setsneedtofeed

setsneedtofeed, 5 dni temu

Repeat from the other thread:

I beat The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

It was alright. A third person shooter where you are theoretically giving tactical orders to two NPC followers. In reality, good or interesting tactics go out the window in favor of just spamming special abilities as much as possible in a chaotic mess of fights. The story was decent and gets interesting near the end, although for my money after the big reveal it feels like it drags out a bit longer than it needs to. For $3 I got my value.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/92c0208a-2f3c-461e-93d0-f0e5960c9302.jpeg

setsneedtofeed, 14 dni temu (edited 14 dni temu)

I’m replaying COD4 and taking notes at the moment for a review I’ve wanted to do for years, coincidentally.

Looking at just COD4 without being influenced by knowledge of the sequels, it’s got a decent story and if you look at the edges you can find contemplations of cycles of violence, and while not to the point of being anti-war it does emphasize the waste of it.

The characters are Tom Clancy levels of larger than life, which is significantly more restrained than what came later. Individually the story beats and scenarios have at least a texture of realism, often loosely based in something real and then strung together in a story that isn’t convoluted.

I could see it being a good movie with the right handling. It probably wouldn’t be.

setsneedtofeed, 14 dni temu (edited 14 dni temu)

While (classic, I’m not counting stuff ghostwritten under his brand) Clancy characters have hyper competence, it’s to be expected given that they are turbo ultra elite soldiers or spies. Their motivations and ability to act doesn’t reach the point of self parody.

For a COD4 example: Nikolai, the Russian that the player rescues early on in the game. He is a mole inside the Russian antagonist faction feeding information to the SAS. He got found out. He’s being kept at a house with a handful of regular soldiers watching him. When you rescue you him he is calm or at least puts up a calm front and thanks you. That’s a pretty believable guy who could have been a real person who is doing something realistic and dangerous.

In MW2 that character can materialize with apparently infinite types of military aviation hardware, and he is also a pilot able and willing to do insane maneuvers. And he is personal friends with Captain price rather than just being an SAS asset. And he is in touch with a friendly militia group in the middle of Europe.

There is a distinct jump from COD4 to MW2, where it goes from Tom Clancy to Michael Bay.

MW2 is still fun, but it exists in an entirely separate tonal reality than COD4.

setsneedtofeed, 14 dni temu

I’m not saying Clancy stuff is always completely grounded, especially the longer it goes on, but I’m trying to use the Clancy comparison to capture the essence of an idea. COD4 while fictional, and with moments that aren’t wholly realistic if you really hold them up to the most intense scrutiny has the overall texture of realism. MW2&3 and Black Ops games all exist as throwing bigger and more insane setpieces out with no regard to any realism.

It’s a the last COD with a real gutpunch moment that says anything about anything. The nuke going off it a moment of realizing you aren’t a special main character and you die like everyone else, and that maybe war isn’t just a big fun adventure. All the shock moments have been trying to top it are so dramatic that they don’t have the same effect that the nuke did.

setsneedtofeed, 13 dni temu

COD4 was the first Modern Warfare game.

World At War wasn’t numbered.

setsneedtofeed, miesiąc temu

I bought GamePass just for Outer Worlds because everyone pointing out that’s it’s from the team that made “New Vegas”.

I did a whole review of this game, and one of the first things I tackled was that it is absolutely not from the New Vegas team in terms of writing or design leadership. I completely blame the marketing for setting wrong expectations by creating that connection.

It is a good game, but going in wrongly thinking (due to misleading marketing) that it is New Vegas In Space is going to leave you frustrated.

setsneedtofeed, 2 miesiące temu

Politicians seem very good at misunderstanding things when it suits them.

setsneedtofeed, 2 miesiące temu

The headline seems a bit overly snarky and dismissive of a small studio dealing with the kind of licensing problems that just come with big properties and image rights to expensive actors. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in a game.

It sounds like without the image rights, there won’t be any closeup cutscenes of Arnold’s face, but given that the game play is a 16ish bit throwback aesthetic, it actually doesn’t seem as distracting as it sounds.

