Pxtl

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Homeworld. I know that’s blasphemy. I love RTS games and the game is cool and beautiful but so slow and boring and tedious.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

They’re jumping into a very crowded space, one where Valve is the first-to-market. That said, Valve is good at proving a hardware market viable and then flubbing at actually dominating it (VR, PC set-top boxes) so I could see somebody like Lenovo winning at this.

I’m kind of surprised they went for the Switch/Tablet form-factor for this instead of targeting the phone scale, but Lenovorola already cratered at trying to do this as a phone once before (Moto Z with the gamepad mod).

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

The Logitech G-Cloud is similarly top-specced and pricy, although iirc it’s supposedly more lightweight and comfortable than its counterparts. It’s getting very crowded in that space, I don’t envy any of these companies that jumped onto this band wagon and found everybody else doing the same thing at the same time.

I’ve tried using gamer-clips on my phone and the top-heavy weight distribution makes them uncomfortable despite the lower-mass of phone+controller, so I can see how that would be a design challenge. I still wish Lenovorola had stuck to it harder with the Moto-mods, but I suppose the death of the Atom processor line and Windows Phone means that any such device would have to be Android, and gamers want x86-64 PC-compatible devices, and that’s probably not doable in a phone form-factor.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

looks.

Ooh, that’s neat! My only complaint looking at it is that they didn’t figure out some place to put a right-side thumbpad for a better mouse-mode. Joystick mouse emulation is a miserable solution, and the central thumbpad is too far for gaming (ask anybody who played Mario 64 or Metroid Hunters on the DS). My dream machine would be to use the old Blackberry trick of making the right-side of the keyboard able to masquerade as a touchpad (you literally run your thumb along the keyboard and it’s a pointing device), add a face-toggle-button to switch between mouse-mode and keyboard mode, and then add a scrollwheel shoulder-button.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

This was solved 30 years ago in Star Control 2, with a non-Newtonian Hyperspace that kept vast distances still feeling vast and made fuel important, while in-system travel was still free and newtonian. There are plenty of options between “fast travel all the things” and “1:1 model of the absolute terrifying emptiness of space” – and even then, the “1:1 model of vast emptiness of space” is still kind of doable, if you’re willing to make the hyperdrive flexible for the various increments of in-system/interstellar travel. The hard part actually would be modeling the surfaces of planets in a way that makes the player forced to land at the “interesting” parts of the planet instead of letting them explore the entire surface of boring procedural-generated landscape without making it feel restrictive.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

ship combat also felt nice

Ooh, that was the thing I was really curious about – too many “space” games are just conventional FPS games set on various alien worlds and space stations, with only minimal nods to interplanetary vehicles.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Yes. Things they changed from classic AC that I like: The assault-flight mode, the cooldown-based weapons, mouse and keyboard controls, some difficult and interesting bosses. The fact that you don’t have to pay for failed missions. Removing stunlocking.

Things I don’t like: fast rotation, loss of radar, general sameyness of the ACs compared to the more extreme oldschool designs. Sometimes it feels like the only important decision is “twogun or sword”.

Things I’m not sure about because they’re obviously “Sekirobot” but the old AC approach had some flaws: the new energy model, the boost-dodges, the new stun model.

Things about oldschool AC I’m disappointed still haven’t been replaced: The fact that buy/sell/install hasn’t been unified into a single screen instead of jumping back and forth between 3 screens. The fact that you don’t automatically start skating by default - why do you ever want to walk in modern Armored Core?

It’s a good compromise between Souls and AC, but there are definitely things I miss about the early games.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

It’s a compromise between the classic AC games that were a bit more mech-y and a Soulslike (note that even the classic games were very fast-paced, we’re not talking about Mechwarrior here). Some people call it “Sekirobot” because it’s moved away from a few of the mech-y aspects and is more about high-speed soulslike combat but with a rocket-pack, guns, and homing-missiles.

Personally I’m enjoying the hell out of it.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

I’ll give them credit, they took a hard crack at mashing up the classic styling of Lara and the modern realistic version of her to produce a novel-looking character who I do not recognize at all.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

If you don’t want to engage with political issues, don’t bring up political topics. Using oppression for flavor text instead of confronting it as a major issue in your story is tacky. Star Wars suffers from the same problem.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Agree that the mecha feel a bit more samey, but I played the heck out of the first AC games and I don’t miss the long and winding maps. I still remember maps I had to play Descent-style constantly switching to the 3D map (like the biological missions with the mouse-monsters in the first game). It was boring and tedious. And I don’t miss superlong missions where I had to ammo-ration.

