What are you Playing Now? Volume XIX: The New Beginning of the End of the Middle

[melkathi]

16 minutes ago, Hurlshort said:

Starcom: Unknown Space - I grabbed this on GoG for cheap and it has been fun. It is lot like Star Control. Less silly, but still has lots of weirdos to meet and planets to explore. It's good. I never played the first one, I guess this is a sequel, but they don't seem too connected.

 

The first one:

https://www.gog.com/en/game/starcomnexus

[Zoraptor]

1 hour ago, Hurlshort said:

Starcom: Unknown Space - I grabbed this on GoG for cheap and it has been fun. It is lot like Star Control. Less silly, but still has lots of weirdos to meet and planets to explore. It's good. I never played the first one, I guess this is a sequel, but they don't seem too connected.

Having played both they're pretty much entirely unconnected, except for having a similar establishing concept/ mechanism.

They're both also better Star Trek than most of the recent TV shows despite lacking the licence.

[Theonlygarby]

2 hours ago, ShadySands said:

Worse, it's usually completely quiet.

The reason is that most of my gaming takes place while working and/or when everyone in my house is asleep. 

I feel like I'm the opposite.  I got my phone, music and the game volume up.  Now that's ADHD.  Must stimulate myself or I'll have to have thoughts

[LadyCrimson]

3 hours ago, ShadySands said:

The reason is that most of my gaming takes place while working and/or when everyone in my house is asleep. 

I was going to say there is this product called headphones, but I suppose that wouldn't be great if working/having to keep half an ear on something else at times.
But at home/late night.  I know in some cases, if one has bad tinnitus (as example), that headphones can be bad, but if it's mild (like hubby's), light over-ear heaphones/low volume still works fine. He uses the small Koss ones I gave him at his desk and loves them.

If I like a game's soundtrack well enough, I'll leave it on. Most of the time however, after either a few hours (or for repeat playthrus) I end up turning it off and playing my own music.  I do like game sound design noises to be on however, and I become mighty peeved if that's attached to the same volume slider as soundtrack/music, ala games of many many years ago. That was one of the best side advances - sound is no longer just on/off. Gotta have Speech, Music, Game sounds at minimum. 

Edited 14 hours ago by LadyCrimson

[melkathi]

So, New Arc Line has about a dozen hours of content in Early Access. I had hoped for more.

I tried a Voodoo Shaman to see the difference between tech and magic.

Gameplay wise, tech characters gain abilities through their equipment. Every weapon has the attacks it allows the character to perform. Backpacks and other equipment may give other abilities - boots crafted for Steam Engineers for example give a rocket jump and a charge ability.

Mage characters on the other hand craft additional spells and gain their abilities that way.

There is a magic corruption system that isn't completely implemented yet. If the spells cast by a mage are more powerful than the regions magic level, the mage slowly gets corrupted and will gain mutations at certain thresholds. It will be interesting to see how that works out.

 

Story wise, some npcs don't like you as much depending on your class. Some quests may have more objectives. During the main quest a mage player gets offered an alternate quest at some stage - it still links back into the next main quest just as if you had done the normal quest, but it offers a choice and that is nice.

 

The game has some potential. All the devs need is for the war to stop so they can develop in peace. 

[Bartimaeus]

On 10/16/2025 at 2:11 AM, Lexx said:

You know, I was just thinking.. back when Pillars 2 released and they added voice over for every dialog, I was like.. why, what's the point of that? Such a waste! But now I'm kinda glad they did. Feels a lot better and interesting to play, also it stops writers from text bloat, which I find highly annoying and tedious to read.

The irony of something like the first two Baldur's Gate games is that they were obviously a product of many, many compromises that the developers probably would've rather not have made if they didn't have to...but some of those compromises were the exact thing that I now realize I want out of a video game. Textual density and voice-acting is just exactly one such thing: the ability to be selective about what is voice-acted versus what is not, making it so that text is generally tight but you can have longer passages when the situation calls for it...and you didn't make the player constantly listen to or make the decision to skip past voice-acting because it's taking way too long when it's really not that good or for anything very important, but contrarily you can have entire conversations voice-acted if it is actually an important story moment or particularly silly or for any other reason you'd like...and it's not like the Baldur's Gate games did any of this perfectly either, there was a lot of room for improvement in many areas that didn't mean either going full book mode OR making every last bit of dialogue voice-acted.

I don't want games that are endlessly text-dense (unless it's actually REALLY well-written or intriguing, but the rate of games successfully sinking their claws into you so much that you genuinely want to explore every last nook and cranny, listen to every last character dialogue, go through the full lore descriptions of each item just for the joy of the writing is really low), but I don't want games to be total basic garbage, either. There's a balance to be struck with these things, and it seems like a lot of games really struggle to find that balance and meaningfully carve out their identities within it.

[Lexx]

Best examples for that are Pillars 1 and inXile's Torment, imo. Both (Torment worse than Pillars1) have a lot of dialog that is terribly overwritten and just horrible to read. And I don't even mean the baker characters. Especially Torment went way over board with descriptive text... You'll just end up skipping all of that after a couple hours. Though I'm not really blaming them - back then we all still thought that lots of text means good RPG. I blame Planescape: Torment for that, lol. Once those games were out and I've learned that a lot of text doesn't mean that it's good, I started to really appreciate Fo1's writing again. It's short, to the point, and never wastes your time. Very nice.

[Hawke64]

I have finished City of Springs and it was not horrible. While it is as engaging as Assassin's Creed without parkour (one can try to parkour and fall through the level geometry), it is functional. The story follows a young unemployed engineer in a steampunk/post-apocalyptic city after the local government executes the engineer's sister.

The stealth is functional and the combat is unusual, for what it's worth. The unusual part is that there are 2 lines and you can summon small drones, so can your oppponent. The goal is to destroy the opponent (bug-like robots). It vaguely reminds of DotA/MOBAs in general, but not quite it. And the opponents have slightly different shells - the starting ones are white, then the stronger ones are purple, and the late-game ones are golden and grey. And their shells have no bearing on their abilities beyond the health bar. The bosses have a slightly fancier shells with decorations on them and do require attention.  

The visual and sound design are present. Again, they are not the worst I have seen, but I generally struggled to notice the interactive objects without the highlight (looking for 3 "machines" in one of the missions was decidedly unfun). The VA is there and line skipping was skipping 2 at a time, thus, somewhere from mid-game I was getting about 50% of the dialogues because listening to it was not exactly engaging. The journal consisted of "Talk to [NPC]. There might be jobs to do" and put markers on the next objective. 

The controls are not rebindable, the game autosaves in 5 slots. There are some side quests most of which I've skipped. 

I suppose, "it works" is not the best recommendation, but given the price I had expected crashes or game-breaking bugs and there were none (I had to reload after getting stuck once), and the story was concluded at the end.