ICastFist

ICastFist, 1 day ago

Meanwhile, PC players can still buy and play it off steam. Or just pirate it

ICastFist, 3 days ago

As other people have complained, it’s a space exploration game without the space nor the exploration

ICastFist, 3 days ago

Very true. So long as your shots don’t hit anybody, or your powers affect anybody, you can show them off all the time on the big cities and nobody gives a fuck. Using the whirlwind Sprint shout on Skyrim makes everyone around comment and a guard desperately asking you to stop.

ICastFist, 3 days ago

My main gripe with the universe of starfield is that it works on fallout logic, as in, everyone acts as if telephones and cameras don’t exist, despite being 300 years in our fucking future without any tech loss.

That “don’t you guys have phones?” Blizzard meme is ironically spot on here. They don’t. Communication only happens face to face while out of a ship.

The other thing is how a lot of the game runs on “nobody cares”. Alien ship showing up on orbit? Nobody cares. Another alien ship showing up and attacking you? Nobody saw it, nobody cares. Alien space magic? Nobody cares. Alien space magic being used to wreak havoc in a big city? Not a word on it, instant amnesia after the attack.

ICastFist, 3 days ago

Their overall premises differ a lot, but it’s very easy to see that a lot of the “exploration” in SF tried to copy NMS, but did so in the worst way possible.

Scanning plants and wildlife? Turn on scan mode and find those. Only in Starfield, you have to do it several times to complete, because FUN!

Points of interest dotting the planet surface? Sure! Just make sure they have zero connection to anything in both games!

Space exploration? Just a random dice roll when you enter a planet orbi, clearly better than using an item to search for a random POI in space!

ICastFist, 3 days ago

Sounds like an AI generated blurb and very far from reality, especially as you have almost no choice in anything, exactly zero of them feel meaningful in any way, can’t “antagonize anyone” (yay for essential npcs 😒), aren’t saving the galaxy and the “hidden story” is one of the worst “ITS THE MULTIVERSE LOL” stories I’ve seen.

ICastFist, 3 days ago

The game isn’t good, but reading how bad it is is a certain entertainment to me, not gonna lie.

Funny thing is that I decided to pirate it around February 2024, after seeing how much people were hating it. “It can’t be that bad, can it?” - my low expectations were disappointed by reality

ICastFist, 3 days ago

I don’t have a problem with people who like and enjoy the game, I just don’t understand your reason to say the game is something that it actually is not

ICastFist, 3 days ago

Not really an engine problem, but Bethesda not caring to make the setting even remotely believable and making the mechanical parts feel isolated and meaningless is what hurts the game the most.

Exploring and collecting materials almost serves a purpose, as you need them to craft/upgrade armor and weapons, or to create stuff around your base, but you can just buy the stuff you need off vendors, which makes both the exploration and the point of having a base pointless. Crafting is almost something you might care about, but you can buy pretty much anything you need off vendors (heal kits, drugs) or get them as drops. None of the crafting targets the ship or its parts, for whatever reason.

If the game was just Dungeon -> Vendor -> Dungeon loop, it’d be much, much better rated and less hated. The lack of variety is felt very early on anyway, it’s not like cutting the bullshit would make it worse to endure.

Also, considering how nearly everyone using UE besides Epic themselves seem to do a really shitty job, including Bethesda with Oblivion Remaster, I’d expect that SF remaster to be even worse than the original 😆

ICastFist, 3 days ago

Ok, but apart from that, it’s okay, right?

No. Not by a long shot. You’re better off playing Fallout 4.

what is a good space exploration/trading game that doesn’t require a huge learning curve?

Freelancer. It’s old (2003), but it’s still effectively the Explore/Trade/Fight space sim that every other game gets compared to. I’ll note that it’s focus is on getting good combat ships and flying around, exploration exists but is the least developed aspect, I’d say. Gotta get it thru the high seas, tho.

Evochron Legacy is an indie game that might scratch your itch, it also lets you fly into planets’ atmospheres and it accounts for the friction, so while you can fly fast, doing so will damage your ship. I don’t think its learning curve is too steep, but it can take some time to get used to. Try the demo before buying it, as one negative review suggests

Lastly, check out Underspace’s demo. Still in Early Access, but seems promising.

ICastFist, 6 days ago

Fuck you, Nintendo. Release a fucking decent Pokemon game instead of lawyering the competition that’s offering a more desirable product

ICastFist, 6 days ago

The first attempt to sue was over copyright. Nintendo figured it had no grounds, so it went for patent bullshit

ICastFist, 6 days ago

Legal battles aren’t exactly cheap and they can drag on for years. Pocket Pair could end up bankrupt in the meantime from excessive legal costs, while Nintendo can keep that shit going for decades.

