tal

tal, 3 dni temu (edited 3 dni temu)

Hmm. While I don’t know what their QA workflow is, my own experience is that working with QA people to design a QA procedure for a given feature tends to require familiarity with the feature in the context of real-world knowledge and possible problems, and that human-validating a feature isn’t usually something done at massive scale, where you’d get a lot of benefit from heavy automation.

It’s possible that one might be able to use LLMs to help write test code — reliability and security considerations there are normally less-critical than in front-line code. Worst case is getting a false positive, and if you can get more test cases covered, I imagine that might pay off.

Square does an MMO, among their other stuff. If they can train a model to produce AI-driven characters that act sufficiently like human players, where they can theoretically log training data from human players, that might be sufficient to populate an MMO “experimental” deployment so that they can see if anything breaks prior to moving code to production.

“Because I would love to be able to start up 10,000 instances of a game in the cloud, so there’s 10,000 copies of the game running, deploy an AI bot to spend all night testing that game, then in the morning we get a report. Because that would be transformational.”

I think that the problem is that you’re likely going to need more-advanced AI than an LLM, if you want them to just explore and try out new features.

One former Respawn employee who worked in a senior QA role told Business Insider that he believes one of the reasons he was among 100 colleagues laid off this past spring is because AI was reviewing and summarising feedback from play testers, a job he usually did.

We can do a reasonable job of summarizing human language with LLMs today. I think that that might be a viable application.

tal, 5 dni temu

I don’t think that there’s a “too big”, if you can figure out a way to economically do it and fill it with worthwhile content.

But I don’t feel like Cyberpunk 2077’s map size is the limiting factor. Like, there’s a lot of the map that just doesn’t see all that much usage in the game, even though it’s full of modeled and textured stuff. You maybe have one mission in the general vicinity, and that’s it. If I were going to ask for resources to be put somewhere in the game to improve it, it wouldn’t be on more map. It’d be on stuff like:

• More-complex, interesting combat mechanics.
• More missions on existing map.
• More varied/interesting missions. Cyberpunk 2077 kinda gave me more of a GTA feel than a Fallout feel.
• A home that one can build up and customize. I mean, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t really have the analog of Fallout 4’s Home Plate.
• The city changing more over time and in response to game events.

tal, 10 dni temu (edited 10 dni temu)

Take-Two’s CEO doesn’t think a Grand Theft Auto built with AI would be very good | VGC

Sounds fair to me, at least for near-term AI. A lot of the stuff that I think GTA does well doesn’t map all that well to what we can do very well with generative AI today (and that’s true for a lot of genres).

He added: “Anything that involves backward-looking data compute and LLMs, AI is really good for, and that and that applies to lots of things that we do at Take-Two. Anything that isn’t attached to that, it’s going to be really, really bad at…. there is no creativity that can exist, by definition, in any AI model, because it is data driven.”

To make a statement about any AI seems overly strong. This feels a little like a reformed “can machines think?” question. The human mind is also data-driven; we learn about the world, then create new content based on that. We have more sophisticated mechanisms for synthesizing new data from our memories than present LLMs do. But I’m not sure that those mechanisms need be all that much more complicated, or that one really requires human-level synthesizing ability to be able to create pretty compelling content.

I certainly think that the simple techniques that existing generative AI uses, where you just have a plain-Jane LLM, may very well be limiting in some substantial ways, but I don’t think that holds up in the longer term, and I think that it may not take a lot of sophistication being added to permit a lot of functionality.

I also haven’t been closely following use of AI in video games, but I think that there are some games that do effectively make use of generative AI now. A big one for me is use of diffusion models for dynamic generation of illustration. I like a lot of text-based games — maybe interactive fiction or the kind of text-based choose-your-own-adventure games that Choice of Games publishes. These usually have few or no illustrations. They’re often “long tail” games, made with small budgets by a small team for a niche audience at low cost. The ability to inexpensively illustrate games would be damned useful — and my impression is that some of the Choice Of games crowd have made use of that. With local computation capability, the ability to do so dynamically would be even more useful. The generation doesn’t need to run in real time, and a single illustration might be useful for some time, but could help add atmosphere to the game.

