As long as it requires a server to operate, then yes, it will go away one day. That it failed to turn a profit even before the economic downturn, according to that Reuters article they cite, doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that it's going to run for very long.
To be fair, it was always priced accordingly, and it wasn't in "early access", even though they still had something to deliver there. What they delivered for the story mode for this game had some really neat ideas that I'd love to see other fighting games steal from them. It also lacked a compelling call to action and got bogged down with traversable area maps with NPCs that you could talk to for no benefit or interesting story reasons.
Nah, even out of the gate, it's done far better than the likes of Punch Planet, for instance. They just made a good game, and people paid attention; perhaps not as much attention as they wanted or needed. If you ask me, they appeared to have started overscoping once they got their initial success. The Salt Mines mode seemed like a big money sink that had a detrimental effect on the matchmaking, for one.
UNI and SG are themselves far more successful than most games. So yes, not as successful as those two, but still more successful than most. Evo is also a kingmaker, and you can see spikes in all of the announced Evo games when they're announced and present at Evo.
I'm going through the story mode of Backpack Hero, and I wish it was better. If I get too frustrated with being unable to tell how to progress, maybe I'll just stick to the classic roguelike mode. It does do a decent job of walking you through the various play styles the game offers though.
I started and finished Cocoon. It's a puzzle game that works a bit four-dimensionally, but it's also a very linear experience, so even though it seems like there are so many options in front of you that you can never figure it out, they actually keep the possibility space small and manageable. I can't imagine what the QA effort must have been like to make sure that you didn't get yourself into an unwinnable state, but they seemingly pulled it off.
I started Starfield. $54 on sale felt like a good price. It meets expectations for what you're getting out of a Bethesda game, with the exception of a lack of city maps (which I knew going into it was a complaint, but I really feel that criticism now). It's still early goings, but I'm enjoying it so far. I mostly had to put it down for Thanksgiving weekend, because I knew I'd have games that would run better on the Steam Deck while I was out of town.
Wargroove 2 has been a satisfying continuation of Wargroove so far. No complaints. It scratches that Advance Wars itch, arguably better than Advance Wars itself.
Speaking of which, in an effort to start carving through my RPG backlog and prevent myself from starting another long playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, I started a game I picked up on sale this week, Pillars of Eternity. I never picked this one up back in the day due to its real time with pause mechanics, which always felt like a sloppier way to handle an RPG than just doing real time or turn-based. I still stand by that, but at least the game's mechanics seem to work with it in a way that matters with its "interrupts" where the casting time of each ability really matters. I'm still very early on in this one too, but the game does me the favor of showing me all of the dice rolls like any good CRPG should so that I can start to deduce the things I should be prioritizing. I want to get through this game and its sequel before Avowed comes out, since it's set in the same world.
Really? There's not much to get. It's just turn-based but harder to wield, in most cases. PoE just assigns lengths of time in seconds to particular actions rather than turns (or "rounds") like old D&D games did. You can also set the game to auto-pause when certain events happen, like when a spell is done casting or a target is killed, so that you can immediately assign a new action when the thing happens.
It's worth remembering that the business model always affects the game design. 6th gen consoles were arguably the most "pure", since obtuse games with strategy guide and hint hotline revenue streams were just about dead thanks to free GameFAQs, and DLC had yet to be introduced. Still, their incentives were to cheaply make as much "value" as they could, which meant churning out levels so that they could put a higher number on the back of the box for how much content you got for your $50 (a little over $80 in today's money). They also knew there was a good chance people would rent the game and decide to buy it off of that experience, so the best content was typically front-loaded, and then you'd get a lot of padded levels in the later parts of the game. It was rare that I would finish games back then, because often times a game would start strong and then end up filling big rooms, that look a whole lot like earlier big rooms, with trash mobs repeating the same simple loop over and over.
LODs take up a lot of space. If it were just a matter of compression, everyone would be compressing their assets. In this case though, Tekken is going to have a lot of story mode cutscenes that wouldn't have a prayer of running in real time on modern hardware, much like MK.
Platform lock-in sucks, and it would be nice if a ruling on one of these became legal precedent so that console players also got a choice on their digital purchases.
The night prior, current and former Epic Games employees told Polygon, a mystery meeting got added to everyone’s work calendar. There was no information included, except for a directive: Cancel any meetings that conflict with this one, because this one is mandatory. “I jokingly messaged my team and was like, ‘I don’t feel good about this meeting. Is this how we find out we’re all getting fired?’”
Yeah, that's the only thing a meeting like that ever means. Not in games, we got one of those where I work too.
