What Are You Playing, Part 3: The Assassination of my Wallet by the Cowardly Sale

[Narkis]

Have you tried the new* singleplayer campaigns and missions in the Age of Empires 2 Devinitive Edition release? I find them so hard even on normal difficulty that I actually feel a bit excluded from the game.

When the two best examples from an entire genre are both remakes of games that first came out more than two decades ago, then we have a problem, don't we? Even if those games have gotten new content.

Still, thanks for the recommendation. I hadn't tried these new campaigns, I'll have to get around to that at some point.

Challenge is good. But so is making difficulty settings customizable.

I'm kinda torn on this, I mean, I share a similar sentiment on the "tutorials all the way to late-game" phenomena, the "on rails" shooters, the omnipresent quest markers... but in whole, even the most wide-appealing games have a "hardest" or whatever difficulty that can at least help the "easy games" part, if not the "hand holdy" part of the problem.

I personally think the solution is more difficulty customization options, but who knows?

Customizable difficulty can only get you so far when the base mechanics are getting streamlined and the AI is only getting worse. Civ, for example, has been upping the bonuses the AI gets in high difficulties with every game after 4, and they are still far, far less challenging than 4 was at a lower difficulty. And this is not an isolated example. I felt Command and Conquer on normal to be harder than any game I've played on the hardest difficulty in the past decade or so.

Eh. The Souls-like "genre" is now ironically riding the same popularity train that other mass appeal games rid before, though. There are more and more games being churned out with descriptors like "Dark Souls but X" and rarely anything to add. The alternative has become the mainstream, so to speak.

Eh, that's just marketing-speak. I was talking specifically about the Souls games themselves, not the imitators who wanted to ride on the name recognition.

The number of people who want a smart ai challenge and are willing to pay for it, are just too few to support the cost.

I'm sure the big game execs think this is the case, but I'm not convinced it's true. A properly hard strategy game would probably not make as much money as, say, Civ6 but I believe it could be profitable if costs were kept down by cutting on, say, graphics. Not everything has to be a blockbuster.

[Rodin]

Customizable difficulty can only get you so far when the base mechanics are getting streamlined and the AI is only getting worse. Civ, for example, has been upping the bonuses the AI gets in high difficulties with every game after 4, and they are still far, far less challenging than 4 was at a lower difficulty. And this is not an isolated example. I felt Command and Conquer on normal to be harder than any game I've played on the hardest difficulty in the past decade or so.

I don't think that's an example of good AI though. My experience with playing the game again is that it's still using the same format as Dune 2 and the original Warcraft. The enemy builds a mix of units and sends them at you. They sometimes target a random unit of yours, which means that once or twice a map they'll go for your harvester.

The AI doesn't react to your build and change up what it builds in response. It has very simple call and response behaviours that you can exploit, such as "send all available units to defend the harvester".

Command & Conquer is difficult because the AI starts with a fully built base, a bundle of cash, and is a couple tiers up the tech tree from your highest possible amount. I've had missions where I destroyed the enemy harvester 5 minutes in and they had enough money to keep fighting until I was smashing down their construction yard.

It's also difficult due to things we would call foul on today. I lost a mission of Red Alert because there was a V2 launcher hidden in the fog of war, and that launcher killed Tanya. Utterly unavoidable, instant fail condition. It was easy to go around once you knew it existed, but it was still a very cheap death. A similar thing happened during Tiberium Dawn - I lost a mission multiple times because it expected you to fly a transport helicopter through fog of war and land engineers next to an enemy outpost. The outpost was guarded by rocket troopers and grenadiers, all of whom were in the fog of war. It took me about 5 attempts to land the copter at a place where my men could disembark without getting blown up before they could sprint into the buildings.

Going back even further, Dune 2 had the Death Hand missile. Playing as Atreides you faced down two enemies that could fire them in the final mission. Where the missile landed was pure RNG, and if it hit your construction yard you basically lost the mission. The "standard" way to beat the mission was to save scum the missile launch. I did an Ironman attempt at that stage once - it was sheer hell. You had to survive long enough to get MCVs, then build additional construction yards to make sure you had redundancy. Losing half my base became commonplace, and I ran the entire map out of spice before I finally won.

