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I’d also add that CK3 is a step above most Paradox games in terms of beginner-friendliness. Everything has a tooltip defining what it does, and most of the game-specific words in that tooltip have tooltips of their own. It’s not like the older games and their “lol keep the wiki open and good fucking luck” approach to explaining themselves
I’m not the person that you asked, but I do hold the same opinion. My biggest reasons are:
- Civs are far more incentivised to expand in VI, resulting in more conflict
- Districts make city placement a much more complicated question
- The city state influence game is much more interesting than just a spending race and also has more game-changing rewards
- The culture and science victories are much more interactive with other civs now, rather than just hiding away and waiting for a bar to fill
I don’t think V is bad by any means. It was the one that got me into the series after bouncing off III and IV. I just think that most of the changes in VI were improvements
There are a lot of paid mods for the original AC, so I expect that will be part of it. However, I do think that there are two other reasons for the devs to want to host a platform of their own:
- Being able to remove content ripped from other games, which will help keep them out of trouble
- Giving users the option to automatically download the mods necessary to join a multiplayer game
Ahh, that thing about the editions tracks with when I was playing on the tabletop. There were a couple of necron armies in the group I played with and they were always right stubborn bastards to put down. They didn’t hit that hard, but you sure as hell had to hit them hard if you wanted to make any headway
I’m not exactly up to date on my 40k lore, do the necrons have some kind of disposable chaff unit now? Back when I played they were the tankiest army in the entire game, which definitely doesn’t work for a game in which you are usually carving through a massive mob
::: Space Marine 2 spoilers I was, of course, pretty gutted that they never showed up in the latter part of the campaign. I was playing through the campaign with a friend that doesn’t know the setting much but who loves Terminator, and the instant I saw the signs of necron stuff going on I thought I was going to get to see him become Power Armour Kyle Reese :::
I did play it! But I found the significantly lower usage of level scaling made it much less of a problem. Like… it is still a car crash of a system, but I don’t have to compete with the fact that every enemy in the world is scaled to challenge me if I a) levelled perfectly and b) put every level into combat skills
The random hit chance thing is a separate issue though
I tried that once, found it too tedious, and just stopped levelling up instead
There is a group that’s remaking Morrowind in Skyrim, but I have absolutely no idea how far along they are https://tesrskywind.com/
The start of Tunic being basically the exact same as Dark Souls made me laugh once I reaised what it was doing. “Here, take your rubbish weapon and your dodge roll and go ring two important bells in opposite directions from here. It’s important for saving the world.”
Tunic late-ish game spoilers
Holy shit the reveal of the endless rows of trapped ghost fox things was jaw-dropping. I think it worked even better specifically because of the adorable art style
That sounds fascinating! I’m pretty tolerant of jank in games if they’re doing something engaging, and while I do enjoy the combat systems of the Souls games I am totally okay with a more abstracted system. Hell I love Paradox’s grand strategy games, and this sounds a lot like how battles work in those — the meaningful decision is in which fights you pick and how you prepare for them rather than your actions within the fight itself.
I’d be really interested to see an action RPG type game that just embraces the real-life scale of the world and lets you screw about with the rate of time passing like in Kerbal Space Program when you’re walking a long way. You’d have to limit the scale of the story to make it manageable to develop, but I think there’s the potential for something cool in there. Maybe there are only two or three villages in one valley, but they’re all full villages and they’re actually several kilometres apart. Make sure that whatever goals you have are time-gated in some way so that you actually have to weigh up whether you can afford to walk to the other village, because even though you fast-forward it so that it only takes a minute of real-life time to walk there it’s actually most of the day in-game.
Though I think you need 4. A human-ish one first, a four-legged bestial one, and a flying one, before the final one. Then the priest and crew arrive, and the end happens.
Oh, I was including what happens after the priest (whose name is Lord Emon, now that I have actually gone to check because I certainly didn’t remember) as one of the colossus battles. Just trying not to openly spoil a nearly 20-year-old game for some reason I guess. My concern is that the value of the colossus battles in the game comes largely in the form of puzzle-solving, something that won’t translate to film very easily. In the game, the fights don’t advance the narrative much. The deteriorating state of Wander and some of the environmental cues do, but neither of those require the actual fight to be shown in full. We need one fight to set up the nature and danger of Wander’s task, at least one more to make tangible that he has to do a bunch of these and they’re all differently dangerous, and the confrontation with Emon because that’s the conclusion to the story.
