Most of your write ups seem decently done if you clicked with the game at all, but if you’re going to continue to review things, you might want to do reign in your personal biases a bit.
Low scores for games you didn’t play or realize you don’t understand the appeal of are pretty bad takes.
Vampire Survivors was quite literally one of the hit games of the year when it came out, to call other games of the genre that are following on its coattails “not really a game” and saying people shouldn’t buy a literal genre is just ridiculous. Is FatalZone trying to be some huge blockbuster, no, it’s just iterating on the survivor concept (same as Deep Rock Galactic is doing, which has more polish but less features than most). The game is literally $5 to buy right now in early access and as one of the many who do enjoy the genre, it’s probably worth the price with the content it has now (unknown if it’ll be same insane value VS has been).
Isn't that exactly what lead us to the "every AAA game is an 8/10" meta of current videogame reviewing? I think it's totally valid to make subjective game reviews. Big outlets trying to make their reviews objectives is IMHO the reason why they are totally worthless (for me).
Everyone has a bias and that’s expected and the stating of opinions as opinions is good, the line is stating opinion as fact or review bombing.
I didn’t play it because I didn’t want to log in, isn’t a review of the actual game, it’s at best review bombing against secondary logins. It tells anyone interested in playing the game nothing other than that a secondary login is needed.
The definition of the minimum criteria for what makes a game is pretty nebulous, but survivor styles are well above all but the most disingenuous definitions of what makes a game. Saying it isn’t a game because you don’t enjoy it is not having a bias that causes you to like something less.
The trending of most games to be 7+/10 is largely driven by idiots who tied the success of a game to metacritic scores and publishers who retaliate against games journalists for “hurting” that success by not cooperating with them on future products by providing review codes.
the line is stating opinion as fact
I totally understand what you mean and I usually don't like it either but I think this post is easily recognized as an highly subjective opinion. So I'm fine with the way it's written and wouldn't take it as a fact.
review bombing
This is definitely not what review bombing even means (yes, that's a fact).
People should have spicy takes. I love when someone goes, “I don’t like Dark Souls because it’s too hard.” Or “Not a fan of gore so Doom isn’t for me”. It tells me more about the writer and seeing their perspective.
There’s enough annoying fanboys out there. If I wanted a tamed review, Ill go read some gaming blog thats too afraid to piss off their advertisers.
“I don’t like X game/genre” is a fine take, calling something you don’t like “not really a game" is not, unless you can really justify it not meeting some minimum criteria to be called a game (doesn’t present a challenge or problem to overcome, doesn’t have a fail-state, has no player agency, etc)
I don’t even know where to begin on the question of “reining in my personal bias”, other than to note all reviews are based on a person’s personal bias, and what they know about the gaming format and industry as a whole. I know it’s a tired trope, but everyone has personal bias, and game/game demo reviews should not try to be objective looks at games (it’s near useless). Reviewers should instead make their experience and opinions known from the start, or throughout the review. That way if their opinions are diametrically opposed, readers who don’t share the same opinions can readily discount it.
Also, while you can empathize with and realize that someone might like a game if they’re into that genre, you can only go so far. I have not played Vampire Survivors, but if it’s anything like FatalZone, I will gleefully state it’s not really a game. Or if I want to be less glib, not really a game I’d recommend for others. Again, for you this might be a good cue to discard my reviews as worthless for you. You should make your own reviews in this subreddit in that case, as it could certainly use more posts.
The demo really was an excellent content warning in itself. I hope that’s the actual opening- that way people who buy it and don’t know what they’re getting into can find out real quick, and get their return.
I understand you have a lot of demos to cover, though I can’t help but feel there’s some dishonesty about the Robocop demo. First mission gets you used to killing gangsters in simple corridors, though after that the demo actually gives a lot of focus on side quests, and very traditional “community policing”, including detective work, and many occasions of trying to find the best balance between community lenience and upholding justice. I even managed to avoid a gunfight in one case by finding clues and negotiating some of the gangsters down.
Maybe you played all that part and it just didn’t feel significant. I admit, it just felt pleasantly unexpected to me.
I’m currently going through Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which is my first experience with the Pathfinder system.
While I do enjoy it right now, the beginning was kinda rough (super long rant incoming). Right after the short tutorial, I went to pick up some berries in a spider-infested cave, which wasn’t too bad, just that the spiders have poison that reduce your stats. In hindsight, this wasn’t that bad, just some missing information on my part and maybe bad tooltips, because the poison was supposed to go away after resting, but it didn’t. What the tooltip fails to mention, the stat penalty can stack and every 8 hours of rest removes one stack, so you might have to wait around for a day or so, before you’re back to normal.
