Bay 12 Games Forum

go for a walk.  might as well see what happens. 

You leave your apartment, wincing at each step. The leylines leading into your neighbor's apartment seem pretty strong, but there's fewer of them. Maybe you can ask to borrow their convergence point. You make a note to ask about that later.

You go down the fourteen flights of stairs before hitting ground level, into the shitty streets below. The cleaning spirits have long ago abandoned this place, and the ground outside the apartment complex is covered in a thick layer of bird excrement. They hang around the building, taking offerings left on the windowsills, but they've long since learned to leave you alone.

Beyond the apartment is a small courtyard, the dead branches of trees heavy with the number of crows. They all stare at you as you pass by. You could swear that there's magic at work here, but nothing registers in your eye. Only the background hum of the mystic world.

You notice one leyline, though, brighter than the rest, leading from your neighbor's apartment and out into the Sprawl. The leylines connect everything. You may want to see where it goes.

You step into a main Sprawl street, splashing into the gutter as the water flows outwards. The rain spatters on your hat. Street food vendors hawk their wares to your left, and a couple of thugs gather to your right, eyeing those passing by.

The world is your oyster, if oysters hadn't gone extinct last year.

Hmm. This life will not do. I should return to the dome, and break it, free my kind so that we may rule over this city together.
But first I will need more resources.

Fly up, find this city's highest vantage point. I must obtain power! For for that I must find where power is concentrated.

You take off and soar upwards the city on one of the many thermals, rising far above the undercity. The air is cleaner up here, but the rain is omnipresent, making it hard to see. And there's always the giant ghost birds.

The giant ghost birds scare you a little. They fly in neat little lines, but you haven't been able to talk to them yet, and every time you try to get close you feel sick, and they often seem to be deliberately avoiding you. But they are big, bigger than a human. Sometimes they sleep on the undercity, and even though you've poked around them, you haven't been able to wake them up.

But even the giant ghost birds stay away from the Ghost of the Shiny Thin Cliffs. Every so often a ghost bird will perch on the shiny thin cliffs, but most of them keep very far away. Once, you saw the Ghost of the Shiny Thin Cliffs get angry and strike a ghost bird from the sky, killing it instantly, vomiting up humans that fell to their deaths.

You stay away from the Shiny Thin Cliffs, even though you're pretty sure the dome is in that direction.

The other way is towards the sprawl of the undercity. Not as shiny as the Thin Cliffs, but almost as full of ghosts, and every so often you can spot something sparkly. Especially the Street That Smells of Blood and Ghosts, though the people there don't like it when you try to talk to the ghosts.

You should probably stay out of the territory of the Murder of Many Windows, though there seems to be a lot of humans there, along with food. You don't think they want to see you there again.

Moniker: Hobo Bob
Motive: Acquire more alcohol
Implants: Bionic eyes
Inventory: Dirty clothing, bottle of alcohol, old tire iron

Your name is Hobo Bob, or Boboboh to your friends, and you wake up with a pounding headache and without any eyes.

It takes you a few minutes to remember what you were doing. Having drinks, obviously. And when you were stumbling back home, something caught your eyes. A gacha machine, filled with implants, guaranteed to have a chance at ultra-rare bleeding edge military prototypes, along with other implants, but you didn't pay attention to the others. And it came with free installation.

You groan as you remember how much you paid for the bag; it could have gotten you another three or four bottles at least. And now you're lying somewhere with a hangover, without any eyes.

Putting your hands to your face, you feel an unfamiliar piece of cool ceramic where your eyes should be. A visor, though you can't feel any lenses or sensors on its surface. Fumbling for the power switch, you turn them on.

A corpo logo pops up in your field of view. Itaratech, with angular lines. It fades out of view, and suddenly you can see.

Everything.

You can see the pedestrians walking by in the street, their implants tagged and annotated. You can see the rats in the walls, scurrying around as small streaks of orange infrared. You can see the data flowing through the air, passing from device to device, dense with encryption and protocols.

