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[lastverb]

Depends on which x-com you are looking for, everything but enemies, lack of isometric view and tiles in battle is xcom-like in this. But for me even the real time combat of x-com apocalypse was better than new-com 2 actions per turn. New-com system would definitely not work for missions bigger than 30-40 units total on map, not even talking about in combat at once.

[Parsely]

That actually looks pretty fun.

[Folly]

Fractured

Currently in kickstarter. As of this posting, 109k funded, 8k remaining to meet their goal, 3 days until the deadline.

Fractured is an MMO ARPG sandbox, which seeks to set itself apart by making 3 seperate worlds inhabited by three different races, the humans, demons, and furries. Furry world is carebear mode, with no PvP and minimal penalties on death. Demon world is full PvP and full player looting. Human world is a balance, with PvP enabled, but limited looting and tracking of criminals. Many crafting materials are exclusive to certain worlds, so trade between the worlds is required.

Fractured also promises to recycle a bunch of old ideas, such as entirely player-crafted equipment, spells that interact with eachother and the environment, player-built towns, skill-based character growth, and food/clothing/sleep requirements. Some of these ideas have worked well in other games, some...not so well.

The thing I find most dubious about this is the projected timetable. Alpha is expected to be in 2019, beta in 2020, and full release in 2021. That's a long wait for a game that looks like it's already in a playable state.

[Folly]

First a note from my above post, Fractured met it's goal at the last minute with a sudden $5000 jump in the donations. I would not be at all surprised if the dev's finished it off themselves...but meh. Funding for their extra goals will continue on their website.


Anyway, today Steam recommended Rend for me. Early Access currently priced at $30.
A very brief look into the game, it appears to be Planetside with a Norse-Fantasy motif and PvE elements mixed in with the PvP, fort-building elements, and gameplay cycles lasting roughly 6 weeks after which one of the three factions is declared winner and everything resets. Some character progress is carried over to the next cycle, others start over from scratch. Feedback is very positive, with particular note of highly active development team who update regularly and actually join in games with the players.

All of this sounds very much interesting to me, and the only thing stopping me from diving right in is the fact that Fortnite, Project Gorgon, No Man's Sky, and a slew of mobile games are really leaving me with no daylight hours to spare, and I would have to give up at least one of them before starting something new. Still I am tempted...

[Folly]

Chrono Break

[Frumple]

That, ser and/or madam and/or other, is no blurb.

... it's also not a game. Probably the wrong thread on like every possible count.

[Kagus]

... it's also not a game. Probably the wrong thread on like every possible count.

I'm not sure if it deserves its own thread though, so there's that.

[Zangi]

I'll say, it is fine here.  Mostly cause its own thread would've died after the first few posts anyways, if not smoldering in some argument about useless semantics.

Anyways, I've been kinda playing Phantom Doctrine.  In short, it is a spy game, with overworld map similar-ish to NuCom and turned based battles/stealth. 
You send agents out and about to check out suspicious activity and thwart enemy agent actions/lay the ground work for missions, usually to eliminate or capture enemy agents. 
As for the missions, you start in stealth and have run of the place till you screw up and get spotted in the wrong place or doing something suspicious in front of others.  Once you gear your people out with silencers, it becomes much easier to do stealth the missions.

Once a mission goes hot, fog of war is basically lifted for the enemy AI.  If you can see them, they can see you and shoot you from straight across the map if they have a long range weapon like a rifle/lmg/sniper rifle. 
So the traditional tactic of taking cover next to a window or something that has a wide view over everything will get the character shot many times.  It also makes overwatch harder to properly set-up, because the AI can and will shoot before they get into the overwatch kill field, unless they have short range weapons, usually not the case, usually not the ones you want to kill first.

[Mephisto]

Farm Together. Plant crops/trees. Buy/feed livestock. Create fishing ponds.

It feels like a mobile game with the microtransactions removed. Crops take time to grow and can only be planted in certain seasons. Trees are planted fully-grown and can be harvested once in the relevant season (apples can be harvested 4x a year, lemons only in the fall, for example). Most structures build instantly when you've got the required resources but houses take tons of time and money - the treehouse thing I'm currently constructing takes 15k gold and 16-ish hours for each of the four stages.

And then there's the "together" part. You can take your world online and let other people come tool around. There's apparently a big Discord server and Reddit community at the moment. They're focusing on growing cursed pumpkins for the Halloween event.

There's even evidence of micro currency - you can do all of the tilling, planting, watering, and harvesting by yourself for free (minus the 10 gold per till and whatever the seeds cost) or you can hop on your tractor and do a 3x3 area for the cost of a bit of gas. Gas is free but you've got to fill up at filling stations. These generate 1 gas per second for the low-tier one or 3/s for the higher one. And the second micro currency - when your farm reaches certain levels, you can unlock another big plot of land using some quantity of gems. I've not had an issue with gems yet - you get them for completing quests, selling resources at specific buildings, or growing specific crops.

Despite the apparent mobile nature, I haven't detected a shop of any kind.

[nenjin]

Playing the new Call of Cthulhu game that came out yesterday.

Pretty good, so far. I didn't play LA Noire, or any Telltale games, but that's essentially what this is, even if it doesn't do either style as fully or effectively as one might hope.

It plays very much like the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. There's next to no action; it's all talking to people, discovering clues and walking around the dank scenery. There's a vague RPG skill system that mostly boils down to "what can you notice, what can you learn."

The story is an original though, as original as any story using the Cthulhu Mythos can be. It's part murder mystery, part occult investigation.

The graphics and atmosphere are pretty great, except for the character's faces which I find kind of ghastly looking.