Baldur's Gate 3 highlighted my RPG backlog, so this will be a good time to pick up Pillars of Eternity ahead of Avowed. Plus I still need to pick up Starfield and Cocoon, so I may as well get them at a slight discount.
Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot of mechanics to it, but it does a really good job of onboarding you in most of them. On character creation, or on leveling up, or anything where the game asks you to make a decision about how you've built out your character, there are tooltips to explain the mechanics. Mouse over it if you're on mouse + keyboard, or press Select or click in the right analog stick if you're on controller (it should tell you which one). It will explain everything you need to know there. But if you'd like to breeze past the character creation screen, you can choose an origin character, which are pre-made, or you can stick to basics. Choose a Fighter with 17 Strength if you want to do melee stuff. Choose a Rogue with 17 Dexterity if you want to do ranged attacks like bows. Choose a Wizard with 17 Intelligence if you want to do magic; magic uses "spell slots" instead of mana or MP, which basically just means you can use a spell that many times. When you get the option to choose a "feat", which is approximately every 4 levels, upgrade that primary attribute until it hits 20, which is the max. Whatever that attribute is (the ones I just listed for those classes), the higher it is, the more likely you are to hit with your attacks.
The gist of it is, when you find a complicated game, you can often just engage with it on the most basic level, and then once you master that basic level, you build on it a little bit at a time. BG3 is a long game, so you've got plenty of opportunity to master what you know before building on it; rinse, repeat. I've applied this same methodology to fighting games plenty of times as well, which many people would consider to be a difficult genre to learn. We got rid of game manuals a long time ago, so complex games have had to get better and better at teaching you how to play while you're playing.
Nah, BG3 rewards you for just doing more stuff. If you keep doing the things you find as you explore, you'll level up plenty. They also let you respec more or less any time you want after the first couple of hours.
I'm no D&D expert myself. I got through those other two BG games with a lot of frustration (and "narrative"/god mode for the last quarter of BG2), and pretty much the only things I didn't understand just from reading tooltips in BG3 were the numbers governing saving throw DCs and the to hit chance with certain spells.
I agree that fighting games haven't made it where they need to be yet. In fact, I've only ever found one that explains how to defend against a command grab, which is a very basic thing they should be doing better. As you agreed though, they're getting a lot closer, with a lot of intermediate steps along the way.
I disagree that the teaching tools are insufficient if they never teach you about something like positioning in Baldur's Gate. For one, you can observe that your opponents are doing so, and you can observe which things that makes easier or harder for you and why, like now it's harder for your melee character to hit them when they run away. That's way better than someone telling you about it, and it's better onboarding to not info dump all the rules at once.
This line strikes me as curious. Were you playing co-op together for his first time through? There are a lot of tutorials in the early game that explain so much of this stuff that you have to explicitly dismiss that they're hard to miss...unless you're in a discord call with some friends. And did you have to explain it to him, or was that just the first opportunity he had to raise the question, and you answered right away without him having time to figure it out himself? Did he ask you because he found the game difficult, or did you just tell him without him even asking because you observed that he wasn't using his movement? The opening moments of the game actually require you to use your movement in turn based combat in order to continue, and you can observe which enemies can reach you or not as you approach your objective.
If your friend really had this hard of a time learning that without trying to see how to overcome the challenge by just doing anything else besides what didn't work, it sounds like the type of person that Sony gets for their play tests that tells them they need to give an answer to a puzzle after looking at it for only a few seconds. I don't know that you can onboard that person without frustrating everyone else, other than easy mode, which BG3 does have, and it tells you what kinds of expectations it has of you on that screen.
I don't think you actually let your friend fail and try to figure out how to not fail, and I don't think it makes the game better when you're so afraid of letting the player fail and apply what they've learned that there aren't actually any decisions to make, like those Sony examples (God of War and Horizon's latest entries, to be specific, were the ones that caught flak for this). That's where the fun comes from.
I don't recall any tutorials explaining anything beyond the cursory "you have to be in range to attack"
And that's all you need to know in order to determine that positioning matters. They also explain opportunity attacks.
The tutorial titled "Combat" simply tells you that there's an initiative roll, combatants are listed at the top of the screen, and during a turn, a character may take an action, bonus action, and move.
Which are a few of the things you said your friend was unaware of, despite the fact that several of these things are reiterated on most of the cards for your available actions during combat.
I've been playing Larian games for a long time and I don't remember a single one of BGIII, DOS2, or DOS ever explaining these concepts.
Me neither, but even in my brief time with DOS1, I don't recall needing to be told either. I just somehow found out that poison clouds can be set on fire, and very quickly.
