this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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[–] LemmyEntertainYou@piefed.social 1 points 12 hours ago

I mostly only play single player games too but of the four used in this meme I only thought one of them was any good.

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 9 points 23 hours ago

I've always preferred single player games. I hate multiplayer, all those strangers running around in my TV, chaos everywhere. I want to relax and explore, but multiplayer is stressful. I don't want to deal with other people.

[–] AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip 1 points 17 hours ago

I used to enjoy playng online in mc servers and occasuionally gmod and cs:go, but only with friends on those last 2.

Nowadays I would never open cs:go because I wouldn't be able to find it fun, especially since I can guatantee I'd be mass reported for not being good at the game. And gmod ain't fun with strangers, IMO.

Any more I just find so much more fun im singleplayer titles and maybe games like Oaken Tower and Krosmaga ( the only PVP games I play anymore ) where it's not skill based PVP. I just find exploration, my own choices being why I lost, and other such singleplayer type of things so much more enjoyable than losing because someone had a wired internet connection or a lag switch or simply a higher level/better equipment from playing longer or better hardware or whatever.

[–] GalacticGrapefruit@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I thoroughly enjoy single players games. I like being able to explore the world at my own pace, make my own decisions, and draw my own conclusions. It's like reading a book, if turning the pages involved solving puzzles and beating monsters. Relaxing, if you're good, challenging if you're not.

Cooperative games are a close second. I like PvE, it means that I get to help my friends. The objective isn't rank and competition, it's winning together. It's why I like Starbound, Minecraft, and D&D.

Genuinely? I despise PvP. It's the trash talk and the aggressively competitive assholes who have nothing to do with their time. I hate dealing with people who like to hurt strangers by humiliating them. Who the hell enjoys that?

[–] Allero@lemmy.today 2 points 1 day ago

PvP can be honorable and joyful and rewarding too, if you don't play with assholes.

Often times, even losing the match may leave you with a sweet aftertaste. Like, yeah, they got us, but it was beautiful and honorable and your teammates were there for you. With you.

Once you get the right people, every match will be like this. With randoms...it's very occasional, but it happens, too.

[–] umbraroze@slrpnk.net 15 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I used to play mostly shooters online.

Somehow, living next to a country which is invading one of its neighbours, and seeing a bunch of actual real war footage from real wars on the daily basis, made me reconsider if shooters actually qualify as "fun" these days.

[–] huey_m@reddthat.com 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Oh, come on. It's not bad if you play something fantastical like cyberpunk... that's a world so far removed from reality, we're talking corporations running the world, harsh police actions driven by corporate interest, commodification of basic health services, constant death and destruct...tion.

Well, shit.

[–] kinship@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 day ago

I felt the same when my friends made me play Call of Duty Modern Warfare. Civilians dying around me is supposed to be fun? Should I feel like a hero while people die like flies around me? That is a hard pass from me!

[–] Nelots@piefed.zip 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Competitive multiplayer games are a big no, but I love cooperative multiplayer games. I'd much rather play one of them with a friend or two than play something by myself. I couldn't tell you the last time I've actually beaten a single player game, I tend to get bored and lose interest half way through.

[–] Digestive_Biscuit@feddit.uk 3 points 1 day ago

This is what drew me to Minecraft. Common goals or just solo'ing. And other people take great pride in showing their builds. So chill.

[–] Rooster326@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I wish split screen/couch co-op was back in fashion.

Everyone wants everyone to buy 2 copies and set up 2 computers right next to each other just to play, and it's not happening. I'll just move on. Take Two seems to be the only sane one - I'll pay for full price for it since it has a free coop copy.

[–] Actionschnils@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago

There are a lot of Couch CooP Games with only one copy and Gamesystem needed- but mostly indie games. Some friends and I get together from time to time and have a great time.

[–] Redacted@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

Too bad you need friends to do that

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 2 points 22 hours ago

Meh, I found that being good at competitive games felt more like work than fun. I play the fun way and get trounced before it could really get fun, so I switch to advance in leaderboards and maybe I could, but it just sucked because the fun stuff tended to be the less strategically wise way to go.

Even non-competitive gaming "hey, let's all get together at 7 pm to do something on the game", now I have "meetings" to worry about.

Single player is there when I want it, for however long or short as I want it, and can play in a fun style rather than an effective/efficient style.

[–] 64bithero@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I personally mostly use video games as a means of an escape from real life. And to me multiplayer pulls to much of real life back into games and it can be unenjoyable.

