Oh yeah, I have no doubt that Larian saw no need to block that feature but had their hand forced, they always were extremely modding friendly and welcoming of player made content
Larian has always supported modding and D:OS 2 included a GM Tool, but BG3 belongs to WotC/Hasbro which likely limits what Larian can allow players to do, officially. My assessment comes from many years of watching how Swen and Larian treats players and how WotC/Hasbro treats players. But, if you enjoy snarky cynicism, I am not going to piss on your birthday cake.
IF you’re correct, then hasbro would just force them to fix it, and it’d become a never ending game of whack a mole, where probably every update has to break existing mods based on the hack to further disuade people.
I’m interested in knowing what your issues with it are. As someone who never played the first, I found it a pretty incredible and innovative RPG. Probably the biggest disappointment is just that I wish there were more monsters to fight, which I understand was a criticism of the first game until it’s Dark Arisen expansion.
I’m really speaking for myself here, but my main issues were the micro transactions that are in the game. Before the game was released, it was announced that you can use real money to purchase wakestones to revive yourself, rift crystals to hire stronger pawns, a portcrystal to fast travel, and even to change your character’s appearance (as well as some other items). After the game’s release people quickly realized that buying these were not necessary at all and they could all be obtained easily through normal play, but the damage was already done. It left a sour taste in my mouth and made it seem like the devs or the publisher were not confident in the game and felt like they needed to add a way to milk some more cash out of the people who bought it.
I mean, that’s just every Capcom release now. It has nothing to do with their confidence or anything, they just add pointless microtransactions because some suit at the company thinks it’s a good idea. It’s the same shit with Devil May Cry 5, all the recent Resident Evil games, literally everything they published. If that’s honestly the only thing keeping you from playing Dragon’s Dogma 2, you’re making a mistake.
It’s not really much of an argument, it’s just stating facts. I’m not for the microtransactions, I think it’s confusing that they would add such a thing at all, but they’ve consistently been doing it for all of their published games for nearly half a decade now. I’ve just chalked it up to a cultural difference since Capcom is an Eastern publisher, and on the sliding scale of scummy microtransactions it’s pretty close to the bottom.
Their implementation of it just feels like they don’t actually want you to buy the microtransactions. In Dragon’s Dogma 2 for example, one of the most useful things you could buy is a Port Crystal, since it lets you setup a location to fast travel to and they’re reasonably rare to find. However, you can only buy one maximum, and you don’t really need them at all in the early game. By the time you would need one, you’ll have collected like 3-4, and getting an extra one would be honestly pointless. You would think that they’d change gameplay in some fashion to encourage you to spend money, but after finishing the game I had tons of all the stuff they were trying to sell.
Ah, I see what you’re saying. Yeah, I agree, their implementation is weird, but I like it that way since there’s less temptation. As you said, I never felt like I was missing out on anything by not buying any of the MTX.
Unless there’s a multiplayer aspect where it gives an unfair advantage, while it might be a bit unsavory and potentially predatory, I think being able to get those mtx in game “legit” without it being a slog is honestly much less shitty then other MTX I’ve seen.
I agree. As long as I can get the same items in-game relatively easily, then I’m fine with someone else spending money to make their game more enjoyable. I have more than enough wake stones and port crystals or whatever to make my game enjoyable without having to grind to get them, so I don’t care if someone else skips the minor steps I put in for them.
What’s wild to me is that you can just use cheat engine if you want to get those things without spending cash. Or install mods. I don’t enjoy grinding and that’s usually what I do when I want x amount of potions or crafting components.
As someone else mentioned, the microtransactions existing put it in a bad light to start
My main issue however is just how UTTERLY UNPLAYABLE it was for most people’s systems on launch. The number of crashes and performance issues rivaled that of even Cyberpunk, and I still regularly play Cyberpunk. it was a complete and total disaster for many many people, and while it’s likely fixed by now it was such a struggle and headache to get through that I’ll likely never finish it.