Then, while I was still recovering from that (mentally and in-game) I stumbled on a text-only event, where you’re going through some marshes and find a seemingly evil idol. Me, being the Lawful Good monk that I am, of course decide to destroy it, but get cursed in return (-2 constitution). Curses are of course permanent, until you can start to remove them at level 5. I was level 2 at the time. Consumable items to remove them exist, but for some reason, drinking a potion can fail. I guess your character just spills everything over the floor. These potions are also super expensive and the vendor had just two of them, while I had four or five people in my party. Thank god my character is also a time wizard, so I cast Quick Load, and was good as new.
After those two experiences, like an hour into the prologue or act 1, I was ready to get fucked at every turn, but that was basically it. No idea why the devs chose to put these quests and events super close to your starting base.
My only other gripe with the game is the Kingdom Management. After you become a baron, you have to start managing your lands, which is fine in general, but I don’t think the devs have found a good balance, because there are just so many events that are constantly popping up, and I felt like I was making no progress with the actual CRPG part of the game. Regularly I’d leave my capital, just to get a notification that something happened, after like five seconds. So I go back to check it out, and it’s always some unimportant stuff. Experienced players might know that you can ignore these things for a bit, but as a new player, this was just super annoying. Then you also have some projects that force you to skip 14 days of in-game time, while your character is busy, and a few times, when I did that, I got notifications for like eight new things that happened. That’s when I called it, pulled out the mods and basically nerfed the shit out of that mechanic. Events now take only a fraction of their normal time, I can’t fail, and most importantly, I can manage most things, while out on the road. I’ll probably have to skip a ton more days manually, but I take that over the default implementation. FYI, you can turn down the difficulty of the management stuff in-game or even completely automate it (that way you lose some throne room events and interactions I think), I just had the mod installed already, because of a different reason, so I just used that.
Anyway, I still enjoy the CRPG part of the game. The combat is fun, although for a complete beginner to Pathfinder (and little experience with DnD) some tooltips are really lacking information. There are tons of keywords and mechanics getting thrown around, that I have no idea what they do. On your character sheet you’re presented with tons of different scores, and for half of them I don’t know how they got there (the others list a neat breakdown for each bonus you get). I think there are also some bonuses that only apply in certain cases, but aren’t reflected on your character sheet, but I wouldn’t know, because it’s not explained. I’m playing on normal or whatever is the recommended difficulty for newcomers to Pathfinder, and it’s not that difficult, so you can get by.
Other than that, I did “finish” Wolfenstein 3D and killed Hitler. There are more episodes and an expansion, but I’ll skip them. Like I said last week, I found the game kinda boring, it’s just too basic for me nowadays. Just a handful of different enemies, just three weapons, and the levels look all the same.
Now I’m deciding on the next retro shooter, that I want to tackle. Right now I’m thinking either Ion Fury or Doom 64, but something else might catch my eye.
Ohhh, one of my favorite all-time games, only surpassed by the successor.
So first off: Wrath of the Righteous is far more approachable. Better tooltips, better tutorial (including a dynamic one that pops up when relevant), better interface. Just in case you feel like more pathfinder. Note that the powerlevel is far higher in WotR because of mythic powers.
Right after the short tutorial, I went to pick up some berries in a spider-infested cave, which wasn’t too bad, just that the spiders have poison that reduce your stats. I
Fun story: This encounter was heavily nerfed (twice actually, once shortly after release, and then overhauled a few months later). It used to be mandatory and much more brutal :D It literally made some people stop playing :D
Consumable items to remove them exist, but for some reason, drinking a potion can fail. I guess your character just spills everything over the floor.
Hah :D So essentially the potion is a spell in a bottle. Wait, not essentially. That’s what it is. It has a caster level that depends on the creator of the potion. So with that caster level when drinking it, the spell casts Remove Curse against the DC of the curse. And that is what can fail.
After those two experiences, like an hour into the prologue or act 1, I was ready to get fucked at every turn
Sounds like you didn’t encounter the overleveled undead random encounter on the western side ;) Owlcat generally overhauled quite a lot of the encounters to remove difficulty spikes.
My only other gripe with the game is the Kingdom Management.
That is a very common complaint. I liked it, and the time pressure it added. Though only for the first few hundreds of hours (1283h played in total, and without beta testing), later I did what you did.
I’ve read that, but I was planning on playing both anyway, so I decided to start with Kingmaker. Depending on the game, it can be hit-or-miss to go back to an older release by a developer. I just played Divinity 2 after BG3, and missing a lot of the changes and QoL additions that Larian has made, was a bit of a pain at times.
