T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve been all over the place.
I played a bit more BALL x PIT. It’s a good game, I had fun, but I wasn’t really in the mood to hunt down a bunch of item fusions. It wouldn’t even take that long, I just don’t feel like it.
I played a bit of Rainbow Six Siege with some friends. I don’t know if many peoples here are even interested in that game. But for anyone curious about the state of the game, the character Dokkaebi just got changed from being able to make peoples phones ring too making them explode.
I’ve been playing Rimworld a bit. Just dabbling with making a melee focused xenotype. They run fast and can hit things with sticks real good.
Right before writing this I was messing around with hammer(the source engine map editor). Not much interesting in that regard, but it’s funny how fast muscle memory comes back for that kind of program.
What’s everyone else doing this week?
Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Why Batman Can't Kill
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
The Best of 2019
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
The Dumbest Cutscene
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
Finished Lego Batman. Game was both fun and funny. It really does draw from most of the Batman movies, so you better hope you like references. I appreciate that it doesn’t let you activate the towers until like halfway through the game because when I used one and it spammed icons all over my map I immediately decided I wasn’t going to collect all the things, there’s just so very very many. The game certainly made it easy to get over being a completionist.
Also been playing a bunch of Mina the Hollower. It is, to no one’s surprise, excellent. Digging is an unusual dodge but extremely powerful when you have the hang of it. The healing system has the downsides of both Dark Souls and Hollow Knight – you have limited flasks and you can only build up potential healing by hitting enemies. On a related note, the game is really hard. Especially early on when I just had one Spark I lost a lot of bones by dying. It is useful to remember that when you die with a Spark you don’t actually drop any bones, so you’re free to figure out some way to spend what you have (and really should!) before maybe losing it all. It seems like the game gets easier over time but I guess part of that is the fact you can go like 4 different directions at the start of the game, so you could hypothetically be going to many of these areas from the get go.
I briefly played Satisfactory and I don’t think it’s for me. I suspected that but I did want to know.
Yakuza Kiwami 3: Rikiya got his tattoo finished, I finished the available side content. The Amon Biker Gang still needs its beating, but I need cash to max out Kiryu before that.
Palworld The continent south west is a nightmare to navigate. Huge cliffs everywhere and most of the bosses are in caves, where the entryway is impossible to find. Not long until 1.0 is released on 10th July. I hope our savegame will still work.
Steam started a Croatia event, where I’ve seen that Talos Principle III is announced. I’m hyped, because Talos 2 was such a fantastic game.
Analog I played with family and friends a few rounds of ito, Castle Combo, Splendor Duel, Tag Team, Quaks Duel and Hero Story. Quaks ballooned the game instead of making it tighter. I need a few more rounds to really make an opinion about it. Same goes for Hero Story. Castle Combo got praise by all participants. Tag Team and ito are known fun.
Thanks for pointing out Talos Principle 3 announcement, I had missed that. Instant wishlist!
Instant wishlist indeed! I hadn’t seen it either!
I didn’t get in a run at Knights of the Old Republic, but DID get in a run of Suikoden V, with the game reminding me of my issues with it the first time I played. First, I was wandering around trying to figure out how to advance the plot, and what you have to do is — with no more prompting than “Let’s look around for a bit!” — go into an alley that is actually hard to see so that you can be followed by someone who appeals to you for help with no indication that there’s even any sort of character like that around so that you can kick off the rest of the plot. I had to read about that in a walkthrough, and the confusion was made worse by walking into the inn and getting a short scene that LOOKED like it was going to lead to something — and it will, later — but that never did. Then I had to go through a relatively short dungeon with some navigational tricks, but the issue is that where you need to go isn’t necessarily clear — here, they added a marker that DOES how you the way — and even worse the random encounter rate is REALLY high. I remember one part that’s worse later, but here I spent a lot of time looking for the right way to go and every time I’d think to try a certain way I’d hit a random encounter and then would have to remember what I was trying to do. Fortunately, the encounters weren’t difficult, but it is a reminder to stock up on healing because with all the random encounters I’m going to need it, especially since leveling up seems to only increase your maximum hit points and not your current ones (lots of JRPGs give you extra current HPs in the same amount as the maximum HPs increased) so you end up with less HPs as combats go on and they never increase except with healing.
The story is still pretty good, though, although I almost wondered if I made the wrong choice in chasing after the agents instead of trying to detain the gladiator, since the scene afterwards seemed a bit vague.
