Skip to main content

Stellaris after a few dozen hours

By

The silver lining for me on having my appendix burst was that my at-home recovery time fell mostly right after Stellaris shipped, so I got more time to play it than normal in the first week.

In its release state, it's not quite the 4X Messiah I'd hoped for, but I'm liking it more and more over time, with some caveats.

The early part of the game is actually more fun than anything I've played in quite a while. The random mini stories spice up the explore/expand phase really nicely. I've still not gotten through to see the endgame stuff, partially because there are so many ways to destroy yourself that are unfamiliar to a pure 4X player. The complexities of politics and diplomacy, which would be familiar to fans of Paradox's other games, killed me outright once and made an otherwise great start go bad midgame once.

It's nice to see that the studio head nailed exactly the two biggest pain points I feel as the targets of the first big patch: borders preventing science expeditions and the dearth of midgame stories.

And the extreme mod friendliness is also amazing. Lots of the more minor stuff that gets annoying, and even one huge bug with troop transports, have already been fixed by modders, and if I don't like exactly the numbers chosen by a modder it's trivial to make personal changes.

So it's kind of funny. I expected the game either to suck, or to be a threat to my marriage and job, but it came out somewhere between. In truth it's good enough to replace MoO2, both on its own merits and because I've pretty much squeezed all the juice out of the classic. In a year or two of the continual improvement that Paradox promises and has a reputation for, I expect it will be the best game in the genre without any disclaimers.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can't write, must play Pillars of Eternity

By
OMFG, I've barely started the game and I'm already hooked and feeling alt-oholic. I only looked at character generation and the first few minutes of play last night, as I can't afford to miss a day of work just for a new game any more. But I'm already sure that this game is living up to high expectations. It's not perfect, there are some flaws that Rock, Paper, Shotgun already did a good job describing, but this is better than many of the game I've paid $60 for over the years. Going to be hard to tear myself away long enough to keep my wife and toddler from getting upset at me this weekend.
Post a Comment
Read more

The highest bang-for-buck thing in Fallout 4

By
So, I had a hankering for some first-person murder hoboing the other day just when Steam put Fallout 4 on sale, so I gave up my plan to wait for the GOTY edition. It's mostly living up to my expectations, good and bad, based on reviews and on previous Bethesda games. The ostensible plot hook (lost baby) is completely underwhelming (sorry, clicking a blob of pixels a couple times can't compare to bonding with a real baby) but irrelevant to the game anyway. The main plot sounds potentially less stupid than the one for FO3. The settlement stuff is not quite as bolted onto the side of the game as I expected - taking time and perks to improve your settlement network can pay off in upgrade mats. But the thing that surprised me most pleasantly was remarkably simple. If you choose a somewhat common name for your character, the voiced robot butler will actually call you by name (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Codsworth/recognized_names). I didn't know this going in, and my first ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sid Meier's Starships - It doesn't suck on PC

By
Apparently a surprisingly large number of fans were expecting to get a deep game like a Civ or a spacegoing Pirates! for $16 on a short development cycle; they also apparently did  not even look at the gameplay footage that's been available for weeks. Going in with my eyes open, though, I have little to complain about in the gameplay itself. It's pretty much what the video promised. The tie-in with Beyond Earth, modulo the bugs I'm about to mention, is no clumsier than I expected. The requirement to set up a 2K account to get the tie-in is not yet onerous - we'll see where that goes, and hope that it's not like EA's player abuse system. Where the game totally fails, though is that despite being developed in parallel, and despite Firaxis' experience with PC games, it comes across as a crappy iPad port. Most of these things are inexcusable, showing either or both of a lack of testing on the PC or a lack of caring about PC quality: It only plays in ...
Post a Comment
Read more