May 2024 General Game Discussions

[Johnway]

You mean DLC won't be available after X date? I'll bet all my debt that it will be in some GotY or Ultimate version a year or two later.

I'm not so sure. its the godzilla update and who knows if it will return as paid DLC after the deadline. As far as i can tell its gone after november.


Speaking of gone, Arcade tycoon has a game breaking bug that i can't progress further with it. The floors for some reason disappear so you can't interact with them. That includes building/deploying machines in those areas. In the Tut level half of the floor couldn't be used. then in my second mission the ENTIRE floor was missing. So i couldn't do anything besides watch. I'm not sure if the devs are going to fix it, but it looks like my play of the game has come to a premature end. I'm not going to waste my time on a game that isn't working properly...

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

I just finished the main campaign of Control for the second time, I'll move onto the DLC's for the first time now. I rate the game higher than before after the second play which is pretty rare for me, I still want to play more. Its a better game than Alan Wake 2 for me, story parts included. Both are great though.

Should really get back into Elden Ring in preperation for the DLC release in a few weeks, but I'm feeling like I want to play Cyberpunk again maybe first. Too many amazing games, not enough time.

 

[ZedClampet]

Should really get back into Elden Ring in preperation for the DLC release in a few weeks, but I'm feeling like I want to play Cyberpunk again maybe first. Too many amazing games, not enough time.

Don't talk about Elden Ring. You'll make me install it again. Then an hour later I'll uninstall it

****
For a few years we didn't have any decent survival games releasing. Now there's one or two or more every month. Even I'm getting tired of it.

 

[Brian Boru]

Now there's one or two or more every month. Even I'm getting tired of it.

That's part of the genre's meta-game

 

[ZedClampet]

This game releasing in early June:

Hotel Business Simulator on Steam

Welcome, Hospitality Maestros! 🌟 Dive into "Hotel Business Simulator where you craft the ultimate empire. Upgrade rooms, cater to guests' whims, set rates wisely, and maintain spotless standards. Your journey to mogul status begins now. Ready to build the hotel of your dreams? Game on!

store.steampowered.com

Used AI to make all of its art assets. They aren't great, yet better than I expected all at the same time.

 

[Zloth]

I was cruising along in ELEX 2, when suddenly the power blinked - right as I was saving my game. When I loaded the latest save, the game started right at the very start of the game. Luckily, the game also has a robust save system, so I only lost a couple of minutes. There was a big storm just south of us, though, and a lot of wind (80mph, as it turned out), so I just read a book for the rest of the night.

The next day, my machine seemed fine until I started playing the game. I got to the main menu (including watching the unskippable company logo videos), but as soon as I started loading my not-corrupted save, it started "blinking." The monitor would turn off for about 3 seconds, then back on for 3 seconds, then off for 3 more seconds, and so on. The game itself played fine whether the monitor was displaying or not.

Alt-F4 and I'm back at my desktop. Everything is fine again. I verified files and rebooted - no help. But I've seen this happen before, so I did what I did before: nothing. I read some forums for about an hour, then tried again. Sure enough, tried to play the game again and it worked just fine. It fixed itself!

Now, what the frak does running a PC for an hour do to fix this that leaving it shut down (with the power cable pulled out - so REALLY shut down) for a dozen hours doesn't do!?

 

[Pifanjr]

Now, what the frak does running a PC for an hour do to fix this that leaving it shut down (with the power cable pulled out - so REALLY shut down) for a dozen hours doesn't do!?

Maybe it just gave your PC time to identify bad sectors on your SSD or in your RAM.

 

[Zloth]

Maybe it just gave your PC time to identify bad sectors on your SSD or in your RAM.

Oh! RAM would explain why everything was hunky-doory until the game got loaded, too.

 

[Brian Boru]

ELEX 2 … unskippable company logo videos

Do this or that

what the frak does running a PC for an hour do to fix this that leaving it shut down (with the power cable pulled out - so REALLY shut down) for a dozen hours doesn't do!?

It shows you love it, and your earlier vicious action was just a fit of pique!

 

[ZedClampet]

Well, we (but mostly just Guido) did it. Personally, I think the numbers indicate there's a bit of a problem here. The achievement before that one was not nearly so bleak, at 9.8 percent.

Congrats to Guido, I guess, First try. I just got to watch most of it. Don't really feel like I finished the game, tbh.

Now he wants to start over on full Brutal difficulty. We were halfway between Normal and Brutal. I don't think I can do it.

 

[Brian Boru]

Falcon of Gameranx has a fiery19m takedown of clueless execs ruining AAA gaming via GaaS pursuit of profit.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPrtOO7veBE

 

[Hveðrungr]

Falcon of Gameranx has a fiery19m takedown of clueless execs ruining AAA gaming via GaaS pursuit of profit.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPrtOO7veBE

He could have mentioned Hyenas by Creative Assembly, too. That didn't even make it to full release, and still ruined the Total War series.