I mean, this looks fine to me:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/ae05ea49-34a6-45c9-86e9-9a0b75b761df.png

Maybe they aren’t allowed to do an accurate Arnie voice impression, but if all the character audio is crunched up to feel more retro, that might not be a problem either.

setsneedtofeed, 2 miesiące temu

That’s why I called it “16ish”. It is probably taking some liberties to improve the graphics that wouldn’t have been available in the 90s, but it is trying get those nostalgia neurons firing. Point is, the aesthetic is intentionally not photo realistic, so missing out on Arnold’s face isn’t the biggest problem in the world.

setsneedtofeed, 2 miesiące temu

Similar to the 1997 point-n-click Blade Runner game. The rights to all the aspects of that movie were such a mess that the developers decided not to use any footage or audio from the game because they honestly couldn’t figure out who owned what, and made it follow a new main character which was an obvious “Not-Deckard” who was chasing replicants in a similar but ever so changed variation on the plot of the movie.

setsneedtofeed, 2 miesiące temu

I really enjoyed it as an XCOM combat-ish game that felt like there was work done to make it feel like it belongs in the Gears Of War universe. It’s not infinitely replayable because the campaign has mandatory side-missions that are generated from a limited template and begin to feel stale once you’ve seen all the templates, and by the endgame you have so many special abilities unlocked in your squad that it kind of drifts away from any semblance of feeling like combat tactics and into a puzzle game about min-maxing abilities to combo chain them together (this opinion might read a little oddly but if you’ve played enough turnbased tactical games you notice many game riding this line, with some going extreme one way or the other). It is worth a sale price though if you need a turn based combat fix.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

Setting aside prices, I’ve seen an unexpected amount of sourness directed at the first game. While the first game wasn’t a greatest of all time RPG and had flaws, I found it overall enjoyable enough and it was clearly a project with some passion that I didn’t regret sinking time into it.

I expect similar of the sequel, with hopefully improvements based on feedback from the first game. I plan to have fun with the game, and it is a bit tiring to see things like the pricing prompting people to badmouth the game itself when they are separate things.

Am I going to pay $80? No. No I’m not. This is a single player RPG though. There’s no FOMO of getting left behind on the multiplayer unlocks or the lore of a new season. It’s a singleplayer game. Put it on the wishlist and buy it on a sale. Simple as.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

The expectation that it was an open world modern style Fallout game does seem to be a theme among people who didn’t like it. That wasn’t helped by pre-release marketing that emphasized it came from the studio that made New Vegas (despite the writers and game leads all being different).

I went in to the game without expectations and found the structure of the game closer to a classic BioWare RPG. Rather than a single huge open world it was a series of curated hubs to travel between. At those hubs there was space to explore but it was more limited and curated than a full open world. The more curated approach meant that the game could be designed with certain builds in mind since players would interact with certain areas coming from known directions, allowing alternate routes or quest solutions for different builds to be placed.

Accepting it as a hub based RPG that leaned into a specialized build made the game click for me.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/ab3e0c4e-bbc2-4336-b803-d1b57224f5ba.png

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

The last Black Ops I cared about was 2. I could almost feel the developers of that one screaming that they wanted to break out of the COD mold. It actually had a lot of cool, if underbaked ideas. There were the sidemissions where you commanded an NPC squad ala Brothers In Arms, there were the pre-mission loadouts where after beating a mission set in the past you could go back and load up with future guns, there were multiple endings driven by choices in the missions.

There was a lot of stuff going on in that game which if it had been given a longer development cycle than the COD treadmill, and more freedom to stray from COD mainstays could have been something interesting. All of the above features could have really been pushed and refined beyond the small implimentation they ended up as. BO2 also tied the setting back to the cold war era roots, which makes it far more interesting that the cutout metal angular girder future design that is just the most generic looking thing ever. Call Of Duty Advanced Warfare was forgotten for a reason and it’s disappointing that Black Ops ended up eating all its aesthetics.

None of this matter of course, since no matter how many story trailers they release or how much people like me talk about what could make single player good, in the end the series is kept alive by tweaked out multiplayer addicts so I suppose it is all just a waste of time to think about.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

objective

MEDIA APPRECIATION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY, GOOD NIGHT!

