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The airship is what sold me. I’ve wanted ships in Minecraft for as long as I’ve been playing Minecraft, both because it’s cool, and because I think survival games would really benefit from the idea of a mobile base. Being able to take your home with you is such a huge deal and really bridges the gap between the “cosy” and “adventure” aspects of these games.
I’ve been spending a little more time with Forever Winter.
Its very definitely early access; not the bullshit “We’re releasing the game, but calling it early access so you can’t complain about any bugs you find” stuff you get now but actual real old school Minecraft style early access where you’re basically getting alpha builds straight from the developer.
That said, it’s in much better shape than it was when I first looked into it (maybe a year ago?). Game is really fun to play, unbelievably tense, but without being too punishing. I think they’re really starting to zero in on that Dark Souls sweet spot where dying sucks, but not in a way that actually sets you back all that much. The stealth gameplay feels good, and getting out with a haul of loot is intensely satisfying.
Plus the art design is unbelievably good.
I came here to say this exact same thing. Videogames are an art form, and the history of that art should be preserved, both the successes and the failures. People should be able to look back on what was a hit and what was flop, on the ideas that worked and the ones that didn’t, on the well made games and the badly made games. All of it matters, all of it is part of the same story.
Basically everything can be set through server / game rules. How do zombies work (speed, strength, toughness, hearing, vision, nocturnal or not, memory, intelligence, etc), how does the virus work, loot availability, XP gain, how long its been since the outbreak, whether power and water should shut off at some point, and so many other things. And that’s all without even touching a single mod. It’s incredibly versatile.
For the record (mostly saying this for the benefit of people who don’t play but might) Zomboid is one of the most customizable games ever. Rules like “How zombie virus transmits” are completely up to you. My wife and I play together and we decided that all survivors are immune to the virus in our world, so we turned off transmission entirely. It just made more sense to us if it was something like an airborne pathogen.
I often describe Project Zomboid as a toolkit for creating your own personal zombie apocalypse.
Jessie what the fuck are you on about?
The audio clip in that source is just flat out wrong (and I’m pretty sure it’s either AI generated or an American trying to do a British accent. Source: Am British). If you look at the phonetic symbols you’ll see that they’re identical for both pronunciations, and every other source agrees that the pronunciations are the same for UK and US.
Here’s one with audio that isn’t fucked - https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-pronunciations/ensign
They also point out that more than 50 percent of Helldivers’ revenue came from microtransactions now. Again, you’re all ruining it for the rest of us, please stop. They also confirm they will conitnue to milk that and “maximize revenue”.
The thing is, Helldivers is priced, delivered and supported in such a way that it’s worth spending that money on.
In Helldivers 2 it is possible to earn premium currency simply by playing the game, and at a fairly reasonable rate. You can basically grind out every bit of content in the game if you want. And even without any of that “premium” content, you get a huge library of weapons, cosmetics and strategems to play with, many of which are better than the premium stuff.
Plus the warbonds are very fair compared to how most games price extra content. In a world where you can easily spend twenty dollars or more on a skin, here’s what a typical warbond - priced at $10 - includes;
- Two or three full cosmetic sets
- An emote or victory animation
- Three primary weapons
- A secondary weapon
- A grenade
- A booster (special power for the squad, not an XP booster; Helldivers does not have any form of XP booster, everyone grinds at the same rate)
- Enough premium currency to cover 30% of your next warbond
(Newer warbonds have gotten a little slimmer in terms of weapons and skins, but now tend to include new strategems as well; it’s a slight downgrade in terms of bang for your buck, but still very good compared to the industry averages)
On top of that, the game itself is very reasonably priced, incredibly fun, and constantly getting exciting new story content. Which means you buy this thing, enjoy the hell out of it, and end up thinking “Man, I’ve still got this money left over that I would have spent on a full price game, why not spend it on some cool shit? Look at all the cool stuff I could get for just ten dollars and I’m still coming in at way less than the price of a new Battlefield game.”
That’s how it should be. That kind of behaviour from a developer should be rewarded. Arrowhead are doing pretty much everything right when it comes to crafting a brilliant product and treating the fans of that product with respect. We can’t stop Sony learning the wrong lessons from that, but if good games don’t succeed they certainly won’t ever learn the right ones.