We just used to accept those sorts of death as part of the game back then.

[Narkis]

I don't think that's an example of good AI though. My experience with playing the game again is that it's still using the same format as Dune 2 and the original Warcraft. The enemy builds a mix of units and sends them at you. They sometimes target a random unit of yours, which means that once or twice a map they'll go for your harvester.

The AI doesn't react to your build and change up what it builds in response. It has very simple call and response behaviours that you can exploit, such as "send all available units to defend the harvester".

Command & Conquer is difficult because the AI starts with a fully built base, a bundle of cash, and is a couple tiers up the tech tree from your highest possible amount. I've had missions where I destroyed the enemy harvester 5 minutes in and they had enough money to keep fighting until I was smashing down their construction yard.

It's also difficult due to things we would call foul on today. I lost a mission of Red Alert because there was a V2 launcher hidden in the fog of war, and that launcher killed Tanya. Utterly unavoidable, instant fail condition. It was easy to go around once you knew it existed, but it was still a very cheap death. A similar thing happened during Tiberium Dawn - I lost a mission multiple times because it expected you to fly a transport helicopter through fog of war and land engineers next to an enemy outpost. The outpost was guarded by rocket troopers and grenadiers, all of whom were in the fog of war. It took me about 5 attempts to land the copter at a place where my men could disembark without getting blown up before they could sprint into the buildings.

Going back even further, Dune 2 had the Death Hand missile. Playing as Atreides you faced down two enemies that could fire them in the final mission. Where the missile landed was pure RNG, and if it hit your construction yard you basically lost the mission. The "standard" way to beat the mission was to save scum the missile launch. I did an Ironman attempt at that stage once - it was sheer hell. You had to survive long enough to get MCVs, then build additional construction yards to make sure you had redundancy. Losing half my base became commonplace, and I ran the entire map out of spice before I finally won.

We just used to accept those sorts of death as part of the game back then.

Yeah, you're right. CnC's AI is definitely braindead, but it compensates by not being afraid to be unfair. This is missing from newer games where the AI is getting massive bonuses but always appears to be somewhat fair about it.

[warty goblin]

I rather wonder if one of the problems with making more modern games hard is because of the RPGification of everything. If the primary engagement loop of the game is based on letting you choose some new hunk of power every 10 minutes, is it any wonder things have gotten easier?

If the new power doesn't make the game easier, it isn't really empowering, and if you're not careful, you could go and invalidate somebody's playstyle or build, and then there will be 1000 YouTube videos about how the game is unbalanced trash. So the neex to empower the player all the time breaks the difficulty curve, and the need to let everybody play the game however they want means you can't have a level or area that hard counters something because somebody will have spent all their upgrade points on doing exactly that and nothing else.

I honestly wonder if a lot of samey open world game feel doesn't follow straight from just these two factors.

[Zevox]

Why are you waiting for it to go on sale? It's pretty darned cheap anyway, and let's face it here, they're not going to do more ports like this if they find they just don't sell enough to make it worthwhile, so I bought it immediately. Haven't installed it yet, still going through a monster game of Stellaris, but it's definitely on my list to play soon.

Yeah, while I'm not trying to encourage Steam releases specifically (would honestly rather have had it on Playstation if given the choice), I did the same. Actually, I bought the Digital Deluxe Edition despite not expecting to do anything with the digital artbook and soundtrack, just to give Atlus five more dollars for it. Hell, Persona 4's tied for my favorite game of all time (with Persona 3), I'm more than happy to reward them for that.

Though while I was at it, I also grabbed another steam game I've been meaning to try: Them's Fightin' Herds. AKA what happens when a fan-made My Little Pony fighting game morphs into its own thing after Hasbro slapped them with a cease & desist. And I have to say, definitely pretty nice. It's very obvious that it was made with the Skullgirls engine, as it has a very similar feel to that game despite being a strictly 1v1 fighter, but that's for the most part good by me. The characters are pretty, all pretty obvious which pony they're based on, and by and large good expies of them. And it's kind of fun to see some of the departures, like Oleander being Twilight but with a mild edgelord/Great Old One Warlock element to her. She's great as the tutorial narrator. Actually, the game's tutorial is just excellent, one of the best I've ever seen for the genre. It even teaches you some things you normally need to go looking around fighting game fan sites to learn about, like hitboxes and frame data.

