Based recommendation, microman was one of the earliest platformers I played. I still remember insert to shoot being an awkward keybind.

NMS was quite literally a different looking and feeling game with maybe 5% (yes, twenty times less) of the current content and gameplay loops. Everything changed from how long it takes to gather basic resources to what order you get them in, the tutorial was streamlined and the way it picks the planet you start on was changed. There’s an unbelievable amount of things to do, to the point that expeditions started existing to give players a more guided experience with fresh regular content. It’s truly a far cry from where it launched, even space stations (the most static structures found in most star systems) have been overhauled and the old ones are only around as easter eggs now.

CP2077 integrated a ton of content and features from the most popular mods it had after the Anime update (particularly Vehicle Combat, from which it even took improvements to the way police spawn and act in addition to, yknow, the vehicular combat). Only a few of the core systems changed, mainly quickhacking and the way cybernetic implants are handled (also almost straight up taken from a mod). They did a balance pass on guns and made some of the weapon type features a bit different. If you didn’t push too terribly far through the game on release, none of it would seem different really. The locations and behavior of weapons and enemies in general gameplay didn’t change much, but access to mobility via implants was made easier (as the separated stores for them were largely equalized and merged) so it’s easier for fresh players and people not using guides to finish their “build”. Not quite the huge makeover NMS received, but it’s definitely different in terms of progression.

While you’re probably right to some extent about naysayers decreasing naturally over time, both games now have suspicious steamcharts numbers for being single player experiences. They get an influx of new players regularly in ways other similar titles don’t, and it’s almost certainly due to the changes in opinion of people who were playing them around their major updates, journalist articles or enthused friends.

TL;DR: No man’s sky really did change that much. CP2077 didn’t go as far but they’ve clearly made end user-oriented changes that are uncharacteristic for single player experiences.

Are you familiar with the term lobbying and how it shares a bedroom wall with bribery? Individual votes usually matter little to none in the grand scheme of things, and there’s next to no evidence that politicians above the local level give a shit about individuals throughout a huge swathe of the US. Governatorial election promises in the southeastern US are almost universally lies about quality of life improvements, from healthcare changes in florida benefitting no one to roadwork that never happens being promised every election cycle in alabama and mississippi. There is a HUGE disconnect between representatives and their constituents in these states, and they’re not the only ones.

Realistically, that money is not being used effectively to sway anyone, especially when little is actually used for propaganda, and weak vectors are chosen. Many campaigns are still running on outmoded methods of contact, like outdated lists of people for cold mailing, text messages that wind up in your spam filter, and shock value ads that only serve to annoy and change VERY few minds about anything.

You have a very optimistic outlook on how any politician views a letter or email from a constituent. Within my whole lifetime, I cannot name ONE politician in the US that has changed course over constituent contact. Not for any single thing. That’s why someone asked if you were eight years old earlier; most people from 25-40 years of age have, at this point, accepted that the current system does not operate in the way that we were taught in school. Instead, we have this broken system where the cries of the masses enter the void, and MAYBE ONE “representative” echoes them to a person or place where change can begin. The ones that do are decried so unbelievably fast it makes your head spin, and the ones that retain office while doing so are treated like crazy extremists by any media that could inform people of their goals, so there’s no hope of popular/uninformed support.

Idk dude, just googled “id analytics ssn” and I immediately get a page of results of articles from 2012-15. Could probably just add “as someone else” in scholar for the paper

An ID analytics study showed 40 million united states SSN had more than one name associated with them over a decade ago.

https://risk.lexisnexis.com/cross-industry-fraud-files/docs/financial/LexisNexis-Risk-Solutions-SSN-White-Paper.pdf

Whitepaper from LexisNexis, corporate background check company, explaining avout SSN not being a unique or even really reliable identifier

You described the garlic-like genre. Which has gotten VERY big. “we’d be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that’s what they were going for.” They are MAKING THEM it’s VAMPIRE SURVIVORS lmao

Most of your complaints about obfuscation make me think you haven’t played Last Epoch and don’t know there is a solution: simply put the information someone would alt+tab or otherwise leave the game to find it IN THE GAME! LE has a robust in-game guide with info on everything from weird status effects down to how elemental resists work against elemental penetration and reduction.

A large portion of the issue is the ever eternal Minecraft Problem imo, it seems like you (and many people in general) have trouble setting your own goals when it comes to why you’re making the character more powerful. ARPG have different approaches to this: diablo 3 hasn’t got much stuff to “distract” you from pushing greater rift levels, while Path of Exile gives you a 12 boss checklist in different dimensions and you need to finish a LOAD of content, then fight 4 of them to fight the bigger bosses after them (and content beyond even that). Without knowing which bosses or how to find them, some players get lost.

TL;DR the genre is evolving as people ask these kinds of questions and you’re slightly behind the forefront of questioning here. Not a knock, just worth mentioning that what you’re looking for (an ARPG with sparkling information clarity) already exists, and the thing you’re thinking might exist in the future (streamlined ARPG with less mechanical intensity) also already exists.

