T w e n t y S i d e d
It’s the PC Gaming Conference. Last year this was long and awkward. We’ll see if it’s better this year.
Running commentary:
Dawn of War: Not really our thing, so not much to say.
Oxygen Not Included: It’s… uh. Five seconds of footage and then they move on?!? Not cool.
Ark Survival Evolved: Open world PvP survival. Meh. Dinos look cool though.
Giant Cop: VR Games are getting strange.
Mount & Blade: Mountain Blade! Josh is excited. Much improved siege combat.
The Surge: Again, another ten-second
Law Breakers: Multiplayer Team Shooter. Huge focus on mobility, vertival movement, and having different movement styles for each class.
AMD: We just made fun of graphics cards the whole time.
Vampyr: Didn’t see enough to say anything.
Killing Floor 2: It seems like the more I care about a game, the less time it gets on the show. Here is a title really far outside of my area of knowledge and interest, and it gets a huge block of time.
Observer: Eastern European cyberpunk horror. Interesting.
Dropzone: They’re calling it an RTS, but it LOOKS like a MOBA.
ARMA3: I don’t know anything about this series.
The Turing Test: Looks like a puzzle game. Sort of Portal by way of Space Engineers.
Dual Universe: Space Engineer building + No Man’s Sky planet-hopping + Star Citizen development approach?
And just like last year, the show ran long. Twitch cut them off and switched to Ubisoft. Oh well.
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Philosophy of Moderation
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
Good Robot Dev Blog
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
Shamus Plays WOW
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
I have a yahoo mail account *in addition* to my gmail account. I give yahoo to businesses I don’t actually like but want to order from just once, so I don’t see their spammy junk (because I never check it)
Agh! Its killing me that I can’t watch this right now.
Actually Giant Cop VR plays to one of VR’s unique strengths, its ability to truly convey a sense of scale, even at extremes, and compensates for one of its weaknesses, inability to move around much.
Arma 3 Apex looking good. I just wish Steam would let you put a separate install for testing beta updates where available.
Also looking forward to Bannerlord. Love how much smoother (including the new siege stuff) it looks compared to the first two games.
Ark is pretty fun in modded single player or on a private server and non-jerky friends.
Played ‘as intended’, tho? Yah, eff that.
My wife and I only got a little bit into it, and certainly not to the extent it’s intended (we didn’t do anything with the dinos but kill them). Graphics are very pretty, but the gating of all tech behind XP got old really fast. I don’t know, it just didn’t scratch our itch.
Played solo or with friends, it’s kind of Minecraftish: you have to come up with your own goals and objectives.
Accelerated XP gain (and taming times and some other sliders) are pretty much a must for solo/duo play, since the game is primarily designed around groups of people and shared experience.
“Star Citizen development approach”
Never coming out, then?
I know that Dawn of War II wasn’t much of an RTS, but it was a pretty great action RPG. I’m disappointed to see the series revert to more of a standard RTS formula. Goodbye, deploying customized characters developed over the course of an entire campaign to use their unique skills to win the day, hello sending wave after wave of identical units to eventually overwhelm the opposition.
That they’re explicitly taking design cues from MOBAs to court that audience only fills me with more despair.
I’m confused? DOW2 felt more like a MOBA to me than DOW1 did (for which Dark Crusade actually did add a reasonably RPG-like campaign). You say that DOW3 will be more like 1 but also more like MOBAs than DOW2? How?
“Observer: Eastern European cyberpunk horror. Interesting.”
I second that, I’ll probably take a closer look at this presentation. Although the only horror game I’ve managed to play that was interesting, and not just scary and oppressing, was SOMA
“Turning Test”: Typo, or did they actually name it that?