It’s just lots of experimentation. Lots of complex games are games that are not designed for you to make it through successfully on your first go. They’re designed to be complete game overs that you learn from and make it further the next time. Lots of games also have a lot of moving parts that you have to master each one individually before you can tackle the whole thing. There’s a reason Hitman speedruns are like 1 minute each level when most regular players can take well above an hour.
This is the fifth version of D&D, released a few years ago I believe. Each version of D&D is called an “edition” and each one contains changes & new rules, characters, settings, stories, etc. Think of it like an update to a video game. Some people prefer old editions, some like new editions. The rules in BG3 are mostly from 5th edition (abbreviated as 5e). Like with video games, the publishers of D&D are called “Wizards of the Coast” so when people refer to editions, they refer to updates released by that particular company. Other companies make other versions, modifications, and campaigns within and like D&D, but only WotC makes D&D editions.
Forgotten realms
This is just the setting for D&D. It’s rather high fantasy, and if you’re playing a bog standard D&D game in real life, this is probably where your story is going to be set. Most of the settings within the Forgotten Realms are set within the large continent of Faerun. FWIW, “Baldur’s Gate” Is the name of a canonical city in Faerun. It’s a very wealthy and prosperous merchant city state. There are other campaigns and stories from other continents in the Forgotten Realms (and from beyond the forgotten realms), but Faerun is by far the most fleshed out.
TL;DR: 5e is the “fifth edition,” which is the most current “official” ruleset for the game. The Forgotten Realms are the official setting for the game. Faerun is the main continent, and Baldur’s Gate is a city on that continent.
What I am searching for is for games that support touch screens and can be played with 1 finger / one hand. No action games with fake joysticks on the screen, just games that work with a single finger or at least one hand while lying in bed and trying to wind down. One very good example is Civilization V, which has a dedicated...
This was something I started wondering about when I was reading a thread about Star Citizen, and about how space combat flight games were much less-common than they had been at one point, how fans of the genre were hungry for new entrants....
Open-ended, sandbox sports games. SSX, Skate 3, Steep, are a few off the top of my head. I remember the Steep devs made a BMX game that was similar a few years ago. I tried it but I just didn’t find it nearly as fun as Steep was. They don’t have to be extreme sports either, I think more traditional sports would be fun too. I like it when they’re unrealistic and over-the-top too. I love playing Skate 3 and just listening to music and doing inhuman tricks. I’ve never played it but I’ve heard the NBA Jam series is like this.
edit: Wreckfest is also sort of in that realm. I’d love to play more racing games that aren’t constantly trying to be simulators. Trackmania is the only one I can think of that’s entirely divorced from being a simulator.
I liked GTA V and I think RDR2 was a wild change of pace so I’m interested to see how (if at all) they implement RDR2 style systems into the game. Hopefully that means less GTA:SA/GTA IV chores though. Those SUCKED. I am 100000% going to wait on this one though, after the remasters it really just seems like Rockstar is after cash and nothing else.
I do hope that after the travesty of RDR Online and the sort-of-disaster of GTA Online (it made them a lot of money but people hated it) they learn from their mistakes. I don’t doubt there’ll be an online mode. One of the major problems with GTA Online was just that they kept updating it without a really good direction for it, so maybe this time they’ll start off on the right foot. It seemed that way with RDR Online but they fucked up the economy to the point of no return.
Eh, the actual country has gotten absurd but I think a lot of the GTA V jokes are still very prescient. Just replace the scientology jokes with QAnon jokes.
my “review” of it so far after 15 hours: marked as spoilers, but it’s not really a spoiler in terms of the story. I guess just don’t read if you don’t want to already know the game’s structure and difficulty (from my experience).
