Weregamer's Game Musings

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.

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

It's pure luck (or maybe karma) that I even looked at this game, but I'm really glad I bought it for more than one reason. The day it came out, Tess had just that morning asked me what I had been playing, and I answered "Path of Exile". Her response was "Don't you ever play things with non-depressing titles?". If that conversation hadn't happened, I probably wouldn't have looked very deeply at the news of the release on Steam, and I might have missed a game that is both fun and innovative. Before I get into the ways in which the actual game design is innovative, I should mention two things. First, it's a really fun little game . I don't expect to be playing it fanatically, but it doesn't require a huge time commitment yet has some strategic depth and fun storytelling. I'll likely have it installed for a long time, playing it in short spurts when I haven't the time for a deeper game or am just taking a break. Se...

This game was on one-day sale on Steam this week, and it had some really glowing reviews (especially at Rock, Paper, Shotgun which is one of the sites I trust most). After playing for a couple nights, I have realized that I like this game a lot but I'm not enjoying playing it. Some of the problem is the inept Windows coding and lack of display settings. No video settings at all - it can only run at desktop resolution, and while it might have been OK in 2010 when the game was first written, that makes things just too tiny on a moderate screen at high resolution. A bigger part of the problem is that the screen is uselessly cluttered for manipulating stuff or watching the details of what happens when there are more than a couple things on screen. If you are used to EVE, or otherwise can adjust to a UI where you see things on the screen but have to use menus to select and manipulate them, it's only annoying (like EVE, but without the good reasons EVE has this problem). But if...