Bay 12 Games Forum

What has been added to the game in the past two to three months?  Or is there some kind of changelog I can look at for the experimental version?

More that fanfiction has raised my standard of quality for literature.  Despite the general opinion being that it lowers it. 

Forgive me if this has been mentioned before, but I hate QTE final bosses. I really hate it. I want to fight them with my skills, not with my ability to press a button. It really pisses me off when a game does something like that.

The only QTE final boss I ever enjoyed fighting was whoever it was at the end of Warhammer 40k: Space Marine.  Mainly because the final fight is still pretty challenging, and the QTE scene is incredibly brutal and satisfying.  Might have been nice to face him one on one, but the fight could have also ended up being really annoying. 

Blue tinting

The entire game seems to be tinted blue! I have seen it come up more recently in a number of modern games, such as Medieval Engineers and Besieged. I think it has something to do with the physically based rendering and the sky colour (some sort of fake GI?), but regardless of realism (and I doub't that that's realistic, RL certainly doesn't look that blue to me when I look out the window) it still looks bad and makes everything look flat. It doesn't help that my screen already has a nasty blue tint to it (yay, early LED backlit screens!), so everything ends up incredibly blue tinted. I'm so sick of the colour blue.

The only game I can think of that is tinted blue is Mass Effect 1.

New Xcom is a good example of a casualised - sorry, streamlined - game. There`s nothing wrong with tweaking the original, but when the major drive in development is not depth & complexity but "accessibility", "new audiences" &  "quarterly profit" then the final product will always suffer.

And if the title in question is not a major disaster it`s much easier for gamers to rationalise away - quite often, like exemplified by Lightningfalcon above in a sensible and convincing manner. Which does not change the fact it`s still a variant of post-purchase rationalisation and the reality is sadly different.

Other examples of great on surface but ultimately disappointing games: Deus Ex:HR, new Shadowrun Returns, Wasteland 2

I was also going to add a large bit about how Xenonauts was able to modernize it without sacrificing everything, but my hand was getting tired.  The existence of Xenonauts is basically the reason why I can look at new XCOM and accept it how it is.  When I want small scale tactical combat with flanking manuevers, I play new XCOM.  When I want larger squad based tactics and actual strategic planning, I play Xenonauts.  Also whenever I want that air combat music. 

     In my opinion, casual elements are whatever removes mechanics from a game for the sake of appealing to a wider audience, or just a lack of gameplay mechanics in general.  For an example, I'll use XCOM and Command and Conquer. 
     In the original XCOM, you controlled a large set of soldiers, had a varying amount of turn units for each soldier per turn that averaged at around 50, a door of pure, unforgiving pain at the beginning of each mission, and a geoscape where the strategic battle played out in. In the new XCOM, you could only have up to six soldiers in a mission, you had up to two actions that could be taken per turn for each soldier, and a simplified version of the geoscape from the original.  How much of each of these changes is making the game more casual?  A max of six soldiers compared to the original twenty is a massive drop.  But, whenever I play the original, I rarely used all twenty at once.  I would almost always use about a third to a half of my space for tanks.  So for the Skyranger I would have ten soldiers and a tank, while for the Avenger I would have twelve soldiers and two tanks.  And even then I wouldn't use them all, , and the people I was using would be spread over a much wider area, operating my men in small squads.  Meanwhile, in the new XCOM, you almost always use all your soldiers, and they are almost always working together, only occasionally being split up on the lower difficulties.  So instead of removing complexity, you are mostly just changing the scale of the battle, while making the individual soldiers more valuable. 
     Next you had the turn units.  On one hand, with only two actions, there is a lot less that can be done.  You either move, move and do an action, or do an action.  But really, what are you going to do with 60 TUs?  Not really much will be different, but now you have to spend a minute crunching numbers to check if you will have exactly enough to run over, throw a grenade, and try to get to cover.  So there you are mainly sacrificing a small amount of extra mechanics for a much more streamlined experience.
Then you have your delivery into battle.  In the original, you dedicated at least one third of your troops to getting shot as they stormed down the platform, giving the rest of your squad time to get to the area surrounding the skyranger, making them a perfect target for grenades and blaster bombs.  In the new XCOM, you start the mission on the ground already, most of the time with no ememies in site.  However, instead of being a case of purposely removed mechanics, this is a symptom of a lower scale of combat and a change in TU functionality, since losing just one or two soldiers straight off at the beginning would be a heavy loss. 
     Finally, you have the geoscape.  From what I understand of the developers reasoning behind their simplification of it, most people only built extra bases for fighter coverage, so replacing extra base functionality with satellites was an acceptable thing to do.  This is the only major change that can truly be called casualition, because there are entire mechanics that have been removed to make it easier for new people to play.  In the original, you had to make the choice between placing all your eggs in one well defended basket, or spending the extra money to diversify your bases, allowing a total loss of your main base to be recoverable, at the cost of more spent money and extra management.  The loss of this functionality basically renders the geoscape to an issue of money, with finding the best balance between satellites, panic, and fighters.
So, overall, most of what was done was changing the core mechanics while still keeping most of the complexity, with a few exceptions.  However, when you get to Command and Conquer Four, what happened was mostly a loss of mechanics.  Having not actually played the game, I can't comment on the specifics.  But in early C&C games, you had a heavy emphasis on base building.  In the few MP games I played with my friends, along with in single player, you would have multiple bases.  Some would be large, sprawling bases that can do everything, some would be secondary bases, some would be just resource outposts, and some would be for being a dick to the other player by use of artillery and bomber emplacements.  However, C&C4 got rid of this, replacing it with some kind of Crawler shit that did all your resource management for you.  This gets rid of an entire field of mechanics, replacing it with something completely different, all in the name of making the game accessibly to a completely different audience.
So, TL;DR, a casual game has a loss or lack of complexity with nothing to make up for it.  There are no complex maneuvers that can be discovered or practiced that allow for a longer amount of gameplay, no stories that can be told, and no deep insight into the human condition that is gained. 

I still don't understand the Monty Hall problem.  It's not that I doubt it - I've followed it step by step and sure enough switching is better.  I understand it's better to basically pick a door *not* to open, since that gives a 2/3 chance of success.  It still seems really weird that switch accomplishes that, mechanically.

Think of it this day.  Instead of three doors, you have one hundred.  You pick one, and the host opens 98 doors.  Your door still has a 1% chance to be correct, but the one other door still there has a 99% chance. 

Correction- We know the fist stanza of our anthem by heart. Ain't nobody know the rest of it.