Gameplay has been so on the decline nowadays, that just having an actual reactive counterplay element like a parry is a major positive, even if it’s a huge simplification of defense. So, more engaging defense mechanics would be nice, sure, and there’s certainly huge underexplored territory on “offensive” actions with non-universal parry type defensive properties to make fighting more interesting, but that doesn’t mean what little we do have becomes a negative or less engaging.

It was tragic that the current Soul Calibur dumbed their deflect down to a single simple action instead of the series standard of at least needing to match low/high height zones (mids could be deflected with either, which was a nicely subtle drawback), but it’s still better than not having it at all.

Parrying is good. More interesting parrying/defense is better, but that’s a level of player and dev effort/investment that’s rarely on the table.

It’s not really pointless, just because you can easily remap them to replace the abomination that is stick clicking.

It’s too short for most games I play, because they backload their interest and gameplay excessively. The first two hours are generally the worst example of the actual game. Frustrates me that devs don’t have the sense to make a demo that showcases the game instead of either nothing or just the beginning, but if a dev does the beginning and lets you carry your save into the full game, you can use the demo as intro and then buy with two more hours to put it through its paces (or already know you won’t need to refund). Still not a smart way to sell your game when the early game is worse and a more focused demo would more effectively and efficiently engage potential players who don’t want to sink time into every demo, but it’s a compromise solution for people who will spend time with the demo and not wander away without buying into the game if they had a good time.

Also, anything with a character creator or other such lengthy setup to get playing just doesn’t work with only two hours of running time as the window.

I’ve seen many devs cite the refund window as why they don’t need to bother maintaining a demo. They’re wrong about not needing a proper demo, but people definitely do treat the refund window as a demo phase, not merely a technical test.

but early access was made so small teams (or solo devs) can not starve while working on a passion project.

It was not. As I said, Valve specifically warns devs in their info docs not to use early access for the money, because it won’t profit. And that’s incredibly obvious to pretty much anyone given how hard it is for any released game to get attention on Steam, and that most people do–and should–avoid buying early access games. Early access money is a small slice of nothing.

Yes, some devs still do it for money, despite all the evidence otherwise, but devs that go early access because they actually need the money to finish the game almost always fail their project, because that’s just a disastrously bad management choice.

Early access was created for feedback and hype/community building. Being in early access for a year gives you 12 months paid testing/feedback and invested players already there on launch day for Steam metrics to count, 12mo of organic social media growth plus chances to catch some actual influencers and whatnot, etc. You’d never see that just dropping the game on release day, without a ton more money in advertisement. Early access is to give a game a chance for the most positive launch day it can manage, if devs make their customers happy and fix bugs.

A project that needs early access money has already failed.

So, when a game releases, buyers get the option to partially refund or commit, and valve uses the commit money to pay the refunds, so devs only make money if they keep more than half of their buyers, and customers have to consciously deal with sinking money into a potentially failed project.

At least right now the abandoned games are still labelled early access.

Most early access failures eventually just call themselves released at some point, so we’re no better off as far as that.

Not charging until the game properly releases is normal. Most devs need to manage and deal with that, and beta testing used to be an expense on the devs. Now, the buyers are paying the devs to beta test, taking the project risk for the devs. Even if the system were free to both sides, it’s still beneficial to the devs, but without the corruption of thinking they should be making money during beta testing–money that they’ll happily keep as they walk away if their project fails to deliver what they sold.

There’s a more fair solution out there than letting devs just sell their games before they finish.

Which is fair. Most people should not buy early access, and should wait for the devs to declare their project release ready. Early access buying is all risk and responsibility (to post feedback, to update Steam review if it’s out of date withe the project, to understand the individual project’s development pace, etc), with a lot of factors a buyer should take into account, that most people genuinely should not need to care about or wait for.

There are an insane number of Steam games already released to buy and play.

I follow lots of early access devs, and it’s not uncommon for some devs to blatantly post updates only strategically, fixing some minor thing as the next seasonal Steam sale approaches. Some continue even after leaving early access: serious issues in bug report threads, but some minor fix gets posted as the sale approaches, clearly to make the game look alive, even though none of the big stuff is getting fixed.

Plenty of devs are their own business side, anymore.

Like I’ve seen games that are in “early access” for years.

Games take years to build, especially when you are changing your design from feedback and improving the game. Some games come to early access intending to change little and just finish the game, while others come to get ideas and reshape the project as it moves along. Many EA projects are also indies with small teams, or even just one dev plugging along on their own, not even full time.

Of course there are bad actors, and devs who made mistakes (like thinking early access would fund development–even Valve tells devs not to do that, but there are always optimists thinking EA is for sales, and then they run out of money), but there are many ways to do every early access, and you have to look at each project to see what it looks like it’s doing, how much and how often it posts updates, etc.

8/10 for a shell of a game, gutted of significant single player modes from the VF5 series (like VF5’s quest, and VF5FS’s licenses), plus only porting some of the customization options, even though VF created fighter customization.

VF5 has become less every installment, and it’s sad this is all that’s left to limp onto PC, still praying that such basic online fighting can be the only thing that actually matters and should earn them a pass on how much of the game they’ve cut.

