June 2024 Game Discussion Thread

[BeardyHat]

I don't know why I know this, but it's pronounced ay - by - autic. Sort of like bionic with an "AY" at the beginning and a "t" instead of an "n".

Oh and speaking of "Biotics" I think I'm going to need to go get some anti-biotics tomorrow, because I got s thistle in my thumb while pulling weeds yesterday and it's hella infected today. Managed to pull the thistle out with my hobby knife, but it's still pretty red and angry.

 

[ZedClampet]

I did adjust some of the spawn rates as you recommended, but not sure I did anything about the enemies. There's definitely entirely too many and respawn frequency is too high for a single player go of it, but I certainly don't want to start over now.

There are some very difficult sections, and if you have to go back to your base, everyone respawns. If you could craft a bed easily, I'd say to just stay mobile and create a new base every night, but you cant craft a bed easily. One thing you might be able to do is keep picking up the army cots and taking as many with you as you can, but food and water might be a problem.

!! Even Falcon Northwest can't touch those prices.... oh! In the upper right, you need to switch it to US Dollars.

LOL I'm not sure why PC Gamer provided a link that was in Taiwan dollars.

Darn you. Now I want one.

 

[Hveðrungr]

eventually try Days of Ruin again, which was my first Advance Wars game, which I didn't really care for.

Days of Ruin broke the concept by being too grim all the time. Advance Wars should primarily be about kids in garish clothes commanding armies and yelling dorky insults at each other. Instead AWDoR is a post-apocalyptic disaster in subdued pastel hues. Also they made the cool CO powers (what Wargroove calls “Grooves”) boring.

 

[ZedClampet]

@Colif you've been on the bots lately. Apparently TF2 has a bot problem, but it's players using bots, apparently to farm for cosmetic drops. It's getting review bombed right now as people want Valve to address the problem.

 

[Colif]

TF2 is famous for bots. Its the example used to find other games on steam that also have bot problems. Just watch its activity chart, most games ebb/flow based on when players online, its consistently the same amount of players online.

they could be using it as a canary to find other games... and yet.. this one below lives:

i linked this before, he mentions TF2 as a way to Know this game is using bots to stay in Steam top 20

 

[ZedClampet]

(stay to the end for more of my humorous incompetence)

We got to a multiplayer raid part of Nightingale, and I saw a side of Guido I rarely get to see--the competitive side. When we arrived at the raid for the first time, Guido and I were both gear level 58, and the two people who joined us were in the high 100's. I thought, "Yay, we got good help here." Guido apparently felt like he was being showed up, though.

After the boss fight, he said he wanted to go back to our base. Crafting in Nightingale is the most complex I've ever seen, and he spent the next two hours or so traveling from realm to realm checking out the essence traders. Up until the raid, we'd never needed to pay that much attention to our gear. We weren't having any problems at all.

I busied myself with doing this or that. Farming and cooking mostly. Finally Guido arrived back from his travels and started crafting things, mostly essence charms. When he was done, he came to me and he was carrying a sickle, the weakest weapon in the game, and his gear level was almost 300. The sickle we can craft normally does 75 damage. Guido said his did 3600. He also raised his rifle from 1300 damage to something ungodly. I can't remember the exact amount.

We went back to the high level raids, and I've never seen anything like it. You can throw the sickle like a boomerang. Guido leaps down into a pit with about 20 high level enemies and throws his sickle and just wipes half of them out with his first throw. His next throw gets the rest.

To skip to the end, he two shot the final boss with his rifle.

He told me what he had done. He had to log off, and I spent the next how ever long replicating his build. Finally I stood there with my god-sickle feeling pretty good. I right-clicked to throw it--and annihilated half of our very expensive crafting tables

 

[Frindis]

This just in: https://www.darkanddarker.com/ is free to play, but not on Steam anymore. I played it when it had a free weekend on Steam and thought it was a decent extraction game. It's not perfect by all means, the combat and traveling can be quite frustrating at times, but overall it is kind of kewl, to use a popular Cartman phrase.