You try to find the documentation, and it's almost as if the visor reads your mind, pulling up a user guide and displaying a two-minute projection-mapped AR tridee of some corpo exec with a stylish white visor. You belatedly realize that is what is now fused to your face. A name comes into view. ITARATECH PANOPTES 6.IIe.

You understand nothing in the video, which throws around jargon like "diffraction-limited solid-state hyperoptical zoom" and "predictive pattern-matching fluid user interface design". What you do understand is that everyone in the video looks much richer and better dressed than you do. And that this visor can see anything that can be seen, and more.

You've won the jackpot, you realize. The first thought in your mind is that you could probably trade it in for a shit ton of alcohol. The second is that someone might try to pull that thing off of your face.

You pick up your trusty tire iron, and cautiously peer out of the alley (through the buildings, because you can do that now), trying to concentrate through the pounding hangover. You could really use another drink.

What do you do?

The nights are hot in Noct City.

A city of millions with the energy consumption to match, home to towering corporate arcologies pumping waste heat into the undercity, through the streets and alleys that serve as its heatsinks. From a distance, the city is cloaked in a heat shimmer, spires rising above the clouds that form engineered patterns as their tepid rain falls on the people below. From up close, there's only the daily struggle for a meager existence.

You stumble into one of the hundreds of half-rate chop shops, opaque bag in hand, and slur that you want to get it installed. You might be inebriated, and any surgeon worth their salt wouldn't operate on anyone even slightly impaired, let alone install their first implant. And any surgeon worth going to wouldn't have a gacha machine filled with blind-packed cybernetics outside their door. But you have a reason. Or perhaps extremely bad judgement.

You probably won't be coming back to this chop shop, you'll think when you're sober.

The last thing you remember before going under is the surgeon whistling a jaunty tune.

What did you get installed?

+1

Definitely a cleaner look.

Great game, cannot recommend enough, if you are at all interested it's best to get out of this thread and play it now. Plays best without spoilers.

Also since the Final Cut is fully voice acted with great voices.

I haven't had a broken raid since the last update, though I only raid occasionally.

This may be the case.  For instance, there are no keyboard cursors right now.  People generally wanted 50 keypresses to be replaced by a few mouse clicks, and I don't think there were any general proponents of the keyboard in this case.  There are some specific concerns, like with macros and stuff, but those would probably be better replaced by interactive blueprints etc. as in Factorio and etc.  I'm all for hotkeys of course, and being able to pull up various information and get things selected quickly with the keyboard, but I've been leaning against replacement cursors and haven't heard a case for them.  I've never seen a similar modern game use keyboard cursors, because it requires so many keypresses, something people have hated and mocked about DF for many years.  And once we admit the mouse at all, wealth display being a hover etc. isn't a concern (although arguably it works as a hotkey for speed purposes.)  But perhaps mouse use is a barrier generally for you - I haven't really heard from the keyboard-only side since they were the only side we'd been supporting to this point.

Hotkeys are still implemented; I think the issue is with the on-screen cursor, so the [query, task, look] selectors, along with building locations/sizes, designations, military orders, zone designations and give/take stockpile linkages. And possibly every single menu (I didn't see a "currently selected item" cursor in any of the menu screenshots).

I am very much a proponent of continuing to allow the game to be completely controlled by the keyboard. I think the keyboard controls should still be implemented (umkl, everything else that's strange and unintuitive), but I think it's okay if there's no tooltips for those? especially if we're expecting new players to use the mouse.

For the Steam Release, this implies reimplementing the cursor, and also changing the menus to show which menu item is currently being selected.

Though personally I'm likely going to mainly play the Classic release, so I would be okay with having the Steam Release have a mouse requirement, as long as Classic can still be played solely with the keyboard. I wouldn't like it, but it'd be okay for me.

Macros are similar; they don't make sense if you can't control everything from the keyboard, but they are obscenely flexible when you can control everything with the keyboard, though I usually use them for things that could possibly be improved with quality-of-life changes (saving military uniforms, designating active/inactive skills in embark profiles, multi-z level blueprints)