I can never relax with that game. I just get it in my head that I must get my chores done right now and it always fucks my head up.
It’s Portal 2… the Valve classic is Portal 2
It might feel wrong to call their last proper sit down at a couch/desk singeplayer experience a “classic”, but its older than Half-Life one was when it came out.
That makes me feel old and I wasn’t even around for HL1. How’s your back feeling, millennials?
Not great. Thanks for asking.
How’s your back feeling, millennials?
Wearing good shoes and keeping my weight down and staying active so it feels fine.
Gen X weighing in. That’ll only last you so long, then your body starts to rebel no matter what.
Won’t work for everyone but I switched to thin sandals and my feet got much stronger and healthier.
I’m still working on the being too fat partMy doctor says that you don’t want squishy shoes and he recommended doc martens because they have a cork insole.
I was 22 when Half-Life came out. I’m tired.
You didn’t have to be such a jerk about the back pain tho.
Doing fine. Sit up straight, do some light exercises, stretch, youll feel fine
That makes me feel old and I wasn’t even around for HL1. How’s your back feeling, millennials?
I’m not old you’re young! I’m not hunched over grabbing my back grimacing that’s just my power stance!
Shit, you’re correct. It’s hard to believe. It feels like my first play of Portal 2 was just a couple years ago. It has been fourteen years…
pretty okay, just had a shower and I’m chilling on the couch with my cat. She is steadily purring. comfort level is around a 7.8, maybe 7.9.
I bought HL1’s GOTY edition when it came out.
Ergonomic chairs, high end sports cars, and staying active has kept my back in great shape.
Also, {{{posture check}}}
I’ve been biking so much lately that my legs are getting hella toned, the rest of my body is starting to tone too and I’m feeling much more alive and healthy than I have at any other point in my life!
How long have you been biking for you to see these changes? I.e. what is ‘lately’?
This is my second season. I’m biking about 5 hours a week right now, averaging about 40-50 miles per week. I don’t know how obvious the toning would be to others but I can certainly see it, since y’know I’m the one who sees myself the most
34 and need a cane. Now get off my parents lawn!
We’re at that age where you have to exercise and watch what you eat if you want to be in good health (and not have your back hurt.) The friends I grew up with who haven’t touched a vegetable in their life, no longer happen to look healthy and thin.
writing headlines like that should earn a nice lengthy face tazing.
Here i was imagining “valve classic” was somehow a wildly popular game ive never heard of
And I’d say that it is 100% deserved. Stardew Valley is a once in a lifetime kind of game and has one of the best developers you could ask for. Free new content and updates for 10 years and it’s still like $20 and frequently on sale. The developer actually tweeted out once that if he ever charged for new content that he’d want everyone to publicly shame him.
“I swear on the honor of my family name, i will never charge money for a DLC or update for as long as I live. Screencap this and shame me if I ever violate this oath.”
Stardew Valley is the gaming industry at its best and one of the best indie games out there.
My only issue has always been that I cannot throw more money at the ape. So I buy the game for gaming-adjacent friends and almost always
ruin their livesconvert themCouldn’t agree more. I’ve re-purchased the game for Switch and iOS after already having it on my PC for ages. I didn’t really want to play it on those platforms but just wanted to give more money to concerned ape.
That’s what I do too. I’ve bought it for all my friends or have convinced them to get it. Feels like I’m a drug dealer trying to push it on everyone I know lol.
Probably only surpassed by Minecraft, although that is of course no longer an indie game today
The copy of Minecraft I bought back then no longer works (there was a bunch of buggy account change stuff that never worked for me). My copy of stardew valley still just works.
I think I would much rather watch a stardew Valley movie than a Minecraft movie
And at those prices I’ve bought it at least twice
I’ve bought it at least 5 times; sent it to a lot of family members.
Hehe yeah. To celebrate the recent patch increasing multiplayer to 8 people. We basically started like a DnD group sessions style of playthrough. We would meet weekly and play for like 8 hours at a time. Was pretty great.
Not that it should be expected to dish out free content and never charge for DLC. Not every game has the kind of profit margin Stardew Valley has.
Idk Stardew Valley is a passion project if I’ve ever seen one. Sure, concernedape is making extraordinary profits, but it has to feel way better to have a decent size of the planet’s population playing and connecting with the project they poured their heart and soul into.
