I will wait until GTA 6 has been out a few years lol. I have a long enough backlog already. Still haven’t started Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Forbidden West, and about 30 other games I mean to play. Patient gaming is the best way
Any good options recommended for self-hosting something similarly functional that doesn’t take too much effort to get up, audit, maintain? Discovery isn’t really important for me, so federated isn’t really necessary, but a cool extra. I’d love to host something or contribute to hosting for my gaming groups, my class or multiple classes at my school, or otherwise. Voice, chat, screen share, camera, would all be great if possible, but range of options would be good. I’m still using Mumble for gaming…
Haven’t tinkered much with Matrix nor do I know much about Revolt, but I’m curious before I look into it deeper if anyone in the community has experience hosting any communication platforms for small, invitational groups.
Nothing comes close to the feature set offered by Discord, Matrix’ bad priorities unfortunately made sure of this. There currently is a project to fix their shit even if it means to break some bad decisions, Tuwunel, however it’s neither ready nor is it clear where it will end up. The previous project it forked, Conduwuit, got bullied into giving up.
You’ll probably be best off with a classic 2-way approach for now. Stick with Mumble for Voice and get something nice for Chat and Organizing like Mattermost or Revolt (or even IRC if you’re a purist). With some luck Discord’s strong enshittification will give projects like Tuwunel the necessary push it needs to force Matrix to finally care for more than just the needs of governments and their perfectionism that gets them nowhere for years now. That or we’ll see some kind of soft-fork with even more bad blood.
Matrix is probably be the best bet atm, although I’m hoping for Spacebar to get more mature as they are aiming for feature parity and compatibility with discord. This way you can host your server with Spacebar, use their client and still be friends with discord users/be in discord servers that haven’t switched yet. Only thing impossible with Spacebar is discord users joining your self hosted server, but once they reach feature maturity (esp in regards to voicechat and videochat) it’ll make switching super seamless.
Yep. I’ve known about this feature for a while. I always think my numbers are insane and someone always comes along and one ups me so while I’m near the right end of the bell curve, I’m by no means at the end.
I’ll be honest I find the ray tracing shit s gimmick that eats up too much resource. I’d much rather just have some awesome games to play, with good looks or not. PC gaming for me has always been about variety anyway. The console looking better never meant anything.
I honestly think some console games look pretty good and perform well. It’s hard to have something optimized when the hardware is so diverse. Similar to iPhone vs android. With that said, PC games without some ass backwards “copy protection” and “anti-cheat” will always be excluded from my lists.
I’d actually never heard this angle but sounds legit. Cutting corners sounds pretty typical of talking head yltyoes that want to try to cut costs no matter what.
i know how the devs cook. i’ve been following this game since closed beta. tons of passion but many actions can really only be taking as loathing their playerbase.
Doing my part to balance out you being ratio’d. Obviously everyone plays this with different expectations, but for some of the players, I think they arent trying to have fun but trying to be the first to find flaws.
I do wanna point out that one of the Horizon games (I believe the second) got pretty screwed by releasing within a week of Elden Ring and didn’t suck. Publishers big and small do need to be careful to not release within a time frame of absolutely massive releases such as Elden Ring and, inevitably, GTA6.
Even if the game doesn’t let you play on release day, I’m willing to bet my kidney that it’ll sell millions of copies and nothing big will be released within a month of it
“Just make good games” doesn’t really work in the age where we’ve got tens of thousands of game releases per year compared to the age of a few hundred games per year.
The failure of a game doesn’t come hand in hand with it being bad. Lots of studios are struggling right now, because there’s just so much out there, and no one wants to compete with GTA.
I’m playing Fallout 4 right now. It’s not the only game I play by any means. Too many new games are overly focused on graphics or monetization. I’m always trying new games and the better ones often don’t have the best graphics. We want 2010 gameplay. Hell, I’ll still play Unreal Tournament 1999 GOTY edition, but older games usually need resolution and texture upgrade mods. Fortunately a lot of great old games actually get them.