ICastFist, 6 days ago

It’s the using a creature to glide that’s the specific problem this time. Not the “using a creature” per se, but “pressing a button to instantly summon a non-player-controlled game-creature to allow for gliding, which is instantly dismissed once the player touches the ground” or something like that in the patent

ICastFist, 6 days ago

Yes, the more you read the patent the more you just want to grab whoever approved it and force them to explain how and why it deserved it, despite lots of prior implementations.

ICastFist, 6 days ago

As described in the patent, yes. You press one button, you start riding said mount. If it’s glider mount, it automatically changes to the stag once you touch the ground OR to the fish if you fall to the water.

Palworld never had this “automatic change from one mount to another”, at best it was the glider pals that you didn’t have to manually summon in order to glide and went away once you touched the ground or water. I’ve skimmed the patent a few times, but I don’t recall it having a case for going from creature-assisted-gliding to back on foot

ICastFist, 6 days ago

That VGC site has a pretty good sum up of Palworld: cynical and souless, but nonetheless a pretty fun game to play, and I fully agree. Pretty much every design up to version 0.3 was fully copied from pokemon. The more recent patch that added the big island on the south has more original-looking monster designs, though others are still pretty obvious ripoffs.

Additionally, the game involves using handheld ball devices thrown at wild world-roaming creatures you capture after cutting down their health by some amount to increase the catch percentage and different “grade” balls have increased chance for capture.

They did that on Craftopia, too, only it was to catch animals rather than monsters.

There is also a nefarious organization competing with you for capturing these wild creatures like Team Rocket.

Not really. There is a criminal syndicate, a bunch of violent hypocritical hippies, a corrupt police and some Borderlands style psychos, none “competing” with you, they just want you dead. I think only the syndicate would “count as team rocket”, but they’re up for all crimes.

This feels like taking advantage of grey area in the realm of visual IP similarity to shut down someone making their gameplay design mechanics look antiquated by comparison.

Palworld became a target at first because of that visual similarity but, as much as the pals obviously resemble pokemons, they’re visually different enough to be considered original and a case on those grounds alone would go nowhere. Which is why Nintendo shifted from IP to Patent bullshit.

ICastFist, 6 days ago

I won’t, unless I can buy one 2nd hand AND there’s a way to jailbreak it

ICastFist, 4 days ago

I don’t know how videogames managed to get different rules.

A lot of people in those offices really don’t understand the technical mumbo jumbo that can be summed up as “doing something that already exists, but on a computer”

Like scanning a document on a printer and immediately sending it as email. That was patented

ICastFist, 7 days ago

Semi related: in the USA, marijuana came with Mexican immigrants, so a lot of the criminalization stems from racism and xenophobia. The same applies to Brazil, since it was typical to find natives and blacks smoking it.

ICastFist, 7 days ago

You can’t be a fence if you never knew the stuff you’re buying was stolen, which was the case in Morrowind, the only person you couldn’t sell stolen stuff to was the owner.

ICastFist, 9 days ago

I think I have that on my GOG account, I’ll have to check later. Also currently on sale there, too, super cheap

ICastFist, 10 days ago

The first 4 Tomb Raider games on PC/PS1

Digimon World on PS1, made worse by the fact that it’s a tamagotchi roguelite RPG. I never played DW3, but I heard it can easily become a “where the fuck do I go now?” because of obtuse/asshole time sinking designs here and there

ICastFist, 10 days ago

I think Hexen takes the cake among the “old Dooms”, since it has a hub map and you have to revisit some levels to toggle switches that became accessible after toggling another switch in another map.

ICastFist, 10 days ago

Legends 1 certainly had more “exploration”, as there was nothing to point you to where you should go. Legends 2 has neat red arrows on the overworld map, so you have a decent idea of where to fuck around, though the dungeons got much more elaborate. Fuck the Nino Ruins

ICastFist, 10 days ago

Blackrock Depths was fucking big, too. Later on, with the LFG tool, it was separated into 2 or 3 parts, I think. I mean, running alone back in WotLK days, where you could easily kill everything side, would still take you 2 to 3 hours to fully clear the place

ICastFist, 10 days ago

So many failed nerevarines. If only they knew they were just an exploit INTENDED FEATURE away from saving Morrowind

ICastFist, 9 days ago

The funny thing is that LucasArts games were done as the “antithesis” to Sierra games, as the latter were chock full of cheap deaths and “Did you remember to do some little side thing 2 hours ago? No? Progress locked, fuck you” situations