I’ve taken a break from my BG3 mods and taken up Marathon, the new one. Love the vibe, tolerate the pvp. I generally never win such conflicts of course, if you’re not deliberately hunting people you’ll always be the one getting ganked, but human players are required to actually make stealth mechanics work as anything more than a puzzle game. The price of a game where you actually do want to avoid active combat zones or hear footsteps and have to frantically decide whether to freeze, sneak, just run for it and pray, or actively try to instigate the fight you’ll probably lose anyway to marginally increase the odds- well the price is that other players will kill you a lot. And all those runs where you got “lucky” and never saw anyone, is probably because you passed other people just like yourself who hid the moment they heard your footsteps.
The whole concept is also just kindof a mood on psychology and the nature of people and whatnot, as you’re never required to kill anyone (aside from the pvp faction quests, which I suspect reward you with little in the way of story and mostly just murder cult babbling), there’s always more loot than any one person or group can carry, and the loss from getting killed yourself will always be worse than the gains (sure there’s a chance you can take down a better geared player, more chance than in truly level-based systems, but if they have better gear you should be at significantly less than 50% on those odds), yet here we are.
And I feel like this (and presumably the whole extraction shooter genre), really has some problems with the concept of progression. Obviously in order for there to be risk, you have to lose your stuff when you die, and I’ve heard other games will let you pick like one item to guarantee keep but even that defeats the purpose. However, the amount of resources you essentially have to “ante up” in order for a *chance* to get more, in a game specifically courting the murder-hobo type of player, and the fact that you have to survive *multiple* successful runs in order to go up a tier? Seems like they either vastly overestimate the evenness of distribution in player skill and temperament, or the whole genre is basically there so that the Top Percent who never have to face a fair fight and thus only lose rarely can lord it over everyone else who have to spend a bunch of time grinding just for a single chance before getting knocked down again.
Similarly, the concept of Rooks (analogous to Scavs in Tarkov): a bunch of players spawn in around halfway through the timer to try and grab what loot they can, and since they’re locked to default free gear they don’t even keep, they have nothing to lose. In theory this lets you do some Rook runs to scrape together/maintain the cash and gear needed to do higher tier stuff, and if you fail you just go again until you succeed. Or you might even be able to catch someone with a bunch of sick gear before they escape! But this game is also pretty clearly designed around Trios (if you play solo you have to remember to manually click ‘solo’ literally every time, or it will dump you solo into a trios queue, which is even more stupid because if you don’t want to fill your team with randoms the game remembers *that*). So, I don’t know how often but it seems more than half the time, these solo Rooks are spawning in to games with *three person teams*, which means no, you’re not going to get lucky and take some high level gear off a player. You would have to take not just one person in a worse than 50/50 fight, you’d have to take a whole team at once. I get the strong feeling that Bungie may have woefully overestimated the Rook’s willingness to band together to tear people down (and thus immediately get a set of gear they can go run themselves). Rooks don’t work together to take down other players, because they’re the same players that are also doing normal runs. They play the same way, which is to say: they generally shoot any other player on sight. Even if they’re another Rook, who not only won’t have *good* gear, their basic gear is literally unsellable.
There’s a bunch of theoretical room for emergent gameplay where people talk to each other and live and let live or team up to take down some mechs or Rooks banding together, there are videos and memes about it, but the reality is. . . not that. The other players do an excellent job of creating a tense atmosphere where you want to avoid notice, but this also means that no one ever wants to speak first because they’ll just reveal themselves and get shot. If you try to hide and then realize it’s not going to work and speak up, they’ll probably just accuse you of lying, after they’ve shot you. The Time to Kill is so short that those shooting first feel perfectly justified, because if they wait until fired upon or even long enough to identify what they’re looking at (say, for rooks to team up), they could lose, so they shoot on sight (which is hilarious when you’re on free/rook gear that will usually lose even if you *do* shoot first.
There’s no shades of grey, it’s just people trying to do their contract in peace who will probably die if attacked, and people who shoot on sight. And people who deliberately move towards anything that sounds like a player so they can shoot them, preferably waiting until said person is damaged or occupied, though I feel like most are too trigger happy to even go that far, trusting the shoot first bonus to win since it usually does. And I don’t see how this would be any better in groups. I don’t know how common random teams actually are, but I *can’t* believe it’s that popular. Just about any team you face is going to be a group of friends who do this regularly and want to go out and win fights and prove their skill to each other etc, and the only reason they won’t shoot on sight is because surrounding you first is better.
