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[Reelya]

Not only are they porting RDR2 to PC (but not RDR1, which people have been begging for for years)

IDK. If they decide not to release something then it probably means they've decided that they won't make money from doing so. Before scoffing, realize that these people have a ton of business/marketing experts working for them, and they like making money, and those experts have straight-up told them it's not commercially viable. And why should they then? They're not a charitable organization.

[Iduno]

Not only are they porting RDR2 to PC (but not RDR1, which people have been begging for for years)

IDK. If they decide not to release something then it probably means they've decided that they won't make money from doing so. Before scoffing, realize that these people have a ton of business/marketing experts working for them, and they like making money, and those experts have straight-up told them it's not commercially viable. And why should they then? They're not a charitable organization.

Lookit this guy, thinking business/marketing experts are more than fortune tellers.

I'd make a prophets/profits joke, but it's daylight savings time and I can't hink for 2 weeks.

[Reelya]

I think the main point here is that they're not money-shy. If they're not pushing something then it's likely they've done the math and it's really, really not likely to be a hit. Especially something low-effort / low-risk like a port. Sure, they don't have a crystal ball about new things, but merely porting an existing, proven title between two known platforms is the type of area you can just number-crunch the likely sales pretty well. I'd put the failure to do it in this case down to the known pile of bullshit that is having to do tech support for a PC game. There are good reasons devs like console. Porting to console is a no-brainer. Consoles are just easier. Porting to PC would be a complete pain in the ass by comparison.

EDIT: turns out the reason for no port is that RDR1 was built with a bodged-together engine, which was then scrapped and they built a proper engine for the next gen of games. So it's a big hacky mess of code and would be hard to port. When they port their other games, what they actually do is port the engine itself over, and then bring the game files into that, then optimize for the new platform. So for RDR1 they'd have to port that unholy mess of an engine over, for the sake of that one game. Or, they'd have port the whole game into their more recent engines then port it to PC.

[Yoink]

Red Dead Online is actually pretty awesome. You're only doing yourself a disservice if you write it off as being another GTA Online clusterfuck - I was pleasantly surprised by how not-awful the playerbase was.

And if you do want to escape a griefer, it only takes about... 3-4 button presses to jump into a story mission.



...Anyway! What I came in here to say is that GoG tells me that Grim Fandango remastered is on sale for like, three bucks.
These GoG sponsored Facebook ads have gotten rather spammy since I opened their site once a while back.

[Jopax]

Company of Heroes 2 is free to get and keep this weekend on steam. So if you ever wondered when Relic started going south and how a shittier CoH looks like, you have a chance to see for yourself now.

[notquitethere]

I don't think CoH2 is as bad as all that. The multiplayer was good fun and the solo campaign was fairly engaging. (I tested the game and it was one of the better titles that year.)

[nenjin]

Here's my super hot take:

-I didn't connect with the theme as much. I'm an American, we love our WW2 and CoH1 delivered that in spades. You got a real "OOO RAH" out of playing that game as an American. CoH2, playing the Russians, I just didn't connect with it the same way. Maybe for a Russian there was some historical significance and immersion playing as Russians, but for me it largely seemed like commonplace memes of Russians during the war.

-The destructible terrain and terrain deformation is clearly inferior to CoH1.

-The missions just felt flat. CoH 1 missions both taught new mechanics and, through scripting, told a cool little war story complete with a map that felt like it was meant to be played through than played on. CoH2, I dunno, the maps just felt like boxes with equi-distantly spaced objectives and features. They didn't feel "alive" in the way they were designed.

-CoH 2 had some technology unlock shit that somehow played in to MP and it felt like it muddled what I was actually doing in the SP campaign. Maybe I'm misremembering this, but I remember finding that stuff a distraction from the actual campaign.

I guess perhaps most damning for me is this: I put hundreds of hours in to CoH1 without ever finishing the entire campaign once, carefully playing my way through each mission setting up new firebases, outposts, artillery sites and defenses, enjoying slowly turtling my way though each mission. I put additional hundreds of hours in to just making custom maps for myself to play, just to set up scenarios or test what the engine was capable of. (Like making a map where it goes from max elevation on one side to minimum elevation on the other. To no one's surprise, LOS calculations start to ignore the terrain at that point.) I've put maybe 20 hours in to CoH 2, and that's it. Made one stab at the campaign and never looked back.