Was just now in another thread having nostalgia about this game: Reamlz.
It was distributed as freeware/ shareware back in the 90’s. You had to physically mail the producers cash if you wanted to get the expansions. I played through Balders Gate III recently and honestly, it doesn’t even come close to the replayability that Realmz had.
Realmz was out about the same time as Spiderweb Software’s games (Exile series, later re-released as Avernum series). Both were popular RPGs for the Macintosh (though I believe both had Windows releases as well).
While I did play and enjoy Realmz back in the day, I personally preferred the Spiderweb Software games. More complicated interaction with the world, and I preferred the writing. Less-pretty, though the Avernum re-release was isometric and had new graphics. Have you ever tried them?
I don’t know if I can recommend them in 2025, but if you’re still enjoying Realmz, I figure that the Spiderweb Software stuff might also be something of interest.
EDIT: The current Steam sale, which runs for another two days, appears to have a bundle of all of their games on sale for 60% off. I didn’t personally enjoy the Geneforge series as much as the Exile/Avernum series, and the Avadon series is considerably simpler, and didn’t really grab me. But a lot of the games are also on sale individually, so…shrugs
EDIT2: It looks like Realmz has not seen a Steam release; thought I’d check to see if it was on Steam too.
Me and my friends, we would play together by each getting a character and then taking turns during combat moving each of our characters.
I might buy that bundle on just your recommendation. I never tried those but if its vaguely like Realmz, I want to try it, since I pretty much only play on my steam deck these days.
Hah! I didn’t know this. Back when Jeff Vogel — the Spiderweb Software guy — was just starting out, Fantasoft, the company that did Realmz, published the first three Exile games too.
goes through the rest of the list
I don’t think that anything else they published were RPGs, though I’ve played some of the non-RPG games.
It looks like there were also a bunch of scenarios released for Realmz. I’m trying to remember…I definitely remember playing City of Bywater. I don’t know if I’ve played the other scenarios, though.
If you haven’t played them and can round them up, might be that you’ve only played about a fraction of the content out for Realmz, if what you’re after is Realmz-like stuff. :-)
While new scenarios were released throughout the game’s history, also typically packed along with the game in the next Realmz release, the game ultimately ended up with 13 official scenarios:
City Of Bywater (developed alongside Realmz by Tim Phillips)
I’ve definitely played City of Bywater.
Prelude To Pestilence (1995, Sean Sayrs)
Assault On Giant Mountain (1995, Tim Phillips)
Castle in The Clouds (1995, Jim Foley)
I seem to recall the above names, though I don’t remember the scenario content, if I did play them. Nothing after this rings a bell at all.
Destroy The Necronomicon (1995, Tim Phillips)
White Dragon (1996, Jim Foley)
Grilochs Revenge (1997, Sean Sayrs)
Twin Sands of Time (1999, Sean Sayrs)
Trouble in the Sword Lands (1999, Pierre H. Vachon)
Mithril Vault (1999, Tim Phillips)
Half Truth (2000, Nicholas T. Tyacke)
War in the Sword Lands (2000, Pierre H. Vachon)
Wrath of the Mind Lords (2002, Pierre H. Vachon)
EDIT: There’s also apparently a pretty-inactive Realmz subreddit at /r/Realmz. No GOG Realmz release either, though. Some abandonware sites appear to have it.
<span style="color:#323232;"> Prelude To Pestilence (1995, Sean Sayrs)
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Assault On Giant Mountain (1995, Tim Phillips)
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> Castle in The Clouds (1995, Jim Foley)
</span>
Same. I also definitely played City of Bywater, and I know I had both Assault on Giant Mountain and Castle in The Clouds (this one was giants right?)
I’m stretching my memory too far. I remember the City of Bywater world map, but I can’t even remember the world maps for the other scenarios, if I indeed played them.
