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Nothing released this year will even come close to touching the Warframe 1999 soundtrack. Absolute bangers from start to finish, and in particular Party of Your Lifetime is the most addictive bop you will have heard all year.
Warframe invented a fictional nineties boyband, and accidentally made them unbelievably awesome.
https://open.spotify.com/track/0bSyNeSTgyCcgMP3VBK8W4?si=6sFgnUnITA2Se12hQngroA
Zomboid is really, really tough.
First off, I want you to know that you can customize the game rules, and I’d honestly suggest doing so. I often describe Zomboid as a toolkit for building your own zombie movie. You can change how long it’s been since the “event”, how the infection spreads, how it works, whether survivors have immunity, how long it is before power and water shut off, the spawn chance of different item categories. It’s extremely flexible. Don’t be afraid to treat it as a toolkit. Make the game that’s fun for you.
In terms of actually playing Zomboid, it’s a stealth game first and foremost. You must evade zombies wherever possible. Stay low, avoid noise, avoid lights. Close curtains to about being seen from outside. If there aren’t curtains, make them from bed sheets. Don’t break windows unless you have to (and if you have to, remember to clear off the shards of glass in the frame or you’ll cut yourself climbing through).
If you have to fight, keep moving. You want to string the zombies out then hit a few, then string them out again. But extended fights will kill you as fatigue and panic set in. Remember that if you play by the default rules any scratch from a zombie has a 25% chance to zombify you, any bite is 100%. Zombie virus under default rules is a death sentence. Personally, I turned that off, went with the “Any survivor by now is probably immune” logic.
Your immediate goals are always a good backpack (backpacks reduce the weight of their contents, but that reduction depends on their quality), a good melee weapon, food and bandages. You can make bandages from torn up clothing, and with a pot of water you can boil them to sterilize them. This helps avoid infection.
Longer term, a big goal is to get your skills up. You want books for the big multipliers they give, and watching the right TV shows will give certain skills a huge boost. There are also certain things that you simply cannot do if you haven’t either read about them or started with the right character, like maintaining cars or hooking up generators.
The golden rule of Zomboid is that whenever you find yourself thinking “Surely they didn’t bother putting that in the game,” well, they did. You have to really start thinking about what you would actually do in these situations if it was real life. If you could do something in real life, you can probably do it in the game. If something would be dangerous in real life, it’s probably dangerous in the game. Don’t drink stagnant water without boiling it. Don’t eat food without cooking it. Etc, etc. (Yes, that includes the time my wife tried to make a can of WD40 and a lighter into a flamethrower and immediately exploded). It’s less of a zombie game and more of a survival sim with zombies (seriously, once you get the hang of this game you will spend way too much time thinking about the value of potatoes).
This just means you’re figuring out what you like, and refusing to force yourself to enjoy trash.
Remember, 90% of anything is shit, and of that 10%, not all of it is going to appeal to your tastes.
On top of that, AAA gaming is a fucking wasteland right now. Publishers have squeezed all the life out of the medium in search of ongoing profit bonanzas. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a AAA game, unless we count Cyberpunk which had the benefit of being self published, so I don’t really think that counts.
Oh, my bad, Elden Ring would definitely count as AAA. That was awesome (still need to finish it, and the DLC). But let’s be real, Elden Ring is great because it’s so different from the vast majority of the open world games out there.
Anyway, I mostly spend my time on mid-shelf, indie and self-published stuff, and even then the number of games I like is pretty small. My main go tos are Darktide, Warframe, Insurgency, Chivalry 2, The Finals (I guess that’s kind of mainstream?), Stellaris, and Total War Warhammer. I’ve also recently enjoyed VA-11-Hall-A, Slay The Princess, Shadows of Doubt, and Space Marine 2. Those were all pretty great.
I like that a lot of games get more long term support now. That’s really cool. It’s fun to be able to keep coming back to a game I like and finding new stuff.
But yeah, you don’t owe it to anyone to enjoy everything, and you owe it to yourself to not waste your time on things you don’t enjoy.
Hey, if they’re actually securing funding for this instead of pushing the cost off onto eager fans, good for them. At least they’re doing one thing right. Unfortunately that only increases the potential for this to turn into a trash fire that sinks their whole company.
Hopefully it doesn’t come to that.
It feels like this has disaster written all over it.
Sorry if I’m harshing anyone’s vibe, but I can’t escape the feeling that a group of people whose main involvement in the games industry is as voice talent are basically saying “How hard could it be?” and not understanding that the answer is “Very.”
Ideally they would team up with an experienced studio to build something off of their creative ideas. But if they try to do this whole thing themselves, it has the makings of a Wha Happen? episode all over it.
Maybe it’ll work. They pulled off Vox Machina, so who knows. I’d certainly like to be wrong. But I can’t help but feel like we’ll all be talking about the fallout from this in five years, when eager backers are still waiting for the game they were promised.
