ranDom vIdeO game news

[Gorth]

On 6/2/2022 at 10:57 PM, Lexx said:

I've read all the Gaunt's Ghosts books and the inquisitor stuff. The parts I liked the most in them is where the normal day to day life was the theme.

Let's be honest, most of the time the battle scenes are just random ww1/ww2 battles where the factions names have been replaced. Especially some of the later Gaunt's Ghosts stuff pretty much reads like a chapter from Der Landser. Kinda bleh, tbh.

 

On 6/2/2022 at 9:38 PM, Wormerine said:

Owlcat doing 40k RPG.... is potentially compelling. I am not a 40k fan, but I enjoyed some of the games. I do wonder how it will holdup without spectacle - when I think of 40k this is mostly what I think of, chainsawing orcs in Space Marine, bloody clash of armies in Total Warhammer or Dawn of War. Not sure how much there is to the setting outside of that.

I loved the Gaunts Ghosts books (got all of them) as well as some of the very old Black Library books - Inquisitor, Harlequin and Chaos Child by Ian Watson

On the Warhammer Fantasy side, I would nominate Felix and Gotrek by William King as my MVP books (a number of authors continued the story after King got sidetracked with other things), followed by the books about Grey Seer Thanquol - Grey Seer and Temple of The Serpent (Skaven are just hilarious in a sad and a burst out laughing kind of way) by C.L. Werner

 

The games I've played so far, including the Mechanicus game does little to no justice to the setting. Censorship is a thing and they have to tone it down a LOT in order to be able to sell the games on platforms like Steam etc. No, I'm not going to post old rule book illustrations here, they are quite NSFW, not just because of nudity, but the gratuitous violence....

 

TV Tropes has a nice summary of the setting... (an old version, the new one is lame imho)

Warhammer 40,000, known informally as "Warhammer 40k" or just plain "40k", is a miniatures-based tabletop strategy game by Games Workshop. Drawing heavily on their previous Warhammer Fantasy game, it began as "Warhammer In Space", but has over time grown distinct from (and far more popular than) its fantasy counterpart.

Thirty-eight thousand years in the future, the mighty Imperium of Man has expanded across the galaxy... to discover that the galaxy is a hell that would make Hieronymous Bosch **** himself in terror, and that it has a hell. From without, the Imperium is assailed by alien monsters from the depths of space, nightmare death-machines and soulless daemons (as well as soulless death-machines and nightmare daemons, and the occasional soulless daemon in a nightmare death machine); from within, treachery, heresy, mindless incompetence and the festering taint of Chaos threaten to tear it apart.

Warhammer 40,000 is not a very happy place. Rather than just being Darker And Edgier, it paints itself black and hurls itself over the edge. The Imperium of Man is an oppressive, stark, and downright miserable place to live in where, for far too many people, living isn't something to do till you die, but something to suffer through till something comes around and kills you in an unbelievably horrible way, while enslaving your soul and melting down your body for more biomass for its army - quite probably something on your own side. The Messiah has been locked up on life support for the past ten millennia, laid low by his most beloved son, and an incomprehensibly vast Church Militant commits hourly atrocities in his name.

The problem is, as bad as the Imperium is, they're not quite as bad as many of the other factions. Death is about the best you can hope for against the vast majority of the other major players in the battlefields of the 41st Millennium. The basic premise of 40k, insofar as it can be summed up, is that of an eternal, impossibly vast conflict between a number of absurdly powerful genocidal, xenocidal, and (in one case) omnicidal factions, with every single weapon, ideology and creative piece of nastiness imaginable turned up to eleven. The standard-issue sidearm of a Space Marine is a fully automatic armour-piercing rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The Astronomican, a navigation aid has the souls of thousands of psychic humans sacrificed to it every day, dying by inches to feed the machine. The Faster Than Light Travel used by most factions carries with it a good chance of being eaten by daemons. There are also chainsaw swords, armored gloves that crush tanks, mountain-sized daemonic walking battle cathedrals, tanks the size of city blocks and warships that level continents, if not simply obliterating all life on an entire planet just to be sure. And sometimes even that doesn't work. There is no time for peace, no respite, no forgiveness; there is only war.

And you are going to die.

The 40k universe is a spectacularly brutal playground of tropes and horrible things taken to their absolute extreme, and in some cases, beyond. Entire planets with populations of billions are lost due to rounding errors in tax returns. Orders a million strong of capricious, fanatical, genetically engineered Super Soldier Knights Templar serve as the Imperium's special forces, while the trillions of soldiers in its regular armies take disregard for human life to new and interesting extremes. A futuristic space Inquisition ruthlessly hunts down anyone with even a hint of the taint of the heretic, the mutant, or the alien, and is backed up by legions of psychic daemonhunting elite super soldiers and fanatical pyromaniac power-armoured battle nuns. The ancient and mysterious manipulator-race contrive wars that see billions dead so that small handfuls of their own may survive, while their depraved cousins cannot endure the agony of a life not spent torturing numberless innocents to death in ingeniously horrific ways. There are several vast Bug Swarms trying to eat every organic thing in the galaxy as part of their natural life cycles, two light-years-wide holes in reality through which countless daemons and corrupted daemon-powered super-soldiers periodically attempt to destroy the universe, and an entire civilization of undying Omnicidal Maniacs serving their star-god masters' desire to exterminate all living creatures, down to the last bacterium. There's a genetically-engineered survivor warrior species infesting every corner of the galaxy and cheerfully trying to kill everything in the galaxy (including each other, if nothing better presents itself) because it's literally hard-wired into their genetic code to do so (and because it's fun). The closest thing to the "good guys" you can find in this setting is a tiny alien empire sandwiched between all the other factions, and they may or may not have a thing for forcing new subjects into their empire through orbital bombardment and concentration camps, but at least they'll offer you admittance into their club. So long as you don't mind being, as with most subjects in their faction, mind-controlled by a few benevolent elites.