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8863b680-575d-42f6-be41-79d084a6a334.jpeg

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

Here’s my pitch: The story and aesthetic of Fraiser, the gameplay of FEAR.

setsneedtofeed, 4 miesiące temu

Fallout 1: If you play it going in blind and don’t look up help, a first playthrough can be stressful early on if you don’t know how much progress you are making on the time limited main quest.

Kenshi: The game doesn’t have quests or main goals, so it is up to the player to figure out what they want and how to get it. Certain game areas are lethally dangerous, factions can be angered if you don’t figure out their customs, and even in less lethal areas being beaten and crippled by bandits is a real problem.

setsneedtofeed, 4 miesiące temu

Far Cry 5 strangely has very enjoyable fishing.

setsneedtofeed, 4 miesiące temu

Deep Rock Galactic.

There is a huge amount of loadout progression for each class, and a seemingly infinite amount of cosmetics to acquire. While there are only a limited number of mission types, the randomized nature of the level population and all of the various modifiers and enemy types that have been added keeps the game fresh. The game is entirely co-op with no PVP element, which keeps the tone more focused on helping other players instead of ever seeing them as competition.

setsneedtofeed, 4 miesiące temu

I’m over here supporting Tamriel Rebuilt myself.

setsneedtofeed, 5 miesięcy temu

RA2

Have you seen DORF?

…steampowered.com/…/DORF_RealTime_Strategic_Confl…

setsneedtofeed, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

Well not how much you’ve spent, how much it values your collection. But what’s that number based on?

Please re-read the article. The values are on Steam itself, based on your interactions with it.

setsneedtofeed, 5 miesięcy temu

From the page with the values:

“OldSpend” is the amount of external funds applied before Friday, April 17, 2015 18:00:00 UTC.

From Steam support regarding package only:

This row includes the portion of the account’s total funds spent that could not be transferred. For example, a hardware purchase, gifted game, or in-game item does not count toward Package Only Spend, but a game purchase for your own library would.

setsneedtofeed, 5 miesięcy temu

You asked what package only means, and I found an answer.

Total is total, with old spend being the cutoff of old spending.

None of the numbers are guaranteed to add up to each other.

I don’t know what’s missing from the reply.

setsneedtofeed, 5 miesięcy temu

From the steam page:

“TotalSpend” is the total amount of external funds applied to your account.

“OldSpend” is the amount of external funds applied before Friday, April 17, 2015 18:00:00 UTC.

setsneedtofeed, 5 miesięcy temu

It’s a remaster of 2033 with a bunch of tweaks to mechanics and improved visuals.

setsneedtofeed, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

My goodness, this is some insane mountain out of a molehill reporting. The article is extrapolating a lot based on some vague and not particularly noteworthy qualifications bulletpoints that should be expected for military shooter VFX work.

setsneedtofeed, 7 miesięcy temu

I know of a great way to get gear early in the first STALKER game, but everyone hates me for it.

All you have to do is goad the military into getting into a firefight with the rookie camp and hide in the shop until the shooting is over and the military loses interest. Lots of dead rookie gear to sell, and at least a few dead soldiers to provide some mid-game rifles early.

setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

Fallout 1, which I’ve probably replayed about ten times more than the second game. It’s concise, with this depressing and dark world that gives a feeling never fully replicated in sequels.

Lords Of The Realm 2, a great little strategy game with an effortlessly charming aesthetic.

Civil War Generals 2, when I feel like really grinding out a strategy game. It has the bright colors and charming graphics which create a clear and readable battlefield that can be brutally difficult as units get ground down into ragged bands.

setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

I’m commenting late, but there is The Precursors which does require Slavjank tolerance, but if you have it, it provides an interesting flavor on a space opera adventure.

I also haven’t tried The Tomorrow War which seemingly requires even higher Slavjank tolerance, and probably isn’t a top of all time game, but seems interesting if you like peering into strange forgotten games. Warlockracy did a video of this one.

setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

Really it just means the sorts of bugs you find with minimal QA testing combined with stilted voice acting, potentially untranslated audio or text, cultural beats that don’t quite cross over, and some game design choices that are different than how a game developed alongside western games might do things.

If you can stand this lack of polish, these sorts of games can at least give amusement for their price point.