Weregamer's Game Musings

Can't delete a spam comment, the UI for it is gone but the hell still says to look in the old place. Mobile UI is a mess, desktop UI doesn't work on Android. G+ seems to be on its way to shutting down. I loathe Facebook as a company and distrust giving them and chance to run code on my property. Google can't be trusted to leave a working product alone and working. Sigh.

The highest quality (both game quality and code quality), best supported game I've ever played, is 100% free to download and play - they survive on cosmetic and convenience microtransactions (as in, extra stash tabs for those of us who hoard in ARPGs, extra character slots for us altoholics). I don't think their financials are public, but I'm sure I'm not the only player who feels guilty for the number of hours I've enjoyed this game compared to the mere dozens of bucks I've spent. The game started out as a far better replacement for Diablo II than the Blizzard one, and they just keep adding freshness and tuning things - and i don't recall a single heavy nerf because they beta test well and are not enslaved by a PvP focus. If you haven't tried Path of Exile yet, do yourself a favor.

This sounds really amazing - something like Eternal Darkness only not horrific, in that the game reaches out from the screen to interact with the player out of character. In ED that deepened the horror and provided comic relief simultaneously; this sounds like it might feel differently to different people but still very cool I don't need to repeat the RPS article, I'll just link to it. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/12/12/oneshot-review/

Paradox just shipped a free update to Stellaris featuring a story written by Alexis Kennedy. That's enough to get me to think about trying it again. I checked out the patch notes, and I see a lot of clean up of things that bugged me about the game. But wait a minute. These are the notes for the fourth major patch, and they clean up things that were wrong (sometimes obviously) from the start? I'll chalk it up to development priorities; certainly there was a lot missing that needed to be added, and since the main point of the game is to look like a 4X while actually being a 1X bolted on to a standard Paradox set-piece political game I guess problems with the other three Xes were not as high a priority. I'm certain I'll try Stellaris again at some point, especially if they get more good writers in on making snippets for it. But I doubt it will ever really be my kind of game.

From a user named Heklios on the civfanatics forum, some words very worth repeating: I would kindly like to remind everyone that, among the total amount of people who bought Civ 6 : - few go about reading Civ6 related stuff online. - even fewer spend the time to write threads on forums. - and those who do write threads are mostly men in the middle to upper age category (I said mostly). I cant recall ever thinking about reading articles on Civ2 when I was 13 years old. It was my very own personal adventure where the difficulty level would matter much less than extrapolating in my mind a rifleman entering a pixelated forest into a real fantasy going on in my imagination. So the opinions you can read here are absolutely not representative of the general opinion. Please, go on and play on Settler if you wish, my son loves it. And I watch him pinch his lips to voice out the sound of the bombard each time it fires, living his own adventure, and me, envying him.

I like the games I like, and I'm no longer in the business of making games, so in many ways this article is not to my address. But it was still really worth my time to read carefully. It never gets anywhere near the stupid misogynistic pseudo-editorial "defense of games" crap that I'm not naming to avoid the still-raging humans pretending to be flamebots, and it comes from the opposite, and very constructive direction. And it quotes Tim Gunn more than once, in a very on-topic way. Tim Gunn is an awesome individual, even though I doubt he's ever been in the same room as a videogame for long. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-11-07-video-games-are-boring

The Wii U was (IMO) a dumb idea that (factually) tanked, evidence that Nintendo had no clue how to follow up what made the Wii a breakthrough product. But it looks like they may have figured out what they are doing right with the 3DS, and how to really cash in on the new trend toward multiscreen entertainment at home without being needlessly expensive, asymmetrically lame on multiplayer, and totally separate from their successful handhelds. http://kotaku.com/heres-your-first-look-at-the-nx-nintendos-upcoming-con-1788004927

I backed a project called "A House of Many Doors" a while ago on Kickstarter, and it now has a "Coming Soon" store page on Steam. This only matters because, unlike the normal case where every KS update seems like a "don't forget us please" marketing spiel, the ones on this have been insights into the author's ideas for how the game will be different and why he is making it. The backer update that accompanied the announcement about the Steam page is a great example, and I think maybe other folks might find it as intriguing as I do: "Without going too much into spoiler territory, the way to advance the main quest is by exploration itself. You need to gather a resource called 'Apprehensions,' representing your knowledge of the House and all its secrets and oddities. You can collect Apprehensions by writing poetry, discovering new locations, or completing side-quests. (Why did I choose this design? Well, I was fed up of the thing you g...