You can really tell the game was made by a bunch of complete nerds, too (in the best way). There's so many references in the alternate color schemes for characters, and they even gave them fun names. For instance, the game's Rainbow Dash expy, a Dragon named Tianhuo, has a red-and-purple color scheme named "Welcome to Die." Or Oleander has a "demon girl" color scheme that resembles Raven of the Teen Titans, and the dark magic book she's carrying gets a red color scheme reminiscent of Trigon to go with it. Or the Pinkie Pie expy, a Llama named Paprika, has a color scheme called "Emperor" based off Kuzco from "The Emperor's New Groove." Arizona, the cow who serves as the Applejack expy, has one called "Milkpool" which colors her like Deadpool's costume. Pom, a Lamb who fill in Fluttershy's role, has "Good Morning Mayor," a color scheme based on Isabelle from Animal Crossing. And Velvet, a Deer who takes Rarity's place, has a color scheme called "VIP," pretty obviously based on the Velvet Room attendants from the Persona franchise.

Gameplay-wise, feels pretty solid to me so far, though I haven't taken it online yet. I keep hearing it has some of the best netcode around though (hell, that's the main reason it's at Evo this year, with the regular event canceled and online ones replacing it due to the pandemic), so here's hoping. I'm thinking I'll be playing either Tianhuo or Oleander - probably starting with the former and moving to the latter if the Dragon doesn't quite gel with me. From messing around in training mode though, damn, your options are pretty wide-open - it feels very Marvel vs Capcom that way, which is a good thing. It's overwhelming enough that I'm going to have to keep myself from trying to figure out optimal combos, or I'll never start playing online.

In the meantime, started on the story mode though, which is, well, different. Wasn't expecting to be moving around a sprite-based map talking to a ton of NPCs in a fighting game. The story doesn't seem like anything too special, but there's plenty of fun silliness along the way, so I'm okay with that. The battles seem fine so far, and I liked the way they turned the final round of the first fight with another proper character into a special event match of sorts, with Velvet surrounding herself in an icy tornado and throwing ice at you while you had to dash across the stage to get at her, that was fun. I am kind of worried about how I'll fare once I need to play either Paprika or Pom though, since both of those seem like characters I'll really struggle with.

All in all, really enjoying it. Don't know if I'll get as into it as I do ArcSys games, but seems like a great entry in the genre.

[Resileaf]

Playing Star Fox 1 on the SNES classic.

Those Route 3 levels are complete nonsense! Who thought they were good ideas in a game that lags so much?!

[oxybe]

Say what you will about Epic and Fortnite, but they know how to throw a party and make a spectacle out of it.

So season 2, chapter 2 or whatever they're calling it has finally ended, officially, earlier today after a couple pushbacks.

they warned us to login early for the sendoff and boy am glad i logged in earlier then the 30 min they recommended, as the servers were chock full very fast.

so you logged in sometimes between 2-3pm Atlantic time and there was only one game mode, a 50v50 first to like... 250 points but it kept going even past the point cap, they just wanted to fill up them servers.

everyone goes to "The agency" a large manor on an island surrounded by 5 underwater vents that houses a spy agency. not surprising since the theme of the season is basically spy v spy.

there is a large countdown timer being projected above the location by Midas, the leader of the agency and the lv100 battle pass skin.

then it happens: the countdown reaches 0 and the fountain in the center plaza of the agency building opens up as a huge Tesla coil topped with a plasma ball bursts through the floor and destroys the building. 5 lightning rod like things slowly reveal from vents and start zapping at the storm, pushing back and expanding the safe zone. it struggles, with the safe zone growing and shrinking as lightning cracks and eventually everything explodes.

all while this is going on the game's gravity is going bananas and we get flashes of being in an office and overhearing someone talking about a project, which ends up being a potentially alternate reality version of Jonesy, the blonde poster boy of fortnite.

Note: this alternate reality has been hinted at before. Drift, one of the characters/skins from... season 1 ch.5 i think, was suddenly teleported to fortnite land, if we go by what's hinted in the loading screens of thay chapter.

