Not quite that long, but I did apparently put 193.7 hours in and didn't actually complete my first campaign…

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71% of my playtime this year was RimWorld (36%), Team Fortress 2 (23%), and Stellaris (12%), all of which are over a decade old*. 7% of my playtime was games released this year, which I think might all be from Ark Nova (the digital version).

*RimWorld only released on Steam in 2018 so Steam apparently counts it as "recent" (1–7 years old) rather than "classic" (8+ years old) in the breakdown, but I had pre-alpha access from the original Kickstarter in 2013 and was playing it years before it officially released.

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It's definitely a grand strategy game (with the attendant effort required to get into it), but if you're used to playing Paradox GSGs I found it wasn't too bad. I got it…maybe two or three years ago, and while I didn't end up actually completing a full campaign because the end game dragged a bit at that stage of development, I enjoyed it and have been meaning to get back into it to see what updates they've released since then. The 1.0 release is as good a time as any, I suppose!

I did really like the whole seven factions idea, and how they all have different goals and win conditions (some of them completely antithetical to each other – you can play as the faction that only wins by killing all the aliens, or the one that wins by helping the aliens take over Earth, to various flavors of "keep Earth safe", to the wildcard "let's figure out how to evacuate Earth's population somewhere else!" faction).

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Quoting: Tethys84It's really sad. I've come across some really great games over the years that seemingly no one noticed or played. Not going to lie, I wish we could go back to something resembling the Steam Greenlight days, where games had to voted on to be able to be on the store. It would just need some tweaking to make sure it wasn't exploitable by shady developers. I feel it would really help cut down on the thousands of legitimately bad, low-effort-made games that flood the store daily.

I get where you're coming from, and to some extent don't disagree, but I'm also not sure how much it'd really help. Let's say that all those games with <10 reviews are the legitimately bad, low-effort games. We cut those out. That still leaves 9,739 games released this year, or over 26 games released a day. We could go further and say only games with >50 reviews are likely to be actually good games…looking at the graph that's still something like 4,500 games, or over 12 games per day.

I think there are just so many people making games now, that even if we apply some arbitrary limit to cut out the really obviously bad ones there would still be so many releasing that no one could keep up with all of them. Would it result in some undiscovered gems getting noticed that haven't been otherwise? Probably, yes. But on the flip side how many games that have blown up and become viral hits in the years since Greenlight ended wouldn't have been voted on for approval with Greenlight?* It's a tricky question, but ultimately I think I'm in favor of erring on the side of more games and letting things like the review system float the good ones to the top (however imperfect a process that may be).

*Or, alternatively, how many games got through Greenlight and then ended up barely played because they weren't as good as the screenshots made them look?

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Well, without looking closely, as someone tangentially familiar with Factorio (having played the demo for maybe an hour), my first thought on seeing that video thumbnail was: "Huh. They're really ripping off closely copying the Factorio look, aren't they?"

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I'm a little disappointed in the Star Wars racing game going from the cool and unique visuals of podracers (jet-engine-driven chariots!) to…the same boring, rigid-body speeders/ships that are everywhere else in Star Wars with a slightly different design. But eh. Might keep an eye on that and the Fate of the Old Republic.

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Kitten Space Agency? 😰 We all know what happened to the Kerbals in KSP…

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Quoting: lucinos

Quoting: Philadelphusbut Trixie was released November 15 last year so I suspect

Trixie made it to stable only this August. Most people won't bother with testing/unstable.

Ohhh, thanks for that! I thought I remembered it coming out around the middle of the year (I'm on stable), but a quick search listed that as the release date so I figured my memory was just going. :grin: I think that fits with what I outlined above even better.

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Leno’s first day is interrupted by a massive solar event that wipes out all technology on Earth.

Plausible inciting incident? ✅
Astronomer approved! 👍

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Proton to Lepton? What kind of particle physics-themed naming is that?? Well, I suppose Electron was already taken. And it's probably too late to rename Proton to Baryon…touché, Valve.

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