Stardew Valley is a good one, but I definately wouldn’t consider Terraria casual or low-stress.

Personally, Im more of a creative-mode player at the moment so the majority of the problems don’t affect me. Its also been a couple months since I last tried Minetest (mostly on Mineclone). From what I remember, my personal dealbreakers were:

• IMO much uglier graphics, and more significantly, its harder to graphically customize with mods and resource packs. Maybe its more versitile than I’m giving it credit for, but at the very least, its not used as there aren’t enough modders and artists making content for the game to even remotely compete.

• Performance - Minecraft may not be optimized, but I was getting much worse performance on Minetest. In particular, I was getting massive frame drops any time I placed or broke a block, making it extremely nauseating to play.

• UX - There were a ton of small roadblocks to actually playing the game as I wanted to. First, customizing the graphics settings - the menu was disorganized and defaults were really weird for my hardware. Then, I had to find and edit the permissions file to be able to fly and sprint on my creative world. Even after that, if I remember right, the controls or flight movement were limitted or weird but in a way that couldn’t easily be fixed.

• Lack of world editting commands - Im sure theres mods for this one, but its more work to find, figure out, and set up and by the time I got to this point, having to put in even more work just to make the game comparable was a dealbreaker.

Minetest isn’t really a substitute for Minecraft. Yes, its similar, but its far less polished, lacking in content, vanilla and otherwise, and is missing a lot of the technical functionality that makes much of Minecraft’s content (esspecially on the modding side) possible. Don’t get me wrong, I want to like it, and I’ve debated trying to contibute to it myself (although my skills are very lackluster) but as it stands its only really a substitute in the context of things like casually playing Pocket Edition.

I’d personally say its like a 7 or 8/10. Its probably the most mechanically varied and deep PvE focused survival game, but at the same time, it does really feel incomplete. Building lacks options, end-game content is often finicky or tideous, and performance issues can make the game near unplayable in enemy-dense regions.

Anger Foot - I played the demo previously and its the only game I’ve played that recreates the feel and flow of Hotline Miami successful. Very much looking forward to the full game. I’m temped to buy it at launch, even for full price, which I don’t think I’ve done since XCom 2’s War of the Chosen DLC.

I know in previous posts, you’ve talked about leaderboards and comparing stats to friends. For those who might be embarrassed by their stats or who would be anxious comparing stats, is ir possible to hide these menus and/or play the game without them? In particular, is it possible to play with other social features still enabled?

I woundn’t say this is suprising news. Most of the big companies and triple-a studios have been in a race to the bottom in recent years, and these are the main companies marketing and selling to console and mobile users. PC on the other hand, has always been less ruled by the big players and thus hasn’t been as impacted.

Yeah. Pretty much boils down to, “There is fewer good triple A games coming out, and less significant hardware advancements.” This doesn’t mean its getting worse, just means its getting better slower. Even if you read it as “getting worse as compared to other platforms” it doesn’t really work seeing as all these issues affect other platforms just as much, and often more.

I just used those two because I figured they’d want iconic D&D monsters, whereas Vecna, esspecially after taking away the godhood and magic elements, is just a fairly generic undead skeleton.

This is such a weird IP to pick, and an even weirder choice of killer. It feels really weird to cram a lich-turned-god into the same gameplay mechanics as a slasher movie killer, esspecially over many more iconic, recognizable, and unique character/monster designs.

I’m not a D&D fan in the slightest, but I would have thought something like a Mindflayer or some sort of lesser beholder would be more fitting, more inconic to D&D and more distinct from the other DBD killers.

Honestly, I think the original. I know its inferior to most of the other games in most ways, but I’ve found a lot of the modern Zelda games feel pretty shallow and formulaec. Not to say they’re bad, but none of them really feel like they stand out to me either - they’re just good games. The original on the other hand, feels very different from a lot of the games since then. The world is kept a lot more foreign and hostile both in terms of aggressive enemies and in terms of tutorialization. Its makes the exploration so much more rewarding, and when you do find a new item, that much more special.

I saw this posted a couple days ago which pretty succinctly summarizes the current state of the market.

That said, worth noting that these launchers and complex storefronts aren’t really needed either, which is part of why I don’t have an issue with Steam. If you have a good game, you can just sell it on your own website like Minecraft, League of Legends, or Tarkov. Steam’s biggest (or at least most universal) utility for developers is just that it provides very cheap, very effective marketing.

Its real. War Thunder just has really elaborate April Fools Day events.

Minecraft with mods?

Base game probably doesn’t have the level of detail you want, but with mods for either specalized detail blocks, or something more generic like Chisel and Bits or Carpenter Blocks, it should be possible to make something close to what you want pretty easily.

Tldr: We know about the hacks and are working on it.

ROCK AND STONE!

The changes to unit and god powers worries me a bit. Hopefully there’ll be some way to change those back to the old system for those who perfer it. The old system, IMO, was a really interesting approach to unit micro that was great for newbies and still had a lot of depth.

By that standard, whats to stop people from just getting more phone numbers? Its just an additional cost.

The game had an early-access launch a year ago, but was early-access, unfinished state. They’re only just preparing to launch 1.0.

Are you thinking of the original? It left Early Access in 2018, which is still 5 years ago rather than three, but seems a bit more likely.

I’ve intentionally held off on spoilers so far, but Im really hoping once finished, Sons of the Forest will be a nice step up from The Forest. The original was so great in so many ways, but also had so many massive incongruities - esspecially with the content so focused around violence and the enviroment that had absolutely nothing to do with the plot.