Yup, something like this or simple sliders would be an ideal solution for what I’m talking about - preferably both, depending on whether the setting is a numerical one or not. It doesn’t have to be a completely granular access to every value, I just want enough control to adjust the experience when things are close but not exactly right.

Jose Pavli, composer for Project Wingman, (re)created music for this project. It’s available on his Bandcamp page.

I’d be down with that. Or at the very least give us modifiers like skulls in Halo games - dunno if that’s just Master Chief Collection addition or if they became a thing after 1 but it’s better than nothing.

I completely agree that accessibility/assist modes are more important and if I had to choose I’d go with that. Since we’re in a fantasy land however I’m still going to advocate for customisation because, let’s be honest, most of the difficulties (besides “the main one”) are usually not that great.

I’m speaking from a perspective of someone who tends to go for the higher difficulty options which extremely often go with the laziest possible decisions like turning enemies into damage sponge and increasing their attack power. That’s it. Stuff like improved enemy awareness, faster reaction times, smarter tactics aren’t exactly common and that’s my main pain point when selecting difficulty. There are also other things like ammo/loot scarcity, need drain in survival games etc.

Having an option to tweak at least some of these things could help folks like me who often end up in a situation when one difficulty is piss easy and the other feels like a drag. Peoples skills and expectations vary way too and there’s simply no way few basic difficulty settings will be right for everyone. And if someone damages their experience? Oh well, let people make mistakes and take responsibility for their choices. Inform them that changing this stuff will affect their experience and leave them to their decisions. We can’t (and shouldn’t) baby-proof everything, in my opinion.

It’s a quick and simple loop that’s easy to get into - just show up, do some super basic tasks and move on to other thing. Definitely a good fit since most of the quests take a few minutes to clear.

These 2 hours would be enough to make some decent progress, especially after unlocking Wayshrines to teleport to.

I’m not sure what I want to play at the moment so I thought I’d jump into Elder Scrolls Online for a bit. After spending a lot of time trying to play as a pacifist character I decided to make a new “normal” one instead - that took a while.

I ended up remaking my character 3 times as I couldn’t decide on who exactly I’d like to play as. Started with my usual choice, Warden, but I wasn’t really feeling the beast master skills and eventually settled down on Nightblade - the class of choice for my very first character, I believe.

I’m having fun so far though I do have some serious issues with the game. Both story and levelling feel WAY to fast, like they were made for someone with neither time nor interest in playing an MMO. Another big problem has to do with movement speed - my character feels like she’s constantly sprinting (even walking and sneaking are sped up) and the worst part is, this only affects my new, dark elf character. Jumping in as an old wood elf Nightblade has her moving like a normal person instead of an arena shooter protagonist. I don’t know why that is but I’m not a fan.

Main content is extremely easy and the writing is… not great for the most part. It’s not like I require some high art from the game but if it could be a little less generic and basic, that would be great.
While of the voice acting is pretty solid there are some real stinkers in there as well - you could tell me few of the characters are voiced by a decade old text-to-speech software and I would believe you.

I don’t know if the game changed so much since my last proper stint or if I didn’t really notice it back then (it’s been years since I played as a combat character). Either way, I might be going back to playing other stuff faster than anticipated. Oh well.

On a slightly different note… I like to listen to game soundtracks - old or new, action packed or mellow, there is something about many of them that just makes me want to put them on as a background for whatever I’m doing at the moment.

I decided to go back to albums from old Maxis games: SimCity 3000 and 4, The Sims and its expansions etc. They all have this atmosphere that makes them stand out and keep you feeling chill and happy. Well, after putting them on I noticed a serious problem - I can’t really listen to them any more, not as a whole anyway. Despite not having such problems in the past, nowadays some of the songs with higher tones sound extremely grating and unpleasant to listen to. I can do it for a bit but but things get painful rather quickly and it makes me sad. I love these soundtracks and not being able to enjoy them really sucks.

I have no idea why that happens but it’s not only limited to these old title. There are some newer games where I end up turning the music off completely since they end up being more annoying than atmospheric. I hate it.

I agree to an extent but there’s a difference between “we made a specific design choice because it fits with what we want the game to convey” and “well, normal mode works like X and feels super easy to anyone experienced with gaming but on hard all the enemies are bullet sponges with 5x HP and player dies in one hit”. The latter approach brings nothing to the table and that’s what I’m against. Plus already mentioned accessibility options for those who need them.

Besides, many games ALREADY HAVE easy modes - giving me ability to adjust things manually (which in my case is usually up, not down) wouldn’t affect their vision any more than it’s already possible.

Oh totally, I’m mostly focusing on solo and co-op titles like Terraria/Minecraft/Raft or whatever is popular for multiplayer these days. That said, it’s not like Souls games have to by played with online functionality even now - it’s already off when not in human form after all.

It’s not a perfect choice for every single title but a good chunk of games could support it without worrying about matchmaking and the like.

Customisable difficulty. Have a single or multiple presets balanced to what you’d like your players to experience but give me an option to adjust some of the stuff to my liking. There are SO MANY games I’d love to play way more than I do but none of the difficulty options feel “right”, bringing the whole experience down.
It’s also a great feature from an accessibility standpoint - pretty important thing for those who literally can’t play your game for reasons that could be easily worked around if such customisation was there.