It‘s a passion project alright, but we won‘t see many games if only those are getting done.
If there were 100x less games but they all had the passion of stardew behind them I think we’d come out ahead
Less AAA trash fires and better access to actual passion projects because they aren’t being drowned in a sea of mediocrity?
This is an absolute win on all sides
Passion projects like Stardew where the devs get paid nothing for years? That’s not sustainable.
I buy things in early access for just such a reason. If it looks like something I’ll like, I’ll buy it early to support development. If it’s great then great. If it falls through then I’m out a bad investment of like, $10.
I’ve got probably a hundred indie games in my library that I’ve supported in exactly such a fashion, from raw pre-alpha to 1.0 release to post-release content update or dlc. They aren’t all winners. But many of them were worth the cost of investment and then some.
But at the same time there are plenty of indie devs that sell games for $30 and then have a few $15 DLC on top of that after a few years. Not throwing shade at those other devs, more just saying that the dev for Stardew Valley could have sold DLC and nobody would have questioned it but chose not to. You could be like Stardew Valley and keep the game cheap, free updates, and frequent sales or you could be like Factorio and refuse to ever put your game on sale and up the price every couple of years and come out with a $20 DLC. And I’d be shocked if Stardew Valley has made less money than Factorio in the long run, especially with it being the in number one place right now.
I think it’s fair, and sometimes good. I’ve been playing Stationeers recently and it’s fantastic. It’s priced reasonably, and it’s an amazing game. They have a few DLCs, which are purely there to give support, not new content. It’s for you to pay the devs more if you have the money to give them and want to.
However, they’re also losing money on the game and have said they never expect it to be profitable*. Most games aren’t Stardew Valley, and they’re struggling to survive. Stardew doesn’t need to make more money. Most small/indie studios do.
*It’s the studio making Kitten Space Agency, which they’ve said they want to be free, with the option to donate. I think they’re allergic to making profit and only like making cool games. I’d highly recommend checking out their games, if only because they seem to be doing development for the sake of the games.
And yet those small studios are one flop away from bankruptcy. Stardew Valley is a one in a million success story and should not pose as a benchmark. Barone decided to continue as a more or less single dev, but you can‘t blame talented young designers to expand their team to realize more ambitious projects and sacrifice economic safety for that simply because they now employ people. Barone can do updates ten years later and postpone Haunted Chocolatier for that, you can‘t do that if multiple people depend on their salary.
Considering how much time he spent developing it, I doubt the profit margin is actually all that good.
Mate, it’s one man, Self-published, pulling in the proceeds of a game that has sold 41 million copies. Even if he has made $5 per copy, that’s over $200 million dollars. The profit margin on his time even after 10 years is insane.
I didn’t realize it had sold quite that many. I knew he spent a lot of time working on it, like 70 hours per week for 4.5 years, but that still works out to at least an enormous $12,000 an hour! Even if he kept at 70 hours/week for all ten years, it’s still only half that number, far greater than you or I will likely ever see.
Steamcharts showed about 150,000 concurrent players playing the game when I saw a few days ago; I’m shocked at just how popular it is as well. I think he could basically just work on it 70 hours a week for the rest of his life and it would still be a great hourly rate.
Personally I play Stardew a lot when my anxiety gets bad. This year has been pretty good for the game’s Steam statistics.
Good enough to not release a new game in ten years, what small scale studio can say that.
Meh, I prefer Terraria.
Good.
Nothing against Portal 2, but Stardew Valley just offers so much more for so much longer
In game time isn’t everyone’s metric for a good game. Some of my favorite games only have a few hours of content, but those few hours are really good.
I’ve watched some let’s plays of Starcraft Valley, and I’m glad I did because I probably wouldn’t like it, and if I had to give it a rating, it would be pretty mediocre.
I think it being so positively rated is that there are a ton of casual gamers that this type of game really appeals to, not that it has a lot to do.
I know it’s a typo, but now I want a cozy space ranch game based in the world of StarCraft.
Lol, yeah, that could actually get me to play. “Whose a good hydralisk? You are! Yes you are!”
Isn’t that just Lightyear Frontier?
Stardew lost 100% of it’s appeal to me once I learned that the events just repeat year after year and there are no consequences for doing nothing. I really want to get into the cozy vibe gaming space but I just can’t seem to do it.