This is a real valid issue. I’ve heard they finally put out a performance fix, but have not personally tried it out myself to confirm. It’s definitely the kinda game where you’ll need cutting edge tech to make it look beautiful, and it can look incredible, but that doesn’t excuse the abysmal performance on lower end hardware.
I’ve personally got a lot of issues with it. It feels like the first game stripped of a ton of charm. The story has so many plot lines that feel pointless. The post game gameplay loop is, imo, inferior to the first game’s. Not to mention the lack of variety in not just monsters but gear.
My biggest gripe though was how it just sorta ended. I didn’t even know I was heading into the final boss fight when I got there. It felt like it was meant to be more of a mid game climax but, nope, here’s the final boss.
A lot of my complaints can extend to DD1 as well but the charm of the game helped me get over all of its faults. Handing me essentially the same game with little improvements (and new faults, I’m looking at you dragon plague) was not the move.
As much as I liked voice acting in Disco Elysium, I didn’t like the narrator. He kept stammering (not sure if it’s the right word… kept making unnecessary pauses) and it was really tiring).
I love how people obviously have no idea how Lemmy works and they’re just ok with ignorance. The reading comprehension is a train wreck off the charts.
It is the exact opposite of that. Easily the best paced strategy game in years. This thing moves. It flows. If Anno had somehow managed to channel the narrative of Snowpiercer and the compulsive clicky crunch of Clash of Clans it would be this.
It's really, really good.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've promised mutually exclusive things to a bunch of council members and I have to somehow navigate a multi-party system without being forced to use the elderly for food.
If Anno had somehow managed to channel the narrative of Snowpiercer and the compulsive clicky crunch of Clash of Clans it would be this.
Depending on how you read it, that explains why FP1 did not have the staying power nor depth nor draw of Anno. 😛 Still enjoyed playing through it once, but as far as best-paced goes, I don’t think the granted-much-newer Against The Storm can be beat in that regard, successfully managing to remove the rote nature of most long-tail city building from the genre - even FP1 sadly has that, more on account of how shallow its underlying systems are though, not that the campaign is done too long.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve promised mutually exclusive things to a bunch of council members and I have to somehow navigate a multi-party system without being forced to use the elderly for food.
This is kinda what I mean, actually. FP1 sells its narrative and atmosphere and story super well, even if once you try the waters, it becomes painfully obvious stuff like that is just a story-cover draped over a very rudementary core. These decisions are trivial in their nature and effect even as they sell themselves as being sweeping. The core directional decision sounds gruesome, but never truly amounts to much mechanically, so it peels off pretty quickly, too.
Either way it’s just about maxing your tree depth so you essentially “beat” the game as people no longer become unhappy, and then optimize grid layout a bit (not even much) to survive the ending.
Don’t get me wrong though, FP1 was fun to play. In hindsight it’s a mediocre city builder polished to an absolute gleam, which makes it “good”. I would not say it’s more than that, tbh, but then again it kinda doesn’t have to be, either.
Right now I'd say on that continuum it's probably FP2>Against the Storm>FP1, but I need to play more FP2 to know for sure.
I mean, I will give you that Frostpunk does trade off some procedural complexity for the ability to give you narrative scenarios, but that's not a bad thing. I am waaaay past needing every game to be an evergreen forever thing these days.
That said, if anybody is just hearing about Against the Storm now, they should go play Against the Storm. Against the Storm is also good.
I need to spend more time with it, but there is an unexpected level of nuance to that, isn't there? You can drag your feet a LOT, and you can promise a choice on the next law to be enacted or to research a technology without comitting to it actually being deployed. Accurately conveying democracy in a game is pretty much impossible, but I do like how well they let you play the policy delay game.