Sounds like you didn’t encounter the overleveled undead random encounter on the western side
I might have gotten it today (two undead, level 14 and 17 or something), but I was already level 9, so it wasn’t a huge deal. Actually, I’m surprised at how much higher level enemies the game throws at you, but you can pretty comfortably win against, as long as you’re prepared (I’m playing on the recommended difficulty for someone new to the Pathfinder system). A few times I had to reload and get a different weapon to actually kill an enemy or change and refresh my spells, because I wandered into an unexpected fight, but did manage to get them down.
Yeah, it was a good idea, as usual, for the reasons you mentioned. I just wanted to shill the successor a bit just so you won’t skip it because some things with PF:KM irked you ;)
(I’m playing on the recommended difficulty for someone new to the Pathfinder system)
You are smarter than 90% of people playing the game ;) It’s crazy, their games have super detailed difficulty settings, and presets with explanations. And yet people go, play on the brutal because they like Dark Souls and then complain it’s too hard. It’s like there’s some mental health pandemic with gamers. /rant
but you can pretty comfortably win against
Besides the difficulty, TB vs RTwP also influence this. I play on Core (actual setting in WotR, requires manual changes for KM, essentially as close to tabletop as possible; then some mods to bring it even closer to TT), but a lot of fights I could not do with RTwP, but they become far easier once I play the game in the way the system was designed.
It was painful ;) TB actually started as a mod, that was later with permission taken by Owlcat and improved for the enhanced edition. During the development, there was almost an even split between devs preferring TB and RTwP, and RTwP barely won. So with the mod having laid some groundwork and it being extremely popular, it was easier to pitch the addition.
And yeah, I’m an old school RPG fan, I love TB. I actually stopped playing RPGs just before RTwP became popular with the Infinity Engine games, and only returned to them with NWN2.
Who would have thought that having your own team/colleagues writing/updating their own engine would rely better results (not always) than using something made from someone else…
The problem is bigger than that. Disclaimer: generalization incoming!
Most game developers are just programmers and nothing else. They know how to write high level languages like C# well enough to write the required functions and that’s it.
Long are the days that devs would need to write their own tools and even engines to put the game running. Some (like Naughty Dog) would even hack the hardware in order to bypass limitations of it.
Yes, there were shitty games made back then , but at least the devs had my admiration. Now, not so much. But this not limited to games, Apps are the same shit. Let’s just use some Chromium framework wrapped as an app and that’s it.
Nah this isn’t true. If you gave the devs a free month I’m sure they could optimize the hell out of things. The issue is there are deadlines and higher priority items. You can technically play cities 2 unoptimized at a lower fps and graphics setting, you’ll have a much worse time playing it if features are incomplete and full of bugs.
They simply didn’t have the time to get to optimization
That’s quite true. A friend told me that the red engine from cdpr is one of the most efficient and we’ll made engine today. It didn’t surprised me because cdpr has been working on it for 2 years after cyberpunk failed to meet the technical requirements they sold it for.
That’s what it takes now for an optimized engine: 2 years on a decade old engine.
Long are the days that devs would need to write their own tools and even engines to put the game running. Some (like Naughty Dog) would even hack the hardware in order to bypass limitations of it.
Re-using engines has been around for basically as long as game development has existed. This idea of some mythical age when game development was more "pure" is a fantasy. What has changed is that expectations on AAA titles has grown to the point where it's extremely difficult to roll your own engine if you are committed to many, many years of work.
Not to mention, it certainly doesn't guarantee that the engine performs well. Look at Starfield or Baldur's Gate 3. Both have noticeable issues with performance, and both are built on in-house engines by their respective studios.
Yeah, this guy is basically harping on the concept of re-usable code. That’s why we praise RollerCoaster Tycoon’s dev, he wrote the entire thing in assembly. Beyond that, everything since 2d has used an engine. Hell, to not use an engine would be wasteful and delay games. What, every game should rewrite an engine?
Even Halo CE, 2002, used an engine. The Blam! engine. Dude’s delusional if he thinks people were drawing individual pixels on the monitor.
That’s why we praise RollerCoaster Tycoon’s dev, he wrote the entire thing in assembly.
It’s ironic that we always seem to praise RollerCoaster Tycoon specifically, as that’s one’s based on the Transport Tycoon engine, which was also by Josh Sawyer and also in x86 assembly.
The problem is that hardware has come a long way and is now much harder to understand.
Back in the old days you had consoles with custom MIPS processors, usually augmented with special vector ops and that was it. No out-of-order memory access, no DMA management, no GPU offloading etc.
