March 2024 General Game Discussion Thread

[Kaamos_Llama]

Isn't this just getting a publisher? They would have made a ton more money self-publishing Control and Alan Wake 2 to Steam, but apparently they don't have enough money to pay for their own development.

Yea maybe I'm just ignorant. I assumed that independent devs usually fund their own games and get publishers to handle marketing or publish themselves. Of course the big guys buy up studios and fund and publish them under their brand, and indies crowdfund or otherwise self fund somehow.

Cant off the top of my head think of many other medium-large developers who arent owned by a big publisher. Remedy and Larian are the obvious ones. I think a lot got bought by Embracer. (Thats a hell of a list)

 

[Brian Boru]

I assumed that independent devs usually fund their own games and get publishers to handle marketing or publish themselves

Unlikely for the AA level.

"While Alan Wake is nowadays a cult classic, its sales were modest enough that Remedy spent years searching for funding for its sequel. The project finally entered active production in August 2019, after the studio struck a publishing agreement with Epic Games"

Alan Wake 2 Is Remedy’s Fastest-Selling Game, Hasn’t Recouped Development Costs

Remedy finally breaks silence on Alan Wake 2 sales, revealing an impressive figure that still wasn't enough to recoup the game's development costs.

gamerant.com

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Yea that sounds reasonable. Was thinking about Larian, now Obsidian comes to mind with them crowdfunding Pillars. Like I say not so sure there are even many AA level devs left around anymore.

Alan Wake was really hyped at the time and was received pretty poorly at release. I remember it got a spot on Radio One Newsbeat back then, no idea about now but back then they never ever talked about video games. Its a decent game but not what I would call a classic, was definitely unique though. Not surprising big publishers werent that excited about taking it on until they had some success with Control.

They had enough spare cash laying around to buy back the Control IP for 17 million, so cant be all that bad for them generally.

 

[Zed Clampet]

@Kaamos_Llama Sorry, I just repeated what you said about Xbox. I thought I'd read your comment, but apparently I just read the one above it.

****

Deleted a post I had put in the article thread when I thought I was in this thread. I need to stop drinking so much.

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Played some Northgard. It was actually the first colony sim I ever owned, and I played it for a few hours after buying it, but found it really difficult because it didn't explain a whole lot and I was new to the genre. Now it seems a little too easy.

****

Speaking of too easy, in 24 hours I went from miserable at Enshrouded's combat to an unstoppable force. The reason being that I had just been teaming up with Guido and hadn't spent a moment of thought on the combat. Now that I'm playing by myself, I went out yesterday and went to an enemy encampment and got killed probably a dozen times (I had put a respawn point outside the encampment, but eventually gave up). But I was playing as though Guido was with me, just running around swinging my weapon.

This morning I thought, "I really need to figure this out" and went back and paid attention to the enemies' patterns and didn't die once. Was a great feeling.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Unlikely for the AA level.

"While Alan Wake is nowadays a cult classic, its sales were modest enough that Remedy spent years searching for funding for its sequel. The project finally entered active production in August 2019, after the studio struck a publishing agreement with Epic Games"

Alan Wake 2 Is Remedy’s Fastest-Selling Game, Hasn’t Recouped Development Costs

Remedy finally breaks silence on Alan Wake 2 sales, revealing an impressive figure that still wasn't enough to recoup the game's development costs.

gamerant.com

Yea that sounds reasonable. Was thinking about Larian, now Obsidian comes to mind with them crowdfunding Pillars. Like I say not so sure there are even many AA level devs left around anymore.

Alan Wake was really hyped at the time and was received pretty poorly at release. I remember it got a spot on Radio One Newsbeat back then, no idea about now but back then they never ever talked about video games. Its a decent game but not what I would call a classic, was definitely unique though. Not surprising big publishers werent that excited about taking it on until they had some success with Control.

They had enough spare cash laying around to buy back the Control IP for 17 million, so cant be all that bad for them generally.

Remedy is apparently trying to self-publish Vanguard/Kestral, but they aren't helping themselves with the development because they had worked on it for two years, and then announced in November of last year that they were starting over on it. They were planning for it to be a more simple, free-to-play game, but it sounds now like they are going to Remedy-it and make it a premium game. Tencent has agreed to localize it for Asian markets.

Will be interesting to see if they pull this off...eventually...and if they remain, against all reason, an Epic exclusive. Hopefully Tencent will slap some sense into them. If they launch on Steam, with a good game and just a little bit of luck they'll never need a publisher again.

