Pulling the game from steam feels like an overreaction to what someone said on the internet. Why would you take folk on the internet seriously? Even if they are a developer of the game in question.

Granted, the asshollness should have been kept to a minimum from the tweeter as well.



The whole.. kerfuffle does raise a good point about Steam's influential and near-monopoly position on the market, which allows them to drop games from transgressions like this without repercussions.

To be fair, while they're keeping the quality of their service as much as they are, I'm giving them wide berth to do whatever they want.

 

I never understood the "it just what somebody said on the internet" argument, especially when he used such an open medium like twitter. In such a case there is no difference between real environment/virtual environment, at least for me. He threatened and insulted Valve/Gabe who had every right to stop their business association/cooperation with him. Their are a private cooperation and not duty bound to provide access to their distribution platform.

I mean doing such a thing against your own boss/firm is enough to get fired.

 

Hmm. I dunno if I agree they're keeping the quality of their service up. Maybe on the technical side, I suppose.

 

In most countries it would be enough to get arrested and possibly jailed. Death threats are generally considered very serious things, so I really don't blame Valve for ending their contract with Murderbeck.

That said, it is fairly obvious that Valve have a near monopoly on games distribution. While this has resulted in some exceptional service from Steam, it's not guaranteed to last. I'd be happier with the world if Steam had some credible rivals, but kept the same level of service. Of course as long as they keep doing what they're doing I'm not going to go out and protest it.

It's the same problem as Google's marketshare. Both Steam and Google are so intertwined with the internet now that it's hard to imagine it without them.

 

Google offers refunds

Edit: reviews suggest I was right to be worried about Korra. Shame.

 

Anyone playing Lords of the Fallen yet? I bought it, but I'm still playing SWTOR, gonna get to it soon.

 

Downloading, at the moment, so I got no opinion on it yet. Keep in mind, if you got an Nvidia GPU, turn off the PhysX, it apparently fucked up a lot of people's games by crashing it or just plain freezing it when it starts up.

 

I'm a scrub, playing on ps4, lol.

Trophies.

 

I've played around 10 or so hours of Lords and... well, I'm not impressed.

That's probably an irrational, kneejerk response to being forced to face off against constant stupid turtle enemies you can't backstab because, even in their heavy armour and massive shields, they can pivot around to keep facing my quick ass rogue self unrealistically.

As a rogue, the only way I can kill these assholes is to shoot my gauntlet-gun at them 7 or so times. I have fuck all MP, so after two shots, I'm waiting up to a minute for my mana to recharge to fire again.

Efforts to try parry to stun them have proven useless. Either I'm getting the timing wrong (in which case I get one shot) or you just can't parry them.

Sneaking up on them to backstab them also seems to not work.

These enemies are... plentiful.

Honestly, I was really enjoying the game before these guys came into it. I probably wouldn't even have this issue if I just rolled a Cleric (paladin like dude who uses faith, the mana stat)

 

And people say video games reduce the attention span...

 

I hear that latest Telltale game, Game of Thrones, is pretty bad. Bad in terms of maintaining the illusion of your choices actually meaning shit. Anyone here played it? I don't even want to pirate it, since it's not really my kind of thing, I prefer actual adventure games, rather than interactive slideshows.

 

To ps4 owners, download the 20yr anniversary theme. It's brilliant!

 

I played it and loved it. I found the choices interesting in that the choices one of your character makes can directly affect another character's story.

Most of it was handled well. I haven't replayed it so I don't know whether my choices didn't really matter but from my single playthrough, I'm satisfied.

 

Without spoiling anything, what I've heard, and seen verified by others, so far is that none of your choices matter all that much, the outcome is always the same, and if you, say, choose [X] instead of [Y], or reverse, the one not chosen acts more or less the same as the other.

Oh and one particularly annoying bit people have complained about is:

Spoiler

Ramsay. Yeah, Telltale loves him because that way they can just openly say 'fuck you' to the player's choice, because he ends up killing the character, no matter what. I'm referring to the whole "But I don't wanna a brave/bold/wise lord". And let's not forget how his men magically all just pop into your hall, despite you letting only him, and everyone else not doing shit. Then there's stuff with Margaery and Cersei, where the former tells you to play nice and well with Cersei, to simper and lick her boots, but when you do so, you get the typical "... will remember that" as though it's impossible of you to be lying in that moment.

 

The character creation for the upcoming ARPG Black Desert Online is flipping amazing.

Originally, the game was supposed to have limited design capability. The devs must have changed their minds because holy fucking hell it has more sliders than Aion. Oh and there's positioning sliders too.

