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The game does a really good job of backfilling information as you need it. Hover your mouse over any highlighted word and it’ll give you a short wiki entry. It’s a very approachable version of the setting.
The big stuff to grok right out of the gate is really just this:
- The Imperium of man is explicitly fascist. They’re not the good guys, but no one else is either. There are good people within this world, but there’s no “Hero” faction. Everything you see extolling the virtues of humanity in the setting is just imperial propaganda and hagiography, and you’ll pretty quickly start to see that play out within the game.
- You’ve pretty much nailed how Rogue Traders work. They basically act as the frontier of the Imperium, to the point of being allowed to colonise whole worlds, which they then own. Each Rogue Trader family is basically a noble house.
- The Adeptus Mechanicus understand the how, but not so much the why. So, they know how to repair a generator, but they believe that the process involves channeling the “motive force” through the wires. Most of what they do is carefully practiced methodology wrapped up in ritual. This isn’t true across the board however; at the higher levels of the mechanicus you do get people who actually know how to do real science. They’re just very rare. It’s mostly the guys who are like 10,000 years old.
- As mentioned by others, the big foundational thing is the Horus Heresy. Half of the space marine legions turned to the worship of the gods of Chaos, and tried to overthrow the emperor. It’s kind of both super important, and actually pretty irrelevant. Like, there are something like 40 fiction books detailing every moment of the heresy, but it’s impact on the setting now mostly just boils down to “This is why the emperor is a corpse on life support and why there are evil space marines.”
- Because of the warp, a realm where the line between imagined and real ceases to exist, there’s a lot of “Well I guess this might as well be magic” in the setting. Gods are real. Demons are real. People with the ability to wield magical powers are real; they might be called sorcerers and witches, or they might be called “psykers” depending on who you talk to, but it’s all the same stuff; pulling power from the warp to alter reality. This “magic” underpins a lot of the setting. People with warp abilities are necessary for long range communication and FTL travel.
If you’re familiar with Dune or Foundation you’ll notice that the setting borrows liberally from both properties, which give you some solid points of reference to draw from.
Actually, the “powered by imagination” thing was canon circa third edition. There’s in game lore about baffled techpriests opening up ork guns to find no working parts inside. This is the problem with making any kind of absolute statement about 40K lore… Most things are usually correct at some point and the lore revises itself and overwrites itself so often that what is canon for any given interpretation of the 40K universe is really up to the writers of that interpretation.
So, I’m not any kind of font expert, but at the basic level you have serif and sans-serif, and mono-spaced or freely spaced fonts.
Mono spaced fonts have every character occupy an identical amount of space. Freely spaced fonts (I think there’s a more correct term for this) don’t; the space occupied on the line by each character can vary, meaning you don’t get awkward gaps. Mono spaced fonts are going to give a very “Old school typewriter / computer text” kind of feel that’s rather at odds with this clean, modern looking UI, though they are more readable.
Serif fonts have those little, kind of, cross pieces on the end of every line. Think “Times New Roman” and “Courier.” (Times New Roman is a freely spaced font, Courier is monospaced). Sans serif fonts don’t. Think “Arial”. Given that everything else in your design is extremely clean and minimal, serifs, in my opinion, add a kind of business to the look that detracts from it. They also tend to, again, look old-school, or even archaic. Courier is basically the classic old fashioned typewriter font, so if you’re evoking that (and a monospaced serif font is definitely going to evoke that) then you’re kind of mashing steampunk into the middle of your Apple store.
I’m not nearly well versed enough to offer any deep cut recommendations here, but the Ubuntu font is FOSS and has a nice rounded look that could probably work well here, at least as a placeholder. Noto and Roboto are also FOSS (if I recall correctly) and both have a nice clean look.
Edit to add:
Second edit:
With the rounded look of everything, a rounded font might also play well. Not sure on the licensing on these, but they’ll serve as examples of what I’m talking about.
As I’ve said elsewhere here, I really don’t have a problem with people holding a moral stance against the use of genAI. It’s fine to just say “However useful this might be, I don’t want to see it used because I think it has too many ethical costs/consequences.” But blanket accusing all work that involved genAI in any capacity of being “slop” isn’t holding a moral stance, it’s demanding that reality conform to your beliefs; “I hate this, therefore it must be terrible in every respect.”
If you truly hold a well founded ethical stance against the use of genAI, that stance shouldn’t be threatened by people doing good and effective work with genAI, because it’s effectiveness should have nothing to do with your objections.
The thing is, you’re conflating ethical and practical concerns here. The commenter you’re responding to is clearly talking about the practical aspects of using AI tools.
If you have a fundamental moral issue with AI that is entirely independent of how efficacious it is, that’s fine. That’s a completely reasonable position to hold. But don’t fall into the trap of wanting every use of genAI to be impractical because it aligns with your morality to feel that way.
If this is an ethical stance that you truly hold, you should be willing to believe that using these tools is bad even when they’re effective. But a lot of people instead have to insist that every use of AI is impractical, in the face of any evidence to the contrary, because they’ve talked themselves into believing that on some fundamental level. Like “If AI is ever useful, that means I’m wrong about it being immoral.”
