ProdigalFrog

ProdigalFrog, 5 dni temu

I thought its discussion of how much Civilization focuses on conquest, colonization, and combat over most other systems, to the point of it becoming a bit ridiculous if you try to go pacifist, was interesting. The year it was written didn’t seem a detriment.

ProdigalFrog, 4 dni temu

Ah! Totally misinterpreted your comment then, sorry 😅

ProdigalFrog, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

The cheating problem is off the charts. There was a really good video of someone who investigated how bad it was, and found that about 50% of players were using wallhacks. of matches will have a hacker.

I played it for a couple months. The gunplay was pretty impressive, but the cheaters made it incredibly frustrating, and after seeing that video, I uninstalled and never looked back.

EDIT: The video in question.

ProdigalFrog, 2 miesiące temu

Ah! My bad, it’d been a while since I saw that video.

ProdigalFrog, 2 miesiące temu

There’s a pretty massive item market for this game to use real money for in-game items, where the seller will meet you in a match and drop the gear. So there’s a big financial incentive for people from third world countries to hack so they can quickly acquire valuable items to sell on that market.

ProdigalFrog, 2 miesiące temu

It’s mostly underwhelming, IMHO. Pick it up on sale only, if you can. And make sure you have at least 8gb of vram, or it’ll cease working after you get to Italy.

ProdigalFrog, 2 miesiące temu

the We Were Here series is pretty excellent, with some light horror.

ProdigalFrog, 3 miesiące temu

Since it’s a native linux game, should work a treat on Steam Deck.

ProdigalFrog, 3 miesiące temu

I also wasn’t a fan, mainly due to how often you need to resupply to stay alive. You get a very small window of opportunity to do actual exploration before you need to go find more food and water, on top of gathering a bunch of other materials.

I liked parts of it, but ultimately just got frustrated with the tedious parts and bailed.

ProdigalFrog, 3 miesiące temu

I did build the big ship, but I don’t think I used the planters effectively. I just remember needing to frequently recharge it and repair it.

ProdigalFrog, 3 miesiące temu

If you play the OG deus ex, I highly recommend modding it with the revision overhaul, or GMDX. It’s very clunky without one.

If you like stealth games, I’d recommend the first two thief games (with fan patches to run well on modern systems).

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

I don’t believe it, or rather, I think Warren Spector and Ricardo Bare really didn’t intend for it to be political, as both of them were far more focused on the game parts of Deus Ex; the mechanics, the balancing, the level design, etc, and are seemingly oblivious to how the writers took those puzzle pieces and made it political. Though the extent that Spector is completely unaware of that fact seems unlikely, and instead he almost appears to be whitewashing what the writers intended? Based on his stance that only movies and books can be political (which is a wild take, since games actually seem the most ripe medium for that), he may be trying to frame Deus Ex as A-political because of that.

It’s very odd that this article didn’t interview the lead writer of Deus Ex, Sheldon Pacotti, for an article about the politics of the game. Sheldon absolutely intended for it to be political, and in an old interview even goes into how capital is used to exploit and suppress the working class, which is what leads to radical terrorist groups, such as the NSF. He mentions in the first part of that interview series how the designers would create the levels without any concept for a story (citing the blown up statue of liberty as an example, which the level designer just thought would be an arresting sight to the player, but didn’t consider how it would tie into a wider narrative).

I think Ross’s Game Dungeon on Deus Ex really shows how Pacotti was able to make Deus Ex realistically political by tackling real societal problems that we all now face, and very few games dare touch, which continues to set it apart it decades later.

Also @Coelacanth & @paultimate14

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

I’ve made multiple attempts to finish Deus Ex over the years after giving up each time due to aspects of the gameplay. I would normally never give a game so many shots, but I love so many aspects of Deus Ex, I want to finish it, but I just can’t push myself to continue at certain points.

I think the biggest blockers for me is I love stealth games (thief 1 & 2 are all time favorites), and since Deus Ex does have a stealth system (though primitive), I tried to play it like a stealth game. a vanilla install means that tranq darts make enemies run around like headless chickens for a minute, and knocking people out with the baton is unreliable. Combined, stealthing is both visually comical, and realistically very frustrating to play.

I could deal with that, and I’ve tried switching it up by going more guns blazing, but the gunplay of Deus Ex is just as clunky, with slow firing weapons that deal little damage on fairly bullet spongy enemies. Combat just doesn’t feel good.

I tried mods and overhauls to see if I could rectify either of those points, which do sorta work as a bandaid. GMDX makes stealth WAY more fun by making headshots with darts work instantly, and baton-ing more reliable. With it, I was able to get all the way to France without quitting, but I think due to GMDX, I hit a massive difficulty spike where my stealth build became much less viable, and it once again just became frustrating. Perhaps a gun-build with GMDX would’ve been the winning combo.