A fundamental problem with AC is they don’t give you enough info to make informed decisions about config unless you want to try->die->redesign. Like if they had a preview of the terrain and some rough guesstimates about mission length and ammo needs, you could tailor your mech without the “oops I didn’t know this was going to be a marathon I’m out of ammo” which is just the most miserable way to lose. AC6 makes this explicit in that you probably won’t run out of ammo if you’ve 4 weapons and you use all of them. Given the alternative, I’ll take it.

And as for the “why isn’t stagger a function of knockback” that was terrible gameplay you could stunlock people in the early AC games.

I like the cooldown-based weapons, like the motion model (fighting while doing the flanking boost is hella fun)… But yes, the energy model is weird and imho does a lot to make the ACs feel samey. It used to be picking an energy weapon meant a tradeoff that you were draining your boost power when firing.

But yes I miss the radar. I think the expectation is that players will lock-on and then forget it, but I hate lock-on so I switched to mouse and keyboard and I find I’m often losing fast-moving targets in my periphery.

I miss the limited rotation rate of the early games, where boosting backwards to put a target in front of you was often better than turning to face them. Rotation rates was another way different layouts felt different. This also led to considerations with FCS shapes - short-ranged weapons with wider targeting-boxes that didn’t require aiming.

But on the other other hand, the spreadsheet of numbers is always dumb. I can’t think of any genre other than turn-based RPGs that are better for including “this weapon does different damage to target X vs target Y”. That’s always annoying trivia - let the Pokemon players keep that nonsense.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

I think most AC games pretty much dump you into the first missions with a stock mech. AC6 is only distinct in that the first mission is so long and includes a comparatively-difficult boss-fight.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Hah, you and OP are literally arguing the exact opposite of each other.

“It’s a bad Souls game, I can’t just use whatever build I want and win with pure skill!”

“It’s a bad Armored Core game, I can’t just optimize my mech for this exact fight and steamroll it!”

…

I like the game.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Agreed.

That said, the Armored Core games seem to disagree with their own stated goals.

“We want you to reconfigure your mech to properly fit with the mission!”

“Cool, so you’re going to give me a thorough briefing on what I can expect so I can tailor my mech to that?”

“No.”

“You’re going to let me reconfigure my mech mid-mission?”

“No.”

“You’re going to unify the buy/sell/garage screens so I can easily redesign my loadout without flipping through 3 different screens?”

“No.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Die. Then reconfigure. And depending on the game, go deeply in debt.”

“Yikes. So at least reloading will be quick?”

“No.”

“You’ll at least skip the scripted dialogue and startup animation when I’m retrying?”

“No.”

“… Okay.”

Seriously, the Armored Core game that die-hard fans describe sounds great. I wish those were the games they actually made.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

I’ve only just finished Chapter 1, but the cloaking mechs were an interesting challenge. That was more than just boss fights.

Mopping up MTs is a stupid waste of time, I agree, at least the ones that don’t have high lethality weapons like bazookas. Bazooka MTs and artillery cannons are an interesting challenge, but there’s not much variety there. Helis are never interesting foes.

The biggest flaw, imho, is that ACs don’t feel different-enough, both to use and to fight. Maybe more will get unlocked further in the game, but I’m not seeing much variety in builds. You’ve got your homing missiles to cause stagger, your damage-guns to deal damage, and your swords and bazookas to punish people. Some ACs skip the punish-weapon and go all-in on damage. I’m missing the flak-bombs from the early games, the very different fighting styles of tanks and quads, the wider variety of missiles, etc.

Shields create an interesting tweak but I’ve only seen the riot-shield MTs and the pulse-shielded enemies – I haven’t seen any with the normal AC shield.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

I kind of wish they’d found some better way to insult him than “bring back Twitter”.

You know, something he finds really offensive to shout at him.

Like “trans rights”.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Mine’s basically the same but with the plasma rifle instead of the pistol and the plasma artillery instead of that dual launcher (I don’t know what that is) you’ve got on the left shoulder. Although I had to downgrade to the starting head to make that all fit.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

I honestly don’t get what they’re thinking. They make phones. They making gaming equipment. Why don’t they integrate those together like they did with the Xperia Play? I don’t necessarily mean taking another kick at that can (but yes, they should take another kick at that can) but why not work with what they’re good at? Like they work with Backbone to make a Playstation branded version of it – but it runs on iPhones only!

It seems so obvious - make an Xperia/PSP branded gaming-grade phone, offer a first-party Backbone-like controller, sell a Playstation Portal screen-and-wifi-only device that also docks into that Backbone-like controller, etc. The only real problem is Google’s monopolistic rules against letting hardware companies offer alternate stores on PlayStore-based devices, or they could have a Playstation Android Store focused on gamepad-based games that are specifically targeting their gaming Android devices.

Bring back PSP as an Sony+Android gaming brand.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

That was BR2. BR1 was kinda distinct because instead of the bat lady it had a heavyset middle-aged warthog woman - most anime-styled fighting games only include female characters for T&A (like the bat lady).

