You’re free to pronounce it however you want, but considering it’s named after a famous mythological character, you may get funny looks as if you referred to similar mythological characters as “Jod”, “Hey-zeus”, “Bud-hah”, or “Hurk-yoolz”.
Bg3 it’s not an strategy game, it’s and RPG, in fact based in the trrpg rules of d&d 5
Also BG1 and 2, weren’t grided, so it’s not like they doing it to “modernize” the game.
I really enjoyed all xcoms (from the msdos first games, so many hours wasted with xcom apocalypse…) But also enjoyed al bg (including not MMO Neverwinter, icewind Dale, etc)
For me, the only reason to jump on a game early is if it's necessary for there to be a thriving multiplayer community to enjoy the game. That's something you would miss out on by waiting for a sale. That early stage, where everyone is still figuring out how the game works and finding new strategies, can be fun. But I rarely play multiplayer games now, so I just skip that and I don't mind.
If it's a singleplayer game, there's no reason to jump on it early -- and certainly not to enjoy it as a technical spectacle. It'll look just as good five years from now.
I remember replaying the original Half-Life in 2008 for its ten year anniversary, and thinking, "This is still fun, but the graphics are almost distractingly outdated." But when I replayed the original Mass Effect from 2007 just a couple years ago -- which was more than ten years old then -- I thought it looked just fine.
That's a really good point. Sometimes the fun you can have with the game's "multi player" community isn't in the game itself.
Baldur's Gate 3 is probably the best example I can think of. (And I don't have it, and it is really tempting for the reason you just gave.) I actually overheard two people talking about it at a coffee shop today, and three people talking about it on the train a couple weeks ago. I can't think of any other game that has been like this.
The late 90s and early 2000s were a time of rapid increases in game graphics.
We went from DOOM in 1993 with sprite enemies, abstract textures, and technical limits like not even being able to have second story rooms on top of each other to Half Life in 1998 with full 3D characters and objects, physics, and much higher resolution textures.
Jumps in graphics back then could be huge. As graphics get better though, improvements on them become diminishing returns. It stops being going from 2D to 3D or going from block head models with textures pasted on to modeled faces, and starts becoming things like subcutaneous light scattering. Things will keep looking better and better but we’ve long ago hit a baseline with graphics.
Mass Effect was made on Unreal 3. While we are currently on Unreal 5, there have been lots of games released in the intervening years that either used Unreal 3 or a modified version of it.
Yeah, while there is an improvement in graphics, it largely plateaued after the PS3/360 “HD” era. We’re fast approaching a time when a 20 year old game will still look pretty good by modern standards instead of hopelessly outdated.
We’ve also reached a point where the novelty of ultra realism has worn off. People expect certain AAA games to look realistic, but nobody is wowed by it anymore.
(Anecdote time: Personally the last time I was wowed by realistic graphics was Battlefield 3. The Frostbite 2 engine was a noticeable and impressive step up, but ever since then I haven’t felt a sense of visceral awe even if I know graphics keep getting better).
In my mind the graphics themselves barely matter as much as aspect ratio, controls (for some genres), and stability on modern hardware when it comes to judging if a game is “hopeless outdated”.
Since this comment chain started with Half-Life, I admit there’s no way around it looking dated, but it doesn’t hurt my eyes or confuse me as some really old games do (Goldeneye 64 sadly falls into this category). I understand what the game is showing me, and the gameplay, art direction, and tone hold it up for me.
The last time I can recall being wowed by graphics was when I finally got an HDTV in 2008 and saw Oblivion on it (the environment, not the ugly lump of clay people). The jump to HD was huge, but ever since then it’s been incremental advancements.
I’m not sure I’ve seen it posted here, a little older, but the TellTale Walking Dead games are killer. You make full choices that affect your game later. Tons of fun, not a ton of action gameplay but the stories told are next level IMO
Pathologic 2 - it’s a really stressful game, but I think it’d be perfect for the criteria. The choices matter aspect are intertwined in both how you spend your time (it’s limited and you can’t be everywhere at once), and in quests (the more traditional choices, like pick A or B or C). Don’t want to spoil any more but it’s amazing, you don’t need to play the original.
Besides it, I’ve also heard good things from Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, though I haven’t played it personally.
Or, y’know, go with the original version of the trolley problem, where you start with the classic formulation (do you pull the lever?), then move to a new scenario;
“You’re a doctor, working in a hospital that has been cut off from outside resources by a disaster. You have five patients, one in need of a liver, one a heart, one a pair of kidneys, one a set of lungs, and one a pancreas. You have no suitable organs available, and all five patients will die without transplants, but there is a healthy young janitor working in the hospital who, by a stroke of extreme luck, is a compatible donor for all five patients. You could kill the janitor, harvest their organs, and save five people. Should you do it?”