As well as the game itself and its rulebooks, faction-specific, setting-specific and campaign sourcebooks, 40k has spawned a range of spinoff games and publications. Over sixty 40k novels and short story anthologies, including the successful Gaunt's Ghosts, Eisenhorn, and Ciaphas Cain novels, are published by the Black Library, a subsidiary of Games Workshop, who also published the now out-of-print comic book Warhammer Monthly and short story magazine Inferno. Boom! Studios now publish comics set in the Warhammer 40K universe, in the form of various mini-series, rather than an ongoing title. There is even a full-length fan film, Damnatus, which was approved, made, banned over conflicts between British and German IP laws, then leaked online. Spinoff tabletop games include the space combat game Battlefleet Gothic, large-scale strategy Epic 40,000, gang-based Necromunda, all-Ork Gorkamorka, small scale Alien-influenced Space Hulk, RPG-influenced "narrative wargame" Inquisitor, and the more traditional RPGs Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and Deathwatch. A small but growing number of 40k videogames have also been made; early examples include the Space Hulk series and a slightly obscure isometric Genesis / Mega Drive game called Aspect Warrior. More recent are Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War and its sequel Dawn Of War II, a pair of Real Time Strategy games for the PC; Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior, a First Person Shooter; and Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command, a turn-based tactical game. Currently in development are a third-person shooter, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, and a MMORPG titled Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online. An official CGI movie, Ultramarines, was recently announced, following up on a number of live-action shorts shown at various Games Day events in the 90s. Before you start screaming about the former, consider that the script is written by Dan Abnett. In the meantime, you can watch the fan-film Damnatus, track down an old Games Workshop VHS release film called Inquisitor, or even watch Event Horizon (which has long been accepted as an unofficial prequel, since the creators seem to have accidentally matched the franchise's premise and style with remarkable exactitude, though not the time period).

 

[Bartimaeus]

I was sent this yesterday, and it now feels appropriate to post it here:

Edited June 4, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[kanisatha]

1 hour ago, Noviere said:

What did Paizo say that implied there was a falling out? The only thing I saw was them saying that the then unannounced game was not Starfinder, and then when pressed they said it was not a Paizo IP either. Was there more to it than that?

Unfortunately this is second-hand. I myself am not a reddit user. I read some posts elsewhere (Owlcat forum and Steam WotR forum) in which multiple posters say that Paizo's reddit posts on this subject have had a sharp edge to them, like they're distancing themselves not only from the WH40K game but Owlcat itself.

Ultimately, the conclusion from my post on this was clearly speculative.

[kanisatha]

What do you guys think of this interview? Is this actually a good use of game development resources?

 

[Gorth]

35 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

What do you guys think of this interview? Is this actually a good use of game development resources?

For me Alpha Protocol will always be the text book example of a trillion permutations... sadly also at the expense of other game mechanics, which were not so good (a bad shooter with bad stealth, mediocre combat and the ultimate crime and joy killer: mini games). But story wise... it's probably unbeaten to this day regarding how many stories players can create for themselves.

[MrBrown]

1 hour ago, kanisatha said:

Unfortunately this is second-hand. I myself am not a reddit user. I read some posts elsewhere (Owlcat forum and Steam WotR forum) in which multiple posters say that Paizo's reddit posts on this subject have had a sharp edge to them, like they're distancing themselves not only from the WH40K game but Owlcat itself.

Ultimately, the conclusion from my post on this was clearly speculative.

https://www.reddit.com/user/Official_Paizo

[Wormerine]

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I was sent this yesterday, and it now feels appropriate to post it here:

What if that boi is Henry C.?

 

2 hours ago, kanisatha said:

What do you guys think of this interview? Is this actually a good use of game development resources?

 

I saw you have seen my first impression thoughts over at Larian's forum. After thinking on it for a while longer - I just think this is a wrong use of reactivity. Reactivity should "react" to player's actions decisions - create an illusion that game reacts to choices the player has made. This doesn't do that - this works hard to cancel players actions. It's the same thing they did with Godwoken prince in D:OS2 - yes you can kill him, even have a choice to let him live or kill him, only for the game to retcon it multiple times because he is story critical. The end result is that there is "intended" way of progressing - even by Sven admition some solutions don't work very well and I personally haven't experience the very silly ones.

[MrBrown]

5 hours ago, kanisatha said:

What do you guys think of this interview? Is this actually a good use of game development resources?