I mean, that’s exactly what makes it so “mid” to my mind. It’s not an atrocious disaster like Gollum. It’s not appalling bad, or even moderately bad. It’s just mid. The shooting isn’t dreadful, just dull. The map, the movement, the exploration… None of it is exactly bad, but none of it left any kind of impression on me. Like you said, it scratches that “running around and collecting stuff” itch, the numbers go up, you unlock new powers, etc. But it all just kind of passes straight through you and at the end you’re left with “Well, that sure did kill a few hours.”
Horizon: Zero Dawn suffers from all the usual modern open world hallmarks, the map littered with things to collect, the towers, the grinding to level up abilities, etc, etc. But the story is an absolute banger, and even a lot of the random collectible junk is full of little moments of deeply moving storytelling. I remember collecting every single one of the vantage points because I absolutely needed to hear all of the short story you unlock by doing it. It has zero relevance to the plot, but it’s just a great piece of writing. In comparison Ghost Wire is just, sort of… There.
Ghost Wire: Tokyo.
It sells itself on cool aesthetics, but the moment you get past that you realise it’s just a very, very generic open world shooter with incredibly bland and boring shooting layered over an impressively faithful recreation of Shinjuku. And even the aesthetics wear thin very quickly, being largely just a whole lot of “Hey I know that anime” level stuff cribbed from Japanese culture. The game is mostly just running around a map collecting stuff.
I’m here to say Portal as well, specifically because, once you really look for it, you realise that about 90% of the game is tutorial. Like, seriously, basically everything leading up to “The cake is a lie” is teaching you the skills you need for the final sequence. It’s a massive tutorial followed by one level of actual game, and it’s beautiful, precisely because you don’t even notice that the tutorial hasn’t ended.
None of what you’ve just said connects back to your previous comment in the slightest. You started by saying that they cut too much from the TTRPG and that the world was too shallow, and then when I asked you to elaborate you just went on about augmentation systems.
At this point I’m not convinced you actually know what it is that you don’t like about it.
I’m really not sure what you mean by this. Are you talking about the game at release, or after they patched in all the intended content?
Outside of what I assume you mean by the “scripted gameplay” of the main story there are dozens upon dozens of side quests and weird little points of interest to discover (well over a hundred, easily). A lot of them help to elaborate on the setting in interesting ways. What exactly were you expecting that the game didn’t deliver on?
I’m actually OK with games costing a bit more to sell if they cost a lot to make; god knows, the devs deserve to get paid properly. But, one, that money won’t actually make it to the devs, and two, any time Randy Pitchford is for something it’s really hard not to automatically be against it, on the assumption that he’s so consistently wrong about everything, and just such an unbelievable piece of shit, that just assuming he’s in the wrong is the safest bet.
Jesus Christ, he’s still alive?! I haven’t heard that name in years.
For those not blessed with the knowledge of our divine Lord and saviour Derek Smart, God’s gift to fame designers, oh boy, grab your popcorn, this is going to be good.
And by “good” I mean that whatever Derek has come up with will manage to be the most objectively terrible version of that thing possible, and he will aggressively defend it as the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of everything, ever.
I definitely want to see this version of self promotion encouraged. I think it’s good and healthy for this community to be a place where creators can discuss cool projects, engage with their fans and solicit feedback, as long as they’re doing so in a way that respects the health of the community. I think the accommodations you’ve chosen to make / demand here are very reasonable.
And so they bloody well should be! How the fuck else are we going to find out about cool, unique indie projects instead of mass produced corporate slop?
Independent creators should absolutely be encouraged to self promote in communities like this, or else what the fuck are we doing here? Just shilling for Activision?
IIRC the reason for this is that China requires that games published there be published by entities that are at least some arbitrary percentage Chinese owned. So basically if you want access to that huge market - that loves video games - you have to cut a deal with Tencent or someone else like them.
I mean, vaporware would require it to fail to manifest. There is a game. You can play it right now. Has it delivered on everything they promised? Absolutely not. But that was never the definition of vaporware. And, paradoxically, what’s there, despite being far reduced from the theoretical scope, is also one the most technically impressive games ever made. Entire planets in a complete solar system that you can traverse without a single loading screen. Not even a disguised one. It’s also, y’know, a buggy janky mess that still lacks many core gameplay features.
Like, there’s so much that you could legitimately criticise about Star Citizen that resorting to the both meaningless and innacurate claim of vaporware just shows an extreme lack of imagination. If you want to be critical go for it, but surely you can come up with something more coherent than that?