Fascinatingly, almost everyone opts to pull the lever in the first part, but refuses to kill the janitor in the second, even though they are, from a deeply utilitarian perspective, the same choice. Unravelling why we see them as different is where things get really interesting.
Level 1 - one person Level 2 - the kids Level 3 - best friend’s mom Level 4 - cancer cure guy
None of it matters in the long run anyway, so might as well pick the choices that affect you directly. Toughest one in this is the best friend’s mom definitely.
Control. Liked it despite being in 3rd person view up until the mezzanine fight an hour or two in, then realized that the enemies are just dumb high DPS bullet sponges, the PC is a low DPS squishy and fighting from a cover or any other tactical approach I'm used to doesn't work.
EDIT: There was also a spellcrafting mod for Skyrim where the endboss was immunebto all magic and would teleport away as soon as you got too close while summoning a bazillion powerful minions. At level 50...60 it was litwrally impossible to figjt the bastard. After many tries I just console killed the bugger and was done with it.
I’m about 8 hours into it, and I would say try it again, and once you get the launch ability rely on that as your primary weapon. I only really use the gun in a pinch or against enemies that can dodge launches.
Maybe I'll give it a retry at some point in the future. If I can recall my forgotten Epic login credentials, that is. Too busy with the thargoid war for the next few years, though.
I also bounced off Control. Really wanted to like it. 3D metrovania in a SCP inspired setting ,how cool is that. The game is a technical marvel. How Remedy got that game to run on base PS4; I will never know. However the gunplay just feels off. I don’t like how the gun recharges instead of an ammo reload system. I feel like I’m too squishy. The weapon mods feel materially pointless. Don’t get me the wrong the setting so super unique. Most of my time playing was spent glossing over all the lore bits. “Threshold Kids” is horrifically fascinating. As if it came straight from creepy pasta. I wonder if I would enjoy Control way more if it was a limited series on Apple TV.
If you want more cinematic games, the Quantic Dream portfolio has a couple. Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human are both notable examples. I remember having some serious anxiety playing Heavy Rain, in the best way.
I actually liked Beyond 2 Souls, too. Didn’t age well at all especially with the naked model allegations and all, but playing it at the time there were some intense moments in there.
I can’t speak for the other games mentioned in this thread, but in the case of Heavy Rain it was very enjoyable that often you had to make quick decisions or the game would choose for you
Hahahahaha, you’re right. My choice of words is very debatable, but it’s true that the moment you had to make a choice was implemented well and I was very concentrated in the heat of the moment
No it’s definitely enjoyable, I’m just kidding around. It’s that it’s the complex kind of enjoyable that is fueled by adrenaline and harmless anxiety. I’m a big horror fan, so it feels familiar to that fandom.
I’d be more supportive of Valve if Team Fortress 2 wasn’t a dumpster fire to play in 2024. The game is infested with bots that make anything outside of independently moderated community servers unplayable.
Even Counter Strike 2 has dogshit anticheat despite the boasts that VAC Live was a solution that could surpass Vanguard, to the point where the only good competitive experience you can have is to play on FaceIt or ESEA servers with their own ring 0 anticheat solution.
If you can only have a good experience by installing malware, you don’t have a good experience.
I really should finish building that nvidia jetson based hardware anticheat that’d allow anyone to cheat even in vanguard protected games with perfect accuracy for just ~150$. Ring 0 anticheat’s only use is to spy on you and yet people will continue defending it until someone’s proven just how useless it is.
Can only speak for the higher ranks of both games but cs2 is currently unplayable above 25k elo since its almost guaranteed to have 1 out of 10 players cheating. While i only encounter a few cheaters each season in immortal in Valorant.
I mean TF 2 is 16 years old. They just don’t really support it anymore. I can’t comprehend how it’s still in or close to the top 10 steam games by player count when it’s been dead for years.
It seems like it would have been a lot more friendly to have reached out personally first instead of via lawyers initially. Seems like these guys would have been receptive.
Maybe there’s some legal reason they couldn’t, but doesn’t seem like it to me.
I guess I don’t. I would have assumed the team would have mentioned it. Especially if there was communication, but it moved forward to DMCA request anyway (i.e. there was a disagreement or something). But seems like the team would have responded pretty quickly.
But yeah, I don’t know for sure.
Still, it seems way more likely that Valve legal just went straight to DMCA.
I have this weird thing where I love a game to be challenging because it’s not engaging if it’s easy, it makes the game boring to me, but at the same time I despise grinding and generally rote gameplay with the only purpose of amassing more points to be able to challenge the next boss. But very few RPGs I like are like that. Baldurs Gate 1/2 are excellent games that I love but I get extremely frustrated by some encounters which just feels like absolute bullshit and require extreme grinding or going off to do a myriad of side quests to bump up your level. Same holds true for Pillars of Eternity which I also love.
