Zagorath

Zagorath, miesiąc temu

It is genuinely hard to describe just how bad this is. I did the best job I could of my own review over on the official Age of Empires forums. Its worst sin is probably the simple fact that it barely even feels like a game where you make choices. You just click what it tells you to do.

It’s telling that they don’t have an official subforum for this game, although there is one for AoE1, 2, 3, and 4, and Age of Mythology.

Zagorath, miesiąc temu

I don’t think so, why? I only played it very briefly, but I thought it had a small but happy fanbase still playing on third-party servers.

Zagorath, miesiąc temu

This kind of stuff? None. It’s shockingly bad.

But a real Age of Empires game? Hells yes. This was announced not long after the AoE2 and AoE4 ports to console & controller had shown to be successful (at least critically—no idea how they’re doing commercially). So I thought that they had cracked a way to do satisfying RTS gameplay on a mobile device. It’d be great to be able to play a quick Skirmish on the bus, or while spending time away from home without my computer.

So when a few aoe creators showed previews of the game back in February this year, I was rather surprised and very disappointed to see that the game has absolutely zero resemblance to an Age game. That the worst fears of it being a shitty rip-off were completely true. Thanks to those previews, I was not surprised on release this week—though the extent of just how bad even the narrative side of this is was still overwhelming.

Zagorath, 28 dni temu

I had a read over the rest of that review. Damn it was a good read. And sadly very, painfully accurate to my experience.

Zagorath, 25 dni temu

Yeah I’m not really sure either. I get the sense that either it got better over its lifetime or over time people came around to it à la the Star Wars prequels. But I don’t really remember it. I played it a little early in its life but don’t remember anything about it.

Zagorath, miesiąc temu

I can’t think of any video game that fits that description. But I wish I got into RPGs earlier. My first role playing experience was near the end of my first year of uni. I wish I could have played D&D or other RPGs from when I was in high school. They’re such a blast.

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

They’d have very little chance in a copyright suit and they know it. Because you can’t copyright game mechanics or general concepts, and those are the things Palworld pretty obviously copies.

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

I doubt it. Other forms of AI could be useful, but generative AI? I doubt it.

And tbh even deep learning through neural networks doesn’t seem to be making the leaps we’d hoped for. AoE4 promised, prior to release, a machine learning–based AI would be delivered down the line. It’s now almost 3 years since release and we haven’t heard a thing about it.

Maybe eventually we’ll be able to easily train a machine learning algorithm to play any game at a wide variety of skill levels (or at a very high level, if not at customisable levels), but it doesn’t seem like it’s any time soon.

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

See also: Born Sexy Yesterday

Zagorath, 2 miesiące temu

They’ve got options.

• never build in forced server components to begin with
• patch out the need for the server as part of the last update before support ends
• give buyers access to run their own servers with an officially-provided executable and set the client to connect to that executable
• open source the whole thing

And maybe others. It’s about making sure that a product you have paid for actually works as it was sold to you. It’s honestly a really basic consumer protection concept. You sell me a television and it stops working within a reasonable lifetime due to your own failure, and you’re obligated to repair or replace it. The same should be true of software.

Zagorath, 3 miesiące temu

And here’s the Half As Interesting video referenced in the bit about sirens.

Zagorath, 3 miesiące temu

Ah, that explains why the auto-suggested title didn’t work here when it did work in !nebula. My damn mouse has a habit of double-clicking when I use the button I have set to paste.

Anyway, link should work now.

Zagorath, 4 miesiące temu

To me, the word sexting implies very explicitly sexual content. If it’s with a minor, far more mild content could still be inappropriate.

Zagorath, 5 miesięcy temu

The Extended Edition was like the HD Edition of Age of Empires 2 (now called “Age of Empires II (2013)” on Steam). This is more like the Definitive Edition. Significant graphics improvements (as opposed to just taking the existing graphics and upscaling them), as well as new content and probably QoL improvements.

Zagorath, 5 miesięcy temu

AoM: Retold is using the AoE3: DE engine, according to comments made back around the time it was first announced.

Which is amusing, since AoE3: DE’s engine is based on the original AoE3 engine, which in turn was based on the original engine of AoM.

Zagorath, 6 miesięcy temu

I know this is a controversial take, but I really intensely do not like Half Life.