But that kind of proves their point, right?
Yes, a lot of projects have had issues with contributers who push unreviewed AI slop that they don’t understand, ultimately creating more work for the project. Or with avalanches of AI code review bug reports that do nothing to help. But that’s not what’s happening here.
In this case, the main developer of the project is choosing to use AI, on their own terms, because they find it helpful, and people are giving them shit for it. It’s their project and they feel this technology is beneficial. Isn’t that their call to make? Why are people treating the former and the latter as completely interchangeable scenarios when they’re clearly not? It kind of does suggest that people are coming at this from a more ideological rather than rational perspective.
Nothing is being hidden from review. The code is open source. They removed the specific attribution that indicates which parts of the code were created using Claude. That changes absolutely nothing about the ability to review the code, because a code review should not distinguish between human written code and machine written code; all of it should be checked thoroughly. In fact, I would argue that specifically designating code as machine written is detrimental to code review, because there will be a subconscious bias among many reviewers to only focus on reviewing the machine code.
You know what’s wild? The answer that immediately comes to mind is Warframe.
Genuinely, I’m not remotely joking, Warframe has some of the best video games romance I’ve ever encountered.
Two things really stand out to me about the conversations in Warframe.
First, the things they learn about you are often just as important as the things you learn about them. The article talks about the process of two people figuring out how they fit into each other’s lives, and that’s exactly what you get with Warframe. You need to actually show that you can be someone they can love, as well as simply showing interest in them.
Secondly, and I think maybe more importantly; most of the conversations in Warframe don’t feel “important.” They all are. But most of them are about comparatively trivial things. A lot of it is literally just people sharing shower thoughts, or jokes, or talking about dumb shit, or getting things off their brains. But how you handle those interactions matters just as much, if not more, than the heavy stuff.
Also, the way the characters interact feels distinct and different. Amir, the most obvious case of ADHD in the universe, writes five messages for every one of yours (these conversations all happen through “Not MSN Messenger”), and most of the time what he needs is for you to just listen while he unloads all the chaotic shit in his brain. Eleanor, the journalist, writes long, carefully formed sentences with correct punctuation and grammar. She poses questions, prods and pries, tries to dig secrets out of you. Aoi will sometimes just send you a string of emojis, and will be delighted if you reply the same way. She likes to be silly, but more importantly she needs to just know that you’re there and you cared enough to reply. It’s the written equivalent of squeezing someone’s hand. Some characters will pester you, others are more likely to wait for you to talk first. There’s a unique dynamic with each of them.
Imagine if any other kind of media did the same thing. Like, you’re reading a book, and every few pages there’s a footnote telling you what the protagonist’s current Paragon/Renegade score is based on the decisions they recently made. Would be a miserable experience.
God, I love KOTOR so much, but its consequences have been a fucking disaster for the entire RPG industry.
I think what you’re getting at here might be better expressed as “Moral choices are more interesting than morality systems.”
Life Is Strange doesn’t have a morality system of any kind, but it has, easily, some of the most interesting moral choices I’ve ever experienced in a video game. One of them doesn’t even affect the ending or later story beats (to my knowledge), and yet I literally had to put the controller down and walk away because I couldn’t make that choice… Both options were so unspeakably horrible, and yet the choice was obviously and urgently necessary.
Mass Effect actually has some really interesting moral quandaries, but they’re massively undercut by the need to force them into the game’s binary moral code, instead of just allowing them to be the complex problems that they are. Morality systems boil every choice down to an arbitrary position on an arbitrary axis.
The Witcher works because it simply presents you with situations and allows you to judge them for yourself. It doesn’t present you with a score card afterwards.
Yeah, I fucking detest the way morality systems in games work.
I don’t think they’re a fundamentally unworkable idea, but very few games have even come close to doing anything good with the concept.
Most just offer you two equal but different benefits, let you pick between them, and call that morality. See Bioshock. And the Mass Effect / KOTOR system always sucked because it punished you for going down the middle (ie, playing a complex character).
One of the only good morality systems I’ve ever seen is Metro 2033. For those who don’t know, the game has a secret personality tracker. It gives you points for taking actions that are pro-social. You get a lot of opportunities in the game to refuse benefits or give up resources to help others. You are never directly rewarded for this. It doesn’t do the bullshit where you give someone some food and they go “Here’s an old gun I had lying around.” Being kind costs you. It also measures the time you spend interacting with people, listening in on conversations, that kind of thing. Just generally giving a shit about other people. By the end of the game, if you’ve played your character like someone who cares about other people, you get an opportunity to make a better choice in a specific situation, that leads to a better outcome. If you don’t, the choice is never presented to you at all, because the character you portrayed wouldn’t even think there was a choice to be made in that situation. It’s brilliant, and it completely solves the usual Deus Ex / Mass Effect “Three buttons” ending where nothing leading up to it matters. To be able to make the good ending choice you have to have played the kind of character who would be willing to make that choice in the first place.
I caved and picked up Clair Obscur. It’s a genre that I’m really not a fan of, but it’s just so exceptionally well made that I’m thoroughly enjoying it anyway.