There have been modified versions of (note: very much NSFW and covers a considerable amount of hard kink material, inclusive of stuff like snuff, physical and psychological torture, sex with children and infants, slavery, forced body modification and mutilation, and so forth; you have been warned) that have incorporated this functionality to generate dynamic illustrations based on prompts that the game can procedurally generate running on local diffusion models. As that demonstrates, it is clearly possible from a technical standpoint to do that now, has been for quite some months, and I suspect that it would not be hard to make that an option with relatively-little development effort for a very wide range of text-oriented games. Just needs standardization, ease of deployment, sharing parallel compute resources among software, and so forth.

As it exists in 2025, SillyTavern used as a role-playing software package is not really a game. Rather, it’s a form of interactive storytelling. It has very limited functionality designed around making LLMs support this sort of thing: dealing with a “group” of characters, permitting a player to manually toggle NPC presence, the creation of “lorebooks”, where tokens showing up trigger insertion of additional content into the game context to permit statically-written information about a fictional world that an LLM does not know about to be incorporated into text generation. But it’s not really a game in any traditional sense of the word. One might create characters that have adversarial goals and attempt to overcome those, but it doesn’t really deal well with creating challenges incredibly well, and the line between the player and a DM is fairly blurred today, because the engine requires hand-holding to work. Context of the past story being fed into an LLM as part of its prompt is not a very efficient way to store world state. Some of this might be addressed via use of more-sophisticated AIs that retain far more world state and in a more-efficient-to-process form.

But I am pretty convinced that with a little work even with existing LLMs, it’d be possible to make a whole genre of games that do effectively store world state, where the LLM interacts with a more-conventionally-programmed game world with state that is managed as it has been by more traditional software. For example, I strongly suspect that it would be possible to glue even an existing LLM to something like a MUD world. That might be via use of LoRAs or MoEs, or to have additional “tiny” LLMs. That permits complex characters to add content within a game world with rules defined in the traditional sense. I think I’ve seen one or two early stabs at this, but while I haven’t been watching closely, it doesn’t seem to have real, killer-app examples…yet. But I don’t think that we really need any new technologies to do this, just game developers to pound on this.

tal, 10 dni temu

Training a model to generate 3D models for different levels of detail might be possible, if there are enough examples of games with human-created different-LOD models. Like, it could be a way to assess, from a psychovisual standpoint, what elements are “important” based on their geometry or color/texture properties.

We have 3D engines that can use variable-LOD models if they’re there…but they require effort from human modelers to make good ones today. Tweaking that is kinda drudge work, but you want to do it if you want open-world environments with high-resolution models up close.

tal, 24 dni temu

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%2B%2B

N++ is a platform video game developed and published by Metanet Software. It is the third and final installment of the N franchise, which started with the Adobe Flash game N. It is the sequel to N+. The game was initially released for the PlayStation 4 on July 28, 2015, in North America, and July 29, 2015, in Europe, and was later released for the Microsoft Windows and macOS operating systems on August 25, 2016, and December 26, 2016, respectively. The Xbox One version was released on October 4, 2017.[1] The Linux version of the game was released on May 31, 2018.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%2B

N+ is the console and handheld version of the Adobe Flash game N, which was developed by Metanet Software. N+ for Xbox Live Arcade was developed by Slick Entertainment and published by Metanet Software. Unique versions of the game were also ported separately to the PlayStation Portable[1] and Nintendo DS[2] by developers SilverBirch Studios and Atari.[3] Metanet Software licensed their N IP for this deal, provided single player level design for both versions, and consulted on the project.

The Xbox Live Arcade version was released on February 20, 2008, and three expansion packs were released later that year on July 23, September 10, and October 15.[4] The handheld versions were released on August 26, 2008.[5][6] N+ was followed by N++ in 2015.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_(video_game)

N (stylized as n) is a freeware video game developed by Metanet Software. It was inspired in part by Lode Runner, Soldat, and other side-scrolling games. It was the first of the N series, followed by N+ and N++. N won the audience choice award in the downloadables category of the 2005 Independent Games Festival.[1]

Release: WW: March 1, 2004

tal, 23 dni temu (edited 23 dni temu)

While that’s true, GOG also is intended to let you download an offline installer. If GOG dies, you still have the game, as long as you saved the installer. If GOG changes the terms of their service or software, they have little leverage.

