Games

I'm panicking guys...

On Saturday 04th October 2024 at 19:15 UTC a Free / Libre GTA clone made by me Dani's Race will be streamed on a PeerTube channel opensource_gaming. Please Join the stream!

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Better late than never?

So I have a philosophical gaming question for you.

Visual novels are admittedly pretty niche in the gaming market as a whole.

If they don’t sell well enough sequels don’t happen. 

So, as a patient gamer, do I pay full price for these games to support further development even though that means buying less games. 

Or do I wait till they go for deep discount like I have been and have therefore been able to spread my limited support around more. 

If my end goal is making sure these games keep being made as much as possible, what’s my best option?

I am all for the patient gaming mentality and typically wait until games are 50%+ off before I think of purchasing.

Looking for opinions on my best course of action. Thanks!

Cloud Imperium Games, the developer of Star Citizen, has mandated its developers to work seven days a week to meet deadlines for Citizencon on October 19th.

I did Episode 2 of Alan Wake today. The screenshot is of the sawmill in the park. My assumptions were right about it ramping up in difficulty on nightmare. I found myself dying a lot more in this episode, and enemies are bullet sponges I feel like. Rusty alone took up about 3 clips of headshots. I think it may have been a lot harder if I didn’t use actual strategy (saving ammo by running away, not always hard pressing the flashlight to aim, and using the flares to chokepoint areas to escape, etc.). Overall though I found the difficulty a fun challenge, especially since I usually play on Normal Mode. I ended up taking a detour and also collecting all the Manuscript pages. I’m hoping to wipe out a good chunk of the Achievements and finally 100%. Something that has evaded me in all my past play throughs.

Starfield steam page for the DLC currently shows eight user review score of 41%, making this one of the worst Bethesda DLC's released of all time. This is so horribly, shockingly bad for Bethesda, because it shows as a gaming company, they are no longer capable of delivering a really good gaming experience as they had in the past. Some of the reviews sum up quite nicely what is wrong with this DLC....

Less content than any skyrim DLC. Less than The Fallout 4 story DLCs. Doesn't change of the complaints people had with the base game, writing is still at a 4th grade level.

Quick: If you are looking to buy my answer is no, you aren't missing much content. I was really hoping to enjoy this DLC. Took about 4 hours for the main story and maybe 2 more hours to 100% the achievements.

These two reviews I think really summed up what Starfield has become, $70 for an AAAA title that has extremely little buy-in from the community, horrifically low amount of replayability and can be breezed through easily. It's mind-boggling to see this

RuneScape was my favorite game of all time when I was a kid. I'd play it for at least 8 hours a day every day, and never get bored. Now, RuneScape is RuneScape 3, terribly infested gambling microtransaction mess that looks like a really bad early access game, or Oldschool RuneScape, which is really fun, but is infested with bots. It's honestly so bad. I tried to play it and it feels so... good, but also low effort. The worst part, however, is the corporate greed. Jagex, the company that developes Runescape, has been sold numerous times. This time, it's owned by some Venture Capital or investment firm, the kind that kills games off to gain their IP and then sell them for huge amounts of money (CVC Capital Partners and Haveli Investments). The first thing they've done is raise the subscription of Runescape to nearly $15, which is truly nuts. This game used to be like $8 a month previously, some are still paying that much....

It's sad to see corporate greed kill such a great game. Idk what to even play now....

Today is Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty from the Master Collection, Volume 1 on Steam. This is really just the HD edition from a decade ago though. But they did seem to enhance the visuals a bit, and like the other collection games, it comes with some background material like a Screenplay. This was probably my 20th time playing this game on yet another platform since the original.

Here messing around with soldiers. I like the markers over their heads.

Magazines come in handy.

I also like a lot of the in-game posters. There's some mods for these too. You should give Ghost Babel a try. It's non-canon, but still a great game.

More "interesting" posters.

There's an easter egg early in the Tanker if you find a specific poster of a woman in a locker and stare at it just right, then call Otacon.

3 big ones recently, this year was God of War Ragnarok, FF7 Rebirth and Jedi Survivor

Back when 3d games were new, tomb raider, prince of persia etc the traversal was the challenge, the gameplay.

Eventually they got watered down and simplified, now they are cleverly disguised choke points while the open world or boss ahead loads.

You'll notice the squeezing between narrow walls to separate 2 areas or a simple climb against a flat wall just before a boss. I think Uncharted was the first to do this as they moved away from climbing and focused more on combat and puzzles.

