In Minecraft I run in one direction for half an hour and build little forts. I don’t sleep in the bed and when I die I die. There’s a neat sense of satisfaction finding all the little things I’ve left behind.
I used to do pixel art too so I’ve run into giant glowstone Pikachus in the past
I would always play AVP2 as an Alien. I loved the mobility of being able to traverse walls and the unique challenges/opportunities it presented. I played it a lot and got quite good at it (would easily be the top player in most games I played), but would more often focus on making use of those unique mechanics for novelty situations.
One map (the forge, or something similar) had high ceilings with ridges built in to it, perfect for hiding an Alien. Instead of running around the map tearing up victims and moving up the leaderboard, I would cling up on that ceiling and wait for an unsuspecting human to pass underneath. I would drop down like a spider, paralyze them with my tail, and immediately headbite them. The glee that I would get from perfectly executing that surpassed any MVP received from high scores. It was fun to just play an Alien like an Alien.
I want to play that so bad right now. The cat like movement with wall-climb, plus the alien vision is easily one of my top 5 unique gaming experiences.
Easily one of my favourite PvP games because of the species dynamics and the lobby options. Used to play it at LAN parties now and then, up to maybe 8 players. Once you had enough players it was great to have 1 Predator vs 2-3 aliens and the rest humans. Species were selected at random so sometimes you’d get a derpy predator or a one hunter killing machine. It always lead to interesting games that sort of naturally lead inadvertently to roleplay scenarios like the humans keeping an eye on vents and banding together.
Oh and alien life cycle was always on for more challenge to the alien players. Trying to find a facehugger victim in and trying not to get blasted straight out of the chest as a chestburster to become the ultimate killing machine.
Endless Sky. The save game is a text file. Save a file on the mobile app (F-Droid), and on the PC (Flatpak), and note the last line. This is the line you must swap to transfer the save file. It is the first game I have played on both practically. The game mechanics are different between the two and you need to alter your strategy accordingly. On mobile, I travel with a ship setup for boarding pirate vessels and never target enemies directly; all of my guns are automatic turrets. I just use a fast ship and travel with a large group of fighters. It is more of a grind on mobile, but it can be used to build up resources and reserves. The game is much bigger than it first appears to be. You need to either check out a guide or explore very deep into the obscure pockets of the map.
You could check out lemmy.world/c/dragonage? Obviously it’s a bit dead at the moment, but this is the thing: all of these little communities need to be restarted from scratch, and to do that you need to contribute your own content until enough people show up that the feed starts rolling on its own. Lemmy.world is currently the biggest instance, and that community has 102 subs already. Seems like a great place to start if you want to recreate r/dragonage on lemmy.
Since we’re dealing with very small niches still, I also recommend participating in genre communities. I’m not really seeing an active one for RPGs but something like Dragon Age would get some run on !pcgaming and !pcgaming (with the usual caveat that kbin currently isn’t always great about getting all their content out to federated instances).
Grow the genre/archetype communities enough and eventually they will naturally break out into individual property niches for sure.
I’ve learned my lesson to never buy again from any other than Steam.
Every other launcher except GOG Galaxy are pure trash. And about a year ago I switched to Linux, so now I only buy from Steam. They make gaming better for everyone, they know it’s a win-win situation.
Putting the connotation aside for a moment, is it even accurate to call people who are interested on niche secondary gaming devices as "normies"? Whatever may be their backgrounds, seems to me like they are dedicated gaming enthusiasts.
They are having problems getting it running on the Xbox Series S, and that’s blocking it from being released on the fully capable Xbox Series X. So nerdrage/console war clickbait.
I was a bit taken aback that, at a certain point in the game during a celebration, neutrality with most companions meant that they all wanted to fuck my brains out. O.o
Sometimes I can’t keep it together when pikachu and Steve from Minecraft duke it out with music playing that makes me expect a giant healthbar to appear in the sky
Golden Sun is probably one of my favorite RPGs, very deep combat system where in the lategame you will be modifying your character class in the middle of battles to change your movesets and other cool mechanics. Fairly interesting story as well. It has great GBA pixel art and it does have random encounters.
Persona 5 is a turn-based RPG that lots of people who aren’t usually into turn-based RPGs tend to like. Simple but satisfying battles, and a story that would have seemed mediocre if it wasn’t for great music and some cool moments which make it really stand out. No pixel art and also no random encounters.
OMORI is pretty good and has a really good art style. The story is also very good with some very memorable characters and moments, and pretty good music. The combat is simple and probably best described as “not bad”. The biggest downside of the game imo is that despite not being very long (<20 hours) it felt like it dragged on close to the end. It might have random encounters? I don’t really remember.
Overall I recommend Golden Sun if you are able to emulate it or something (not on steam or switch)
For clarification, Golden Sun was mostly 3d rendered models. They purposely made them to have a resemblance to pixel art since they needed it to both fit in a GBA cartridge and screen, and not look ugly while doing all that. Also I believe it is on Switch now if you pay for online and have the GBA emulator (which I personally don’t pay for and never will).
