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This is where we are now in 2024.
Check if Game is Safe to Buy Checklist:
- The game is available as a direct download, on Steam, GOG, or a console I own (if I want to play on console)
- The game functions
- The game is complete, has launched publicly, and has mostly positive reviews
- Exception: If I believe enough in the product to purchase it early access
- The game is compatible with my system
- In my case, this also means 32x9 support in Windows
- AND Linux because I’m heading there soon no doubt
- In my case, this also means 32x9 support in Windows
- The game’s performance is generally good on a system with my components
- The game’s bugs aren’t a dealbreaker to me
- The game is fun
- The game price is a good value to me
- The game is not PTW
- The game has minimal/no MTX
- If the game has MTX, it’s not intrusive
- If the game has in-game currency, it can be earned in-game without grinding for ages
- The game has no advertisements (unless it’s just for a joke)
- The game is not from the following developers:
- Bethesda Games Studios (post FO4)
- Battlestar Games
- Psyonix
- Whoever developed the Gollum game?
- Starbreeze Studios
- [more to come]
- The game is not from the following publishers:
- Sony/Playstation
- Bethesda Softworks
- EA
- Activision Blizzard (post D3)
- Riot Games
- WB
- Deep Silver
- Ubisoft
- Psyonix
- Gearbox (post BL2)
- [more to come]
- The game does not require 3rd party launchers
- The game does not require 3rd party DRM
- The game does not require 2nd or 3rd party account linking
- The game does not require kernel-level anti-cheat
- The game is not related with a blockchain, NFTs, or crypto
- The developer of the game treats their employees well
- The publisher of the game treats their developer well
- The game is not a live service game
- If the game is co-op, it allows local hosting
- If the game is single-player, it does NOT require an Internet connection to play (optional net connection OK for things like Elden Ring features)
- Red Flags:
- Games developed by:
- Hello Games
- CDPR
- Rockstar
- Nintendo games (it supports Nintendo’s crappy business practices)
- Games developed by:
*some exceptions still apply
So… We’re down to solitaire and minesweeper.
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I’ve had a blast with Hades, Stardew, Outer Wilds (haven’t finished though), and many others. There are some excellent indies.
Oh hell yeah lemme shill for valheim, 7 days to die, avorion, kenshi, project wingman (in vr with flight controls if you have it), and the forest. I don’t think I have any reputation on this site but I’ll put it on the line to recommend the shit out of those games.
deep rock galactic best game, they’re going to be letting you just… straight up switch between past seasons in the next update, it has such an absurd value for your money and just continously teabags AAA games
Rock and stone! I’ll have to revisit it. My crew burned out on it pretty quick. Likewise with killing floor. Wave shooters just kinda don’t feel amazing.
RIGHT!?!? I was SHOOK when they announced that! Overwatch could take ALL my money if they adopted a similar Pass System.
is mentioning 7dtd there supposed to be a joke?
It’s not for everyone but I’ve gotten hundreds of hours out of it. Probably more than any other game I mentioned.
I will always shill for Cassette Beasts. Best monster collecting game, hands-down.
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Whilst we’re shilling for indie games… CrossCode is such a fantastic game with a well thought out and told story with some of the most fun environmental puzzle design I’ve ever seen.
Don’t those have ads on Windows now?
F U C K
Micro(soft)transactions too, I heard
Not if you firewall it off funnily enough
And Doom. Don’t forget Doom
Sadly unless you buy an old copy (on gog?) and use the WADs on gzdoom, doom is now Bethesda’s and they integrated the account system for all the old doom and quake titles
Whoever developed the Gollum game?
It was Daedalic Entertainment and their older and more indi titles are fine. Since they closed down their dev team after gollum, I don’t think you need to avoid them.
All of their point and click adventures are great. Unfortunate things went downhill after Poki left the company.
Why CDPR? They just had a single game with a disaster last gen console launch and a kinda rough PC launch, they made up for it in basicly no time and iirc they own Gog the platform without any drm always online crap
it was only in “red flags”?
maybe more of a “never pre-order” type comment?
Yeah, I meant it more as a caution than a “DO NOT BUY”
I think you were meant yellow flag, which means be cautious.
Red flag: to identify or draw attention to I’m pretty sure I got the color right.
But red flag means that: never even consider to buy, or if bought by accident, refund if still can. Or at least in other areas of life it has such a meaning.
you don’t need red flags to not pre-order. you should never ever pre-order, period. wait for reviews. then wait for about a month to see if they added in-game transactions in that period so they could get away with it like the c***s always do now. then but it if it looks like it’s good and there’s no in-game transactions sneakily added.
I think you answered your own question in the first part, and for the rest, I was mostly interested in the immersion in the game via roleplaying, like NPC’s having their own routines, living, breathing world, etc. A.K.A. the stuff they lied about that still has not made it into the game.
You should definitely check out this video to understand hello games were the good guys fucked over by a bunch of hype and then Sony, the publisher, giving the studio barely any support while pushing the blame on them for everything.
