September 2024 PCG Article Discussion Thread

[neogunhero]

Yeah, that is a lot. I wonder is the AC pick deliberately on Valentine's?
He: "Sorry honey, got a major migraine, probably last all week. I'll make it up to you next year, I promise."
She: heaves big sigh of relief, goes back to Civ 7—hadn't been sure how she'd wangle out of the special date.

He: “Babe, I’ve picked the perfect spot for our date tonight. You’re going to love it.”
Her: “I’m excited, but why are you opening Ubisoft Connect?”
Proceeds to watch cherry blossoms in Photo Mode for hours

 

[Colif]

Given the only game I will probably buy next year doesn't have a release date yet, I don't need to memorise release dates.

 

[BeardyHat]

My bet is Kingdom Come 2 is delayed. They already have the engine and everything, so I can't imagine it'll be as badly delayed as KC was, but this is the type of game you can never stop polishing and adding more to.

 

[Zloth]

If this isn’t a plan for disaster I don’t know what is. There’s a lot of games that will have overlapping fans and players, so those who can’t afford to buy/don’t want to buy them all will have to pick and choose which is worth their money.

It's a diabolical plan to get people to use their WISH LISTS to keep track of the games they want instead of just buying whatever game is spending the most on advertising at the time! It can't be the game companies doing it, so I presume Valve is behind it.

Somehow.

 

[BeardyHat]

D&D 2024's Player Handbook first impressions: A great upgrade, but a mere echo of the brave step forward it could've been

10 more years, 10 more years, 10 more years.

www.pcgamer.com

I've been playing D&D since I was like 17 and while it was exciting at one point, I'm mostly just bored of it these days.

I was invited to a friend's group last December, which I'm still going to, as it's a good excuse to hang out with said friend, as well as some other people who are friendly; but boy is it boring to play.

They've suggested everyone take a turn as DM, so I'm thinking if and when that comes around for me, I'm going to have them try a different system for a one or two shot campaign. Not sure it'll stick though, as they're all pretty enamored with D&D, as it's their first TTRPG.

 

[Colif]

I've been playing D&D since I was like 17 and while it was exciting at one point, I'm mostly just bored of it these days.

I haven't played it since the 1980's and it was boring back then.
Amazed its still popular but I assume people play it in discord channels or something now... not actually around a table like we did.

So many other games now, its funny people play older games. I liked reading the books more than actually playing game. Same applies for below.

Traveller

Welcome to the Far Future. The latest edition of Traveller is based on the original classic but tweaked, finessed and updated for the 21st Century! Every Traveller book is now printed in full colour and all core rulebooks and supplements are gorgeous hardbacks, packed with everything you have...

www.mongoosepublishing.com

 

[BeardyHat]

I haven't played it since the 1980's and it was boring back then.
Amazed its still popular but I assume people play it in discord channels or something now... not actually around a table like we did.

So many other games now, its funny people play older games. I liked reading the books more than actually playing game. Same applies for below.

Traveller

Welcome to the Far Future. The latest edition of Traveller is based on the original classic but tweaked, finessed and updated for the 21st Century! Every Traveller book is now printed in full colour and all core rulebooks and supplements are gorgeous hardbacks, packed with everything you have...

www.mongoosepublishing.com

D&D has become the "Kleenex", "Band-aid" or "Coke" of TTRPGs.

My group still plays in person, but I admit, it feels pretty hollow because everyone uses D&D Beyond, so rather than character sheets and pencils in front of us, we all have laptops. I don't care for that aspect either.

Traveller looks interesting. I'm hoping to get some mileage out of Mothership when it's my turn. Mostly so that everyone at the table won't have to spend any money to actually play (aside from myself, of course) and I'm hoping to show them that character death can be fun.

I'm hoping it works. Everyone at the table has grand storytelling ideas, not realizing that D&D is both combat focused and incredibly boring when it comes to combat. I do my best to just use it as a hangout session and try not to actually crap all over their fun and be a negative Nancy, because I was once enamored with it too.

 

[Colif]

I think most of our games turned into going to inns and beating up people in them, not actually going into dungeons. Thats what you get with playing with teenagers

I think we were just role playing our future lol.

D&D was originally a table top game like warhammer was. it just morphed into the version we have now. Over time... I can remember having a stack of different sided die. We never played the table top version, books were expensive enough.

 

[BeardyHat]

I'm trembling at the potential power of a 21,760-core RTX 5090. And the price. Actually mostly the price

"I'll never financially recover from this."

www.pcgamer.com

I've started watching various YouTubers doing "budget builds" recently and by budget builds, I mean trying to stay at or under $100.

It's extremely satisfying to see what you can do within a super tight budget and I think, importantly, highlights what PC gaming is really about; namely, being able to be a PC Gamer on any size budget.