My favorite Remedy game is Quantum Break. Most people didn't like it, possibly because you had to watch a television series during your playthrough, but I thought the TV stuff was very well done and enjoyed that part of the game too.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Just accepted another random Steam friend request. I'm a glutton for pain. This is the third one this week. I need to stop participating in all community related things.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Enshrouded has the best building of any survival game I know of. After spending ages gathering materials, actually building the house only took about 5 minutes. It has some nice features like allowing clipping (and no flashing is created). The only negative is the resource collection just depending on what materials you want to use. You can actually gather stuff pretty quickly if you just want basic wood and stone.

The house isn't 100 percent done, as I actually ran out of materials before I could add the front facade and things like doors. Plus I haven't unlocked actual rails yet for the deck over the blacksmith area on the right.

This is on my new character that I'm starting a new world with so that I don't mess up my and Guido's game.

Your characters can move from one game save to another easily, so I took him first to our main game and picked up all the supplies for the house and a weapon and shield.

 

[Zloth]

I started the assault on a Chosen base yesterday in XCOM 2 and I really dislike how small and contained each room is. There is much less space for careful positioning and very limited opportunities to get a height advantage. I had to quit before I could finish, but I'm hoping it isn't much larger than what I've seen so far (also because I'm starting to run out of consumables).

I'm not looking forward to doing this two more times for the other Chosen as well. I'm hoping they will have a different sort of base, but I have my doubts.

Going by some old memories, but I'm pretty sure they are all different. The ending room has the same mechanic, but the layout is different. One of mine (that was not the assassin's base) looked like this:

Spoiler: Base final room screenshot

I'm seeing plenty of altitude opportunities in that room!

 

[Zed Clampet]

Going by some old memories, but I'm pretty sure they are all different. The ending room has the same mechanic, but the layout is different. One of mine (that was not the assassin's base) looked like this:

Spoiler: Base final room screenshot

I'm seeing plenty of altitude opportunities in that room!

That gives me nightmares. Not because it was so hard. I didn't even notice whether it was hard or not. When I got there, 3 days after launch, the final mission was thoroughly bugged out. I had terrible graphical and screen movement glitches to the point I thought it was game-breaking and that I wouldn't be able to finish. Somehow I managed it, and I've never been happier than I was that it was over.

Was really the only problem with bugs I had the whole game. I figured it was probably the last thing they did, and it was just rushed.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Remedy is apparently trying to self-publish Vanguard/Kestral, but they aren't helping themselves with the development because they had worked on it for two years, and then announced in November of last year that they were starting over on it. They were planning for it to be a more simple, free-to-play game, but it sounds now like they are going to Remedy-it and make it a premium game. Tencent has agreed to localize it for Asian markets.

Will be interesting to see if they pull this off...eventually...and if they remain, against all reason, an Epic exclusive. Hopefully Tencent will slap some sense into them. If they launch on Steam, with a good game and just a little bit of luck they'll never need a publisher again.

My favorite Remedy game is Quantum Break. Most people didn't like it, possibly because you had to watch a television series during your playthrough, but I thought the TV stuff was very well done and enjoyed that part of the game too.

Been meaning to play Quantum Break for years, but theres so much around I dont know if Ill get to it. The powers look like a lot of fun to use from what Ive seen.

Seems to me they want to make the games they want to make and make enough money to cover themselves doing it. Thats an approach I respect.

 

[Pifanjr]

Random thought of the day: fetch quests are only bad if you don't enjoy playing the game.

 

[neogunhero]

Random thought of the day: fetch quests are only bad if you don't enjoy playing the game.

I agree. My first 15 hours of AC Valhalla were fun even though it was full of fetch quests and follow quests. Once my enjoyment start to wane, I began dreading fetch quests and instead would just go explore and do things on my own time. I’m probably going to drop it because it’s so overwhelming large and I’m just not enjoying it anymore.

 

[BeardyHat]

I've abandoned two games this week:

Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology for one, which I'm not sure it super counts here, since it's on 3DS, buuutt...

I'm not really a JRPG fan. I've played several and enjoyed them, but I would never say I really like them. This one was cool though, fun story, good VO (surprisingly good VO) and mostly pretty fun gameplay and I played 5 hours of it, but realized this wasn't going to be a thing I really made it all the way through when I thought, "the next time I play, I hope it's all story and no combat."

The combat seems interesting at first, but ultimately becomes very tedious and tiresome, especially because when there is combat, there's a lot of it. It doesn't do the random fights thing like most JRPGs (which I loathe and will not play), but it does have this, initially, interesting combat system where it takes place on a grid and you can move enemies around and stack them up for a big bonus to damage. Unfortunately, this just becomes annoying when every fight becomes the same thing. Instead of being able to mindlessly mash A through each fight without looking, you actually do need to think about it a little bit, which ends up being annoying overall, because there's just not that much thought or tactical consideration. You end up using the exact same skills over and over again for each fight and some enemies just end up making fights take longer because they're immoveable, so it gets even more tedious and annoying. Unfortunate, because I was enjoying the story.

