Sure, but I think that the type of game is a pretty big input. Existing generative AI isn’t great at portraying a consistent figure in multiple poses and from multiple angles, which is something that many games are going to want to do.
On the other hand, I’ve also played text-oriented interactive fiction where there’s a single illustration for each character. For that, it’d be a good match.
AI-based speech synth isn’t as good as human voice acting, but it’s gotten pretty decent if you don’t need to be able to put lots of emotion into things. It’s not capable of, say, doing Transistor, which relied a lot on the voice acting. But it could be a very good choice to add new material for a character in an old game where the actor may not be around or who may have had their voice change.
I’ve been very impressed with AI upscaling. I think that upscaling textures and other assets probably has a lot of potential to take advantage of higher resolution screens. Maybe one might need a bit of human intervention, but a factor of 2 increase is something that I’ve found that the software can do pretty well without much involvement.
They have mechanical components that will wear out over time (though I suppose some people probably use them lightly enough that it’s less of an issue).
Looking to ask for people’s favorite tactical RPGs because I have played a bunch but never really gotten into any. XCOM, Fire Emblem, Disgaea, Advance Wars, Fallout, etc....
Just tried it, and it was some other game I was thinking of; I hadn’t played JA3 yet.
While I haven’t finished the game, thoughts:
It’s the strongest of the post-2 Jagged Alliance games that I’ve played.
Still not on par with JA2, at least relative to release year, I’d say also in absolute terms.
My biggest problem — I’m running this under Proton — is some bugginess that I’m a little suspicious is a thread deadlock. When it happens, I never see the targeting options show up when I target an enemy, and trying to go to the map or inventory screen doesn’t update the visible area onscreen, though I can blindly click and hear interactions. The game also doesn’t ever exit if I hit Alt-F4 in that state, just hangs. AFAICT, this can always be resolved by quicksaving (which you can do almost anywhere), stopping the game (I use kill in a terminal on Linux) and reloading the save, but it’s definitely obnoxious. Fortunately, the game starts up pretty quickly. Nobody on ProtonDB talking about it, so maybe it’s just me. I have not noticed bugs other than this one.
So far, not much by way of missions where one has to figure out elaborate ways of getting into areas or the like: more of a combat focus. I have wirecutters, crowbars, lockpicks, and explosives, like in JA2, but thus far, it’s mostly just a matter of clicking on a locked container with someone who has lockpicking skill. Probably more realistic — in real life, an unattended door isn’t going to stop anyone for long — but I kinda miss that.
The maps feel a lot smaller to me, though the higher resolution might be part of that. A lot of 3d modeling to make them look pretty. There’s a lot more verticality, like watchtowers.
The game also feels considerably shorter than JA2, based on the percentage of the strategic map that I’ve taken. That being said, JA2 could get a bit repetitive when one is fighting the umpteenth enemy reinforcement party.
Unique perks for mercs that make them a lot more meaningful than in JA2 (though also limit your builds). For example, Fox can get what is basically a free turn if she initiates combat on a surprised enemy. Barry auto-constructs explosives each day.
Thematic feel of the mercs from JA2 is retained well.
Interesting perk tree.
A bunch of map modifiers like fog that have a major impact.
Bunch of QoL stuff for scheduling concurrent tasks for different mercs.
Pay demands don’t seem to rise with level, though other factors can drive it up (e.g. Fox will demand more pay if you hire Steroid).
Feels easier than JA2, though I haven’t finished it.
I’m pretty sure the keybindings are different.
Tiny thing, but I always liked the start of JA2, where your initial team does a fast-rope helicopter insertion into a hostile sector. Felt like a badass way to set the tone. No real analog in JA3.
I started running into guys with RPGs early on in JA3, much earlier than in JA2.
JA2 has ground vehicles and a helicopter and they require you to obtain fuel. Transport logistics don’t exist in JA3, other than paying to embark on boat trips at a port (and just checked online to confirm that they aren’t just in the late game).
More weapon mods in JA3. Looks like some interesting tradeoffs that one has to make here, rather than just “later-game stuff is better”.
For me, it was a worthwhile purchase — even with the irritating bug I keep hitting — and I would definitely recommend it over the other post-JA2 stuff if you’ve played JA2 and want more. It hasn’t left me giggling at the insane amount of complex interactions that were coded into the game like JA2 did, though, which were kind of a hallmark of the original.
What did you think of the new aiming system? I’ve heard mixed things, but it sounded good to me (or at least way better than a flat percentage).
I don’t know what the internal mechanics are like, haven’t read material about it. From a user standpoint, I have just a list of positive and negative factors impacting my hit chance, so less information about my hit chance. I guess I’d vaguely prefer the percentage — I generally am not a huge fan of games that have the player rely on mechanics trying to hide the details of those mechanics — but it’s nice to know what inputs are present. It hasn’t been a huge factor to me one way or the other, honestly; I mean, I feel like I’ve got a solid-enough idea of roughly what the chances are.
even if it doesn’t hit the same highs as JA2, there hasn’t really been much else that comes close and a more modern coat of polish would be welcome.
Yeah, I don’t know of other things that have the strategic aspect. For the squad-based tactical turn-based combat, there are some options that I’ve liked playing in the past.