E:D doesn’t really have them, but valheim and other information heavy games tend to have writeable signs. Since early modded minecraft, I have utilized these signs to communicate with my future self; writing down what I’m doing at the time and what my major goals are before logging off for the night is just part of my gaming routine now. Takes me a few seconds of reading to trigger the flow of action again. When games don’t have signs, I use a notepad .txt file to track what I was up to, or failing that I’ll save a note in my phone.

I would never have finished factorio or satisfactory without text files and signage. I would never have finished most large minecraft modpacks without signage. Organization skills rock.

They literally tried to patent the loading screen and mechanically locking a player object to a moving object ingame just after the release of TotK. Nintendo is the absolute king of frivolous gaming patents. Here’s hoping it’s their downfall. For an example of how seriously vague some of the patents they’ve been granted are, check out some of their current ones after pokemon sleep’s initial success (basically trying to keep everyone without 9 digit money out of the sleep app game space).

https://patents.justia.com/assignee/the-pokemon-company

PT stands on its own in the horror video game genre IMO. Too many games fail to convey one of the elements of horror well, typically overusing shock and disgust as it’s hard to achieve psychological terror when your art medium has the potential for funny things to happen (like physics objects in amnesia deciding to fling themselves all over the room when you let go because they bounced wrong). Really interrupts the flow of the scared juice. The other half of horror games give you enough tools to completely defuse the horror after an initial few encounters (death stranding) or straight up don’t try to scare you situationally, just acting as combat action games with horror themes (later resident evils).

PT remakes for PC are in a good place finally, “P.T. emulation” being a bit closer than unreal PT to the source material as a project. How konami could possibly drop a project with star power like kojima+del toro is beyond me, especially considering reception to the demo was GREAT and it was slated to release while streamers playing horror games was still in vogue. Unbelievable fumbled bag lying there

It’s so hard to describe contact. It’s like a more exploratory Rune Factory with no farming sim element and swappable jobs like the final fantasy MMOs. I feel like the audience for the game wasn’t targeted well, as it fell in that era where “core gamers” stopped being a popular target audience (we hardly use the term at all these days).

Early in the lifetime of the DS, before the 3ds had even been mentioned, a ton of JRPGs released for the platform seemingly in a bid to become the next earthbound or chrono trigger. Most of them were very mediocre, but to this day Contact (published by atlus) and The World Ends With You (square enix) stand out as stellar titles to me. They represent opposite ends of the jrpg spectrum; contact is a grinding game with a very floaty story, whereas TWEWY has an intricate story and a penalty-free swappable easy difficulty setting to help new players cope with the (initially) awkward combat system. Both of them are stand-out in their own ways, with memorable settings and characters supporting the mechanical depth they offer.

Both of them are games that take advantage of the DS’s unique features, not the microphone but the touchscreen. While Contact is pretty easy on the gimmicks, only requiring you to occasionally peel a sticker or something simple like that, TWEWY’s combat flow has you use buttons to control the top screen while simultaneously doing multiple touch screen gestures, making the game difficult to master on the actual DS and unbelievably hard on an emulator.

TWEWY has since had a remaster and a sequel, but contact is seldom mentioned anywhere when I see the DS talked about. Worth a look!

You could build up your base (also a defense map) pretty freely, but it was never unlimited resources creative. You’re right to be confused by this comment

Save The World isn’t sandbox or everything and was the only launch mode for the game. It had more mobile gacha practices than anything tbh. I get thinking that seeing as it has taken cues from Roblox, but it isn’t reality

You’re incapable of having a rational discussion and ignoring the fact that you needed to install uPlay even when buying it through other storefronts. This isn’t something steam did better on, and you googling and linking the first article you see that remotely confirms your viewpoint (which is now detached from the thread) is kind of childish

You cherry picked a single example you couldn’t recall until pressed. It’s really obvious you’re only here to trash a storefront you don’t use for no reason. If you recall, the division 2 was only on uPlay, requiring you to install the game through it even if you purchased it elsewhere - and that’s a substantially worse data collection vector than EGS (multiple breaches) and it is actually missing features like linking of DLC to the store page. What’s your point?

You are not arguing in good faith here - the other user is being very clear about their question and you are pretending not to understand. You invented a sourceless situation to answer the question while saying you didn’t understand it.

What features? I have seen a lot of complaining about performance of the storefront here, which leads me to believe a lot of the complainers have not actually used EGS in actual years. I haven’t seen anyone mention an actual specific feature of Steam that EGS is missing. Multiple running versions for beta testing, DLC linking with the main game page, sale frequency, everything except the social features of steam (which are notorious for being garbage communities) are on par in EGS these days, so this thread is confusing for me since you guys haven’t actually explained a single missing feature.

The OST is a nightmare too, that game is a purgatorial experience

There’s an in-game log of hints you’ve been given in the ship, the “rumor mode” on the terminal can help you stay goal-oriented.

The alien names aren’t gibberish - they’re all mineral and plant names. Made it really easy for me to keep track of lore, actually, having something to tie the characters to conceptually. Absolutely true that it’s a puzzle game first and foremost.