September 2025 General Game Discussion Thread

[Zed Clampet]

@Zed Clampet maybe something for you?

Firefighting Simulator: Ignite on Steam

Face unpredictable dangers, fight perilous fires with your crew, and save lives in Firefighting Simulator: Ignite. Step into the boots of a U.S. firefighter and play with up to 3 friends or with the help of your NPC controlled crew members.

store.steampowered.com

Looking forward to try this demo out!

FREE Digimon Story Time Stranger demo announced for PC and consoles

Digimon Story Time Stranger will soon receive a free demo available on PC (Steam) and consoles. Check out the details here.

gg.deals

Guido and I have played a couple of emergency services games, and they always end up being hilarious. This one looks better than the ones we've played, so I'll have to keep an eye on it.

Looks like the Digimon demo comes out tonight. Will be trying that.

*****

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptnGO3VJPlg


On the survival one, which was pretty funny, most survival games have ditched all that stuff now, but Atlas used to have vitamin deficiencies, and it was so annoying that when we started to get low on one vitamin or another, we'd just die to reset it Eventually we got a mod that provided multivitamins..

 

[Frindis]

@Zed Clampet This one is free to play until the 15th this month.

Save 93% on Ship Graveyard Simulator on Steam

Visit the largest ship graveyard in the world. A dozen kilometers of beach filled with wrecks. Hundreds of ships wrecked on the coast. Thousands of tons of steel. Choose the most valuable ship for you and start the adventure. Play as one of the workers during the most dangerous work in the world!

store.steampowered.com

 

[Zed Clampet]

@Zed Clampet This one is free to play until the 15th this month.

Save 93% on Ship Graveyard Simulator on Steam

Visit the largest ship graveyard in the world. A dozen kilometers of beach filled with wrecks. Hundreds of ships wrecked on the coast. Thousands of tons of steel. Choose the most valuable ship for you and start the adventure. Play as one of the workers during the most dangerous work in the world!

store.steampowered.com

I've actually got the 2nd one. They are strangely entertaining. For instance, you just have to take the ship apart, but you don't have to do it in any specific way, so I liked wandering around the ship looking for places to undermine the integrity of the whole ship and start removing those things until eventually the ship collapsed on top of me (you don't take damage.

My only problem with the 2nd one is that you work hard to level your tools, and then on the 4th ship (I think) all that work just vanishes and you have crappy tools again and have to level them again. The developer explanation was that they wanted the later ships to show some sort of difficulty progression. I said, "You can't think of any other way to progressively make these ships harder to scrap? Like something to do with the materials, the size and/or design of the ship?" But they are finished with the main game and only doing maintenance. The massive and fully destructible ships must require a huge amount of work, so there's no way they will retool the difficulty shift at this point.

They are also coming out with two games soon that look cool to me. One where you are a medic during WWII, and one one where you run a demolition company. I guess that's a good way to reuse tech that they developed for the Ship Graveyard games. the demolition one comes out in 2 weeks.

 

[Pifanjr]

On the survival one, which was pretty funny, most survival games have ditched all that stuff now, but Atlas used to have vitamin deficiencies, and it was so annoying that when we started to get low on one vitamin or another, we'd just die to reset it Eventually we got a mod that provided multivitamins..

I think it's a bit of a shame that most survival games nowadays have at most three meters to take care of, with a lot of them only having two or one and they usually give you a way to trivialise the upkeep pretty quickly. It often feels like the game includes the meters because people expect them in a survival game but do nothing to actually integrate them into the game loop.

 

[BeardyHat]

Guido and I have played a couple of emergency services games, and they always end up being hilarious. This one looks better than the ones we've played, so I'll have to keep an eye on it.

Looks like the Digimon demo comes out tonight. Will be trying that.

*****

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptnGO3VJPlg


On the survival one, which was pretty funny, most survival games have ditched all that stuff now, but Atlas used to have vitamin deficiencies, and it was so annoying that when we started to get low on one vitamin or another, we'd just die to reset it Eventually we got a mod that provided multivitamins..

Well I watched 3 of those skits now and I'm saving the rest to make my wife watch them with me this evening.

