I’m a slut for La Belle Epoque so even though I’m not necessarily in the market for a JRPG at the moment I might just cave anyway with scores like this.
I’m almost done with Blue Prince too, so it’s fortuitous timing.
So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations.
Steam does many things well, but its recommendations system is one thing that, in my experience, really falls flat on its face (which surprises me, because they have enough information to do what I would think would be fantastic recommendations).
For finding games on Steam, I’ve had the most luck simply sorting by user rating (which is a pretty darn good metric of what I’ll like, in my experience), and then using the tags to look for games in a genre. There has been one or two times that it’s led me astray, but in general, an Overwhelmingly Positive game is something that I’ll get a ton of fun out of, and a low-ranked game will rarely be a lot of fun.
Sometimes I’ve had luck with looking at “similar games” to a game, which are shown on that game’s store page.
But the recommendations queue is just awful, in my experience.
I basically do the same, searching overwhelmingly positive games. But most I haven’t tried are poorly looking indie games or weird Asian games. I played several really good indie games, I’m not against that, but what I see generally doesn’t catch my interest. And I have over 600 games in Steam alone, so many good ones I already played.
Now it’s just a sea of junk, having to find a needle in a haystack. And user reviews aren’t a gold standard anymore. I’ve seen amazing reviews of mediocre games, as young people don’t have standards anymore as most games these days are empty of story, full of bugs or both.
The game dev community was outraged by bg3, warning people they shouldn’t see bg3 as a new standard. While back in the days when you still bought physical games in a store, it indeed was a standard to sell you a proper product for the price you pay.
These days I illegally download triple A games to check them first, if they are good I’ll buy them. I haven’t bought a triple A game for a long time. Often 2h of playtime for a refund on steam isn’t enough, when you want to see all the storyline videos and conversations. Not enough time to experience the gameplay.
Indie games I often buy immediately, they really put in effort to make something worth playing. Big companies however just put in effort to make it look really good to make a lot of pre-orders, then to abandon it after a few minor bug fixes while gameplay is poorly written and just a few hours. As long as you peek the interest for just over 2h so people aren’t eligible for a refund anymore. This is scamming people, I don’t understand why they keep getting away with it.
In 2024 almost 19.000 games were released on Steam. I have yet to find a single title from 2024 worth playing.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2511500/Dominions_6__Rise_of_the_Pantokrator/ is a pretty involved fantasy strategy game. I haven’t played 6 much, but I’ve played the series a lot in the past, and each game is a pretty direct expansion of prior games. Not sure if that’s up your alley, though. The game turns can get pretty long late-game, as there’s a lot going on.
Endless Sky. Open source and crowd developed. Its story lines, assets, and general size have only increased with age. Active Discord server as well (but it’s only single player, for now anyway).
Have you tried Kingdom Come Deliverance 2? It’s really good and difficult. It’s a history simulator with a really kick ass story and the hero is just a guy. I really like it a lot.
Yeah but I’m stuck after 2 hours. I got into a battle through a quest I stumbled upon, but there’s an enemy I fail to win from. I seem to be unable to get out of the quest. I played 1, which was really nice although I didn’t completely finished it due to bugs.
I would suggest to load up an earlier save. The beginning is the hardest part of the game (like brutally hard combat sometimes) and if you don’t train Henry up (either find Tomcat or Captain Gnarly, they are trainers) you’ll just die. Or you can do what i did and just brute force the fight with save scumming. The combat is not intuitive until you practice for a bit.
One tip i would give you so you don’t get overly frustrated is if you see what appears to be a combat situation (anyone hanging out on the road or beside it at camps) save the game by exiting. This makes an exit save which will be overwritten by the next exit save but it doesn’t cost you a saviour schnapps to save. This way you aren’t drunk in combat nor are you limited to saving only via schnapps. If you do that right as you see a combat encounter you should be able to try it a few times and if you can’t win just run or sneak past them.
Thanks, I’ll try that. With 1 I added a mod so I could save any time. I don’t like the snapps mechanic.
This time I saw a guy in a tree with wolves under it. I easily killed the wolves, but then had to carry the guy really far. In the end I had to kill some guys at an emcampment so I could bring this dude to his place, but I couldn’t kill the more heavily armored camp leader. So I played an annoying side quest by slowly carrying a guy really far, then to end up being stuck. So rage quit haha
Lol Vostatek is great. If you can’t get Pepik back, try going at night and sneak in and kill the camp leader with a knife to the throat while he’s sleeping. If you’re lucky you can kill two or three before the others notice. Also at night they don’t wear armor or weapons except the guy on guard.
Alternatively you can just run in and grab Pepik and get back to Vostatek post haste. The mission is to get the horse, the guys are just extra loot.
