Weregamer's Game Musings

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...

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...

Thea is a hard game for me to review, because I'm having a hard time deciding if I like or hate it. Seriously, I find myself playing Thea for a couple days straight, deciding that it's just too boring and repetitive, and barely deciding not to delete it. Then a few days later, I find myself firing it up for a few games to get one of my deities to the next level. I think the best unified comment I can give is that the concept and design of the game as a whole are very compelling, but it starts to get repetitive because there just isn't enough different on each playthrough. If there were many more of the interesting story vignettes, and if they were triggered more based on what you are doing instead of randomly, the story of each individual game could get compelling. But as it is, every playthrough starts to feel the same, both in what happens on the map and in what vignettes I see. The first dozen or two games were satisfying to me as a builder, but eventually there just...

Ah, Winter Vacation. Time to start going through the too many games I bought on the Steam Holiday Sale, and look askance at the Steam Winter Sale coming on its heels. Except sometimes one or two of the sale games grab me so much that I don't get around to all of them. I can't complain. The surprise hit for me was Infinite Space 3: Sea of Stars. The Infinite Space series is more of a series of remakes, like the Space Empires series, rather than whole new games. But I've enjoyed each of the earlier ones for several hours and several days, and if I'd seen the Kickstarter for this one I'd have backed it. The big surprise when I tried it was its staying power. There are finally enough random things in the pool to be selected from that it took as long to feel like I'd found everything in this one as it had taken to wring the previous one dry entirely, and now I can still come back to try for a higher score on higher difficulty settings for a brief visit. The...

I've put a little time into this this week, and although the changes seem like little tweaks, the sum is a huge change in how fun the game is. Except for a few buggy places which probably involve uniquely scripted objects, switching characters to use a skill has been smoothly automagicked, and during character generation and leveling up, tooltips and shading help you see which skills are already in the party at which levels. So while your party is still basically a bucket of skills, you spend so much less time tracking who has what that it doesn't break immersion. The traits and quirks don't have a huge effect, but they are sufficient that you can have two characters with the same weapon skill who feel distinct in a fight, and some pairings of skills (combat and non, in all three combinations) yield interesting synergies. A lot of tuning also shows. There are no longer runaway best and worst choices in NPC recruits, and some of the more tedious, less interesting "pu...

Hmm. They are the last company that still has it, but with their last few releases, Firaxis has almost lost my unconditional buy-it flag. In particular, the wartime diplomacy system in Rising Tide is so restrictive of player choices that Sid Meier ought to be turning over in his chair. This, and the other ways in which the new diplomacy system removes player agency, are well covered in the RPS article (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/10/08/beyond-earth-rising-tide-review/) so I don't need to repeat them myself. (Although the actual bug involving allies and war declarations was patched almost immediately.) Overall, Rising Tide is a definite if not quite good enough improvement for BE, roughly like the first expansion to Civ5. It adds some important systems and addresses some balance issues, but is still not "done" yet. I hope the next expansion, like the second one for Civ5, will make it a complete and satisfying game. One of the biggest handicaps that BE has co...

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 one is a credible improvement in the series, even if the hyped up ship model building doesn't mean much (the actual ship design process and results are really unchanged from galciv 2, what's new there are just more cosmetic options). The big meaningful changes are in the planetary economic model. Buildings are located in specific hexes on a randomized planet map, with adjacency bonuses that make clusters of related buildings important. Since even excellent planets have more unusable than usable hexes, it adds real depth to growth planning. And shifting all building bonuses to percentages makes the base population more important and population buildings as desirable as production or research or money. The new scheme for shipyards is also a good idea that meshes well with the revised planetary economics, and the full integration of racial tech tech trees and the cleaned up alignment system work really well. All that said, the game pace and flow are pretty similar to the...

The Steam Summer Sale is an evil plot an excellent opportunity to try the games you were curious about or didn't want to pay full price for. It's been my chance to pick up some of the 4X space games that have come out recently. First up is Galactic Inheritors. This is a cool and innovative little game. Some of the traditional mechanics are bare-bones, and the overall turn-by-turn flow is a bit clumsy, but the new stuff is interesting. In particular, your military ships are built by contract with private companies, and each company "levels up" on a skill tree; you can thus specialize each company in one area, though they only gain "XP" from building ships and ships are a big investment. All in all, this game felt like something that I could get involved with and dig into, except for two factors. One is that the main screen color scheme is hard on the eyes - the grainy white background, like that of Distant Worlds when zoomed out only more so, is a short...