Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Chiefwaffles]

I think the best thing RTS devs can do is make their games singleplayer-focused. Not only have MOBAs completely eaten RTS games' lunch in terms of (especially competitive) multiplayer, but I just... can't get into playing PvP multiplayer in RTS games.

The main problem as I see it is the gulf in play styles and skill levels. Casual players and up playing a completely different game than those skilled in the multiplayer scene.

[dragdeler]

Fair enough, online they were never that much fun to me either... I have a decent skill (or rather talent?) level like bring an unknown rts and I'd win the first few rounds with my friends usually. But online? Forget it, that stuff was allways giga-ultra competitive. Then again I didn't think in terms of meta 15 years ago, like ever, just try to grow real fast and thats it. But yeah no anyway, agreed.


Oh and I guess if you can pause it one could technically nitpick at the "realtime" aspect. But like, total war is half rts, or is not?




You gave me an idea, how about you remove some of the stress by taking inspirations from moba: so like a game where your units autospawn and are in sort of a stalemate with the ennemy, to remove some of the micromanaging burdens, but then you'd have some sort of squad based combat, a bit like xcom very tactical with covers and some verticality, but mostly realtime, where it is decided what spawnpoints are lost and where new ones are created. Basically you'd have to lay out the maps in such a way that the squads who are trying to affect the gameboard, are constantly harassed by the streams of disposable units, maybe the aforementionned verticality is the key. Sounds more like a moba than an rts until you realize that it's not two teams with a bunch of players each, but rather each players manages his own faction. Idk maybe it isn't that great of an idea... But I really feel that it wouldn't take thaaat much to make a somewhat innovative rts title, that's also fun to play.


Or here is another take on the third dimension in rts: how about we mix the spor early game, with thandor and... lootboxes. So like top down view, except it's the sideview of a liquid, evrything is transluscent to a degree and you move trhough the liquid by scrolling the mouse. Your units are like simple organisms that you equip with traits you find on the map (in the soup) but the traits get randomised and slowly evolve over generations.

[Frumple]

I mean, the second one is just a squad based AoS -- there were a few of those back in WC3 days, and I've seen at least one commercial attempt -- with some multi-faction stuff going on. If you go back to the old custom map stuff instead of the DotA fellating moba junk, you'd be in comfortable territory for that kind of experimentation. It'd be a step back in the right direction

[Akura]

Someone made a VR mod for Half Life 2.

[dragdeler]

So this weekend it was cold and grey and rainy, some truely western european weather, finally, I enjoyed it a lot. And I wanted to play something to reinforce that mood, browsing through my epic library I stumbled on Vampyr that I got for free I don't remember when.




I kinda want to like this game but I keep being bothered by stuff... It's idk, it's like they had decent writers, but not much else? Like the first 20 minutes I kept getting disturbed in my immersion by things like:

Why are there candles lit in an abondened house.
Why does the game tell me my choices matter but forces me to kill in the toturial before I can open the doors.
How is he controlling both speed a direction on that boat with a single "steering wheel".

I had to plug in a controller to be able to find how I swap weapons and parry, but Y axis inversion affects both mouse and controller, so I can't even hotswap between control schemes without having to open the options. And there is a lot of small corridors where the camera isn't fun at all to manage via controller. Also it feels kinda console'ish.



On the other hands it does have some real vibe, and visuals. The voice acting seems nice enough.

[Robsoie]

The  "choice matters" is only related to the many NPC you'll see, the other type of human you'll meet (the ones you can't talk to) are all there to kill you or be killed by you without consequence.

The most hilarious for me in Vampyr was when i had taken the blood of many NPC, leading the character eyes to change a lot (black eyeballs with red iris) with lots of apparent vascular oddities on his face and around the yes (making it even more vampire-looking than some of the older vampire you'll meet), and none talking to him seemed to notice there's really something wrong with him

[Niveras]

Tried Tower of Fantasy.