I think my best experience was with the Revision overhaul, but by then I had started the game over so many times over so many years, I just didn’t have the appetite to get all the way back to France.

It’s a truly spectacular game in terms of story and open-ended level design, but the mechanics really are a turn-off. I wish my first playthrough had been with the Revision overhaul (though I wish it didn’t radically change the level design so much), but even still, I think it would benefit from a Nightdive style remake.

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

I didn’t mind the RPG elements of the gunplay either, it was how lame all the guns felt to use even with higher skill levels.

The shotguns take way too many rounds to down people, the smgs are pea shooters, and pistols can work ‘okay’ with headshots, but still just feel meh. I assume the sniper rifle is more effective, but I never used it much.

I wish they had made it to where low skill makes reloading and accuracy suffer greatly, but if you do manage to score a hit, it hits hard. That would make shotguns in the early game super valuable, but they could’ve still encouraged stealth and more thoughtful tactics by limiting ammo availability.

Basically the RPG and story elements combined with Tarkov style gunplay and thief-style stealth would be heaven for me.

I’d be curious of your thoughts on revision, if you ever feel like coming back to this comment section by the time you finish it!

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

Hell yeah! We can do this!

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Very insightful. Thank you for your wisdom.

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

I suspect they would’ve brushed it off regardless, they didn’t want to deal with it. There’s another 100k UK petition (The one linked to at the bottom of the OP text) that would force them to re-look at it with more depth which is also ending quite soon.

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

Glad to help out, and thank you for letting me use your well written words! :D

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

Absolute legend.

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

Thank you so much for contributing! :D

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

Already included at the bottom of the text body of the post (though it’s to the StopKillingGames page on it, I’ll swap it to the direct link)

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Just to clarify, this isn’t a normal toothless petition, this is an official EU mechanism that allows citizens to bring problems to the attention of the European Commission, and force them to pass judgement on it legally. You can read more about it here.

It’s good to be skeptical of anything asking for that personal info, but I’d suggest researching into it to confirm that it is indeed legit.

Thank you for signing the UK one :)

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

No worries, I’ll edit it to try to make it more clear.

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

Thank you for contributing!! :D

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

Thank you for your help! :D

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

I think it’s been very hard for us to spread awareness into countries where a majority don’t also speak English, as the organizer and much of the coverage is only in English.

If you know of any big Italian gaming YouTubers or streamers that might be receptive to helping or talking about the campaign, could you reach out to them about it with a comment?

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

Sorry to hear that they were so nasty. :(

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

Helping spread the word is still an option, and would be greatly appreciated! :D

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

Yes! They’ll also be plugging it on their main channel soon.

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

Pretty sure it’s just EU citizens. If you can’t vote in elections there, you probably can’t sign this.

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

The campaign was designed to save all future games, The Crew was just a useful catalyst to launch from, since it was a very visible example of what they were fighting against.

But yes, saving games is pretty minor compared to stopping literal fascism. It’s just a shame that PirateSoftware fucked the campaign so hard, and stopped a big influencer from basically pressing the ‘win’ button by talking about it.

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

Here’s hoping there’s a final push for SKG, then!

ProdigalFrog, 4 miesiące temu

I don’t know. Fascism hates art

Speaking of which…

ProdigalFrog, 5 miesięcy temu

I think the issue is that, as with reddit, a lot of people are only reading the headline and commenting.

ProdigalFrog, 5 miesięcy temu

That does seem to be an influence, though oddly there are some modern wildly popular games, Minecraft being a prime example, that still allow you to self host your own server, so it shouldn’t really be as foreign of a concept as it appears to be to some younger folk.

ProdigalFrog, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

As the graph breaks down, some games are patched by companies to allow them to function offline or to enable self-hosted servers. Mostly its fan efforts to reverse engineer the server code, though.

The point of the stop killing games campaign is to legislate by law that going forward, developers/publishers would have to account for a way to allow the player to host a server or patch the game to run offline when they become unprofitable and are shut down.

ProdigalFrog, 5 miesięcy temu

Here’s a link to the Stop Killing Games campaign, of which the video is about.

ProdigalFrog, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

MS-DOS games are pretty much what GOG built their business on, they still sell quite well. 50’s music is still listened by many (over 57 million views on that one song alone), and often used in movies, though that’s a bit of an odd comparison, almost as if old things aren’t worth keeping around. I mean, people still listen to classical music that’s hundreds of years old at this point, read ancient stories, and look at art from artists long dead. I consider games to be an art form like any other, and worth preserving.

ProdigalFrog, 5 miesięcy temu

I understand, but I’m not really sure why you’re pointing out the exact problem that this campaign is actively trying to solve.