[–] FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I used to be pretty good at the usual stuff like COD, CS, Battlefield… but each game got fucked up in its own unique way. Stuff became just too sweaty and annoying, all the while the sense of community faded. COD back in the 360 days was fun. Now it’s just annoying.

These days, I’m fully single player. It’s just not worth the price of modern games to deal with all the multiplayer bullshit.

[–] Rooster326@programming.dev 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

A real sense of community

The community

*** you $&#ki-$ $*. $+#)$ ur ****** dark kht

[–] FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago

Yes, that exactly!

Back in the days of COD on 360, voice chat was a relatively new thing. And everyone wanted to have a go. Since it was novel to talk to people far outside your own country, they did what humans do: teach each other naughty words and slurs. And whether you were from the Netherlands, Greece, the US or wherever, that was fun!

Now, obviously there was verbal abuse. But the thing people don’t really grasp unless they were there is: everyone gave as good as they got. Someone calls you X, Y or Z, well you insult their mom in three different languages back. Especially European lobbies were great fun since you’d get teams of all different nationalities.

And since voice chat was pretty much uncensored, nobody thought anything of it. Like I said, we all gave as good as we got.

With modern games, there’s so much censorship that people take voice chat off game. Barely anyone talks anymore, and certainly not outside their own group. Because one slightly offensive word can get your account banned.

So yeah, I’ll take an uncensored, chatty community over a completely silent one.

[–] AceTKen@lemmy.ca 86 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (13 children)

I don't play multiplayer games anymore.

First off, they always seem to enable the worst of game companies trying to financially ruin their players.

Second off, I'm in my 40s and my reaction time isn't what it was when I used to play UT or Quake. You can't improve an aged reaction time nearly as easily, yes, because it's gotten slightly worse with age, but also because you become less willing and / or able to dedicate the sheer volume of time that you would need to to improve. Getting repeatedly stomped isn't fun, and quite simply, I've got better and more important things to do.

Third off, I don't like the constant recycling of content that you see in multiplayer games. A handful of maps are expected to last you infinite plays. I like changes of scenery, storylines, and varied experiences. Doing the same thing over and over again is just boring.

Fourth off, player communities in some games are aggressively dogshit and I really don't want to interact with them at all.

[–] grinning_serpent@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 30 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

It's unlikely your reaction time has changed much in your 40s. You probably have well over a decade before that starts to happen. On your first couple of tries, reacting to something is going to seem impossible. After you've seen the same stimuli and practiced what you should do in response, you'll be right around where teens and 20-somethings are. If you don't want to put the time in to make that happen, that's fine, but don't think it's unattainable to get good at a given multiplayer if you were otherwise interested in doing so. E-sports are now old enough that we've seen enough folks age into their 40s and remain top talent, as long as that remained an ideal career choice for them when so few are going to be able to support themselves in that career.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

In my own experience, now in my 50s and having played games since my teens, including a long period of RPGs and FPS online, reaction times start dropping in your 30s.

It's a tiny bit and you only really notice it when you're operating near your limits (same for intelligence, by the way - if you're using it near capacity, you'll notice that your capabilities start falling at around your mid 20s).

However, you can compensate it with experience, smarts and even wisdom - for example in FPS games you use the environment against other players, lead them into doing something predicable and get them then and/or prefer play styles that don't depend on reaction speed.

It's just a fact of life that physical and mental capacities do decay with age and far earlier than you seem to think, and whilst if you keep on using them it's not that much, if you're using them at a near peak-level it's noticeable if you pay attention as you can't just reach the peaks you could reach before.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

And in my experience, having gotten into fighting games in a serious way for the first time at age 30 (I'm now 37), people tend to attribute atypical "good reaction times" to what are actually smart input buffering techniques. In a crowd populated by mostly 20-somethings, I still routinely end up in the top 15% in a given game, and those opponents that beat me never feel like the difference was reaction time. Going from memory from a link I'll surely never be able to find again, so take this with a grain of salt, the US Air Force had a vested interest in studying how reaction times change as we age and found that it didn't really start to decay in any meaningful way until long after 40.

[–] grinning_serpent@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

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[–] muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Got drunk and played megaman 11 with siblings, passing around the controller, cracking jokes about how megaman’s ow sound seemed weirdly gay and horny in this one. I was so bad I kept getting him hurt and it sounded like a gay porn.

My sister asks “isn’t that supposed to be a robot child?”

Me: “He’s been a child since the 80s and his voice is lower now. He’s a megaMAN now, and how dare you demean the short king fighting for your safety over his robo masochim kink and short stature.”

