I have yet to see anyone ask “But is it actually fun?” about, say, Baldur’s Gate 3.
Maybe part of the reason why is because games like Hogwarts Legacy don’t respect player agency and spend their time forcing you to play the game the way the developers wanted, while Baldur’s Gate 3 allows you to experiment and try to break guardrails.
Hogwarts Legacy literally won’t let you jump over a fence that your legs are visibly taller than. I only finished that game because I wanted to be able to write correctly about how deeply that game disrespects player choice and is all-in on “you play our game the way we intended, or you don’t play.”
It is 😬 I really appreciated the nuance they covered the topic with because holy shit
It was also weird to hear one of the interviewed players talk about how people were moved to tears because of how patriotic some of the stories were. Really curious what that even means
I guess a “patriotic story” could be made in any country about its respective fight for independence, and/or any war. Something like every character having a well built background, then sacrificing it for the greater good.
Maybe with the goal being to unmask the traitor, but the traitor being an NPC, then everyone learning of everyone else’s sacrifices as the game progressed, empathizing and ending up crying?
Dunno, I guess there could be many ways to make a mostly scripted game a patriotic one, when nobody can say “I throw a box of lit dynamite sticks into the air and cry Leeeroooy!!”, or “A book? I read aloud whatever it says. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh…”
Videos idea: disabled transport in netherlands, how do people move around when they cannot cycle.
Since one of the major copium people have about car dependency is disabled people/elderly have a hard time riding bike. Yet, in reality, it is much more expensive/dangerous to put a disabled/elderly in a car than public transport or a electric wheel chair than in a car.
On the other hand, I am also curious whether a electric wheelchair will congest the bike lane, given the bike lane is kind of narrow.
NJB already featured the tiny four-wheeled car thingy that people use for exactly this. Idk which video exactly, but it’s there for anyone to comb through.
Being orange-pilled is painful in situations like this; you know the exact thing the Dutch already figured out but unless you have the exact video ID and timestamp on the ready you’d have a hard time pushing back the cope-ists. Even the ones that insists there’s no way these people are mobilizing outside of public transport.
This is a meaty demo, taking me a little over 2 hours.
As someone who adored the “City Building” series by Impressions (Caesar, Pharaoh, Emperor) and thought going in that Synergy had similar vibes, it’s about what I expected. It has a lot of similar systems with plenty of different resources, both physical and “well-being,” which is like Desirability. It does away with the really fussy stuff like city walkers and labor availability, and instead gives buildings a range of effect. Travel time for your populace still appears to be important (like Tropico).
It also has its fair share of jank. Building work orders are by far the biggest problem; you can only assign one task, and even when there are available resources for an alternative task, the building will just idle. This is especially bad in the gathering huts because you have to manually select the plants to collect from, and plants have multiple resources (but only one mode is available at a time). I could see this being a recipe for micromanagement hell. There are some other small issues I figure will be resolved for the full release, like missing ambient audio from the settlement itself and untranslated elements, although the translation itself was good (this was developed by a French studio and publisher in case you couldn’t tell; no native English speaker in their right mind would release a video game named Synergy).
Overall, I’m interested. I also got the impression it might be a continuous city campaign, unlike the chapters you’d get in the City Building or Tropico series, which could be a fun change of pace. I’ll be keeping an eye out for a release date.
The graphics engine is laughably bad by today’s standards, the story is bad, the point of the game disturbing (the game focuses around torturing people to get answers, as opposed to one quest might have torture as an option), and the gameplay doesn’t look fun.
youtu.be
Aktywne