Saturnalia and Warhammer: 40K Mechanius are free on epic this week. This will be my first Warhammer game owned for me, but I’ve never heard of Mechanius or what it means in related to the other ones. Sounds like a dlc for an existing game, or what people used to call an expansion pack, which required the original game.
Mechanicus is a standalone game.
Mechanius focuses on playing tech priests - technology-obsessed cyborgs - as they fight and plunder their way through a bunch of robot tombs. It’s… fine. Just repetitive after a while. Definitely better than most 40k games, if only because any developer with a pulse and a dream can acquire a license from GW to make whatever crap they want.
My only real tip is this: between fights, the game throws choices at you that either provide benefits or penalties. Some are “glyphs” you just choose and maybe something good or bad happens. Sometimes they’re little narrative dialogues with no rhyme or reason or way to suss out what the ‘right’ choice might be. Find a cheat sheet online and just skip 'em. Instead of “oh neat, a random chance for something cool and awesome or something cool and terrible!” it just feels like a roulette wheel where half the possibilities are “FUCK YOU.”
Sims 4 base game is now free. Tons of free mods and custom content out on the interwebz.
Quality is at least improving in that sphere; Shootas, Blood & Teef is a ton of fun; a short side-scrolling shoot-em-up from the Ork perspective. Just beat it this weekend, it was a good time.
Darktide is easily my game of the year, hands-down. SOOO good. 17 more days until I get to play again… not that I’m counting or anything. (Full release is on November 30th)
EA wants you to get it from them, but you can also get it free from Steam or Origin.
My gaming crew is counting the days. Vermintide was pretty fun, but take the same gameplay and stick it in the 40k universe? Oh my, yes please.
Personally, I avoid all things multiplayer (even co-op except Left for Dead 2 which was crazy fun).
That’s just me though. It seems I do not play well with others. Also, I’m too old to be putting up with what they did to my mother in the comments.
The only multi-player gaming I do is with people I know. (Including people I only know from online interactions.)
I don’t have the patience for random match-ups.
Fanatical is giving away Internet Café Simulator when you sign up for their newsletter. Offer ends in four days or so.
You’re not alone there. Well, I guess technically you are alone since you won’t play multiplayer but… you know what I mean.
I have no desire at all to play multiplayer games. If the game doesn’t at least have a single player mode, I’m not interested.
I avoid all things Player-Versus-Player; I absolutely love cooperative multiplayer games, though; but only when played with people I know, not random matchmaking.
For me, it depends on if they’ve actually created content. Too many games these days have no content at all. It’s like giving a kid an empty box and saying, “Use your imagination!”
There are too many MOBAs (multiplayer online battle arenas). Games like Fortnite or PUBG or LoL. Each one, without exception, is garbage. You put people in a room and they try to kill each other. That’s the whole “game”. They are to video games what reality shows are to television. The creators don’t really have to do anything but put people together and then let them do everything.
They’re just frankly boring.
I also don’t like games that are fully PvE, but require teaming up. Left 4 Dead and Vermintide for example. It requires that I find other people that I can meet with on a particular schedule. As a grownup with kids and responsibilities that is difficult.
The only kind of multiplayer games that work for me are MMORPGs, and that’s because they’re flexible. A good MMORPG can be played mostly as if it is solo, and you can occasionally team up with other players for certain things, but you’re not restricted to only playing that way. I actually play them quite a bit, and have since the earliest days. (I even played MUDs before MMORPGs were even a thing.)
Other than that, forget it. Multiplayer games are for kids, or other people who have fewer responsibilities. Heck, maybe I’ll get into them in 20 years when I’m retired.
I’d add MMO-adjacent games like Minecraft.
Multiplayer games, while always having been there, seem to have jumped to the front in the last five years, and are awarded with claims they’re the future (as if they’ve not been there for years). But they’re successful for one simple reason: they’re free. Thus children with little income (and some with lots) can play together, and the ones with income can pay for the rest of them. Being free, thus popular confuses the industry as thinking they’re “successful”.
Also what annoyed me (rather than playing against children) about multiplayer games before this was in effect the transitory nature of them. You’d perhaps get good at say Medal of Honor, or the latest Unreal Tournament, and then the next big thing comes along (like Battlefield, which I never “got”), and all the servers are empty and eventually gone. Everyone would shift on about 1-2 times a year, and sometimes fragment into more and more different games.
Single player only for me, while I forced into some kind of multiplayer challenges during Deathloop, I turned them off early, and when I finished the game played the invading thing for a little while until I realised, yet again, it was pretty horrible either over fast or took forever.
At this level of reductionism you can make anything sound stupid.
Not sure if you’re aware of this, but you’re allowed to not like something while also recognizing that those things took work to create, appeal to some people, and gasp, some people have different preferences than you. You don’t have to be condescending and shit all over everyone who made or likes those things because you don’t like it.
I’m talking about the market for those games. I’m not in the demographic. You completely misread me.
The majority of people who play those games are people who can devote that kind of time to them.
If you play them and enjoy them, more power to you.
And it’s not an insult to point out the fact that you don’t have to develop content like stories, quests, or game worlds for games that don’t have them. Just as it’s not an insult to point out that you don’t have to write a script for unscripted content on television. That is literally why those sorts of entertainment are ubiquitous. They are cheaper and easier to make.
Case in point… I’m a supporter of an MMORPG in development. Very early on they tossed together a quick MOBA so people can test combat. It took very little effort to do it. That was many years before the actual game was available to launch.
And clearly they are appealing to a lot of people or they wouldn’t bother making them. They’re successful. Just not my cup of tea.
I could go on and on about how I can’t stand mushrooms either. I think they’re disgusting, every aspect of them. But I have no problem with people who farm, sell, cook, or eat them. People can express their dislike of something, it doesn’t at all mean they are insulting anyone.
MOBAs (DOTA2, League of Legends, etc) and Battle Royales (Fortnite, PUBG, etc) are two distinctly different genres. MOBAs have their roots in RTS games and Battle Royales have their roots in first/third person shooters and the two genres play very differently (aside from extreme reductionism of “You kill the other guys” which can be said of games ranging from Space Invaders to Call of Duty to Chess)
I would liken them more to sports. They are, after all, skill-based games. If cheating is an actual thing with aimbots and whatever, then that’s just like corrupt sports, but still sports. If it’s mostly amateurs or friends getting together, it’s analogous to a pickup basketball game.
That is fair. I’m a sports fan but many of my friends are not. That is a better analogy than what I came up with.