June 2023 Random Game Thoughts Thread

[Kaamos_Llama]

@ZedClampet Failing Diablo 4, theres a little game called Elden Ring that you may have heard of. I hear its 100% a proper RPG and you should try it.

I've been playing Dawn of War now as well as still PS:T and Warhammer 40K Boltgun. DOW definitely doesnt not feel like an almost 20 year old game, especially when you consider that 19 years before DOW released we were talking Gauntlet and Space Harrier.

Boltgun is wearing a little thin already, I just find it reminding me of Doom Eternal except the enemy variety and level design isnt as good.. Still its OK maybe it picks up later on with different weapons, theyve seemed pretty underwhelming so far even if the action is nice and frantic. Only 4 levels in though I should give it more time.

 

[Johnway]

Not much going on my side of things. Still playing the rise of the tomb raider (75% done) and playing doom wads. i really need to get back to drawing/painting but studying for AWS is sapping all my weekend time from committing any real time beyond random doodles and sketches. I need to get back in the groove, hopefully i'll would have played through all my doom wads and free my schedule for some much needed art stuff.

 

[Zloth]

An example of the typical process of a Minecraft project:

1. I find a recipe where I can turn 8 coal/charcoal and 1 flint into a ball, put that in a compressor, then combine 8 compressed balls with an obsidian to create graphene, which can go back into the compressor again to make diamonds.

Errr, obsidian in diamonds?

1. I look up sources for all the ingredients. Charcoal can easily be made by burning logs. Flint can be made by washing gravel. Obsidian can be made by washing magma blocks. Doesn't seem too bad.

Washing magma!?

1. I built a nether portal and immediately find a large source of magma blocks, enough for all the diamonds I could ever want for.
2. I find flint chickens, which lay flint instead of eggs and can easily be bred to the point that I get more flint than I know what to do with. Everything is going really well so far.

Wait, they lay flint not eggs, so how do you breed them!?

1. I summon a lumberjack spirit, using materials I had already gathered when summoning an ore processing spirit. However, its pathfinding is broken. Luckily it somehow fixes itself when I start the game again later, so I built it a large forest. However, when I move him into the forest, his pathfinding breaks again and doesn't come back.

There's a topic for that!

1. I find a machine that can harvest trees and replant the saplings. However, it doesn't collect the resources automatically. So now I need a way to power this machine and a way to gather and sort all of the resources. Also, it needs a piece of amber, a resource specific to this mod.
2. The amber can be created with lava, a fire charge, a redstone block and gold. However, redstone and gold are needed for a lot of things and the only source I have for them is to mine, which is a lot of effort. Luckily there's an alternative recipe that uses honey instead of lava, a single redstone powder instead of a redstone block and a magma block instead of a gold.

Sap-free amber!? This game is in desperate need of a chemist.

1. Honey comes only from bee hives (or the bee dimension). However, there don't seem to be any bee hives near my base (or portals to the bee dimension). Luckily, some research shows that bee hives have a 5% chance to spawn when an oak tree grows near a flower. Good thing I had cleared an area already to set up a forest. It only takes a little while to get 5 hives, which start producing honey pretty quickly.

The bee DIMENSION?? I shall live the rest of my life in fear.

Back in my own game, the Boron and Argon have allied with each... wait. Boron? Argon?? OK, I think I found where Minecraft's missing chemist went.

 

[Ryzengang]

Until a few days ago I hadn't been getting too much gaming in, but with the release of Diablo IV I've been playing a lot with a friend of mine. Blizzard has really hit it out of the park with Diablo IV. Phenomenal art direction that is much darker and more suitable for the series than Diablo 3's art. The gameplay is fluid and fun, and the game runs well and has very few technical issues. The servers have held up very well too, although I question whether that will be the case come June 6th when it fully releases; I'm guessing the servers will be getting hit really hard once it's fully out.

As a side project this morning I learned how to install the Battle.net launcher on the Steam Deck so I could play Diablo IV in handheld format. It seems like it can actually run pretty solid overall, so it's nice to have that option if I ever want to play it away from the computer.

