Traditional roguelikes may frequently pair with bad graphics, but it’s not a requirement. There are games like Tangledeep and Jupiter Hell, for instance. But thanks, these sound interesting.

What’s the hook to each one? I hear people mention Caves of Qud a lot, but the low-fi graphics aren’t grabbing my attention on their own.

I’m sure it would if I thought more highly of it.

I didn’t personally care for it, but I know I’m in the minority. In fact, one of the reasons I didn’t care for it is because it felt far less replayable than many of its peers. Even Zagreus will call out “the butterfly room”, because there are so few permutations to see.

Tons. There’s an entire roguelike genre built around this; some of my favorites are Vagante and Streets of Rogue. There are games with procedurally generated worlds like Terraria, RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, and Factorio. There are RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 that have so many ways to spec your characters and so many permutations of how events could unfold based on what you did that you’re unlikely to see them all.

I’m still moving forward slowly in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Not much else to report there without spoilers.

I beat Fallout 2 for the first time. It got off to a rough start by only really allowing you to use melee weapons, even if you didn’t spec for them. It also ended in a rough spot by similarly not giving you tons of options for how to get through the final area, and the ones that were there reminded me a lot of 90s adventure games, with very specific solutions that you’d wonder how on earth you were possibly supposed to know that. In fact, once you get to the final step of retrieving the GECK, through to the end of the game, the game suddenly does a very poor job of pointing you toward what you’re supposed to do next, which stood out because the game had been really good at it up to that point. The progression was also really strange. Most of the power progression is going to come from armor, but they’re really stingy with letting you amass enough money to buy better armor, and armor and weapons rarely drop from enemies at all. Your lack of ability to take on combat encounters for most of the game limits how much XP you can earn, to the point where I spent 3/4 of the game at or below level 8, and then the last quarter of the game very quickly got me to level 18. Those issues aside though, the middle chunk of the game that forms most of your time with it was some of the best RPG stuff I’ve seen in the genre.

I then immediately moved on to Fallout 3, which I had played before over 10 years ago, and the last time I played it was before I played the classic Fallout games. Especially with Starfield fresh in my mind, I was expecting this to have aged worse, but so far, it really hasn’t. Bethesda made a lot of smart choices with how they changed the progression, like giving you fewer SPECIAL points up front and letting you put points into what you want with every level up; plus they flattened the progression on big guns and lasers, which were previously (in Fallout 1 and 2) a stat you could put points into and then never use until the back part of the game. Plus, the quest design is miles better than Starfield. Sure you take a quest that looks like it’s just a simple fetch quest, but when you get there, not only are you in the middle of a minefield, which already throws a wrench into the works of how the game typically plays, but then there’s a sniper trying to detonate them on you too. Just purely by the game’s systems, I get into a shootout with this guy, and my bullet happens to shoot the sniper rifle out of his hand, really showing the power of the sandbox in Bethesda games when they’re at their best. That interesting thing that happens along the way in your quest is the thing Starfield needed so badly. Fallout 3 sure isn’t perfect; the shooting feels bad, and they’re too content to let you follow objective markers instead of using your head more, but it’s good to be back.

I also started Life is Strange: Before the Storm ahead of Double Exposure. The opening scene was so bad that I almost put the game down then and there, but I’m told it gets better soon, and I did like the original Life is Strange.

I’d just as soon call this the death of co-op games. How many can be played without an internet connection? Split-screen, LAN, direct IP connections, and private servers are super rare now, and it sucks. Plenty of games in that chart from 2018 might not even be playable anymore, and plenty more can go down when Steam servers are down for maintenance or will be unplayable when you’re on a train or some other location without internet access.

It’s on GOG. Currently on sale for $3. It’s the non-remastered version, but I doubt that will hold people back much.

Gods Will Be Watching is the one that comes to mind for me. It’s a strategy game of sorts with about 7 or 8 totally different scenarios where you’re managing a very bad situation. In one, you’re holding hostages while executing a heist, and in another you’re wandering through a desert with limited resources. Each one is a balancing act, and a through line forms the narrative across them all. It was probably hamstrung by its punishing difficulty at launch, which was later addressed by additional difficulty modes, but there’s a lot of room to iterate on this concept without it ever getting old.

They’re not. This same curve happens with PvP games. The ones that don’t follow this trend are the exception, not the rule.