Once the dust settles, you're back on the battle bus, flying to the agency but instead of the storm's big purple death area, we now have a huge wall of water, as though the entire map has beed flooded noah 's arc style. it was a neat 10 min give or take long event.

and that's it. some stuff was hinted at, like during the flashes in the alternate reality uou could move around and i saw dossiers of Lynx, a catwoman like figure and skin, Midas, the agency's leader, and a third i didn't recognize. so these three may have a big role in the next chapter's meta-story.

I played a match proper and the new storm, that water wall, is danged imposing looking. the giant sharks swimming in it and the light devouring blue don't do it any favours towards making it an inviting swim.

we're gonna have to wait until Wednesday to see the ramifications and the start of chapter 3.

[factotum]

If the new power doesn't make the game easier, it isn't really empowering, and if you're not careful, you could go and invalidate somebody's playstyle or build, and then there will be 1000 YouTube videos about how the game is unbalanced trash.

There's an incredibly easy way to fix that--allow character respecs. Grim Dawn does this, which is a good thing, because the RPG system in that is super complicated and it's easy to end up with a trash build by mistake. And as long as a skill is fun to use and *somewhat* effective it doesn't need to be balanced against the others. I remember Diablo 2, where the Hammerdin (Paladin using Blessed Hammer as their prime skill) was acknowledged as one of the most powerful builds around, but I never got far with it because I just found aiming the damned hammer to be unfun, so I would use some other less powerful but more fun skill instead.

[Eldan]

Welp. Had a pretty epic time playing Subnautica this weekend. Super frustrating too. Finally built a Prawn suit, found the entry to the lost river, navigated it for quite some time (didn't find much like upgrades or resources, but the giant skeletons look very impressive, at least) and then... some **** of an enemy I didn't even see coming teleported me out of the prawn suit and killed me in like two shots before I could react.
So the prawn suit is... 900 meters below sea level in a cave I'm not even sure how to find the entrace of again. My seamoth goes to 300 meters and my Cyclops to 500.

Well, over the course of several hours of searching and escaping various leviathans by the skin of my teeth, I actually managed to somehow jiggle the Cyclops into a tiny cave entrance in the Grand Reef (no idea how I managed that, in retrospect. It looks much smaller than the sub), crash it into every cliff face that cave had to offer repeatedly, and somehow park it about 300 meters above the prawn suit, just barely under the ceiling of a cave and about 2 meters above crush depth. And then had to dive down with three air tanks, evading those same enemies and then bunny-hop the prawn up various cliffs. Died about six times again getting the prawn up to the cyclops, but since I respawned relatively close by, it was doable.

But yeah. Next I'm googling how to find weapons for my submarines and suits and how to build them before I go exploring again.

Seriously, though. It was fun to get back in, but enemies that teleport you out of your armored vehicles so you are completely defenceless strikes me as super frustrating game design.

[Anteros]

Still messing around with Terraria. It's a weird mix of extremely frustrating and fun. There's a lot of fun exploration and discovery to be had...but the game expects you to grind for literally dozens of hours to do some of it. I do enjoy difficulty in games, but I don't necessarily agree that timesinks=difficulty so I've resorted to cheating in a game for the first time I can remember. So far I haven't cheated for anything other than boss summoning items where you're expected to basically wait for hours for them to grow in the world naturally and then find them. In particular the plant boss where you're expected to find a bulb to summon him, build an enormous arena around the bulb, and then fight the boss. After about 3 repeats of this pattern I just can't be bothered to keep sinking hours into pixel hunting and building arenas.

Anyway...it's a good game, but I can only recommend it to someone who has a lot of time on their hands, or a willingness to cheat away some of the more boring/grindy aspects.

[factotum]

Seriously, though. It was fun to get back in, but enemies that teleport you out of your armored vehicles so you are completely defenceless strikes me as super frustrating game design.

The main problem with that is the disorientation--so long as you can find your Prawn suit again and get back in you can quite easily get away. The real issue is when that happens in the really hot zone further down, because the heat alone can kill you there.

