Is there any Strategy game in a persistent online world?

Theres mobile games like ogame and lastwar, mini strategy games in a persistent online world, always on always pvp.

I would like that in a real game, like a Civ or even a RTS game in a online world.

Is there any game like that?

I know we can play civ/aoe etc online but they are session games

Thank you

Recently been debating about buying myself a handheld as a Xmas present for myself. I've watched lots of videos and comparisons of the two. I still can't make up my mind on which to pick. What do you all recommend?

I would be mainly playing games such as: Cyberpunk, Dishonored, Baldur's Gate 3, Hades, Assassin's Creed, ect. Single Player games essentially.

Hello everyone! As the title states I'm looking for game recommendations. I have both XBOX and a gaming laptop. My favorite games are Minecraft and Skylanders and I would love to find something similar to Skylanders, with a story that I can play through levels. First person POV for the MC would be nice, but it's not required. I also really enjoy the tranquility of Minecraft.

Thank you!

TLDR

Crazy difficulty doesn't mean challenge, it often means unrefined design. Easier difficulty doesn't even need to be default. Compensating game design elements should be made available to ameliorate restrictive "difficulty" or more likely design

Summary

In the most basic sense, games are ultimately puzzles where players need to find the solution to complete the challenge. For shooter games, the solution is mostly straightforward, bullets hit the enemies till they die before the player does.

However, certain genres/games innately have a design that restrict the solution to such a narrow degree until they genuinely feel like actual Puzzle Games rather what they are meant to be

Games do not have to cater for everyone or all difficulties and sometimes the inherent design and vision calls for a level of challenge baked in, but some design really should be thought through better.

Game 1: Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade

Most people would actually be more familiar with Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade instead - or more easily identified as Fire Emblem GBA in the West. That's the easier game

Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade however, is the game where at about ⅓ of playthrough, you could realize that you have effectively softlocked yourself from finishing the game.

For the uninitiated, Fire Emblem's (at least the GBA-era incarnations that I'm more familiar with) core gameplay is a Tactics RPG where casts of supporting characters (Fighter/Archer/Mage etc) are assembled to accompany the protagonists along their journey. Leveling via combat & inventory are carried over a set of mostly linear missions, only a selected handful of characters can be deployed to a mission from the cast and should a supporting character bite the dust during combat, they are permanently removed from the remaining adventure.

As the story progresses, the enemy types can get increasingly specialized, which needs certain classes of characters to more effectively counter them. But if those classes were neglected to be deployed in the earlier missions, then it's tantamount to a total Game Over as there is no way to raise their levels sufficiently to take on the existing mission as there is no backtracking.

This is often no fault of the player themselves, the starting supporting Character is likely the most powerful and able to hold out on his own, so there is always a direct and powerful incentive to continually throw him into the fray and he sucks up all the XP from the combat encounters. By the time the player realizes that he needs to level-up the other supporting cast at an even rate, he'd have progressed far too deep into the game to correct course.

And even if a player knows that he needs to distribute the combat encounters more evenly across the cast, it's often a laborious and tedious process of deliberately sending a very weak and fragile Mage to the front and constantly rotate him towards the rear to preserve his sorry hide. This is not helped by the fact that such characters are often saddled with poor movement range compared to a character with an actual saddle on-top of horseback. Yet this is necessary if the player wants to stand any feasible chance against the late-game enemies which specifically are more vulnerable to Magic

Later GBA Fire Emblem games gives an outlet by allowing level-selection and repeatable "grind" stages to farm XP. It's cheesy, but it does eliminate the softlock problem. I do not think Fire Emblem necessarily should change its system - maybe it already has by the Switch entries, but this is a cautionary tale of game design itself contributing to a difficulty that cannot be reasonably be anticipated by the (first-time) player which can totally kill the pacing especially for a linear story-driven experience.

Game 2: Advance Wars 2 GBA

The Advance Wars series are some of the most addictive battlefield tactics games of all-time. Raise and command a small army composition from Infantry to Battleships to breakthrough and holdout against the enemy army. The style of gameplay is smilar to Fire Emblem, but the units are now directly raised on the battlefield through resource-collection and base-capturing

Advance Wars 1 was the hook that probably drew a whole generation into such games as it featured a modern setting with infantry, tanks and planes - combined with a charming art-style that was very appealing especially for a handheld game. Advance Wars 1, until the final mission had sufficient leeway for players to strategize and plan ahead several moves to secure their victory once a path is viable.

