Unfortunately not at all. I was excited for Persona 5 Royal and was prepared to purchase it again (got it on PS5). Wanted to play it with a Trainer for fun.
However the discount is meh for an rebuy, it’s like €35(?). Was more hoping for €15-20.
I'm waiting for them to remove Denuvo DRM before I buy. I'd love to play it on PC with higher resolution (and hopefully framerates) but that DRM is a dealbreaker for me, unfortunately.
P5R is mildly tempting even though I also own it for PS4. I think I will pass on it until it goes under $20. I also want to hang onto my gaming cash in case Persona 3 Reloaded ends up being legitimately good.
Isn’t Baldur’s Gate 3 just DnD, so thats easy as I already have that knowledge. All the others don’t seem that complex.
Deep Rock is Shoot Stuff, mine, don’t die
Overwatch is only complex when you get past the early learning and pissing around and start learning characters and trying to counter pick. Which you don’t need to do to have fun.
Destiny I don’t remember much of. I guess it had some more complex movement and stats so that one might be more complex.
I guess so? Never played DnD in my life and didn’t realize that.
Overwatch is only complex when you get past the early learning and pissing around and start learning characters and trying to counter pick. Which you don’t need to do to have fun.
Just feel like I’m gonna get my ass kicked by all the people who understand all the mechanics instead of just fucking around in-game. Would just be nice if they included the necessary info in the game instead of making you search it up online.
BG3 uses D&D fifth edition rules, and the game is set in the Forgotten Realms, which is the official setting for D&D right now. That being said, that can be a lot to get into, and the BG3 tutorial is trash. For character creation you might just want to pick one of the origin characters. Creating a custom character can take a good long while, even if you know the rules already. The origin characters have most of the basic classes covered and will give you a feel for the game. If you want to change it up, there is a way to change your class and stats partway through act 1. That will at least get you in the game and playing, where there are tooltips that pop up.
This is the fifth version of D&D, released a few years ago I believe. Each version of D&D is called an “edition” and each one contains changes & new rules, characters, settings, stories, etc. Think of it like an update to a video game. Some people prefer old editions, some like new editions. The rules in BG3 are mostly from 5th edition (abbreviated as 5e). Like with video games, the publishers of D&D are called “Wizards of the Coast” so when people refer to editions, they refer to updates released by that particular company. Other companies make other versions, modifications, and campaigns within and like D&D, but only WotC makes D&D editions.
Forgotten realms
This is just the setting for D&D. It’s rather high fantasy, and if you’re playing a bog standard D&D game in real life, this is probably where your story is going to be set. Most of the settings within the Forgotten Realms are set within the large continent of Faerun. FWIW, “Baldur’s Gate” Is the name of a canonical city in Faerun. It’s a very wealthy and prosperous merchant city state. There are other campaigns and stories from other continents in the Forgotten Realms (and from beyond the forgotten realms), but Faerun is by far the most fleshed out.
TL;DR: 5e is the “fifth edition,” which is the most current “official” ruleset for the game. The Forgotten Realms are the official setting for the game. Faerun is the main continent, and Baldur’s Gate is a city on that continent.
Overwatch makes new players do tutorials on each of the heroes now as well as describing all the abilities at any time in the selection screen. I think if you were to explore it again and play for a while you would learn it all really quickly. The characters aren’t really that complex once you learn what is going on haha. Definitely at first it’s just chaos and dunno why you’re dying
Lmao gotcha. I mostly played when it first came out. I imagine the reason it was overwhelmingly negative was the review bombing of the “overwatch 2” which is the exact same as overwatch one except they forced everyone to switch to this one where the only difference is the addition of a store. everything that used to be free cosmetic wise is now payable content.
Lovecraftian horror games. There have been some games in recent years but I think there’s definitely a larger design space for this kind of thing. This could mix with other genres as well like survival and potentially rogue-like stuff.
I think that Lovecraft’s setting is actually virtually the only fictional setting where you’re spoiled for choice, because Lovecraft permitted other people to use his setting. Like, you only get to do a Star Wars game if Lucasarts licenses it, because they leverage their copyright on the setting. Most people and companies who create a setting don’t allow other people to freely use it, and copyright law permits them to make that restriction. But Lovecraft was unusual in that he specifically encouraged other people to build on his world.