PC gaming has such a huge swath of games to play, from the earliest days to now, the catalogue is unending. Even modern games like Cyberpunk will run on these budget builds, even if that's Low 1080p. Even still, some of the best PC gaming has to offer are games that are under $20 and will run perfectly on that sub $100 PC.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I can never imagine spending more than $500-$600 on just a GPU (most I've ever spent was $379 on a 970 GTX) and this whole keeping up with the Joneses (or "influencers", as it were) idea is baffling to me.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

I'm trembling at the potential power of a 21,760-core RTX 5090. And the price. Actually mostly the price

"I'll never financially recover from this."

www.pcgamer.com

I've started watching various YouTubers doing "budget builds" recently and by budget builds, I mean trying to stay at or over $100.

It's extremely satisfying to see what you can do within a super tight budget and I think, importantly, highlights what PC gaming is really about; namely, being about to be a PC Gamer on any size budget.

PC gaming has such a huge swath of games to play, from the earliest days to now, the catalogue is unending. Even modern games like Cyberpunk will run on these budget builds, even if that's Low 1080p. Even still, some of the best PC gaming has to offer are games that are under $20 and will run perfectly on that sub $100 PC.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I can never imagine spending more than $500-$600 on just a GPU (most I've ever spent was $379 on a 970 GTX) and this whole keeping up with the Joneses (or "influencers", as it were) idea is baffling to me.

2010 the GTX580 was the fastest Nvidia card with the biggest chip on it for 499, 3 years later in the following generation they called the equivalent tier chip a 'Titan' and doubled the price to 999. Unfortunately the market supported the behaviour, they kept pushing the prices up and here we are.

 

[Pifanjr]

Phil, buddy, you can't just tease StarCraft fans only to announce that the RTS is coming to Game Pass

It's just cruel.

www.pcgamer.com

As a RTS fan that hasn't played all of the Starcraft campaigns yet this is actually good news. I never got around to playing Legacy of the Void, so this might very well be the game that will finally get me to try out Game Pass.

D&D 2024's Player Handbook first impressions: A great upgrade, but a mere echo of the brave step forward it could've been

10 more years, 10 more years, 10 more years.

www.pcgamer.com

I've been playing D&D since I was like 17 and while it was exciting at one point, I'm mostly just bored of it these days.

I was invited to a friend's group last December, which I'm still going to, as it's a good excuse to hang out with said friend, as well as some other people who are friendly; but boy is it boring to play.

They've suggested everyone take a turn as DM, so I'm thinking if and when that comes around for me, I'm going to have them try a different system for a one or two shot campaign. Not sure it'll stick though, as they're all pretty enamored with D&D, as it's their first TTRPG.

I personally don't think D&D 5e has a bad combat system, but it is easy to make a boring encounter. It takes quite some work from the DM to make sure encounters are interesting mechanically, plus then they should also add some proper context and dramatic flair. And players need to play their part in that as well: they need to know their character's mechanics and they should add their own dramatic flair in describing their actions.

And honestly, in my experience the mechanical aspect is the least important part. A campaign with mechanically simple fights can still be interesting if everyone is immersed in the game. This happens frequently in video games as well: there are plenty of games with fairly mediocre gameplay that became classics primarily because of their story.

 

[Zloth]

So many other games now, its funny people play older games. I liked reading the books more than actually playing game. Same applies for below.

Traveller

Welcome to the Far Future. The latest edition of Traveller is based on the original classic but tweaked, finessed and updated for the 21st Century! Every Traveller book is now printed in full colour and all core rulebooks and supplements are gorgeous hardbacks, packed with everything you have...

www.mongoosepublishing.com

I hope they fixed it up a LOT. The original was really pretty weak, IMHO.

Traveller looks interesting. I'm hoping to get some mileage out of Mothership when it's my turn. Mostly so that everyone at the table won't have to spend any money to actually play (aside from myself, of course) and I'm hoping to show them that character death can be fun.

Sounds like that is right up Paranoia's alley. It's a VASTLY more relaxed RPG where rules are just there to keep a lid on the insanity. Honestly, you're mostly paying for the setting and to hear somebody tell you "quit obsessing over your AC and just have fun." Characters die so often that they get a bunch of clones to replace them if they get killed part-way through an adventure. They aren't allowed to know the rules, either, so no worries about what they have to buy.

It is most definitely not a long-term RPG where you develop a character up in power over the course of many adventures through the years. It's more of a "let's cut loose for a week or two and have some laughs" RPG.

When we were playing back in college, something rather powerful energy gun fell into our hands. Unfortunately, it had a nasty red light on it that was blinking in a very "I'm going to blow up" sort of way. We gave it to the guy with the best technical skill. There was much rolling of dice to see if he could get it fixed and, eventually, he fixed it! Hurrah! That gun should help out a lot in fights to come.

Then I did something terribly stupid and said: "or he just broke the lightbulb." We all died seconds later. Never give a GM ideas.

 

[BeardyHat]

I personally don't think D&D 5e has a bad combat system, but it is easy to make a boring encounter. It takes quite some work from the DM to make sure encounters are interesting mechanically, plus then they should also add some proper context and dramatic flair. And players need to play their part in that as well: they need to know their character's mechanics and they should add their own dramatic flair in describing their actions.

