I don't understand how people hang out in these places. It just doesn't seem like a system conducive to discussion. The forum/link aggregator format works much better imo
LET ME TURN OFF THE CLAUSTROPHOBIC VIGNETTE, PLEEEAAASSEEEE. Even games like Cyberpunk 2077 that have gained countless features over the years and have individual HUD on/off switches still ignore this.
UGC as a whole. I grew up on Half-Life mods, custom Counter-Strike: Source maps, and LittleBigPlanet. The fact that we've pretty much abandoned that outside of Halo, Counter-Strike (just barely, mind you), and more recently Fortnite with proper Unreal Engine support is a terrible thing. It makes more sense than ever in an era of live service where you want players to never stop playing.
"Good" is subjective. I know CoD is mangled corporate moneygrab trash, but it's still really fun, so I play it. The only reason I bought Cyberpunk was because I knew everyone was going to be talking about it and I wanted to be able to be part of the conversation, and it didn't disappoint.
And yet some of my favorite indie games are games practically nobody's ever heard of. Most recent was Metal Unit, a game that I don't know how I have in my Steam library and somehow evades the internet's favorite rule despite the main character being an anime girl in a bodysuit. At time of writing there are 17 players in-game.
So while good games are good and bad games are bad, the good ones may not necessarily be sustainable.
Mainly AI Dungeon because I've been hella tired and it requires minimal input compared to other games, but I loaded up my three year old Cyberpunk 2077 save and started playing again with 2.0, and Counter-Strike 2 just dropped so I've been giving that some of my time.
Look man, I'm super tech-savvy and I straight-up almost never made it over here from reddit because the explanation of it that someone was giving just sounded shitty and convoluted. Now think about how much effort someone who uses Gmail as a substitute for knowing how email works is willing to put in.
The fad isn't over until there's something to replace it. Right now, I'm pretty sure we're securely in the era of "PvPvE extraction shooters" now that the top three Battle Royale podium has ended up Fortnite, Call of Duty, and PUBG.
Though, frankly, CoD DMZ is probably going to win Extraction Shooters for no reason other than that it's free and all the stuff carries over into CoD BR and the standard multiplayer. If they don't kill carry forward next year, they're in a position for some serious success. I've given it a play for no reason other than that it's the easiest mode to get battlepass progression in and the M13B was locked behind playing it.
No they can't. We all found out during the Quest 2 era that their elite straps are fragile and prone to snapping. 100% of the advice in the community is to buy third-party.
I imagine this is a mix of things. UE5 has officially been out for a while, their biggest competitor just offed themselves, Fortnite's UE editor support is out and thus Fortnite probably doesn't need as many devs now with UGC to pick up the slack, etc.
That's still a huge chunk of people though. Wonder if all these financial gambles they've taken are starting to add up.
It was a "ground-up" rebuild on Source 2, so while it carries forward all the CSGO content and aims to "play the same" in terms of movement and gunplay (with the exception of improvements like subtick actions), I'd say it's way more of an actual "2." New engine with all kinds of fancy lighting and other improvements, new assets (including weapon and character models, some of which were still originally in the 2013 CSGO launch), remakes and retouches of maps, vastly improved map-making tools, some nifty accessibility features (your walking sounds appearing on the radar) and quality of life features (selling back misbought items, or the picture-in-picture grenade throw practice camera), and some huge balance changes (games are now shorter, players now need to more strategically choose their weapons, smoke grenades are voxel-based and can be cleared out with gunfire and grenades, skyboxes are now open for grenade tosses, etc.)
It looks the same but with some lighting changes on the surface, but it's actually huge.
I don't understand how people hang out in these places. It just doesn't seem like a system conducive to discussion. The forum/link aggregator format works much better imo