Far Cry 2.

The game is fundamentally broken in a way that mods apparently can’t even fix. The enemy militia checkpoints instantly fully respawn as soon as you trip an invisible trigger. It makes combat with them pointless, which means getting stuck in a firefight with a checkpoint tedious.

The weapon degradation feature is way overtuned to cause some weapons to start visibly rusting from shot to shot.

These two aspects turn the game into a slog. Not even in a way that makes it immersive and survivalist, but immersion breakingly frustrating.

It’s a shame because the game was so ambitious. The game having a mechanic where a player at 0 health can get randomly saved if they befriended an NPC which will drag them to safety is really cool. The fire spreading everywhere was visually and tactically great. The malaria bouts were controversial, but I think they were a good way to increase the feeling of survival and desperation. There’s a lot good with a bleak, serious, and grounded Far Cry game but it just missed the mark in all the most impossible to ignore ways.

‘Far Cry 2 (2)’ would be amazing.

FC4 and FC5 have some structural differences. I think a decent amount of feedback was taken for FC5. It doesn’t have tower climbing puzzles and the collectathoning which had gotten way out of hand in FC4 was toned down a lot in FC5. FC5 replaced some of that with the totally optional survivalist bunkers that give rewards per bunker. It’s hard to go back to FC4 and it’s “collect 300 scraps of paper” nonsense after FC5.

Why I caveat with words like “relatively”. I know game dev is a volatile industry, but that’s why I’m happy to see a small team put out a second game.

I’m very happy whenever a smaller studio (this game was developed by the Shovel Knight team) not just sees success, but becomes a stable small team able to put out multiple games.

This structure of small, but relatively stable and established teams seems like a much healthier gaming ecosystem than the bloated quadruple-A studio with hundreds of developers and a focus on mind numbing photorealism over actual gameplay.

More like “Guess I’ll just print this file labeled ‘hyper realistic movie prop lazer blaster’.”

There’s just so much insane bloat in the industry. It feels like every game made by a AAA studio has a hundreds of millions of dollar budget, and hundreds of people working on it. A lot of people are just completely unfazed by the novelty of high production value anymore. Not a majority, but the number of people checking of AAA seems to grow constantly a little bit over time.

There’s obviously an audience for these massively produced games, but I just don’t understand how every AAA game is expected to be successful like this.

Meanwhile digital publishing, with Steam Early Access being the default example, has lowered the bar to entry in the market to basically nothing. Indie and “AA” games are on the front page of the storefront next to multimillion dollar AAA games.

Sure the vast majority of Early Access games never get finished enough to grab attention, but given the sheer volume, even a tiny fraction of those games releasing and getting traction dilutes the hold of AAA games.

People spending time playing Zomboid or Kenshi aren’t spending that time playing AAA next big thing.

I’m not deluded enough to think anything like a majority of gamers are playing mostly indie games, but a noticeable enough amount might be to reduce the needed profit margin of a bloated production.

That’s how this goes every time a question like this is asked. I agree. There’s a lot of games I personally don’t enjoy at all, but I can understand the appeal to a certain audience.

Someone already linked it, and amazingly the horse electrolytes weren’t even the worst thing going on with that guy.

Mark is the stupid one here.

Spoilers etc for show only watchers. People get big mad over odd things.

It’s not out for Halo 2 yet, but the Halo CE Ruby Rebalance is very good. A lot of thoughtful changes, some obvious (new weapons and enemies) some more invisible (tweaks to weapon stats and enemy spawn logic). It is respectful and high quality enough to the original that if you’d never played CE or hadn’t played in a long time, it would be hard to tell what the mod content was.

Keep an eye out for the Ruby Rebalance mod for the MCC.

MCC are remasters not remakes. This entire discussion got beat to death when the Halo CE remake was announced. The remakes will be completely new games, not visual facelifts on existing ones.

Get a load of this guy not even understanding even the simplest fiat currency analogy.

Caesar 3 has different “levels” where you have different cities and have to meet different demands from Rome with them. If you play this game I highly, highly, highly recommend using the Augustus mod from the get-go to have modern quality of life features. Also look up some tutorial videos as there are some counter intuitive mechanics.

This is a standalone program.