There is no reason to actually have the characters climb anything if it's not fun or there are better ways of traversal, GoW being the biggest offender here

Jedi Survivor embraces traversal more but still locks you out with invisible walls and floors that kill you

I think I might prefer the elevator loading screens from Elden Ring, at least you get to stretch out your fingers when waiting

Happy Halloween Month! Today's game is The WereCleaner. It's a cute yet gory game about a janitor named Kyle who turns into a werewolf at night. Which isn't normally a problem because he works during the day. But due to not meeting quotas, the CEO demands ALL employees work the night shift for a week until they're back on track. Meanwhile, the CEO is napping, getting drunk, goofing off, etc. in his office:

So it becomes a stealth game, wherein you're trying to do your janitor job while not letting employees or the security guard see you. If you're spotted, you go into a blind rage and kill the employee. (See first screenshot.) So it's in your best interest to stay hidden and sneak around the office while cleaning. Don't forget to clean up the bodies you mutilate in the office!

The security guard is on to you, but he doesn't suspect you specifically. As the week goes on, he gets closer and closer to identifying you, which culminates in you having to avoid him on the final day as he hunts you down in the office.

It's a really short, but very entertaining game. I really enjoyed playing it! Oh, and it's free on Steam!

Good stuff. I didn't get far in Ghosts of Tsushima because the open world felt very samey, but if they work on that I could probably try the sequel.

This is cool. Hans Zimmer is very talented, so I'm looking forward to this.

Today’s Game is Alan Wake. I finally got a chance to finish Chapter 1 on nightmare mode.

It was surprisingly easy. If you look at my ammo you’ll notice I still have a ton of Shotgun rounds. That’s because I conserved Ammo and fled when I could, hoping to use it in the fight against Stucky. Turns out though, Stucky went down in a couple Flare Gun Shots and took all the other Taken with him.

I also got stuck wandering around in the woods for a while, as it turns out I took a wrong turn. Those woods are like a fucking maze.

The photo I chose for today was of the Gas Station. It felt appropriate as the End of Chapter 1, since that’s where I chose to end my gaming session for today.

I’m going to continue with Chapter 2 tomorrow hopefully though, as it turns out I still have my Alan Wake II save from when I thought I deleted it because it ate my Steam Deck’s battery alive and I’m a few chapters into that, so I’d like to make parity with them before playing parallel (assuming I don’t end up changing my mind).

with Google's assault on Invidious leaving it inoperable, consider watching this video with FreeTube, a nifty open source program that lets you watch youtube videos privately!

Combined with Libredirect, which automatically opens youtube links in Freetube, it becomes really slick and effortless to use.

For Mobile, consider giving FluxTube a try.

I've been playing the things since Diablo I; I love the concept and the gameplay loop, but the game-design issues they run up against, and the mechanics that get implemented to address them... irritate the crap out of me over time, and I want to talk about that.

I think the paradox at the core of it all is that the gameplay loop is basically Stardew Valley in Doom clothing.

It's not a hunting game, it's a gathering game. Walk through this area, and harvest all the objects. Explore every part of the map, rip up all the weeds, look for hidden goodies under every fallen log.

The satisfaction you feel ripping through a wave of mobs isn't the satisfaction from triumphantly pounding your enemy's skull into a pile of bloody ashes and limping away, it's the satisfaction you get from ripping off a really big crackly sheet of tree bark in one go. You could probably reskin the whole thing into an apartment-cleaning game and it would still work.

And that would be fine in and of itself, but it probably wouldn't sell many copies - so they dress it up as Epic Monster Combat, and that's where the problems begin - layers and layers of obfuscation to hide the seams.

In order not to feel tedious and grindy, there needs to be a sense of progression; your standard power-fantasy stuff, where the challenges increase, you improve to meet them, rinse and repeat. In practice this equates to a varying number of clicks-per-mob. You start out needing three clicks to defeat a mob, over time you get better gear and go down to two clicks, level up and drop to one click, and woah I'm so powerful. But oh no! A new area with bigger scarier mobs! They take three clicks, even with my new powers!

But of course you'd see through that straight away, so they put numbers on everything. You see bigger and bigger damage numbers as you level up, so it keeps feeling more impressive. For a while, at least.

But that only lasts so long before you start to feel played for a chump, so slap on more and more layers to hide the lines, and make little mini-metagames around navigating them. Trouble is, those minigames really aren't very fun.