Sounds about right. You should add Paradox Interactive as they added a launcher to Across the Obelisk.
I think that’s not the only game to which they added their own launcher. I don’t know exactly which one, but from what I have read my impression is that it’s most of new games.
At least the launcher of their games actually has a practical use with modding (being able to quickly create sets of active mods that you can switch between).
Why Psyonix? Rocket League is the only game they still work on.
Edit: Psyonix isn’t even a publisher
Only things I can remember for Psyonix was they dropped OS support for Mac and Linux, pulled the game from steam, and required an epic account to continue playing. Luckily refunds were being honored when it happened.
They also removed trading for epic’s stupid rocket racing mode that died within a month, made dropshot and snow rotate with each season causing people to throw because who cares about a seasonal mode, servers getting worse every day, doing nothing to stop the smurfing and boosting problems, GC level bots still in ranked (although not as much), invisible players, cheaters able to fuck with the servers and cause disconnects/lag, and just general toxicity from the player base that they won’t address.
Do you need an Epic account to play if you already have it through Steam?
Yes.
Thanks I haven’t played in a long while and couldn’t remember.
Bingo. I was a Steam, Linux, and Mac (IIRC) player.
But this happened after the Epic acquisition though, the game had Linux support from day one then Sweany came in.
Rocke League before Epic was great and I wouldn’t consider Psyonix a bad company.
I mean, they allowed that to happen, so…?
It feels like they should have replaced that one with “has epic bought the game or developers”
Like, with rocket league for example, almost every negative thing they mentioned on the list that applies only happened to the game after Psyonix was bought by epic.
Why Hello Games?
I agree, why Hello Games. They are a studio that has gone to great lengths to make the game better and haven’t charged a single penny more. Sean Murray has learnt to not overhype things. I’m looking forward to Light No Fire and having seen what they are capable of following all the NMS updates I have confidence they can succeed.
No Man’s Sky wasn’t all it was hyped to be on launch, it’s actually much better now (I’m literally playing it right this second lol)
Hello Games sold a game that was not what was promised. It is not common to have a game be released in the state that NMS was released in get the support that NMS received. Definite red flag. I would stop, and really think hard before purchasing another game from them. Not that I wouldn’t buy one, but I would use some brain function before doing so.
maybe I should make one of those meme / concept review accounts on steam and run games through this list.
Feel free to copy, improve, and spread the list.
Great list I mostly agree with it for myself. I’d love to have a steam bot tell me when a game in my cart violates this. Or maybe a steamdb bot that tells me when I bought a game that violates this, so I can still refund it in the window.
You forgot to include Epic Store, and itch
Also forgot must be open source and self hostable (if multiplayer)
I wouldn’t buy something from the epic store. Though I agree with Itch and direct download.
Direct download is already listed there. No Epic store. Games do not need to be open source. I already included local hosting.
You said for co-op not all multiplayer though
Oh! Good call. Thanks.
Must be open source? Would be nice, but you are excluding 99.9% of games. Which is fine as a stance, but you don’t need the list then, your stance is just “I don’t play games*”.
Must be self hostable? How would that work with MMOs? Releasing the server software would spoil everything, and discovery of how new mechanics and content works is part of the fun. It would also allow cheaters to learn how the server-sidr anti-cheat works.
Would be nice, but you are excluding 99.9% of games
Take LoL, you can’t physically play the version of the game you want anymore. Buying anything in that game means nothing because it might not exist tomorrow, with open source you can fork it when they change it/remove the thing you bought
How would that work with MMOs?
There already is private servers of closed source MMOs, and there are open source MMOs
Releasing the server software would spoil everything, and discovery of how new mechanics and content works is part of the fun
Not sure I understand it
It would also allow cheaters to learn how the server-sidr anti-cheat works
I don’t know where people suddenly decided cheating is bad. Getting into hacked lobbies and playing scrapped content was so much fun in MW2. Or hacked zombies in W@W
But basically the same as now, anti cheat doesn’t stop cheating. Just ban them when you see them
Again LoL example, they have a kernel anticheat and there’s still cheating. Same with Fortnite.
Take LoL
I agree, I’m just saying it’s an unrealistic stance to have unless you want to play no games at all.
There already is private servers of closed source MMOs
Yes, most done by reimplementing the protocol. They are separate projects that network with the same client project.
Not sure I understand it
Many MMOs have secrets that are undiscovered for years. Many communities spend lots of effort testing mechanics trying to discover how something works, or working together trying to solve a new quest, or piece of content nobody figured out yet. They create wikis trying to catalogue what the player base figured out about the game. When you put it out in the open, all of that is gone, the game is “pre-solved”.
I don’t know where people suddenly decided cheating is bad.
Millennia ago, I assume, when competitive sports became a thing.
Getting into hacked lobbies and playing scrapped content was so much fun in MW2. Or hacked zombies in W@W
Sure. Never played that but this sounds like mods and has nothing to do with cheating.
anti cheat doesn’t stop cheating.