The missions of Advance Wars 2 however, had so many additional restrictions slapped on-top of it as a sequel, it felt closer to a Tetris/Puzzle analogue rather than a strategic Tactics game.

Fog-of-war mechanics are nothing new in strategy games. In fact, it is necessary to obscure a perfect infomation horizon from players - especially in multiplayer, to create the tension & conflict needed for the upcoming clash. Advance Wars 2, however, took this idea to an extreme, by layering turn time limits on numerous of their missions, combined with extremely limited ability to raise additional units on those scenarios too - not that it matters as well, often the new units would be too far away to make it in-time or too wounded after skirmishing with the enemy to make it to the objective

A restart or two for difficult missions in video games are not uncommon or undesirable by itself. But when a mission seems to be designed to require numerous restarts just to glean advance-intel about enemy placement and composition, it distorts the fog-of-war mechanics from being a complementary system to one of annoyance. It results in there only being very little initiative from the player, often boiling down to just a singular path forward and taunting players to find it out - or just to consult a guide

Back in the early days of the internet, where GameFAQs reigned supreme, this might artifically pad out the game's runtime, though more likely it just serves to alienate & sap the goodwill of players who earnestly tried to engage with it.

Game 3: XCOM2, specifically, without its addon War of the Chosen

XCOM and its earlier forebears in the series, is extremely popular and with good reason; the thematic layer and persistence between alien interception deployments, combined with the Soldier/Squad progression to tackle the alien threat is genius.

The modern incarnation of XCOM has had decades of reference in design, both within its own franchise and outside of it. There should be an expectation of a more balanced game design for wider viability of play - and for the most part it is available, just that the early-game curve is way too steep & relies again on frequent restarts and hampered by a below-average UI in the strategic layer.

Thematically XCOM 2 takes place in the canon where Humanity of XCOM 1 were unable to beat back the initial alien invasion & 20 years have passed and XCOM has now morphed into a Resistance network aboard a stolen Avengers flying mothership

On the tactical gameplay level, what it means is that the Rookie soldiers of XCOM end up having terrible aim, low health bars, poor weapon damage against enemy forces and suffers from debilitating conditions even upon survival from a Mission. Meanwhile, the enemy enjoys numerical superiority, reinforcement deployment and psychic abilities from the get-go.

There is a reason why most such games offer a decently-powered bodyguard character to start them off before the rest of the squad gets up to speed. A few unlucky dice rolls means that the initial squad is good as toast and that's it for XCOM as the strategic layer is its own boondoggle.

One of the loudest and earliest gripes about XCOM2 is about the restrictive turn-timers - fail to finish the Mission objective within a set number of turns and it's a loss. This countdown system also applies on the strategic layer where is is a constant Doomsday clock counting down, adding constant stress onto the entire experience.

So not only does the tactical missions have a frustrating high-probability of overall failure due to the need to rush towards the map objective, experienced and good soldiers can & do get gravely incapacitated, the strategic layer is also putting a everpresent looming threat above your head while being starved of resources and recourse with just a few bad moves & dice rolls in the early game.

Worse, the UI on base-building is rather subpar. This is only apparent after a few runs, but there are actually several very optimal placements for certain room upgrades or certain sequence of room builds are extremely critical. This is however, poorly telegraphed to the player and a few wrong clicks could spell a spiral to an inevitable defeat.

It fits the theme of the setting, maybe. But this is another variant of the Fire Emblem softlock problem which thankfully isnt as dealbreaking.

There are ultimately ways around it, but the game truly opens up alot more once players mod away the annoying elements to their liking themselves, which suggests that more options and parameters offered by game itself would have gone a long way to make the game much, much more enjoyable for alot of people.

When I was 4, the game over screen in Donkey Kong Country terrified me.