This is not an insult to your friend, but just because he falls into the group that didn't catch on immediately, I don't think that's indicative that the game is bad at teaching you how to play it. The Nautiloid highlights exactly where you have to go and how many turns you have to do it. If you let him fail once and try again, presumably, he'd realize that what he was doing wasn't working and notice that giant UI element telling him how many turns he had to get to his objective.
At least it can still be played offline, though character unlocks do require an internet connection. They also replaced the krypt mode, which was itself pretty grindy, with a far grindier mode that's far less fun this time around, so a significant chunk of the value is gone.
Yeah, WB is just late to the party. Sony was going to make a dozen different live service games, but they're reading the room now and cutting that forecast to less than half. With any luck, this is the tail end of the live service era.
Tons. Just not the latest crop with the biggest marketing budgets. For what it's worth though, the live service nonsense in these fighting games doesn't really get in the way if you're not tempted by cosmetics. The real problem with MK is that you can't decline wi-fi opponents, and the problem with Tekken is that the netcode appears to be unimproved from Tekken 7. These days, I mostly play Street Fighter 6, Guilty Gear Strive, and Skullgirls. Killer Instinct is getting one more balance patch soon, and rumor has it there's a sequel on the way. GranBlue Fantasy Versus: Rising is coming out very soon with Under Night In-Birth's sequel hot on its heels. There's lots to play.
I know a sizable amount of the Skullgirls community, and I wouldn't call any of them 4channers. I don't have melanin on my list of fighting game criteria, nor do I know what's acceptable for your standards, but that's probably restricting your selection far more than live service shenanigans. If Tekken does it for you, then I hope you can tolerate its netcode.
EDIT:
I def don’t believe the IG announcement Wednesday is going toward a sequel
The rumor was there was a sequel cooking long before IG became available again.
I'm not faulting you for the perspective. I just don't know what to recommend you if Leroy and Jax satisfy you but not Nagoriyuki, especially since the percentages of representation appear to me to be similar or better than DBFZ and Soul Calibur.
I beat Dungeons of Aether, both in the story mode and in the roguelike challenge dungeons mode that I didn't realize was there at first. The story mode is structured more like an XCOM or Midnight Suns, with a home base to buy upgrades at between missions, while the challenge dungeon mode is more like the Slay the Spire structure that the game's combat system sets expectations for. I wish I liked this one better. There are some decisions they made in late-game enemy design in the pursuit of adding challenge that I very much disagree with, where in lots of situations the game can just always react to what you do with the mathematically correct decision rather than allowing you to bait out attacks like the game teaches you to do. Also, one of the playable characters, Hamir, just seems way better than the other three. I beat the roguelike mode on my first try using Hamir. I got my money's worth out of this one, and it's got some really neat ideas, but it lacks the replay value you'd expect out of a roguelike. I think they need to take another go at this one and let it bake some more.
I then moved on to Backpack Hero, which I played in early access before they added its own story mode with a more macro structure, and I guess that's just what the roguelike market is doing these days, huh? So far, I don't think it's quite as good as just doing a regular run, but this game does have that replayability that you come to a roguelike for. I'll see the story mode through before moving on to the other games I'd like to finish before the year is done.
Nah, in most modern fighting games, the tier lists just don't matter. Whatever tiers exist in Strive are pretty tight these days, and they mostly always have been. You're good with whoever you like. I play a character with a white WA (Goldlewis), so I'm using it more as a neutral tool than a combo tool, but yeah, the general flow is just hit 1, hit 2, special move, red RC, then whatever's good for your character to juggle with. So since you're blessed with one of the game's best 6Ps, stain state confirms, and enormous buttons that win neutral against almost everyone, you're usually doing Slash, Heavy Slash, reaper, RC, and you can just about make up the rest and it won't matter much. You'll get that in no time. Go into training mode, practice it against a bot set to block after the first hit. Then when you've got that down, set them to block randomly so you can practice confirms.
It is surprising every time a game sells this many copies, because it's so rare. By Wikipedia's count, only 5 other games have sold better, and for the length of time it's been on the sales chart, we can realistically only compare its success to GTA V and Minecraft.
Alyx is an interquel, if we're going to say that's a real word, and it released on a platform most of the audience just won't ever have. Also, it doesn't so much continue the story as it does promise to continue the story. They admit that they've got work to do.
I have trouble reconciling that with the PC market, where the same version of a game I bought 4 years ago would be able to run at better resolutions and frame rates the next time I get a new machine. From where I sit, it does just appear to be worse value in the console space.
