Politicians seem very good at misunderstanding things when it suits them.

The original version of Crysis is available right now on GOG and the EA store. PC isn’t a single vendor ecosystem where the only store also owns the hardware to play it.

We also don’t know who decided to pull it. I’d still wager it is unlikely Valve made a unilateral choice or pressured the game off the platform. Look at EA for answers.

It’s unlikely Valve forced the game off the page. Even so, the supposed issue has always been if Steam were to pull games from you that are already in your library (which AFAIK they haven’t) or a future hypothetical where Steam closes down and if people would be able to offline save their libraries.

Similar to the 1997 point-n-click Blade Runner game. The rights to all the aspects of that movie were such a mess that the developers decided not to use any footage or audio from the game because they honestly couldn’t figure out who owned what, and made it follow a new main character which was an obvious “Not-Deckard” who was chasing replicants in a similar but ever so changed variation on the plot of the movie.

That’s why I called it “16ish”. It is probably taking some liberties to improve the graphics that wouldn’t have been available in the 90s, but it is trying get those nostalgia neurons firing. Point is, the aesthetic is intentionally not photo realistic, so missing out on Arnold’s face isn’t the biggest problem in the world.

The headline seems a bit overly snarky and dismissive of a small studio dealing with the kind of licensing problems that just come with big properties and image rights to expensive actors. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in a game.

It sounds like without the image rights, there won’t be any closeup cutscenes of Arnold’s face, but given that the game play is a 16ish bit throwback aesthetic, it actually doesn’t seem as distracting as it sounds.

I mean, this looks fine to me:

Maybe they aren’t allowed to do an accurate Arnie voice impression, but if all the character audio is crunched up to feel more retro, that might not be a problem either.

I really enjoyed it as an XCOM combat-ish game that felt like there was work done to make it feel like it belongs in the Gears Of War universe. It’s not infinitely replayable because the campaign has mandatory side-missions that are generated from a limited template and begin to feel stale once you’ve seen all the templates, and by the endgame you have so many special abilities unlocked in your squad that it kind of drifts away from any semblance of feeling like combat tactics and into a puzzle game about min-maxing abilities to combo chain them together (this opinion might read a little oddly but if you’ve played enough turnbased tactical games you notice many game riding this line, with some going extreme one way or the other). It is worth a sale price though if you need a turn based combat fix.

The expectation that it was an open world modern style Fallout game does seem to be a theme among people who didn’t like it. That wasn’t helped by pre-release marketing that emphasized it came from the studio that made New Vegas (despite the writers and game leads all being different).

I went in to the game without expectations and found the structure of the game closer to a classic BioWare RPG. Rather than a single huge open world it was a series of curated hubs to travel between. At those hubs there was space to explore but it was more limited and curated than a full open world. The more curated approach meant that the game could be designed with certain builds in mind since players would interact with certain areas coming from known directions, allowing alternate routes or quest solutions for different builds to be placed.

Accepting it as a hub based RPG that leaned into a specialized build made the game click for me.

Setting aside prices, I’ve seen an unexpected amount of sourness directed at the first game. While the first game wasn’t a greatest of all time RPG and had flaws, I found it overall enjoyable enough and it was clearly a project with some passion that I didn’t regret sinking time into it.

I expect similar of the sequel, with hopefully improvements based on feedback from the first game. I plan to have fun with the game, and it is a bit tiring to see things like the pricing prompting people to badmouth the game itself when they are separate things.

Am I going to pay $80? No. No I’m not. This is a single player RPG though. There’s no FOMO of getting left behind on the multiplayer unlocks or the lore of a new season. It’s a singleplayer game. Put it on the wishlist and buy it on a sale. Simple as.

The last Black Ops I cared about was 2. I could almost feel the developers of that one screaming that they wanted to break out of the COD mold. It actually had a lot of cool, if underbaked ideas. There were the sidemissions where you commanded an NPC squad ala Brothers In Arms, there were the pre-mission loadouts where after beating a mission set in the past you could go back and load up with future guns, there were multiple endings driven by choices in the missions.

There was a lot of stuff going on in that game which if it had been given a longer development cycle than the COD treadmill, and more freedom to stray from COD mainstays could have been something interesting. All of the above features could have really been pushed and refined beyond the small implimentation they ended up as. BO2 also tied the setting back to the cold war era roots, which makes it far more interesting that the cutout metal angular girder future design that is just the most generic looking thing ever. Call Of Duty Advanced Warfare was forgotten for a reason and it’s disappointing that Black Ops ended up eating all its aesthetics.