Now, I only lasted about an hour in Star Wars: Republic Commando. I'm not a big Star Wars person, I like it well enough, but haven't watched anything since the prequels 20 years ago, but I'm wanting to get into the Wargame Star Wars: Legion. So I fired this one up and what initially seemed cool, rapidly turned into frustration and anger when I realized it was an "Endlessly Spawning Enemies Until you Reach the Checkpoint" style FPS. Couple this with the fact that your AI partners, which are essential to your progress, are dumb as rocks and will let enemies down them and you have a game where you're constantly babysitting the AI, trying to give it orders to heal itself, kill this, hide here, all while also trying to kill enemies so you can push forward just to make them stop constantly spawning for a damn second, so you can have a breather to babysit the AI again.

It's dumb and frustrating, lazy design and I don't understand how this game was lauded back in its day.

At any rate, the worst part now is that I need to figure out what I would like to play next.

 

[Pifanjr]

Going by some old memories, but I'm pretty sure they are all different. The ending room has the same mechanic, but the layout is different. One of mine (that was not the assassin's base) looked like this:

Spoiler: Base final room screenshot

I'm seeing plenty of altitude opportunities in that room!

Turns out I was right at the entrance of that room last time I quit playing and it was a lot bigger than the previous rooms. I could properly position my units and it all went very well (except for a few cuts and bruises and maybe some broken bones and/or minds).

I also did the mission you get from decoding the Codex brain, which honestly was worse and I would have lost at least one soldier if it had taken me one more turn to finish. So after that I had 10 wounded soldiers, but the Avatar project was set back a whole bunch, so I figured I had some time to let my soldiers heal. But before anyone had time to heal I got a warning I have to stop a new Dark Event from triggering, so now I have to send out some of my least experienced soldiers and hope they make it through.

 

[BeardyHat]

But before anyone had time to heal I got a warning I have to stop a new Dark Event from triggering, so now I have to send out some of my least experienced soldiers and hope they make it through.

That's XCOM, bayybee!

 

[Johnway]

Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology for one, which I'm not sure it super counts here, since it's on 3DS, buuutt...

I'm not really a JRPG fan. I've played several and enjoyed them, but I would never say I really like them. This one was cool though, fun story, good VO (surprisingly good VO) and mostly pretty fun gameplay and I played 5 hours of it, but realized this wasn't going to be a thing I really made it all the way through when I thought, "the next time I play, I hope it's all story and no combat."

The combat seems interesting at first, but ultimately becomes very tedious and tiresome, especially because when there is combat, there's a lot of it. It doesn't do the random fights thing like most JRPGs (which I loathe and will not play), but it does have this, initially, interesting combat system where it takes place on a grid and you can move enemies around and stack them up for a big bonus to damage. Unfortunately, this just becomes annoying when every fight becomes the same thing. Instead of being able to mindlessly mash A through each fight without looking, you actually do need to think about it a little bit, which ends up being annoying overall, because there's just not that much thought or tactical consideration. You end up using the exact same skills over and over again for each fight and some enemies just end up making fights take longer because they're immoveable, so it gets even more tedious and annoying. Unfortunate, because I was enjoying the story.

i had it on the DS. i paid a pretty penny to get it imported from the US. That sound track is pretty good and yeah similar opinions about the combat. interesting and clever, but far to repetitive and its rinse and repeat strategy. That said, the separate time lines (with different stories, enemies and locations) and time travel stuff was good even if it made decisions absolutely trivial, Get a bad ending, shrug and pick the correct option to progress.

i didn't have much difficulty beating the game either and visually it looks like snes game and didn't benefit from the DS power.


Other game wise, still playing assassins creed odyssey. 120 hours on the clock and we've almost mapped the entire of greece! That said, there is some jank that makes me roll my eyes or just laugh.

The eye roll - one of the cult of kosmos (one of the HVT you have to assassinate) for some reason was hiding in a cave and some bandits just murdered him and i just walked in and confirmed the kill. Didn't even know who he was.

The funny situation - had a bounty on my head and he was +2 levels above me. So very dangerous. Ran into a massive crowd of civilians and unsurprisingly, the bounty hunter accidentally hit the crowd of civilians and aggroed them. So whilst the bounty hunter was trying to kill me, he was slowly being beaten to death by the civilians and in the end he succumbed under the fist blows. All that was left for me to do was loot the dead guy and bask in my rank increase.

