I went back and forth on it. The campaign is just the meta progression, the missions are the randomized element. Comparing to Darkest Dungeon for example, it’s really similar in structure.

Ok, sticking to roguelikes, here’s some other options:

Deckbuilding Style: Slay the Spire, Monster Train, Griftlands, Balatro

Survivor/Bullet-Heaven Style: Vampire Survivors, Brotato, Deep Rock Galactic Survivor

Realtime Combat (I’d put Hades/Dead Cells here): Hand of Fate 1/2, Zero Sievert, Wall World, Rogue Legacy 1/2, Risk of Rain 1/2, Heroes of Hammerwatch

FPS: Gunfire Reborn, Roboquest

Turn-based/Pausable: FTL, The Last Spell, Loop Hero, Dungeons of Dredmor, Darkest Dungeon 1/2, Backpack Hero, Into the Breach, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, XCOM 2

Sure I missed some other good stuff.

Not a roguelike but if you liked the combat style of Hades, check out Bastion.

It’s listed under each title in the article.

For something I’m paying for, I want no ads, recommended or otherwise.

For something I get for free, if it’s easily skippable/ignorable, I don’t really care, I’ll skip it or mute the tab or whatever. If I can’t, I’d rather have a like sniper level targeted ad (use all the data!), really try to show me something I’ll care about (there was some like 10 minutes ad about the science behing glass by one of the guys from MythBusters, I watched the whole ad, it was great). The demographic level targeted ads are my 2nd least favorite, mostly because it feels like I usually need to suffer through what is a targeted ad but if they bothered to exclude some of the audience based on some data points (looking at you luxury car ads, it’s just never going to happen), they’d know I’m a bad target, I’d rather some generic add over those. My least favorite ad though, when I get an ad in a language I don’t even understand, like at least match my primary language, wasting everyone’s time…

Article feels weirdly biased, an Xbox mid-gen update has been talked about for over a year and is expected in the next like 4-6 months. Anyone in the market for a current gen Xbox is likely to consider that and may decide to postpone their purchase until then, making sales artificially lower than demand for an Xbox. The article doesn’t even mention it, instead talking about even more speculative hardware that isn’t likely more than some R&D project, if that.

You can see similar effects for PS4 sales when the PS5 was announced, sales cratered. Can’t tell too much with the PS4 to PS4 pro because they announced close to actual release.

Feels like the author is clickbaiting the console war.

That graphic is limited to a comparison of emissions from use of roads only.

It’s more about the hardware/firmware/software uniformity and reliability for some people. My friend is in this camp, he doesn’t want to need to manage a PC, he just wants a box he can reliably turn on and use.

This isn’t early access, it’s advanced access, like if a game has a deluxe edition that lets people play a few days before the official release.

Palworld, rent a dedicated server, anyone can hop in or out as necessary. Guns, legally(?) distinct from pokemon monsters to catch. Cartoon violence. Tons of fun to be had.

Not that I’ve seen at least, you can mulch a bunch of the same type to get like a better tier of it, but for like the little penguins and the big penguins, you get the big ones from eggs or as a boss so far.

Worst most captured Pokemon only leave their Pokeball to battle themselves to exhaustion in either gladiatorial combat against another similarity trapped opponent, for the purpose of additional enslavement or simply to physically or mentally cripple their free opponent into unconsciousness.

If it helps, inside of a Pokeball it’s supposed to be a simulated paradise for the pokemon, but that is also a form of cyber dystopia so …

It’s not really a pokemon game, the similarity basically ends at: there are weird fighting animals you catch with round objects and take research notes on. There’s no evolving, combat is an active battle rather than turn-based, combat participants are unlimited, your character participates in combat directly, you can catch people, you put what you catch to work for you at your camp, plus all the survival elements.

I’d settle for just having the online co-op functionality that Grounded has, make the Xbox/PC host it but allow multiple players to do that for the same save.

It’s fun so far, typical survival type game, but with a ton of pet varieties that you also enslave to work at your base. It’s pokemon basically in that there are cutsie animals with punny names that you catch, combat is definitely not standard Pokemon.

I’ve installed (not shown as a pre-install) it on Game Pass, about to boot it up.

It’s fine to be aspirational and fail, but transparency and communication are key when that happens, but it’s also on the consumer to not trust years old marketing, games change all the time, some fundamentally.

Best I can tell, they didn’t take preorders or Kickstarter funds. Just did a release. Seems like their old plans didn’t pan out and their old marketing doesn’t align with what they did release after they scaled back due to almost cancelling the whole thing at some point. From watching Sacriel play a bit yesterday, it’s definitely not an amazing game, has typical issues with the genre (e.g. not enough AI, extract camping) in addition to other typical poor game issues (e.g. poor ui, tooltips, latency).

Seems like a lot of the backlash is due to failing to meet its own hype, plus people continuing to buy games without consulting release version reviews and feeling burned, and added to the general cultural frustration of things being released before they’re actually ready.

This wasn’t Kickstarted, I couldn’t find one, and found a PC Gamer article stating the same.

RoboQuest has been my main jam for a bit, decent little roguelite shooter. I like how you unlock travel to different areas by finding things from other paths.

Wish it scaled to more than 2 player though…