 

[ZedClampet]

I get these notifications a lot:

I like walking through the cooking fire. En fuego!

 

[Colif]

I understand wanting to stay warm but most people have some self preservation. Maybe move bed a little away from the fire.

 

[ZedClampet]

I just spent 2 hours preparing food in Nightingale. Should last us awhile. Basically, I made 2 types of food. Food that you eat whenever, and food that you eat when it's time to get serious.

It takes a really long time to make some of this food. You have to grind spices, extract oils, create marinades, season the meat, make broth, fix mixed vegetables--then put all that together to make stew. But first I had to go hunting for meat and mining for salt and farming for vegetables, wheat and spices. And in some cases fishing for the right species of bass.

 

[ZedClampet]

The good thing about playing with randoms in Nightingale is that they sometimes give you gifts. Someone gave me the best umbrella in the game yesterday, fully upgraded. (umbrellas shield you from heat and hail and you use them as wingsuits)

 

[Johnway]

Days of Ruin broke the concept by being too grim all the time. Advance Wars should primarily be about kids in garish clothes commanding armies and yelling dorky insults at each other. Instead AWDoR is a post-apocalyptic disaster in subdued pastel hues. Also they made the cool CO powers (what Wargroove calls “Grooves”) boring.

yeah days of ruin is a mixed bag. had potential, but it lost much of what made AW series charming. namely grungy graphics, uninspired characters and meh campaign. Still, i did beat the game (i really should play Dual strike one day) but i don't want to play the game again again.

 

[ZedClampet]

NEWFLASH: You don't have to do everything upper management tells you to do.

I've been reading articles about Bioware as they prepare to reveal their new Dragon Age game, and the truth is that Bioware needs to learn to work in a corporate structure where executives occasionally show up with marketing reports and make new demands. That's the world of big corporations, and if Bioware can't handle that and still make good games, they are not long for this world.

If the head of Marketing comes running in and tells you that your cRPG needs to be a live service game, you give him a thumbs up and tell him you're on it. Then you assign half-a-dozen people to making a multiplayer component and the rest of you go back to what you were doing before the marketing idiot showed up.

When you finish making an awesome single-player game, you arrive at your next meeting with execs and say, "We'd already been working on the game for over two years when you told us we needed live service. We started on it immediately, but it's not going to be ready at launch. We could delay the game another year or two while the live service team catches up, or we could make a lot of money right now and add live service at a later date."

You have to learn how to manipulate the people in charge when they are obviously clueless.

 

[ZedClampet]

A Rare Victory for Zed!​

...the necessary stats to use higher level equipment. Sucked when you take off wrong part and everything else falls off.

This morning, I was solo raiding a dungeon on Extreme difficulty because I needed something an enemy dropped while on Extreme, and if anyone else was with me, they'd probably get it before I could.

The people who drop the item are these huge guys with sledgehammers who hang out with the boss. There's no way I could handle it all by myself, so I was shooting and backing into a stairwell. I got 3 of these guys (too many) down the stairs and into a hallway and just kept firing, planning to stay as mobile as possible. Just then, a suicide bomber leapt through them and exploded right on top of me.

I was still alive, but my backpack broke, which made me extremely encumbered. I could barely move, which is what I was reminded of when you said you took the wrong thing off and everything else fell off.

I was a dead man, but I kept firing at the head of the guy in front. I killed him right as he got to me, but the other two were already swinging their hammers at my head. I looked down and saw the item I needed and tried to pick it up as they bludgeoned me to death.