Maybe Robin Hood or a small handful of others from history, like Greek or Norse mythology, that developed before copyright law had really become the norm.
I dunno. Maybe there should be some kind of Creative Commons license that permits use of setting and maybe characters, while still keeping an individual work copyrighted, to encourage creation of collaboratively-developed settings like that.
This could mix with other genres as well like survival and potentially rogue-like stuff.
One of the top entries I see on Steam – though I’ve never played it – is an Overwhelmingly Positive-rated game, Disfigure, that appears to be a Lovecraftian action roguelike that just came out a couple of months ago.
Realistic naval fleet combat sims. There’s not a lot out there. I assume that there’s probably limited demand – flying fighter planes seems to be a lot more popular when it comes to military sims. Rule the Waves does keep seeing releases, but it’s not a genre with many decent entrants.
Kenshi-style games. I’m not sure that there is a name for the genre, but sandbox, open-world, squad-based combat with a base-building and economic side.
Mount & Blade: Warband certainly has got some similarities, and it was one of two games that I thought of when trying to think of games that are at least a little similar (the other being the X series from Egosoft, though there the sci-fi theme is pretty different), but it’s also got a lot of differences.
The similar:
You start out as one person.
It’s not especially easy, particularly at the start.
You can control multiple characters in different places in the world, and the companions and yourself are on the order of the number of characters in Kenshi.
You can form military groups – much larger than squads, normally – that are out and about.
There is a base-building (well, capturing) aspect.
There is an economic aspect.
The game world is dynamic, and factions take control of different portions to the map and can be wiped out.
But there are also some pretty substantial differences:
While you start out with small units, M&B focuses on considerably larger armies, and while the battlefields normally have armies enter at a limited rate to keep load on the engine workable (looks like 150 cap by default, increasable to 500), you’re still working with considerably larger groups of units. Larger armies are just generally better, and the end game is hundreds are thousands of units. Kenshi has you working with a squad-level size, and you’re going to know and equip each character.
You’re generally working with formations, not individual units.
Kenshi is about wandering around in a world and discovering what’s there. Unlocking tech blueprints, which are important, really requires traveling the world. There’s a very minimal exploration aspect to M&B – you’re mostly looking at the strategic map, and get dropped into pre-created battlefields when two forced run into each other.
Most of the M&B fighting is between, nameless, expendable soldiers that die in battles. A lot of what you do in the game is to recruit and train them to maintain your supply. Companions are immortal. In Kenshi, characters can die, but you’re aiming to keep all the members of your squad alive.
The economic and military envioronments in Kenshi are unified. You have characters that might be running around in a squad or producing things. M&B has a black-box economy that is pretty disconnected from individual characters. In M&B, most of what you’d do with your companions, if they aren’t in your main army, is to have them run around with their own smaller armies defending territory you hold.
M&B locations are all pretty much similar. There’s the type of soldiers you can recruit and the type of factions that might be nearby, and a few locations that are more-advantageous for different types of industry (which themselves are basically drop-in replacements for each other). In Kenshi, if you’re setting up an outpost in an area that is taxed or has environmental hazards, different power generation capacity, different agricultural or mining potential, or significantly-different monster attacks, it plays out rather differently.
M&B does have a limited form of base-building to the extent that you can capture fixed, pre-designed locations and purchase some upgrades for them, but Kenshi lets you put outposts anywhere on the map, and structures and fortifications anywhere in the outpost.
M&B has a limited ability to affect an economy in that building an upgrade will tend to result in more of whatever that produces, but Kenshi’s modeling the whole shebang; what’s being produced matters a lot more.
Honestly, Starfield has a more-similar outpost-building and economic model to Kenshi. No random traders, but the arbitrary placement of outposts, layout of those, and modeling production is more similar. And the environment affects what you can produce. Though there production is automated, not done by in-game characters. It’s just that in Starfield – at least vanilla; we’ll have to see where mods take the thing – there isn’t a lot of reason to build outposts other than for the purpose of accumulating resources to build more outposts. Fallout 4 (vanilla, at least) was kind of similar. My guess is that Bethesda wants to cater to people who don’t want any base-building too, but it really makes the bases less-interesting.