Saying your Cyclops can only go to 500--you know you can upgrade its depth capability? Same with the Seamoth, and the prawn suit itself for that matter--you'll need to upgrade them to get to the deepest zones. I never tried travelling long distances in the Prawn because I just found it annoying, I'd just dock it aboard the Cyclops, drive that to near my destination, then drop out in the suit to cover the last few metres. Yes, manoeuvring through the Lost River in the Cyclops is annoying, but it's entirely possible with a bit of care.

[IthilanorStPete]

Welp. Had a pretty epic time playing Subnautica this weekend. Super frustrating too. Finally built a Prawn suit, found the entry to the lost river, navigated it for quite some time (didn't find much like upgrades or resources, but the giant skeletons look very impressive, at least) and then... some **** of an enemy I didn't even see coming teleported me out of the prawn suit and killed me in like two shots before I could react.
So the prawn suit is... 900 meters below sea level in a cave I'm not even sure how to find the entrace of again. My seamoth goes to 300 meters and my Cyclops to 500.

Well, over the course of several hours of searching and escaping various leviathans by the skin of my teeth, I actually managed to somehow jiggle the Cyclops into a tiny cave entrance in the Grand Reef (no idea how I managed that, in retrospect. It looks much smaller than the sub), crash it into every cliff face that cave had to offer repeatedly, and somehow park it about 300 meters above the prawn suit, just barely under the ceiling of a cave and about 2 meters above crush depth. And then had to dive down with three air tanks, evading those same enemies and then bunny-hop the prawn up various cliffs. Died about six times again getting the prawn up to the cyclops, but since I respawned relatively close by, it was doable.

But yeah. Next I'm googling how to find weapons for my submarines and suits and how to build them before I go exploring again.

Seriously, though. It was fun to get back in, but enemies that teleport you out of your armored vehicles so you are completely defenceless strikes me as super frustrating game design.

Warpers! Those are fun, for Dwarf Fortress values of fun. I'm surprised you haven't run into them before; IIRC, they're also around the deeper Degasi base, the Mountain Island, and a few other places.

The main problem with that is the disorientation--so long as you can find your Prawn suit again and get back in you can quite easily get away. The real issue is when that happens in the really hot zone further down, because the heat alone can kill you there.

Saying your Cyclops can only go to 500--you know you can upgrade its depth capability? Same with the Seamoth, and the prawn suit itself for that matter--you'll need to upgrade them to get to the deepest zones. I never tried travelling long distances in the Prawn because I just found it annoying, I'd just dock it aboard the Cyclops, drive that to near my destination, then drop out in the suit to cover the last few metres. Yes, manoeuvring through the Lost River in the Cyclops is annoying, but it's entirely possible with a bit of care.

Yeah, definitely try and upgrade the Cyclops's dive depth. Getting into and out of the LR with it is indeed annoying, but it's definitely doable; I did it all the time before moving into the deeper parts of the game full-time and using the Seamoth to shuttle between the LR and the surface.

[Eldan]

Warpers! Those are fun, for Dwarf Fortress values of fun. I'm surprised you haven't run into them before; IIRC, they're also around the deeper Degasi base, the Mountain Island, and a few other places.

Run into them, but mostly ran away. Occasionally had to swim back to my Seamoth, then run away. Don't think any had killed me before, and certainly not in such a super inconvenient location.

[Eldan]

The main problem with that is the disorientation--so long as you can find your Prawn suit again and get back in you can quite easily get away. The real issue is when that happens in the really hot zone further down, because the heat alone can kill you there.

Saying your Cyclops can only go to 500--you know you can upgrade its depth capability? Same with the Seamoth, and the prawn suit itself for that matter--you'll need to upgrade them to get to the deepest zones. I never tried travelling long distances in the Prawn because I just found it annoying, I'd just dock it aboard the Cyclops, drive that to near my destination, then drop out in the suit to cover the last few metres. Yes, manoeuvring through the Lost River in the Cyclops is annoying, but it's entirely possible with a bit of care.

I know I can, but I haven't found the plans for a Modification station yet, even after quite extensive exploration (I think I'm at 2/3 parts required?).

I also assume there's better ways to get into the Lost River than the one I found, ways that are more cyclops-navigable. The one I found, I almost had to turn the Cyclops upside down to get it to the right angle so it fit through the hole. Basically, the back section was resting on the seafloor above, while I was trying to shove the cockpit under a rock, then dive, so that it would pitch forward and slam itself down the cave entrance.