Tedious: too long, slow, or dull; tiresome or monotonous
I think what you were going for was challenging and/or punishing. The first game explicitly has ends to each city type, and I certainly wouldn’t describe watching the city steam a man alive to get the people to tolerate you putting sawdust in their food “dull”
Even if you just want to chill you can easily use cheat engine to give you infinite resources and it’s still challenging and captivating believe it or not. I played through all the campaigns that way and enjoyed them all. People really need to give a shot to cheating in single player games they’re iffy about, sometimes it can create the experience you’re actually looking for
Completely agree. I played through a few times and lost each time, but wanted to see the ending of the game so I turned on cheats for extra resources and still found it difficult, but overall I was able to beat the game and enjoyed it! Especially when life is busy, I see no issue with the occasional “cheating” in single player games to get the experience you want!
It’s a “survival city builder,” so it’s easier to lose than most. It has some serious style and in the first game has some tough decisions between doing what’s humane or doing what benefits you mechanically. As an example, for dealing with the dead you can create a cemetery where the dead can be remembered, reducing the malus to the hope of your people when someone dies. Alternatively you can create a snow pit out in the cold to preserve the bodies for organ harvesting, healing the sick faster and preventing some deaths but reducing hope overall.
I’m biased because I’ve played the first game for over 200 hours, but if it’s on sale definitely give it a try if you think the art looks cool or like city builders. It’s best played in winter when it’s already cold outside. I first played it during the polar vortex a few years back and it was awesome feeling the cold creep into my room as I tried to keep the cold from taking my people.
I’ve also played two playthroughs of Frostpunk 2 the last week and it feels like a larger scale escalation of the first game. If you play the first game enough you learn build orders and what to research first which can become rigid, the sequel feels a lot more fluid in deciding what to build toward next. A law or building has a smaller impact overall but there are enough of them that it feels like building a house of cards that you hope can weather the literal storms that hit you.
The new one is more focused on the district level though right? IE you’re not building around the generator, just where to build new generators, mines, etc?
Yes, instead of building individual houses and mines for a few hundred people, you build districts for thousands of people. Instead of heat levels per district, there are five “bad things” that have levels, food, sickness, cold, squalor, and crime. If you don’t produce enough of something like heat from coal/oil the cold level will start to rise to different levels depending on the percentage of the need met (if you make 1/4 the heat demanded, it gets really high). Each level affects other problems, so high levels of cold leads to higher sickness, high levels of sickness reduce the number of available workers, which makes it harder to keep housing districts running, which you need to keep enough shelter or else cold levels rise more.
There are also multiple ways to solve the issues this causes. If you can’t find or exploit a new source of heat yet, you could build hospitals in housing districts to counteract the increase in sickness and keep that level low, preventing sickness, or you could pass a law like family apprenticeship that increases the percentage of your population that can be used as workers (kids helping their parents) so you can afford more people being sick. You could also shut down some material or food production to save heat demand or workers, but then you need to have big enough stockpiles to survive the deficit, or you might be dealing with hunger from food shortages (which increases sickness by the way) or crime from material goods shortages.
And the worse things get, the blacker the edges of the screen get as tensions rise, trust falls, and your own hope outside the game wavers, which get’s really intense. But that only makes it all the sweeter when that one district, building, or law you needed finishes and you see that beautiful word while hovering over the problem killing you; “diminishing.”
I think I went on a bit of a tangent there, but I have really been enjoying my time with the game so far. The one issue I have is the game chugs right now. On an RTX 2080S I have the resolution down to 1080p and framerates still hover around 40. Maybe it’s my CPU, but by the end of my last game building one mega metropolis even the music was skipping repeatedly as the game tried to keep up. I do really hope they make it run better going forward.
I’ll admit, I’ve kept no interest in the game or its sequel because the concept just sounds depressing. Similar to Dark Souls’ plot; “Life sucks, you accomplish nothing more than survival, and innocent people die anyway.”
It’s currently free on psplus so I wanna try it. I’m always iffy on those games cause just learning the mechanics can take so long and I just wanna play already
What this post doesn’t tell you, dear reader, is how Frostpunk will kick you in the dick repeatedly and you’ll learn to like it. It is a fascinating and difficult game, and not one to take lightly if you struggle separating digital game characters from real life empathy.
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