They’re very faithful reproductions of the old Commandos-formula, real time tactics about sneaking and stabbing through a dense map full of guards covering each other, finding spots where to get in with specific abilities of your varying characters. In the newest one in particular, your pirates are recruited in any order you like, and being supernatural in nature they have some wild abilities. Your starting character can briefly freeze time for a target. Your Quartermaster can possess people. A skeleton has a golden head he can toss to make guards come over to try pick it up and then make their corpse disappear by using his fishing pole to drag it into the endless chest he has on his back.
I think the pseudo-quote you wanted to do the other way around.
The thing is, sure, I prefer buying things from say, GOG. But Epic is horrible, and that’s even just from my consumer perspective with it’s bad client, terrible discoverability and lack of forums or anything. So as a consumer I have no incentive to support Epic, no matter whether I want to give my money to Steam or another place.
This is almost always a situation that can be pinned on Steam, actually. The games that end up doing this are usually using Steamworks, which essentially forces them into a sort of soft-exclusivity on Steam since their multiplayer features and such can only exist there.
But Steam doesn’t force them to use Steamworks, so I don’t really see “steam’s fault” fault here. Although, of course, it’d be cool if Steamworks would work for non-steam games at least for modding/multiplayer. Granted.
Although, I can imagine supporting Epic is annoying. Unlike even GOG, they don’t have their own support mechanism like a forum. I can see why someone would release on Steam (and hence stuff like GMG and Humble) and even GOG but not Epic. Example Baldur’s Gate 3, which released on everything except Epic. Although in their case Larian commented that the decision to not release on Epic was specifically to not show support for their exclusives-everything stance. Hence on everything except Epic.
Same, I always check whether GOG has a game first, and whether it’s patched up to par. Sadly, surprisingly often while games release on GOG they then lack features (although personally I do not really care about achievements) or worse, the devs give up on releasing patches for the non-Steam versions.
Oh that’s another really good point: Epic trained the consumers to open Epic weekly to get free games, then close it again. It’s a weird thing to be known for.
Sure, had them cornering the sellers market worked out - unrealistic as it was in hindsight - then having the buyers already all have the store installed for the free games would have been a genius way of getting more and more people onto the store. But it did not, and now it has just cemented the Epic store as a place you do not spend money on!
Yeah, GOG is my preferred store if there’s feature parity, too. On that note, anyone here got AoW4 from GOG? Are all mods available through Paradox, or at least all you’d ever need? Or is most bound to Steam like back in the AoW3 days?
Oh, don’t mistake me preferring Steam (and GOG, for example, who have an actual value proposition to me as a consumer - unlike Epic!) to “Valve worship”. They’re simply the least bad option, but of course they’re all huge corporations. Realistically though Valve has actually surprisingly little bad given the amount of money and market control they have, so eh… for now, I’m happy buying about half my games there (usually ends up that way, though I prefer GOG for games also releasing on that).
It turns your units against you. Sure the ROF is low, but damn. Plus, given how the controls worked (or didn’t) back in the days, this caused utter havoc not only with the unit control but also other unit’s pathing.
Nah, it’s a very faithful remake - after a lot of back-and-forth of them considering changing the game more they ended up making a near 1-to-1 graphics update.
So I would recommend it. There are some parts that are made more challenging. Inventory management is a big one. OTOH that makes sense, as the modern controls enable *far more accurate combat and hence saving ammo is somewhat easy and you can easily use the shotgun or the magnum as staples.
I basically saved teflon ammo whenever I found it (dumped it all near the cargo lift) then before entering level 8 retrieved my modded Scorpion from there with nearly 1500 ammo and just went to town with that + leftover shotgun shells. But the drops are also changed, so both teflon bullets and magnesium ones for the Assault Rifle still commonly drop in the final few areas.
And of course, taken from the main game, EMP grenade into berserk-stim Laser Rapier is always an option and kills even the toughest enemies in the game before they recover.
That being said, one specific thing is annoying: Beta grove now deals constant and quite significant damage even with the enviropack on. You have to rush rush rush it, luckily it is brief. Other than that, it’s neatly improved, modern graphics with a cool retro-effect from the nearest-neighbor filter, modern controls and combat and some better and more convenient HUD, redone audio including new recordings from Terri Brosius (SHODAN), they also completely redid cyberspace. While I like the original, I can see why most did not, so I really don’t mind this part.
I just finished playing the System Shock Remaster yesterday night after ~22 hours. I could still do everything from memory pretty much, and it remains an amazing game to this day, especially with the slick fresh paintcoat from the remaster.
Now I’m exploring Shadow Gambit a bit. Always loved the Commandoes games, and this is the third - and sadly final - Mimimi game that copies the gameplay verbatim. And from the little I’ve played so far, it’s fantastic. Having actual supernatural characters fits the abilities really well, and the voicework is done tremendously well, too.