I can hardly speak about the gameplay because ToF's UI alone is filtering me. There are a dozen different menus that you cannot access from each other. Some information isn't even accessed from the default "menu" system but rather from buttons (that don't look like buttons) attached to your minimap. There are multiple "premium" currencies that are spent on their individual... things (I don't know the correct term, but I wouldn't call them banners). You not only upgrade your weapons and "matrixes" (slotted into weapons with set bonuses, acting like GI's simpler artifact system) but also a full set of gear for your own character (helmets, bracers, legguards, etc). You have mounts and relics. All these items require their own (multiple) individual garbage to upgrade. Relics are various tools, mostly puzzle solving or traversal related, but you can only equip 2 at a time and they are complete pain in the ass to switch, especially when you only need it to solve 1 puzzle and then switch back to what you normally have in the slot.

The UI is clearly designed for mobile and its an obnoxious, if not outright hostile, experience on PC. I don't know if I'm a boomer and all this is normal now or if they're doing some kind of psychological manipulation tactic that I'm too old to just accept. Given it is, after all, a gacha game, I'm inclined to believe the schizophrenic UI is intentional.

I really quite like the concept behind the games, in terms of the content and world and how you explore and hit things up mostly randomly/naturally as you explore, and get resources to upgrade your equipment from different content. I really think I prefer this kind of item system - where you can commonly find items that will fit the build you want to make, and then upgrade them to the point that they are viable for the content you want to do - versus having to constantly upgrade to completely new items and shuffle stats, as is typical in an ARPG. The downside is that they spend all this effort on the world but then focus the endgame on some "waves of damage sponges in a square room disconnected from the rest of the world" that are so bone-dead simple you can't even call it procedurally generated.

I haven't played Genshin Impact outside of maybe a week after its global PC release, and while I equally had problems with the game and its UI, they felt more like boneheaded inefficiencies that result from a touchscreen-first interface design rather than the "this is deliberate" vibe I get from ToF.

This is, of course, not even getting to the gacha aspects. I really wish there were private server alternatives or some western studio could develop a game mostly like this with a more conventional payment model (i.e. one-time purchase + big expansions). These games make billions per quarter, to say nothing of per year, and only invest a fraction back into development. It should be possible to create a game with very similar content and a much less predatory profit model, if only the studio were willing to make handfuls of cash instead of buckets.

Spoiler: irrelevant bug that annoyed me (click to show/hide)

Dialogue in general. There's a bunch of weirdness with the dialogue and cutscenes. Characters snap back to their default pose at the end of their voice lines, rather than allowing the animation to complete and resetting "naturally". Several cutscenes cut away to a different perspective, but only for like half or 1 second - took quick to take in what they were trying to show - leaving you to wonder why cut away in the first place. The text scroll for unvoiced lines cannot be skipped individually, despite this being possible for voiced lines, leading to a lot of secondary quests being tedious to sit through (sometimes you can skip the entire dialogue, but the button takes several seconds to appear and is not always present; the delay is unrelated to the length of the dialogue). Unvoiced lines are commonly timed poorly for the english translation, leading to text that moves to the next line before you're given a chance to read it (sometimes even before the scroll completed).

[Robsoie]

Some question about the difficulty progression in Ark on The Island game world.

I remember +/- 5 years ago my nephew showed me that game on his console, starting in a "easy" zone in the south of the map he was +/- only a couple of days in his run.
But things went to hell very quickly, while he was cutting some tree a tall dino that looked like a big raptor (no idea of the name) showed up and ran after him, he explained to me that was very bad and ran away over a hill only to run into a pack of at least small dino that shoot some green stuff that made the view very blurry while they were gnawing at the character. 

And before the character died there was a raptor that was coming too at some distance. 
That seemed hilariously hard and very FUN! especially for an "easy" zone.   

Flash forward to now, after toying with the current Ark from the epic weekly freebie, i'm now at +/- 13 days in and while i started in the same zone as i remember seeing my nephew playing, i don't see any of that happening.

