What Video Games Have You Been Playing VII: The Real Ending is Locked Behind a Paywall

[aimeeandbeatles]

It's also a really badly optimized game. It stutters even on high-end machines and has a pretty bad memory leak issue that I believe never got fixed.

On the other hand, Sims 2 has a tendency to corrupt the neighbourhoods if you look at them funny, and the Sims 4...well, it runs okay, I'm told. But do you really want to go down that rabbit hole?

 

[cardgame]

I got Darkest Hour to work on my PC finally

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Chaos at the local greengrocer's.

Spoiler :

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Chaos at the local greengrocer's.

The guy puking in the rosebush is gonna be sorry. Not that I have any experience with that sort of drunken behavior or anything.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

That person is actually "smelling flowers." For some reason they crawl on their hands and knees to do so. Even when said flower is a cactus.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

That person is actually "smelling flowers."

That's what it was called when I was in college too, unless you couldn't make it far enough in which case it was 'painting the sidewalk.'

 

[Ajidica]

Been playing a lot of Civ6 this weekend. Now that I've finally gotten the hang of the game, three big things stand out to me:

1) The AI civs don't build units. At. All. I was playing as Rome and went to war with Peter in a late medieval/early renaissance war. The entire army I saw from him was a pikeman. That's it. No archers, swordsmen, knights, nothing. Egypt threw a few archers at me and a chariot archer in a war at the same time. Before the game was half over and without trying particularly hard, I had knocked four civilizations out of the game. Perhaps I really need to pick up Rise and Fall to make warmongering harder....
2) The game pacing feels off from older civ games in that there is a huge focus on the modern age. Swordsmen units are supposed to represent everything from early Iron Age warbands to dismounted knights, but we get three types of airplanes? (Biplane, Fighter, Jet Fighter)? Sort of nice to see love finally given to the modern age, but still. Related problem is the bad duration for the "Epic" game speed. In Civ4 the research costs increased at a greater rate than the production costs, so beelining wasn't as effective a strategy as it otherwise might be. In Civ6, they just slow everything down by the same amount.
3) The in-game calendar is junk. Sure, it is a completely cosmetic feature but when I'm fielding Mamlukes in 230 BC or Aircraft Carrier in 1540 that indicates there might be an issue with game pacing.

As an aside, really hope in the next expansion they bring back ethnically diverse units. Seeing my Roman crossbows looking like Japanese crossbows is a bit sad.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

On top of the Sims 2, I've also been playtesting a custom map that a friend made for Quake, mostly because I have a penchant for uncovering obscure glitches. Not even a minute after loading the map, I managed to get stuck on the edge of a tunnel.

 

[Akka]

The story of Horizon Zero Dawn gets better and better the more you play it. You get sucked in to the lore after a few hours. Overall it's a great game, the only let down is the melee combat.

Nearly finished the game by now (I'm at the last mission, though I have the whole expansion to do first), and yeah, the story really is well done. The rough concept is pretty quickly guessed, but the details are much more thought-out than they typically are in most background lore (the whole plot and *gasp* the technology actually MAKE sense, which is really something I find critical to appreciate a story and which happen really not often enough) and the execution is top-notch (both technically and scenaristically, it's nearly like a movie where you learn just the bits that make you hunger for more, I'm impressed). The feeling of apocalypse that is conveyed by the emails and holovids is impressive, and honestly the game allow for some pretty deep thoughts about how it actually could really happen, in one form or another, to our actual lives. Gave me some actual dark mood and some feeling of real-world danger here. Big thumb-ups here.

Still have the add-on to do, but I took a break. For one, I've spent 70 hours in one week and a half playing the game, and I'm a bit overwhelmed by now. And second, I'm really feeling the "political agenda" fatigue here. Because my god, I don't mind the melee combat, for me the let down is the incredibly ubiquitious and caricatural political message. That is really becoming tiresome and actually detract from the stories, both because it drags you out of the immersion to hammer itself again and again, and because it ends up making so many quests feel copy-paste of the same mold and so completely predictable that I know how they'll finish even before they actually start.
The moment I just felt "okay, that's it for today" was literally five minutes after entering the Banuk territory, I hear about a catastrophe, I hear some random comment "blabla some girl hope she'll be back", "blabla some guy big war chief lost many people". I'm already 95 % certain that the warchief will be a white male that is wrong and made a mess and will be either the main opponent or at the very least one obstacle, and the woman will be a strong-willed yadda yadda that will have to clean his mistakes and/or replace him.

I like that I can play a girl, I like even more that she's not sexualized at all (I especially like how she seems utterly puzzled by the very concept of romance, kind of refreshing and funny), but GAWD, Guerrilla is so heavy-handed they manage to make Bioware itself looks like a shining example of subtlety and restrain. Put whatever ideals you like in your games, guys, but 1) make it realistic and 2) MAKE IT LESS ANVILICIOUS, thanks. I like to immerse in a game, not constantly be dragged out of escapism because someone wants to hammer on my head "THESE ARE MY POLITICAL IDEAS AND YOU WILL WATCH THEM".