However, the reality is that most gamers are now using gear that has some ray-tracing capability.

Sure, plenty, and I’m still going to hard-pass any idiot game that forces raytracing or upscaling. Find something actually useful to do with the power available, instead of something that worthless and computationally wasteful, or don’t and run at lower power. That’s more valuable than raytracing.

It’s more that many keep Origin because the EA App is so much more of a problem.

Generally the control im talking about is whether or not I can continue to play the game.

Obviously, and I’m saying that’s an extremely small amount of control, for which you give up a lot of other control to have.

“Straightforward” or not, it’s well-trod territory, and devs don’t do their homework on a doing a good job before putting games out. I don’t just mean absurdly basic niceties like rebinding (which is frankly only difficult if your game input is built wrong), but mechanics like deadzones, trigger response handling, aim reticle behavior, and so on. All these are things I frequently need to adjust from outside of games, because we simply can’t rely on developers to do quality work, nor to correct things afterward. Building new input schemes is also occasionally useful, eg Curse of the Dead Gods used a dumb weapon switching mechanic on controller, but I was able to build a more reasonable swap-button mechanic on top of it, and share it so anyone else running through Steam can load that config to play that way. It’d be nicer if devs listened and did it themselves, but they couldn’t be bothered, even though they already built the kbm input to work the right way.

I’ve had one Steam game delicensed the past ten years or so, and I got it replaced later. I couldn’t easily count the number of games I’ve changed in one way or another, but I’ve got a couple thousand hours playing controller in a game with no support whatsoever, so the control I have over my how games play seems a pretty big deal ;) Off-Steam, there was Ubisoft taking The Crew away from owners. How’s your physical copy of that running for you? Oh, right, it doesn’t run for anyone, at least aside from PC people working on modding in replacement servers.

I’m just saying, there’s a lot more to it all than “game runs”.

It’s funny to talk about “keeping control” because you can put a disk in a device that completely locks down every aspect of the game environment. PC offers generally way more control over games, allows more games, etc.

And there’s GOG to buy from if one doesn’t want Steam’s potential ability to delicense a purchase, but I’d be playing games through Steam either way because of it’s ability to tweak and rebuild controller handling for each game. I’m picky and a lot of game devs are sloppy about how they handle controllers, so having that extra control over the experience is a major plus to me.

Raksasi is not so much about elemental effects as it is about spacing and good core action. It’s also a fantastic game with a lot of value.

• Nioh 2
• Witchfire
• Devil Slayer Raksasi
• Curse of the Dead Gods
• Metal Mutation
• Cavity Busters
• Waves (free, but still)
• BlazBlue Entropy Effect
• 30XX
• Nova Drift
• Quantum Protocol
• Deep Rock Galactic
• Hellsinker
• Twin Ruin
• Devader
• Arboria
• Bloody Spell
• Aura of Worlds

Also, if he’s a bit of a tinkerer, he might be interested in trying shooters using gyro+flick-stick, which he probably didn’t have access to before. Witchfire, Deep Rock Galactic, and Deadlink can readily play that way once set up in Steam Input. Some games you only need to set up the gyro-to-mouse and flick-stick, whereas others (eg Vermintide 2) you have to map the entire controller manually.

Combat Complex

Twin-stick shooter against various bugs and robots with some ARPG gearing, and the action here is fantastically tight with probably three key factors:

• Enemies target you but hit each other, so you manage their attacks to help your fighting instead of just staying out of trouble.
• “Frenzy” orb pickups, which act a bit like combo meter fuel except instead of chaining hits you make frequent choices about whether an orb drop is worth chasing, keeping you close to danger.
• Instant gun switching with overheating instead of reloading, so you fight hard and switch constantly between your three guns to keep any one from overheating while getting the best out of their specific properties.

I play a lot of twin-stick and top-down shooters, and this does a great job mixing the arcade twin-stick feel of high intensity fending off a swarm with tactical top-down dungeon crawling elements, and it’s just really special feeling to play. The core action feels not just well designed but like it was made just for me, and I’m genuinely glad someone made it (or is making it, since it’s early access). Plus, it’s extraction style instead of being a roguelite, so you’re always right at the best action while still getting procedural levels, to keep runs a little different.

If this added itch.io it’d be a fantastic filler for managing all the non-DRM off-Steam stuff.

You ain’t got to buy the game on there, you can get codes at other retailers

You actually can’t buy the vast majority of Steam games elsewhere. 18,800 games released new this year on Steam. Do you know any legit retailers that even sell 18,000 games total?

It’s something I’ve been noticing with all the routine seasonal complaining about sales on Steam not being worth looking at anymore… Sure, I don’t only buy from Steam, but I do buy more from Steam than elsewhere, because those games–good games–just are not other places to be bought. So on the one hand, I see a lot of value from Steam sales and people shouldn’t dis them so out of hand, but on the other, yeah Steam clearly controls the market. And that’s not even getting into how Steam deliberately reduces the value-to-the-devs of your off-Steam purchases, so buying elsewhere keeps your purchase and reviews from helping the dev earn much needed Steam visibility.

So it’s far from as simple as “You can just buy codes elsewhere”.