 

[Colif]

Maybe it just gave your PC time to identify bad sectors on your SSD or in your RAM.

Possibly it was marking ssd sectors but even if it could identify bad sectors in ram, windows has no way to avoid them. Only way to stop windows trying to use bad ram sticks (well, apart from the obvious: take them out) is to put the bad stick as far away from slot 0** as possible

Try running memtest86 on each of your ram sticks, one stick at a time, up to 4 passes. Only error count you want is 0, any higher could be cause of the errors. Remove/replace ram sticks with errors. Memtest is created as a bootable USB so that you don’t need windows to run it

**most motherboards have a preferred 1st slot to put a single stick in, it is probably not labelled slot 0 but in essence it is. True, with 2 sticks in Dual channel memory mode, its not that simple. Replacing bad ram is always the preferred choice.

 

[ZedClampet]

He could have mentioned Hyenas by Creative Assembly, too. That didn't even make it to full release, and still ruined the Total War series.

Creative Assembly is now falling all over itself to win back its Total War players and is working on 3 new Total War games, so maybe they've righted the ship. Will be interested in seeing what they do with Star Wars.

 

[ZedClampet]

@mjs warlord

Here's a little known factory game you may not have heard of:

Save 20% on Revive & Prosper on Steam

Voxel automation game where you build factories and optimize production using belts, trains, teleports, and catapults. Play with or without enemies, control a limited crew of characters, gather resources, balance the environment, and expand into space. The key to efficiency is smart water control.

store.steampowered.com

I haven't tried it yet. Briefly talked to the dev and looked at the progress they've made in the last year, and it seems fairly impressive on the surface.

 

[Hveðrungr]

Creative Assembly is now falling all over itself to win back its Total War players and is working on 3 new Total War games, so maybe they've righted the ship.

I certainly hope so: I've been playing Total War since Medieval I—I first played Total War: Warhammer at a PC Gamer convention in London, funnily enough—so I desperately don't want them to go the way of Arkane Austin. But that still doesn't fully undo the damage they did to their brand over the preceding year, though, especially the unacceptable state of the Shadows of Change release and the outrageous price of Pharaoh.

Will be interested in seeing what they do with Star Wars.

I'm yet to be convinced that they're actually making a Star Wars game!

EDIT: New leak shared on the Total War subreddit! 😱

https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/1d20fsl/ca_really_need_to_do_something_about_all_these

View: https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/1d20fsl/ca_really_need_to_do_something_about_all_these/

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Out of all the TW gamesI only ever really played Warhammer 1 and 2 a lot. Total War Star Wars would have me very interested though. Hope the rumour is true.

 

[ZedClampet]

I certainly hope so: I've been playing Total War since Medieval I—I first played Total War: Warhammer at a PC Gamer convention in London, funnily enough—so I desperately don't want them to go the way of Arkane Austin. But that still doesn't fully undo the damage they did to their brand over the preceding year, though, especially the unacceptable state of the Shadows of Change release and the outrageous price of Pharaoh.


I'm yet to be convinced that they're actually making a Star Wars game!

EDIT: New leak shared on the Total War subreddit! 😱

https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/1d20fsl/ca_really_need_to_do_something_about_all_these

View: https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/1d20fsl/ca_really_need_to_do_something_about_all_these/

I started with Medieval 1 as well.

Apparently the source of the rumor on Star Wars is fairly reliable, but who knows...

 

[Hveðrungr]

Apparently the source of the rumor on Star Wars is fairly reliable, but who knows...

Isn't our only word on the TW Star Wars rumour's source quality the original DualShockers piece? A piece that dedicated just a couple of paragraphs of detail-free text to its supposed “scoop” before padding out the rest of the article with generic Total War content? In a publication with half a dozen staff, none of whom are strategy gamers?

 

[neogunhero]

Hope my fellow Americans had a good Memorial Day weekend. It was quite a lazy and relaxing weekend for me.

I played a TON of AoE4 this weekend, almost 20 hours of it. I’m really starting to get better at this game. I only played custom multiplayer matches, 4v4 player vs AI, with the AI typically being a mix of Hard/Intermediate difficulty. The server fills up decently quick and everyone I played with were cool and joined with the same mindset, we were all there to just have fun and not try to be the best at the game.

I mained Delhi Sultanate all weekend. It’s my most played civ so far. They have a focus on economy, with all research items being free but taking a lot longer than other civs to complete. You need to garrison Scholars in those buildings to speed up research. So the first 20-30 mins I’m focused on making a large amount of villagers and scholars, doing as much research as I can and try to progress to Age 4 as fast as I can. If all is going good, I usually don’t make an army until Age 4. This is good because by the time I’m ready, my army has all the research that does things like increase health and damage, and the scholars are researched so they produce army units faster.

