased work.

Or maybe not idk I’m not omniscient

My $300 Brother laser printer that does everything works just fine because it wasn’t designed to be a money-siphoning piece of shit.

People used to form “gaming-clans” in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.

Unlikely imo, because modern game devs have been killing the viability of that for years. User-hosted servers are gone, crossplay is reliant on SBMM to be realistically possible, and private matches often block players from receiving XP and rewards because they’re worried about FOMO and people getting too much fun without spending enough. Even CSGO got an update in the months leading up to CS2 where they removed the ability to earn drops on community servers, driving another nail into the coffin as one of the last kinds of these games that still retain the mere ability to run servers of our own.

Valve.

Not new management, but they definitely changed direction. From Portal 2 to Half-Life Alyx was a dark age of live service titles and hardware. Fortunately, it seems like they’re finally getting back to their old selves?

Alyx was supposedly their re-entry into releasing games (hopeful that HLX is good), the Steam Deck caused them to go back and fix several of their titles (plus do the huge Half-Life update we just got), and while they’re not exactly making their games as open as they used to, they’re letting the community handle things like TF2 events and L4D2 patches.

So, I dunno, cautiously optimistic for their future. At least as long as Gabe is running the company.

I wouldn’t play Web3 games, I don’t really see a future for web3

There’s no future for these because the big players that could pull it off have no reason to do so. Game publishers love FOMO and thus hate trading, and platform owners would probably look at Valve’s success with the Steam Marketplace instead of the continued failure of crypto.

I also don’t really see a future for VR/AR.

This one doesn’t have that same sort of constraint where it fundamentally doesn’t make sense.

VR has a future as an entertainment system for sure. Probably not as widespread as simply grabbing a PS5 and playing Madden, but there’s a ton of potential especially as older hardware drops in price and game libraries continue to expand. Porn is gonna keep this concept alive forever either way.

As for AR, its future is utility. Seeing map directions on the road itself, interactive models during meetings, having real life Shadowplay built into your glasses since they’re camera peripherals, etc. Or porn but in your room with your own parts idk.

Watch the video.

No they can’t. We all found out during the Quest 2 era that their elite straps are fragile and prone to snapping. 100% of the advice in the community is to buy third-party.

I imagine this is a mix of things. UE5 has officially been out for a while, their biggest competitor just offed themselves, Fortnite’s UE editor support is out and thus Fortnite probably doesn’t need as many devs now with UGC to pick up the slack, etc.

That’s still a huge chunk of people though. Wonder if all these financial gambles they’ve taken are starting to add up.

Not allowing to ship out paid orders is not forgivable no matter the situation imo.

Not to mention accessibility settings in games themselves. Fortnite has an option to visually show sounds and their directions on the HUD and it was amazing when I spent a month with no audio solution, I can’t imagine what a breath of fresh air it is for deaf gamers. The Last of Us Pt2 is also wildly player-friendly, and recently I’ve even been seeing some indie titles like Metal Unit do their best to assist players and let them enjoy the game.

Accessibility is only getting better, and I think this cynicism is unwarranted. We should certainly keep up the fight and demand for it, but you go back two decades and games didn’t even come with subtitles as standard. Doom 3 still pisses me off in that regard.

Because Chrome just stopped working on my PC one day like a decade ago.

Damn, guess I’ll finally need to upgrade.

Why? Guardians of the Galaxy is what they were working on. This game is why Shadow of the Tomb Raider was mid.

Sony management didn’t even see a point to backwards compatibility until recently and still can’t be bothered to figure out PS3 emulation. It’s easily the console’s greatest flaw imo.

All other game developers in the history of games have understood the concept of making the lowest-powered device you’re launching on the baseline for development. We’ve dealt with crippled titles on more powerful consoles for ages, I’m sure Larian’ll figure it out for their next game.

it really was just “another Saints Row game” but with better characters.

This is sarcasm, right? If it were even close to that we all would’ve loved it. To me, it felt like the worst parts of later SR games mashed up with a desperate attempt to replicate Watch_Dogs 2’s vibe. I don’t play Saints Row to play as a dude trying to pay off their student loans while fighting “gangs” that have access to random bullshit technology like neon batons that spin real fast and deflect bullets. That’s the type of stuff that should’ve stayed in Agents of Mayhem with its far less grounded setting.

That’s not what’s being argued. You don’t own a picture just because you’re in it and this has been proven legally on numerous cases, the story behind the LUL Twitch emote being a relatively recent example.

Trump can take a selfie and put it on a shirt. If I take a picture of him and upload it to my site, I can sue him if he uses that picture instead. The argument is that the jail can too.