I have mixed feelings about Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. I like a lot of the ways the mechanics have been refined from DXHR; I like that Eidos Montreal paid attention to how stupid the idea of "boss fights" in a Deus Ex game is. Overall, mechanics-wise, this is a great sequel to DXHR. But there's something just plain missing, and that's, for lack of a better term, the heart. I'm anticipating more hours of a fun stealthy choice-of-options game, but I'm already convinced that there's zero chance that it will give me anything to chew on, mentally, and isn't likely to even keep me attached to the character I'm playing. With only mechanics and no heart, this is simply not worthy of the Deus Ex name; it's just cyberpunk Thief. The original Deus Ex was a masterpiece in many ways - and notably, the stealth gameplay and shooter aspects were not high on the list: for example many shooter and stealth game fans rag, accurately, on the stupid guard AI. ...

This is a really clever idea, especially after some of the total boners on pre-order ideas by other companies in the recent past (I'm thinking of the craptastic thing Bethesda tried and abandoned for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.) . The pre-order bonus for Civ 6 will be immediate access to a Civ that all other players will get for free three months later. So it's not a financial offer - latecomers won't have to pay anything. But it's still a great incentive for those of us who would buy the game anyway, to take the risk of pre-ordering. Admittedly, Firaxis is one of the few companies that I don't feel I'm risking much to preoorder from. Even Civ: Beyond Earth , which was quite a bit weaker than I'd hoped and expected, was not such a disappointment that I felt I'd not have bought it if I'd waited for reviews. And Starships was clearly telegraphed and priced as a "lite" game. But this approach is something that I hope other companies will...

I picked up this title a while ago, and at first was very excited. It's clear that somebody finally actually made a MoM-alike that's actually a lot like MoM. Unlike most of the early attempts, you are the big wizard in the tower, not on the battlefield, and your decisions about magic are the central focus of strategy. The game setup screens had me really excited. It's presented differently but the choices are extremely similar to those in MoM - anything that wouldn't be infringing is practically verbatim, but the presentation is clearer and cleaner. The big change is the larger and interlocking array of spell schools, which are more or less lifted from recent games (IIRC it's straight out of Sorcerer King). In fact, the most striking thing about these screens is that they are still basically low-resolution, though higher than the ancient original. I think they are 1024x768x16. And the gameplay itself is very similar, with some new ideas stolen from the HoMM ser...

The Witcher is one of those titles that has gotten a lot of positive writing from thoughtful folks, not just hype. But bits mentioned in that positive writing tend to put me off; things that suggest that it eschews"wimp" features that will make the game playable despite having a life and only playing a few hours at a time. "Oh no, we can't have quest objectives on the compass, that would Break Immersion!" But then I also keep reading things like this, that show a quality of worldbuilding that might make it worth the frustration of a UI designed for people who have nothing else occupying their brains. I'm on the fence, still. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/06/17/the-witcher-3-folklore-rpg

If you're a TL;DR sort of person, here you go: Stellaris is not a 4X game at all. Its core design goes a completely different direction. It has some cool bits in it that will probably catch on in future 4X games, and by using mods to tune it I got a hundred or so hours of fun out of it before the honeymoon wore off, but in the long run it will likely be remembered as a non-4X game that was nonetheless a good influence on the genre. To go into more depth for those inclined: Pre-release, the big excitement about Stellaris was the hope for innovation in a 4X in ways to make the late game less of a grind - that period when you know you've won but the mechanics of getting the victory screen will take hours more. This was a bit of marketing poetry, or maybe outright disingenuous. At its core, Stellaris is not a 4X game. It's a pretty standard Paradox set-piece grand strategy game with a "1X" game bolted on the beginning to substitute for the real-world history t...

