For a few years now, Phasmophobia has been a game my friend and I like to play for a few hours each weekend. But they recently came out with a disappointing and terrible update, and its pushed us to try out some Phasmo “clones”.
The Other Side is the one we’ve had the most fun playing over the past few weeks.
I think survival games are the type of game that are infinitely more fun with a friend or two to play along with. As long as said friends are the cooperative type and not the type that gets upset over having stuff taken from their chest. Being able to split up the grind and show off your accomplishments or frankly terrible builds to friends always makes them a lot more fun to play. They also just tend to be pretty laid back experiences usually despite their genre’s name, so it gives plenty of room to just chat as you do menial tasks like mine or build.
I mean don’t get me wrong, the stories don’t tend to be anything crazy, and they’re basically never the center of the game. Like, you’re not going to find a story on par with The Witcher 3 in an idle game. They’re usually just there to give a justification as to why you’re doing things, and in some games it’s pretty obvious that the gameplay was designed first and the story was more of an afterthought.
I don’t mind that personally, I’ve never been one to seek out games just for their story.
Bit of an irrelevant metric if you’d ask me. Best-selling game of all time run by owner of both Windows and Xbox has bigger numbers than indie title, color me surprised. Considering Minecraft only has 5x as many sales as Terraria, I’d say Terraria is doing pretty well. Average player counts will obviously be comparatively lower because it’s a completely different genre.
And to be clear I’m not arguing that Minecraft is unpopular or that it doesn’t allow for near unlimited creativity. It’s one of my favorite games. I was just naming a couple of other incredibly popular games like you asked.
Old School RuneScape and RuneScape 3.
Terraria just had its 15th year anniversary less than a week ago and is more popular than ever. World of Warcraft is still popular as well.
Not everyone’s looking for a story or skill development when they play games. Sometimes you want to just turn your brain off for a bit and enjoy the dopamine. Plenty of clickers and idlers have actual stories regardless. As for RSI, most “clickers” don’t actually have you clicking much past the very early game anyway. It’s almost always automated.
Now to be fair to other survival games, 7 days to die is just a terribly made game imo. They’ve been consistently dumbing it down and straying further from a zombie apocalypse every update. Nowadays zombie dogs look more like wendigos, and for a while they had literal yetis and plague spitting mummies in the game until they got a lot of shit for it and had to retexture them into proper zombies. I’ve got 900 hours in the game and I just can’t touch it anymore, it’s no longer fun.
I mean sure, but aside from having the same goal you aren’t really interacting with them in my experience. They’re basically just people you share points with rather than proper team mates.
I don’t even like deck builders but I gotta disagree with you there. I mean sure, if its a poker game like Balatro I could see it. But how is Slay the Spire gambling? That’s like calling DnD-like games simulated gambling because everything is decided through a dice roll.
That’s a hard question. There’s tons of popular games I personally couldn’t stand but can still see the appeal of, like Baldurs Gate 3. But something I just can’t understand? I guess my best answer would be basically any purely PvP game.
I get something like a hero shooter where there’s cooperation and team play involved. But I’ve never understood how people get more than 15 minutes of fun in games like multiplayer CoD.
TIL it’s okay for kids to die if they’re privileged.
I’ve never seen a car like that before… it looks like a big cat of some kind.