None of this matter of course, since no matter how many story trailers they release or how much people like me talk about what could make single player good, in the end the series is kept alive by tweaked out multiplayer addicts so I suppose it is all just a waste of time to think about.

objective

MEDIA APPRECIATION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY, GOOD NIGHT!

It’s definitely worth playing, I can’t overemphasize how refined 3 is compared to 2. Also a while after 3’s launch I mentioned in the wasteland subreddit I was having a very particular bug (a certain interaction between a specific kind of build and certain combat situations) and a dev reached out by PM asking for screenshots. The bug was fixed in the next patch. That really meant a lot to me.

I feel like Wasteland 3 improved on your complaints specifically, and in general it was a lot more tightened up. WL2 while good just sort of seemed to go on and on and on, especially when you go to LA and essentially have to start over. The game world was just too big, and much of it pointless.

WL3 presents the central conflict right from the start, which is a faction based dispute. Dealing with it involves radiating from the central location and then going back to it. It builds more faction investment by creating ongoing interactions with them, and quest choices will affect standing with factions which have tangible effects in the game world (certain vendors will or won’t trade with you, certain factions will staff your HQ, different factions get equipment based on quest choices, and certain endings and location outcomes vary). I think this helped make it feel like less of a drag than WL2’s mystery which was sort of vague and didn’t really involve much back and forth with the player until the end.

WL3’s combat is a lot snappier. In WL2 assault rifles were overpowered so much that combat was just sort of a lot of midrange shooting. WL3 arguably overcorrected by making assault rifles possibly the worst weapon type, pushing to have run’n’gun SMG or shotgun party members, 1 or 2 snipers per party, and specialists like leaders, hackers, and medics playing important varied roles.

WL3 uses talking heads for important characters, and they convey a lot more personality. With recruitable special NPCs there is actual voiced party banter, and special NPCs have their own loyalities which can make them leave a party under extreme circumstances. Non recruitable major NPCs also have more memorable personalities, and given that many of them represent factions you have to decide which ones to make friends and which enemies, which can be tough to call if you are playing blind.

Fallout 1: If you play it going in blind and don’t look up help, a first playthrough can be stressful early on if you don’t know how much progress you are making on the time limited main quest.

Kenshi: The game doesn’t have quests or main goals, so it is up to the player to figure out what they want and how to get it. Certain game areas are lethally dangerous, factions can be angered if you don’t figure out their customs, and even in less lethal areas being beaten and crippled by bandits is a real problem.

Far Cry 5 strangely has very enjoyable fishing.

Deep Rock Galactic.

There is a huge amount of loadout progression for each class, and a seemingly infinite amount of cosmetics to acquire. While there are only a limited number of mission types, the randomized nature of the level population and all of the various modifiers and enemy types that have been added keeps the game fresh. The game is entirely co-op with no PVP element, which keeps the tone more focused on helping other players instead of ever seeing them as competition.

I’m over here supporting Tamriel Rebuilt myself.

You asked what package only means, and I found an answer.

Total is total, with old spend being the cutoff of old spending.

None of the numbers are guaranteed to add up to each other.

I don’t know what’s missing from the reply.

RA2

Have you seen DORF?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2388620/DORF_RealTime_Strategic_Conflict/

It’s a remaster of 2033 with a bunch of tweaks to mechanics and improved visuals.

The last time I bought a game for $40 was in 2014, the last time I paid $60 was in 2011 (and it was a mistake).

While there will always be an endless surge of people willing to pay whatever price game companies demand and those people can’t be convinced to care enough to change, if you’re reading this I hope you’re the kind of person who can look into the effectively infinite backlog of games that already exist and into the indie and AA space for new games at decent prices done with some actual passion.

From the page with the values:

“OldSpend” is the amount of external funds applied before Friday, April 17, 2015 18:00:00 UTC.

From Steam support regarding package only:

This row includes the portion of the account’s total funds spent that could not be transferred. For example, a hardware purchase, gifted game, or in-game item does not count toward Package Only Spend, but a game purchase for your own library would.

Well not how much you’ve spent, how much it values your collection. But what’s that number based on?

Please re-read the article. The values are on Steam itself, based on your interactions with it.

Oh boy a Star Citizen thread.

I understanding removing the ability for publishing reasons. It is the apparently mandatory apology which I find a bit humorous and pointless. “We’re sorry because of unforeseen player actions which were obviously not an intended part of design.”

Perhaps I’m just so deadened to the hollow “We will do better.” apologies belted out by companies and public personalities, where the apology reads the same regardless of the amount of actual fault.

Sims type games have always had that kind of appeal to be able to go full sociopath in a harmless way. Drowning Sims in pools is a classic of gaming. The devs can do what they want with their game, but (unless this was something they had to do for publishing reasons) it strikes me as strange that they apologized for players being able to hit kids with cars in game, or abusing interactions to kidnap NPCs.