I would end up with a farm that took all day to water, and never enough time to go down in any mine far enough to find iridium enough to make sprinklers out of, and then stop playing.
There are some cheap sprinklers you can make pretty early but they only water like 8 tiles or something.
You can buy an Iridium Sprinkler from Krobus every Friday
I can also say I’ve had my fun with the game and move on.
wait for a rainy day, no watering needed!
Can’t agree with this. I got dozens of hours out of Portal 2, simply from replaying it so many times (which is an amazing feat in of itself because I never finish games).
Meanwhile I was bored of Stardew Valley after two hours of wandering around and not being able to find anything to do. From what I’ve gathered, the game expects you to figure out how play it on your own. I’m in my late 30s and I have bills to pay. I don’t have the time nor the patience for a game like that anymore.
Edit: Point I forgot to make is that I feel like for a game to be considered the highest rated among them all, it should have universal appeal. But that’s just my 2¢.
I preface this with the caveat that all grants are subjective and you can like what you like.
Stardew Valley is a love letter to the harvest Moon games(and I guess rune factory as well). If you have ever encountered those games you immediately know what to do in Stardew.
I think where Stardew is different is that it came later and benefited massively from the “cozy game” popularity.
While I played harvest Moon on a super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, and Gameboy my girl friend who did not have that exposure growing up loves Stardew. This generational and gender Crossing game has tapped markets that were not available back then. Couple that with the fact that at this point you can play that game on basically any platform from phone to console, new and old and it’s totally understandable why this headline might be true.
This is pretty much how I am, too. I’ve purchased SDV three times but could never get into it because I have no idea what I need to do.
Big fan of the dev though and how much he does for the game, even if I don’t personally play.
What valuing quality over profit does to a mf
To be fair, portal 2 was also built when valve valued quality over profit.
when valve valued quality over profit.
I like this
Fuck valve and their gambling
The fuck is with the clickbait title? For shame, OP
Edit: Thanks for changing it.
How exactly?
It didn’t mention portal 2 before OP edited the title
would’ve been better from the start indeed but it’s not that clickbait
it was the name of the original article
Portal is such a great series. I hope we get a new one one day.
It’s one of my favorite games of all time, but I don’t think Portal 2’s basic formula would be culturally relevant if it was reused today. The quippy writing is very 2010s-coded (à la Guardians of the Galaxy), the gameplay is a bit too simple to be re-used as is in 2025, and the sweet&short linear storyline of Portal 2 would ironically be lacking ambition for a successor to Portal 2.
Like all truly Great pieces of classic media, Portal 2 is a product of a skilled and truly passionate team getting together at the perfect time with the right idea, and reaching its public at a culturally relevant time.
The Portal universe still has stories to tell, and there are still test chambers to solve, so I obviously wouldn’t complain if Portal 3 came out, but I understand why Valve wouldn’t want to make a barely decent game in the shadow of Portal 2.
The Talos Principle became an interesting spin on the idea of FPS puzzles that try to keep you engaged. They got more direct with introducing the lore of the world around each time (P1<TTP1≈P2<TTP2). The puzzles are probably less eye-catching because you rarely shoot yourself into air, they are closer to classic 2d logic timekiller games, but I find these games are what Valve need to look at to see if they want to expand the world like that in their own way. If we assume Portal 3 would be about portals, wouldn’t reinvent the formula from the ground up, I think they’d need to go for higher stakes, and seemingly expanding the world or the mission at hand (from the probably sterile conditions of it all affecting just Chel and Apperture’s robots and facilities), be it an escape into the outer world of some sort (although it overlaps with Half-Life, is it bad?) or make her herself not the only thing at stake. My only hope is that it won’t be AR\VR\whatever experience because it would make me nauseos and\or poor.
(They’ve already stated they won’t do Portal: VR because of the nausea issue.)
I completely agree with your analysis, they would need to completely switch up the ambitions from a writing perspective for Portal 3 to make any sense. There are plenty of super interesting stories to be told in Aperture Labs, but I don’t think that Valve is structured to write any of them
Valve has always been “gameplay/tech first, story second”, and it just happened that Portal 2 delivered unexpectedly well on the writing. But I don’t think they can make a game with gameplay/tech twice as ambitious as Portal 2, and at the same time double down on Portal 2’s amazing writing. They’re just human and most of the people involved have moved on with their lives; in fact Portal 2 was their last truly ambitious narrative-heavy game, and they had to hire the old writers as consultants to make Alyx (which I haven’t played but from what I heard the narrative wasn’t on HL2’s level).