It’s a little janky, and the blocky aesthetic may or may not be your thing, but it handles the idea of detective work better than any other game I’ve ever played. It’s not just “Walk around in detective vision until you assemble enough clues for the character to tell you the solution.” You have to actually think about things, examine the evidence, assemble a theory of the crime. Which is doubly impressive given that every crime is procedurally generated.
Sure, but again the amount of actual player to player interaction involved in that is minimal. Like I said, I’m in a clan, and outside of obtaining my initial invite (which basically went “Clan plz” in chat followed by clicking accept) I’ve had literally zero social interaction with my current clan. Trading has been effectively automated by Warframe market. You copy and paste something into chat, and the rest of the interaction consists of a pro forma exchange of "ty"s. Also, you don’t actually need a clan to trade, because anyone you’re trading with will inevitably invite you to theirs, so they’re only really important when selling.
This is absolutely nothing like the way that raiding and guilds are core to World of Warcraft. Clans play an almost purely mechanical role in Warframe, they’re not remotely the same thing, and do not have remotely the same requirement of social interaction.
A lot of the game is built around guilds and player to player interactions.
For a while that was true. But that entire design direction has basically been abandoned. Clans are more or less a vestigial organ at this point. Literally the only interaction I have ever had with a member of my clan was when I asked for an invite.
The core story content is single player only. The rest is multiplayer, but unlike Destiny there’s nothing that requires you to form your own group outside of the game, and all the gameplay is designed in such a way that you really don’t need to communicate. You can basically just turn on public matchmaking and get a bunch of humans who might as well be bots for all you’ll have to actually interact with them.
You can play all the content solo if you want to, but the difficulty might get a bit much, especially starting out (there are also certain game modes / mission types that really lean on having a full group).
Wow, it’s almost like they fired all their developers, cancelled every good game they were working on, and underfunded the crap out of the rest so they were destined for failure.
Remember when Aspyr released a hotly anticipated remake of Battlefront and it failed because Embracer gave them no time to fix the bugs and no money to run servers? Yeah, like that.
Do you know who used to be part of Embracer? Sabre. Who just released Space Marine 2, a game that sold absolute gangbusters (because it’s fucking awesome).
Embracer are the cause of all of Embracer’s ills. They hoovered up excellent mid-shelf studios, fucked them over, and then cried foul when consumers rejected the second rate slop that came out.
First thing that comes to mind is Warframe. It’s a co-op third person looter-shooter, with full crossplay, so you can all party up across your platforms. It’s all very controller friendly, with lots of shotguns, SMGs, melee weapons and space magic that are all really forgiving of imprecise aim. It cares less about twitch reflexes and more about movement.
The scifi setting and “space ninja” aesthetic may or may not be to your taste, although I promise if you take the time really sink into the world it’s actually one of the most refreshingly different and unique scifi settings out there. There’s a lot of weirdness, but as you dig deeper into the story that weirdness all makes sense. And, like, it’s the good kind of weird if you get me? Stuff that makes you go “Holy fuck I want to know what the deal with that is!”
It does have a lot of MMO elements, so it can get grindy at times, but in my experience it’s a really solid game for hanging out and chilling on Discord together. Plus the game itself is free, with no paid DLC or add-ons, and for an adult with an income a few bucks here and there skips a LOT of grind, especially if you check out the third party market website where players will sell you a lot of the rare drops you’ll want for less than a dollar.
Added bonus, it’s made by the original developers of Unreal Tournament, Digital Extremes (there are actually a bunch of UT references squirelled away in the game).
The problem isn’t so much the lore connections; everything seems to more or less line up from the rough pitch they’ve described. It’s more that no one who loved the original games for their amazing world building and storytelling is going to be super jazzed about a psuedo sequel in the form of an extraction shooter. That is the absolute antithesis of a story driven game, as far as I can see.
If this was a side project to acompany a new single player Marathon game, I wouldn’t care. But announcing this as the continuation of Marathon just feels like a slap in the face.
Have they managed to do anything about the absolute death spiral that the culture of the game suffered?
I think that’s really what turned me away. I loved the mod and played it obsessively, but after standalone launched it really felt like people were no longer willing to take any chances on each other. The whole game became very much kill on sight, when it wasn’t assholes just handcuffing people and feeding them bleach.
This game is literally perfect.
I don’t say that lightly. And I’m not saying it’s the greatest game ever made or anything like that. What I’m saying is that everything it’s trying to do, it does perfectly.
The writing is incredible. The voice performances absolutely nail it, every line read feeling like a mic drop. The art is gorgeous. The music is subtle and evocative. The design of the branching narrative is brilliant.
There’s not a single thing I can find to criticise. Slay the Princess is an absolute gem and you owe it to yourself to try it.
There’s a bar in my town whose gimmick is all their original arcade and pinball machines. Including Missile Command. God that game is stressful.