I have issues with it from a narrative perspective. I have no idea who it is I’m fighting or why. It feels like an incredibly forced “oh, we need an excuse to throw some baddies at the player” premise.

But the main problem I had was mechanical. It’s just not a fun game to play. The gunplay was fine, but then it forces itself to throw a bunch of puzzle and platforming mechanics at you, and just…why? It’s so, so terrible at them. Running up to the edge and jumping will more often than not really in you falling because of a misalignment in perceived location and where the game’s engine says you are. Boxes, which you have to move around to solve the puzzling, fly around at a million miles per minute, making the fine control needed to successfully solve the puzzles very, very difficult. And ladders…don’t even get me started about ladders.

I couldn’t bring myself to finish the first Half Life, let alone start on the sequel.

Zagorath, 6 miesięcy temu

I’m not a big shooter player. I had played a fair bit of Battlefield 2 multiplayer, the CoD4 campaign multiple times, as well as games like Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the first game with that title…) and Mass Effect (I think at the time I had played only 1 and 2).

I actually thought I had played the Source version of it, but my Steam history says otherwise. I was playing the OG version, in 2014.

Zagorath, 6 miesięcy temu

Sure, and I am in no way suggesting that it was a bad game in its day (especially now that I know at least one of the issues I had with it was a bug introduced long after the fact). But I am suggesting that it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as some people like to insist it does. It’s the “Seinfeld is unfunny” trope, except that that relies on the idea that people today don’t find Seinfeld very funny; the difference is that I regularly see people saying that yes, Half Life is still an excellent game if you play it today.

And for what it’s worth, the game I have put the most hours into on Steam (and by 2x the 2nd place game—which is a more recent entry in the same franchise) was released just 10 months after the original Half Life. Granted, I’m playing on a 2019 remaster with upgraded graphics and some new QoL features, but it’s the same basic game, and had a vibrant community still playing on the 1999 version all the way up until the '19 remaster. It’s a game that I think really does hold up very well today, albeit in an entirely different genre.

Zagorath, 6 miesięcy temu

Thtat’s the one! (And my #2 is AoE4. AoM is #3, and AoE3 is #5. All these considering only Steam play time.)

Zagorath, 6 miesięcy temu

Haha yeah, when I was young I played a fair amount of Age games, but never playing them in their normal intended fashion. A lot of using the cheats, playing the campaigns on easy mode, and some custom scenarios that largely don’t use actual economy management that’s at the core of the game.

Only got into the more competitive side of the game after the DE release in 2019.

Zagorath, 6 miesięcy temu

Note: this is copy/pasted from my comment on the Nebula version. Time codes might be slightly off.

The stock clip used at 3:20 involving a driver unabashedly on their phone is brilliant.

The 5:45 clip of a dude in a bigfoot costume cycling through Tokyo was unexpected.

6:00 the self-shout-out had me laugh out loud.

The idea of lowering local street speed limits not actually making your trip take much longer is so true. Brisbane-based cycling safety advocate Chris Cox has a video where he gives a demonstration. He drives the same route twice, once sticking to 30 km/h on the local streets, and once trying his best to get up to the speed limit of 50 km/h on those streets. (Driving to the predominantly 60 km/h speed limit on arterial roads.) The video on the whole is actually incredibly similar to this one, down to the safety/speed curve, the FOV comparisons, and the dismissal of the ridiculous arguments against 30 km/h. Because yeah, Jason’s words in the conclusion to this video are so right: the data is really, really, really clear here; at some point we have to realise that anybody fighting against lower speed limits within cities is either wilfully ignorant or they’re a selfish arsehole who values their convenience more than other people’s safety. But here’s a timestamped link to the bit of Chris’s video where he starts his experiment. It took a whopping 9 extra seconds. 9 seconds, on a 10 minute journey.

Zagorath, 6 miesięcy temu

Ek=1/2 mv^2

fwiw, Lemmy actually supports both subscript and superscript, though the syntax is a little weird if you’re used to Reddit. ~text~ is subscript, ^text^ is superscript. (Unfortunately support on mobile clients—even Jerboa, made by the official Lemmy devs—is rather lacking.)

Ek=1/2mv^2^

But yeah, that’s a really good point. I wonder how long you’d have to be travelling at 60 km/h to make that extra acceleration worth it in terms of fuel efficiency.