This abandonware site appears to have a Windows release:
I have no idea what scenarios might be included, and I’m always a little leery about running binaries from random sites outside of a VM — abandonware can be a vector for malware — so I don’t know if I should recommend using it, but it’s there. There are serial numbers to activate what looks like all the listed scenarios in a comment there, so maybe it comes with all of them.
The company appears to have been defunct for the past 20 years, so I suspect that there isn’t going to be any legitimate re-release.
Curious what makes Realmz so replayable. BG3 has so many unique storylines and endings you’d be hard pressed to play them all. Not to mention character classes and subclasses.
So Realmz is truly open world in a way that BG3 only pretends to be. In BG3, they create the sensation of this huge diversity of endings and paths you can take, but its all pretty much a fugazi: the illusion of choice when actually only a small number of endings are possible. In BG3, the choices add “color” along the way, but they don’t fundamentally change anything about the game, or what its about (like what even is the point of the game?). I have a whole essay of criticism I’ve developed on it, because I truly did enjoy it, but it was so… it pointed in the direction of how much possibility it could have but didn’t execute on it. Its really only an impression of what it claims to be.
There is no ending in Realmz. Its just a big open world. And as you dig, you find more, and more and it just keeps going. But there is no particular path to take. You just can go anywhere and find adventure along the way. There are a huge number of random encounters, and the combat style is basically top down tile based D&D, which BG3 is also, more or less. Then you get into some corner of the map in Realmz, and you find some cave or castle or dungeon to explore… and it just keeps going. And going and going and going. And instead of it being one monolithic story like BG3, its a world in which many BG3’s happen. The spider tower. The kobald army invasion. The castle in the clouds. The necromancers tower.
Another thing is, predictability/ “jail breaking”. Modern games have this expectation that we “know” everything that is possible for an item or method or whatever. This is a big departure from early games where we would often “find out” about what is possible. In modern games when something unexpected happens, the dev’s patch it and change the game. In old games when something unexpected happens… well… thats just part of the game. Dota is a great example of this, where basically, finding ways to break the game to come up with a new strategy was quite literally how the game was played. Its now devolved into a poor impression of itself. In realmz, I remember beating some adventure and its final wizard and getting a wand of polymorph. I used it on one of my characters and it polymorphed them into a red dragon and it killed the entire party. I highly doubt the game developers planned that as a possibility, but game development then was often about creating possibilities, not limiting them. Whenever anyone figures something like that out in BG3, they patch it and the game becomes a little more sterile, a little more boring.
Also, BG3 is just kinda… empty. Which I was really surprised by, considering how many studios create amazing, populated worlds with complex day night cycles and economies. In BG3, once you’ve pretty much cleared an area, thats it. Not much more to do other than advance to the next area. In Realmz, you had to watch your ass if you were really out there, because no-matter what state your party was in, a random encounter can happen at any time, and in that game, death is permanent. Also, wtf is with there not being a day night cycle in BG3? Like wth. I’ve got a damn vampire and they aren’t weak during the day and OP af at night?
There is no ending in Realmz. Its just a big open world. And as you dig, you find more, and more and it just keeps going. But there is no particular path to take. You just can go anywhere and find adventure along the way. There are a huge number of random encounters, and the combat style is basically top down tile based D&D, which BG3 is also, more or less.
Just to comment further, if you’re not a big fan of Baldur’s Gate 3 (or the Paths of Exile series, to name another popular modern RPG) for that reason, I wouldn’t recommend the Avadon series in the Spiderweb Software bundle, as it has the same sort of streamlined “move you through the world to the right places” thing. The Exile/Avernum series has the Realmz-style “go wherever and stumble onto stuff” model that you’re referring to.
Kind of reminds me of the difference between Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds. Like, both are…technically open world games, but there’s very little reason to ever backtrack in The Outer Worlds, and not much placed content to stumble on outside of cities, whereas in Fallout: New Vegas, I’m running all over the place and running into all sorts of stuff, without having the game really drive me in one direction.
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