Wasteland 3 without looking up any guides poses some difficult choices, usually in the form of being forced to side with a certain faction at the expense of another, with no option to skip the choice once it’s presented.
It’s very good, but the tone can be totally broken if you master combat. Killing soldiers doesn’t lower morale, so they are free targets.
Depending on what locations spawn, it is possible to completely ruin the intended vibe. I’ve wiped out the military outpost and ended up with so many supplies I didn’t know what to do with them all.
Edited: There was a recent patch this year. Which supposedly has fixed the technical problems that made Spacer’s Choice unplayably bad. I still can not recommend it because it was broken when I tried to play it pre-patch, but it has supposedly been fixed. Edited to slightly soften the tone against it.
A lot of comments in this thread are confused about what “Spacer’s Choice” means. This is the “remastered” version of the game that was not done by Obsidian. It is a Game Of The Year style pack that includes all the DLC. The upgrade flowchart picture on the storefront page is needlessly confusing, ignore it. As of May this year, this version was very buggy and unoptimized. Texture pop-ins and laggy framerates are widely reported. For me personally I couldn’t even get it to run at all.
I wanted to play Star Wars Rebellion, but my copy is doing a thing where all the icons in-game are upside down. Apparently it’s a known issue running the game on newer OS (How? WHY?!) but until it’s fixed I can’t really play.
I’ve been playing Call Of Duty 2 as part of taking notes about the roots of the series. Not sure if there’s enough meat for a proper essay but I will see.
I really can’t wait for Christmas break to immerse myself in something. Maybe Deus Ex.
I’ve been playing the original Call Of Duty games, starting at the first one. I beat it and United Offensive. I’m working on the second game.
It’s all in service of a write up about the core identity and the design philosophy of the games. How the original games were fresh for their time, and how COD4 used a lot of the sensibilities of the WW2 games that preceded it. There’s a lot to mine and digest in the old games, COD4, and Modern Warfare 2 as a contrast and turning point. I just don’t know if people care enough to follow it.
I don’t want to come off as to PCMR, but truly Bethesda developed games need to be played on PC to get the most out of them. The mods tremendously elevate the experience. Everything from bug fixes and optimizations (that Bethesda should have done) to full on overhauls and DLC sized expansions, and everything in between.
I think I average about 200 mods simultaneously on Fallout 4 playthroughs.
There are diegetic elements like that, but also how the non-diegetic HUD delivers information.
When is it giving information? Is it giving me information I don’t actually need at the moment. For example a first person game that always has a compass or minimap. Maybe I want those sometimes, but do I want them always?
What are the visuals of the HUD like? Are they easy to read? Are they distracting? HUDs that have stretched and difficult at a glance fonts are a bad idea to me. Simple fonts that can be read against a variety of background colors are seemingly underdesigned to many UX designers, but it’s all I want sometimes.
Do HUDs have needlessly animated elements? Sometimes just putting a plain and simple number or bar on a screen is enough, but many games add so many artistic flourishes that it gets in the way of the game visuals.
HALO CE had its shield bar with the little health dots underneath. Technically diegetic, but obviously a gameplay element. It wasn’t distracting, it was clean and easy to read, it gave information that was constantly relevant.
I completely understand how overcluttered and distracting some HUDs can become. I have found however that fully HUDless experiences tend to be more of a novelty than an increase in immersion.
If I’m playing a shooter and don’t have information on, say how many magazines I have, I find that more distracting than immersive. In real life I could quickly pat my vest to know. A HUD can be a replacement for information that seems intuitive to have because in a real situation we’d have kinesthetic feedback.
Basic information like health while injured is simply too useful. Realistically my health isn’t defined by a single variable bar nor is it restored instantly from a grievous wound by a using a syringe, so I find that seeing the bar is useful for succeeding in the game even if it is equally as unrealistic.
Something like the iHUD mod for modern Fallout games is my ideal HUD. It is modular and I can define what information I see, what information I don’t, and for how long the information I do get stays on the screen. Health can be set to only show at certain thresholds, the compass directions or map markers can be disabled unless I ask to see them briefly. Other elements similarly made optional.
I’ve played fully HUDless in both Metro games and in modded STALKER games, and each time I do I find myself going back to having at least a minimal informative HUD.
I don’t hate HUDs and I think most people who try HUDless don’t actually hate them either. What is hated are obnoxious tool tips, flashy HUD animations, and floating intrusive quest markers. If UX designers do their jobs right, people don’t know they did anything at all.
I mean they didn’t really do 4X aside from Lords Of The Realm and Lords Of Magic games, but the city builders and strategy games do have, how do I put it, a similar wavelength was Sid Meier games.
Impressions Games is the name of the studio that made the Civil War Generals games. If you like old Sid Meier games, I’d put Impressions studios games in a similar ballpark.