 

[Colif]

de ja vu

 

[Frindis]

Just under two hours for the party to start

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZzia5NrMuU

 

[Frindis]

It is on Steam again and free to play

Dark and Darker on Steam

An unforgiving hardcore fantasy FPS dungeon PvPvE adventure. Band together with your friends and use your courage, wits, and cunning to uncover mythical treasures, defeat gruesome monsters, while staying one step ahead of the other devious treasure-hunters.

store.steampowered.com

 

[Frindis]

Civ 7 gameplay reveal coming this August. That should pique someone's interest, @Brian Boru

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pygcgE3a_uY&t=37s

 

[Frindis]

I just noticed the weirdest thing so far from Summer Game Fest: Dolph Lundgren, Chris Hemsworth, and Ken Jeong ++ doing a cameo promoting some mobile game. It was pretty well made too. Same video they showed:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMH_SGJciQY

 

[ZedClampet]

de ja vu

I left a note in the moderator notation thing that pops up saying that I was deleting it and moving it over here so as not to potentially derail that thread

 

[Zloth]

Someone gave me the best umbrella in the game yesterday, fully upgraded. (umbrellas shield you from heat and hail and you use them as wingsuits)

Yondu, is that you?

View: https://youtu.be/os9J0QXo2AE?si=-amSIxwwh-7i899T

 

[Pifanjr]

My kid beat her first Pokémon gym today, pretty much entirely by herself. I haven't helped her outside of showing her how the game works and she can't even read yet, so I'm proud that she's managed she's gotten this far.

I decided to start a new game of Pokémon Infinite Fusion myself, using some variant of Nuzlocke rules. I still can't use any Pokémon that have fainted, but instead of only being able to catch the first Pokémon encountered in each area, I decided I can catch two and then must fuse them, unless one of them is already fused in which case I can't use the other one.

Furthermore, I have given myself unlimited Rare Candy, which immediately levels up a Pokémon, so I don't have to grind. However, I can't level up my Pokémon to be a higher level than the highest level Pokémon of the next gym. This is common with Pokémon streamers, as they don't want to stream themselves just grinding for hours. I also gave myself unlimited repels, which prevent wild Pokémon encounters, so I can run through grass and caves without having to run from wild Pokémon every 5 steps. This basically turns the game into a series of "boss" battles, as pretty much every other trainer or wild Pokémon can be avoided or is trivial to defeat.

I also found an option to instantly heal all my Pokémon without having to run back to the Pokécenter, which saves a lot of running back and forth.

So far I've been enjoying the game a lot more. Now when I only have 10 minutes to play I can make a significant amount of progress instead of spending most of it grinding and/or running back and forth from the Pokécenter.

Turns out it's pretty hard to avoid random trainers if you're not careful and they aren't always that trivial. I lost three Pokémon to two trainers. Luckily I had some backups, but I shouldn't do that too often.

 

[Hveðrungr]

You have to learn how to manipulate the people in charge when they are obviously clueless.

I think part of the problem with the publisher-studio relationship is that there are two layers of clueless people “in charge”, those at the publisher and those at the studio itself. Most managers in all industries are useless parasites who don't merely contribute nothing but often actively make the product worse. So the more layers of managers you have, the worse the product will get.

Civ 7 gameplay reveal coming this August.

Anyone wanting to scratch their 4X itch should try Millennia. Great little game with some interesting ideas.

Just under two hours for the party to start

Is it just me or was that pretty underwhelming? I hope the Future, Xbox, and PCG showcases are better.

 

[BeardyHat]

Anyone wanting to scratch their 4X itch should try Millennia. Great little game with some interesting ideas.

That looks pretty interesting. The reviews are encouraging that it's "Not Civ"; I like Civ well enough, but it generally feels pretty proscriptive and micro heavy, with most games I've played feeling pretty similar.

That said, if I'm going to play a 4x, I really should play Old World which I already own and haven't played at all.

 

[BeardyHat]

Is it just me or was that pretty underwhelming? I hope the Future, Xbox, and PCG showcases are better.

I didn't bother watching it or anything listed in the group of trailers, aside from one game: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. KC: D is easily one of my favorite games of the past 15+ years and one I upgraded my computer for after I received the game for free on Epic in 2019; I'm very eager to continue Henry's story, as well as explore more of Bohemia and spend more time with Lord Capon.

I should start a new playthrough of the original, but I feel like there's still so much I haven't done.