Though I tend to be a stubborn person so I generally come back a week or month later if I get stuck but I tend to put the game down once I’ve dealt with the immediate challenge and realize that I need to do all that boring stuff again for the next boss and then I just don’t start.
I definitely had that experience with Baldur's Gate 2, but I'm about 20 hours into Pillars of Eternity so far and very much not having that experience. Pillars seems to give me all the information I need to know to get through an encounter while BG2 will just say "weapon had no effect" without telling you that this monster can only be defeated by a +3 weapon.
Well the “early” fight with the noble / king / count can’t remember in PoE had me tearing my hair on the difficulty I played on, took intense space bar action and every trick I could muster in terms of abusing targeting and kiting, etc to win it. I don’t know how many times I reloaded and how many days I tried, must’ve been in the hundreds by the end when I finally got it due to a few lucky crits and rolls.
I haven't found a noble, king, or count 20 hours in yet, but there was a quest that said I had to go fight Lord Raedric, and then I'm warned by both an NPC and a quest description that this is something I should do later because it's going to be very difficult. Is it possible that you missed the warning and went to do something late game earlier than you should have?
It’s a long game, I think I just overestimated how far in you’d be at 20 hours. Since I really jammed with the game (and it was before I had 3 kids 😂) I had done all the side quests I had found but I hadn’t explored further away than the zones the side quests took you to. I will say though that plot wise it would make absolutely no sense to save it to the “late game” if that’s even possible. But that is the fight I was talking about, 100%.
Valve are well within their rights here. This isn’t new content or transformative. It’s literally trying to remake the same game using the same engine. These devs knew they were playing with fire. Never come between GabeN and his hats.
Black Mesa is a remake of a single player game that Valve wasn’t planning on remaking any time soon, more profitable to make it official and take a cut
TF2 actively still makes them sht tons of money, no profit in splitting the fan base
Imo, Trademark. Black Mesa is a concept from Half-Life, but “Black Mesa” to the best of my knowledge wasn’t a registered trademark. “Team Fortress/Team Fortress 2” are registered trademarks however, and that significantly changes the value and functionality of the specific terms.
Yes, but it’s easier to give permission to use concepts that don’t infringe on trademark than it is to give permission on something that could be argued in court as muddying a trademark.
I know they require permission either way, but what permission they’re actually asking for changes based on what terminology they use
Well my point is that since the content is directly related, it actually doesn’t matter what they called it. It would’ve been exactly the same amount of infringement if they called it, “happy fun times at the science lab”.
The only differnce is it would’ve been less obvious to identify.
I get your point, my point is the infringement would be less egregious without trademark and thus easier for Valve to turn a blind eye to, or even potentially officially endorse via some potential deal à la Black Mesa.
But hey, I am fully willing to concede that I am just a layman with enormous distance from this topic and no specific expertise or insider knowledge, so the possibility of me being wrong is high
My thinking is that it was hot garbage that was trying to milk the TF2 name to grow their own fanbase. And valve didn’t want to be associated with that.
My guess is that Black Mesa looks great, had passionate people who were really communicating and engaging with Valve/community, didn’t infringe on the Half-Life trademark and it felt like a step forward, which is why it was allowed to continue AND even be brought to market.
Unfortunately it’s not just well within their rights, it’s their legal obligation. The stupid situation that is America means that for them to be able to maintain their claim of ownership on the IP trademark, they have to both actively use the trademark and actively police unauthorized use of the trademark by others. If they don’t, they risk losing the right to claim the trademark, which wouldn’t just mean independents running servers for the game, but also would mean unscrupulous entities could produce and sell merchandise featuring the trademark en masse without having to seek permission from or pay any commissions to Valve.
It’s shitty, but it’s more shitty because of the stupid system we’ve built than because of any intentional malevolence on Valve’s part, imo.
Important caveat: I am not a legal professional and it is entirely possible my understanding of trademark law is flawed, but this is my earnest understanding of the situation.
It is hardly incumbent on copyright owners, however, to challenge each and every actionable infringement. And there is nothing untoward about waiting to see whether an infringer’s exploitation undercuts the value of the copyrighted work, has no effect on the original work, or even complements it. Fan sites prompted by a book or film, for example, may benefit the copyright owner. See Wu, Tolerated Use, 31 Colum. J. L. & Arts 617, 619–620 (2008).
I play a lot of puzzle games. Some of them are pretty hard (the later levels of Tametsi take quite a while to crack).
But this one is on a completely different level. If there is a more brutally punishing sokoban-family game on existence, I have no idea what it might be.
Stephen, if he exists, is most likely condemned to roll sausages eternally in hell, for the sin of making this game.
Baba Is You is fantastic, and I think its difficulty curve is much, much more reasonable in the beginning than Stephen’s Sausage Roll. I haven’t finished it, but I didn’t utterly bounce off it either.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne