Katana314

Many of us only view a game's release in passing, and view it as an "event". Groundhog Smasher came out, it failed, and we don't hear of it again. Additionally, many of us associate "online" games with being "live service" - expecting the developers to announce a new skin, battle pass, game mechanic, or character every other week.

But some online games are just purely enjoyable, or get enough unremarkable patches, or sometimes don't even need a high playercount, to be enjoyed for years after the developers stopped emitting news.

This subject also gets confusing with cross-play games; even if one game has hardly anyone in its Steam playercount, sometimes between Playstation and Xbox there's just enough left to garner a following.

Which games do you play, or know about, that most people would've thought to be completely closed down, or at least had totally forgotten about?

Given how little libraries advertise, this is something that I found recently. Like many, I missed being able to easily/quickly rent games via Blockbuster. But, it turns out many librarians keep up with modern preferences and keep quite a few games for checkout. Even when the one closest library doesn't have something I want, it's often available in the others on the network.

Especially as Nintendo lifts their prices to $80, this may be something to seriously consider for people that have felt burned just two days into playing a game that isn't as fun as it looked in trailers.

Storyline? What kind of lore-addled whackjobs needed a storyline to get invested in two teams of knuckleheads killing each other endlessly in the Nevadan wasteland? Back when I played video games, it was two bleeping and blorping pixels that would gladly use their own guts as a rope to strangle the other. And you were lucky if you got any blorping!

Anyway, it ends on a happy note so you may as well enjoy it. Merry Smissmas!

For game designers, encouraging aggression is often a good thing. Too many players of StarCraft or even regular combat games end up "turtling", dropping initiative wherever possible to make their games slow and boring while playing as safe as possible.

But in other games, often of multiplayer variety, hyper-aggression can sometimes ruin pacing in the other direction. Imagine spawning into a game with dozens of mechanics to learn, but finding that the prevailing strategy of enemy players is to arrive directly into your base and overwhelm you with a large set of abilities, using either their just-large-enough HP pool, or some mitigation ability, while you were still curiously investigating mechanics and working on defenses.

Some players find this approach fun, and this may even be the appropriate situation for games of a competitive variety, where the ability to react to unexpectedly aggressive plays is an exciting element for both players and spectators.

Plus, this is a very necessary setup for speedrunners, who often optimize to find the best way of trivializing singleplayer encounters.

But other games have something of a more casual focus, which can give a sour feeling when trying to bring people into the experience without having to reflexively react to players that are abandoning caution. Even when a game isn't casual, aggression metas can trivialize the "ebb and flow, attack and defense" mechanics that the game traditionally tries to teach. This can also lead to speedruns becoming less interesting because one mechanic allows a player to skip much of what makes a game enjoyable (which can sometimes be solved by "No XGlitch%" run categories)

So, the prompt branches into a few questions:

• What are fun occasions you've seen where players got absolutely destroyed for relying on various "rush metas" in certain kinds of games, because witty players knew just how to react?
• What are some interesting game mechanics you've seen that don't ruin the fun of the game, but force players to consider other mechanics they'd otherwise just forget about in order to have a "zero HP, max-damage" build?
• What are some games you know of that are currently ruined by "Aggression metas", and what ideas do you have for either players or designers to correct for them?

This might be a slightly unusual attempt at a prompt, but might draw some appealing unusual options.

The way it goes: Suggest games, ideally the kind that you believe would have relatively broad appeal. Don't feel bad about downvotes, but do downvote any game that's suggested if you have heard of it before (Perhaps, give some special treatment if it was literally your game of the year). This rule is meant to encourage people to post the indie darlings that took some unusual attention and discovery to be aware of and appreciate.

If possible, link to the Steam pages for the games in question, so that anyone interested can quickly take a look at screenshots and reviews. And, as a general tip, anything with over 1000 steam reviews probably doesn't belong here. While I'd recommend that you only suggest one game per post, at the very most limit it to three.

If I am incorrect about downvotes being inconsequential account-wide, say so and it might be possible to work out a different system.