Weregamer's Game Musings

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...

Rounding out what I played on my vacation are a game I had for a while but hadn't played yet, and two that got updates. Guild of Dungeoneering This is a funky little game that I filled my "I've got a half hour before bedtime" niche until I found Infinite Space III. It's an interestingly meta game, because the story is about the development of your guild itself, with individual adventurers and their expeditions as events in the larger story. While a single adventurer might get lucky with their "battle scars" from completing missions, they are all doomed to die. But even in dying, they bring in some loot that funds improvements for your guild, and when they beat a quest they bring in lots of loot. In an oddly contrary way, though, having an adventurer succeed and hence survive can do you more harm than good, because once a quest is complete it is no longer available, and the difficulty curve on later dungeons is steep. The optimal way to play is ...

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...