As a separate question: people would probably often be willing to sacrifice their fuel efficiency if it meant substantially shorter travel times. I wonder how much this would actually work. On highways it’s definitely going to be a huge factor, but on the sorts of inner-city stroads that are usually posted at 60 km/h, I suspect you’ll probably arrive at most of the same red lights accelerating up to 40 km/h as someone getting all the way up to 60 would. Would be an interesting experiment to conduct.

Zagorath, 6 miesięcy temu

I don’t think he tossed it out completely without comment. He simply pointed to the graph and said (or at least implied) “yeah you can keep decreasing it if you drop speed further, but this is the point at which it seems the return on investment starts significantly decreasing”.

I get the impression from your comment that this is the first NJB video you’ve come across. It might seem strange in that context. But this is one piece in a large history of discussing what makes good road safety, urban infrastructure, and city planning. For example, one thing that he didn’t really discuss in this video but has mentioned many times before is how the most effective way to slow down drivers is actually not just lowering the speed limit, but changing the design of the road to make drivers feel unsafe driving at higher speeds. Things like objects near the side of the road, narrowing the road, making it less straight, making corners at intersections sharp right angles rather than smooth curves, etc. And this video doesn’t talk at all about the importance of infrastructure that encourages cycling outside of merely lower speed cars.

The “goal” is…complicated. Because there are a whole bunch of different factors that reinforce each other in a virtuous way. Safety, happiness, health, economics. Good urban design is good for all of them and more. Even just lowering the speed limit increases the safety for cyclists, which increases the rate of cycling, which is good for health, environment, government budget, and small businesses’ bottom lines.

Zagorath, 6 miesięcy temu

The stock clip used at 3:20 involving a driver unabashedly on their phone is brilliant.

The 5:45 clip of a dude in a bigfoot costume cycling through Tokyo was unexpected.

6:00 the self-shout-out had me laugh out loud.

The idea of lowering local street speed limits not actually making your trip take much longer is so true. Brisbane-based cycling safety advocate Chris Cox has a video where he gives a demonstration. He drives the same route twice, once sticking to 30 km/h on the local streets, and once trying his best to get up to the speed limit of 50 km/h on those streets. (Driving to the predominantly 60 km/h speed limit on arterial roads.) The video on the whole is actually incredibly similar to this one, down to the safety/speed curve, the FOV comparisons, and the dismissal of the ridiculous arguments against 30 km/h. Because yeah, Jason’s words in the conclusion to this video are so right: the data is really, really, really clear here; at some point we have to realise that anybody fighting against lower speed limits within cities is either wilfully ignorant or they’re a selfish arsehole who values their convenience more than other people’s safety. But here’s a timestamped link to the bit of Chris’s video where he starts his experiment. It took a whopping 9 extra seconds. 9 seconds, on a 10 minute journey.

Zagorath, 6 miesięcy temu

For anyone who see the preview back in February, this is not exactly surprising, but it certainly brings home the reality of the situation—that the preview did not unfairly represent the actual game.

This deeply upsets me, because the Age of Empires franchise is one I really care about. 1, 2, 3, 4, and Age of Mythology are all excellent games, and every one of them belongs in the top 20 RTS games of all time. Microsoft might not be developing this game (that’s getting outsourced to Chinese company TiMi with a history of producing trash mobile games), but they are tarnishing their brand by allowing it to be associated with this game.

But it gets worse. They are apparently also silencing critics of it. Back when February’s announcement came out, some select few creators were allowed to put out videos about the game using exclusive footage of the game, and were told they’d be paid for their role in promoting the game. But they retained editorial control over the videos. YouTube channel Age of Noob put out one such video, and while tempered in its tone, it was largely negative.

Yesterday, the YouTube channel Age of Noob put out a video saying he never got paid, as well as more specifically saying how bad the game was. Today, he put out another one saying he was forced to take down that one (in vague terms—it would not even be clear he was talking about AoE Mobile, if you hadn’t seen the first video). In a pinned comment he also said that after making the second video, he found out he had been removed from the Age Franchise Partners programme.

If this is how Microsoft is willing to treat their biggest game franchise (well, biggest one that they didn’t buy after it was already huge), and the creators that help promote it, that is incredibly disappointing.