I’m like 20-25 hours in and seem to have mined out all the story quests that don’t require me to go make a big noise, then go fight a boss (which makes a lot of extended loud noise where it’s obvious someone can kill you while you’re busy), then loot something off the boss and take it somewhere else and do another thing, all without dying. Completing those requires an appropriate time of day, as it feels like past a certain hour all the peaceful players disappear and it’s just murder hobos so the odds of a “lucky” run drop precipitously. The fact that there seems to be like four tiers of gear suggests that I probably won’t be climbing very high. But I shouldn’t talk myself out of keeping on for a while since I did actually buy the thing. Game is good. Gameplay is solid as ever, setting is great, hell the whole megacorps pitting the disposable plebs against each other which the plebs gleefully do even though they’d profit more if they just stopped killing each other is 1000% accurate for the setting. Maybe if you climb high enough things get different? Maybe the ranked mode that’s supposed to open up later siphons people off, or playing that discourages people from taking fights for no reason more than losing gear would? It’s quite frustrating that the game is so good in spite of the murder-hobos. But as great as the mobs are to fight, it does need the context of actually worrying about everything else, and everything else can only be supplied by human players. Seriously, there must be scores of psych papers written about this stuff.
Biotech was widely considered the best DLC for RimWorld (until Odyssey came out and gave it a run for its money), and being able to play around with gene-editing your colonists is a big part of why. My highly modded RimWorld run finally succumbed to mod-update-related failure (or so I assume), which is fine because I was getting bored of it and wanting something different anyway. I’m thinking about making a heavily polluted world with a special xenotype that’s pollution resistant but built to go around cleaning it up.
Progress continues in Solar Expanse. I’ve colonized much of the solar system, and have been building up my alloy and polymer production on Phobos, from whence I can launch it to the orbiting interstellar ship construction yard where I’ve started working on a colony ship. I’ve unlocked asteroid thrusters, which can be used to send asteroids tootling around the solar system. The intended use is to crash them on Mars (or other bodies) for faster terraforming because it instantly dumps all resources they have on them onto the body they collide with, but from reading some guides I discovered they work much better as cargo transports: the game doesn’t actually track the mass of any resource deposits on them, so you can take a tiny asteroid, load it up with megatons of water from Europa, then send it back to Mars for way less fuel than you could by ferrying it by spaceship. So that’s kind of a fun little loophole I’ve just started exploiting.
I’ve also been playing a little Creeper World III: Arc Eternal again after several years since I finally got around to implementing this fix for some old Unity games that began failing to start on Linux a year or so ago due to intricacies of Steam now using an embedded Chromium framework.
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is finished. I finally found the second new dungeon, which ended up being in a place I hoped it would be. I would say it’s one of the better dungeons in the game, in that it’s both thematically interesting, and easy to navigate. The other new one wasn’t, nor are a fair few of the originals. So the new one’s up there in “best parts of the game” for me.
I didn’t clear it though.
Or the original two postgame dungeons.Maybe when I’m not heading on vacation.Brotato. Switching between Nightmare runs and Level 5 runs. Nightmare continues to be Way Too Much even with the bullets turned off. (Seriously, the bullets just make me think of the Wandering Damage Table.)
4TheWords. Trying to write a Dark Pictures parody; turns out when you let everyone die in the first scene, the branching paths compound ridiculously fast. I think I’m three scenes in and continually thinking “there’s no way anyone would ever have the budget for this.” But until reality can actually catch me, the adventure remains ascoot.
I have actually had some time for gaming again!
I’ve dug up IXION again, a space station builder/resource manager strategy game, that very much vibes with me. I am also very much tempted to just start over again, bc I feel like I’ve build myself a bit in a corner and am not at a great point to continue, but I am also very much tempted to just see how much I can salvage it.
I’ve also gotten into Everspace 2, which thankfully did away with the roguelike approach of the first one. It’s a run-of-the-mill ego shooter in space, it doesn’t even have a throttle, but it’s fun to shoot with many different weapons at red-marked things while moving in 6 degrees of freedom. The story so far is engaging enough to make me wanna see how it continues, and I might suffer from my usual problem of “I’ll check ALL THE SIDE CONTENT before I look at the next main quest again”.