And there’s X-Com. I didn’t like the new ones, which are glitzy, lots of time spent doing dramatic animations and stuff, but maybe I should go back and give them another chance.
Well, unless someone makes an alternative, people are going to use it.
They do need to provide a lot of bandwidth, which isn’t free, though I wonder how viable it’d be for someone to create a Nexus-like Website using magnet URLs and BitTorrent as a backend.
Maybe too much of a technical bar to attract users.
It really depends on how one is applyng mods. Bethesda does have their own mod site and in-game support for modding, and that’s pretty straightforward (and the only option on consoles). That will limit what mods are available.
I do kind of wish that there were one cross-platform open-source universal “game mod” program that could support multiple online services. Would like to have Wabbajack-like functionality (apply a whole set of curated, tested-together mods) as a base too, as that’d lower the bar.
Given the hate Mindseye is getting for omitting water interactions entirely, what are some 3D games that have solid or interesting water/land player-character interactions?...
Capitalism deals with industry being owned privately.
If you want to complain about Microsoft being a publicly-traded, private-sector company rather than a worker cooperative or part of the government or whatever, okay, at least I can see where you’re coming from.
But a socialist economy is perfectly compatible with having high prices.
I’m trying to remember a video game from about ten to twenty years ago. It was a tactical military battle simulator. It was played from a bird’s eye view. The player could move units like vehicles and infantry groups around a map and needed to defeat enemy troops. The simulation of the combat itself was very detailed. After...
I don’t know if I fully agree with the petition, but I do think that there are some real problems with the status quo.
I also think that either a legislature or courts need to provide legal criteria for the good or service division with games. I think that there probably need to be “good” games, "serviceʾ games, and possibly even games that have a component of both.
I’d be more-generous and just call it a wildly-mismanaged development process that ran out of control, and where they have no realistic way of fulfilling all the promises they made at this point.
This is not to imply that one should throw more money into the hole, mind.
In a traditional development environment, the publisher would have bailed on this a long time ago.
EDIT: I do think that it does highlight two things, though:
The risks with this kind of funding structure for game development.
The fact that there are a lot of people who really badly want a modern, good space combat video game.
Along with the game—which originally had a targeted release date of 2014—Lord was supposed to have received numerous bits of physical swag. “So aside from [the game], I’m supposed to get a spaceship USB drive, silver collector’s box, CDs, DVDs, spaceship blueprints, models of the spaceship, a hardback book,” he said. “That’s the making of Star Citizen, which—if they end up making this game—might turn into an encyclopedia set.”
That was back when only $200 million had been sunk into the development.
I really don’t think that it’s all that abnormal, aside from the funding structure.
Lots of video games — including even some pretty successful ones — have dev studios that screw up the scope when they estimate what they can accomplish with their financial and hardware budget.
The problem is that if you’re a video game developer and you look at the state of your game and you know that it doesn’t meet up with what you’re hoping to make, you can maybe go to the publisher and say “we screwed up and need more money”. And the publisher — who is familiar with the industry and has the ability to actually come in and take a look at what’s going on with your development process and has bean-counters whose job is to make a cold, clear-eyed call on this — is one entity who is hopefully is going to make an objective call.
But with Star Citizen, that structure doesn’t exist. The developer can just keep go begging for more money.
Take https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana: “The aim was for the company to create games that catered to their creative tastes without excessive publisher interference, which had constrained both Romero and Hall too much in the past.”
Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever: “Broussard and Miller funded Duke Nukem Forever using the profits from Duke Nukem 3D and other games. They gave the marketing and publishing rights to GT Interactive, taking only a $400,000 advance.” That was self-funded, so there wasn’t some outside party saying “no more”.
In 2009, with 3D Realms having exhausted its capital, Miller and Broussard asked Take-Two for $6 million to finish the game.[8] After no agreement was reached, Broussard and Miller laid off the team and ceased development.[8] A small team of ex-employees, which later became Triptych Games, continued development from their homes.[14]
In September 2010, Gearbox Software announced that it had bought the Duke Nukem intellectual property from 3D Realms and would continue development of Duke Nukem Forever.[15] The Gearbox team included several members of the 3D Realms team, but not Broussard.[15] On May 24, 2011, Gearbox announced that Duke Nukem Forever had “gone gold” after 15 years.
The problem is that the developer knows perfectly well that the game doesn’t meet the kind of standard that they’d hoped for and which they’d gotten players expecting, but they aren’t willing to cut their losses and just wrap things up. And the publisher wasn’t in a position to cut development off. In Duke Nukem Forever’s case, happened when they exhausted their own capital, because employees aren’t gonna work without pay.
But in Star Citizen’s case, even that brake doesn’t exist. They aren’t using their capital. They’re using player capital that they got in exchange for promises, and I don’t think that players are nearly as good as an outside publisher at performing cold, hard, objective analysis of the development process. CIG dug themselves into a deep hole. Once they’re in that hole, there’s not really a good way out. If they just stop development at any given point, they aren’t going to have something that players are happy with. The only route they have out, to not fail, is to make more promises, try to get more money, and somehow try to develop their way to a successful game. So they’re gonna keep doing that until all of the players cut them off, which can take a long time. A publisher would say “you blew through numerous deadlines in the existing development process, and I don’t think that you’re a good investment”, or said “no more money unless you give me a hard, short timeline for wrapping this up”. I think that CIG knew pretty well that there was no point where they could wrap things up in a handful of months and meet player expectations, so their choice was always “fail” or “keep kicking the can down the road in hopes that they could fix things”.