There are ways to archive Steam games, but it’s not the “normal mode of operation”. If Steam dies, you probably don’t have your games. If Steam’s terms of service or software changes, they have a lot of leverage to force new changes through.

Some other wrinkles:

• Some games on GOG today have DRM, though at least it’s clearly marked.
• I also agree that Valve has and continues to do an enormous amount to support Linux gaming. I used Linux as my desktop back in the days when Valve wasn’t doing Linux, and the gaming situation on Linux was far more limited. It’s hard to overstate how radical an impact Valve’s support has had.

tal, 23 dni temu (edited 23 dni temu)

Honestly, it might be better to just do a new, similar game in the same genre and theme. NOLF is pretty long in the tooth now. Hard to compete with current shooters.

en.wikipedia.org/…/The_Operative:_No_One_Lives_Fo…

The Operative: No One Lives Forever (abbreviated as NOLF) is a first-person shooter video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Fox Interactive, released for Windows in 2000.

That’s a quarter-century ago now.

It was followed by a sequel in 2002, entitled No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way.

Almost as long.

I mean, I don’t think that the actual IP from those games is necessary to make a similar game to scratch the itch.

tal, 23 dni temu

I just use lgogdownloader, which is open-source, or for a single game, the web browser.

tal, miesiąc temu

Is he running with antialiasing on?

Looking at their system settings page:

borderlands.2k.com/…/amd-optimization/

Their settings for every single GPU listed there seem to have antialiasing off.

It may be that current hardware can’t do that at a reasonable clip

tal, miesiąc temu

no TAA

I would like TAA to be available. I think maybe a more reasonable ask is “let me toggle TAA”.

tal, miesiąc temu

Ram is cheap

Kind of divering from the larger point, but that’s true — RAM prices haven’t gone up as much as other things have over the years. I do kind of wonder if there are things that game engines could do to take advantage of more memory.

I think that some of this is making games that will run on both consoles and PCs, where consoles have a pretty hard cap on how much memory they can have, so any work that gets put into improving high-memory stuff is something that console players won’t see.

checks Wikipedia

The XBox Series X has 16GB of unified memory.

The Playstation 5 Pro has 16GB of unified memory and 2GB of system memory.

You can get a desktop with 256GB of memory today, about 14 times that.

Would have to be something that doesn’t require a lot of extra dev time or testing. Can’t do more geometry, I think, because that’d need memory on the GPU.

considers

Maybe something where the game can dynamically render something expensive at high resolution, and then move it into video memory.

Like, Fallout 76 uses, IIRC, statically-rendered billboards of the 3D world for distant terrain features, like, stuff in neighboring and further off cells. You’re gonna have a fixed-size set of those loaded into VRAM at any one time. But you could cut the size of a given area that uses one set of billboards, and keep them preloaded in system memory.

Or…I don’t know if game systems can generate simpler-geometry level-of-detail (LOD) objects in the distance or if human modelers still have to do that by hand. But if they can do it procedurally, increasing the number of LOD levels should just increase storage space, and keeping more preloaded in RAM just require more RAM. You only have one level in VRAM at a time, so it doesn’t increase demand for VRAM. That’d provide for smoother transitions as distant objects come closer.

tal, miesiąc temu

copyright

This isn’t a copyright, but rather a patent.

tal, miesiąc temu

Jack Thompson

For those who don’t remember this guy, he was pretty obnoxious.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(activist)

tal, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

corsair.com/…/scimitar-pro-rgb-optical-moba-mmo-g…

1000009259

OP didn’t expand on it, and his photos didn’t show it, but this mouse apparently has a bunch of thumb buttons, which is a legitimately-rare feature (though it’s not the only mouse out there to have a bunch).

EDIT: Amazon has 786 “gaming mice” with 10 or more — a bit arbitrarily-chosen on my part — buttons, so I guess that there’s a reasonable crop out there.

tal, 2 miesiące temu

kagis

I haven’t played it, but it sounds like it doesn’t have a replay system, which apparently has exacerbated finding cheaters.

tal, 2 miesiące temu

facebook.com/groups/…/1842637456471565/

Sounds like PvE works, but not PvP.