These days, you have all of that on x86 plus branch predictors, complex cache architecture with various on-chip interconnects, etc… It’s gotten so bad that most CS undergrad degrees only teach a simplified subset of actual computer architecture. How many people actually write optimized inline assembly these days? You need to be a crazy hacker to pull off what game devs in the 80-90s used to do. And crazy hackers aren’t in the game industry anymore, they get paid way better working on high performance simulation software/networking/embedded programming.
Are there still old fashioned hackers that make games? Yes, but you’ll want to look into the modding scene. People have been modifying the Java bytecode /MS cli for ages for compiled functions. A lot of which is extremely technically impressive (i.e. splicing a function in realtime). It’s just that none of these devs who can do this wants to do this for a living with AAA titles. Instead, they’re doing it as a hobby with modding instead.
Fully (or at least more) customisable controller settings. It’s not difficult. Let me bind what controls I want to what button I want. And adjust the stick dead zone, god damn. Why are you giving me pre set control schemes when we’ve had fully customizable controls figured out for decades? Fuck you game
Yes! To add to this, please let me invert the analog stick camera controls. Both axis! My biggest pet peeve is when a game let’s you invert the Y axis, but not the X… Why? You were so close dammit how much effort is adding the other really?
It makes sense for me in third person games. Imagine a stick stuck in the protagonist head from behind. You are the camera behind the character, imagine you grabbing the stick and rotating the head with that. You have to pull the stick down for the character to look up, and push it upwards to look down. By the same logic, you have to move it left for the character to look right, and vice versa. The stick is the analog stick on the gamepad.
Once you get used to this control scheme, it’s quite hard to re-learn non-inverted controls.
You should look into Steam Input (if you have a Steam Deck, you may have already messed with it), but it allows a mind-blowing amount of control customization for any game you’re launching through Steam. Most games will also have community presets you can easily use.
Inverting view or turning on gyro controls is trivial. It goes shockingly deep. You can create radial menus if you want, it’s wild.
It’s fun when done right. Humor is a thing. And we can joke about these things. At least I can, you can do what you want. :)
If you think about it, humor is much needed in the world today. It’s healthy and good for you to joke and laugh about these things, unless you are pointing at a specific person. You have to know the difference between bullying and humor.
Started playing Space Wreck which has been fun so far. It’s like playing the old Fallout and Arcanum games, or at least as how I remember them. The first act I basically talked my way through without fighting a single fight or passing any other skill checks. I really love these kinds of role-playing games so I’m a happy… err… person :)
I’m already thinking about how to replay this for my second and third run (it’s supposed to be a short game)
Sidenote: Pioneers of Pagonia is by the actual developer of the actual old The Settlers.
I loved it. And yeah, it’s a simple management game without much depth or fuss, but that chill easygoing settling of the landscape is what enchanted me about the original right around 30 years ago, and it worked just as well with the demo. In fact I found that comparing Against The Storm, I kinda prefer the less gameplay that PoP has, exactly because it has less gameplay. ATS sits a bit in the middle, still being a chill town builder but also wanting to be deeper, and in that case I just want a proper 4X or Grand Strategy game instead. PoP is then the exact opposite of that for me, it appeals to the chill&relax part of gaming, a bit like playing Dorfromantik or something.
I’m a bit in a not-yet-released slump. “Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous” gets a new DLC in late November, so not playing that until then. The same company releases their new game “Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader” in December, so I’m not playing the Beta until then. “Vagrus - The Riven Realm” gets a new DLC some time this year, so also waiting there. “Colony Ship” gets out of EA and releases November 9, so obviously not playing EA either.
I had enough of BG3 for now (finished it only twice, it’s not as captivating as the Pathfinder games) and will only eventually replay it with one of those “make it like actual D&D5” modpacks. Regarding D&D5, I should some time check if there are updated fan campaigns for Solasta that use the higher DLC level cap :D
I did plan to replay Wasteland 2, but that will take quite some time, and as I mentioned, upcoming releases.
So after telling you what I have not been playing, what I currently do play is alternate between my typical fallback games: Stellaris (a game I never once finished despite 1080h of time played) and Civ V with the amazing and mandatory Vox Populi mod.
I recently discovered Snowrunner and have been having a ton of fun playing on the switch! I’ve also rolled down the same hill multiple times 🥲 though I’m learning to tame the mud
It is! Last night I discovered the fleetstar had awd in the garage 🥴 I’ve built two bridges, fixed two rockslides, and pulled the truck to the farm in the time since!
bin.pol.social
Aktywne