I was listening to an interview with a senior EU translator several years back, and he said that these days, he normally does the first pass with Google Translate, then manually cleans things up. My guess is that to some extent, most human translations likely incorporate some AI translation already.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/251060/Wargame_Red_Dragon/. Intended to be played multiplayer; I played it single-player. Steel Division II is a far better single-player choice if you don’t mind the different setting, as the AI is much more interesting.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1151340/Fallout_76/, the only entry here I actually play multiplayer (and even that to a minimal degree; that game tends to have players having pretty minimal interaction with each other unless they’re actually trying to play with each other). I would recommend playing Fallout 4 over Fallout 76 unless you specifically want multiplayer; Fallout 76 is just the closest thing to “more Fallout” short of a Fallout 5.
Not run through Steam, so no Steam stats (though available on Steam) but I’m sure that they’re way up there:
Well I’m not them, but for me: KSP1: 1800.8 hours. Current cost $40 = $0.02 an hour
My electricity costs to run the game are higher than the cost of the game itself at that point.
EDIT: Keep in mind that some of these have DLC, and if you buy them, it increases the price. Kerbal Space Program with all DLC is $70; that’s still an extremely good value at 1800.8 hours, but does bump the number up. Fallout: New Vegas has (good) DLC that I would want; all DLC would take the game to $45. Civilization VI would go to $230 (and I assume that they’re still turning out DLC). I listed Stellaris myself, along with a lot of other people. I really liked the game, and even the base game is a good game, IMHO, but in typical Paradox game fashion, if you buy all the DLC, it adds up to quite a bit — $470 currently, and they’re still turning out DLC. Someone listed DCS, I have The Sims 3 on my list, Total War: Warhammer II. All of those games have pricey DLC libraries that, if purchased in total, run multiple hundreds or over a thousand dollars (with the Total War: Warhammer series using an unusual take on this, where prior games in the series also act as DLC for the current ones). They can still be pretty cost-competitive per hour with other games, but only if the person who buys them is actually playing them a a lot.
Obviously quality of gameplay matters, but point is that you need to take into account hours of gameplay, not just treat the game as a single unit, if you want to have a useful sense of what kind of value you’re getting, since the amount of fun gameplay you get from a game isn’t some sort of fixed quantity per game – it colossally varies.
If the way one rates a game is to simply use the price of the game, and disregard how much you’re going to play the thing, then what you incentivize developers to do is either (a) produce games coming out with enormous amounts of DLC, as Paradox does, if you don’t count DLC price, (b) short games sold in “chapter” format, where someone buys multiple games to play what really amounts to one “game”, (c) games with in-app purchases, data-harvesting or some form of way to generate an in-game revenue stream, or simply (d) short, small games.
I have a lot of games that I could grind for many hours — but I haven’t done so, never will do so, because I’ve lost interest; they’re no longer providing fun gameplay. I’ve gotten my hours out of the game, though that number is decoupled from the number of hours to complete the game. I have other games that I’ve played to completion a number of times, and some games — particularly roguelikes/roguelites — which aim for extreme replayability. The hours matter, but it’s not the hours to complete the game that’s relevant, but the hours I’m interested in playing the game and have fun with it.
For some genres, this doesn’t vary all that much. Adventure games, I think, are a pretty good example of a genre where a player has to keep consuming new art and audio and writing and all that. They aren’t usually all that replayable, though there are certainly adventure games that are significantly shorter or longer. But you won’t be likely to find an adventure game that has ten, much less a hundred times as much reasonable gameplay as another adventure game.
But there are other genres, like roguelikes, where I don’t really need new content from an artist to keep being thrown my way for the game to continue to provide fun gameplay. There, the hours of fun gameplay in a game can become absolutely enormous, vary by orders of magnitude across games in the genre and relative to games in other genres.
I tend to like games that have lots of “levers” to play with and spend time figuring out, so I think that tends to be the unifying factor in the above games.
I don’t know of anything really comparable to Oxygen Not Included in terms of all the physics and stuff. I’d like something like it too (especially since Tencent bought ONI and now has some locked graphics for some in-game items that you can only get by enabling data-harvesting and then playing the game for a given amount of time, which I’m not willing to do. They don’t have an option to just buy that content. At least it’s optional.)
For Rimworld and Oygen Not Included, both are real-time colony sims. Of those, the closest stuff on my list is probably:
Dwarf Fortress (note that the commercial Steam build looks quite different from the classic version, has graphics and a mouse-oriented UI and revamped the UI and such, which may-or-may-not matter to you; if the learning curve being steep is an issue, that makes it a tad gentler). Rimworld is, in many ways, a simplified Dwarf Fortress in a sci-fi setting and without a Z-axis.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/233860/Kenshi/. Not a colony sim. You control a free-roaming squad (or squads) in an post-apocalyptic open world. That’s actually a bit like Rimworld. However, you can set up one or more outposts and set up automated production there. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth, and the early game is very difficult, as your character is weak and outclassed by almost everything. Focus is more on the characters, and less on the outpost-building – that’s more of a late-game goal. I find it to be pretty easy to go back and play more of. There’s a sequel in the works that’ll hopefully look prettier. Not really any other game I’m aware of in quite the same genre.