Aongside that, I’ve been playing Rogue Trader at last, after my wife has been bugging me to play it for over a year. It’s very, very good. Probably one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. The degree to which your narrative choices matter is phenomenal. There are scenes in the tutorial that define the entire game. And it nails the setting.
Lastly, I picked up a founders pack for Soulframe. The only bad decision anyone made when working on this game was calling it Soulframe - it is in absolutely no way the “Fantasy Warframe” people are imagining. The designers say their big inspiration was Dragons Dogma. For me, I’d say the gameplay has a lot of the feel of Breath of the Wild. The combat is exceptionally tight. Easily one of the best combat systems I’ve ever played. There’s not a huge amount to do yet, but it’s early access, that’s understandable, and I think they absolutely made the right choice in nailing the feel of the game before worrying about how much of it there is.
We Do Not Preorder
Seriously, don’t reward this kind of anti-consumer bullshit.
The only acceptable justification I can see is if it’s an indie dev who has really, truly earned the trust of their players and proven that they will work tirelessly to deliver the product people want. And even then I’d be very, very unlikely to. I’m crazy excited for both of Owlcats upcoming games and I still haven’t pre-ordered them, for example.
Pre-orders encourage bad, buggy, incomplete or deceptively marketed releases by juicing day one numbers without any need for the dev / publisher to actually release a worthy product.
Read the article before making assumptions. It’s nothing to do with the artists.
They were deliberately duplicating all of their data to speed up load times for mechanical disks. Based on industry standard assumptions, they thought this was necessary. The article goes more into why it wasn’t actually necessary after all. But it was nothing to do with the efficiency of their models and textures.
The worst part is that this failure will probably kill any chance of The Chinese Room getting to actually take a proper swing at this, from scratch, with time and a real budget. It really feels like if they were allowed to do that they would hit it out of the park. Bloodlines 2 is a much better game than the review scores suggest, mostly weighed down by the expectations people put in the Bloodlines name.
This. Gog doesn’t force you to use their launcher and most games are DRM free.
If you think it’ll be an inconvenience to split your library, check out Playnite. It’s a unified launcher for all of your game libraries, and it works really, really well. Nice clean UI, easy management with lots of filtering options, and integrations for every game library out there.
Do not cite the deep magics to me, I was there when they were written. I grew up on System Shock and Deus Ex, and that’s exactly why I found Dishonoured so hard to get into. Those other games gave the player a complete free choice in how to approach them, but Dishonoured doesn’t do that. It presents an apparently wide open field, but the moment you pick a particular path and set off down it, the game wags its finger and says “Oh no, not like that. That’s not how you’re supposed to play.”
There’s also a lot of stuff throughout the game about how the city gets more corrupted, more rats everywhere, that sort of thing. Some of this makes some stuff harder, some of it is just vibes. But all of it is the designers very noticeably wagging their finger under your nose for engaging with the mechanics they made and actively encouraged you to engage with.
I bailed on Dishonoured for one very specific reason; the morality system.
Dishonoured is, in my opinion a spectacular example of game design, and an equally spectacular example of how to break your game design by not understanding the way players interact with the tools you give them.
Dishonoured is a stealth game. It’s also a game with a superb combat system, and a really fun and exciting set of powers for the player to enjoy using. These things can, sort of co-exist, if somewhat uneasily. But then you add the morality system.
The morality system, in effect, punishes you for playing the game in a non-stealthy way. Or, more specifically, for playing with the wrong kind of stealth. The morality system wants you to ghost the whole game, slipping past every opponent without the slightest evidence you were ever there. But doing that means not engaging with most of the powers and any of the combat.
Having the option to follow a ghost playstyle is great. But when the game sets up a bunch of really fun mechanics, then punishes you for engaging with those mechanics in exactly the way they were designed to be engaged with, that just sucks.
Usually. Enter The Matrix was one of the rare exceptions. That game genuinely slapped. The gameplay was crazy fun; it took all the slow-mo coolness of Max Payne and added wall-running, super jumps and martial arts. The combat was lots of fun, and the story was all written by the Wachowski’s to tie in with the second and third movie, including actual scenes that they filmed as part of the process. They took it really seriously, to them it was an essential part of the story.
Obviously the whole Matrix 2 & 3 saga has some problems, it’s not the Wachowski’s best work (how could it have been, they had a plot for one movie that they were told to expand into two), but the game is still a really fun entry in their ouvre.
Everwind is fantastic. Fixes just about every complaint I have about Minecraft, and I say that as someone who bought Minecraft back in alpha. There are things that could be improved, but even where I think there’s room for improvement the baseline always seems to be “It’s already better than Minecraft”. For example I really feel like the combat could do with a dodge mechanic and harsher stamina management, but that’s based on comparing it to stuff like Dark Souls. Even in its current state it absolutely clowns on Minecraft’s combat.
The artstyle is lovely, the building and crafting feels really good, the range of furniture and decorations you can build is massive, and you get to build and fly an airship. And that’s not an afterthought, it’s a core part of the game and feels really, really good.
In their first video they were openly gushing over the demos from Nvidia. That’s not “considering the potential.” They were straight up saying that it looked great.