 

This is another level of stupid. Sven, or other people working on this, don't seem to understand the basic premises of RPGs.

Players are never free to do literally anything they want, there's always a framework you're working in. If the GM is very good at making up things on the fly without preparation, the framework can be very large, like "you can do anything that sticks to the world of D&D, but nothing outside of it". If the GM is a mere mortal like 99.9% of people, they will have some kind of content prepared, and the framework will be smaller, like "your quest is this, your characters want to do this" or "you start at this situation, from it you can do anything you want". Going outside the framework will break the game, and generally make it impossible to play.

For CRPGs, this basically means a GM that's huge on content preparation. That's just how it has to be, technically. If the framework for BG3 means that you have the box, then just force them to take the box. Don't belittle people on the some kind of illusion of choice if you don't want them to make that choice. You can't have it all up to the player in any case; Players will come up with thousands of decisions that would be rational and logical in some sections of BG3's story that they won't have coded in, so no reason to pretend they can do anything they want.

It's wasted resources, and an insult to players.

 

But here's the worst thing they can do: Force you to take the box, and then have a character say "You idiot! You kept the box!". Don't make negative-McGuffins.

[Katphood]

 

I'm with the stupid on this one.

[the_dog_days]

10 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Found the heretic.

[Humanoid]

I must have played the game before the box was implemented, whatever the hell it is. Seeing the video title I thought it was in reference to that Peter Molyneux scam or somesuch.

 

What I don't get is that this is the same developer who made it so that at the end of Act 1 in their previous game, they just instakilled all potential party members in the game except the ones you've explicitly put into your party, presumably because they didn't want to leave any loose ends.

Edited June 5, 2022 by Humanoid

[Wormerine]

1 hour ago, Humanoid said:

I must have played the game before the box was implemented, whatever the hell it is.

Box has always been in the game - it’s the thing Shadowheart has. The game just gained ways to make sure you have the box.

If you have Shadowheart she has the box, she has the box and is super protective of it and uses it during mandatory story beat. If you kill Shadowheart, the box will fly to you and not allow itself to the thrown out. If you don’t have Shadowheart present during this story event (but met her and learned about the box) the box will magically fly to you to be used in the mandatory story beat, after which Shadowheart will be - I don’t care, the box chose you. Apparently if you make an effort to not meet Shadowheart she will appear in the mandatory story beat and be like “uff, good thing I found you stranger and used this box I have”. 

I didn’t know of the last one before watching the video, but to me all paths outside recruiting and having Shadowheart in your party didn’t feel great

 

1 hour ago, Humanoid said:

What I don't get is that this is the same developer who made it so that at the end of Act 1 in their previous game, they just instakilled all potential party members in the game except the ones you've explicitly put into your party, presumably because they didn't want to leave any loose ends.

It still might happen again in BG3. During early Q&A when asked about axing off companions Larian said something like: “you will be able to recruit whomever you want during act1 but will have to commit afterwards”. Considering that BG3 copies D:OS2 formula to a tee so far, It seems rather likely. 

[Hawke64]

4 hours ago, Humanoid said:

I must have played the game before the box was implemented, whatever the hell it is. Seeing the video title I thought it was in reference to that Peter Molyneux scam or somesuch.

 

What I don't get is that this is the same developer who made it so that at the end of Act 1 in their previous game, they just instakilled all potential party members in the game except the ones you've explicitly put into your party, presumably because they didn't want to leave any loose ends.

Yes, but you can meet the unchosen ones (much) later and fight them*. I quite strongly disliked that - due to the ability to respec at any time as much as you want, it did not directly damaged the balance and party-composition (it could be assumed that you have an adequate party at any given moment), but it was immersion-breaking, as a character build is an essential part of a companion. In other words, switching between companions would be preferable to going back to the ship and changing their builds.

*does not happen if you modded the game and took all of them with you at the end of Act 1.

[kirottu]

It Costs $110,000 to Fully Gear-Up in Diablo Immortal

I have no words.

[Gfted1]

^Ive been playing that, and p2w loot boxes notwithstanding, its a solid game and Im having f2p fun. Just got my Necromancer to level 32 and first legendary gear!

[MrBrown]

1 hour ago, kirottu said:

It Costs $110,000 to Fully Gear-Up in Diablo Immortal

I have no words.

Meanwhile...

So, 

x Get money

x Alienate your previous fanbase

Mission successfull!

Edited June 5, 2022 by MrBrown

[Malcador]

Some day gamers will learn this whole thing is about money as it always was. But the amount of moaning about D:I is at least entertaining.

Edited June 5, 2022 by Malcador

[MrBrown]

2 hours ago, Malcador said:

Some day gamers will learn this whole thing is about money as it always was. But the amount of moaning about D:I is at least entertaining.

You're supposed to moan about how much things cost, isn't that the point?

And, well, I should also mention design made to obfuscate the amount of money required to reach content, or design made to make psychologically weak people to spend more money. That's why lots of countries have gambling laws, after all.

[HoonDing]

I literally played 5 minutes of Diablo before going back to Blackthorne.

[Gorth]

Time for a new sequel...