 

[neogunhero]

Nothing but Skate last night. The new early access version made some changes to progression, giving less currency points for completed missions than before, making grinding progress a bit longer. The only thing you really unlock is cosmetics and quick drop objects to place in the world and it's usually randomized so in a way it's not that bad.

They released a roadmap as well and have lots of cool features coming out up until the end of the year. This update release cadence will work great to keep players attentions. I'm really excited for the public release, can't wait to see all the people hop on for the first time.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I think it's a bit of a shame that most survival games nowadays have at most three meters to take care of, with a lot of them only having two or one and they usually give you a way to trivialise the upkeep pretty quickly. It often feels like the game includes the meters because people expect them in a survival game but do nothing to actually integrate them into the game loop.

So survival games changed with Valheim and have moved much closer to open world RPGs, although there are plenty of small team/solo dev traditional survival games still being made. But as of Valheim, which laid the foundation, the bigger survival games are like mash-ups of survival/adventure/RPGs. What Valheim did was say that you could have a survival game without eating/drinking constantly, and players loved it. But eating wasn't made irrelevant because different foods gave you different bonuses, pretty significant ones.

(just a note: Valheim even made decorating, a survival staple, worth something as you got bonuses for how well you rested in your house.)

That's all I actually know, but I speculate that developers then had to fill the vacuum now that hunting/farming/cooking/eating wasn't taking up nearly as much time anymore. Where you once went into a survival game and didn't know much about the world or what was going on or why you were there, now you go to places like Nightingale and do quests for NPCs.

That's basically what survival players said they wanted. Less reliance on something mundane like eating and drinking, and more story to make their sandbox feel alive and worthwhile. I can't tell you how many discussions I read about ARK Survival Evolved being pointless, and that is probably the second most popular survival game after Minecraft. It finally did get something of a story at 1.0.

Not that we always realize what is happening. Half the players didn't know there was a whole big story going on in Dune Awakening until part 2 of it was released last week I guess when a giant worm chases you all day, you don't pay as much attention to other things.

Survival has kind of become the everything genre (as far as 3D first/third person games go).

 

[Zed Clampet]

I did well in Monster Train 2 except for the Daily Challenge, which I completed but my global rank was pretty low. However, I just now looked up how you score points. I'm not trying to get to #1, as would have been my goal when I was younger. I would settle for the top 50 percent.

I have to repeat this story: I love how if you screw up in Forza Horizon it congratulates you, without any touch of sarcasm, for being in the top 100 percent.

 

[Johnway]

more Path of exile action. Another challenge completed and i'm just grinding anything i can think of. I think my process is a bit scattershot atm, i should focus on one or 2 mapping objectives like completing missions and finishing any incomplete maps.

On more pleasant news, in POE i started to dip my toes in the currency exchange system and it has made me RICH. I had whole load of crafting material that i don't use and just sits in my chest taking up space. Sadly i don't have any tabs to sell my gear, but no matter, delving has been profitable and in fact one item (prime chaotic resonator) sold for a staggering 77 chaos orbs. i currently have 4 of them in stock....

Throw in the basic primitive one gives me 2 chaos orbs and i have 20 of those around.

All in all i have nearly 500 chaos orbs just sitting in my chest doing nothing. i think i'm going to start to spend some of them to complete some tasks.

So.... time to get the currency tab in POE? i dunno, i've been thinking and i'm reluctant to spend money. I could buy £20 of POE currency, or i could use that money to buy another game... i know the latter would be the right choice.

on more grim and frustrating news doing the rounds, nintendo, the litigious butt hurt dicks, apparently have patented the summoning and battling patent (article of news below). The implications can be pretty serious as it could affect not just palworld, but also other JRPGS with a summoning feature like shin megami tensei and digimon. But also any RPG where you can summon minions. So effectively every RPG that has a nercomancer or summon minions, depending on how you interpret the patent. Lets face it, if you summon monsters/minions, it will attack enemies automatically and gather round the player when theres nothing.

Uh Oh: Nintendo Just Landed A ‘Summoning’ And ‘Battling’ Patent

Nintendo's patent collection continues with one that seems to relate directly to Pokemon and Pikmin mechanics.

www.forbes.com