She was credited with a pseudonym. It happened plenty in the 90s, and this wasn’t long after. That means probably Hollywood talent. Someone prestigious who thought taking this role would be bad for her career, or maybe her agent thought that. But times have changed in the past 20 years, so maybe we can know who it is now.

But will they credit Eva’s voice actor by her real name this time? Whatever stigma there may have been in 2004 for being in a video game has got to be gone by now.

There’s also a new 3D factory game called Foundry. Having bounced off of Satisfactory, that one seems more promising as a fan of Factorio.

In the US at least, this is false.

It’s a great game, but it’s hard to argue that it didn’t change the genre, and all of multiplayer video games, for the worse. Multiplayer games can no longer be designed to just be fun. They must also be addictive, they must retain players, they must keep them coming back, etc. using every manipulative trick in the book like XP bars and unlocks. You might say MMORPGs did this first, but this was the application of that feedback loop to a competitive action game.

I just picked up Dread Delusion, Shadows of Doubt, and Stellar Tactics. I played demos of Dread Delusion and Shadows of Doubt a while back, and both of them blew me away; the former just launched out of early access and the latter is supposed to do so before the end of the year. Stellar Tactics is one that’s intriguing, but I haven’t played it yet. I’ve been playing Fallout 2 lately, and it made me want to find a CRPG that was more successful at what Starfield was trying to do; I typed in some tags into the Steam search, Stellar Tactics was what I found, and I think it’ll scratch that itch. Stellar Tactics is also in early access, and it’s been in early access since 2016 with no end in sight, but it’s very systems driven, so I’ll likely be okay with playing it early anyway.

That line about “only 20% stick around for the multiplayer” isn’t exclusive to RTS. Usually I hear a number like 30%, even for other RTS games, but that’s the case across every genre, even for games like fighting games that you think are only there for multiplayer. Only about 30% of people of any game’s player base will stick around to play online matches against other people.

StarCraft II is one of my favorite games, but to get back into RTSes, for me personally, I’m looking for two solutions: I want it to work well with a controller, and I think I want to get rid of the fog of war. The controller thing, done well, solves the APM complaint already, since there’s usually a speed limit on it. Tooth & Tail, Cannon Brawl, Brutal Legend, etc. give you a “cursor” character such that it doesn’t matter what input device you’re on, since that character can only move at a set speed. This isn’t the only way to do it though; it isn’t coded to use controllers, but Northgard operates on distinct tiles and things move at a slower pace such that a game like it could work on a controller without compromise. One of those compromises that games like Halo Wars or Battle Aces have made is that you can’t really place buildings strategically, and that feels like they’ve gone too far. As for the fog of war, I recognize its strategic value, but it wrecks me mentally and emotionally. It’s just so stress-inducing, even when I understand how to thoroughly scout. Cannon Brawl does without it entirely, and I can enjoy that game in a way that I can’t other RTSes. You still have to split your attention paying attention to all of the different attacks in motion that your opponent has thrown at you, and so it doesn’t feel like it’s missing something. I’m the star of my own story, so these things definitely feel important to me, but I do feel like both of these things would do wonders for making the genre feel more approachable.

And of course, for me, it’s a non-starter if the game is online-only. The two big RTS revivals with the most marketing right now are Stormforge and Battle Aces, and both are online-only, as is that Beyond All Reason game right now. These games have been cooking for a long time, and they’re going to be launching into a live service game crash. Their lead developers may take away the lesson that the genre can’t be saved when I hope that the actual reason is that customers hate putting time and money into a game that will likely be deleted off the face of the earth in a matter of months, not even years.

Microsoft is a wrench in the works, but they’re not building a game any larger than they’ve been doing for some years now. This is still a game that is scoped so that it doesn’t need to sell 10 million copies to break even.

Thus far, Obsidian has been very good at creating games within reasonable constraints, which means they’re typically not overscoped relative to the size of the game’s actual audience. And they do all of this while being a multi project studio that’s allegedly good to its employees.

I never had a Dreamcast, but this was always the game mentioned in the same breath as Smash Melee back then when we were all getting competitive. These days, I’m a Skullgirls player, and MvC2 is a huge influence on it. The Fightcade implementation has issues, but even if the main player base ends up there for online play, it will be nice to learn the game with a better training mode and to boot it up without emulator jank. It’s worth noting that cross play comes with its own downsides.