ICastFist, 9 days ago

I still think about how I managed to finish it once, then tried again 1 month later only to be completely dumbfounded as to how to get the damn yellow block upgrade again

ICastFist, 9 days ago

I don’t even remember “where” I got, but I do remember I got to a point I had no clue how to progress. My party was around level 46, super powerful, but I just couldn’t find the right dungeon anymore

ICastFist, 9 days ago

Sounds like Antichamber

ICastFist, 8 days ago

Sounds interesting. Reminds me somewhat of Uncharted Waters, which is a naval RPG set around 1560. You could visit ports all over Europe, Middle East and Africa, probably over India and Japan, too, doing trade runs or living a pirate’s life.

ICastFist, 8 days ago

On arcades, you’d get fucked by asshole difficulty. At home, you’d get fucked by asshole difficulty and purposeful lack of information. Took me a while to put 2 and 2 together and realize how “predatory games” have been around for a very long time. Can’t sell the game twice, but you can sell information.

ICastFist, 12 days ago

The steam reviews are a fun read, too. It’s unironically an Overwhelming Positive

ICastFist, 13 days ago

The irony is that becoming a solo dev is rarely feasible and even more rarely leads to a product that pays up more than just working elsewhere.

That immediately makes people point to success stories, like Stardew Valley. Dunno about others, but I don’t have a family + girlfriend to sustain me for 4+ years, nor am I blinded by the dream possibility of reaching millions of sales when so many games struggle to reach 10k sales.

ICastFist, 14 days ago

Plenty of people will never experience these worlds or stories due to the turn-based combat

Not an actual problem. A lot of people simply won’t try those games because they’re old, others because they only know how to play Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite.

ICastFist, 14 days ago

Out of curiosity, which games with TBC have you played? I understand that the most common problem with them is that it’s just a dumb numbers game, bigger number wins, which also means lots of grinding

ICastFist, 17 days ago

Still on X4, over 150h in now. Got a small fleet of destroyer ships and “conquered” a sector that was originally Xenon owned (Tharkas Demise I think, north of Hatkivah Choice). The problem is that they keep sending fighters and, once in a while, a destroyer - the latter WILL destroy 1 or 2 of my destroyers if I’m not manually piloting one of them

ICastFist, 17 days ago

Poor Rock’s been languishing for ages, with Trigger being abandoned in space for 25 years now :(

ICastFist, 17 days ago

Having that music start without “OBJECTION” being shouted first feels so weird

ICastFist, 21 days ago

I remember a similar story some time ago, of another map that was just a big arena filled to the brim with all the enemies. Part of the strategy was circle strafing the whole place while enemies killed one another, then using the ammo to deal with whatever was left. Can’t remember the map name

ICastFist, 21 days ago

Still better than magic in Skyrim, which by level 10 wouldn’t be causing enough damage even on mudcrabs anymore

ICastFist, 21 days ago

I find that very likely, which will be extremely on character, as Oblivion was the first single player game to sell cosmetic DLC: horse armor.

ICastFist, 1 month ago

A more apt comparison would be with film reviewers. Before the internet, knowing what a movie was about, if you didn’t care about spoilers, would require either someone watching and telling you, or reading a piece on a newspaper (or, in some places, watching TV). It’s almost the same with “professional” game reviews and how they completely lost space to random dudes on the internet.

Also, watching a video usually feels more like entertainment, whereas reading a review or walkthrough feels more like doing some research.

ICastFist, 1 month ago

Let’s see if the physical disc once said anything about needing an online connection for single play. Oh look, it did not, the subscription required was only for 2-8 players network play.

Let’s compare with Destiny 2’s back cover, a game that is a MMO and thus “cannot be owned” by the players. Hey, a “Online Play (Required)*” sticker that is not present on The Crew! The fine print has a bit that states that “Activision makes no guarantee of regarding availability of online play or features, and may modify or discontinue online services at its discretion without notice.”

FF14 . It clearly states on the rectangular bit above the T Rating: “Users are granted only a limited, revocable license and do not own any intellectual property in the game or game data”

You deceived consumers, Ubisoft. “Online Play Required” is not there, so the game should remain playable offline.

ICastFist, 1 month ago

if the soyjak was hugging the shitty ghibli AI slop while complaining about the rest, this would’ve been 10/10

ICastFist, 1 month ago

Isn’t that exactly what’s happening as soon as you install win11?

ICastFist, 1 month ago

Not to mention the many deals with hardware manufacturers in order to avoid competing OSs to have any chance. They managed to kill BeOS and dominate the Japanese market in the 90s