So far the dinos i see are passive to me, the only threatening ones i found were 2 (not in a pack, each on different days) of those dinos that spit green goo , but everything else isn't really trying to bother me (out of that diplodocus that loves to walk all over my base since a few days...).
Only when swimming in the river i got attacked at some point by a manta that my 2 tamed armored turtles quickly killed, but even the many ancient dolphins (that dino name escapes me sorry) seems just happy with approaching me in the hope i feed them.  I saw some big shark-like ones a few times but it was in deep water and a long distance.
 
So i guess through the years they probably changed the difficulty balance. But then how does the difficulty progression work now in ark ?
- are zone defined for specific dino type/difficulty that will never walk toward another zone and so unless i move to another zone the difficulty is just "capped"
- is it a matter of difficulty progressing with how many days spent in a zone and so threat will start to appear at some point ?
- are packs of dinos still a thing (i don't think i saw dino groups with more than 2 dino inside, out of some annoying birds that comes in 4 or 5) ?

[Akura]

It's been a while since I've played, but I think there were some kind of raptor-like dino in the south area. I know it was something that kept me towards to western side of the starting zone. I also remember there may have been actual velociraptors on one of the islands in the south.

[Robsoie]

It looks like you're right :

After a few more days passed, and still not seeing anything new in my region, i decided it was time moving away to seek the challenge of the game because at that point it looked more and more than in current Ark region are difficulty "capped" (featuring then their own set of dinos that correspond to the region difficulty level with no higher difficulty dino ever having a chance to come or spawn in easy regions) and not time related

Meaning all the time i spend making my base being useless as no dangerous dino would come.

Took my boat and decided to explore relatively far in the south west of my region.
After some time following the river that is between the mainland and the big southwestern island, i saw some funny water battle between what looked like tall ducks (those guys that leave those nice and rare "Organic Polymer" as loot from skinning them, the material that is usefull in crafting the ghillie suit armor) and inflated pirhanas

And it looks like the ducks actually had the upper hands as i started to see several pirhana corpse floating.
I had to help those ugly fishes, not because i like them but because the "Organic Polymer" from the ducks is something good to fetch.

Resuming course, after more time i ran into what looked like a raptor but slightly smaller, so no idea what it was called, but it was running on the land without a care for me or the other animals around. Then more interesting i spotted a big (well slightly bigger than a raptor) threat, a carnotaurus that looked much meaner and bigger than i thought.  And that guy really meant business because it killed several small river banks animals (no idea what they are, they exist around my base sometime , some gecko/lizard type thing that are a bit bigger than a dodo)

As i had a lot of tranq arrows, was on my boat , i decided maybe it could be a good idea to try to tame that ugly big bad for additional protection on future away explorations.
After more than 6 arrows, the thing simply didn't stop, it jumped into the water, swim to my boat, jumped on it, followed me after i jumped in the river trying to save my life while still shooting arrow.

In the end the carnotorus probably had a dozen of tranq arrow in his head and throat, but he never slowed down and destroyed my character, i managed to last for a while as i had upgraded my health a lot but still got eaten.

It was a fun adventure coming back to my corpse and boat, using my big turtle as a boat to avoid long walking time

[Akura]

You know, I don't think I've ever tamed a water creature I could ride on. Definitely tamed a pterodactyl or something like that, and was able to fly. That was fun.

Fun fact about Ark: the T-Rex has a special attack that specifically makes you shit yourself.




In a different game, the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, I came across this in the Sector 5 orphanage:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I distinctly remember there being some old and probably obscure Flash animation starring Cactaur and Tonberry. I can't think of any other reason they'd be drawn together like that. I haven't been able to find it again, but the only place I've looked was Flashpoint Infinity's animation list which almost certainly doesn't go back that far(not true; I've seen some oldies there).

[Robsoie]

Wow, that remake sure look visually different from the FF7 i remember playing when i had a playstation
Checking youtube for "Cactuar and Tonberry"  there are a lot of animations/videos featuring those, i had no idea that was some kind of popular meme at some point.

On Ark, finally reached the level i can make a saddle for Pteranodon, and to my surprise it only took 2 tranq arrow to bring one down for taming time, and the taming was rather fast.