The other things on my list don’t really deal with building.
Oxygen Not Included has automated production. If you’re willing to go outside “colony sim”, there is a genre of “factory-building games” where one controls maybe a single character or base element and just tries to create a world of automated production stuff, maybe with tower defense elements. I’d probably recommend https://store.steampowered.com/app/526870/Satisfactory/ if you want 3D and a first-person view. I like it, but in my book, it doesn’t really compare with the games that I’ve racked up a ton of time on, winds up feeling a bit samey after a while, looks like I have thirty-some hours. https://mindustrygame.github.io/ is a free and open-source factory builder that you can grab off F-Droid for Android to play on-the-go; that and https://shatteredpixel.com/ are probably my open-source Android favorite games. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Program/ has outstanding ratings, but I have not gotten around to playing it.
There are a few colony sim games sort of like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress. I tried them, and none of them grabbed me as well as they did, but if you want to look at them:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/328080/Rise_to_Ruins/ is a colony sim and does have combat, but less focus on individual characters than Rimworld. I don’t like it mostly because the game is not really designed to be winnable, which I find frustrating. There’s growing “corruption” coming in from the edges of the map, and the aim is to try to last as long as possible before becoming overwhelmed; you can flee from it to other colonies. Technically, there are some ways to defeat the corruption, but not really how the game is intended to be played.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1062090/Timberborn/. This was in fairly Early Access the last time I spent much time on it, so I’m kind of out-of-date, and it looks like it’s still in EA. Doesn’t have the combat elements from Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress.
Fallout Community Edition is a fully working re-implementation of Fallout, with the same original gameplay, engine bugfixes, and some quality of life improvements, that works (mostly) hassle-free on multiple platforms.
There is also Fallout 2 Community Edition.
Installation
You must own the game to play. Purchase your copy on GOG or Steam. Download latest release or build from source.
FreeFT is an open-source, real-time, isometric action game engine inspired by Fallout Tactics, a game from 2001 created by an Australian company, Micro Forte.
Running
To run this program, resources from original Fallout Tactics are required. You can buy it on GOG or Steam.
No prob. I’m reasonably confident that there are other multiple projects that have also done this; I just tried to list what looked like the most-currently-viable ones.
kagis
The first I think I remember seeing chronologically was FIFE, which IIRC was renamed from some slightly-different acronym from when it was intended to only run Fallout games. It looks like they’ve focused on becoming a generic RPG engine:
FIFE is a free, open-source cross-platform game engine. It features hardware-accelerated 2D graphics, integrated GUI, audio support, lighting, map editor supporting top-down and isometric maps, pathfinding, virtual filesystem and more!
The core is written in C++ which means that it is highly portable. FIFE currently supports Windows, Linux and Mac.
Games utilizing FIFE are programmed through Python scripting layer on top of the base C++ API. Games can be also programmed using the C++ layer directly.
FIFE is open-sourced under the terms of the LGPL license so you can freely use it in non-commercial and commercial projects.
It sounds like they may have not taken it to full playability of the first two games; IIRC, the original intention was to do so:
FIFE stands for Flexible Isometric Fallout-like Engine and is an open source project for the creation of cross platform ISO/top-down 2D games (e.g. RPGs & RTS’). The assets of Interplay’s RPG classics Fallout 1 & 2 are supported as test implementation but are not required to work with FIFE. It is not a Fallout emulator and you cannot play Fallout with it. The project’s goal is more universial. You can read graphics from fallout data files and create your own mods or draw you own content and make a completely new game.
Falltergeist is an opensource alternative for Fallout 2 and Fallout 1 game engines. It uses C++, SDL and OpenGL. Falltergeist requires original Fallout resources to work.
But the last GitHub commit was three years ago, and the main site’s last blog update was in 2018.
This is a modern reimplementation of the engine of the video game Fallout 2, as well as a personal research project into the feasibility of doing such.
It is written primarily in TypeScript and Python, and targets a modern (HTML 5) Web browser.
However, the last commit was six years ago.
There’s Harold, which is apparently a project continuing darkfo:
FOnline: Reloaded is a free to play post-nuclear MMORPG based on FOnline: 2238, an award-winning game set three years before the events of Fallout 2. FOnline: Reloaded provides you with a unique opportunity to revisit the ruins of California and explore the familiar locales from Fallout 1 and Fallout 2.
FOnline: Reloaded is a player-driven, persistent world MMORPG that allows you to participate in a wide range of activities, which range from faction wars to exploration, mining, scavenging for resources, caravan raids and more. The game puts a lot of emphasis on team play and dynamic, unscripted PvP action, but there is absolutely nothing to stop you from focusing on PvE dungeons or role-play.
FOnline: Reloaded is powered by the latest iteration of the FOnline Engine, which was created from scratch by Cvet and which is capable of utilizing assets imported from the original Fallout games, as well as Fallout: Tactics, Arcanum and Baldur’s Gate. The development of this engine started back in 2004 and continues to this day.