At least I finally found beacon plans. Immediately made about twenty, so that next time I need to go back somewhere, I don't have to search for cave entrances again for hours. I've started to tag everything now.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Welp. Had a pretty epic time playing Subnautica this weekend. Super frustrating too. Finally built a Prawn suit, found the entry to the lost river, navigated it for quite some time (didn't find much like upgrades or resources, but the giant skeletons look very impressive, at least) and then... some **** of an enemy I didn't even see coming teleported me out of the prawn suit and killed me in like two shots before I could react.

I would rather face down Leviathans than Warpers, and they’re one of the big reasons I’m not overly fond of the Prawn suit.

I made the mistake of building my first-ever Prawn in Warper territory. I got in, tromped around for less than five minutes, and then got warped out and slashed for a big chunk of health. I swam back to the Prawn, desperately trying to clomp away at top (still very slow) speed from the purple alien assassin bot, then got warped out again and promptly murdered.

The PDA says it takes weeks of training to stop feeling invincible in the Prawn. I managed it within minutes.

And the impression was sufficiently strong that I willingly drove the super-clunky Cyclops down into the deepest regions of the game rather than navigate a cave system full of Warpers in the Prawn.

Congrats on finding beacons though! Those things are awesome.

[Triaxx]

Starter pod to Mushroom forest near Aurora, then to the bulb zone. Northwest (Aurora's the east side of the crater) from there is a sharp drop that leads to a cave that leads to lost river. You'll have to pass by a juvenile leviathan to get in, but it's a much easier path. Also has thermal vents just before the leviathan so you can park a Cyclops upgraded with thermal reactors there to remain charged/recharge the Prawn Suit.

[Spacewolf]

That's the only play I died as well due to the warpers. During my run I only ever used the Seamoth then the prawn for the final push. Only built the cyclops due to it being required for the final mission i think. ( Or maybe just for fun.)

[Eldan]

I quite enjoy the cyclops. Piloting it just feels cool, with the cameras, and the large momentum... it's not something I've seen other games replicate, even though I've played a lot of submarine games. And the prawn isn't that unlike any other mech suit in a game that has them.

[Rakaydos]

I got greedy and killed my Steel Soul Hollow knight run. Ten charm notches might not be enough to take on the watcher knights... and how hard could Troupe master grimm be?

[factotum]

Starter pod to Mushroom forest near Aurora, then to the bulb zone. Northwest (Aurora's the east side of the crater) from there is a sharp drop that leads to a cave that leads to lost river.

Not sure if this is the same place you're talking about, but IIRC the entrance I always used was about halfway between the lifepod and the island with the honkin' great alien gun on it. Seafloor drops away to about 500m depth, and there's a cave (facing away from the lifepod) that leads to the LR.

[Eldan]

I actually scraped my cyclops in through somewhere in the Blood Canyon.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

I quite enjoy the cyclops. Piloting it just feels cool, with the cameras, and the large momentum... it's not something I've seen other games replicate, even though I've played a lot of submarine games. And the prawn isn't that unlike any other mech suit in a game that has them.

Tell you what. If we ever get stuck on 4546B together, YOU can drive it, and I will stick with the Seamoth.

[LibraryOgre]

I did restart with a Dwarf Mad Dog Barbarian/Archaeologist who will go Dragon Disciple. There's a pretty steep feat tax keeping my Leopard up to snuff (since Boon Companion adds 4 levels, it's basically every other feat), but the fact that she knocks people down all the time in combat is pretty cool... later game, I was struggling to figure out which feats I wanted, so it's going to work out.

And since you can only do Boon Companion once, I respecc'd, changing my level of Mad Dog into a level of slayer. I simply do not understand that class (WTF even is a Slayer?), but it had what I needed, which is all martial weapons.

[Rynjin]

And since you can only do Boon Companion once, I respecc'd, changing my level of Mad Dog into a level of slayer. I simply do not understand that class (WTF even is a Slayer?), but it had what I needed, which is all martial weapons.