By this time I’ll also construct a massive stone wall around my base with just one entrance/exit and place my army right there. Stone walls require siege units to break down and most of the time AI on those difficulty levels don’t do that. If I played against other players, having only one entrance wouldn’t be a good idea.

My strategy of not making an army early game isn’t the best because other players are usually destroying the AI by that time. Other civs are a lot more military focused so it’s really just my civ. I have other ideas for different strategies to try out. I really need to play other civs but as I said in another post I really enjoy and have fun learning one civ fully.

 

[ZedClampet]

Isn't our only word on the TW Star Wars rumour's source quality the original DualShockers piece? A piece that dedicated just a couple of paragraphs of detail-free text to its supposed “scoop” before padding out the rest of the article with generic Total War content? In a publication with half a dozen staff, none of whom are strategy gamers?

I sincerely apologize and don't mean to be rude, but most of your comment there was irrelevant to whether their scoop was accurate. Whether they dedicated just a couple of paragraphs or seemed generic with the rest of the article or don't have a lot of staff or don't play strategy games--none of that is relevant. In fact, it tends to make me believe the rumor is true. Why would they make up a rumor about something they don't have particular interest in? Someone they trusted, probably a current or former employee of Creative Assembly, gave them information. We'll see if it turns out to be true or not. PC Gamer seems to give the rumor some credence. I'm certainly not going to be dismissive about it. This sort of thing happens in journalism every day.

 

[Hveðrungr]

@ZedClampet Well, fair enough, I just strongly disagree. I think that an unreliable source (no expertise, no record, no prominence) telling me that their unnamed third-party source is reliable means I shouldn't treat the end source as reliable either.

As for why they'd “make up”—not what I said btw, I think they are probably just giving it more credence than they should—such a story, the answer seems obvious to me in the number of clicks they've received for it. Content creators do this all the time, over-reporting or even outright making up rumours to increase their clicks.

A credible news organisation would at least have reached out to Creative Assembly and Disney for comment. They'd have gone to some of the staff recently laid off from CA and quietly asked them to corroborate the leak. Even if they hadn't done that by the time of publication (they could easily have asked CA and Disney for comment), they'd follow up their reporting on such a scoop; instead, nothing.

I'm not outright dismissive of the rumour: it could easily be true, and if it is I will be delighted and play the heck out of it! I'm just not outright credulous of it, either.

 

[Frindis]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1326470/Sons_Of_The_Forest/ with a historical low (30% off) on Steam for anyone interested. I have not played it, but it looks like a game I would enjoy for a while. It could get lower on the upcoming Steam Summer sale (June 27-July 11.) so that is something to keep in mind.

 

[BeardyHat]

Well, after chaos Saturday and constant family stuff Sunday and Monday, I'm finally having a bit of a relax day today on our vacation. Slight problem though: My kids have never used Disc based media and there's a PS5 with a disc system in it at our AirBnB. Well, they went ahead and shoved 3 discs into it, trying to figure out how to get it to work. I'll commend them for trying to figure it out on their own and I can't be mad, because they've literally never used something like this before.

https://imgur.com/a/kLLI9lS

A quick trip to Ace Hardware and some a small screwdriver set and it's back as good as new. Thankfully this is not my first rodeo as far as disassembling electronics goes.

Also, Street Fighter 5 is dumb. That's what my kids wanted to play and after getting things working again, I tested it out; well, you need to make a Capcom account, otherwise you literally cannot play the game. You'll get to the "Create Avatar" screen, but then it'll tell you you need "add-on" content to do this and then shunt you back to the intro video and I refuse to make an account on someone else's machine for something I'm never going to actually play again.

Lastly, I hauled this whole eGPU setup out here and realistically, there's no place to actually use it, aside from my bedroom. There's little table space, zero desk space, 6 adults, 4 kids and soon to add two more adults and 2 more kids, so the Steam Deck ends up being the practical thing to use, since I don't need a whole setup to actually use it, go figure.

 

[red_5ive]

Hope my fellow Americans had a good Memorial Day weekend. It was quite a lazy and relaxing weekend for me.

Right back at ya! Ours was relaxing as well. Hung out by the pool yesterday, and usually watch a war movie in the evening (Saving Private Ryan is a favorite), but we decided on Memory with Liam Neeson.

I also took Friday off and got some gaming time in, but not as much as I wanted to. I spent half the weekend trying to get a new monitor dialed in (I really hate Samsung software), and then Dragon Age: Origins' infamous crashing finally bit me which otherwise had been mostly fine since starting it 2 weeks ago. I didn't find a solution until late Sunday.

But it was nice to have the long weekend, and I'm thankful for those who have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.