Scattering a dozen different stats and resistances across half a dozen gear slots is just a box-packing game. You want to get the best possible numbers for each attribute, but they're clustered randomly across all the different items, so you need to evaluate a butt-ton of different combinations in order to get the best coverage. I'm guessing that's going to have some kind of shitty NP-hard algorithmic complexity, so you're basically doing the travelling salesman problem in your head. Wheee. (ok but seriously this has to map to a named problem that someone's analyzed already... any ideas?)

And hey look, there's the insanely complicated perk tree of PoE, or the similarly confusing devotions from Grim Dawn. Again it looks like they're confusing complexity with richness, and making optimization too confusing to do without third-party tools or even less fun, following a published build. (for god's sake, if we're going down that route, let us plug the final build in at the start, then auto-level towards it)

Item sets! Because there's nothing like grinding for weeks until your corneas dry out, filling up endless stash tabs with partial sets that you'll level out of before you ever complete; it's so much fun. Crafting recipes, same deal, and even worse, meta builds that rely on unique items that are impossible to reliably SSF, so you spend your whole game grinding for trade.

And on and on, there's so many symptomatic patches to delay the eventual ennui, but no fixes to the fundamental design issue that causes it. You can't just take them away and replace them with nothing, or you'd be bored in minutes. But building up to completely jaded after a couple of weeks once you start playing the engine rather than the game is also pretty crappy.

How do you make the fighting feel like fighting instead of watering cauliflowers, or else how do you make crop-harvesting feel badass? How do you create a sense of progression beyond mere stat inflation? How do you do a rich slew of possibilities without creating spaghetti hell that ends up only having six basic metas at the end of it? How for the love of god do you make combat feel intense without blanketing the entire screen in particle effects? Could someone design a system where every build can be effective if you adapt your playstyle to suit?

I dunno, It just feels like the genre is still only half-invented, and waiting around for someone to do it properly.

Thoughts?

Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana for PS Vita. Fishing edition. Some random fishing pics I grabbed. I liked the fishing part of the game. It even slightly contributes to the story and progress if you catch them all.

I remember fondly the days of playing Heroes of Might and Magic II, never played HOMM3 or anything after, but as I looked at the latest and most "recent" heroes games... they're all rated/reviewed SO harshly. Apparently, they never gained steam like the earlier titles. RTS seems to have the same issue, tapering off. Starcraft is basically dried up and dead, and we never got another Warcraft unfortunately. Even WC3 Reforged was a total flop/disaster, people were hoping one day to get Warcraft 4. Would've been nice, honestly.... But it never happened. as of today, I can't find a single RTS or RPG I actually enjoy that isn't some old 'classic'.

What happened to these genres?

Today's game is Alan Wake. Both in preparation for Halloween and my heart's one desire to play Alan Wake II, I am replying through the first one again on nightmare difficulty.

What i'm thinking i'll do though since i'm feeling a little impatient to get to AW2 is Play it parallel to the Second one since i've played through both AW1 and AWAN 4 times in the past. So i'll do one chapter of AW1 and then one chapter of AW2. I'm still thinking this through though

I may have gotten a little out of control with the screenshots though after i discovered the built in free cam, as instead of my usual 10-20, i took 80 in just the opening section. So I figured i'd dump a few extras here today since i won't get a chance to reuse them again.

I also got explorative with it once i realized there wasn't a range and i could go anywhere with it (you'll see more of that in the second section)

Alan and his Magic Spinning Flashlight

The dorky deer float i saw

I screenshotted this building as i realized that i don't think i ever get to see a proper look at it, for how much detail it has. the only other time we're on this side of bright falls is at night during combat.

This kitchen had a surprising amount of depth for not being able to go back here

This is where i got a little explorative with the camera and spent a large portion of my playtime exploring just unseen things:

The entire backhalf of the lodge is rendered in (mostly) full textures despite not being able to see it from the first chapter. Especially not where i'm at

An entire unused room in Birdleg's cabin. I just thought it was interesting the window was see through on the inside when you can't even see it from the outside

out by the coast (?) i noticed this weird water mapping thing going on. It's hard to see but they are on completely different levels

I found some remedy debug textures on the ground under the water. Also interestingly the land under the water had depth to it, instead of just being a flat plane. I'm not really sure why this is (maybe just to be thorough?) but i thought it was interesting.

And god dammit. I leave for a few hours and the entire cabin gets stolen. Can't have shit in bright falls

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like they're going to call it just "Lords of the Fallen" again. That would've been so good.