Totally.
I didn’t know games could come with professionally printed labels, when I was a kid with no income. I thought everyone just got them on disks labeled in marker from a good friend of the family.
It’s important to me to support developers, but I can’t say I regret getting to play those games before I could have ever afforded them.
I’ve since gone on to buy those same games from their developers several times over on various platforms.
Why not both?
Because DRM misfires for a small percentage of paying customers.
Those paying customers, ironically, usually get help from the pirate community to get their game working.
Then they go back to paying for everything, because they still trust game studios more than pirates. Wait no, this last bit usually doesn’t happen.
Overall DRM prevents zero percentage of all privacy, while hassling a small percentage of paying customers.
Don’t make me point to the sign with people standing on boxes in front of a fence.
This should be very easily solved with matchmaking lobby settings.
Anyway, most accessibility settings are either something every competitive player should be using anyway (reasonable color contrast settings, HUD tweaks for clarity) or things that only people who need them despately would ever use (remapping all buttons to be able to play using only a stick in the players mouth, because they have no hands).
This seems to me like a total non-issue. And in the very few cases it is, the ranked lobbies can just diable that setting.
The backlash was probably because for you and I a harmed pvp experience is a “could happen” while for a bunch of gamers the lack of accessibility is a daily undeniable part of their reality. For some people, games are a critical sanity-saving retreat from the rest of their life. Let’s let them have their tweaks outside of ranked play.
Accessibility feature enabled: “You can just kill this escort quest NPC and go enjoy the rest of the game.”
I hope so. As someone who will use the accessibility features, I don’t mind separate badges at alll. I don’t need the same badge as a speed-runner. I just want to play the game.
I’ve found diving deep into retrogames is great for my similar situation.
Games from the 80s, 90s and even some from the 00s are often designed to be played in much shorter play sessions.
Great points.
To add for OP: I’ve found that I can scratch the “play and progress with friends” itch with games like Torchlight II, which doesn’t have the same kind of addiction triggers.
That’s a good point. No company has had a great time throwing their handheld into the market across from a Nintendo product.
Steamdeck and Evercade seem to be holding their own, at least.
As a current Switch owner deciding what to pick up next time I spring for a new system, the lack of anything portable from Microsoft and Sony is kinda wild to me.
Honestly, if I had not been burned previously by Xbox losing my online purchases, I think I would consider buying an Xbox for game pass.
I don’t hate the concept, and I’ve heard great things about the Xbox game pass library.
I’m also not a big fan of not actually owning my games. I have 40 year old games that I still return to every year. The idea of finding something special on Gamepass and having it just disappear like a streaming show does… Not compelling to me.
Yeah. I stopped buying XBox after they let my account get hacked and restored none of my purchased content.
I occasionally consider giving Xbox another try, but then the whole tiers of systems and naming nonsense takes long enough to parse that I remember why I stopped buying Xboxes.
I like to play though GunStar Heroes (a terrific Contra style bullet hell) with a self inflicted “melee attacks only” rule.
The fact that it’s possible is one of the cool things about the game.
I had the opposite FF8 experience. I got lost like 3 times, and between over leveling and limit breaks, none of the bag guys ever got through their dialog trees during a fight. It was funny, but I don’t recommend it.
I did the speedster pacificst build in DnDOnline once, because I liked to kite most enemies while charming a few to fight for me.
It was wild how that character could solo some difficult dungeons, but then a solitary guard at the top of a ladder was nearly impassable.
I do the same!
I would love to hear people’s preferred early game alternate starters.
I usually go with the first non-Normal type Pokemon I encounter and build my team around it.
I feel you.
I have found that searching for game reviews with the term “Cozy Gamer” finds games that fit into that after work funk, for me, when I have that time.
Indeed! I wish they would standardize this mode and add it as an icon to the back of the game box.
Edit: Also I’m old enough that I think of games as coming in boxes, still…
“Anything with a pause button.”
Someone make this into a shirt with a cool gamer logo. I’ve found my gamer crew.
And I’m sure they understand that exposure also leads to more sales.