 

[Brian Boru]

I need a new game to play

Well since you're the guy who knows more about new games than most of us—Exhibit A = OP—that sounds like a quest for a change of genre/scene. Following are different:

Try the demos for Royal Envoy I keep rabbiting on about. RE2 is the easiest of the 4, RE3 is the most interesting.

Another one is the Adelantado Trilogy—no particular preference among the 3.

 

[ZedClampet]

@ZedClampet Failing Diablo 4, theres a little game called Elden Ring that you may have heard of.

I can't buy Elden Ring right now. I have to at least make sure it doesn't go on sale later this month. As for Diablo 4, I really never tried that kind of game much. I bought Grim Dawn during the last sale. Maybe I need to start there and see if I like that sort of combat. Your suggestion was very helpful because I had forgotten all about Grim Dawn.

@Zloth "Sap-free amber!? This game is in desperate need of a chemist."

Minecraft has many nonsensical mods.

@Pifanjr "I find flint chickens"

The first thing I ever automated in Minecraft was making cooked chicken. The only problem was that without an infinite storage chest mod, my exponentially growing cast of chickens pretty quickly filled up all the chests I attached to it.

Thinking about automation makes me actually want to play again. The most difficult part was laying out your redstone in such a way that you didn't seem inebriated. Automated potato, wheat and monster farms were my favorite things to do in vanilla. Well, that and the automatic 3 wide door that used to impress people back in the day.

I used to host a small server for about 6 people. It was fun, but we spent half our time griefing each other by luring creepers to each other's houses. I finally turned creeper damage off.

 

[Pifanjr]

I used to host a small server for about 6 people. It was fun, but we spent half our time griefing each other by luring creepers to each other's houses. I finally turned creeper damage off.

Classic. My friends and I were also fans of throwing water or lava down someone's mine shaft as they were coming up, putting tnt underneath a pressure plate in their house and when someone went afk encasing them in several layers of stone. Also just regular pyromania.

 

[ZedClampet]

Classic. My friends and I were also fans of throwing water or lava down someone's mine shaft as they were coming up, putting tnt underneath a pressure plate in their house and when someone went afk encasing them in several layers of stone. Also just regular pyromania.

Yeah, I think the best anyone did on my server was to completely encase a house in obsidian for a player who had built a 2x2 cube for a house. They went AFK inside their cube and then couldn't leave because they didn't have a diamond pick. He eventually opened it up for her, mainly because he needed the Nether portal he had intended to build with the obsidian.

She, the encased player, was actually the one who started the Creeper-fest, so I just thought it was funny.

*****

For the second time, the developers of Big Ambitions have reversed an update. Basically, they tried to do essentially the same thing twice, just a tiny bit differently the second time, and players went nuts both times. They may be a little frustrated, but the thing is, it's a terrible idea. It doesn't matter how they implement it; it's always going to be terrible.

 

[ZedClampet]

The beautiful but boring and dumbed down Far Cry 6 has "mixed" user reviews on Steam. It must really irritate Ubisoft that they are required to give their customers a voice in exchange for their money.

This is the company that said customers were too stupid to recognize how groundbreaking Breakpoint was. For those who don't know, Breakpoint is a Far Cry game with a different name. I guess that's the groundbreaking part. They changed the name. Honestly, though, Breakpoint is a better Far Cry game than FC6. The first Ghost Recon was even better.

 

[Zloth]

Also just regular pyromania.

Not Safe For Work

View: https://youtu.be/j5TFHz88Qu8

 

[DXCHASE]

My Steam Replay is going to be significantly different than my actual gaming use. I did not play any steam games in the past 4 days (OK EXCEPT FOR AN HOUR ON DESTINY) or so but have def. been playing. I wish blizzard would add a way for me to see how long ive been playing for like steam, amongst the many other features it should have like steam.