I spent well over a month talking to investors to get the actual data behind what’s happening to the games industry. I was going to say “enjoy!” but it’s, uh, not great.
Last few years I’ve been excitedly waiting for sequels from several small-to-medium sized studios that made highly acclaimed original games—I’m talking about Cities: Skylines, Kerbal Space Program, Planet Coaster, Frostpunk, etc.—yet each sequel was very poorly received to the point I wasn’t willing to risk my money...
Why do you think this happens when these developers already had a winning formula?
I mean, all series are going to have some point where they dick things up, else we’d have never-ending amazing video game series. I don’t think that the second game in the series is uniquely bad.
Some of it is just going to be luck. Like, hitting just the right combination of employees, market timing, consumer interest, design decisions, scoping a game’s development time and so forth isn’t a perfectly-understood science. Making the best game of the year probably means that a studio can make a good game, but that’s not the same thing as being able to consistently make the game of the year, year after year.
Some of it is novelty. I mean, part of most outstanding games is that they’re doing at least something that hasn’t been done before, and doing so again — especially if other studios are trying to copy and build on the winning formula as well — may not be enough.
Some of it is that most resources don’t always make a game better. I know that at least some past series have failed when a studio made a good game, (understandably) get more resources for the next game in the series, but then try to expand their scope and don’t do well at that new scope.
Engine rewrites are technically-risky, can get scope wrong, and a number of games that have really badly failed have happened because a studio tries to rebuild everything from the ground up rather than to do an incremental improvement.
You mention Cities: Skylines 2, and I think that “more resources don’t always help”, “luck”, and “engine rewrite” were all factors. When I play a city-builder, I really don’t care all that much about graphics; I’ve played and enjoyed some city-builders with really unimpressive graphics, like the original lincity. CS2 got a lot of budget and had a dev team that tried to use a lot of resources on graphics (which I think was already not a good idea, and not just due to my own preferences; reading player comments on things like Steam, what players were upset about were that they wanted more-interesting gameplay mechanics, not fancier graphics). Basically, trying to make the world’s prettiest city-builder with the money maybe wasn’t a good idea. Then they made some big internal technical shifts that involved some bad bets on how well some technology that they wanted to use for those graphics would work, and found that they’d dug themselves deeply into a hole.
Sometimes it’s a game trying to shift genres. To use the Fallout series as an example of both doing this what I’d call successfully and unsuccessfully, the Fallout series were originally isometric real-time-until-combat-then-turn-based games. With Fallout 3, Bethesda took the game to be a pausable 3D first-person-shooter series. That requires a whole lot of software and mechanics changes. That was, I think, successful — while the Wasteland series that the original Fallout games were based on continued the isometric turn-based model successfully, Fallout 3 became a really big hit. On the other hand, Fallout 76 was an attempt to take the series to be a live-action multiplayer game. That wasn’t the only problem — the game shipped in an extremely buggy state, after the team underestimated the technical challenges in taking their single-player game multiplayer. But some of it was just that the genre change took away some of what was nice about about the earlier games — lots of plot and story and scripted content and a world that the player was the center of and could change and an immersive environment that didn’t have other players acting out of character. The audience who loves a game in one genre isn’t necessarily a great fit for another genre. In that situation, it’s not so much that the developers don’t have a winning formula as that they’ve decided to toss their formula out and try to write a new one that’s as successful.
KSP does what it does well. Any sequel comes with huge questions of why people would want another space program simulator
I think that there were pretty clear ways to expand KSP that I would have liked.
There was limited capacity to build bases and springboard off resources from those.
I’d have liked to be able to set up programmed flight sequences.
More mechanics, like radiation, micrometeorite impacts, etc.
The physics could definitely have been improved upon in a number of ways. I mean, I’ve watched a lot of rockets springily bouncing around at their joints.
Some of the science-gathering stuff was kind of…grindy. I would have liked that part of the game to be revamped.
I don’t think that graphics were a massive issue, but given how much time you spend looking at flames coming from rocket engines, it’d be nice to have improved on that somewhat. I’d have also liked some sort of procedural-terrain-generation system to permit for higher-resolution stuff when you’re on the ground; yeah, you’re mostly in the air or space, but when you’re on the ground, the fidelity isn’t all that great.
I’d kind of like Steam to have the ability to indicate games that can run offline in its Store and enforce this by running the game in a container without network access.
I wish that Steam would just unify all their damn search UIs. Like, take every criteria that they let a user search by all across their client and different parts of their website, and then make one unified UI for it and let a user search using that UI everywhere Steam permits for searches. Steam’s got the most-insanely-fragmented set of search UIs I’ve ever seen on an online service, which all have overlapping sets of functionality.
Among other things:
Sometimes permitting searching by a Boolean value — but only for one of the values. For example, searching the Store in the Web UI lets you exclude games in your library, but not include only games in your library. This is despite the fact that for tags, there’s a tri-state (Yes, No, Ignore) checkbox (at least now they do…they didn’t used to permit for exclusion there either at one point).
In the Store search, I can put an upper limit on the price I’m searching for, but not a lower limit.