Zagorath, 6 miesięcy temu

It’s honestly shocking. They went for a decade with heaps of trashy mobile games advertising using stolen AoE art assets. When they finally announced a mobile game, I assumed it was because they thought they had cracked how to do a good mobile game that would do justice to their franchise. I guess the reality was more “oh, look how many companies are making lots of money ripping off our IP. We could rip off our own IP and make all that money!”

Zagorath, 6 miesięcy temu

I think the answer there would be “capitalism”.

Zagorath, 7 miesięcy temu

I started playing the original game ages ago but got distracted by life, and finally picked it up again a couple of months ago. The game is honestly very janky and unpolished, much more than I remember it being the first time I was playing, but it’s still so much fun. It was refreshing to see in their announcement video that they acknowledge that the first game didn’t live up to their hopes, and that with a bigger budget and more experience, the sequel should get them closer to their dream.

Some thoughts:

• Holy shit the voice actor for Henry is Henry. I had no idea he was modelled off of him that closely.
• Hand cannons!!!
• Wonder what year this’ll be set in. The original was 1403. Are we skipping forward a few years or picking up right where we left off?
• Will we get to see further development of the tiny amount of Hussite stuff we got in the last game? I found the vast majority of times the game touched on religion last game to be tedious and preachy, except for the hints of the upcoming theological conflicts.
• Where will the expanded map take us? I was doubting it’d extend to Prague, until they mentioned that it would be dealing with kings. And honestly I’d love to go to Prague.

Zagorath, 7 miesięcy temu

Not sure the ADL is really a reputable organisation worth looking to as and authority on what is and is not hate. They’re an explicitly zionist organisation with a history of defending genocide.

That said, this particular article seems completely fair. They don’t say the ok gesture is a symbol of hate, only that it is sometimes used that way. Which is accurate.

But also:

Since the early 1800s, the gesture increasingly became associated with the word “okay” and its abbreviation “ok.”

Whoops guys, got that one wrong. OK is the , and okay is a lengthened form of that.

Zagorath, 7 miesięcy temu

I’d like to know what source that page is using. What does it count as “gaming”? Because too often, these stats include both intentional and incidental gaming. Those are my terms because I don’t know what the official terminology is, but it’s a distinction that I know gets talked about in serious circles and it’s worth making here. When people talk about who is a “gamer”, they instinctively always mean people who have made a deliberate decision to sit down and play a game now. They don’t mean “oh I’m bored, let me pull out the phone and play a round of Candy Crush”.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

Me too…mostly.

Only it’s over 20 years old. And it’s still getting expansions, all except for the latest of which I have bought.

And it’s not “just as good”, it’s way better than it was back in 1999.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

Haha, yup.

I was a bit misleading though, because I also play a lot of the 2.5-year-old AoE4, and a tiny amount of AoM and AoE3 (and expect the amount of AoM to go way up later this year when Retold comes out).

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

Yeah it’s pretty incredible. I don’t know if I ever played without at least resource cheats as a kid.

I do remember knowing the triangle infantry beats cavalry beats archers, but also thinking “more expensive units must be better”. So I would build m@a-line to counter scouts or knights, rather than spear-line. I probably never built more than 20 vills, either.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

and I can’t get myself to come back to that save

Honestly this happens to me in every grand RPG. If I go more than a month without playing, I’m starting over. Too difficult to pick up where I left off what with understanding my character, my skills, the quests I was doing, etc.

I’ve done it multiple times with Elder Scrolls games, with Mount & Blade, and most recently with Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

New platform?

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

Under normal circumstances, I’d never recommend a remake/remaster of a game, but the Reignited Trilogy is the only acception so far.

I don’t have a strong memory of the original, and I haven’t actually played the remaster, but was the Crash remaster not also good?

I would definitely add the Age of Empires Definitive Editions to that list, too. 2 and 3, at least. And fingers crossed for Age of Mythology Retold.

Zagorath, 8 miesięcy temu

Gateway to Glimmer was the one I owned as a kid, playing a bunch of 1 at a friend’s house and renting 3 a few times from the video rental store. I had really fond memories of the unique mechanics in 3 and was very excited to see the game remastered so I could finally sit down and play through the whole thing in one relatively short amount of time.

Zagorath, 9 miesięcy temu

Google en passant vertical castling

Zagorath, 9 miesięcy temu

I don’t wanna know who, I wanna know how‽

Like, these things don’t have any exposed ports to plug in a USB, do they?