 

Totally agree with this. Played through the game several times(or reloaded to see if I could get a different outcome) and many of the important "choices" don't really matter. You'll still end up in practically the same situation no matter what you do and the only things that really change are usually minor and wont affect the overall plot. Now there might be more divergences and significant changes in episode two, but I've played their Walking Dead game as well and they pulled the same shit in that. I like the story, don't get me wrong, but it's frustrating to see them make the same mistakes again and again.
Oh, and the graphics and animations are shit. I don't know why they decided to try for a more realistic style but it doesn't work at all and only detracts from the game even if it isn't necessarily focused on graphics.(muh immersion!)

 

Seems like they're just caging themselves in if they're trying to make the game fit in with the events of the books/TV show. If I was going to play a Song of Ice and Fire game like that, I'd want choices to be able to change things (preferably save a few Starks from getting shit on or something). The Walking Dead at least was separated from the events of the comics/TV show, though it still had the problem of a railroaded narrative.

 

So I've been playing Neo-Scavenger lately. It's a survival strategy game where you play an amnesiac who has just woken from cryo-sleep into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It's a turn-based game set on a hex grid, with each tile having the potential to hold items and resources of one kind or another. Open fields often have random junk, woods have wood for harvesting, abandoned villages have clothes, water and occasionally food.

Your job is to survive long enough to reach the Megacity of Detroit, which is the largest source of civilisation for miles around, so you can learn who exactly you are. That's not as easy as it sounds, though. Pretty much everything in the game can kill you; the water needs to be sterilised (and even then might be poisoned), diseases exist and are transmitted through encounters with NPCs and you'd better hope you find a sleeping bag quickly, otherwise you're going to freeze to death.

That's not even touching on the vicious Dogmen, Melonheads or Mergas, all of which are stronger than you and violent to a fault. Worse than them though are the other survivors. Wanderers with their own stories venture forth for the same resources you're hunting for, armed with improvised weapons as often as firearms (which is assuming they even have ammo).

Combat in this game is very much a game of Try Not To Die, because every scratch you take has the risk of becoming infected, and even when you're armed to the teeth and a veteran of the wilderness you can still die to a single bullet just like anyone else. Often it's better to avoid fights, to run and hide.

To help with that there are a number of skills, all of which have effects on the plot and character dialogue. At character creation you get four skills by default, but you can take a weakness to gain another skill (or two, or three, etc.). All of the skills are useful, if not immediately so. Botany has its uses from the very start as it lets you identify the difference between edible and poisonous berries. Melee makes you a better close range fighter. Electrician lets you fix up electrical gear, though you won't be doing much of that in the early game.

All in all it's a very involved and intricate game with an interesting storyline and well developed characters. It's also got a lot of replay value due to different character builds opening up different plot lines. Give the demo a go if you're not sure, but I do highly recommend it.

http://bluebottlegames.com/main/node/2

 

I haven't added anything big to my collection in a while, though I do have some odds and ends.

Ultimate General: Gettysburg is not a bad Civil War RTS, but the reviews seem to think it's the second coming of Sid Meier's Gettysburg which it is...not.

It's very arcadey and has serious balance issues (don't play as the Union, it's a snorefest once you figure out how to play), unit movement in rough terrain and elevation is painful. Oh, and the map is 2-D so you have to use the topographic overlay a lot to place troops and men properly. It does, however, have at least marginally better AI than most RTSes.

Oh, and artillery can't limber up, and skirmishers and cavalry are locked into running for some incomprehensible reason... and brigades can't change formation (they only column up if you give them a move point that's sufficiently far away). Controlling brigades instead of regiments simplifies gameplay but can be clunky as all fuck at times.

Oh, and the audio can be somewhat mediocre.

But that's just a list of all the problems I have, and it's a $10 game (15 now, it was $10 in early access) I've played for 100+ hours. So.

Picked up Endless Legend last week. Not bad. If you played Endless Space, you'll have a decent idea of what to expect- a basically solid game with a lot of good ideas and some ideas that don't quiiiite work. It's considerably more polished than ES is in a lot of ways.

I actually enjoy it more than I do Civ V (not that that is saying much honestly).

Europa Universalis IV, on the other hand, I've given up on. God damn it, Paradox, why are you so very inconsistent.

Also, since it was mentioned: I generally don't like puzzle-style games, but Papers Please is fucking great.

T.E.C. 3001 is a surprisingly fun little free-run/rail run game.

My last big-name purchase was probably R2TW and fuck Rome 2. But that's a rant for another thread.

e: Also, I got the chance to play some Hyrule Warriors at a friend's place (I don't have any current-gen consoles). It's fuckin' great. The best Warriors game by far I've played in quite a while and I've played...um...a lot of them. Also, the soundtrack is legitimately excellent.

 

Project Steam for 3DS looks like a hardcore Valkyria Chronicles rip off.

That's what you get for sitting on such a superb game Sega, you fucks.