It was creepy how it was a black screen with both of them enlarged and pop out 3D facing you. Donkey Kong freaked me out the most as he covered his eyes and you could barely see that arm covering it in the dark. The worst part us he looked to me like he had a giant oreo cookie stuck in his mouth. And Diddy with one barely opened eye, his face looked grim. And again it scared me how you could barely see their limbs in the dark. They looked like they wanted to scare and haunt you. Even the game over letters looked freaky for some reason. The music was pretty creepy. And it was terrifying how it stopped and was silent with the screen still displayed. Loke that forever until somebody presses something.

I even had nightmares about it. In one of them I was playing the game at my grandma's house but everytime I turned the game on it kept going straight to the game over screen. The third time it happened DK and Diddy jumped out of the screen as they looked in it and as hob balloons and bounced as they chased me down the hall way. Diddy kong jumped on me and I went inside him. Then Donkey Kong shoved his "face" to look at me as that was what scared me the most in that screen.

Growing up I always thought I was the only one who was scared of that screen until youtube came and saw other people who went through the same thing growing up. I was shocked but so relieved. So I just wondered if anyone in this subreddit also had what I call the "dkc game over phobia".

I always wondered if Rare meant it to be scary like that.

The situation:

Family of 3 owns a PS5 and a PC. Ideal scenario would be 2 of us would play on the PS5 on a local coop setup while the 3rd joins online from the PC.

We were hoping that Minecraft Dungeons would support this, but even though it supports cross-platform coop and couch coop, it doesn't support them both at the same time.

What are good games out there that would support this?

A lot of video games, particularly multi-player games, use tie-ins from other games, films, TV, or other media to add more exclusive content to their games.

Sometimes it is for cosmetic purposes, sometimes they add new gameplay elements.

The most apt example that really uses this feature is Fortnite. Not only does it add a lot of tie-ins from other forms of popular media but it adds some gameplay elements as well like the Infinity Gauntlet for a brief period.

There was a brief period where these tie-ins were unlockables or easter eggs like the other gimmicky outfits in the old God of War games that had particular abilities but with the expense of playing Kratos look different or silly

Other than these two examples, tie-ins are sometimes added through mods where players can add whatever characters, cosmetics, gameplay elements and other things in their favourite games if they wish to do so.

But the question remains - do these tie-ins actually improve the gaming experience or are they just hype or another feature for the gaming industry to garner more income through microtransactions or paid DLCs or add-ons?

What about tie-ins which do not "fit" with the genre like Call of Duty skins that are not "military-like" or tie-in skins in Rainbow Six Siege like the Rick and Morty skins? Do they add anything or are they just unnecessary items?

I like the game, but it's not really my jam... The soundtrack though? It's on another level!!

What other games are.like this?

I got this ps3 slim a yr ago, been trying to use cds on it don't work, on latest version 4.91 what should I do? what's the issue here? I can put it but it doesn't spin, this might be cause my cover dont work for some reason, the cd insert thingy is visible, mb for the dust😭

was this game actually released on the 360?

Why do this? It's such a drag. Why can't the audio follow me as I proceed? Talking about mass effect 3 in this instance but I know several other games do this.

Can someone explain to me on why so many Wii U discs break so easily or get scratched and are not playing anymore after some time? I heard it soo often on this sub, so I think it's a great way to ask you all here in the sub.

Hello! I'm looking for some great recommendations like Overcooked & Duck Game, Gang Beasts & Pummel Party, It takes Two & Unravel Two. My cousins came over for the holidays and we have our controllers but we need new games as we've already played the ones I mentioned. We're looking for games along these types of games, even if it's just 2 players so long as it is split-screen or local co-op. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Prefer controller support games if you know any as well.

I've tried to use the filter option in the steam search but among hundreds of games, we just want to see games that someone would really recommend.

I often buy a shiny new, just released game full price, end up playing for about 1 hour, don't really like it, and come back to realize the return window had passed. I have a couple games I've played through and beat, but if it's not one of the rare games, I just have it and never come back. It's getting pretty bad now, around 1000 dollars total and I want to stop and only buy the games I'll play

What should I do

I want to play my xbox on my phone. Ive seen Backbone, Nacon, Razer, Gamesir ect ect. Whats the best one for casually playing while my kids are watching tv?

As above.

Which game/boss /puzzle had a deceprivlt easy solution you overlooked over thinking it or by not paying attention