Played it at launch and I’ve never had the desire to jump back into it since beating it the first time. I never had major issues with bugs or anything, the story was just on rails, there was no point in jumping back into it to play the same story all over again. Like yea, I guess they changed some systems and mechanics, but whatever.
The PS5 in general has just felt like a nebulous console. I don’t know if it’s just me not being as connected to console gaming anymore or what, but there’s no PS5 games that are “must play” or anything that I’ve seen/read/heard hype about that has made me really interested. Partly there was the Covid years where it was apparently facing shortages and during that I just switched my mind off to the idea that I’d ever buy one. It’s been out for years now though, but nothing about it makes me care to move on from our PS4 that’s still chugging along.
I started playing one of the Gacha games a few months back now, Watcher of Realms, I think the only reason I started was because it showed jiggling boobies in a trailer. The name is goofy and the story is almost non-existant, the gameplay isn’t terribly deep, but has some nuances to it, it’s like a tower defense RPG game. It’s kind of dumb as a game because it records your playthroughs of scenarios that you can then use later on to “Auto-fight” for you as you frequently have to grind for different shit. So you basically set the game on auto-pilot and stop playing the game. I’ve been playing for something like 6 months now, but I’ve been committed from the start to never pay a single dime for it and I’ve stuck with that the entire time. Granted, I’ve put way too much time into the game and, if time is money, I’ve wasted a bunch that way, but I’ve never actually paid for anything in currency. Cheap skate 4 life. I honestly don’t know why I keep playing, knowing what the game is setup for, but I still log in day after day.
I can definitely see how it encourages players to spend money, there’s so many mini-currencies within the game that obfuscate what you need to do to earn this or that hero or get whatever thing you’re trying for, but ultimately the incentive is to buy shit to get further along. In this game though, the rates are so goddamn ridiculous that you’d have to be an impatient jackass to pay the rates they want for simple things that don’t even give any guarantees of better performance in the game. On the one hand, I thing games like this are evil for trying to take advantage of people, but on the other, if you’re that stupid and that rich that you have money to burn on a game like this… maybe throwing your money away on digital stuff isn’t the worse thing you could be wasting your money on (like real world drugs or donating to Trump or something stupid like that). But yes, for kids who haven’t mentally developed yet, there probably should be some sort of protections for them, since they’ll pay for dumb shit at the drop of a hat.
This was a really interesting video on how modern wargaming is used by the military and its links to the recreational scene, I just got done watching it yesterday. I think Quinns, in typical fashion, seems to try to moralize a bit much, especially with his pointed questions, but then does a good job of coming back around to show the other point of view, though I think the overall view he had seemed negative. He tried to present both sides at least.
He did recognize the need for militaries in general, but then seemed to equate any use of wargaming as resulting in deaths, which was automatically bad. I think some of the wargame professionals made pretty good cases for why it was justified and how “wargaming” is a bit of a misnomer, it’s more a way of contingency planning and working through possible scenarios you might encounter, so wargaming just helps prepare for different scenarios by showing the range of actions that players/actors might take in a given situation. They’re mapping out probabilities using human psychology, along with boardgame and videogame mechanics.
I think the ending portion where he called on gamers to “do something” about making wargaming ethical was kind of whatever. As if the gaming community was any sort of unified bloc that could even do anything about it. Something like that would probably require like a wargamer’s guild or union that added some sort of restraints on the kinds of projects they would work on (only scenarios that minimize casualties) or something like that, but that sort of defeats the purpose of trying to map out probabilities, since you’d purposely censor certain probabilities from your line of thinking. I think wargamers will just continue to do whatever they’re doing.
I grew up playing FPS shooters like Doom, Quake, Tribes, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, etc, but I had avoided Fortnite for awhile because it just seemed like a kid’s game, whatever. Then my oldest son started getting into it and we’d play matches together, and suddenly I felt out of my element. The addition of building mechanics adds in a whole other element that you don’t really have to think about in other games. Granted, it’s not realistic being able to build shit that quickly, but whatever, it’s a game. And seeing some of the skill involved with these people running/gunning/building elaborate forts and the sort of battles that play out between two people gets insane sometimes.
Another interesting aspect of it is all the cross-marketing that goes on, you’ve got almost every major franchise represented in some way, shape, or form. It reminds me of Ready Player One. It sounds dumb, but Fortnite is probably the closest thing to a Metaverse that we currently have. I mean, hell, Emperor Palpatine somehow returned in between the movies in Fortnite (a dark day for Star Wars fandom).
I haven’t even been able to get it work using Nexus mods with my Steam version. I’m getting the intro screen/menu, but it never actually loads a new game after that. I’ll just wait a few months/years til I remember about it and try again.
Actually, I feel like back in the day we actually got manuals with tons of story content and artwork and such. Game manuals seem to have mostly fallen to the wayside now.
Incredible game that can be a little jarring for people who are probably expecting something like Baldur’s Gate 1&2, Fallout 1&2, or some other kind of isometric killfest RPG. It essentially turns the dialogue into 90% of the game, but the dialogue is so damn good that it doesn’t matter.
It also takes getting used to damage, as sometimes you can “die” in seemingly random ways. I was on a rooftop, I think trying to reach for a scarf or something, and failed my roll. That caused me to apparently get so depressed that I lost the game. I can’t remember which stat/trait it was but I think there’s a morale or mental trait you have to watch out for too.
Pirate this game if you wanna give it a try, don’t ever buy it. This is what the developers have advocated for and it actually fits right in with parts of the game itself.
Really great party game, kids love it. There’s a constant push-pull to make the level just hard enough. It kind of breaks down though if somebody has made it effectively unwinnable for everybody and you can’t find a way to unblock it. Otherwise though, it’s a fantastic game.
I loved RTS games back in the day, played through all the Command & Conquers, Warcrafts, Starcrafts and all that, but then gradually it felt like the genre starting morphing into DotA and other games and I just sort of moved on. I was mostly single-player, though got into multiplayer later, but remember it being so fucking nerve-wracking and having to click hundreds of times a minute and trying to optimize everything, I’d be so worn out after playing. My best game I ever remembered playing was Starcraft 2, there was one match where multiple players tried ganging up on me in a FFA match, it was obvious they were coordinating, and I somehow fended them off and took the game. It wasn’t an important game or anything, but that was one of the fond memories I have from that time in my gaming life.
I think I eventually just shifted over to turn-based strategy instead and I don’t know if the genre ever really returned from DotA.
That’s how alot of these discoveries seem like. Partly it’s just science reporting hyping up anything that happens, but then for many of these astronomical discoveries, it’s just a couple of pixels on a screen. And then somehow they can infer all sorts of things about it based on that. It’s just mind-blowing to think of all the data they can get from that about stars that are millions of light years away.