“But my artistic integrity and vision!”

No, shut up. Your vision doesn’t mean squat if my experience with the game is annoying to the point where I don’t even care about the lore implication of an enemy placement or how gameplay systems intertwine with themes and story of the game. It’s important, sure, but it shouldn’t be more important than player’s enjoyment of your product.

Balance your game how you imagine it but let me play with the sliders to make it feel how I want it to. Just drop a scary message about it not being the intended way to play and it’ll be fine.

It was also an unfortunate victim of the time when IOI struggled with figuring out how to transition from “classic” way of making games to the modern, high budget approach. I’m glad they managed to get back into the rhythm with new Hitman games but it’s still a little disappointing K&L had to serve as a stepping stone towards better times.

The worst part is there’s no “full” version since each beta added new features and removed other ones. I’d give a lot for a build which combines all of the lost mechanics into a single package.

I knew I forgot something! Fantastic style and soundtrack, engaging gameplay and a bit rough in execution - it was great.

Can’t say I feel guilty about liking these but if we’re talking about mediocre games I love that would be:

• Drakengard 3 - simple, repetitive gameplay, huge amount of asset reuse and terrible performance if you’re crazy enough to play it on PS3. It also has a really engaging and tragic story, full of weirdness unique to the series (well, the first game anyway, haven’t played D2 yet).
• Kane & Lynch (both games) - they’re rough, gritty and don’t pull any punches. Pretty divisive in terms of gameplay though I personally think it’s thematically consistent and adds a lot to the atmosphere. My favourite games from IOI despite not being as well designed or polished as the Hitman series.
• Oni - 2001 action game by Bungie. Really cool hand-to-hand combat system, huge empty levels, simple story with wannabe Ghost in the Shell elements.
• Starbound - lots of hype about Terraria in space, lots of wasted potential and cool features that didn’t make to the final release. I tend to prefer beta versions (mainly “Glad Giraffe” beta) but the final one also seemed alright based on what little I played of it. Definitely not as good as it had chance to be during development.
• Scarface: The World is Yours - budget GTA clone based on the 1983 movie with Al Pacino (it’s actually a sequel). It looks bad even for the time but it plays well enough and has some neat mechanics which made it stand out, if only a little.
• Tresspasser - the infamous Jurassic Park game with full control of your arm and focus on physical interactions with the environment. It’s a bit clunky and far from polished but it’s an interesting experience nonetheless.

That’s all that comes to mind for now, I might update the post if I remember anything else.

In case you weren’t aware there’s an ongoing project adding Surface hardware support to Linux kernel. It’s in a pretty mature state, with most of the features already implemented and working (here is a full breakdown per device). I’ve been using it on my SP6 for a few years with zero issues.

It might be worth a look until you get to buying new hardware.

Oh right, I heard about the Linux situation - it’s unfortunate. I never actually played 4 so most of my info comes from osmosis pretty much. The last thing I heard about it was that some modes on the PC version are still active however that was a year or so ago and things might have changed by now.

The thing is, I didn’t even think about the official servers when I asked this question. My mind automatically went to PC version with potential unofficial ones, which now that I think about it might not even be a thing for Bf4.

I had a bit of a tangent explaining my reasoning towards the series but it’s honestly not that important in the grand scheme of things. I had fun and the minutiae of “why this much and not more” would simply end up as me rambling.

Is Bf4 one of the games that didn’t manage to stay alive long term? I know Bf2 and some other titles (Bf3, I think?) are still played but I don’t do much multiplayer these days so I’m not really up to date with what’s still available.

Edit: Just finished Sam & Max, added some thoughts.

Article already mentions it but folks behind No One Lives Forever Revival project are the real MVP. Hosting both games + Contract Jack, all updated for modern hardware and widescreen resolutions.

Can’t buy it? No worries, piracy saves that day! Again.

I did play it actually! I’m doing a chronological playthrough so I went with Reach > 1 > 2 (partial) > ODST > 2 > 3 and now 4. And yeah, I agree it’s closer to what I like in Halo media than the mainline entries. It was fun but, unfortunately for me, I’m playing on Heroic so gameplay (or health) wise there’s not much difference between playing as a spartan and ODST. Presentation and story did their job though.

I totally get that. While my situation is different there are plenty of times where all I want is to play on autopilot, it’s just not something I do when playing something for the first time. I’m also very hard to please when I get to this state so I end up jumping between multiple titles until I find one that’ll grab me, (which can take longer than the actual playtime but whatever).
Bouncing off on the other hand is something I still suck at but I’m actively working towards. There were way too many games I chose to stick with for the sake of completion despite not enjoying them enough to not feel like I’m wasting my time after certain point. I’m slowly getting better at it but it can still be a tough decision to make (and even more difficult to stick with it).

I have a similar experience with Morrowind as well, though in my case it has to do with the fact it sits in a weird middle ground where it doesn’t feel as immersive as Daggerfall but also isn’t as enjoyable to play as Oblivion, making it very difficult to stick with long-term. The fact that I don’t really care about main stories in TES games and tend to treat them as sandbox playgrounds doesn’t help either. Maybe one day.

Good luck with your attempt!