A bit of a weird title, but basically what’s a game that’s more than a year old but still considered “modern” that you love? There’s no real strict definition for modern, I’d just like to see some discussion around great games that aren’t quite classics yet (but probably will be one day).
The nature of this community typically attracts discussion around decade-old games (which is what I mostly play too), but I’d like to see some newer (but not too new) games on this post.
got death stranding when it was free for a day on epic a while ago, been playing it for the last few weeks pretty nonstop and just finished the story. i've always been a kojima fan for mgs but oh my god this is magnificent. an absolute masterpiece, imho. i get it's not for everyone but i've had a blast and may immediately do a very hard offline second playthrough. definitely recommend, especially if you can grab it free or heavy discount.
How have the “interactive” features been now that there are fewer players? Is it a wasteland, or does the game still randomly place in user generated content from when the game first released?
online stuff smattered everywhere. plenty of people still playing and i imagine a good handful also snagged it like i did when epic gave it away for a day. there's also older stuff like well placed safe houses and joke bridges on flat land or mountain peaks that have an insane number of likes so they must've been there for years.
also there's a page where you can see the players you've interacted with, your likes for them and their likes for you and it also shows last login date, and most of mine are online recently like me with some maybe last logged in in january, or late last year. i did see one who hasn't played since '22 but they've still got stuff in my world, too, so i think there's some playtime syncing where a bridge or whatever might actually be destroyed in their game if they logged in today but since it was there from hour 5 to 25 of their playthrough you'll get it at hour 5 and will stay if you repair it unlike they did. but that's a guess.
edit: for quick reference when you log in you get a summary of people liking your stuff and yesterday i saw "75 players are pleased with you, 7328 likes". so definitely still active. also no spoilers but there are a game mechanic or two that affects how many other players you are connected to, so your actions in game can determine how many people's stuff shows up, as well.
Can you confirm which game mechanic gives you more player stuff? I don't remember since it's been a year since I last played. I think this game is old enough for spoilers, ha. So it's okay.
yeah sure. there's the connection level of each knot itself, with higher levels giving you more chiral bandwidth and i'm pretty sure gives you higher numbers of online structures in that area too, but i'm not certain about that.
other than that tho there's bridge contracts which state they give you a stronger connection to that player so you both share more of your structures with each other. i actually forgot about that until the last few days and after adding the max 30 contracts i def have more structures.
i also suspect that if you like online structures actively rather than just letting it get a like when you use it the game gives you more other players and structures as well, but i'm not certain on that one either. it makes sense to me what with the 'likers get liked' sign mechanic and how the amount of likes you can get overall is a skill to improve as well as your time to give likes increasing with skill as well.
There were so many levels of mechanica 8n that game that I probably didn't even know about. For example, I never did any contracts. The online component in general fit so well in the game though. Seeing useful items or structures left behind by other players was so cool.