 

[Zed Clampet]

@Pifanjr @Zloth disregard my statement above about that mission being bugged. I thought that picture was of the final area of the game. That's where I bugged out.

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Does anyone know how they make destructible environments in games?

Had a dev ask me to do something, and I spent 2 hours stacking assets around a small area and checking off my FPS at specific milestones. For some reason he told me not to talk about it, so I can't say which game, but I realized as I was doing it how nuts all his models are. The environment is fully destructible, and he's made every model out of a bunch of smaller models joined together. For instance, with a wooden chair, each leg has 3 segments. Shoot the chair leg and it will break at the nearest segment to where you shot.

The chair was fairly reasonable, but there are other models that have a lot of models stitched together...a lot. And the FPS just tanks.

I always assumed that if you blew up a brick wall, that before you blew it up it was just one model, and after you blew it up, the game replaced it with a model of rubble with a few individual bricks scattered around. But in this game, the wall starts off made of a hundred bricks, and each brick is two models, a 2/3 brick and a 1/3 brick fused together. And if you break a wall, you can pick up the individual bricks (which is kind of cool).

I'm not trying to give him any advice. I have no idea how to do this, but this doesn't feel right to me. It's not my game and I refuse to mess it up, so I'm keeping my mouth shut. I was just curious if anyone knew how this was usually done. I thought destructible environments were more smoke and mirror than this.

 

[BeardyHat]

i had it on the DS. i paid a pretty penny to get it imported from the US. That sound track is pretty good and yeah similar opinions about the combat. interesting and clever, but far to repetitive and its rinse and repeat strategy. That said, the separate time lines (with different stories, enemies and locations) and time travel stuff was good even if it made decisions absolutely trivial, Get a bad ending, shrug and pick the correct option to progress.

i didn't have much difficulty beating the game either and visually it looks like snes game and didn't benefit from the DS power.

I think that's fair criticism about the time lines; I thought it was kind of neat and a very clever way for the developers to reuse limited assets, rather than build numerous subpar ones for new areas. With all the time travel stuff and the fact that you can just do things over, I do wonder if this one would have just been better as a visual novel.

The soundtrack is great, as you pointed out; I really think most of the game is really great and I like it a lot, but faced with all that tedious combat, I think it's best for me to just bow out. I'll probably try watching the story on Youtube and leaving it a that, because if I need to slog through that combat for another 35-40 hours, I'm probably going to end-up hating the game.

 

[Johnway]

I think that's fair criticism about the time lines; I thought it was kind of neat and a very clever way for the developers to reuse limited assets, rather than build numerous subpar ones for new areas. With all the time travel stuff and the fact that you can just do things over, I do wonder if this one would have just been better as a visual novel.

Technically it was 2 storylines rolled into one as you play different stories, meet different people and locales whilst at the same time try to uncover the person pulling the strings between both timelines. Eventually the timelines blend together into one for the final showdown. Can't say the story would be riveting to watch, but its ok.

i think JRPGS can be pretty tedious affairs sometimes especially grindy sometimes. Etrian odyessy series is absolutely notorious for this as progress is measured in steps as you move against ever increasingly harder monsters and mapping areas out. To add to the difficulty there are high threat monsters intentionally situated that you have to dance around or expect to be crushed mercilessly and can't be beaten until much much later. i sometimes play them to help fall asleep sometimes.

Speaking of JRPGS, i'm playing shin megami Tensei IV and yeah, can get grindy at times. Unlike persona, getting demons is about convincing them or fusing them. No freebies and there is no straight path to do it. Sometimes you give them everything they want and screw you over, other times you reject them completely and they join you, sometimes you can talk them into joining or during a fight they beg for mercy. it makes getting the better ones tough. it does have some QoL improvements compared to say strangers journey (have it on the DS and i never beaten it). But the early game is difficult and seriously off putting as progress is measured in inches in early game.

The only way i found it easier was using the DLC content. So yeah, you could say that it was p2w. The DLC gear is far superior to whatever is in the shops or earned so far (and thats 24+ hours into the game) and the only downside is that i look like horrible like some camp party raver.

 

[Pifanjr]

@Pifanjr @Zloth disregard my statement above about that mission being bugged. I thought that picture was of the final area of the game. That's where I bugged out.

****

Does anyone know how they make destructible environments in games?

