Fenixp

Naturally, as we all know, Endless Space 1+2 and Endless Legend are just crappy spinoffs of the masterpiece that is Dungeon of the Endless. This can certainly also be attributed to the fine ladies and gentlemen who helped test this ageless piece of art.

We do have Civ VI releasing soon, but historically, purchasing Civ games is really worthwhile at the end of their life cycle, so I'm not getting that for... A long time still. Anyway, Endless Legend. Master of Magic meets Civilization meets Alpha Centauri. The game has a strong focus on its theme and story, seamlessly mixing sci-fi and fantasy elements into a very intriguing world. Each faction even has its own storyline that you may follow (or ignore completely, as you wish) and there's actually a surprising amount of good writing fleshing out the world of Auriga (the game also ties into lore of Endless Space and Dungeon of the Endless which is cool if you happened to play either, and its storyline will be directly followed by Endless Space 2. Amplitude is building quite a universe for us.) Gameplay-wise, it's easily among my favorite 4X games of all time, and one of my major gripes, lack of naval warfare, will get resolved with the expansion that releases in 4 days or so. The game can get a bit stale late-game, depending on playstyle, but that's really an issue with majority of 4X games. Around teh interwebz I've also read complaints about lack of fine balancing of factions and such, but the game does seem to concern itself a lot more with creating fun, distinct and thematically fitting factions as opposed to obsess over balance too much. (Cultists, for instance, can only build a single city and they gain map control by assimilating neutral factions. Shadows can't research technology at all and must either buy or steal it. Stuff like that, choice of faction can change gameplay drastically.) Oh right, and the music is amazing. Soundtrack of Endless games by FlyByNo is one of the few select ones that I listen to at work. I mean... Here you go, main title theme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhG6Qaij7VE&feature=youtu.be At any rate, I would recommend grabbing the base game, as many expansions as you see fit and then enable them one by one while learning to play (they can be freely enabled via main menu) - or just grab everything and get a rather complex experience from the getgo. Each expansion is worthwhile and adds something that the base game was lacking.

We crushed those who opposed us and assimilated those who admired us. We restored Auriga and nothing stands in the way of our quest for revenge now. Right, now to play the Forgotten. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFQxwaODOOc

Homeworld

So... SuperBunnyHop is doing a video series of "reviews" on... Well, Japan. In the first video, he takes a look at Arcades, in the second, he explores Pachinko parlors and in the third Japanese gaming restaurants and ... Karaoke machines? Not news per se for many people I'd imagine, but a lot of interesting info for us untouched by Japanese culture. Or by socks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcgr2ThIWnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2iJLy-1IGg Oh right, I can't insert more than two videos. Well, this'll become a link then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3QhamG6PY

Nah, Vanishing of Ethan Carter is more of a proper adventure game I think. There are no ways to die, this is true, challenge lies in finding and solving the puzzles it presents you with (which, true, weren't all that difficult.) Most games marked as "Walking sims" don't even have that, or contain puzzles which are completely trivial with no real thought required to complete them. Play Dear Esther, you'll see what I'm talking about and then weep. Length of Vanishing seemed perfect for me - given the story it tried to tell and given the amount of detail they put into each individual scene, longer playtime would mean decline in quality, one way or the other. I felt like the game has taken a ton of inspiration from Myst (remake from 2000 with fully 3D movement is here). While longer, Myst is also a lot more cryptic and much more challenging (in other words, filled with irritating puzzles) - but other than Myst I can't think of many games quite like Ethan Carter. Anyway, the ending...

Well that's whooping 921600 pixels, each and every one of them refreshing 30 times per second. Why do you need more?

So... Is it just me or do the (obviously massively edited) Wasteland 3 screenshots looks incredibly dull? Like they're graphically impressive, sure, but looking at them, the scenery just looks incredibly busy without actually using a lot of color. It feels duller than Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 2 was darn dull.