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

PowerStone 2. 4-player full-freedom game. Think Super Smash meets WWE games, but with pulp adventure theming (including a kinda stereotypical T-Hawk-style indigenous dude) and a vaguely Tezuka retro-anime art style. That and Virtual On Oratio Tangram (which is like if Armored Core was a fighting game) were reasons to own a Dreamcast for innovative fighting games.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

I’ve just unlocked tank legs but I’m still all-in on my reverse-leg and plasma setup. I just finished The Wall.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I haven’t been looking into the meta at all, been enjoying farting around and experimenting solo, what’s a Meefcake? Heavy biped with bazookas?

Edit: found the vid. The game came out two days ago how is there already so much content???

Anyhow, dual plasma I see. I tried rolling dual energy and hated it because of how rapid-clicking dual charge-weapons feels.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

That’s been the central feature of this series for like 25 years - Battletech level customization, but fully visible in your mech’s construction, and with Gundam/Macross style mech action and styling. And now they’ve added some Soulslike gameplay now that they’ve returned to the series after all that Elden Dark Blood Whatever.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

I was already doing a plasma rifle, but the warnings about Balteus convinced me to do some tweaks to optimize the build before going into the End Of Chapter 1 mission. Inverse legs, lightweight arms, the starter head (it’s better than the flat-head and it still fit, every other head either made overweight or over-energy). One plasma rifle, one sword, one plasma-mortar, the big volley-missile-mortar, and speed. I might not have been as tough as the full dual Meefcake, but I killed him with style, even finishing with the sword. I honestly couldn’t tell if I died or he did in the final explosion, then the dust settled and I had one notch of health left.

Took about 2.5 hours of trying.

Holy shit that was fun. I’ve played Armored Core games, but only the early ones that didn’t have Soulslike bosses like this. That was goddamned amazing.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

I just finished the first really hard boss (Balteus) and I’m having a ball. Can recommend. But play it on PC with KB+M. I know it’s a fromsoft game, but the KB+M controls are 10X as good as gamepad controls.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

There is no grind. Parts sell for 100% value, and even the training missions give you valuable parts, so with no grinding I’m pretty much at exactly the mech I wanted from all the parts available.

The game is difficult, but it’s rewarding about it. The fights are hard but also fun and interesting and the game gives you tons of interesting parts to try loadouts.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Why would you want to buy everything?

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I beat him with a hardcore mobility and missiles build, but I’ve heard he’s much more doable if you switch to a superheavy build of all plasma weapons (the “Meefcake” is its name in the meta). One thing I noticed is his movement habits make him pretty vulnerable to missiles, which catch up to him when he holds still.

With mouse and keyboard where you can track him well he’s very fun to fight in close range since he likes to hold still for his missile volleys (you can pour in the damage while dodging), except that his ability to punish you with the bazooka means every screw-up is lethal when you’re in close. And that’s 10X worse when he gets his flaming sword.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Wait, you can reconfigure mid-sortie? How? I know you get a chance to garage-only-reconfig after the briefing, but the briefings haven’t contained contain useful info for planning loadouts so far. Is there something in the “Restart from checkpoint” screen I’m missing? I was disappointed I couldn’t tweak my loadout at resupply, for example.

edit: I’d always been assuming that leaving the mission meant leaving your checkpoints. Is there some way to partially-leave-mission?

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Wait it’s all shovelware always has been meme .jpg

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu

Honestly while the aiming and moving controls in the old game were bonkers, imho the jumping and firing controls were better. Only 4 buttons – fire, switch weapon, sword, and jump (which is lateral boost if you do it while walking) fit the game into a standard PS1 pad. Playing ac6 I’m annoyed how much my right thumb has to jump back and forth between the aim stick and the face buttons – if they didn’t have 4 attack actions and 3 boost actions they could’ve fit more on the shoulders and l3/r3 actions.

Pxtl, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I’m playing on PC and switched to KB+M in my 2nd session and it’s night and day. Unless you’re using a PS5 controller with the extra buttons on the back, this game is meant for keyboard and mouse.

My kid thought I was nuts: “it’s a fromsoft game! They don’t even know keyboards exist!” but they provided basic keyboard/mouse support and it works amazingly.

Edit: I feel like dual-wielding takes away a lot from AC. The swordplay is too essential to the game, imho. My dream AC game would play more with melee weapons in the left-hand slot but remove dual-wielding. However, otherwise I prefer weapons in AC6 - more oomph and longer cooldowns means there’s more fun cycling through your gear instead of switching to a weapon and emptying it like was often the strategy on AC1, and the AC1 “heavy shoulder guns mean going immobile” and the stunlocking were dumb ideas.

