Homeschooled316

Jez Corden correctly leaked the Death Knight class in hearthstone prior to announcement. He seems to have sources at blizzard.

Game companies will literally invent superhuman artificial intelligence to filter rude remarks sooner than they will admit their ranking-treadmill game design breeds toxicity.

The lead is actually buried by this headline. Denuvo is unironically claiming their DRM has no performance impact and that gamers are spreading a myth. And to prove it they will provide a test example, entirely controlled by them, to game journalists in the future.

I should put “accessibility” in sarcastic quotation marks. Here, it doesn’t mean adding options or features to assist someone with different handicaps or needs. It means making the game so easy that anyone, even a toddler or game journalist, can finish it without having to learn from mistakes or think about what they’re doing.

Particularly with regard to excessive guidance. Varying degrees of “mobile game that makes you click exactly what it says for 30 minutes to prove you played the tutorial.” Those games may be the worst offenders, but less-dramatic hand holding happens in console and PC games too.

People are going to be pedantic about this one, because it’s not ALL games, but what you’re seeing is real. Game design, especially corporate design, has changed to accomplish two things:

1. Engagement
2. Accessibility

Games are designed to be playable by as many people as possible for as long as possible. Some would say this is just Western AAA games, but lots of anime games have been doing this nonsense for decades - games with 10 hours of baby’s first JRPG tutorial and 80 hours of grinding and filler. Many of them critically acclaimed games that fans would flog me for if I actually named one of them.

There are indie games that help you escape this, but many take that accessibility-first approach that requires everything to be very structured and corral you toward the right direction.

Again, I think people are going to be dismissive, but you’re right. It’s a tough world out there for someone who just wants to play a game and not be suckered into a live service engagement trap, or ladder system that hides your real MMR to keep you grinding up an imaginary points system. It’s not like the old days when you can just pick something popular, you have to discriminate and carefully judge what you buy now.

All the usual problems you expect with lists like these.

• Franchises represented by their first or most ubiquitous game rather than their best (or better yet, all of them that deserve it making the list)
• Recency bias toward games that likely won’t be recognized as this good 5 years from now.
• Missing entries so egregious that almost anyone would agree they belong on the list (see the lack of Symphony of the Night, for example).
• Arguably too much weight put on storytelling.
• (most importantly) The items above being applied randomly and inconsistently.

Arkham City was for a long while considered the best, but age has arguably been kinder to Asylum (thanks to storytelling) and Knight (thanks to streamlining/modernization).

I don’t think there is any question on how to answer the literal post, though. If you could only get one of them, it’s Asylum.

Also, I would not recommend binging these games unless you are REALLY feeling it when you finish Asylum. The chief complaint about them was always that they did not change the formula around enough between games. I have to think playing them back to back exacerbates that.

Age of Empires 2 skirmish maps are procedurally generated, in contrast to other competitive RTS games of that style. It’s done quite well and makes scouting meaningful for reasons other than rock-paper-scissoring your opponent.

And who knows among that percentage how many actually are versus just said so on the poll. If you take into account people who were never going to buy the game anyway, the actual number could very well be 0.

I have a cool idea to prevent hardcore disconnect deaths: Let people play single player games offline. But that would hinder their ability to retroactively ruin their game 5 years from now.

MetalFX upscaling is a nice gesture, but turned out to be a lousy performance-quality tradeoff comparable to FSR 1.0. Apple Arcade had some nice gems like fantasian, but also ended up a recycling bin for failed f2p games. We can only assume the monkey’s paw will curl some way or other for this, too. Apple’s attempts to get gamers to buy their stuff is always a little half-assed.

Seconding slipways. It is peerless.