It’s easy to pull up a list of games by a particular developer or publisher by clicking on their name in a game’s store page, but then one can’t use the Store search criteria to filter that down, nor can one search by developer or publisher in the Store.
Just today, I wanted to sort my games in the left-hand Library sidebar of the client by release date. The Steam client can’t do that…but you can create a shelf, another sort of search visible in the Library, sorted by Release Date.
I can sort by User Rating in the Store, but not in my Library.
I can sort by Release Date in the Store, but not search by it.
I want to have exactly the same set of search functionality in all locations that I can search. I want to be able to sort by all of those fields, search by all of those fields, and search for any value that a field might have.
That means:
In the Store search.
In the Library sidebar.
“Virtual categories” in the Library sidebar, which are basically “saved” searches that are re-invoked to build the category in the sidebar.
In Library “shelves”.
When viewing lists of games available as part of a particular sale or promotion.
When viewing lists of games from a particular developer or publisher.
Yeah, that’s also an issue. It should be easier to get to the “advanced Store search”. Most websites have some kind of “advanced search” or “more options” button or dropdown or something next to the search field. On Steam, none of that is accessible for the Store search until you’ve actually done a search, and then it’s exposed with the results. So basically, put your cursor in the “search” field, whack your enter key, and you’ll get a list of all Steam games in the Store along with all the options to do tag searches and whatnot in the right sidebar.
So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations. I liked ksp2 1, cities skylines 1, age of empires 2, baldurs gate 3 a lot, I just finished Divinity original sin 2. I like rpgs and management / factory games like workers and resources,...
If you’re saying that you liked the (unfinished, abandoned, poorly-rated) Kerbal Space Program 2, you might play the original, which is better-regarded.
Dwarf Fortress is another colony sim, has a freely-available classic version or a commercial graphical build on Steam. Steep learning curve, but lots of mechanics to explore.
I like https://cataclysmdda.org/, though it has a pretty punishing learning curve. Open-world roguelike. It touches on both the RPG (well, not much by way of plot, but in terms of building a character) and the factory (build buildings, faction camps with NPCs, and vehicles) side. You aren’t going to run out of gameplay complexity to explore any time soon on that. Open source and freely-available, though there’s also a commercial build on Steam.
It does have a sandbox aspect, but much as I want to like the game, I always find myself dropping it and playing Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead instead, which is a similar “zombie survival” genre game, but has vastly more stuff and game mechanics. The big selling point for Project Zomboid, in my book, is the far gentler learning curve and lower barrier to entry; it’s got an adorable tutorial racoon, and doesn’t hit you with too much at once, but…
The combat in Project Zomboid frustrates me. It’s very simple, not a lot going on, but because a zombie infection is incurable, a single mistake in timing can have catastrophic effects, so it requires no errors.
The character builds. Project Zomboid has a lot of perks and such. Cataclysm’s got vastly more, plus mutations, bionics, all that stuff.
I prefer the Cataclysm turn-based play to the Project Zomboid real-time play. I don’t have to wait in the real world for actions to complete, and I can stop and think about what my next move is.
To try to illustrate the game complexity difference, take firearms as an example. Project Zomboid has six handguns, four shotguns, and four rifles. Each has one type of ammunition. There are ten weapon mods, each of which can be placed on some of those weapons. There is a firearms skill.
Cataclysm has, to look at just one firearm class and caliber category, 41 rifle-class weapons chambered in .223 (and that’s by default, as chambering can be modified). Each of these can take something like six different classes of weapon mods (replacing the stock, sticking things on the barrel, adding secondary weapons like underbarrel grenade launchers or flamethrowers, etc), multiple fire modes. There are 18 sight mods alone, and it’s possible to have multiple sights on a weapon. Recoil is modeled. Firearms can fit in various types of back/ankle/hip holsters, and draw time and encumbrance is a factor; these also have volume and longest-dimension characteristics, so that a large revolver can’t fit in a small holdout holster. For those .223-caliber rifles alone, there are 13 types of ammunition, including handloads, tracer rounds, armor-piercing rounds, etc. There are 63 different calibers of weapons. Energy weapons, flamethrower/incendiary weapons, chemical weapons, explosive projectile weapons, flechette weapons, illumination rounds, EMP weapons. There are multiple-barrel weapons, including some with barrels in different calibers. You can load specialized ammunition in a specified order. Different types of reloading mechanisms (revolver, tube magazine, detachable magazine, belt) are modeled. Some weapons use compatible magazines, and high-capacity and drum magazines exist. Speedloaders for revolvers exist. Weapons can be installed mounted on vehicles (fired manually from a mount position, or with an automated weapons targeting system installed, set up to fire automatically). NPCs (friendly, and hostile) can be armed with them. Bore fouling is modeled. When you fire a weapon without hearing protection, you’re temporarily deafened to some degree. There are multiple stances one can take when firing those weapons. Some of the game’s martial arts forms permit use of firearms. There are firearm melee modifications, like bayonets. There are skills for different types of weapons. The game has all sorts of exotic real-world firearms (e.g. to pick a random one, the American-180, a submachine gun firing .22 rounds with a 180-round pan magazine); the game probably has more real-world firearms than any other video game out there; my current source tree says that there are 555 in total.