Last expansion for Endless Legend, Tempest, adding a whole bunch of naval-based mechanics including naval warfare and a whole new faction centered around them, is coming out October 14th https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKkSNFXOoDM Oh, and Endless Space 2 released into Early Access today. Here, have the brilliant Vodyani faction intro! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6rouSJad2I Amplitude, I love you.

Even if you click the "manual" link in the game, it'll just open browser window and the wiki in it. Regardless, Amplitude did actually go the extra mile and wrote a proper manual for the game, so it should work either with an e-book reader or good ol' printer.

I get a feeling Nonek might be joking just a smidge :-P Devil May Cry tho, damn, now I want to play it again.

You can increase UI size somewhere in the UI menu. UI gets in the way then, but it's legible, which ... Is a bit of an advantage.

Yup, it's 1404 - it got released DRM-free on GOG recently, so I grabbed it. As for its complexity... I feel like it's easy enough to just build a settlement, but it's rather challenging to build multiple, fully automated settlements that you don't need to constantly oversee and that won't fall apart when you go do something else. And I think that's kinda the main point of the game - optimizing your production chains in such a way that they work without intervention, that surplus resources get automatically sold or transported to settlements which need them, that kind of stuff. I do find this aspect rather satisfying, but the campaign has been fairly easy so far, true enough (it has other advantages - storytelling not among them, sadly.)

So that's how I started... ... and then it was midnight

Witcher 3 is a no-no? I really want Darksiders 3 to exist. But yeah, combat in Darksiders 2 was pretty darn good. Options -> Gameplay -> Set "Automatic finishers" to "Off". Finishers are still there, but you have to trigger them manually if you want to see them. Writers did seem to eat a book entirely consisting of the word "Ploughing" before beginning to work on that game.

One has to wonder why's the genre even called "Fantasy" anymore...

These are videogames we're talking about, not real life. When the game doesn't explicitly state otherwise, it's never obvious that bringing fists to a gunfight is disadvantageous because both fists and guns can follow any arbitrary set of rules that developers want them to follow. It's partly a matter of proper communication obviously, but instead of spending development time on something that'll never get used, it's better to either not develop it at all or then spend some more time on making it work properly anyway, IMO. It also adds another irritating aspect, which is difficulty. In many RPG games that lack balance, you can hit a dead end at one point or another for no fault of your own. Arcanum and Bloodlines are actually a good examples of this - the games suggest you can get trough them with minimal use of violence, whereas many hours into them, it'll turn out you actually really can't. And that can be an issue with weapon skills as well - pretending that, say, spears are as powerful as swords and then throwing uber-powerful sword of murder that's required to progress at the player is just ... Not enjoyable in any way. And lastly there's element of experimentation. Trying different ways to play a game, like in Pillars, is fun to me. Trying different ways to play the game only to discover that 90% of them won't work is... Not so much fun.

I disagree somewhat. If you want all games to be set in the same universe, have the same tone and tell very similar stories which are just better written versions of the older ones, then yeah, you certainly don't need new mechanics. But the moment you change any of that, you need to significantly change gameplay in one way or another to reflect changes in the writing. Just about anything can be used to reinforce or in turn undermine the story you're trying to tell, and you need to innovate mechanically if you ever want to actually tell stories which are powerful and varied enough. Why? I get W2, but combat in Witcher 3 was rather good, just not capable of carrying a game so long. Combat balance should certainly be secondary, but a properly balanced game can give you an insane amount of options. I'll take your example of Meele in Fallout games actually being viable - say they're not, and if you ever trained a character with this skill, it would be wasted skill points. What will that lead to? Well, players never using those skills, obviously. However, since it is viable, you can totally build a character that can use both ranged and meele weapons if you want, and it'll work in-game reasonably well, making it far more varied. If we go back and look at Pillars of Eternity, take weapon options from Fallout, imagine they're balanced, and multiply the build options you can get out of that tenfold. By the game containing reasonably balanced skills and equipment, suddenly you get a game which gives you an insane amount of options in how do you wish to build your characters, and the game is significantly better for it as this increases replayability significantly (if you like replaying to try different builds that is.)

