My final day of freedom before starting as a nurse, and I've finished playing Dragon Quest XI. Over 100 hours invested into it.

God, it was amazing. Everything I wanted out of a Dragon Quest game. Just loved the story, the characters, the gameplay. The character design by Toriyama came across perfectly while still maintaining great graphics quality.

I'm gonna go be an adult tomorrow, but right now I am just enjoying that feeling of a completed journey after a lot of effort and investment. I love stories.

 

Found the guy in Hollowing Cliffs, that was a fun (if small area). I think I know where the guy in the thorns is, but I don't have w/e movement upgrade will let me reach him yet. Haven't found the area where ash falls, so I'll keep exploring.

Side note, got the second upgrade and fought a dream warrior. My God are those fights easier once you deal actual damage. Can't believe I went so long without an upgrade...

EDIT: Bank lady ran away with my monies... >_<
Hoping I can find her later and beat it out of her...

 

So over 100 people got laid off at ArenaNet (Studio behind Guild Wars), including some of their biggest names.

I'm legit upset that this happened to the studio. I've been playing GW since like a month after it first came out. I actually chatted with a few of the people that got laid off in game.

Fuck NCsoft.

 

I hope Guild Wars 2 stays profitable just so Guild Wars 1 stays up. The servers are cheap to maintain since most of it is client side anyway, but I'd rather not take any chances. At least the game has actively updated recently - store side and in game. Even though it's a couple devs on their own time for the most part, I'm still optimistic

And yeah, lay off day was a bloodbath. Gaile Gray got the axe too

 

It's a sad, pathetic, and at the same time somehow hilarious time in the AAA games industry. The biggest players in that crowd (Ubisoft, EA, Activision, Bethesda) have been fully invested into the live service model for a good few years now, and as always, the people who are getting screwed are those most willing to put their trust in the devs and publishers--the early adapters, the day one buyers, the enthusiasts who support a studio or game because they want to participate and see the game succeed.

Consider: we've had at least half a dozen examples in the past several years of live service games being released in an atrocious state, where customers still pay full price for a broken, incomplete game, and then often continue paying more for DLCs and updates while the developer takes a year or more to fix their shit. The Division, both Destinies, Rainbow Six Siege, Ghost Recon Wildlands, now Anthem.

You, dear day one buyer, are a bitch. You pay the AAA so they can release their mess of a game, and you pay some more. And you sink your time and money into a game that's not worth either on the promise of "potential". Meanwhile, I wait two years and can then make an informed decision: I can now pay the fraction of the total cost that you have paid over the years and enjoy a complete game that may even be actually good now, or I can say fuck it and not give AAA any money.

Thing is, no matter which path I take, you're screwed either way. You're the developer/publisher's bitch because you buy into their bullshit time and again, or you're my bitch because you paid to be a beta tester for my improved experience.

I've heard opposing arguments: if you're not along for the ride, you don't become part of the community, you don't have the cherished nostalgic experiences, you don't go through the highs and lows, you're not "in".

Sure. You still paid to be a beta tester.

 

Not playing games you don't want after weighing the expected benefit against the expected cost doesn't really seem like a 200 IQ play, so people who buy these games are either not smart enough to figure out the costs and benefits or have a different set of costs and benefits than the rest of us, so for them it's a positive good. For this second possibility that allows for rational gamers, I would suspect they're only complaining about getting virtually no consumer surplus out of the exchange.
The developers know they're dealing with children, whether of the 12 year old variety or the 27 year old variety. The endless memery about the developers being evil really only proves why this is too easy for them- the consumers literally don't realize they can just not pay for games and it doesn't require that all of them do it. This one guy I know even said that 'EA would charge you to use the only fishing pole on a deserted island', comparing video games with something you need to survive.

 

I think the easiest fix is for gamers to shift their focus away from triple A content and towards indie development. The problem with that is that indie development almost entirely occurs on PC platforms. So console gamers are in a tough bind.

 

PC master race proven superior once again

 

Even then, the big issue with getting folks on the Indie train is that high production values are a big attractor for a lot of people to games. Like it or not, better graphics do, in fact, drive sales. It might not for you, but a large portion of the audience will just buy whatever's shiniest, and Indies just can't compete with AAA companies when it comes to production values (though AAA has been doing their damnedest to let them in recent years).