So i wound up using a sick day yesterday because the weekend also brought a lot of non-gaming stuff, it was worth it since its my family playing w/me along with the 1 random guy in our clan that decided to join us lol. So far i have 4 characters levels 31,27,20 and 11, but nothing too far yet where as people are already level 100 lol i still think i got my fair share of early access. (game officially drops later today)

 

[Pifanjr]

My wife has a bunch of WoW friends that have started playing Diablo IV and now she wants to try it too. As a patient gamer the idea of paying $70 for a game is madness, but the FOMO is hitting her hard.

 

[Pifanjr]

I stumbled upon this article about the development of League of Legends and I thought this part in particular was really interesting:

While the team showed off the game during GDC, Beck and Merrill met with potential publishers, but the meetings didn’t go well. The biggest issue was that the duo didn’t want to sell the game, instead they wanted to earn money off the back of in-game sales. While the freemium model was starting to gain traction in Asia, it really hadn’t yet been proven in North America.

“We originally just wanted to be a game developer, but then when we talked to publishers at the time they were like, ‘Wait, you’re not going to have single player (gameplay) and you want the game to be free and virtual? What are you talking about?”

With how popular the Game as a Service model is nowadays, it's interesting to see how controversial the concept was to publishers.

My wife has a bunch of WoW friends that have started playing Diablo IV and now she wants to try it too. As a patient gamer the idea of paying $70 for a game is madness, but the FOMO is hitting her hard.

She just bought it so it's done downloading when the game releases.

 

[ZedClampet]

What is wrong with the people on Steam forums, and why do they gather there rather than other places online? It's really disturbing. They seem to all be from the movie Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

 

[Zloth]

Steam forums are good stuff! It's the best place to ask questions about a specific game.

A pity their software is terrible. After about 10 minutes of reading, it just marks everything has being read - even if you haven't gotten to it all. Posting through a browser or their software doesn't matter - it's just bad forum software. What's worse, is that they used to have fairly good software for the time. The old Steam forums used normal forum software and worked nicely, but then they decided that they needed to make their own. That must have been 15 years back, and I don't think they've done much of anything with the software since then.

 

[mainer]

Jagged Alliance 3 went on sale today for preorders, and currently set to release on July 14th, and it's 20% off as a preorder bonus until that date. I really like the looks of this game with it's open world structure, turn-based tactical combat, and RPG elements, such as gathering a crew of misfit mercenaries with different personalities & quirks. Gameplay, in parts, reminds me a bit of Wasteland 2.

While I'm tempted, especially with the discount, I think I'll probably wait for a few reviews before I buy it.

Jagged Alliance 3 on Steam

The country of Grand Chien is thrown into chaos when the elected president goes missing and the paramilitary force known as “the Legion” seizes control. Hire mercs, meet interesting characters, and fight in tactically deep turn-based combat in this true successor to a beloved franchise.

store.steampowered.com

 

[DXCHASE]

As a patient gamer the idea of paying $70 for a game is madness, but the FOMO is hitting her hard.

Try dropping 300 for the ultimate editions to get early access

 

[ZedClampet]

Jagged Alliance 3 went on sale today for preorders, and currently set to release on July 14th, and it's 20% off as a preorder bonus until that date. I really like the looks of this game with it's open world structure, turn-based tactical combat, and RPG elements, such as gathering a crew of misfit mercenaries with different personalities & quirks. Gameplay, in parts, reminds me a bit of Wasteland 2.

While I'm tempted, especially with the discount, I think I'll probably wait for a few reviews before I buy it.

Jagged Alliance 3 on Steam

The country of Grand Chien is thrown into chaos when the elected president goes missing and the paramilitary force known as “the Legion” seizes control. Hire mercs, meet interesting characters, and fight in tactically deep turn-based combat in this true successor to a beloved franchise.

store.steampowered.com

That does look interesting. What I usually do in a situation like this is buy the previous edition for practically nothing and see if I like it. In this case, I already had the previous edition somehow, so I'm installing it now.

