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Patient gamers ftw!
Lost all my grumpy coin cause devs were a bunch of meth addicts.
Oooh which game was that?
I used to buy Steam games without a care in the world. Now to spend even 5 bucks I make myself go through a quality control checklist so vast it would impress a space shuttle commander. There’s just been too many abandoned games, terrible sequels, fake reviews, unnecessary game launchers and disappointing Steam sales. That’s not to say there isn’t still an excellent bunch of games on there, but they’re all hidden deep in the forest and I have to go sniff em out like a basset hound.
If I spend a fiver on a game and it entertains me for two nights I still consider that fine value to entertainment ratio. If I went out somewhere in real life with the boys I’d be spending a minimum of $50 and that’s for a single night out. So I buy a lot of indie games in the $5-10 range without much guilt over it. Weird single-dev projects with pixel art and a 5 year span in early access are my favorite kind of art.
Now if you’re asking me more than about $20 for your game then yeah the quality control checklist comes out. But my standards are much lower for the $10-tier and I’ve found some really good games in that tier. Not ones that I’m still playing, maybe, but ones that I had a good time with for a few days to a few weeks and that I remember fondly.
Firewatch checked that box for me. Two of my kids did a playthrough too.
I’m more of the just stick to the indie goats type of guy, those which give you unlimited replay ability, but reading your comment made me fondly remember Yes your Grace!
A little game which i got through in two days and probably never touch again but absolutely loved. It made feel more like a King (of a really small realm) than a crusader kings or civilisation.
I pretty much only buy games that are either very well-known to be good (famous on the level of Skyrim, Stardew Valley, etc.), or that I saw a “let’s play” of.
How dare you not sharing your list with us uneducated
Be our messiah
Well ok but I did say it was long. Tbh, my checklist is almost a minigame itself now 🤣
So once I’ve found a game that looks interesting, I do the following:
Google video search for the game’s title and filter to past week, then month, then year and that shows me how many people are actually talking about this game right now and who’s doing the talking.
I look at the Steam reviews and initially filter to only show negative ones. I find it’s a lot easier to see if the game’s been review bombed that way. Also, a lot of negative reviews complain about features I find positive so that’s helpful too “This game was way too easy! I finished it in 30 hours and I still had all my hair at the end, harumph!”. I also check phrases like “Abandoned by the devs” or “Yet another asset flip” or “Beware! The EULA is a privacy nightmare”.
I then switch to positive reviews and read the short ones. The dissertations are just way too much detail at this stage (or any stage really for me).
At some point early on I check the Steam update history. If the last update was years ago I factor that in. I also try to keep on top of relevant news like that time the entire staff of Annapurna Interactive quit, making a sequel to Stray unlikely.
Also, if it hasn’t had that many recent updates I’ll join the Discord and see how active that is. That’s usually so revealing. Often in a positive way like with the G-Rebels devs.
Then I go through my top YT game reviewers like Raptor, Scarlett Seeker, Splattercat Gaming, Orbital Potato and Nookrium and see if they’ve talked about the game.
I look for the title on Allkeyshop to see if there’s a cheaper EU unlockable Steam game key available.
I check for trainers in case I need an escape hatch if it turns out to be too grindy or tedious but still worth playing.
If all the searches have been positive so far I’ll wishlist it around this point. If there’s a demo I’ll play it. If it looks amazing from the start I’ll install the demo after looking at a couple of gameplay videos.
I also have a 21:9 monitor so I hop into the Steam discussion group for the game and look for confirmation that it’s compatible.
If it’s too expensive I’ll check SteamDB and look at it’s price history. My personal limit is <7 bucks for an old game and <18 for a relatively new one (unless something exceptional suddenly appears like Eriksholm).
I’ll check if there any Steam sales coming and if the theme is likely to match the game I’m looking at.
I really do actually do all this by the way. It’s the only way I’ve been able to get more sensible about the games I buy.
I got one!
Valkyria Chronicles 1 and 4
i got stuck in valkyria chronicles 1 right before you get the valkyries or whatever they’re called in game.
I’ve gotten stuck a couple of times.
What chapter are you on?
My experience too. Being burned day one release sucks, looking at you Back 4 Blood.
The only game I preorder is GW2’s yearly expansions. Everything else is c/patientgamers material, waiting a few years and paying just a small fraction of the release price to get all DLC, fixed bugs, and tons of fan resources that were created meanwhile 👌
The only way that modern AAA games should be bought.
I kept waiting for Starfield to drop in price. Impatiently, I sailed the seas to see if it had improved since launch. Sadly, it’s still a HUGE turd and now it’s off my watch list. The first big Bethesda title I don’t own.
