Factorio is not for everyone, but it’s also one of the all stars of its genre. With the upcoming expansion in a couple weeks, it’ll probably eat another few hundred of my free hours over the next few months, and I know I’m not alone on this one.
Fortunately, if you need character backstories and such, you could instead read the books or watch the TV series instead. I jumped straight into Witcher 3 and had no issues with missing background knowledge.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t play 1 or 2 though, just that there are other options.
For what it’s worth, I feel the same way about normal settings for FP1 in that it’s pretty easy. Switching to extreme though, it felt as though I needed to play perfectly to finish a scenario. To me, I think it comes down to most of the difficulty being frontloaded. A solid start sets you up for the rest of the game, while a rough start can ruin a run as the game continues to kick you down with every temp drop, event, etc.
I keep looking at this game not because I want to play it, but because I want to see how it was made. As someone who’s played with bevy a bit, it’s amazing to me what they were able to do with it, and it would be so cool to see how it was done.
I made the mistake of starting Frostpunk (1) since I saw that 2 released. It’s an incredibly well-made game. The art style is beautiful, the game is intense, there is a lot of emotion, and it does its one thing just so well. Unlike a lot of modern games these days, Frostpunk wants you to lose, which is fitting for its setting. It sees that you’re behind, then kicks you in the shins for good measure rather than lending a helping hand. I’ve lost so many hours of my time to this game in the past week.
I’ve read that Frostpunk 2 is a completely different game. That one might be next on my list if I get to it before Factorio updates and the expansion for it comes out.
As much as I dislike Nintendo, the Switch is an excellent console despite its hardware. It’s no surprise that it’s been as popular as it has been for so long. These days though, there are a lot of competitors in the handheld space that have much better hardware, so it really maintains its position due to a combination of branding and the game exclusivity.
I’m curious what their next console will be. I probably won’t buy it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was also a huge success.
I’m not sure which game this comment is in context of, but steam reviews showcase the issues pretty clearly. For example, I went on the steam reviews for MTGA at one point for fun and saw a comment complaining about there not being enough white male masculine looking avatars. I’m not sure how Gideon Jura (literally the definition, even in cards, of a masculine white guy) and Garruk are not masculine enough for this person lol.
Most likely, from how the comment read, they were complaining about the female portraits and portraits with non-white characters. I’m assuming they missed the NB character portrait (Niko Aris) since they didn’t specifically call them out.
I also remember back when Horizon: Zero Dawn came out there were a lot of people complaining about a female MC. Personally, that was one of my favorite parts of the game since it gave a non-traditional perspective of the story in my opinion. Maybe some people disagree, and that’s fine, but giving a game a poor review just because the MC is female is honestly just a dishonest review of the game.
You are not entitled to my money.
I don’t think the article claimed anyone was, at least from my read of it. It’s your loss if you refuse to enjoy games over such a petty reason though.
It’s also honestly just childish to give a game you haven’t played a bad review for having a more diverse cast. The main character is literally on the box art - if it bothers you, then the game is clearly not for you. It’s like me reviewing an otome game poorly because I don’t like otome games.
This sounds like a nightmare for production lines. Items on belts just randomly turning into spoilage? I hate thinking about how this will break so many common factory setups, and I like this change just as much for that same reason. Just filtering out spoilage at the end of a belt won’t be enough for some designs, especially when 3+ ingredients are involved in the recipe (so two input belts). It’ll be interesting to come up with new designs that can filter the inputs mid-belt to remove the spoilage, since it’s inevitable if your inputs come faster than you can process them.
From the quotes in the article, I have to agree with drawing that line. On the one hand, making a non-profit mod using AI-generated voices has no opportunity cost to the actors since they wouldn’t have been hired for that anyway. On the other hand, and this is why I am leaning against training AI voices off people at all without permission, it can cause actual harm to the actor to hear themselves saying things they would otherwise be offended by and wouldn’t ever say in reality. In other words, the AI voices can directly harm people (and already have, according to the article at least).
I couldn’t finish Starfield, but had fun up until the point they added the fantasy mechanic to it. For a game I got for free, it was worth every cent. I might have been upset if I got it full price though.
Removing filter variants of inserters sounds super nice. It always felt odd to me that filters were a part of a completely different type of inserter, and needing to carry both non-filter and filter variants of inserters took up a lot of inventory space it felt like.