[strken]

I used to think I wanted a higher purpose in games, but what I really wanted was a community with some kind of large-scale competition. The MMOFPS Planetside 2 gives me that, but I get the impression you can also get it from Eve, from competitive gaming scenes, from traditional MMOs, or even from older things like MUDs.

Friendly competition with and against thousands of other people is like a higher purpose, but it's more pragmatic, easier to find, and probably more fulfilling than a game with a higher purpose but no community.

[Aerroon]

Planetside 2 is probably the one PC game everyone even remotely into gaming should try.

The massive battles are pretty much unlike anything else I've experienced in online games. The scale makes it different.

It's quite something to be a part of a 40-man platoon doing a Max-crash on a base to retake the points with just a few seconds to spare. Even better when this gives your team the overall victory on the continent.

[strken]

It manufactures cooperation and friendships on a level unlike any other game I've played. If you join any actively led platoon and you have a microphone, you immediately feel like you're part of something big, and you've got a 50% chance of being recruited by the outfit running it and/or invited to their discord.

My impression of Rust and Tarkov is that they manufacture meaningful competition well, but they don't create friendships as quickly, and they especially don't create friendly rivalries and working relationships between people on the same team.

[fattless]

You might enjoy foxhole a lot. It’s a grand scale mmo war game where two sides fight over a giant map over the course of a few weeks. There’s extensive player led logistics lines, massive front lines, and every battle, base, and item are all made by players.

From my experience it’s got a great community, thousands of players working toward the same goal, participating in little excursions, fighting the front lines, supporting the bases ect.

[evilotto]

Play Ingress. Lots of community and large-scale competition; plus the visuals and framerates you find in the Real World while hiking to a portal are pretty impressive.

[grantsch]

You would love this game called Foxhole

https://store.steampowered.com/app/505460/Foxhole/

[throwaway17_17]

This concept looks great, and while I do not play any games with online components or games on Steam, I might just buy this. I’m definitely going to grab a bookmark for the page and watch the progress.

[bloodyplonker22]

Play Rust, it will destroy your faith in humanity.

[kbenson]

Play Tarkov, it will destroy your faith in the concept of faith.

[BookPage]

As someone who played Rust and had to remove it from my steam account because of how much I loved it - can you elaborate?

[kbenson]

Oh boy, here we go. First, I meant that on multiple levels. Tarkov has some interesting dynamics with competition and dual classes of players, and competing incentives to both team up and betray others based on in-game tasks and rep systems. The high emphasis on looting (my understanding is it's like Rust but more) and penalties for dying (you lose what you brought in), make for tense interactions. They just added in-game VoIP this last wipe (late December. Every 6 months or so they wipe player status and make everyone start over along with a big patch to change some of the game, because it's still beta).

That's the player side. The other faith you'll lose is in the developers to fix your pet peeve bug, because while they make large gains and fix many things, other small things tend to be left for a long time that drive people crazy.

I've not played Rust, but from what I've seen of it and what people have commented, Tarkov is like Rust but more extreme and more realistic. Depending on why you liked Rust, you might downright love Tarkov, and it's already highly addictive, so maybe don't install it? It often feels like Dark Souls the looter FPS edition, because it's so, so rough sometimes.

[brobinson]

Tarkov has the most comically incompetent development team of any game I've seen. They are the polar opposite of the Rust team (big monthly updates, minimal/zero regressions) despite both games using the same engine. The big Tarkov update yesterday just broke a core gameplay component (player scavs killing a _PMC_ now aggros all AI scavs) and there are a ton of graphical regressions in addition to a fun new race condition that results in glitched backpack windows staying visible (even on the main menu, etc.).

My killer game idea right now is EFT built by a competent developer with more interesting quests than "kill N bad guys" and "collect N items".

[kbenson]

Eh, they're definitely not great, but I think a lot of is is different expectations of the developers and the players. It's in beta, and the dev team treats it like such and treats the players as both beta testers and the QA department.

Sometimes that results in the players wondering "what could possibly thought this was okay to submit? Did they even check it at all?" just like every QA department since the beginning probably has occasionally.

The real question will be whether they actually change that when they release 1.0, which is supposedly in a year or so.

[blangk]

How do you feel about being repeatedly punched in the dick?