Ahh, the days before games companies hired the casino slot machine UX designers. An elegant game from a more civilised age.
Hello, could I take a minute of your time to talk to you about our lord and savior, de_rats?
It was pure gaming.
No advertisments, no marketing, no extra costs.
The only way to get better was to play more.
How can it not be fun?
Good ol’ days, thank you VALVE.
I believe the thank you was regarding the mod-friendly mindset of early valve. A section in the game menu for loading new mods and it shipped with a mod (TFC, which was based off a community mod for Quake)
I don’t know about the launch release, but the Game Of The Year release is the one that shipped with TFC, plus (what we now know as) the GoldSrc SDK was on the disc. Every tool they’d made they used to build Half Life, they put on the disc and gave to customers.
Boomers my ass. This is Gen X gaming.
Millennials as well. I get bored with modern games. Grinding all day for a pink weapon skin. Tf, I don’t care what color are my skins. Give me a good old challenge
I mean it is a nice extra, if and only if the core gameplay is enjoyable. Porbably most triple AAA titles would be fine with all the secondary stuff, if they whould have just put a little more effort into making a fun game first and foremost and then add the other stuff afterwards.
But of course adding loot boxes to a fun game is a different process than designing a loot box ecosystem and then trying to fit a game into it.
Well we had mods and custom levels when we got tired of the official stuff.
CS 1.6 was peak gaming. There were servers with Warcraft 3 mod where you could pick your race and level up to receive additional modded abilities and items, and it would save your progress over months. Not to mention the map customizations.
Also, no paying for season passes or DLC, no paid skinpacks, no censorship or embedded ads or tracking. And custom porn sprays.
EDIT: there were definitely skins, they were just free downloads from modders. And they were client side so you could see them but other players would just have their own skin or default for the same item.
This reminds me of wc3 mods run on fy_pool_day. Stupid fun with the overpowered HE nades