I still replay the series once every couple years, though. Fantastic series.
It’s not on the GBA app yet. At least the first game was announced for the service when they announced GB/GBA for Switch Online, but neither game is available at the moment on that. Hopefully soon.
Played it all day yesterday. It still has some bugs and if you play co-op you should do it in a separate save file because you can’t ever remove your offline friends’ characters from your party, but at a mechanical level, the game is a masterpiece.
It’s D&D 5e translated with extreme loving detail into a video game. Conversation is nearly as engaging as combat and many of the NPCs have massive dialogue trees, all fully voiced. You can switch between using a controller to directly control your character or using the traditional keyboard and mouse controls like the older Baldurs Gate games.
Hells, the character creator is probably worthy of an award by itself
I’m now 38 hours in and my opinions are basically the same, though I will add that I love how fast they’ve been patching it. If Larian ever release DLC or expansions for this game I’d expect them to be the best goddamned expansions I’ve seen in at least the last 10 years.
I’m really hoping it’s reasonably moddable because I’ve little doubt the community would love to mod entire custom campaigns into this engine.
My partner is very tuned into the various ethical mishaps happening in the world and keeps me apprised of which companies are doing shitty stuff and which people/companies I should stop supporting.
Problem: the set of companies you shouldn’t support due to unethical behavior is pretty much all of them. As the saying goes, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. If doing business with someone with blood on their hands puts blood on your hands, then only the hands of hermits and children are clean.
This is one of the reasons why I use free and open source software wherever possible, but very few games are FOSS and most of them were commercial before being FOSSified (e.g. Doom).
I’m frustrated by the current largely-unethical state of the games industry
It’s the fate of any large enough company in a capitalist system. Greed creates/incentivizes this behavior and then rewards it. Microtransactions and dark patterns wouldn’t exist if they didn’t work. Greedy people know this and the rest of us are plagued by them.
Planning on playing through Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 for the first time this week. Know almost nothing about the game, nothing about DnD rulesets, just diving directly in because a partner very highly recommended them.
Edit: Ended up buying Baldur’s Gate 3 and getting into it instead, looks like I’m gonna be playing it in 3 > 1 > 2 order. As a side note, performance was way better on Vulkan than Directx11 for me, despite common advice being to use Directx11 on Linux for the game.
They are absolutely lovely, though undeniably very old school. BG1 is more action-adventurey with a bigger emphasis on exploration, BG2 is very story-heavy. They have aged remarkably well, considering they’re over 20 years old. The handpainted backgrounds still look pretty.
With potential increased interest due to BG3, I wonder if it would be an idea to create a community for the classic Baldur’s Gates 🤔
I’d like that, or a classic CRPG community with a certain timeframe. Two of my favourite games now are the original Fallouts after playing them for the first time only a few years ago. I’d love to see more of the games from that era.
I have actually pondered a “classic gaming” or “old school games” type community for these types of (primarily) PC games from the era up to maybe 2010.
Retro Gaming communities typically focus more on old console and/or arcade type stuff.
Haha yeah same here. I guess we sit back and hope someone else takes up the mantle.
As for names, I’m not sure. There’s already some retro/vintage PC communities on SDF but they are more hardware focused. Old PC Games? Retro PC Games? The Beforetime? No idea.
Also, what would be the appropriate cutoff for the timeframe? I just threw 2010 out there, but maybe even slightly later? What is a good milestone to cut off at? I was thinking starting at 1993 with the release of Doom.
Doom seems like a solid start, it was revolutionary. You could also push it to 1990. As for an end date I’d have to think about that. 2000 or 2003 gives a 10 year range with a lot of influential releases, but might be a bit limited. If you did 2013 that’s a 20 year range, but it could also be a shifting time frame where it is for games of a certain age. If it was 10 years or older games then it would start with an end date of 2013 and the range would expand every year. The issue with that is it would lose focus on older games eventually.
I was thinking Doom as a sort of watershed moment in gaming, and going earlier than that and you could argue those titles belong on the already-existing retro gaming communities.1993 actually had both Doom and the first FIFA, it’s got a lot going for it as a start year.
Looking at releases for 2013 though we have things like GTA V, BioShock: Infinite and The Last of Us. I definitely would hesitate to call those “old school games”. 2011 has Skyrim. Does that qualify? Otherwise I’m starting to feel more drawn to the 1990-2010 timeframe; nice round numbers and should sort of capture the era of classic gaming. 2010 has Red Dead Redemption 1, Mass Effect 2 and Civilization 5. Is it fair to say those are some of the last old school games or do we need to go older? A two decade window seems good.
I agree that an open ended timeframe would lead to lost focus over time. If it’s 10+ years old as the criteria, it would mean we’re just 2 years away from The Witcher 3 qualifying for a community meant for stuff like Fallout 1&2. That just feels… wrong.
Yeah good points on open ended timeframe and the 2013 end date. 2010 seems pretty good, the only odd one out for that list would be civ 5 because it’s so widely played.
