Just be more cautious about how you word things in the future.

At the S tier level it’s both strategy and speed. Lower than that, as in like over 99% of players, strategy is more important than anything else.

If you think Nestle is just shitty chocolate, that’d explain a few things here.

You literally called the game unfair and then suggested that your difficulties weren’t your fault. That’s not an opinion, that’s blaming the developer. Maybe you were just stating your opinion, but the wording isn’t you expressing a simple opinion, it’s making a statement.

What are you on about?

You said something stupid. Be an adult and accept your correction instead of trying to play it off as “omg that person’s just mad.”

I’m talking about how surprisingly complex it is to avoid a diversified corporation, using Nestle as an example. Is this really that hard to follow?

Might give CULTIC a try, then. It’s essentially a Build engine game along the lines of Blood with large maps that typically allow for some degree of nonlinearity and exploration. You end up with quiet periods of sneaking around and exploring to break up the combat segments.

Otherwise I’d say you can’t hardly beat the new Wolfenstein games. Varied gameplay, an actually decent plot, and when has shooting Nazis not been as American as apple pie? The first one hasn’t aged as well as the second on PC though. I get occasional frame drops and other oddities, but I suppose that could be an Intel drivers thing. Those idTech engines haven’t aged super great.

Yeah. Gabe Newell wasn’t wrong when he said he believed piracy was a service problem. Hell, I’d be giving Nintendo regular income if I could buy official ROMs for games I had legal copies of as a kid at a reasonable price and without needing to buy into the Switch ecosystem. I don’t know how you convince executives that they should change their tune, though.

Yeah, I get that. I’m on the opposite end where I want to be challenged and enjoy the feeling of beating a tough room or encounter. Sadly not all games are balanced well and increasing difficulty might not actually make much difference, in which case you might as well just play on easy.

We’re talking about food, not games.

How do you like boomer shooters?

Yeah, SC2 and RTS in general is - surprise surprise - about strategy way more than mechanical speed. You’ll see that with people taking a nostalgia trip in AOE2, too. You will eventually reach a point where lack of mechanical speed will hold you back in SC2 but that’s quite literally like the C and B tier professional bracket - you would already be at the point of being able to win a free dinner here and there in tournaments.

No real difference. Kind of a shit patch overall but I respect the effort. If they actually cared about the game’a economics they could have just re-read the essay written about it over at TL during the LotV beta. But Blizzard almost never admits fault, unfortunately.

The odd ways players come up with to communicate without text is definitely an endearing part of the design!

I mean, generally in those games you’ll pick up exactly where you stopped. You just have to take the extra step of quitting to the menu.

Difficulty doesn’t really have anything to do with story. Playing games on easy can even rob you of the enjoyment of the full gameplay mechanics. Noah Caldwell-Gervais’ recent video covering RE4R and RE9 is a good example, where some of their conclusions regarding gameplay design were only because they typically play on easier settings. Some of the things in question make more sense or have stronger legs when the game’s played on a reasonably challenging setting.

Tribes Ascend had at least two periods where it was good bordering on great and Hi-Rez fucked it up both times.

That company’s sheer incompetence is noteworthy. Global Agenda had serious first-mover potential and they bungled that too.

Being a meta slave is a mindset, not often reality. There are countless examples of players taking “useless” characters or builds far in the professional scene across many different genres and games.

The overwhelming majority of competitive games, across any genre, are determined predominantly via knowledge and skill rather than raw mechanical speed until the very highest level of play. Players who dedicate themselves to laddering will not get filtered by lack of mechanical speed until they’re already among the very best in the game.

Games that would be determined primarily by speed would become very boring to watch after the first few rounds. So developers generally don’t design games around it.

Twitch reaction time isn’t particularly important in most games. Quake and UT, sure, but even in those most twitchiest of shooters strategy will still carry you into the upper echelons of players.

Counterstrike is almost entirely based on spray control and map knowledge. Twitch reactions have only a minor role to play.

Even games like Starcraft are determined primarily by strategy and not mechanical speed. You could probably play at a professional level before a lack of speed compared to your peers would actually begin holding you back.

Plus… you can train reaction time and multitasking. An actual physical impairment like RSI might stop you, though.

The whole “ohhh I can’t do games because I have the olds” is such a nonsense cop-out. The rest of your post is pretty accurate, though.