Slayer is a hybrid class of Ranger and Rogue, and generally comes down as quite a powerful class for a pure martial. In conception, it was to give people the "spell-less Ranger" people have wanted for a while, and it's primary feature is basically "Favored Enemy: Anything" at the cost of your Move action (or Swift later) and it being half the bonus. It also gets a bit of Sneak Attack and its own version of Rogue Talents, which can get it Ranger Combat Styles...quite strong, overall.

[IthilanorStPete]

I quite enjoy the cyclops. Piloting it just feels cool, with the cameras, and the large momentum... it's not something I've seen other games replicate, even though I've played a lot of submarine games. And the prawn isn't that unlike any other mech suit in a game that has them.

Amen to that, at least for the Cyclops. I was pretty much squeeing when I first built it; it's amazing to have that sense of power and momentum.

[Zevox]

So, unfortunately, it looks like Them's Fightin' Herds' story mode is incomplete - it abruptly cuts off at the end of chapter 1, which focused solely on one character, Arizona. From the look of things they must be planning to continue adding to it, because a chapter select menu shows chapter 2 intending to be focused on Velvet. Pity, but I guess for an indie game, I can understand it. Not the best story mode I've ever seen in the genre, but it was fun.

So with that stonewall, I went online with the game for the first time today - and holy crap. Granted, I only played two people, but so far, this seems like the best online I've seen in a fighting game, period. It lets you see opponents' specific ping number rather than just a vague number of bars out of 4 or 5, gives a recommended amount of input delay for that ping that you can adjust before the match starts (and my first one was so good it recommended a delay of 0 frames, which I went with), all of the pre-fight menus and loading go by very fast - and then you get into the match, and it looks and feels buttery smooth, no different from offline play. Woah. I've played a few games with rollback netcode before (MvC Infinite, Skullgirls back when it first came out, MK11), but based on what I played tonight Fightin' Herds is on another level even compared to any of those. I am thoroughly impressed.

[Cespenar]

Yeah, you're right. CnC's AI is definitely braindead, but it compensates by not being afraid to be unfair. This is missing from newer games where the AI is getting massive bonuses but always appears to be somewhat fair about it.

I don't know how being unafraid to be unfair is somehow a positive thing, but okay.

I rather wonder if one of the problems with making more modern games hard is because of the RPGification of everything. If the primary engagement loop of the game is based on letting you choose some new hunk of power every 10 minutes, is it any wonder things have gotten easier?

If the new power doesn't make the game easier, it isn't really empowering, and if you're not careful, you could go and invalidate somebody's playstyle or build, and then there will be 1000 YouTube videos about how the game is unbalanced trash. So the neex to empower the player all the time breaks the difficulty curve, and the need to let everybody play the game however they want means you can't have a level or area that hard counters something because somebody will have spent all their upgrade points on doing exactly that and nothing else.

I honestly wonder if a lot of samey open world game feel doesn't follow straight from just these two factors.

Could be. Also could part of the reason be that at least some mainstream design recipes actually theoretically made sense in the first place, but then were copied immediately and incessantly because of that, which quickly saturated the market and devalued such games?

[oxybe]

So the new Fortnite chapter/season/ehatever is upon us and... they flooded like 2/5ths to half of the map.

the remains of civilization can still be seen in some areas and new locations have appeared.

some weapons are gone and new ones have replaced them or been unvaulted.

the new skins... they're nice and they're sorta progressive skins too, in that you unlock their next form through ranking up the battle pass, whereas the old progressive skins would level up as you gained xp, and even if you didn't reaxh the xp total needed one season, it carried over to the next.

The Fade, Kit and Eternal Knight skins look dope. Fade's stylized Oni design is very reminiscent of the Drift skin from Ch1 S5, one of my fave skins for it's stylized Kitsune/anime nerd. Kit is just kinda wild to look at as it's an anthropomorphic kitten in a jury-rigged mech. EK is just a badass knight, and I approve of that.

Some of new skins are interesting. quite a few of the pickaxe skins have dual-weild or two-handed forms. I'm a fan of the bigass monkey wrench/ dual wrench one personally. it's a cool alternative to my favoured prybar.

last season we had a Deadpool skin to unlock and this time we have Jason Momoa in both Aquaman and shirtless versions.

