Ahh, the days before games companies hired the casino slot machine UX designers. An elegant game from a more civilised age.
Hello, could I take a minute of your time to talk to you about our lord and savior, de_rats?
Boomers my ass. This is Gen X gaming.
Millennials as well. I get bored with modern games. Grinding all day for a pink weapon skin. Tf, I don’t care what color are my skins. Give me a good old challenge
I mean it is a nice extra, if and only if the core gameplay is enjoyable. Porbably most triple AAA titles would be fine with all the secondary stuff, if they whould have just put a little more effort into making a fun game first and foremost and then add the other stuff afterwards.
But of course adding loot boxes to a fun game is a different process than designing a loot box ecosystem and then trying to fit a game into it.
I don’t think this is even Gen-X. Certainly this Gen-Xer grew up on Atari with very obvious 8bit and even text based games. I don’t recognize this one and we had few or no first person shooters
My “complex world” game was the computer texting to me “you have entered a maze of twisty passages, all alike”
I don’t know what the tail end of the Xers played, so maybe.
I had to look it up, but the last of the Xers were born in 1980. This looks like a 2000’s game, so they would have been adults
It’s not a joke. But it’s not sincere either.
It’s a criticism.
Because yes. People DO want brand tie-ins. Literally look at Fortnite. It peaks in popularity during brand tie-ins.
man I was jecking out the toy island recently and i saw a carrera oracle redbull race track right next to one with “non-lego” lego brick buildable cars and the mario kart themed one.
I tell you: one day these crossovers and brand tie ins and market consolidation will lead us to the ultimate mono brand multiverse -> Think of Mario Raving Rabbits in Avenger costumes lego figures as playable characters in fortnite
We had mods. They’re a bit like skins and new content, only free and far more creative. They are what you call microtransactions today but you didn’t have to sell your right arm to get them because anyone could make them.
Mods are literally the reason why doom II, skyrim, fallout new vegas and assaultcube are still my most played games, I’m both genuinely surprised and scared at what people can come up with.
CS 1.6 was peak gaming. There were servers with Warcraft 3 mod where you could pick your race and level up to receive additional modded abilities and items, and it would save your progress over months. Not to mention the map customizations.
Also, no paying for season passes or DLC, no paid skinpacks, no censorship or embedded ads or tracking. And custom porn sprays.
EDIT: there were definitely skins, they were just free downloads from modders. And they were client side so you could see them but other players would just have their own skin or default for the same item.
Man made me remember zombie escapes. Complete darkness, scary maps with zombie screams from another game. I used to play a lot of those.
Source also had W3 mod. I remember a server that ran it on de_deathcookin for some reason, but it was so good.
Also, glass maps. And this one server that ran 24/7 scoutzknivez low gravity gun game.
Titanfall is the only game I’ve seen that took surfing, and not only did it on purpose, but built the whole game around it. That’s why I love it so much, you literally just use your surf skills to fly around the maps like a fighter jet, doing dive bombs on people and just overall being a menace.
This reminds me of wc3 mods run on fy_pool_day. Stupid fun with the overpowered HE nades
Actually they tried experimenting with in-game ads at one point in CS 1.6.
https://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/ads_turned_on_in_cs_1.6/1/
Personally, I’m kinda amazed everyone forgot about ads in the MOTD that a lot of multiplayer source games had. Granted, the ads were set by the server host, not Valve, but yeah.