This guy claims that he got it working in PvP, at least at one point:

old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/…/tarkov_on_linux/

Ran fine for me with Proton Easy Anti-Cheat when added to Steam. This was a few patches ago now though. Whenever Streets came out.

tal, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

I doubt it, seeing as it looks like it’s still being actively developed. I’d expect anyone who wanted to have higher resolution textures or whatever to just add an option for that to the main game.

EDIT: It does look like they have abut 500 “addon” tracks, and I suppose that some of those might have higher-resolution textures than the tracks in the base game.

online.supertuxkart.net

EDIT2: Also, it’s not SuperTuxKart, but you’re looking for more-realistic open source racing graphics and haven’t seen it, there’s TORCS. That might do what you want.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-vnkZyDghA

EDIT3: Also Speed Dreams:

speed-dreams.itch.io/speed-dreams

EDIT4: It doesn’t look like you can sort the add-on tracks on the website by size, but you can sort by upload date, and I’d assume that newer tracks are probably more likely to have higher-resolution textures.

tal, 2 miesiące temu

Looking at their dev guidelines page, they don’t have any texture resolution limit other than “don’t use very large textures on very small objects”, so I doubt that the project has any really hard caps.

supertuxkart.net/Texture_Guidelines#texture-detai…

Do not use large textures for small objects—this wastes video RAM.

If they are concerned about distribution size, if the game supports it or could support it, might be possible to have a separate high-resolution-texture package, package those separately.

tal, 2 miesiące temu

Well, someone in this thread linked to the Diablo 4 credits, and those list what they do.

tal, 2 miesiące temu

My guess is that most people in the market for a Steam Deck aren’t getting either this or a Deck.

tal, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

He could install https://www.luanti.org/ and mod to his heart’s content.

Like, legality aside, he’s fighting to add value to a game whose publisher has tried to prevent him.

tal, 2 miesiące temu

“Back in the day, we used to put in painstaking work and made many futile efforts to avoid texture warping, only for it to be called ‘charming’ nowadays.”

I like the look of Carrier Command 2, and that doesn’t even have much by way of textures; it uses mostly untextured polygons, with some low-resolution nearest-neighbor-scaled textures for things like displays.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=z15zGaCUjxo

tal, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

Hmm.

I have to say that as pornographic video game tags go, the tag library that itch.io provides is kind of limited. The goony.dev people apparently scraped the tags from itch.io’s database of tags, which makes sense if their aim is to keep pornographic itch.io games visible. But…if goony.dev aims to be a database of specifically pornographic video games, there’s not a lot by way of relevant tag data to make the games searchable.

Contrast with, say, vndb.org’s tag library, which has a wide range of tags specifically dedicated to fine-grained classification of sexual content. Vndb.org isn’t specifically for pornographic games, but tracks and indexes quite a few, and has a very extensive tag database.

I wonder if it might make sense to (a) link to other vendors, like Steam/Patreon/whatever as well and (b) since there are tags on some other sources, incorporate use of those tags as well to get more metadata, since some games are listed on multiple databases or with multiple vendors. Maybe have a way to ask for tags just from one vendor if there’s concern about not forcing users to see mixed data from multiple sources, but that seems like it’d be a significant value-add relative to just searching directly on itch.io or whatnot.

tal, 2 miesiące temu

I dunno if you’re specifically referencing Lawrence of Arabia, but if so, I really like that movie.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvH6PT7I_dI

LAWRENCE: It is the servant who takes money.

AUDA leaps to his feet and backs away from this moral threat as another man might from a physical one.

AUDA: I am Auda Ibu Tayi! (He goes to the edge of the tent and bawls into the darkness) Does Auda serve? Does Auda Ibu Tayi serve? (He faces his persecutors and goes into a furious litany) I carry twenty-three great wounds all got in battle! Seventy-five men I have killed with my own hands, in battle! I scatter, I burn my enemies’ tents! I take away their flocks and herds. The Turks pay me a golden treasure. Yet I am poor! … Because I am a river to my people! Is that service?

tal, 3 miesiące temu

That’s nice, but I’m not going to do so, because I’d rather support the developers of pornographic games financially. They already deal with enough flak without needing to give up sales revenue over this.