In Kenshi (and M&B, come to think of it), you really do want to ultimately get outposts to support the upkeep of your characters in the field, and it’s a first-class part of the game.
Don’t get me wrong. I like M&B too. It’s just that in practice, I don’t think that it plays all that similarly to Kenshi. You spend a lot more time traveling and exploring with Kenshi. You have bands of characters that you individually equip and know. The characters chatter with each other and in response to different areas. Expanding the tech tree by exploring the world is important. Characters can change drastically, become much tougher, lose limbs and have them replaced with robotic ones. M&B has one mostly fighting large battles on fixed battle maps, and once you’ve picked up the companions you want around the world, you can mostly settle down. You capture fixed outposts rather than building them and laying them out. Companions don’t individually change things that much militarily (realistic, but less RPGish); their major perk is that unlike regular troops, they are immortal, aren’t killed in battles, so having them fight in each battle constantly saves soldiers. You don’t really see the game world off the strategic map other than on the fixed battle maps. In battle, you control formations, not individual characters (aside from yourself). There’s a black-box economy. A lot of what you deal with is replenishing and training new troops, which isn’t really a thing in Kenshi. A lot of what you do in Kenshi is exploring and traveling, which isn’t much of a thing in M&B. In Kenshi, you have a starting character, but they are otherwise unimportant; you can switch to any other character. In M&B, you can only follow the main character in the game world – that’s what the camera follows on the strategic map.
When I saw your title, space combat games are immediately what came to mind.
I adored the space operas that were FreeSpace and FreeSpace 2 (VIP Volition). I would love for something along those lines. Add in a little bit more management, some rpg/progression elements, even pilot/FPS sections, and it’s dream game for me. It’s one of the reasons I was so excited (and let down by) Star Citizen.
It’s not dead as a genre, but I was in a conversation the other day on the Fediverse – don’t remember whether it was this community or not – trying to figure out what happened to the space combat genre. One guess was that it was just a really good match for the hardware limitations of the time. In space, there often isn’t a lot of stuff near you, so you can get away with making 3D games that don’t have to render all that many objects. And they were popular in the early days of 3D hardware, around the late 1990s and early 2000s. So maybe some of it was that developers would have done other genres, but that hardware limitations pushed more towards space combat.
I think that some of it has to do with a sort of societal interest in space. In the 1950s and successive decades, humanity entering space was very new, was a completely new frontier – maybe a frontier that no life form out there has ever crossed the barrier on. People liked theorizing about what society in space would look like, and so you had schools of architecture that alluded to it, comic books and novels about it, and then later movies about it, and later video games about it. But maybe space just isn’t as novel any more, is part of ordinary life. The video game genre tended not to be hard-realism, but adopted conventions from movies and TV series, like slowly-moving visible laser pulses that make a distinctive, synthesized sound, ship orientation changing ship direction of travel, objects like nebulas based on false-color NASA images, audible explosions, and such, so I think that those were maybe important in building interest. I don’t think that there have really been recent new entrants in movie and TV series that inspired the video games – Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, stuff like that had their heyday in the past too.
I did, and I’m very glad! I set an alarm this morning, made sure everything was good to go. Got the LE right at 10:00:03 and delivery said 1-2 weeks but then the purchase didn’t actually get through until 11:26 after many various different errors. Got the “out of stock” message maybe 5 times by which point it was saying 2-4 weeks lol. At one point had been restricted from “too many attempted purchases.”
I’m just glad I managed to get one. Valve hardware is truly something else. I happily use my 4 Steam Controllers (game nights and I rotate them :)), I got the Index when I was able to have space for VR and after that the Steam Deck was just a no-brainer (went with the 512gb for the anti-glare as I’m not a fan of gloss.)
When they announced the OLED I was a little remiss but accepted that it was gonna happen eventually. No plan to get it or sell the old one even though I’ve really wanted an OLED gaming device since emulating on phones actually looks really good compared to LCD screens.
Then I saw the red themed translucent and apparently something came over me and I’ll have 2 Steam Decks now. (don’t worry, my OG currently has 4 roles so it will still get plenty of use as a music tracker and girlfriend machine… er, machine for her)
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