And honestly, in my experience the mechanical aspect is the least important part. A campaign with mechanically simple fights can still be interesting if everyone is immersed in the game. This happens frequently in video games as well: there are plenty of games with fairly mediocre gameplay that became classics primarily because of their story.

I've struggled to find D&D's combat engaging for many years now. The majority of the time, it's a simple, "I attack", because there's not much else to do. Combat generally isn't movement driven and when it is, it feels like simply chasing down mobs, because all you can really do in that turn is move, especially if they're just out of your normal movement speed. Bonus actions generally don't mean much and there's a fairly minimal amount of reactions, even in the mid-levels.

Most of combat tends to be, "I attack" then wait 20+ minutes for your turn to come around again to do the same damn thing. Maybe I've just played with bad DM's for the last 10+ years, but I find myself just consistently bored with D&D, but it's all anyone wants to play these days.

 

[Zloth]

Most of combat tends to be, "I attack" then wait 20+ minutes for your turn to come around again to do the same damn thing. Maybe I've just played with bad DM's for the last 10+ years, but I find myself just consistently bored with D&D, but it's all anyone wants to play these days.

!?!? Kinda getting off topic here, but are you playing 1st Edition? That tended to come out all simple attacks most of the time. Spell users could get some variety once they got high enough level to bring a lot of spells (or if the DM lets you sleep for 8 hours right in the middle of attacking an enemy castle), but the melee types had nothing to do but chop away turn after turn. Modern D&D has lots of feats and such to give everyone a lot more variety.

 

[BeardyHat]

!?!? Kinda getting off topic here, but are you playing 1st Edition? That tended to come out all simple attacks most of the time. Spell users could get some variety once they got high enough level to bring a lot of spells (or if the DM lets you sleep for 8 hours right in the middle of attacking an enemy castle), but the melee types had nothing to do but chop away turn after turn. Modern D&D has lots of feats and such to give everyone a lot more variety.

I'm open to suggestions on my playing, but yeah, it's pretty basic overall. I'm playing a Paladin as of late, focusing on DPS, which it's...ok at, but there's just not much to do really. He can do a lot of damage if he hits, which once per long rest I can add +10 to hit, but that's pretty much a one off thing; otherwise it's basically just random swinging, because yeah I can cast spells to empower my attacks, but that's my basic action and then what do I do after that? Attack.

Or I can cast one of my spells, but that's all I get to do. I've built this character with a variety of feats to really be mobile in combat, so he won't provoke opportunity attacks, but there's just so little use for most of it outside of the initial combat phases when I'm charging to get into the mix. Combat is easily my favorite part of the game, yet I mostly just feel bored during.

Back on topic:

Mojang reveals the first addition of Minecraft's new year-round update schedule: A creepy forest biome haunted by a tough-to-kill monster

The Pale Garden and its attendant Creaking monster will come to the game "in the next few months."

www.pcgamer.com

Beginning of the end, I'd say. Seems to me that once a (Live Service/MMO) game starts hitting this pace, things begin to go downhill pretty quickly from there. I'm sure my kids will still play it regardless, but this cadence generally is indicative of falling dollar signs and the owners trying to squeeze blood from a stone, resulting in generally low quality content.

 

[Pifanjr]

I'm open to suggestions on my playing, but yeah, it's pretty basic overall. I'm playing a Paladin as of late, focusing on DPS, which it's...ok at, but there's just not much to do really. He can do a lot of damage if he hits, which once per long rest I can add +10 to hit, but that's pretty much a one off thing; otherwise it's basically just random swinging, because yeah I can cast spells to empower my attacks, but that's my basic action and then what do I do after that? Attack.

Or I can cast one of my spells, but that's all I get to do. I've built this character with a variety of feats to really be mobile in combat, so he won't provoke opportunity attacks, but there's just so little use for most of it outside of the initial combat phases when I'm charging to get into the mix. Combat is easily my favorite part of the game, yet I mostly just feel bored during.

That does sound like poor encounter building. It sounds like your character would be perfectly suited to, for example, get past the enemy tanks to get to their more dangerous magic users to take those out first, but if most encounters are just a homogenous group there is no need for that mobility.

Back on topic:

Mojang reveals the first addition of Minecraft's new year-round update schedule: A creepy forest biome haunted by a tough-to-kill monster

The Pale Garden and its attendant Creaking monster will come to the game "in the next few months."

www.pcgamer.com

Beginning of the end, I'd say. Seems to me that once a (Live Service/MMO) game starts hitting this pace, things begin to go downhill pretty quickly from there. I'm sure my kids will still play it regardless, but this cadence generally is indicative of falling dollar signs and the owners trying to squeeze blood from a stone, resulting in generally low quality content.

I would say the beginning of the end was the addition of microtransactions. However, I think Minecraft, like Skyrim, has too many mods to ever really go away, regardless of what the developers do with it.