I’d love to be proved wrong but IMO there won’t be a Portal 3 for as long as Valve exists in its current form.
I agree. But hear me out:
Portal 3 explores the fleet of Gaben’s megayachts with puzzles to get a control of them and also some abordaging\swimming mini-games to get from one to another, from smaller to bigger, with the last one being the promised Aurora Borealis, where game leaves us on an uncertain moment after we too see the feared G-Man but in Freeman’s glasses, got catched by a Smoker’s tonque in mall ninja rainbow colouring, only to be freed by Pudge teaming up with Scout.
VALVE TEAM: THE END OF LIFE FOR DEATH FORTRESS: EPISODE FOUR: THE PORTAL TO THE INTERNATIONAL
I’m happy they don’t do that and for all I care I can wait if they do something or not as long as I can still play in their classics.
I had to settle for Lego Dimensions. Better than nothing. And GLaDOS arguing with HAL 9000 was pretty epic.
Both Portal levels and both Doctor Who levels were great.
If you like portal you may also like superliminal. It’s the only game I’ve found that scratches the similar itch
For anyone that hasn’t seen it, Portal: Reloaded is a fan-made dlc that’s really quite good as well.
For the puzzle part, sure, but not the humor. I like The Stanley Parable for that aspect.
I’d also recommend The Talos Principle and The Turing Test for similar itch scratches.
Thanks for reminding me I have the Talos Principle 2 DLC in my inventory that I have to play!
I still haven’t played 2!
In a similar vein to Superluminal, I’d also recommend Viewfinder, it’s kinda like Portal but with a camera rather than a Portal gun.
Antichamber is another that feels similar. Although Antichamber doesn’t really have a plot.
Ooo I’ve never heard of this! Kinda sad I only saw this comment after the Summer Sale :P Thanks for sharing!
If that’s your kind of game, Unfinished Swan is another thats more plot based, but still has some fun puzzles. Doesn’t get mentioned as frequently so usually one people haven’t seen/played before.
No pressure on their next game or anything.
Deadlock doesn’t look bad
I’ve been over the hero shooter fad for almost a decade. Where are the actually new ideas for the genre?
I think Deadlock is pretty up there. That said, it’s closer to Smite than it is a hero shooter. The community-driven character builds mean meta is pretty fluid and it has what I would describe as a very accessible MOBA-centered design. I don’t care for MOBAs much, but to say Valve isn’t innovating here would be disingenuous. I think my only problem with it is that it’s lacking something that makes the gameplay loop feel satisfying, but that may just be my bias against MOBAs talking.
That said, it’s closer to Smite than it is a hero shooter.
I haven’t played Smite since it came out, but has it really changed that much that it’s no longer a hero shooter? 🤨 It was like Overwatch, 2 years before Overwatch came out.
Smite was not that much of hero shooter, Paladins from the same company was a hero shooter.
Hm… Maybe that’s what I am thinking of. I know for sure that Smite is the reason Tribes: Ascend was left for dead, though, and that’s reason enough to hate it.
I miss Tribes: Ascend, great game. Hi-rez love to kill their games.
Paladins always was better than overwatch and they killed it too.
Well it is the best game.
Bobby Lee did it.
God I wish I could enjoy it. I feel like I’m missing out. I just, I don’t get it :(
Are you into dramatic NPCs? If no, you have to play it multiplayer with someone who gives a crap about pixel people.
I tried playing it alone but every system in the game is puddle deep so I was only able to play until winter by myself.
Then I played it with my girlfriend, and I spent 100 fondly remembered hours.
<3
While I enjoyed it, it was also very stressful. I think we just played wrong. We covered every millimeter of the plot with farms or other useful stuff and then proceeded to be busy for more than half the day with just maintenance. At some point this meant that we never got to explore and often barely had time to go to the stores or talk to the people in the village.