 

Another big problem with indie game is lack of budget for advertisement. An indie studio can make the most awesome game ever, but if no one knows about it nothing becomes of it.

 

Which is a damn shame, especially when Minecraft is the second best selling video game of all time (after Tetris).

RIP Totalbiscuit and his WTF is series.

 

This is hilarious

https://www.gameinformer.com/2019/02/27/anti-vaxxers-will-strengthen-your-pathogen-in-plague-inc

Anti-vaxxers are being added to Plague Inc. as a buff for your plague.

 

Stardew Valley is coming to Android on March 14th. Current estimate is £8/9.

No multiplayer, but apparently altered to autoselect a tool based on what you're using, which I hope gets ported to PC.

 

The shade is strong with this one. Time to download that app for roughly the tenth time.

 

I might finally play it. Been meaning to for awhile, but tbh when I am home there are other games I would prefer to play. But if it comes on mobile I can see myself playing at work and giving it a shot finally.

 

https://www.gameinformer.com/feature/2019/03/04/polish-powerhouse

This is some really good journalism from Gameinformer on the gaming industry in poland and how it has become a powerhouse.
--- Post automerged ---
Reading it. Huh...CD Projekt Red somewhat owes their success to the founders of Bioware. My how things have changed...

 

Has anyone else tried Dawn of Man? Civ building (perhaps more literally than most) game, released in full about a week ago. You start as a Paleolithic tribe of seven hunter-gatherers, and have to try and survive up to the Iron age.

It's got a decent enough soundtrack, especially as you'll likely be playing for extended periods, but not a patch on some AAA titles. Similarly, the graphics are decent enough, but my PC could still handle a relatively busy settlelement.

Gameplay wise, it's a standard resource balancing act. Most 'raw' resources, such as wood, stone, or water, can be gathered in any season; but there's also forage only available in certain seasons, which needs careful balancing around. Most resources decay over time, or with use, which means you need to keep an eye on your chokepoints, to make sure you don't end up ruining everything. I found this part quite similar to 'They Are Billions', in that it's probably wise to upgrade one thing at a time, or when something breaks, and only when you've given yourself some extra wiggle room.

The tech-tree is, as expected, boring. There's a total of 43 techs, and they don't cross branches at all (in research, any way), and generally they don't place limits on each other, apart from advncement to the next era, which is unlocked with the tech in the giant box. Given that you play a tribe in pre-historic times, there's a limit to how much research can be done. Moving through the tree advances the eras of the world, which can cause mass extinctions, and the emergence of new wildlife (majorly, at the start of the bronze and iron ages). Tools, weapons, and buildings progress in a generally linear fashion (flint > copper > bronze > iron > steel / tent > shack > house), and are (nearly) always a minor improvement in every way over the previous.

Research is gained through reaching milestones - building/gathering/making/hunting the first/fifth/tenth/hundredth/etc of something. This works pretty well, as it means you can probably push for extra research points when you need them, but you'll be slowly accruing them anyway in standard play.

Resource collection is done by tribespeople, and they follow a pretty annoying AI. You can flag certain jobs as 'high importance', which will generally means that the job will be done sooner... But earlier stages in the resource chain won't be prioritized.

For example, I want to upgrade a shack to a house. This involves the tribespeople 'recycling' the shack (and regaining some of the build cost), and then building a house from scratch. If I flag this as 'high priority', then the shack will be destroyed as soon as someone isn't working. But if I don't have the material to make the house, then this will just be an empty lot. And if you don't have ALL the materials, then it will just sit as an unfinished building site, and nobody will go to get them.

On top of this, there doesn't seem to be any prioritization with time limited tasks. If I set 'gather crops' as high, and 'fish' as high, they will both get the same number of pops working on them... Despite the fact that the crops can only be gathered in autumn. I can manually make people work a single patch of food, but a field will be up to 5x5, and you'd need to set someone to do each one individually.

Further, as you assign tasks, your 'productivity' will increase. If this is less than 100%, then you have unemployed pops. If this is over 100%, then all your pops are working, and there are some tasks on standby. If this gets too high, your pops will work themselves to death, and just not eat, sleep, or drink until they complete the tasks. This can then cause a cascade as the productivity is now even higher, and you lose too many people for your tribe to now sustain itself as is, so you need to break down everything.