 

[Zloth]

The previous edition was QUITE some time ago! I remember very little except "Elliot! You IIIIIDIOT!!"

 

[Brian Boru]

previous edition was QUITE some time ago

Indeed, around 20 years ago it seems—or maybe there were later ones, they seem to want to confuse us with their naming, remaking, and general shenanigans.

Maybe I'll try it when I get into my GOG backlog.

 

[ZedClampet]

Played some Amnesia, The Bunker. Very good. Much better so far than Rebirth.

***********'

The previous edition was QUITE some time ago! I remember very little except "Elliot! You IIIIIDIOT!!"

Yeah, depends on how antiquated the controls are. The type of game it is, it could either feel completely modern or it could feel very dated like a 2 year old Final Fantasy game. If it's the latter, I'm out.

 

[ZedClampet]

Here's an example of the problem with Big Ambition's developer. In the game, you have the ability to open up 3 different types of office businesses: law firm, graphic design and web development (this is in addition to all the retail businesses you can start).

So I had a law firm that was bringing in $160,000 a day. It seemed a bit high to me, but it was nice to have office income as opposed to just retail. Then suddenly they send out an update and say that the amount we were able to charge for the services was too high. I agreed with that, and I opened the game to find out what that law firm was making now. Under the nerf, it was now losing $18,000 per day.

That's ridiculous and objectively wrong. Why would they go that far in a nerf to where you went from making good money to losing $18k a day? Did they not test the new numbers? They could have cut down what you were charging by half, and everyone would have said, "Yeah, okay." Instead they cut it to a ridiculous amount. I had to go through and fire most of my attorneys, the ones I was having to pay more than they were earning, and ended up with 6 attorneys left when I had started with 100. They were bringing in a few hundred dollars a day, so I just closed the office.

Just ridiculous.

 

[ZedClampet]

I will say one thing for the Big Ambitions developer: they have a wonderful community manager. No matter how crazy the players get--and they've been nothing but crazy for the last two weeks--the CM is always incredibly attentive, supportive and positive.

 

[Shodan_]

I've been playing through all the Brothers in Arms game. Another series I read about throughout the years but never got around to play.

It's been...interesting.

Road to Hill 30 on difficult felt okay but overly ambitious for it's own good. The game hammers home how you need to suppress and flank, but the way it encourages this mechanic feels artificially forced on you by how crappy your weapons are. Yes it's fun, and yes it works but your weapons are so inaccurate and your hits feel straight up RNG'd to a point where it's more about shooting in the general direction of your enemy and having your squad do all the work. Taking on enemies yourself is seemingly so discouraged that you could be running up to a fully flanked/suppressed position and not hit anything from 15 feet away with a machine gun aiming down sight in short bursts. It's completely ridiculous. If you swapped positions and let your assault squad do the work while you suppress they would wrap it up in 2 seconds. Too many times the game funnels you down strict paths where there are no good decisions to take, and you see a fence leading to another route that would make sense but can't jump over it...

Halfway through earned in blood on difficult as well and so far it's way better. It's basically identical in gameplay but the level design IMO allows for more tactical decision making, which mitigates the fact that using your own weapons accurately is kind of a dice roll. The levels feel more open in general and you get more breathing room to make some calls in the heat of the moment.

 

[ZedClampet]

We started yet another new game of V Rising, this time with the current update, which means no mods, and just adjusted the game to be harder. I was looking forward to the first person mod, but it doesn't have an FOV slider, and it was pretty claustrophobic and disorienting for me.

******

Played about 10 different games today. Did some more Amnesia, The Bunker, and am still enjoying it, but like the original Amnesia, this game is too dark, so I've adjusted my gamma to be able to see. I'm sure some people think that's cheating or missing the point, but I just hate having to inch my way through near total darkness. I've also turned off the damn wobbly screen effect, and I make no apologies for that. The only time I died during the original Amnesia was when I intentionally jumped to my death just to get the screen back to normal.

I'll probably end up getting the game on Steam because you can't play user-made content on Game Pass.