It also sounds like at least some of the stores are aiming to make the games available later with different payment processors, so I expect that they’re likely to come back.

tal, 3 miesiące temu

Could be. They don’t say so on the page, though.

tal, 3 miesiące temu

Markdown treats a single newline as a space, so that already wrapped text doesn’t need to be rewrapped. If you want to have each item on one line, some options:

Two spaces before newline

<span style="color:#323232;">Foo  << two spaces here
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Bar
</span>

Yields

Foo
Bar

Backslash before newline

<span style="color:#323232;">Foo
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Bar
</span>

Yields

Foo
Bar

Paragraph Break

Most clients will have a “larger” vertical space if you do this. Use a double newline:

<span style="color:#323232;">Foo
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Bar
</span>

Yields

Foo

Bar

Bulleted List

<span style="color:#323232;">* Foo
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Bar
</span>

Yields

• Foo
• Bar

tal, 3 miesiące temu

I doubt that it has anything to do with social preferences of anyone internal to payment processors. They won’t care.

Putting pressure on payment processors is a useful way to put pressure on any commercial service. The commercial service may operate in another country, but it needs the payment processor, and the payment processors don’t want to be ejected from countries. The payment processor can be a lever for laws passed elsewhere.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

There’s a whole class of controllers, often called “fightsticks”, which have a full-size arcade-style joystick and a ton of buttons, to reproduce the feel of arcade fighting games.

www.reddit.com/r/fightsticks/

!fightsticks (not very active)

www.amazon.com/Arcade-Sticks/s?k=Arcade+Sticks

tal, 4 miesiące temu

“Fallout is the big one,” Middler claimed. “There are multiple Fallout projects in development, including, as far as I’m aware, that one that I’m sure you’re all wanting. It’s not far enough in along to say anything like ‘you’re going to be playing this game anytime soon’.”

Middler then joked, “Anyway, New Vegas 2, coming soon”. Is this the one we’re “all wanting”? Yes, but then also so is Fallout 3 Remastered, Fallout 5 and even a remake of Fallout 2. The fanbase is rabid, and hungry, and it’s been a long time since they’ve been fulfilled outside of Fallout 76 updates.

I mean, if Bethesda released all four of those, I’d buy all four.

I also don’t know what “Fallout 3 Remastered” entails, but if it means forward-porting the content to Starfield’s engine, that’d be pretty cool, though I do wonder how much effort will be required for mod-porting.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

Honestly, I feel like Morrowind is the title least in need of a remaster, as unlike later 3D titles, it has an open-source fan reimplementation of the engine, OpenMW, plus the fan updates of content.

searches for video of content

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnvOy5Kw79Y

It looks like the OpenMW people are also working on a VR version.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

There’s a similar, open-source game, https://www.luanti.org/ (until recently, known as Minetest). It doesn’t have as many mods in 2025 as Minecraft does, but you might also enjoy it.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

I love CDDA, but I don’t know if I’d call it light on a battery. It won’t hammer a GPU, but it actually does use a fair bit of CPU time for the simulation. Also, every time it redraws a frame, it does so via recomputing the world lighting and such, so it’s actually surprisingly heavyweight.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

kagis

docs.luanti.org/for-players/controls/

Touchscreen

Display inventory: Press on-screen button in left lower corner

tal, 4 miesiące temu

Not ignored—not played yet.

Journal, July 3, 2025:

The day opened with a round of https://store.steampowered.com/app/2478330/Barbie_Project_Friendship/.

I then followed it up with survival horror https://store.steampowered.com/app/1944430/Amnesia_The_Bunker/ from survival horror specialists Frictional Games.

Next on the list was gay dom/sub dating sim https://store.steampowered.com/app/2747220/Blood_Domination/.

Then hard milsim https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076160/Command_Modern_Operations/.

I wound down with some relaxing time in art toy https://store.steampowered.com/app/1418570/Zen_Trails/.

I have always been partial to variety.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

Sure, but I think that the type of game is a pretty big input. Existing generative AI isn’t great at portraying a consistent figure in multiple poses and from multiple angles, which is something that many games are going to want to do.