spoilerI’ve got 15 hours in it so far. I haven’t unlocked everything yet and maybe the story opens up more but it certainly seems like there’s less content. It’s just difficult to compare because there’s a bit more puzzle variety but also a bit more repetition. The game’s divided into chunks so that you experience a bit of puzzles then a bit of story, then you repeat it all, so it’s harder to parse for me how much of my content has been engaging with story vs how much of it was puzzles, whereas the first game was almost entirely divorced from the story. The amount of new mechanics is staggering but as I near the last two worlds I’ve been disappointed with what feels like a developer obsession with lasers. I know the lasers were a huge part of the first game’s story but they weren’t the only feature… I know mines frustrated a lot of people in the first game but honestly? I miss those. And I miss the fizzler thingies that didn’t kill you but still acted like mines. However I think with most mechanics being segregated between the 12 worlds, that opens up a lot more options when you get stuck. For example I hated recording in the first game. Took me ages to work out how it worked and I hated every bit of it, so when I got sick of it it was harder to try other things because in C world and most of B world, most puzzles had recorders. If you don’t like the gravity (“gun”?) mechanic in this you can just go to the 11 other worlds where 99% of the puzzles don’t have it. I don’t really know how to write what I think of it though because it’s so incredibly different from the first game. The story has also been vastly improved in my opinion, but I do think it would be nice to have a little less cutscenes. In general though I think this is one of the better games I’ve played in a very long time. Some people online seem to be saying that it’s “easy” compared to the first game but honestly I’ve been struggling so much with the latter puzzles. Early in the game I was spending maybe 10 minutes tops on a few puzzles but now I’m spending upwards of 30 - 45 minutes (maybe even an hour) on just one puzzle. I also am disappointed with the lack of easter eggs and unmarked secrets. (there’s no minimap but there’s a HUD with a compass that shows you were “?” locations are. I have yet to find more than a handful of interesting items that aren’t marked on the compass and aren’t part of collectible achievements). Maybe I’m just really bad at searching through them, but I remember loving how the first game was so full of secrets. You’d thought you found a way to break out of bounds but then there’s a star or a hidden QR code or pictures of cats… That’s also what made the first game so replayable. The developers didn’t bother with invisible walls or boundaries that pushed you out so you could break the puzzles in very ingenious ways. In this one I have yet to find a way to do that, sadly.
I haven’t played it yet (and probably won’t, I didn’t like the first) but I enjoy how they actually tried to make it look nice. It’s not like the first game looked awful per se, but it definitely didn’t feel very inviting in my opinion. Everything felt so grey. I know real life cities are grey but this is a video game.
There’s no real controversies he’s involved in. I just never liked the sensationalism. There was a solid decade or so where valve barely did anything substantial as a company and yet Tyler was making announcement after announcement about how their next new game was coming in like 6 months.
He was right about a lot of things but in the end he was so, so wrong about everything else.
I can see why he did that. Valve is a notoriously secretive company so only posting a video every 3 months when valve actually announced something substantial for any of their projects wouldn’t have been a good financial decision. But on the other hand it made it really hard for me to personally feel optimistic about anything valve did when Tyler’s predictions were always wrong.
And as somebody involved in the Source engine community space, the amount of times he misunderstood an obsolete feature or a simple mapping concept as a groundbreaking sign of things to come made me want to slam my head against the wall.
These are all my opinions though I mean if you like the guy then go for it. He’s nice but I’ve rarely considered anything he did “news” back when his channel was called “Valve News Network”
Squadron 42 is the single player campaign of Star Citizen, that is supposed to launch as a separate game. It's basically a small portion of Star Citizen, but with a story and ending. I'm still not confident; waited too long for that.
It’s a space MMO sandbox game that’s been in development for like 11 years now I think? It’s still in the alpha stage. I think at one point it was the highest backed Kickstarter in history. Some people think it’s fraud and they’ll never deliver, others think they’re working on it just slowly. I think at this point universally though, people are just starting to give up hope. The game is available and in a playable state, it’s just nowhere near the promised state.
It also doesn’t help that a lot of ships in star Citizen can be bought with real life cash for pretty exorbitant amounts. A cursory Google search (haven’t played the game) tells me that the “600i Executive Edition” is the most expensive ship in the game, available for $25,000 real life USD.
I’ve heard the best comparison for the game is the presently finished game Elite: Dangerous. Star Citizen is basically saying they’re E:D but better.