I’m in my 30s now so I have to remember that someone who was 5 in 2010 would be 18 now, and red dead redemption 1 would definitely be considered old. I think that’s a solid timeframe, 1990 to 2010. If Lemmy ever gets big enough to warrant it there could eventually be games by decades communities as well.
If you don’t care about round numbers and it being exactly two decades you could also do 1993-2009, starting with Doom and ending with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. There is a different kind of symmetry to that, and I honestly kind of like it.
The only issue I would have with a 93 start date is it excludes games like Dune, Wolfenstein 3D, and the original Civilisation, which were earlier in the 90s.
Having said that, every cut off point has its flaws, and a more focused range could lead to a more focused and spirited community. Very weird that COD:MW2 is 14 years old btw.
Very fair points as well about those games. I think maybe a looser guideline would be more appropriate than strict dates. I really like the Doom - CoD: MW2 bookending to encapsulate that golden era of gaming, but I wouldn’t delete any post about Civ 1, if I was actually running the community.
And yeah, time flies. It was equally scary earlier when I realized Witcher 3 is almost ten years old.
I just started Baldur's Gate recently and beat it minutes ago. It's not the first D&D game I've played before, but I'm far from well-versed in it. I had to Google "THAC0" a couple of times to understand what the game was trying to tell me, as well as understanding certain status effects. There's a presupposition of knowledge that the game has with its players, but it's still fairly okay at initiating people to D&D.
THAC0 is… yeah. I guess the systems take some getting used to. And it gets a little more complicated at higher levels with different layers of protective spells and counter-spells.
I already started it and bought BG3 as well. I had played Planescape: Torment about 10 years ago, so some of this was familiar, but it and Baldur's Gate have some different philosophies around things like combat and party size. One thing I'm fairly confident will be a thing of the past when I get to BG3 is trash mobs. BG1 at times feels like it's being run by an asshole DM who's out to kill the party with tons of trash mobs between rests rather than providing a good time.
Imagine you're at the table with your friends, and the DM says, "Then, from the darkness of the dungeon emerges...6 Kobolds!" You beat them, the party is pumped about it, and then the DM says, "As you press further on across the bridge, you come across...7 more Kobolds!" I'm not exactly sure what the thinking was, but between the aforementioned trash mobs and the magic casters who attack you with debilitating adverse affects that do tons of damage and take you out of the fight for like 20 straight turns, BG1 can be cheap as hell, even on easy difficulty. I get the sense that BG3 will still be difficult, but from my brief time with Divinity: Original Sin and what I've seen of BG3 footage, I'm expecting them to have more consideration for each combat encounter.
And oh yeah, BG1 also had a few areas with really narrow passageways that the AI pathfinding was not really able to adequately handle, as friendly characters would bump into each other and not be able to figure out how to move.
Yeah, these old games were kind of a wild west when it comes to design. I also love Fallout 2 to bits for example, but god damn can it feel cheap and frustrating at times. On the other hand there are loads of ways to cheese encounters, too, if you’re interested in making things easier. Backstabs, Snares, Cloudkill (and similar effects), abusing Fog of War. Almost all of BG1 can be cheesed with Skull Trap. And almost all of BG2 can be cheesed with Set Snare.
I’ve only started playing BG3, but so far it’s been a lot easier and simpler than both the old games and Divinity, which maybe is to be expected with it being based on D&D 5E rules. Compared to D:OS 2 combat has been a lot less complex and challenging. Granted I’m playing on medium difficulty. I didn’t want to start off on Tactician after the Divinity games, but maybe I need to here.
Anyway, I hope you’ll enjoy BG2. It’s one of my all-time favorite games still, and I replay it every now and again. There are so many ways to set up fun parties with loads of interactions, especially if you use the Tweak that prevents companions from killing each other even if they hate each other. Some of the best interactions are from mixed-alignment parties.
narrow passageways that the AI pathfinding was not really able to adequately handle
I must confess that these days I always play with DebugMode=1 and one of the primary reasons is to be able to use Ctrl+J to teleport the whole squad when pathfinding acts up.
I definitely organically discovered the cheese you can do with fog of war, but most of the strategies you mentioned were things that I just did not come across organically. I would love to have more of the debilitating spells that the enemy NPCs were using on me, and I did come across things like Sleep that would rarely work against an opponent challenging enough to deem it worthwhile, especially considering how many enemies you're likely to run into until your next rest compared to how many spell slots you'll have.
Summons are a really powerful way to deplete enemy spells, just send them in one by one. Summon Skeletons is good for this.
As you move onto BG2, using spells to counter enemy protections becomes more important, like using Breach to deal with Stoneskin etc. Though as a caveat, I’ve been using Sword Coast Stratagems so long I barely remember what combat is like without it.
I’m playing through Baldur’s gate 1 atm as well. I tried it and didn’t enjoy it back in the early 2000s but now I’m digging it. I still don’t like real time with pauses combat, but I can forgive it with the party size. I do wish there were other ways around things than combat most of the time though, but early DnD was primarily a dungeon crawler so that’s fine.
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