On the other hand, I’ve also played text-oriented interactive fiction where there’s a single illustration for each character. For that, it’d be a good match.

AI-based speech synth isn’t as good as human voice acting, but it’s gotten pretty decent if you don’t need to be able to put lots of emotion into things. It’s not capable of, say, doing Transistor, which relied a lot on the voice acting. But it could be a very good choice to add new material for a character in an old game where the actor may not be around or who may have had their voice change.

I’ve been very impressed with AI upscaling. I think that upscaling textures and other assets probably has a lot of potential to take advantage of higher resolution screens. Maybe one might need a bit of human intervention, but a factor of 2 increase is something that I’ve found that the software can do pretty well without much involvement.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

From the article, I believe that it’s Steam Deck parts, not Steam Controller 1 parts.

Which makes sense, because you can get a Steam Deck, but the Steam Controller 1 has been out of production for some years.

EDIT: Wikipedia says that production ended in 2019.

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

They have mechanical components that will wear out over time (though I suppose some people probably use them lightly enough that it’s less of an issue).

tal, 4 miesiące temu

Yeah, I really liked https://store.steampowered.com/app/1620/Jagged_Alliance_2_Gold/. The UI is pretty elderly today, though.

I haven’t been very impressed with some of the subsequent attempts to revive the series, though I still haven’t gotten around to playing https://store.steampowered.com/app/1084160/Jagged_Alliance_3/ yet, and that has much better scores than some of the intervening releases, like https://store.steampowered.com/app/57740/Jagged_Alliance__Back_in_Action/. If you haven’t tried JA3 yet either, you might consider taking a look.

EDIT: Oh, wait, yes I did play it, because I remember the intro mission that they have screenshots of.

…steamstatic.com/…/ss_0edc29526ad201a59357234cd77…

https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/1084160/ss_0edc29526ad201a59357234cd77a34a5ba507208.1920x1080.jpg

I don’t recall finishing the game, though. I should go back and see what my status in that game is. Thanks for making me think of it.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

Cannon Fodder - a UK classic, very arcadey but very fun and lighter than all these other “serious” games

It has that iconic theme music:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASTLGt_9vbU

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Just tried it, and it was some other game I was thinking of; I hadn’t played JA3 yet.

While I haven’t finished the game, thoughts:

• It’s the strongest of the post-2 Jagged Alliance games that I’ve played.
• Still not on par with JA2, at least relative to release year, I’d say also in absolute terms.
• My biggest problem — I’m running this under Proton — is some bugginess that I’m a little suspicious is a thread deadlock. When it happens, I never see the targeting options show up when I target an enemy, and trying to go to the map or inventory screen doesn’t update the visible area onscreen, though I can blindly click and hear interactions. The game also doesn’t ever exit if I hit Alt-F4 in that state, just hangs. AFAICT, this can always be resolved by quicksaving (which you can do almost anywhere), stopping the game (I use kill in a terminal on Linux) and reloading the save, but it’s definitely obnoxious. Fortunately, the game starts up pretty quickly. Nobody on ProtonDB talking about it, so maybe it’s just me. I have not noticed bugs other than this one.
• So far, not much by way of missions where one has to figure out elaborate ways of getting into areas or the like: more of a combat focus. I have wirecutters, crowbars, lockpicks, and explosives, like in JA2, but thus far, it’s mostly just a matter of clicking on a locked container with someone who has lockpicking skill. Probably more realistic — in real life, an unattended door isn’t going to stop anyone for long — but I kinda miss that.
• The maps feel a lot smaller to me, though the higher resolution might be part of that. A lot of 3d modeling to make them look pretty. There’s a lot more verticality, like watchtowers.
• The game also feels considerably shorter than JA2, based on the percentage of the strategic map that I’ve taken. That being said, JA2 could get a bit repetitive when one is fighting the umpteenth enemy reinforcement party.
• Unique perks for mercs that make them a lot more meaningful than in JA2 (though also limit your builds). For example, Fox can get what is basically a free turn if she initiates combat on a surprised enemy. Barry auto-constructs explosives each day.
• Thematic feel of the mercs from JA2 is retained well.
• Interesting perk tree.
• A bunch of map modifiers like fog that have a major impact.
• Bunch of QoL stuff for scheduling concurrent tasks for different mercs.
• Pay demands don’t seem to rise with level, though other factors can drive it up (e.g. Fox will demand more pay if you hire Steroid).
• Feels easier than JA2, though I haven’t finished it.
• I’m pretty sure the keybindings are different.
• Tiny thing, but I always liked the start of JA2, where your initial team does a fast-rope helicopter insertion into a hostile sector. Felt like a badass way to set the tone. No real analog in JA3.
• I started running into guys with RPGs early on in JA3, much earlier than in JA2.
• JA2 has ground vehicles and a helicopter and they require you to obtain fuel. Transport logistics don’t exist in JA3, other than paying to embark on boat trips at a port (and just checked online to confirm that they aren’t just in the late game).
• More weapon mods in JA3. Looks like some interesting tradeoffs that one has to make here, rather than just “later-game stuff is better”.