I beat it on game pass and had fun. The base building is kinda impressive but there’s little reason to spend a bunch of time on it because nobody will ever see it. It’s not amazing but I definitely don’t think it deserves turd rating. That said everyone should just play expedition 33 instead.
I will be cold and dead in the ground before I play a game about a frenchman.
As a huge sci-fi fan, and fan of most of Bethesda’s games in the past, I disagree. Turd rating is accurate. It just all felt like a waste of time. Like you said, the base building seems like it could be good, but it is never relevant. It’s like this for almost every piece of content. They’re just all on islands that don’t interact.
My biggest issue though is the writing. It’s so boring. It’s like they watched a bunch of sci-fi and put tropes from them in the game, but then they never explore the consequences of them. They just exist for a quest and are gone. Why sci-fi is good is because it uses these stories to explore humanity, which would be made even better with an RPG where the player has agency. They just don’t though. You get a few boring options that don’t actually effect anything and everything goes on as normal. It’s just a bland game that doesn’t respect your time.
Unless they require linking an EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, or other bullshit account requirements, in which case they get added to the ignore list.
or Battle Pass, Micro, >10 DLC.
I usually pre-order the deluxe digital.
Sounds like something somebody with a username like that would do.
What can I say I’ve got to spend that money my tenants give me somehow.
Yup, still tracks.
Not even pre-ordering the Premium Edition? How the mighty have fallen!
It’s rare, but there’s a few indie games where I did not wait for a sale, even knowing I wouldn’t play it for a while, because I wanted to be supportive to devs that made something I wanted.
I’ve even come across games, like If On A Winter’s Night, Four Travelers, that is free, but it’s such a great game, that I just had to buy the supporter pack :) (I even waited a bit for it to go off sale :) )
does that have anything to do with the calvino book?
Moonring is another free game who had to add a $5 megadungeon DLC after being harassed by fans for months to give them a way to support the game monetarily
This thread has some bangers. Thanks for sharing!!!
I really like this “supporter DLC” model. And it legitimately warms my heart to see a lot of people saying they go out of their way to support indies this way.
That is how gaming should be. <3
That was me with Dispatch. Got the Deluxe too
Support your Indies. They are the future of gaming once the AAA industry collapses in on itself.
I so want to play Sonic Crossworlds but that shit’s expensive
I don’t even play the majority of games I buy. I give game devs free money.
Retirement planning
Me, 83 years old on my first day of retirement booting up a game I bought in 60 years ago because it was only $6: “wow, this sucks”
This is my future and I hate it.
My man
-95% and an All-Time Low mark on isthereanydeal.com is like my personal catnip.
Same! A Humble Bundle with 3+ games that mildly interest me was another, but they’ve been getting lamer and lamer.
i sometimes just buy dlc when i can afford it - though i really want rimworld’s odyssey i just can’t yet afford it. I am loving biotech though!
I considered odyssey, but then I realized it would break all my mods, because they aren’t through steam, and I have multiple weeks spent getting those appx 750 mods working properly. Not worth it when a lot of the mods I like most have been shelved with the major changes. I’d need an entirely new setup.
Maybe someday though!
with my five mods i think im … only scratching the surface. i beat it once on biotech but in proper form; my newborns were annoying so i used them to launch the ship after i sterilized every adult so that wouldnt happen again.
If you play on steam, and want to try a very easy-to-load set of mods that completely reworks the whole game, check out the progression mod pack. (Link is for the 1.5 version since you don’t have odyssey, there’s a 1.6 version as well and I think there’s a link for it on that page)
It’s around 1,000 mods, many of which are compatibility/patch mods, the authors of them worked closely together for compatibility, and they have a community-driven mod sorting tool to reduce errors. You can single-click to add all and follow the directions to have them properly sort for best experience.
I use around half of the mods on that list, very much recommend. You don’t have to have all of them enabled if there’s content you don’t like or whatever.
I do mostly sandboxy base building, rather than accomplishing main objectives, so I frequently have hordes of kids running around my base (highest pawn count ever was 86, I just sort of let people do their own thing and accommodate them). The first bit is kinda annoying, but growth vats for newborns are great if you can’t spare people for feeding and play time :)
Commenting here just so I don’t lose this post. Thank you <3!
thanks!! i’ll take a look!
If it’s under 5€ I might buy and never play it. If it’s over 30€ I will never buy it.
I paid full price for Dispatch. After looking at the 7 year development cycle I felt like these are the groups that need my patronage (Indies)
Ah, how I miss flashsales
& here I thought I was the only one…