While the game so far has almost no stealth or combat sections, when compared to Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of Earth, it's also a lot less janky or bogged down by these elements. At first blush one thought the wound system in DCoE was neat, but in practice it was tedious nonsense that just slowed the game down. CoC 2018 doesn't have any of that. It's got a dirt simple inventory system and limited interactivity with the environment or characters. (There's no Jump button, for example.) While that doesn't sound great and maybe it isn't, it really does put the game's focus on the environments and the exploration. And while none of these things are truly all that deep (there's a Mass Effect style dialog system, where options can be added or removed based on what you know or what you've learned, areas look great but are basically just rooms with things to look at an examine and the occasional hidden object to find or puzzle to solve), it works. Especially if you're going in expecting a detective story first and foremost.

All that and it's by Cyanide Studios. I sort of swore after Bloodbowl I wouldn't buy any more of their games but I didn't really research this before buying it. S'alright though, I don't see anything egregious in CoC 2018 that makes me regret giving them money for it.

Really I'm just stoked to be playing another CoC game where I don't know what's going to happen. DCoE was a great experience to play through an existing CoC story.....but having read and re-read Mythos stories for years, it's a real treat to play a game with a detailed story where they clearly give a shit about it, and I don't know what's going to happen next.

[JimboM12]

took a trip through the steam mines and found a potential gem:

Outpost Zero!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/677480/

its this survival sandbox game where you are a robot sent to claim and harvest a planet for this megacorp. there are robobandits as well and hostile wildlife. to help you in this hostile world, you can make a number of helper drones and assign them to do things.

heres the awesome part; it actually works and you can see them run off to do the thing. ask them to help build? you can just place the skeleton and the little eyebot helper will run over and help build it with its zappy multitool. ask them to harvest? you can set what you want them to collect and they'll run off to harvest the nearest sources of it and bring it to the nearest AI-allowed storage box. you can set what gets stored in each box and whether the AI can access it or not so you can save things you dont want used. with this it's easy (if a bit tedious if you're a neat freak) to manage the resource collection for your ai helpers. this includes a simple input/output pipe system that lets you use remote harvester buildings that can pump their harvests into these pipes to bring them right to your base. its extremely finicky but once you get the hang of it, its very useful. i recently unlocked nuclear reactors and i have 2 uranium drills pumping uranium from their distant fields right to a box near the generators. pretty damn cool. whats cooler is my closer iron drills is hand hauled by a helper who on the side also keeps my generators running.

once you get set up, its real easy to collect insane amounts of resources that the robobandits want to take. you'll get raided every once in a while, i haven't tweaked the settings yet but at the default level they're kinda easy once you have a few helpers and a gun.

lots of potential. endgame sucks as usual but im playing singleplayer, in a serious MP game im sure there could be some cool war moments when your corp fights another corp with all your wardrones in tow. the reviews are mixed, of course, but i haven't had any of those issues other than some AI issues with my helpers (they do get stuck but i planned for this so it happens less).

[JimboM12]

das double post!

its not out yet but i was watching one of my favorite streamers who got a beta testing key for an upcoming roguelike/stationbuilder: Genesis Alpha One!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/712190/Genesis_Alpha_One/

i can't talk much for it but that idea sounds so legit and even the small amount of gameplay i saw looks intriguing for someone as addicted to combat builders as me.

[Zangi]

Alright, this does look legitimately interesting. 
Depends if going into FPS mode is optional during combat or not.  (In a not really a choice if it is between taking unacceptable random losses and total win.)

[Kagus]

So it would appear that the failed Kickstarter project HellSign (formerly Hellhunter[or something]) has, after one of the sketchiest development cycles I've ever seen, made it to Steam Early Access.

They've added a new trailer to go with the launch of the game, and it still reuses some of the exact same clips that they've been recycling since the game's inception. At least it was mostly new footage, but that's still pretty hilarious.

Judging from reviews, they've actually managed to make a real game, one that can even be played... Which, I have to say, vastly exceeds my expectations for the project. I fully expected them to simply vanish in a puff of nothingness, especially considering the multiple years they've spent making and "re-imagining" this game have resulted in zero progress updates through its entire process. I legitimately didn't think they had anything to show beyond those prerecorded clips.

It's changed a bit from its initial outset, and seems to be a bit more focused on story and character personalities than the original "do procedural stuff, don't die" ethos indicated. You play as GRUFFY MCSPIT, real name "Johnny Dice", who woke up on the wrong side of the gravel pit this morning and seems to have stolen Crocodile Dundee's hat. There's even a cute little cutscene in the trailer where he eats a balanced breakfast of PILLS HERE!, so I feel like he's got an interesting and complex backstory that builds up into the multifaceted individual he is today.

But that's not important, let's shoot ghosts. Promotional images show off all sorts of actual equipment you can play inventory tetris with, so that's cool (no really, I like having a variety of different things to customize kit with. I'm a hopeless packrat). Different scopes, flares, a gas can, you can even buy accessories like a bottle of whiskey or insoles for your boots. And weapons! Different guns, weapon mods, ammunition types including specialized rounds for dealing with... dealing with... oh god, they didn't actually-...?

Yes. They did. Underworld's curse of stupidity lives on.


Ammo box:
9x19 Ultra-Violet
Ammunition designed to release small bursts of UV light upon impact.



I give up.

EDIT: Wait, no, Johnny Dice appears to be someone else, the pictured conversation box just made it look like you're him. A different screenshot showing inventory management seems to place your name as Jack Steel, which is much more reasonable.

[Kagus]

^{Acknowledging my double-post and continuing on shamelessly...}
SAVAGE: The Shard of Gosen

Just... Just watch the trailer.