Bonus Xp is now in punchcard challenges instead of location based ones. the punchcards are grouped up similar challenges, like catch X >Y >Z amount of fish.or getting weapon expert in a round for each weapon type, or just getting a huge killstreak. They're not really things you need to go out of your way to do, as you play you'll occasionally net yourself some extra XP.

looks to an interesting map with new challenges when it comes to building and traversing l.

[Yora]

I got Dirt Rally 2 when it was free on PS Plus, because the only non-hover-racer game I ever played was Need for Speed Porsche, which had gorgeous rally courses and I always wanted something like that again. I've been thinking about getting a Rally game for a long time, and it ended up being Dirt Rally 2 just because I saw I could get it for free.
I finally got to start playing last week, and I really love it. It is very much no frills. Just a course, a car, and navigator calls. No silly story mode or campaign or anything like that. You do have a team of technicians that you can upgrade, but they are really just a stat screen where you can invest your winnings to improve the speed of repairs between the stages of an event. All the things that get broken on the car can be repaired, but each repair takes a certain amount of time depending on how many technicians you have and how your upgrade their skill for different types of repair. You can select which things you want to have repaired, patched up, or replaced, but if the time cost for everything together goes above 30 minutes, you get a penalty for your race time on the next stage. Since rally racing is not just driver skill but also car reliability and endurance, repair time is an actual part of the "race", and so the a rally game would not be complete without it. But other than that, it's really just being in a car on the course. Which I find very endearing.
Though I would have liked to be able to see my best times for courses in the championship mode, and not just the times of the competition for the current event.

The base game comes with 6 rally locations, which I felt was a bit underwhelming, since they don't have a huge variety. Spain has asphalt roads, Poland and New England have very straight courses for very high speeds, while Australia and New Zealand look pretty similar and Argentina just doesn't have anything to look at.
Since I got the game for free, I did pay 20€ for a DLC bundle, which adds seven more courses. Monaco (which I am very certain is actually France) has a narrow snowy mountain climb while Sweden is all snow full speed. Greece feels like a hybrid of Spain and Argentina (and happens to be set in one of my favorite places I was on vacation), and Scotland like a hybrid of New England and Australia. There's also Wales and Finland, which I don't have played much yet.
Germany sucks. It's (based on) a real course, but it's in one of the most boring locations possible. It feels like a gigantic stadium and not at all like back roads.
I can totally understand people being upset about the limited selection in the base game, because in career mode you get to race six locations for each tournament, and there are only six locations in total. Having to pay 20€ extra to get the other seven tracks (which include all the snow tracks) doesn't feel right, but since I only payd 20€ for everything I don't complain myself.

With the full 13 locations, there's actually a great range of variety, and I believe there are two "full courses" for each location, that also have a reverse version, which makes for a total of 52 courses. I'm still on the second car class in the game (out of something like a dozen), and a full course usually takes me 10 to 12 minutes. They are really quite long.
The courses don't just look visually different, they also have very different feels. Poland is very straight and extremely fast, followed by New England, until at the other end you have New Zealand being quite windy and Argentina being super narrow and windy resulting in very slow speeds. Poland actually terrifies me, as those courses are set in the same landscape that I live in, and those straight flat roads that are lines by trees are pure death roads. There's 18 years old wrapped around trees Friday and Saturday night all the time. Going on these things at 150 during heavy rain is terrifying. Which brings me to the one minor downside with the game, which is its crashes. Yes, when you do a 12 minute race it's not fun to have to start all over again because you made a mistake three quarters during the race. But crashing into a tree at 160 and continuing the race just seems ridiculous.

Though I do regret that I didn't save the replay of my first race ever. It's unbelievable how incredibly terrible I was. I basically crashed into something every 3 seconds, would fall off the road 10 times, and always arrive at the finish with no headlights, bonnet, and radiator grill, and sometimes without fenders and a missing wheel. Some 20 races later, I usually finished with headlights still working and just a few scratches. Good thing that the starting car you get has no repair costs.

[xroads]

I've been playing Borderlands 3 and The Blackout Club with my wife.

I played Witcher 3 for awhile there, but that hasn't been able to keep my attention for very long.