This was something I started wondering about when I was reading a thread about Star Citizen, and about how space combat flight games were much less-common than they had been at one point, how fans of the genre were hungry for new entrants....
I'd like to see more first-person shooter campaigns in general. They've mostly disappeared. And what I don't mean are the likes of Dusk or HROT that harken back to the Quake era. I'm looking for the era just beyond that, like Halo, BioShock, Half-Life, F.E.A.R., Crysis, 007 games and so on. A Cyberpunk expansion and, to a lesser extent, a remake of System Shock are all I have to scratch that itch this year. Someday the indie scene will cycle around to getting nostalgic for that type of game, and I'll get more of it again. With Free Radical facing near-certain death on that TimeSplitters revival, so do my hopes for getting more of that type of FPS again. With LAN and split-screen co-op and deathmatch with friends while we're at it too. Trying to make a game into a live service that inevitably dies is just telling me not to buy the few promising games that come around, like Friends vs. Friends.
People brought this up at the time, and the go-to problem with it is if you go too far back, like your 1812 example, you have to deal with reloading a gun being one of the most time-consuming actions you can perform. WWI was taboo for a while due to chemical and trench warfare, and for the most part, devs still shy away from it.
The person above you in this comment chain said 1/5. 24 hours to 17 hours isn't that huge of a difference, and you responded with "lol what" as though I indicated Viewfinder was comparable in length to Baldur's Gate 3.
I think I'd say, in a world where games that used to be 10-15 hours are now 30-60 hours and much worse off for it, that dollars per hour is just not a metric I'm interested in using or setting thresholds for. So no, I don't think $6/hour is an insane amount to pay. I paid that for Resident Evil 2, and it was very good.
To each their own, but if you see an arbitrary grind to max level as offering more value, it's exactly why people like me find more value in games that don't have one, as that's the way that games can be arbitrarily made to be "longer" that I was talking about. I've played Metal Gear Solid so many times that I've easily gotten over 100 hours out of it, but that doesn't make it a 100 hour game. It's just a quality short game.
But that's no different than me just replaying Metal Gear Solid or setting an arbitrary goal for myself in any other game. That's just you enjoying that game and wanting to replay it in some different way, which is fine. You can replay Super Mario RPG as many times as you like too. The arbitrary grind is more of a modern thing that developers derived from systems like Chrono Trigger's that have been around for decades that they weren't thinking of in Chrono Trigger, but they didn't add tons of content to Chrono Trigger by having a high level cap. You just chose to power level against the same content over and over again.
Marvel Snap devs say the card game won't go anywhere, as publishers reportedly look to exit “mainstream games” (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
Them's Fightin' Herds to end active development without finishing story mode (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of November 26th
What have you all been playing? I’ve been playing more dicey dungeons and cross code! Want to really commit to finishing cross code this time
I don't miss PS2-era level design. (www.youtube.com)
Tekken 8 PC requirements pack a punch, requires 100 GB available storage space (www.eurogamer.net)
Are there too many video game remakes and remasters? (www.eurogamer.net)
Sony facing $7.9 billion mass lawsuit over PlayStation Store prices (www.reuters.com)
Steam Sale Games
What are people excited about for with the steam sale? Any hidden gems you’d like to share with the class?
The human cost of 2023's devastating game industry layoffs (www.polygon.com)
[Original article in the title has links with sources, text-only copied here]...
Steam Autumn Sale begins this week, looks like it's going to be a good 'un (www.destructoid.com)
You weren't using that money for anything useful anyway, right?
How are you all playing these insanely complex games?
Just some off the top of my head: Destiny, Deep Rock Galactic, Overwatch, and most recently Baldur’s Gate....
Get ready for shitty games from WB next year that are full of always-on and battlepass
This is from earlier this month. But it didn’t really hit until seeing more Suicide Squad details....
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of November 19th
What have you all been playing?...
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Falls Out of the U.S. Top 20 Games for the First Time in Six Years (www.ign.com)
Half-Life 25 Anniversary Update (www.half-life.com)
The Last of Us 2 PS5 Remaster Announced, Has a Brand New Survival Mode, $10 Upgrade Path (www.pushsquare.com)
What game genre would you like to see more entrants in?
This was something I started wondering about when I was reading a thread about Star Citizen, and about how space combat flight games were much less-common than they had been at one point, how fans of the genre were hungry for new entrants....
YouTuber The Completionist's Open Hand Foundation Accused of Keeping Charitable Donations - IGN (www.ign.com)
Karl Jobst’s video...
Super Mario RPG (2023) Review Thread
Game Information...