For me, it was a worthwhile purchase — even with the irritating bug I keep hitting — and I would definitely recommend it over the other post-JA2 stuff if you’ve played JA2 and want more. It hasn’t left me giggling at the insane amount of complex interactions that were coded into the game like JA2 did, though, which were kind of a hallmark of the original.

tal, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

What did you think of the new aiming system? I’ve heard mixed things, but it sounded good to me (or at least way better than a flat percentage).

I don’t know what the internal mechanics are like, haven’t read material about it. From a user standpoint, I have just a list of positive and negative factors impacting my hit chance, so less information about my hit chance. I guess I’d vaguely prefer the percentage — I generally am not a huge fan of games that have the player rely on mechanics trying to hide the details of those mechanics — but it’s nice to know what inputs are present. It hasn’t been a huge factor to me one way or the other, honestly; I mean, I feel like I’ve got a solid-enough idea of roughly what the chances are.

even if it doesn’t hit the same highs as JA2, there hasn’t really been much else that comes close and a more modern coat of polish would be welcome.

Yeah, I don’t know of other things that have the strategic aspect. For the squad-based tactical turn-based combat, there are some options that I’ve liked playing in the past.

While https://store.steampowered.com/app/240760/Wasteland_2_Directors_Cut/ and https://store.steampowered.com/app/719040/Wasteland_3/ aren’t quite the same thing — they’re closer to Fallout 1 and 2, as Wasteland 1 was a major inspiration for them — the squad-based, turn-based tactical combat system is somewhat similar, and if you’re hunting for games that have that, you might also enjoy that.

I also played https://store.steampowered.com/app/254960/Silent_Storm_Gold_Edition/ and enjoyed it, though it’s now pretty long in the tooth (well, so is Jagged Alliance 2…). Even more of a combat focus. Feels lower budget, slightly unfinished.

And there’s X-Com. I didn’t like the new ones, which are glitzy, lots of time spent doing dramatic animations and stuff, but maybe I should go back and give them another chance.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

Well, unless someone makes an alternative, people are going to use it.

They do need to provide a lot of bandwidth, which isn’t free, though I wonder how viable it’d be for someone to create a Nexus-like Website using magnet URLs and BitTorrent as a backend.

Maybe too much of a technical bar to attract users.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

It really depends on how one is applyng mods. Bethesda does have their own mod site and in-game support for modding, and that’s pretty straightforward (and the only option on consoles). That will limit what mods are available.

I do kind of wish that there were one cross-platform open-source universal “game mod” program that could support multiple online services. Would like to have Wabbajack-like functionality (apply a whole set of curated, tested-together mods) as a base too, as that’d lower the bar.

tal, 4 miesiące temu

Obligatory

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

Capitalism deals with industry being owned privately.

If you want to complain about Microsoft being a publicly-traded, private-sector company rather than a worker cooperative or part of the government or whatever, okay, at least I can see where you’re coming from.

But a socialist economy is perfectly compatible with having high prices.

tal, 5 miesięcy temu

A lot of real-time tactics and turn-based tactics games would fit that description.

Matrix Games specializes in milsims, so they’re an easy way to get a list.

www.matrixgames.com/inventory?sort=new-releases&f…

As another commenter says, having more criteria to narrow it down would help.

I like the Close Combatseries myself, which is real-time.