And that’s before getting into stuff like sandbox vehicle design and construction (land, water, air, amphibious), power generation and storage, nutrition (weight and its various effects on physical capabilities, body fat, vitamins, calcium intake), artifacts, magic (if you turn on some of the various magic or psionic mods), bionics, mutations, local weather systems, temperature (air and body; you can set up heaters and air conditioners in vehicles), vision in various spectra, monsters tracking scent/vision/noise, fires and building structural failures, brewing, the ability to recruit NPCs and create faction camps, quests, aliens, disease modeling, various types of parasites, fungal infections, various types of poisonings and envenomings, various types of lights, devices with removable batteries, internal-batteries, USB-style (UPS) charging and power that can run off static, vehicle, bionic, or power stations. Solar/wind/gasoline/diesel/jet fuel/nuclear power generation. Multi-fuel engines. Multiple-engine vehicles (or, with appropriate electronic systems, hybrid vehicles that can automatically toggle an ICE engine to charge a battery to run electric motors). Seatbelts and harnesses (and being ejected from vehicles in crashes). Folding, portable vehicles. Bike and motorcycle racks on cars. Stimulants, depressants, alcohol. Acetylene and electrical welding. Tons of types of food to cook (looks 547 recipes currently available). The thing is just huge.
I like Stellaris quite a bit, but I should note that OP mentioned how he didn’t like spending money on DLC. Stellaris follows the typical Paradox approach of creating a lot of DLC to expand and extend the game and its gameplay as long as people are interested in buying it, and winding up with a large game that’ll cost you a lot if you want all the DLC. It may be worthwhile, but if one wants to get all the DLC, it’s gonna add a fair bit to the price.
(checks Steam)
The base game is $40. Buying every available piece of DLC (and it looks like they’re still coming out with more stuff) is another $429.
That being said, I’ve also got a lot of hours of gameplay out of Stellaris, so that does bring the cost-per-hour down quite a lot. But it depends on how much someone is going to play the thing.
So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations.
Steam does many things well, but its recommendations system is one thing that, in my experience, really falls flat on its face (which surprises me, because they have enough information to do what I would think would be fantastic recommendations).
For finding games on Steam, I’ve had the most luck simply sorting by user rating (which is a pretty darn good metric of what I’ll like, in my experience), and then using the tags to look for games in a genre. There has been one or two times that it’s led me astray, but in general, an Overwhelmingly Positive game is something that I’ll get a ton of fun out of, and a low-ranked game will rarely be a lot of fun.
Sometimes I’ve had luck with looking at “similar games” to a game, which are shown on that game’s store page.
But the recommendations queue is just awful, in my experience.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2511500/Dominions_6__Rise_of_the_Pantokrator/ is a pretty involved fantasy strategy game. I haven’t played 6 much, but I’ve played the series a lot in the past, and each game is a pretty direct expansion of prior games. Not sure if that’s up your alley, though. The game turns can get pretty long late-game, as there’s a lot going on.
Like can we make this a more vocal opinion that Triple-A studios/publishers are like legally required to offer a version… Or what is your take on that, especially if you have a similar opinion with a deviation in execution. let me know why if you dont agree too!...
M-DISC (Millennial Disc) is a write-once optical disc technology introduced in 2009 by Millenniata, Inc.[1] and available as DVD and Blu-ray discs.[2]
M-DISC’s design is intended to provide archival media longevity.[3][4] M-Disc claims that properly stored M-DISC DVD recordings will last up to 1000 years.[5] The M-DISC DVD looks like a standard disc, except it is almost transparent with later DVD and BD-R M-Disks having standard and inkjet printable labels.
Those will outlive you.
You can get an M-DISC-capable burner on Amazon for $35, and M-DISC media for about $3/pop, each of which will store 100GB.
GOG is probably more-suited than Steam for this, since it’s aimed around letting you download the installers, and they make a game being DRM-free a selling point and clearly indicate it in their store.
But you can just install a DRM-free Steam game — there are some games that don’t have any form of DRM on Steam, and don’t tie themselves to Steam running or anything, if you’re worried about Steam dying — and then archive and save the directory off somewhere. Might need a bit more effort if you’re on Linux and trying to save copies of Proton-using games, since there’s also a WINEPREFIX directory that needs to be saved. And then you can stuff that on whatever archival media you want.
Now, that’s not going to work if a game makes use of some kind of DRM, but you specified that you were looking for DRM-free titles, so should be okay on that front.
I’ve been on and off playing witcher 3 the last couple months. Just got to the skelliga main quest where Yennefer tells Geralt to get out of his armor and wear something nice to some social event (which btw doesn’t make sense, my armor is way better looking than the tunic options). It reminded me of the quest where Triss...
So do I go back to end of now or never and change the answer? Do I go back further and leave novigrad when it was in chaos? Even further before the questline began?
If you think that you’d like to play The Witcher 3 more than once, one suggestion:
The first pass through a game is the only time that you can play the game without foreknowledge. You can never experience that again. If you’re going to play without guidance from a wiki or anything like that, really sit in the main character’s shoes, I’d do it that time. Just don’t worry that much about getting your ideal outcome, because you can do another run. Maybe it’ll give some interesting variety, have you experience something you wouldn’t normally have done, with foreknowledge of the consequences of decisions.