I'm still playing stellaris in almost all my gaming time, and enjoying it, primarily because I've found and either used or stolen ideas from a bunch of mods that fix problems that are fixable. To be honest, some of these I like because they straddle the line carefully between moving it more toward a pure 4X game and losing the fresh voice in 4X coming from the Paradox grand strategy sauce. Some of the resource constraints pot such limits on early strategies that you are forced to let the early game become just the randomization step for a mostly static patchwork of essentially equivalent-powered empires, so the midgame looks just like one of their historical games. But removing them entirely is too much; I dial then down so the decisions of the early game become significant ones about how to grow my empire - how much physical expansion, how much infrastructure, how much defense - instead of meaningless firefighting while waiting for the static nap to evolve. But all that said...

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...

I may be setting myself up for a disappointment. I rarely let myself get this excited about a game that's not only unreleased but doesn't even have any hands-on early reviews out. That said, I can't help it. Stellaris, if it even manages half of its goals and doesn't completely screw itself up trying, could be the first really new space strategy game in a very long time. Of course, the last time I was excited about an ambitious 4X space game it was Spore, and that turned out to belong in the dustbin one step up from the Com Outpost heap. But if they pull it off - if they keep the micromanagement optional enough that those of us with families and limited gaming time can play without getting ultra-frustrated by dumb AI assistants, and manage to make a game with enough surprise variations to make several plays in a row all feel different, they'll have done something as seminal and remarkable as Civilization or MoO2 (or, though RTS isn't my cup of tea I have t...

Well, I've put quite a few hours into the game, and it's still a mixed bag. It definitely has the Bethesda addictive magic, with always something to find over the next hill or in the next ruin. I'm warming to the settlement subgame to some extent. There are some UI/UX pain points with the way it's shoved into a completely different game engine. Most notably, there is no way to see what your actual stocks of a resource are except when you are about to build something that uses it. The feature to "tag" resources that you need to build something so junk that would yield them is highlighted during exploration is decent (especially if you take the otherwise unexciting Scrapper perk, or use the console to cheat it on) - but there's no fine control. Certain rare resources I'd always like to see highlighted, and some common ones I don't really want highlighted except when I'm actually low on them. I think the mods available on the PC are also a mus...

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 ...

After two plays through XCOM 2, in giving that a rest, just in time for the release of Grim Dawn. I kick-started this one, and though it failed to pull me away from Path of Exile while in beta, the complete game is more satisfying. Also, PoE league endings (which dump all your characters and stash contents into the base league) generally flush most of my interest, it's so anticlimactic to see the cool bestest loots, fruits of your labors, suddenly just drops in the bucket of what you've seen throughout the life of the game. Back to GD: The influence of the folks who worked on Titan Quest is very obvious, especially in the class and skill system which is pretty much a straight port. But the interesting addition of a Wild West flavor, and a bit of effort into various types of storytelling makes it more appealing to my current tastes, and the clean integration of firearms with magic is cool. Despite the similarity in the shallow high concept description, the setting is not muc...

The first week or two after Heart of Thorns went live, I was a bit disappointed. Playing on, first because four of my friends and I always play together on Mondays, I got a little more of a philosophical handle on how the expansion changes the game, and I'm no longer ambivalent about having bought it - I love some parts, and I just had to learn that the "different kinds of fun as you feel like it" game design is now painted in broader strokes - especially you should only go into one of the new zones if you feel like the activity that is going on in it. Roughly speaking, HoT adds four things to the game: A new character class, a new "elite" subclass for each class, a new form of progression at L80, and a bunch of new zones with their story. Of these, the zones are the most visible and important, and the mastery tracks are the most novel and IMO successful, so I'll leave those for last. In thinking about these changes together, I think I see a philosophica...