Witcher 2 was a very poor attempt of replicating Dark Souls combat in a Witcher game, I wouldn't exactly call that 'new'. Anyway, to explore new and fun quests/writing/characters/dialogue, you still need new mechanics and new ways in which you can explore them, because... Well, why not just read a book otherwise?

First of all, isometric, party-based RPG offers a significantly different experience than single chracter action games do, and are attractive to different audiences. Sure, the more streamlined games are appealing to a much wider audience - but that doesn't mean audience to which slower-paced games with a different focus appeal will ever disappear, even if such audience remains small. I'm also not entirely sure Witcher games are even close to mechanical complexity of Pillars of Eternity or Divinity: Original Sin, just by the way - and guess which experience will the crowd preferring mechanical complexity go for. I'm pretty sure you couldn't even do anything with your party members in the Xbox version of Mass Effect. I can be mistaken tho. Turn-based strategy games are actually seeing a bit of a resurgence on mobile devices and in the form of 4X games, which brings another point - you can never predict where will these old mechanics rear their ugly heads. CRPG games are niche because they always were niche, even when they were "mainstream" back when gaming itself was niche. I believe they will emerge either on devices with limited input methods or their underlying mechanical complexity will be used in unexpected ways in mainstream media, perhaps even mixed with the character action approach - Dragon Age: Inquisition is already trying, but it's not doing a very good job of it sadly. Eh... Doesn't 'novel gameplay ideas' equal 'tinker with overarching mechanics' pretty much? Anyway, I would strongly disagree with a statement that we should just stick to what we have and just try to explore new settings with it (I'm not claiming that's what you said - I'm just not entirely sure what did you try to say). To explore new settings and new stories, we can use any medium, not just videogames. But only videogames can explore new ways to interact with either novel or classical settings.

Mass Effect games are also taking the genre in new (and for many unexpected) direction, I just don't think it's a direction you enjoy. But still, *cough* Indie games *cough*. They've got our backs. I still think major re-emergence of cRPGs is just a matter of time for mainstream as well tho - and if VR gets widespread enough, we'll get a whole bunch of entirely new takes on older genres. I'd also like to point out that I never really saw either Arcanum or Bloodlines as games which pushed the genre forward in any significant way - they were just extremely well designed games in unorthodox settings without enough time to get finished. Mechanically there wasn't all that much interesting about them.

So, how much is Namco Bandai paying you to do all of that work? :-P

Heh, my endgame save file is around 10 MB and loading takes over a minute and a half. It was slightly faster on my Linux partition, but we're talking like 10-15 seconds here. I'm running a modern gaming rig capable of running anything I throw at it.

The issue seems to be both with Obsidian, game's genre and with Unity engine itself. Unity games generally have issues with loading data, even in games in which you'd say that issue should not be present at all like some fully 2D titles. Since Pillars is an RPG with reasonably open world and a truckload of ways in which you can play it, there's no way around it - the game has to record every single thing you do and keep it in memory, which amounts to an insane quantity of data. And with Obsidian because they didn't find ways to streamline that process in any reasonable way. At any rate, loading times are by far my biggest issue with the game, and while having an SSD drive seems to have mitigated it to an extent, loading screens still take much longer than they should. You know something is wrong when Pillars of Eternity takes about 3 times as long loading a 2D backdrop with a bunch of characters than Mankind Divided takes loading streets of virtual Prague. That said, no, there's not much you can do, aside from getting said SSD. I hear deleting old saved games helps, but I never noticed significant difference when doing that. My fix for the problem was to let the game load and go do something else in the meantime. Sad, yeah.

Is it? I wouldn't exactly call Expeditions: Conquistador a historically accurate game. Also, what about the DLC for Mount and Blade: Warband, Viking Conquest? While I own it, I didn't invest a significant amount of time in it, wonder if it's good after the vigorous patching it received.