Had a dev ask me to do something, and I spent 2 hours stacking assets around a small area and checking off my FPS at specific milestones. For some reason he told me not to talk about it, so I can't say which game, but I realized as I was doing it how nuts all his models are. The environment is fully destructible, and he's made every model out of a bunch of smaller models joined together. For instance, with a wooden chair, each leg has 3 segments. Shoot the chair leg and it will break at the nearest segment to where you shot.

The chair was fairly reasonable, but there are other models that have a lot of models stitched together...a lot. And the FPS just tanks.

I always assumed that if you blew up a brick wall, that before you blew it up it was just one model, and after you blew it up, the game replaced it with a model of rubble with a few individual bricks scattered around. But in this game, the wall starts off made of a hundred bricks, and each brick is two models, a 2/3 brick and a 1/3 brick fused together. And if you break a wall, you can pick up the individual bricks (which is kind of cool).

I'm not trying to give him any advice. I have no idea how to do this, but this doesn't feel right to me. It's not my game and I refuse to mess it up, so I'm keeping my mouth shut. I was just curious if anyone knew how this was usually done. I thought destructible environments were more smoke and mirror than this.

As far as I know your intuition is correct. You would use a single model until your object needs to be destroyed, at which point you replace it with multiple pieces that get send flying. There's software that can dynamically create these pieces as well, so you don't have to do that in advance.

 

[Zed Clampet]

As far as I know your intuition is correct. You would use a single model until your object needs to be destroyed, at which point you replace it with multiple pieces that get send flying. There's software that can dynamically create these pieces as well, so you don't have to do that in advance.

For all I know, he knows this, but has something in mind that requires a more granular approach. I guess we'll see how it all works out.

****

V Rising goes to 1.0 on May 8. Their Early Access has been a true pleasure. They stated from the beginning that they would only update the game once a year, and those updates have been massive and darn near flawless. I've finished the game twice and can't wait to start over and finish it again. In fact, I'm so pumped up about it, I may just play it between now and May 8.

 

[Brian Boru]

fetch quests are only bad if you don't enjoy playing the game

Of course. The gameplay loop works for you, or it doesn't. There's only so much unappealing gameplay can be compensated for by non-essentials like story, graphics, soundtrack. It seems to me that many don't like fetching because it delays them 'finishing' the game, in the box-ticking sense of 'getting thru' it.

I’m probably going to drop it because it’s so overwhelming large and I’m just not enjoying it anymore

Haven't played AC Valhalla, but similar with Far Cry. 6 is good fun but huge, so on my first replay I made 4 games out of it—initial clear-out plus the 3 big regions. Took maybe a week break between each. Similar with current replay of 5—it's better than 6 so gameplay doesn't lag, but story missions are generally much less enjoyable than 'in the wild' wandering. I pick an objective for each session—collect these, visit those, capture this—and leave it at that.

Similar with Civ too. Just in general, binging on one game leads to burnout after a week or so, whereas breaking it up a bit can result in months of enjoyment.

I don't understand how this game was lauded back in its day

Well Star Wars is a cult thing, isn't it? So they can throw out anything and it'll get lapped up.

I thought destructible environments were more smoke and mirror than this

I thought so too, since so much of game presentation is exactly that—eg the excellent job done making water look fairly real, or reducing detail in more distant renderings. You guy's approach has to place a major load on the playing PC.

I recall reading in 90s how explosions and destroyed military vehicles were done, and it was all as you surmise—replace the whole single item with a bunch of flying bits. I'm sure it's advanced a lot since then tho, but optimization is still a thing. UE5 has a new destructible system, but I haven't read up on it.

 

[Zloth]

Random thought of the day: fetch quests are only bad if you don't enjoy playing the game.

Typically, yes, especially in recent years. I've seen some stinkers in some descent games, though. (Greedfall, I'm looking at you.) Quests where you've got to fetch things from areas you've been in too many times already jump to mind.

I'm not really a JRPG fan....
I'm not a big Star Wars person...

I don't think I've played a JRPG yet that didn't have somebody say "I've got a bad feeling about this" or something close. Western games have it a lot, too, but JRPGs never fail.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Typically, yes, especially in recent years. I've seen some stinkers in some descent games, though. (Greedfall, I'm looking at you.) Quests where you've got to fetch things from areas you've been in too many times already jump to mind.


I don't think I've played a JRPG yet that didn't have somebody say "I've got a bad feeling about this" or something close. Western games have it a lot, too, but JRPGs never fail.

Have you tried the Epic Battle series? I think it satirizes some parts of JRPGs like the dialogue, but they are supposedly pretty good JRPGs

 

[Zed Clampet]

Ugh. When I uploaded my mods for Troy, I put a statement in saying that after a certain date that I would not support the mods anymore. We are way past that date, and people are still bugging me. The mods still work.