But I assume I’m weird since I skipped all the middle games in the series and jumped from ac2 (which I barely played) straight to ac6 and was mostly an AC1 die-hard. I’m sure I missed a lot of good reasons why dual-wielding is good.

I also played Daemon x Machina and it was boring as hell, and duallies was a big reason.

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu

Do WC3-style hero-driven RTS. Somebody needs to bring back Warlords Battlecry but with D&D branding.

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu

Oh my God you idiots just bring back the Xperia Play how hard is that???

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu

It’s been over a decade since Xperia Play, and two since ngage. The market has changed, people are now spending a grand on phones, gamers are now buy some very expensive hardware for their hobby.

The biggest hurdle would actually be the Google Android rules about accessing Play Services on a device that would also need its own store for PlayStation branded games.

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu

I feel like Sony is the kind of company with enough muscle to get them to add controller support.

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu

Give us an HD remake of Twisted Metal 2.

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu

Twisted Metal 2 was the one where the series made its biggest hit on the PS1. 3 and 4 weren’t made by singletrac, and while they were good games they didn’t have the same style as the original two. The later games were after the industry had kind of moved on from that kind of game.

It’s like Megaman – there were a zillion Megaman games, but the ones that were biggest in the Zeitgeist were Megaman 2 and Megaman X.

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu

I’m mostly just annoyed that their main gimmicks like zero-G seem like an afterthought.

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu

Right? I don’t need an FPS to go full Shattered Horizon like Boundary, but if you’re going to advertise zero-G it should figure larger into your game.

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu

Games are entertainment, and so I get my news coverage from people who I find entertaining. This means I’ll take biased, opinionated ranting if it’s funny-enough. So mostly Yahtzee.

I get my Serious News about municipal politics.

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu

I mean Billet sent them a unit for review. That implies they’re expecting to be reported upon. Now, LTT half-assed the reporting and then accidentally put the prototype into their auction system, but I’d say “damning reporting” is an expected possible outcome of sending something to a reviewing org to be reviewed that doesn’t require special notice.

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

imho, what’s happened at LTT has a few separate root causes:

1. A focus on extremely high output that means poor-quality work and poor working environment.
2. Extreme unprofessionalism that works okay when you’re a handful of guys who are close friends and all personally invested in the mission, but not when you’re a big company with communication problems across the various working groups. This is normal growing pains when a company moves from “nimble start-up” into “big production”, but Linus has been handling it really badly, and seems like a big part of the problem. Stepping back from the CEO role was a good first step but he’s obviously still de-facto running the company.

I can’t call Linus a poser since he and his team quite apparently know a massive amount about PC hardware, but the above factors mean they’re going to make near-constant screw-ups, and now they’re seeing real comeuppance from that.

edit: I just read the rest of the allegations on Xitter and holy shit this is worse than I thought. She really buried the lede. It’s still “unprofessionalism” but a level of unprofessionalism that totally crosses the line far beyond normal growing pains. Flubbing workplace sexual harassment is a serious leadership fuckup.

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

Honestly, after the allegations on Xitter, I think it’s time for Linus to not just post apology videos but actually take a leave of absence. He’s the problem and he needs to admit that to himself. Bring in experts on fixing a broken company culture, reorg the company, let those experts fire some problem people, go take some classes on leadership full-time, and come back in a few months and just be a talking head at his company. No leadership at all.

Either way I’m done with them now. Maybe not forever, but I’m not giving them any benefit of the doubt for a very long time.

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu

I mean yeah I’m not arguing that point. Maybe calling that “half-assed” is an understatement when they were clearly showing their whole asses on that effort, but still:

Billet sent a unit to get reviewed, and the reviewers made a review. A grossly incompetent review, but a review. I don’t see why that would be worthy of special notification. Losing/selling the prototype was just a further demonstration of that incompetence.

Whereas if you’re going to do a long-form report on a group’s involvement in an event, it’s considered good form to reach out for comment.

Either way, imho the Billet story has kind of been eclipsed by the Xeets by their ex-employee about the toxic workplace.

Basically, Linus’ company is a complete trainwreck and he has no credibility on fixing it since it seems like the disastrous culture is his own fault. Sitting and saying “this is fine, I’m taking care of it” to every disaster while pushing for more and more content to the point that quality slips to legally actionable levels is piss-poor leadership.

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu

I’m reliably informed by people who really hate Overwatch that thinking like this makes you a chump for capitalism who is ruining the industry.

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu

Uh, I thought I was being pretty clear that I wasn’t the crazed anticapitalist, but I guess Poe’s Law.

Pxtl, 10 miesięcy temu

The characters are very easy to unlock in game for free. Obviously it’s not as good as getting them at the start of the season, but it’s not p2w. They’re at the end of the free battle pass in their launch season, and have an easy achievement challenge to unlock them in following seasons. I’d say the preferred weapons in tf2 were harder to get.