I guess having "single player" checked in the hundred of options available really shorten a lot of the waiting time, leveled the dino a bit to increase his weight capacity so i didn't needed to ride it without anything in inventory to be able to take off.
My big turtle is locked in a fight to the death at sea, a couple of hundred meters of my base against some kind of shark, it's been several days they're duking it out, but from what i see underwater it's because they have a hard time to turn around, so they're locked in a battle circling around each other without being able to hit each other
Can't help as it's taking place too deep for my character, will have to forge a crossbow (as it can shoot underwater) to replace my nice bow.

I also completed my guillie suit, it is the most usefull suit for the temperature in the region, as the other type of armor either protect vs heat but are negatively weak to cold or protect vs cold but are negatively weak to heat, while the guillie suit protection vs temperature is mediocre against both cold and heat, so it allows to move around without having either "it's too cold" or "it's too hot" constantly everytime you enter an are with a slight heat or a slight cold air.

edit:

- are packs of dinos still a thing (i don't think i saw dino groups with more than 2 dino inside, out of some annoying birds that comes in 4 or 5) ?

replying to myself :

Spoiler: oh yeah they still exist (click to show/hide)

On one of my away exploration, i discovered a therizinosaurus (had to google to find what the hell that ugly big thing was) as the creature was actually stuck into a couple of tree, and the wiki mentionning that while it's mostly passive once angered it's easily as dangerous as a t-rex, that was a perfect opportunity for tranq arrow.
After a bunch of them, the beast fell unconscious, ready for taming time !

Good i had checked an ark wiki to find what the hell that monster was, because i would have never thought it was actually herbivore judging from its look, meaning all the meat i was carrying around was totally useless to tame that clawed terror, forcing me to go quickly fetch berries around.

And i didn't noticed before, but coming from the hilly jungle a large pack of raptor rushed at ful speed toward me, leaving me no chance at all.
It was FUN! to get my corpse inventory back

[Iduno]

I noticed an old early access game that I have called Osiris: New Dawn. Originally it was a game version of the book/movie The Martian. Now it looks like a No Man's Sky knock-off. Does anyone know the game, and can let me know how accurate that description is?

[Akura]

I haven't played it in years, and there was some severe drama involving the developer around that time. I don't remember what happened exactly, but development stopped for a while until a few months ago. I would say it's more of a less-creative Empyrion than NMS, though. At least back then. Now, I don't know. Apparently, it's getting close to full release.

[Robsoie]

Some fun Ark log.

After taking my boat and sailing from my south western base (buit on the rocky elements near the small waterfall) and following the western coast i arrived to rather chilly icy waters with lot of floating ice chunk around. 
There was an island with a huge mean allosaurus duking it out against 2 ... i have no idea what it is but there were very small varan-like but with spike all over their backs, though the spikes may have been hairy stuff i don't know it was far and the models were probably using their distant level of detail for performance.
To my surprise, the 2 litte buggers murdered the allosaurus that was trying to eat them

But no way for me to get close to check what those dinos were, i valued my character health after such long trip.

Then at +/- 50 meters, i spotted an ice chunk floating , and on top of it 2 allosaurus that had apparently spawned on each other, meaning they were completely stuck, unable to move.

unable to move ? oh oh perfect time for me then to try a capture, my trusty crossbow and the lots of tranq arrows started to rain on the beasts, took the whole lot of them to bring one of those allosaurus unconscious, but the other didnt fell to sleep unfortunately, so i had to switch to my normal arrow to kill it (took a lot though) fortunately it was still stuck in place instead of trying to swim in chilly water to eat me.

After using the bunch of meat i had in stock the taming completed and i was the proud owner of a happy bloodthirsty allosaurus !

And i understood why the little buggers murdered the solo allosaurus, because the beast i tamed was only level 1 !
So i guess the game spawned some very underleveled allosaurus pack (they always come in pack of 3 from what i read in the wiki) in the middle of a bunch of high level weaklings, explaining i guess why the lonely allosaurus was destroyed like that.