So, Croteam, the creators of the Serious Sam series as well as the Talos Principle game have just announced the sequel to the Talos Principle, The Talos Principle 2, is set to release a little over a week from this post, about 9 years after the first game came out. I was always a huge puzzle fan and so I loved the first game, as...
I don’t really understand how people make the review threads, but we’re sitting at a 77 on OpenCritic right now. Many were worried about game performance after the recommended specs were released, but it looks like it’s even worse than we expected. It sounds like the game is mostly a solid release except for the...
DLC part pisses me off also. I know this game isn’t developed by Paradox but it seems to be a trend in Paradox games where you need to spend the base price + an absurd amount of extra money to get the developer’s “true vision” or whatever. It’s really annoying.
To get most of the base game features that are currently present in Crusader Kings III, you would’ve had to spend a sizeable chunk of cash on DLC for Crusader Kings II.
Plus it ends up being a lot more than a video game machine, especially for people who don’t have smart TVs or a roku stick or anything. My parents use the Xbox more for Netflix than for anything else.
Half Life 2: Despite Zombie Chopper only having 6.9% of steam players actually get it, including myself, it’s arguably the more famous of the Half Life 2 achievements.
Please, Don’t Touch Anything is a puzzle game where the player is presented with an empty room and a button, and pressing it unlocks more knobs and switches and levers that they have to figure out how to press to unlock endings. When it comes to the achievement for simply pressing the button, only 96.6% of all players have gotten it. That means a shocking 3.4% looked at the button and decided to just not press it and then didn’t continue playing the game.
The Talos Principle: About 20% of players have gotten the achievement for getting the “canon” ending of the game, but only 6.1% of players got the achievement for going up to where the canon ending takes place, changing their mind, and walking back down.
Myst (2021): In the 2021 remake a shocking 32% of players made it through Selenitic, but only 4.6% got the “Never Lost” achievement. This is a bit of a big leap in logic, I’ll admit, but I’m willing to bet that means only 4% of players actually know how to solve the mazerunner puzzle. It’s a puzzle you must solve to complete Selenitic. Without going into it too much, you control a train going through a maze of rails and at each junction you can spin to go to a set of different rails. Each cardinal direction corresponds to a series of 4 sounds you were supposed to have memorized from the previous age (level), the Mechanical age. If 2 sounds happen, then you have to go in the direction between those sounds. If you play the game in the non-randomized state then you can just look up a walkthrough of this puzzle, which is what most people did in the 90s and what most people still do because guaranteeing good sound quality for everyone is still difficult. Most new players might even play with the sound off just because they don’t know about this.
My 9yo daughter has a tablet with family link, so I can monitor what apps she wants to install. As the garbage games are mostly at the top free, she keeps asking for games that I reject, in most cases because it’s riddled with ads....
For me it was the Xfinity router. I knew I shouldn’t have bought one and should have gone for a third party one, but I did it anyway because it was cheaper when I was setting up my Internet plan.
Stupid thing forces you to download an app to get it to work and sign in. Apparently if you buy any other third party combination modem and router, you just log into a default web page and sign in with default credentials. But no, for the Xfinity one you need to connect on the app and let it search over 5G for the thing, which took ages. There were multiple times where I set it down to load, came back, and the app said it failed to find it. When the router was sitting within inches of my phone
I mean you’re probably older than me but I’d say the process is more streamlined, it just takes way longer since it seems like there’s just so much to do. I doubt you had to make an IBM account to use your DOS computer, right?
We have this cool thing in English called words. Instead of wanting to say things, they could have literally expressed those ideas using words and removed all ambiguity.
And sure, I also lied about that, because that makes sense. It’s a thing I just had to lie about.
They streamlined everything so it’s really hands off, but it’s all just loading little updates and features that didn’t come shipped with the console. If you got it on christmas of release year like we did with the Xbox One then it was only maybe 1 or 2 hours of updates, but if it’s 3 years later like we did with our PS4 then that’s like 6 hours. A commenter earlier mentioned I’m lying unless I have a slow internet connection, and they’re right. Like, in 2013 gigabit internet was far from standard. We had comcast/xfinity, paying for 100 mb/s and getting 50 on a good day. I distinctly remember my dad took a day off work just to play our new PS4 (what a legend). I left for school when he was unboxing the thing and when I came back from school it was still loading.