Free is free and so it's probably worth owning in that regard. But it's one of those games I should like, tried but can't bring myself to try again.

[LordBaal]

Crusader Knights 2 is free, again, but now also the Sword of Islam DLC. So, only 9999999 DLC to go free for me to complete the collection. Hahhaaha

This is in steam BTW.

[Jopax]

The biggest sin CoH2 commits (and pretty much the only one it had to avoid to be a merely mediocre sequel) is the commander and lootbox fuckery. The moment you paywall multiplayer options and then introduce a grindy as fuck lootbox mechanic that might or might not get you said options you have basically shit the bed so to speak.

[LordBaal]

It speak volumens they gif CoH2 like every year and have done so only once (that I now off) the original.

Mechanichs wise is not a bad game per se. Like Jopax comments the largest flaw was that loot box crap, however being a sp minded gamer myself I couldnt care less about it, I havent played it much because a variety of reasons but being an awful game is not in the top 10.

[Dostoevsky]

No idea if it works in multiplayer (I only did singleplayer), but there were mods that effectively unlocked all the commander types. Can't recall if it was through other custom commanders or just unlocking the 'vanilla' ones, but that was nice. Modders managed to make a random map generator, too, which is pretty interesting.

Still doesn't resolve the inherent terribleness of what they did there, though. And one could argue COH2 was the midway point to DoW3, and so shares some of that taint.

On the ARPG front, Inquisitor: Martyr is 60% off on Steam. Reviews are all over the place and the gameplay videos I've seen make me rather wary, however... is $20 for the base game (or $32 including DLC that apparently can be grinded for in-game without purchasing?) reasonable? I prefer ranged combat in my ARPGs and combat that's not entirely mindless, but beyond the window dressing it's hard to tell if that would really scratch that itch.

[nenjin]

Inquisitor Martyr is.....

It's basic, as an aRPG. I can't really call the combat satisfying throughout. It's rather repetitive, your selection of abilities is fairly fixed. What you can do comes from what weapons you equip and that's like all of 4 possible attacks. You can have an alternate weapon set which brings that up to 8, plus whatever ability you get from your armor. Since you'll use the same kind of weapon and armor throughout the game, only better tiers of it, you by and large only use the same handful of abilities the whole time once you've played the game long enough to unlock the weapons/powers that you feel are cool. 

Optimization is an issue in certain parts of the game too.

The real reason to play Inquisitor Martyr IMO is because it's 40k. They clearly love 40k and did their damnedest to infuse the game with that 40k flavor, mostly successfully. There's plenty of grind to be had for new levels, unlocks on the skill tree, gear improvements, customizing your injectors for healing or buffs, and all that. For me the joy is being like "you know what? Heavy bolters are awesome, Imma gonna use a heavy bolter." As a 40k fan getting to pick and choose your loadout is about half the fun. Whether or not that loadout is actually viable is a different story.

And yeah, you can unlock a ton of cosmetics and additional content through just playing the game, which is nice. The treadmill in Martyr is significant.

If Martyr's action was more enjoyable and more varied, I'd have no real problems recommending it. At $20, I can still recommend it. Just don't expect Path of Exile or Diablo levels of aRPG refinement and variety, Martyr's core action is much more simplistic and less flowing than that, and assets get reused a bit too much for my liking which contributes to it feeling repetitive.

If you do get it, I can say with confidence that the most broken class is still Psyker by leaps and bounds.

[Dostoevsky]

Thanks. Would you say it's fine to skip paying for the extra DLC, then? (At least until/if one wants to support the devs by throwing in some extra cash.)

[nenjin]

I think? the only actual paid DLC is the Mechanicus playable class. All the other DLCs are unlocked via in game currency you earn through playing through the game.

edit

Oh. I see they've added a lot more paid DLC. I can tell you from playing the free DLC, that their expansions are not mindblowing affairs. Some dialog, some new activities that are basically the stuff you've done before, a few ways to get additional loot.

I'd absolutely skip the paid DLC for now unless you're sure you like the game. Their DLC is not, like, actual expansions you'd expect from any other aRPG.

[Dostoevsky]

Bleh - looking at the sale, it's $4.74 cheaper to get the giant pile than it is to get just the base game and the Prophecy expansion.

I usually like summoner classes in these games -- have you tried the Mechanicus? Decent enough?