That would be the game designers’ and game director’s job. The listing in the article is for a VFX artist, who is working on the visual side at the direction of the game director.

Just screaming “make the game more fun!” at VFX artists is misplaced. These people are necessary on games, but unless it’s a small/single person team, they don’t have any hand in the game design mechanics aside from implementing what is coming from the director.

Nothing in the job listing seems like it is looking for a revolutionary destruction system. That seems like flourish added by article. It looks like a much more mundanely written job listing for destruction VFX, which is a role that shouldn’t be surprising in any way in a military shooter.

My goodness, this is some insane mountain out of a molehill reporting. The article is extrapolating a lot based on some vague and not particularly noteworthy qualifications bulletpoints that should be expected for military shooter VFX work.

Oh yeah, I’m totally aware of that. I was more thought spinning a from the ground up redesigned remake taking advantage of knowing how far the tech and design knowledge has come. Change up the levels, mechanics, and weapons design with a profession game developer level of resources while still using a fairly retro engine and keeping the original spirit.

It’s a good thing to have the game faithfully remastered, though part of me does wonder what a more ambitious remake might have looked like.

Issues like the imprecise aiming seem like artifacts of having to work around the original game’s limitations. I don’t know how different the Jedi engine is to the Build engine, as they seem superficially similar. Seeing games like Ion Fury being made on the Build engine makes me curious how a from the ground up remake of Dark Forces on an improved Jedi or Build engine, with some unshackling in terms of redesigning game mechanics with lessons learned while still keeping the original atmosphere might have gone.

But I understand that’s a lot of money and dev time that’s way beyond the scope of these kinds of remasters.

Fallout 1, which I’ve probably replayed about ten times more than the second game. It’s concise, with this depressing and dark world that gives a feeling never fully replicated in sequels.

Lords Of The Realm 2, a great little strategy game with an effortlessly charming aesthetic.

Civil War Generals 2, when I feel like really grinding out a strategy game. It has the bright colors and charming graphics which create a clear and readable battlefield that can be brutally difficult as units get ground down into ragged bands.

Really it just means the sorts of bugs you find with minimal QA testing combined with stilted voice acting, potentially untranslated audio or text, cultural beats that don’t quite cross over, and some game design choices that are different than how a game developed alongside western games might do things.

If you can stand this lack of polish, these sorts of games can at least give amusement for their price point.

I’m commenting late, but there is The Precursors which does require Slavjank tolerance, but if you have it, it provides an interesting flavor on a space opera adventure.

I also haven’t tried The Tomorrow War which seemingly requires even higher Slavjank tolerance, and probably isn’t a top of all time game, but seems interesting if you like peering into strange forgotten games. Warlockracy did a video of this one.

TLDR Bloated staff sizes and poor workflow management means salary costs skyrocket while a lot of people on staff are left waiting for things to do. The article keeps saying the costs aren’t just about better graphical fidelity, but I think this issue is somewhat related because a big chunk of staff are going to be artists of some variety, and the reason there are so many is to pump up the fidelity.

Not that it much matters to me personally. I’ve said before that games have long ago hit diminishing returns when it comes to technical presentation and fidelity. I’d rather have a solid game with a vision, and preferably a good visual style rather than overproduced megastudio visuals. Those kinds of games are still coming out from solo developers and small studios, so it doesn’t affect me one bit if big studios want to pour half a billion into every new assemblyline FPS they make.

In the stealth section there are static guards and patrolling guards. At the bottom of every turn the players pull from a deck of cards which says which of the patrolling guards will move and also a special event- this can be the meter towards the alarm ticking down, some of the guards reversing direction of their patrol, or reinforcements prestaging just off board.

During stealth if a dead guard or a player character is spotted by a specific guard, it will shout alerting other guards inside a certain radius and act according to the combat logic. At this point the stealth section will likely shortly end because of all the negative stealth modifiers.

In the combat section, enemies will move towards and fire at whatever spotted player character is nearest. The combat is very simple, which is balanced by it being very difficult for the players to survive, which means you want to delay combat as long as possible.

Mechanically I don’t think anything changes with the number of players, since you always have 4 player characters no matter how many players.

I personally don’t think it would be as fun solo. You would have more control and precision which might appeal to certain people, but for me the chaos of having other people doing things and having to negotiate a plan where everyone is constantly inputting was part of the fun.

The box comes with 9 different missions, and there are expansions with more missions and player characters. I’ve only played just this once so far though.

The tiles are double sided and I don’t believe we even used all the provided ones for this scenario.

Took me about 7 hours but I was poking around and going back for screenshots. It should probably take about 6 normally.