And yeah, this isn’t really the fault of Sony, but it’s still really annoying that nowadays it’s even a feature as opposed to just plug and play. Same goes for retail game discs. It’s really annoying buying the thing, copying it, then having to wait for gigabytes and gigabytes of updates.
Not everybody has good internet. I’m done explaining this. I’ve explained it in multiple comments now so if you don’t get it then that’s a you problem.
So, while INFRA already does fully exist, I’d love to see more games like it. It’s really hard to describe what INFRA is without major spoilers, but if you’ve played it then you probably know what I’m talking about.
It’s like… take the new Chernobyl game and remove literally all the death states, then fill it to the brim with easter eggs, lore content, secret rooms and pathways, challenging logic puzzles, stuff like that. INFRA ticked all those boxes for me and I have yet to find a game like it.
Every game that I’ve looked at and been recommended as being “like INFRA” always has some major flaw or some concession that really sets it apart from the original game. INFRA is pretty much all about exploring your surroundings to uncover the plot of the game and even change some of the story if you’re vigilant enough about the puzzles. You can literally complete the game just as a walking sim while doing fuck-all, but I think most players will find the intrigue of the story interesting enough to be almost coerced into going down the other fork in the road, so to speak. Like there are sections in every chapter where you have to use your knowledge in civil engineering to repair some sort of machinery using intermediate logic puzzles, but you’re always able to just skip it. However, completing these puzzles allows you to unlock the story as the puzzles require exploration. Hope that made sense.
Interestingly enough, if the games industry had kept the $60 price point that they fixed back ~2005 up with inflation, games would be costing around $95 today.
Agreed, and it’s been such a quick change in the industry too which is a great sign. It really wasn’t that long ago that you didn’t even get a brightness slider, and hell some games still have a static 50 FOV.
I’ve read a ton of good things about this game, so I started it this week. I’m a couple of hours in now, but all I’m doing is floating around in the little space ship so far, and respawning every so often when I do something dumb....
It’s definitely interesting but it’s totally okay if it’s not for you. I really didn’t like it personally but it’s a bit disappointing when everyone and their mother is recommending it saying it’s the best thing ever.
For me it was Dead Space 2 when I was 12-ish. For reference, at this point the most gruesome/gorey/violent media I was exposed to was the Halo 3 Flood levels and the original 2 Alien movies....
Fallout 3 isn’t a horror game but man that atmosphere is crazy. I remember one of the very first missions has you go to galaxy news radio from the first settlement, megaton to talk to the DJ. It’s a really long journey through subway tunnels and ruined DC streets. The wasteland is pretty horrific and lots of enemies are disgusting and almost disturbing to look at.
As much as Bethesda gets shit for that game, they did an amazing job converting the atmosphere from the first two games into a 3D world.
While Elon’s then-partner Grimes was recording her part in the game as cyborg popstar Lizzy Wizzy, the erratic tech billionaire turned up with an antique firearm to “insist” on being included in the game. “The studio guys were like sweating,” Grimes is quoted as saying. Musk adds “I told them that I was armed but not...
How are you all playing these insanely complex games?
Just some off the top of my head: Destiny, Deep Rock Galactic, Overwatch, and most recently Baldur’s Gate....
‘The Walking Dead’ Just Released A Shocking, Hilariously Bad Game (www.forbes.com) angielski
Anyone knows about calm Windows games with 1-finger touch screen support? angielski
What I am searching for is for games that support touch screens and can be played with 1 finger / one hand. No action games with fake joysticks on the screen, just games that work with a single finger or at least one hand while lying in bed and trying to wind down. One very good example is Civilization V, which has a dedicated...
What game genre would you like to see more entrants in? angielski
This was something I started wondering about when I was reading a thread about Star Citizen, and about how space combat flight games were much less-common than they had been at one point, how fans of the genre were hungry for new entrants....