Apart from overcooked it was probably the most stressful game Is ever played and it’s not supposed to be like that
Yeah my problem with stardew is I feel too invested in min-maxing my time so I end up stressing over every minute in the game and it’s too exhuasting
I find it funny, because it is not required at all. You could be the most casual lazy ass gamer, and still see and accomplish every piece of content inside the game. The game doesn’t penalize you, and instead goes out of the way to reward the player for everything they do, even if it is just loitering around and barely progressing stuff at random and by chance.
It doesn’t feel like that though. For example, trying to earn money and progress by going into the cave or whatever to fight nets you almost no money gains and eventually your gear can’t keep up.
As someone who doesn’t enjoy farming sims because they feel like work, it just doesn’t feel like the game cares if you progress in other ways. And it may not penalize you, but a lot of the other options feel tedious because of the drastically lower rewards you get from trying to earn money through those activities.
Thing is, that’s ok. The game just isn’t for me and I am fine having moved on.
Personally I’d say that “always striving for the maximum and stressing myself out” is a personality trait that’s not only a problem in Stardew Valley for me haha. I’m o it’s not a great mindset to have, but unfortunately it’s a subconscious drive that’s hard to eliminate.
The urge to make even more money
The days are just too short in the game
Some people have a money anxiety built in that translates into the game. The funny thing is they bring it all themselves, the game makes absolutely no fuzz at all about making money.
The very first scene is the main character running away from the ratrace to a farm. Yet the very first thing some players do is bring in the ratrace with them. Everything in the game makes money and no money at all is ever required by the game from the player, except to advance the farming itself. It doesn’t even have banks or debts like animal crossing.
It’s bizarre how people, when left to their own devices, simply reproduce the worse habits of real life.
no money at all is ever required by the game from the player
Yes it is though? To upgrade the house, purchase new equipment, buildings, to see more features
Sure, you can do without money, but then you’re going to miss half of the game’s features
I might be remembering wrong, but I think it is entirely possible to develop relationships with the town characters and see almost all of the cutscenes without ever upgrading any of those.
maybe, but I would say that’s not most of the game’s features, I personally don’t really care about it
Then you don’t engage with over 60% of the game anyways. Sounds to me like a balanced game that has something to offer to a variety of players, and anxieties, overfixation and stress with some gameplay and not other seems to be something the player brings in and is not caused by the game.
To open the community center (the primary goal for the first year+) specifically takes quite a lot of money actually, and outside of talking with NPC’s once a day, money is necessary to get every other advancement I can think of. I agree that many players probably go too hard into trying to min/max things, but the game isn’t as loosey-goosey with costs as you suggest.
No the game has a much, much worse anxiety time crunch in trying to 100% it before the end of year… 2 ( I think) when grandpa shrine first measures progress.
You don’t find out what that means unless you made it to year two and it immediately tells you that you can keep trying anytime you want.
It’s not a one and done, you can literally retry the test infinitely. There is no crunch period at all, this anxiety comes from players misunderstanding things the game says in plain English.
I never understand why anyone puts together those massive farms. Personally, I always end up leaving the vast majority of the space unused. My farms only ever occupy the space directly in front of the house, and even that needs sprinklers asap.
I guess it’s just a mindset difference. I’d say me and my friends are all pretty competitive gamers (as opposed to more creative gamers). We tend to play games mostly for the challenge. Also didn’t help that we had just finished our Facorio playthrough. So in our mind we still had “the factory must grow”. So our minds were like “if space -> use space”.
Sorry, I probably could have been more clear that I was referring more to people that play SD for irl years and have crops spread all across their farm. I can definitely sympathize with new players that spread out too much without the experience to know what that entails. Hell, I’m pretty sure did the same my first time playing. It seems petty natural to make that choice.
Fwiw, if you end up trying the game again, I found QOL mods really enhanced my enjoyment of the game, particularly the one that provided the option to change how long days were. Even just a 20% change really helped make the game less stressful for me.
There are probably games or other media that you love that the average Stardew Valley fan wouldn’t click with. You’re not missing out, you’ve just got other stuff you enjoy.
Very true, but then again most Overwhelmingly Positive games I find amazing. I do have a long list of games I love and a selection I actually always keep installed, some of which are mediocre by many people’s standards ;)
jesus did i go back in time???
No, my child. You are where you belong.
As a DS9 fan, to me that sounds way meaner than you probably intended.
XD yeah no I meant just ironic edgy blasphemy
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Published: Jul 08, 2025, 22:37
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