Then in subsequent runs, you’ve already experienced a number of “spoilers” from your prior runs, and you can try to use that knowledge (as well as knowledge from wikis or forums or whatever) to guide the plot to your desired outcome.
I just picked up the highly hyped Blue Prince. On the other hand reviews have also called it a very niche game. I like puzzle games to a certain extent and roguelikes, but these are subjective experiences....
The other elephant in the room is if steam refunds are meant as a demo for everything or just to check technical issues like FPS and network connection issues
I’m pretty sure that the refund window isn’t primarily intended to create an ad-hoc demo of games, but to let you return a game that doesn’t function correctly on your system.
Game developers who do want to create a demo can (though I’ll admit that it’s a less-common route than one might expect).
List more in the comments! I’ll add them if they are a community for a video game genre, and have had at least one post in the last month. Crossposted to !communitypromo here....
Yep, I actually own 7,255 games on Steam. I’ve played 23% of my library. I regret nothing. angielski
Why do I play all these games? Because it’s important that they’re played....
Like it or not, developers are experimenting with AI for their remasters and remakes - but can they ever be any good? [Eurogamer] (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
One gamer got so tired of waiting for Valve, he made his own 'Steam Controller 2' out of Steam Deck parts, and it even splits in half like Switch Joy-Cons (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
What are your favorite Tactical RPGs? angielski
Looking to ask for people’s favorite tactical RPGs because I have played a bunch but never really gotten into any. XCOM, Fire Emblem, Disgaea, Advance Wars, Fallout, etc....
Nexus Mods' new owners promise they won't monetise the site to death as users panic at the whiff of venture capital (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
First/notable 3D games where you could dive below water (and walk on land) angielski
Given the hate Mindseye is getting for omitting water interactions entirely, what are some 3D games that have solid or interesting water/land player-character interactions?...
The Outer Worlds 2 Can't Be Anti-Capitalist When It's Charging Us $80 To Play It (www.thegamer.com) angielski
[Solved] Trying to remember a game (military battle simulator)
I’m trying to remember a video game from about ten to twenty years ago. It was a tactical military battle simulator. It was played from a bird’s eye view. The player could move units like vehicles and infantry groups around a map and needed to defeat enemy troops. The simulation of the combat itself was very detailed. After...
Star Wars Jedi director’s new studio is making a Dungeons & Dragons action adventure (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Had a take about Supergiant Games that recieved a lot of pushback fromy teo longest eunning best friends. angielski
“I wish Supergiant would get the roguelite bug out of their system and make sequels to Bastion and then Transistor finally.”...
What games are just objective masterpieces? angielski
70% of games that require internet get destroyed (www.youtube.com) angielski
Over a hundred thousand Dune Awakening players got swallowed by the sandworm | Massively Overpowered (massivelyop.com) angielski
Star Citizen’s new cash shop offerings provoked fresh pay-to-win and predatory monetization accusations | Massively Overpowered (massivelyop.com) angielski
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy has 100 endings, and it's pushing the creators to the brink of bankruptcy | PC Gamer (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
Interplay co-founder says she has Fallout 1 and 2’s source code safe and sound (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
The games industry is screwed. [26:11] (youtu.be) angielski
I spent well over a month talking to investors to get the actual data behind what’s happening to the games industry. I was going to say “enjoy!” but it’s, uh, not great.
8BitDo no longer shipping to US from China due to Trump tariffs (www.polygon.com) angielski
Cities Skylines 2, Kerbal Space 2, Planet Coaster 2, Frostpunk 2... What Went Wrong? angielski
Last few years I’ve been excitedly waiting for sequels from several small-to-medium sized studios that made highly acclaimed original games—I’m talking about Cities: Skylines, Kerbal Space Program, Planet Coaster, Frostpunk, etc.—yet each sequel was very poorly received to the point I wasn’t willing to risk my money...
Ubisoft Accused of 'Secret Data Collection' in Single-Player Games (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Steam will soon start making it easier for players to search for games based on accessibility features (steamcommunity.com) angielski
What’s New...
I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game angielski
So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations. I liked ksp2 1, cities skylines 1, age of empires 2, baldurs gate 3 a lot, I just finished Divinity original sin 2. I like rpgs and management / factory games like workers and resources,...
I want a law for PC games to be offered in physical versions again angielski
Like can we make this a more vocal opinion that Triple-A studios/publishers are like legally required to offer a version… Or what is your take on that, especially if you have a similar opinion with a deviation in execution. let me know why if you dont agree too!...
Useless rant about Witcher 3 romance angielski
I’ve been on and off playing witcher 3 the last couple months. Just got to the skelliga main quest where Yennefer tells Geralt to get out of his armor and wear something nice to some social event (which btw doesn’t make sense, my armor is way better looking than the tunic options). It reminded me of the quest where Triss...
Does the 2 hour refund limit on Steam affect game design? angielski
I just picked up the highly hyped Blue Prince. On the other hand reviews have also called it a very niche game. I like puzzle games to a certain extent and roguelikes, but these are subjective experiences....
Video game genre communities on the Threadiverse angielski
List more in the comments! I’ll add them if they are a community for a video game genre, and have had at least one post in the last month. Crossposted to !communitypromo here....