Official: New Grand Theft Auto Trailer Arriving in December (twitter.com)
18+ Rockstar plans to announce Grand Theft Auto VI as early as this week and will release a trailer in December, sources tell Bloomberg News. (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
Title and link taken from reddit. (Don’t kill me I don’t have a Reddit account anymore)...
Development of a Live-Action Film of The Legend of Zelda to Start (www.nintendo.co.jp) angielski
Archive link: archive.ph/F4r9U...
The Talos Principle 2 Review Thread
Game Information...
Cities Skylines II is an absolutely beautiful game (vimeo.com)
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/5266864...
EXCLUSIVE W/ HALF-LIFE DEV - NEVER SEEN CUT CONTENT @Tyler McVicker (yewtu.be) angielski
Play the mod we are playing here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/812440/HalfLife_Absolute_Zero/...
Stop blaming teeth for Cities: Skylines 2 performance problems, say devs (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Far Cry's Multiplayer Game is an Extraction-Based Shooter (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Space sim Squadron 42 is "feature-complete" and gunning for Starfield's lunch with massive new video (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Squadron 42 is the single player campaign of Star Citizen, that is supposed to launch as a separate game. It's basically a small portion of Star Citizen, but with a story and ending. I'm still not confident; waited too long for that.
I just wanted to commend Croteam angielski
So, Croteam, the creators of the Serious Sam series as well as the Talos Principle game have just announced the sequel to the Talos Principle, The Talos Principle 2, is set to release a little over a week from this post, about 9 years after the first game came out. I was always a huge puzzle fan and so I loved the first game, as...
Well, Cities: Skylines 2 is here, and it's another broken game release. angielski
I don’t really understand how people make the review threads, but we’re sitting at a 77 on OpenCritic right now. Many were worried about game performance after the recommended specs were released, but it looks like it’s even worse than we expected. It sounds like the game is mostly a solid release except for the...
PS5 Slim’s Lack Of Fanfare Speaks Volumes About This Generation (www.thegamer.com)
Shout out to that moment back in 2009 when Robin Walker of Valve once wrote that they started working on Team Fortress 2 back in 1987. (www.teamfortress.com) angielski
(2nd paragraph) …which would have put the development of TF2 11 years before the first Team Fortress came out. Nice one, Robin.
Submachine: Legacy - Gameplay Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
insert “it’s happening” gif here
What's the most surprising facts about a game you've gleaned by reading a game's achievement/trophy acquisition percentage? angielski
I’ll start with a few:...
How to let my kids find quality games on Android? Right now they only find the pay to win / ad riddled games.
My 9yo daughter has a tablet with family link, so I can monitor what apps she wants to install. As the garbage games are mostly at the top free, she keeps asking for games that I reject, in most cases because it’s riddled with ads....
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Fairly interesting article I just read about Yoji Shinkawa, the lead artist from the Metal Gear Solid games. (www.cookandbecker.com) angielski
What type of game you want to see that doesn't fully exist yet?
Capcom President Says ‘Game Prices Are Too Low’ (kotaku.com) angielski
lol. lmao.
Counter-Strike 2 is officially released (www.counter-strike.net)
"They don’t care": Inside the triumphs and failures of accessible gaming hardware (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Should I stick with The Outer Wilds? (EDIT: yes) angielski
I’ve read a ton of good things about this game, so I started it this week. I’m a couple of hours in now, but all I’m doing is floating around in the little space ship so far, and respawning every so often when I do something dumb....
What was the formative horror game of your childhood? angielski
For me it was Dead Space 2 when I was 12-ish. For reference, at this point the most gruesome/gorey/violent media I was exposed to was the Halo 3 Flood levels and the original 2 Alien movies....
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of September 24th
New thread!...
Elon Musk demanded a cameo in Cyberpunk 2077 while wielding a 200 year old gun: "I was armed but not dangerous" (www.pcgamer.com)
While Elon’s then-partner Grimes was recording her part in the game as cyborg popstar Lizzy Wizzy, the erratic tech billionaire turned up with an antique firearm to “insist” on being included in the game. “The studio guys were like sweating,” Grimes is quoted as saying. Musk adds “I told them that I was armed but not...