David Lowery (The Green Knight)
That’s a brilliant suggestion, that film was exactly what would be needed to adapt this game. I don’t have… well, much of any hope for the guy who is actually attached to it, but I suppose it’s unfair to judge him too hard before we have any idea of if or how it will actually happen
I think you could do a fair bit by following the priest and his soldiers that are chasing Wander more than the game did. He can provide exposition to the soldiers as they travel, seeing more and more pillars of light in the distance as they do so. Have some banter along the way to get us to like one or two or the soldiers as well. Play up this party’s protagonist energy.
In the meantime, let Wander talk to Dormin more. Dormin remains honest and helpful throughout the game, so I think you could easily add in concern for Wander and curioisity about why he’s doing what he is doing. “What a strange, fascinating little mortal. We do hope he knows what he’s doing.”
I suppose you could probably only show maybe three colossus fights max, including the ending. Picking which ones get done in full would be tough. First one almost certainly has to be on the list. I think the giant flying serpent in the desert is probably the best one visually, so that’d be my other pick
https://www.indiegameawards.gg/ scroll down here to see the winners
I don’t even like ESO much, but the trailer for Elder Scrolls Online’s High Isle expansion.
he should have won
It’s great fun! So long as you’re on board with the experience it is trying to create, of course. FromSoft are good at what they do and don’t much care for whether or not what they do is everyone’s cup of tea
I’d love to try Bloodborne, because that gameplay combined with a bit of cosmic horror sounds amazing to me. I’ll have to either wait for a PC port or learn about emulation, though
The thing that stuck out to me more than I expected about it is how painterly it often feels. It’s exceptionally good at framing its environments in a spectacular or pleasing way even while the player has full control of the camera. I’m not usually one to worry about visuals too much, but this game’s environments really stuck out to me. And while it is very high-fidelity and nicely rendered, it’s less about the actual graphical performance than it is about the design of the environments
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Elden Ring. Only the base game, and this is my first run. I have been very thorough with it, though. I’m currently trying to beat Malenia, then it’s off to do the last boss
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Victoria 2. Weekly multiplayer session with a couple of friends. It’s 1915, and my people have just elected an anti-military party that is really hampering my efforts to swing a big imperialist stick around
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Lorn’s Lure. PS2 graphics, generous 3D platforming mechanics, and an impossibly vast and desolate megastructure to explore. Well I’m playing the demo of it, anyway. I am going to get the full version, it made a good impression.
I tried it out because I love the setting and we’ve obviously been somewhat starved for anything else Elder Scrolls, but I just couldn’t get into it. It felt like it never rewarded me for exploring like the main series does. There’s never something cool to find that’s just hidden out of the way.
I did also feel a bit miffed that the Northern Elsweyr story (the new one when I played, and the reason I wanted to play) was just the Skyrim civil war again, but without even the interesting idea of the rebel faction being nationalists against an empire. It was very little to do with anything about Elsweyr, and then dragons became the focal point again anyway
Obviously each to their own. I do see the appeal of it. It’s just not for me
One of the Paradox strategy games by a comfortable margin. It’ll be one of the Crusader Kings or Victoria games. I’ve got a weekly game night with a couple of friends that was originally just CK, but has for a while now been working extremely slowly through a megacampaign. You can take the end of Crusader Kings and make it into a mod for the start of Europa Universalis, then repeat the process into Victoria and then Hearts of Iron. You need to set some rules for yourselves, because an experienced player doesn’t need even a third of the CK timeline to demolish all AI threats, but the games are already good roleplaying fodder anyway so you can set rules that play into that. We’re currently about three quarters of the way through Victoria
Outside of those, Noita or Deep Rock Galactic. For a while, those plus a podcast were my go-to “zone out brain off” relaxation, so the hours racked up
Based on your enjoyment of management and strategy, Paradox’s grand strategy games might be something you enjoy. Same publisher as Cities Skylines. There are four main series of them, each with their own mechanics but enough broad-scale similarities that knowing one helps with the others. They are:
What distinguishes them from strategy games like Civ and Age of Empires is the greatly-reduced abstraction. There’s no expectation of every starting point or playable country being balanced; if you start as Belgium in Hearts of Iron, you’re going to have to do something clever to not get steamrolled by Germany. There’s also no win condition beyond what you set for yourself. When I start a game of Crusader Kings, I’m not trying to win the game, I’m saying to myself “let’s see if I can unite all of Britain and Ireland under a Gaelic ruler”
All Paradox games have quite a lot of DLC, but the base games are solid (often now including several of the earlier DLCs for free, in the case of older games) and they go on steep sales pretty often. If there’s not a specific time period or mechanic that sways you towards one of the games, I recommend Crusader Kings 3 for the best new player experience