There are a lot of great suggestions here already, so I will just share Mini Review with you as a discovery tool. I like to use them because they have a lot of filters to help you find a mobile game. For example, here’s their list for free, single-player, offline games with no ads or in app purchases, sorted by highest user score. They also have an app for both Android and iOS with the same info and filtering as the site.
Apparently, they have twice as many players on PS4.
Have you tried Itch.io? They have a lot of Gameboy and NES roms that are “Name your own price.” I don’t have any recommendations - I’ve just started poking around with homebrew roms myself.
Those responsible for sacking everyone have been sacked.
What is your source on multiplayer games being more popular and prevalent than single player? Because a cursory search only turns up the opposite preference. You’re ignoring the parts of my argument that don’t suit you as well, like playing only with friends, so I don’t think you’re really being an honest interlocutor. That leads me to believe you are probably a player that bullies other players, which is why you’re so strongly anti-moderation.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/259577/us-single-player-vs-multiplayer-frequency-among-gamers “According to an October 2022 survey of PC and console gamers in the United States, over half of respondents stated that they spent about 75 to 100 percent of their gaming time playing alone.”
https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/single-player-vs-multiplayer-a-generational-changing-of-the-guards-or-a-bifurcation-of-gamer-behaviours “57% of gamers prefer single-player over multiplayer games, compared to 22% who prefer multiplayer games. While the overall preference for the single player mode holds true across all age segments, the degree to which the single player mode is preferred differs significantly with age.”
You don’t know what is true? That people can’t stop playing a game? That developers care about players quitting their game? It’s trivially easy to play video games and avoid trolls. There are single player games. You can play only with friends or family. You can play live service with lots of solo-oriented content and mute the chat. It’s not a hyperbolic choice between playing video games or avoiding all social interaction in life period - that’s a very “terminally online” kind of perspective. Normal people reduce toxic interactions where they can, they don’t think, “Welp, I either put up with constant bigotry and rape threats in this totally optional entertainment or I have to move out to a shack in the woods.”
nature. Stop fighting a losing battle. Learn how to block people and move on with your life. If you stop engaging they’ll get bored and leave you alone. They thrive on your reaction so stop giving them one.
The problem for developers is that the easiest way to stop engaging is to not play their games. They care about moderation because they want people to continue to play their game.
Warframe and Lotro are terminal illnesses for me. I’m never done playing them. It’s an endless cycle of dressing up a hobbit in Middle Earth or dressing up a Warframe in space.
Maybe I’m reading into it, but that phrasing seems intentionally vague. If it’s a permanent exclusive, they could just say so while praising Epic for supporting them.
If you excuse me now, got to continue playing Last Epoch which is even in its early access fucking amazing.
What’s the deal with the Epoch points? I keep wanting to check it out, but the Epoch point packs makes me think it’s going to be the same deal where you can’t earn cool looking stuff in game and have to buy it.
I love the title of this post. The only arpgs that I don’t see mentioned already are Victor Vran, which I think is a lot of fun, and the Warhammer arpgs, I haven’t played yet, Chaosbane and Inquisitor Martyr. Inquisitor Martyr is supposed to get a fully offline mode soon and they’ve patched it to have all the seasons available to play through.
I don’t know if it’s the “most authentic” experience, but for a “pick up and play” setup, you might want to look into Emudeck (www.emudeck.com). It was originally made for Steam Deck, but has a desktop version now and it pretty much automagically handles setting up all your emulators. Plus, it integrates with Steam. Russ with Retro Game Corps has a installation guide on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05dunYi6hkY&t=1s
ContraPoints has a video that explains a lot of it: https://youtu.be/7gDKbT_l2us?si=_RQR_ZJE2ZHsh8E2
EA App is not even a little bit better than Origin. Offline mode straight up doesn’t work in the EA App, which has been reported so many times and ignored. You can’t move your installation to another drive like you could with Origin. You can’t gift games or DLC to your friends in the EA App like you could in Origin. EA apps sucks so much that when I recently purchased Mass Effect Legendary Edition for the ridiculous deal of 90% off (on Steam), and then remembered I would have to use the EA App to play it, I immediately refunded it. Given a choice, I would happily go back to Origin. I hate the EA App so much. It deserves a negative score.
I remember when Steam curated their store and indie devs complained because Steam didn’t select their games - Steam was basically a king maker. In response to those complaints, Valve introduced the Greenlight program and a bunch of asset flips and shovelware started getting the green light. So, Valve added a cost for publishing a game to slow down the volume of crap getting green lit. Since then, they have added the Discovery Queue, Steam Curators (which is useful for specific use cases, like finding couch co-op games or multiplayer games you can self-host), and Next Fest (which brought back demos) to help gamers find the games they want. So, it’s not like Valve is ignoring the problem, provided that you think the problem is difficulty finding games you want to play.
Also, my remembrance is that after they opened the store up to more games, they discovered audiences for genres that they (Valve) were not aware had much of audience these days, like visual novels, hidden object games, and adventure games. So yeah, I think if the choice is between less curation with tools to find games or more curation with more indie games or entire genres potentially being overlooked, I prefer the first option.
Epic doesn’t see gamers as their customer - they see developers as their customer and shape the customer experience around that. For example, Epic said that if/when they add reviews, developers could choose to opt their games out of reviews. That’s very pro-developer, but very anti-consumer, whatever you might think of the value of reviews. Informed customers can rattle off a long list of reasons they don’t like Epic and why they’re bad, but they are a small minority of PC gamers. The “silent majority” doesn’t keep up with this kind of stuff or really care about it, so they are literally judging stores on their merits and Epic is a bare bones platform that doesn’t offer customers a good reason to spend money in their store because they don’t think they need to.
For me, it’s the decision fatigue. The content is so fragmented across so many services and it’s constantly getting worse. The rising costs adds to the fatigue because the fragmentation is less manageable now with all the services raising prices and cracking down on password sharing. I just feel like I have to think about it too much now.
Thank you for naming the game in the screenshot.
I want it to work in game mode and the last time I tried, copying the PW didn’t persist when swapping between the app and screen. If that’s working now, I would be so pleased.
The article says that comment came from a CEO of another game company, not players. Tim Bender, the CEO of the publisher for The Manor Lord, said “Players are happy, the developer is happy, and we as publisher are thrilled beyond belief.” I don’t understand where the post title that says he cited gamer expectations came from.