And door locks don’t stop burglary, but they sure reduce it.
Bethesda Why?
I assume you died in 2011 and this is your ghost trying to catch up with the last decade and a half
I was 5 years old in 2011 :(
Jesus i keep forgetting how old I am
Skyrim wasn’t objectively good, but it was well-liked and infinitely moddable.
Fallout 4 had some interesting mechanics, but the story was bad, the in-game radio host was awful, and the engine was a decade old at that point. It was also the game where Bethesda introduced paid mods.
Fallout 76 is a tale of its own. It failed at every conceivable point, including promotion, merchandise, and post-release content.
Starfield is a loading screen simulator with 1700 near-identical planet and a bad story, and is overall so insignificant that I almost forgot to mention it.
Most recently, Fallout 4’s newest release broke mod compatibility, the only thing that kept it relevant.
It’s fair to say that Bethesda hasn’t developed an objectively good game since Oblivion, and that was the game with the horse armors. Plus there are all the games that are owned by Bethesda, but not developed by them. Redfall, Deathloop, and what Id did to Mick Gordon.
death loop was great what are you even
Omori fits
Being created by omocat is a red flag by itself
Why is that
The game is not a live service game
I don’t know about you but I enjoyed my time in RuneScape. And haven’t paid a cent for it!
So arrowhead are 100% telegraphing that this is Sony not them
They’ve literally stated it.
I’ll see if I can find it again.Found it. https://old.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cj8p0x/from_the_community_manager_on_the_discord/
Getting strong “our hands are tied” vibes from everything they say 😞
Fun fact on Sony:
Warframe, regardless of what you think of Digital Extremes, had cross platform play pushed last year out, more recently cross platform save too. Both worked out of the gate when launched, they did their homework.
At its inception, each platform had its own little icon beside the player name to indicate what device they were on.
Sony took a look at the system and apparently freaked out that there was the potential of a PS player losing a PvP match to an Xbox or Switch player and demanded via legal threats that it be changed immediately.
MS didn’t seem to care and I think Nintendo was just amazed a half decent looking game with as many mechanics as Warframe can run on the Switch.
So now, players can see who is on their platform, and a universal icon if they aren’t.
Whoever plays Warframe for the PvP suffers from brain rot.
Yeah thats the funny bit, no one uses its PvP modes.
Seems Sony people do
This is the case with every cross-platform game I’ve played on PS. PS logo for PS players, a generic icon for everybody else. Makes it really frustrating in crossplay games when I have to ask myself “Did I somehow get placed into a M&K lobby, or is this guy just a Xim cheater?”
Wow, that’s petty
I’m inclined to believe this, but it does seem a bit urban-legend-esque. Do you happen to have a source?
Unfortunately it was in one of their live streams, and they do 2-4 hours a week of that. I’m not digging through several hours of video content for that.
Totally fair. I wouldn’t want to dig through that either.
I’ll consider it “unconfirmed” for now, lol.
All suits are losers who bend the knee to money. Bigger corps are like a bigger money pot to their twisted brains. OFC they’d bend the knee to Sony, a world renound brand name.
I mean, they had them tied willingly in the first place.
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Technically they haven’t changed the terms, they were very up-front about the requirement for a PSN account. There’s been a warning on the Steam page this whole time and it even tells you it’s required the first time you open the game. The problem is that they didn’t actually follow through on making it a real requirement for 3 months.
Yeah, but their FAQ also said it was optional. Well, it did until today. They changed that little bit overnight.
If it was mandatory from the start then it shouldn’t have been sold in the countries PSN has deemed unfit. The argument kinda falls apart from there. Probably not even legal to do so, the singlehandedly most scummy move anyone could do though.
Think about it, its mandatory, and you Jo Schmo living in Kazakhstan get to play for months, and now nope. Just nope, they straight lied to your face, took your money happily, rode on the success from you adding to the “total players”, then took it all away.
Mandatory my ass.
I don’t know if they were “very” up-front about it. I was gifted the game a couple weeks after it came out, so I never saw the details on the store page and I’m not sure if I ever saw the prompt in-game.
They really played me like a damn fiddle. I actually noticed the warning and that part of the EULA but I also noticed that the account linking was effectively optional so I thought it was a “general” EULA that they didn’t bother editing.
They didn’t change after sale, they eula roofied you
This is the first time I hear the term outside of a Louis Rossmann video, thank you
Try to refund a second time. From what I’ve heard, the first request is done by a bot but it will be manually reviewed on the second try.
I was actually planning on getting this game until all this.
Same
I was thinking about buying the game and immediately refunding but apparently it would do literally nothing to hurt Sony except pad their refund stats
I’m still seeing that tweet with the context you screenshotted
I don’t think the tweet is an issue, but the linked page being edited.
oooooo
But you still have to have the account, no? Is that not the issue?
Not right now. It’s been optional for a while, definitely when I bought it. They’re making it mandatory. That’s a bait and switch.