Brother: “yea he can’t help he was built that way. You’re a monster. Don’t kink shame”

Me and bro: -glare-

Sister (who is in a poly relationship and very much the alternachick of the family): “….what the fuck is happening here?”

Single player games are still fun when played together.

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

Your family sounds fun lol

[–] purplerabbit@piefed.blahaj.zone 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The live service model has been a plague on gaming and has basically killed every bit of enjoyment I'm getting out of multiplayer game nowadays. Shit's like having a job. You leave for two weeks and you might as well be playing a different game. Leave for a month? Maybe the game don't even exist anymore. It's exhausting.

[–] grinning_serpent@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

It's also why they keep dying. All of them operate off a walled garden model while simultaneously demanding "this is probably the only game you can play for a while" levels of time investment and using unlockables as the carrot.

So is it surprising that players don't want to jump ship and leave all their skins and "look at me I'm special" shiny equipment behind for something that's not much different than what they got already?

It's the same thing as when every Tom, Dick, and Harry were sure they'd be the next WoW. Execs never learn.

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

If I wanted to be the target of homophobic insults, I could just do it to myself in front of a mirror, though granted, I can't really emulate the voice of a 12 year-old so it's not quite the same experience bouquet.

Beyond that, multiplayer is almost like working - you're supposed to relentless keep at it, on somebody else's timings even if you're in a guild: done it in EVE Online and WoW and, frankly, for the experience of work I have real-life were I actually get paid for it rather than the other way around.

Then there's the whole creepy monetisation shit - I'm not really interested in the constant sales pressure, especially when it's "buy this or else you're handicaped vs those who did" (EA is still in my shit list since they did it with a DLC in one of the older Battlefield titles), especially nowadays when I've managed to mainly remove advertising from my life.

So I just stopped doing multiplayer a decade ago and pretty much avoid it like the plague.

Maybe I'll try Guild Wars 3 if it's in the same style as Guild Wars 2 (which came out before the monetisation era).

[–] Shellofbiomatter@lemmus.org 35 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

Yes, it's a peaceful life. It sucks when i finally can sit down in the evening and start up a game and then getting insta killed by teenager who has nothing to than practice all day.

Or team based PvE games where it's just trying to keep up with the speedrunners farming.

In addition getting 30 min of uninterrupted time can be a luxury, so pause feature is a must have.

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[–] Larry@piefed.social 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I miss community servers. Each had its own identity and you could pop in and out without being penalized. Being locked in to a 30+ minute sweatfest with people I don't know, or like, has never been appealing to me.

[–] grinning_serpent@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Like so many things involving the internet, things were a lot better 15-20 years ago. Dedicated servers with active admins beat the pants off anonymous "skill based" matchmaking services we're required to use now. Yeah, it'd take some time before you'd find a server that fits you but the search was worth it - and if you wanted to put in the money and effort yourself, you could just pay a service for server space and host your own!

No need to rely on AI chatbots to take out the trash, either. If someone was breaking the rules - which were set by the server! -, the admins would just ban them. Quick as you please. Players were anonymous like they are now, but you could ban their SteamID and it didn't matter how many times they changed their name and thumbnail, and most other games had similar options. People that stuck around made friends and built a community, while others would move on and find a home somewhere better suited to them.

I miss it.

[–] mereo@piefed.ca 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

I'm in my early 40s. Back then, I used to play Quake 3, UT 99 and Tribes 2 competitively. Not anymore. Life is stressful enough, and I don't want to add to that by playing competitively. I want to relax by playing story-based games. I also play a lot of games on easy mode so that I can truly enjoy the story.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Tribes 2 was so fun.

There was a brief period where I played Tribes: Ascend, and it was actually really good and reminiscent of the old games. Then, I don't remember specifically what happened but it only took one update to kill it. Pretty sad.

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[–] grinning_serpent@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Until your horse gets blown in half…

[–] lonefighter@sh.itjust.works 18 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I have over 1500 hours into The Witcher 3.

Sometimes I think at least 500 of those hours are just me loading into the game after a long week, finding an isolated spot on the map, and just staring into the sunset while the wind howls in my headset.

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[–] Switorik@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Don't forget all the new CoD, battlefield, and even tarkov (soon) is requiring TPM 2.0, secure boot, and actively blocking linux making it impossible to even play them.

[–] scops@reddthat.com 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I've yet to find a game I couldn't play on Bazzite in the year since I've switched from Windows. I know that says something about my gaming preferences, but it is also high praise for the folks who have worked on Wine and Proton over the past years

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