KCD2 is a game which rewards you for thinking outside the box. Frontal assaults don’t work unless you’re a sword god and henry ain’t that in the early game.
Thanks, will check them out! Railway empire 2 doesn’t look like something I’d like but I have 2 hours to try before refund and if you say it’s good, I’ll go check it out :)
With Railway it’s the typical anticipation of strategy games that gets you. Just one more expansion of your network, one more resource to connect to a town, one more logistical puzzle to solve. It’s way more intricate (in a good way) than just managing the budget and I’ve sunk hours and hours into some of those missions to figure them out.
Dr Mercer was advantageous to the Marker to have alive and doing his work, so he isn’t killed until his usefulness has run its course
Canonically: the markers try to influence people to do what will assist in Unification. Isaac vehemently doesn’t believe in Unitology so the marker throws enemies at him to try to stop him / manipulate him into doing what it wants (in DS2 & 3). Other people in the series are believers, so they don’t need to be killed off if they’re more useful alive for the time being
Survivors lasting by staying behind locked doors isn’t too unbelievable, either, given the fall of the Ishimura took a while (1 month from marker discovery to it getting on board the ship), and you arrive not that long after it falls (less than a week). It’s been at most a week since she went dark, I think, which is a believable timeframe to survive given the comms going black is at least a day before the big fall of the ship
Well, but Isaak was believing that after he talked to Dr mercer, or am I wrong?
I mean, he brought the marker back to the planet, which should be what the marker wanted, so why were they still attacking him?
But also, from another perspective, they have set up this twist perfectly. I mean, first of all its pretty logical: everything all right --> marker removed --> everything going to shit, so everything all right <-- marker brought back <-- everything going to shit
This, the betrayal, and Dr mercer being one of the people studying the marker in the first place (and Isaak’s girlfriend actually being able to interact with things, and the necros attacking her) have really convinced me that bringing it back was the right thing to do, and the necros not attacking all of a sudden would have been way too obvious
Edit: Wait, is mercer the guy developing the invincible necromorphs, or is he the one helping you bring the marker?
I mean, he brought the marker back to the planet, which should be what the marker wanted, so why were they still attacking him?
The marker wanted to stay off of Aegis VII, actually. Their entire goal (as we learn in 3) is to spread the Necro infection and eventually make a Brother Moon. It’s likely the marker kept attacking Isaac in an attempt to stop him from putting it back on the planet that was about to fall apart. Isaac’s mental infection isn’t hardcore until DS2, either, so he’s not being manipulated very hard yet
Dead Space gets fucking complicated if you read the extended lore in all the games holy shit I sound insane
Wait, is mercer the guy developing the invincible necromorphs, or is he the one helping you bring the marker?
Mercer is the guy making the invincible Necro. In the remake he kills himself willingly, in the original he’s “betrayed” by the marker. The guy helping you is June, poor bastard
Even when the prompt is better (at all?) articulated, threads like these are a waste of time. People who respond barely read the prompt and OPs generally don’t even know what they are asking for. So obviously you should play a little cult classic indie game called Hollow Knight.
My suggestion is to instead put some time in to find an influencer/reviewer you like. Even if you don’t have a similar taste in games, a good reviewer will say WHY they do and don’t like something and you can make informed decisions from there.
A classic one would be to go for BG1 and BG2
Then either play the enhanced editions with EET or play the originals with Baldur’s Gate Trilogy to allow you to play all three games as a singular campaign (as well as running BG1 in the same engine as BG2 if you go for the originals)
Switching to management then, have you played Banished?
Have you played the mod Colonial Charter? Latest version is 1.76 and I found a GDrive download here: www.gog.com/forum/banished/colonial_charter_mod
Mod makers site seems down.
Depends on what parts of banished caught you. The mod lets you build much more visually pleasing cities by adding lots of different housing styles and so on. It also add many more production chains. Was many years since I played it and I think it was an earlier version of it.
Each of these I write makes me quite nervous. I’m never sure people will like what I write, or more importantly how I write it
I always look forward to seeing your posts, and (based on the comments) I’m not alone. Keep up the amazing work!
The only minor thing I will say is that these info dumps take a long time to parse, and I’m usually looking for shorter content. I often scroll through your posts fairly quickly looking for things that tickle my fancy, but I always go back a second time to see if I missed anything. Also, commenting on a specific section almost requires quoting it to give context. In a perfect world, each section could be separated out into its own post.
But hey, I recognize that would be even more work for you, so it’s not fair to expect it. Just offering an unsolicited opinion. 😜
I really appreciate all of the effort you put into these posts, and I can’t wait to read the next one!
bin.pol.social
Aktywne