Bay 12 Games Forum

What Toady said about unknown ends to fortresses and then about mosquitoes jigged out my memory of Paestum!  It'd be great if that sort of thing could come out of the game, one day: Paestum was a Roman settlement made at the bottom of a wooded hill.  Naturally, the Romans deforested the place to use for their hypocausts— so the rain that the trees used to soak up slid down the hill and made the place into a marsh, bringing a bunch of mosquitoes around until the town was completely wiped out by malaria.  It was discovered hundreds of years later, intact but in the middle of a swamp!  Now that sort of thing would make losing fun.

Zorkmids!  Alternatively, Cyzicenes or tetradrachms, depending on who I'm talking to.  :p

So, err, what does the petvalue affect?  It doesn't seem to say on the wiki's pet page.  Are dwarves happier with more valuable pets, or is it to do with how much you can sell them for?

The game just sounds bizarre now.  It doesn't much sound like you get to choose anything but the placement of prestige doodads.  Sounds a lot like The Movies only without the movies... :p

I'm of the opinion things haven't changed much from their original course.  Sure, there are some games that sacrifice plot and the like for uppity graphics and repetitive gameplay (CoD comes to mind); but there always have been games with poor plots like that. 

The only reason there are more of these about, as far as I can see, is that the target audience has shifted.  Nowadays game-playing is a lot more widespread and games like CoD are aimed at impressionable young people, who couldn't care less if the plot is bullshit: they're only playing for five minutes of distilled glory.  Please don't shoot me down for raging at the yoofs; I am one myself after all.

I do disagree with their choices... but I still think there are games filling our niche too; you just have to look harder, as in the case of DF and other indie games.

I think asking so much of games like WoW is pushing it a bit.  WoW has an admirably well-made plot for its size, even if they do seem to sully it by mixing in idiotic manga storylines or making stuff up purely so they can release expansions on time. 

They aren't aiming solely to please RPG players: more players who'll grind or PvP lots for a tenner a month so they can get the happy feelings they crave.  I don't look down on people like that; I'm just suggesting why gameplay may be a more major focus for mainstream games these days.  Gaming's much more mainstream these days: you might do better comparing today's World of Warcraft to yesteryear's Dig Dug.

Nevertheless you can actually roleplay in MMOs (I do), which is more than you can say for Baldur's Gate (sure you can play a role, but that's not actual roleplay in the DnD sense: it takes two to tango etc.).

Why remove a fun feature?

EDIT: Seriously, have these people played DKII?  And then having to micromanage the boss to get things done?

Presumably they want to make theirs unique and not wholly plagiarism.  Frankly though, I would prefer it if it was wholesale plagiarism but with updated graphics...  Chris (of their forums) has said that important things will need to be done by the player's avatar himself which sounds extremely dodgy.  It sounds like a design choice they'll regret in the future: this sort of thing never works out.

I dunno, I don't mind a lack of graphics, as per ASCII games, but a sort of mid-way is sort of hideous some times.  The screenshot you've posted in this thread makes the graphics look terrible (for today's graphics).  Usually I don't much mind but it must be said it looks sub-standard at the moment, which is pretty bad for a strategy/city-building game.  Anno managed it. 

But I did like Stronghold though, back in the day... even if it was a little silly.  Tried the map editor?  It's not paused, so if you set people down they automatically start attacking each other x)

Quote from: Captain Alchatron on August 07, 2010, 10:56:29 am

Europa 1400: The Guild.  What else?!  Pity you can't find it anywhere nowadays, though.

I found The Guild to be extremely tedious and boring, actually.

Impossible!  The Guild is like... the Deus Ex of sims.  Rubbish graphics, lacking in realism, and hardly any plot, but it manages to be insanely good.  Politics is the Guild's forte, as is trying to get things in runs (how many years can you get Count in, for instance). 

And the multiplayer is brilliant, if hilariously buggy: I had one game where my brother, playing over LAN, saw all of the male NPCs in my game as women and vice versa, so when he married a woman it turned out to be a man and he could never have kids...  Bizarre.