But because that's a task, productivity goes up again.


From what I've seen, you're the only tribe on the map. Wild animals spawn each year, so you can't hunt the species to extinction forever, although you can overhunt each year, or overhunt a specific area. This doesn't lead the map to feel too empty, however, as the animal populations roam across the land, and you'll have to send foraging parties further and further afield as you stripmine everything of value out of the earth.

I feel like the main limit is the small size of the game - maps contain only you, the tech tree is easily finishable, and less than ten hours will give you a comfortable enough knowledge to not need to worry too much in 'beating' the game. And once you've reached the end of the tree, there's no 'endgame', unless you're trying to unlock the tenth milestone (reach a population of 100), as you'll have reached all the others during play.

Currently, there's three 'freeplay' missions, and three 'objective' missions. Both have standard (enemy progression is linked with yours) and hardcore (enemy progression is unlinked). So far, I've played through the first freeplay to completion, and can maybe see myself trying some of the others as I get spare time. 3/5 - decent enough, but not exactly standout.

 

Haven't played it, but looking at it, it reminds me a lot of Frostpunk.

 

I've started replaying KOTOR 1. Last time I played the game was when it first came out, so like 16 years ago. Bought it on steam since I didn't feel like digging my old dusty xbox out of storage. I did a full playthrough then, though I admit, I remember little, though the majority of the plot is stuff I'm fairly familiar with because I've spent too much time exploring the SW wiki over the years for various fics, so I'm not going to be blindsided with plot twists. I know many people hold the opinion that it's the golden goose of SW games, but my opinion has always been that it's maybe top 5, but certainly not the best SW game of all time. For the record, I've always come off saying how much I dislike the SW movies, but I love the games a lot. This game supports that.

Anyways, I finished the Taris stuff yesterday, so still early, but it's enough to form an opinion. I know it's taboo to rate a game that old in a modern day lens, but honestly, my opinion is unchanged. It's not that this is a bad game, it's just that there are a lot of really good SW games. I've played both Rogue Squadron and Battlefront recently and they're still better, and that's not even talking about their sequels which are better than the originals. Battlefront is kinda sparse at times, I will admit, but the combat is just so fun. Haven't replayed Jedi Outcast in a really long time, so maybe that doesn't make my list anymore, idk.

KOTOR is good, don't get me wrong. The plot is really well done, everyone knows that. But the actual character interactions... man, it certainly isn't DA:O. It's at the point where I stopped bringing Carth just because I don't want to hear him talk anymore. Mission Vao is amusing, but I think every single scene with her ended with the same joke. From the very start of the game, when the tutorial guy is monologuing at you about how much of a Mary Sue you are.... kinda sets the tone. I won't really complain about the gameplay too much, though I found the combat to be clunky, but not as clunky as its contemporary, Morrowind. I play a lot of retro games, so it's not that I'm complaining about 16 year old gameplay (most games I play are actually older). It's fine, it's an rpg. Still works as intended. Graphics are fine for what they are, no real complaints there, since they're past that awkward N64 stage where everything is endless polygons. So for what it is, it's a fine game. I can definitely see where people are coming from for wanting a remake. With how uninspired a lot of recent rpgs have been, a remake of this game could really make waves. And I do think it needs a remake, not just a remaster.

 

A KOTOR Remake would be a amazing if done well.

Or even a solid spiritual successor. (SWTOR doesn't count)

I'll always look back fondly on kotor. It was my first RPG. I loved the storyline and the feeling of being in star wars. That said, as an adult, I recognize that the character interactions were incredibly clunky in comparison to the later Dragon Age/Mass Effect companions.

Was talking with chaos guy about this in IRC, but Kotor's combat (and Baldur's gate imo) could have really benefited from being completely turn based rather than the weird hybrid they went for.

Anyways, I echo your thoughts. I think it was a great game for its time (and set the foundation for Bioware's great work on Dragon Age Origins). It didn't age the best, but still a good game.

@Anarchy What do you think of KOTOR 2?


Personally, an open world star wars game with the quality and choice of the witcher 3 would be my dream. Or I'd be content with a sequel to Jade Empire.

But I wouldn't have any of these made by Bioware today.