You must log in or register to comment.
“Things are bad/the end of the world” is the in-vogue thing right now. People think it makes them look smart/unbiased/well informed.
I dont get the hype for Helldivers or Lethal Company.
I think Lethal Company is popular because it is a great experience with friends, especially with mods. The horror aspect of people just going silent when dead and not knowing if you are the last alive, feeling like everything is going fine and turning a corner to find a monster that has you dead to rights, and the non-serious almost parody meta make it entertaining beyond the core gameplay.
Helldivers is also a great friends game and the bigger picture meta of the game gives a greater goal than to just complete the mission. It feels like you are part of something bigger than just that match while you are just ripping through enemies. It apparently was originally a Halo ODST Helljumper game pitch that Microsoft didn’t think was good, hilarious that they didn’t greenlight it in retrospect.
Lethal company is by far not the first game to do this tho and it’s not really the most polished one out there.
The lack of polish is charming and not detracting because the gameplay and in-game universe is fun.
Yeah. A few companies made good games. Doesn’t mean most companies aren’t making dogshit games that everyone keeps gobbling up and shelling money for
This is the way it’s been since the beginning. Way more people are going to try making something good than people are going to succeed at it. Whether it’s greed, incompetence, laziness, they ran out of time, whatever.
You don’t have to give a bad product any attention at all just because it’s “big”. The box says “Suicide Squad” not “guaranteed to be good” 😅
In the same time period, we’ve gotten Skull And Bones, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, and Diablo IV skins that cost more than the base game.
It can simultaneously be true that the big companies are churning out cash grabs while other companies are making awesome games.
One thing all these games share: not being made by one of the big companies like EA, Activision-Blizzard-King, or Ubisoft.
Hell, one of these was made by one dude, and another was made by the guys who made Magicka and was expected to have a player population of around 10k.
Gamers seem to be a pretty nasty bunch of people for whatever reason. Games have never been better and are absolutely amazing atm. But many people just like to focus on all the negatives and how certain games are bad. I honestly don’t get it - you have lots of choices so just don’t play the bad games, it’s pretty easy…
It’s because gamers are dirty Cheeto dust neck beards who never go outside
Didn’t Helldivers 2 ship with a kernel level spyware? I wouldn’t put it on this list.
Also riddled with microtransactions and yeah it’s not the worst in that regard but there’s still a lot of game design decisions that are worse off because of it.
One form of microtransaction that can be obtained through regular gameplay instead can’t be classified as “riddled with”
What the hell are you talking about? I’ve been playing it since it came out and I would totally understand if someone never even found the menu for spending real money. All the weapons all the Armor All the strategends are all in game currency that you can’t even buy. You can pretty much only get Cosmetics with the super credits and a couple hilariously enough pretty bad weapons that are so cheap that you’ll be able to buy them off the super credits you can simply find laying around in maps if you really want them
The main issues I have with it are the grinding rpg style gameplay loop, and forcing players to return to the ship as often as possible.
Maybe I’m being too cynical but I assume its to try to get people to play as long as possible and look at the storefront as often as possible.
You can unlock a lot of things for free including some premium currency, but that’s just to increase player familiarity with the premium store and to make the player think about the cosmetic upgrades as often as possible.
Another issue is with the difficulty scaling: it doesn’t scale with the number of players or add AI players to the game if someone drops out. On its surface this can be explained by not wanting to spend the man hours to develop smart friendly AI or put more work into difficulty balancing, but the financial incentives also work against this as without it people are encouraged to invite friends to play with them, thus generating free advertising for the in game store.
That’s just a couple of examples, but every game design decision gets influenced to some extent by the way players interact and think about microtransactions. This isn’t really the case with baulders gate 3, which is in a completely different league in terms of quality(and dev budget tbf) to hell divers: it feels a bit like comparing McDonald’s with a michelin star restaurant 😂 (I haven’t played lethal company so can’t comment on that one)
Calling you back to the ship frequently so that you have the ability to change planets or change systems. The entire map of the game is basically real time and dynamic with a game master occasionally coming in to fuck with things.
You’re supposed to tug of war fight with the AI over different planet systems and objectives. A lot of people are just basically sticking to One Planet their entire gaming session and it’s currently causing super Earth to not really gain much ground because they will simply hard liberate a planet say from the automatons but then rush over to the bugs who have taken over a planet in the meantime. You’re supposed to try to spread your effort out like it’s an actual Active war
And there is so much design language in the game that shows this, did you know that if you are looking out at the ships while you’re at a planet that those are fairly real time? Not perfectly obviously but when you see ships out your window shooting down orbitals sending down drop pods or exploding that’s all something that was caused by an active gameplay session on that planet.
When people call down supplies you see that, if their ship explodes it means they just lost the mission, it helps you gauge how well a planet is currently going with the idea being you can now decide whether or not this planet is in need of more help or you should go elsewhere.
You also may want to change your loadout, you may have gotten enough metals to unlock a new weapon enough samples to unlock a new strategym or a ship module. So if you weren’t frequently going back to the ship to spend them you would be stuck on an equipment set for quite a while which could easily kill the pace of the game.
Literally everyone I know is currently playing the game and I did a little bit of a pole in my group and most of them don’t even remember that there is a store for spending real money and not a single one of us ever has spent any real money the game really isn’t pushing it hard you can ignore it completely very easily
I’m not saying it’s difficult to ignore the microtransactions, but it influences the design in a way I don’t like 😂
I guess it’s just not for me as I couldn’t care less about the lore or the global state of planets and position of other players ships 😂
The key difference is Originality.
And not coming from a massive company
There’s also tons of REALLY good games that are made by small developers and cost about as much as an energy drink.