 

[hobbsyoyo]

One of the lore stories you can follow is about a kid who dropped out of school to do stupid things and eventually became a rocket scientist. That made me unbelievably happy.

 

[EgonSpengler]

So World of Tanks finally went to 1.0 yesterday, with a massive graphics overall and reworking of many maps. I played the heck out of WoT from beta for about 4 years. I'd probably be embarrassed to see how many games I played. Yet I didn't quit because I'd grown tired of the game, I quit because I'd grown tired of the game's community. I stuck my head into the forums this morning, and at a glance, it was the same [stuff]. There was even a new thread complaining about people rushing the valley on Lakeville. (Inside joke, but the point is, it's the same complaint everybody - including me - was making about that map 8 years ago.) It's too bad. It's a good game, and I kind of want to play it some more, but I doubt it'd be worth the headache.

 

[Broken_Erika]

So World of Tanks finally went to 1.0 yesterday, with a massive graphics overall and reworking of many maps. I played the heck out of WoT from beta for about 4 years. I'd probably be embarrassed to see how many games I played. Yet I didn't quit because I'd grown tired of the game, I quit because I'd grown tired of the game's community. I stuck my head into the forums this morning, and at a glance, it was the same [stuff]. There was even a new thread complaining about people rushing the valley on Lakeville. (Inside joke, but the point is, it's the same complaint everybody - including me - was making about that map 8 years ago.) It's too bad. It's a good game, and I kind of want to play it some more, but I doubt it'd be worth the headache.

Do they have a Bob Semple Tank?

http://www.tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww2/NewZealand/Bob_Semple_Tank.php

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

In the Sims 2, I had one of my Sims invite over her boyfriend for a little bit of fun. I'd gotten them on the bed and they were making out when suddenly (thanks to a mod that makes the ghost scares more 'pushy') one of the ghosts from the family graveyard appeared to scare the boyfriend. He wet himself and then ran away.

 

[Commodore]

So World of Tanks finally went to 1.0 yesterday, with a massive graphics overall and reworking of many maps. I played the heck out of WoT from beta for about 4 years. I'd probably be embarrassed to see how many games I played. Yet I didn't quit because I'd grown tired of the game, I quit because I'd grown tired of the game's community. I stuck my head into the forums this morning, and at a glance, it was the same [stuff]. There was even a new thread complaining about people rushing the valley on Lakeville. (Inside joke, but the point is, it's the same complaint everybody - including me - was making about that map 8 years ago.) It's too bad. It's a good game, and I kind of want to play it some more, but I doubt it'd be worth the headache.

I tried to get into World of Tanks a while back, but couldn't stand it. I hated it for the same reason I hated Sword of the Stars 2: nothing was streamlined. Keep in mind, I'm not complaining about complexity as I don't mind complexity in games. What I do hate though, is when games are complex and compound the learning curve by making it hard to figure things out. That's the way both World of Tanks and Sword of the Stars 2 were for me.

If you are going to make a game complex, you also have to make it so new players can kinda figure things out relatively easily so they stick around to learn the finer points of the game and get good at it.

 

[Esperr]

S-T-A-R-D-E-W V-A-L-L-E-Y

 

[cardgame]

WoT was never complicated or in need of such streamlining when I played it, but I stopped around 0.7.3

I tried to get into it again about six months ago, but at the risk of sounding sarcastic, it is literally unplayable on my ultrawide monitor. Incredible distortions, unable to judge distance, looking at it gives me a headache.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I tried to get into World of Tanks a while back, but couldn't stand it. I hated it for the same reason I hated Sword of the Stars 2: nothing was streamlined. Keep in mind, I'm not complaining about complexity as I don't mind complexity in games. What I do hate though, is when games are complex and compound the learning curve by making it hard to figure things out. That's the way both World of Tanks and Sword of the Stars 2 were for me.

If you are going to make a game complex, you also have to make it so new players can kinda figure things out relatively easily so they stick around to learn the finer points of the game and get good at it.

I guess I'm not sure what "streamlined" means in this context, but I think the game must be terribly unfriendly to new players. I had the sheer luck to get into the game during the open beta, when everybody was more or less a 'newbie' and nobody was an expert yet. At the time, there was no tutorial at all, and learning the game consisted of your tank exploding under you. Even simple controls were opaque. I remember having to ask the open chat channel how to swivel my camera view without moving my tank's turret. Still, the spectrum of player skill wasn't too broad, so I was able to catch up pretty quickly. I think there's a tutorial now, but I'm not sure how comprehensive it is, and a tutorial probably can't mimic 'live' play anyway.

After I'd played for a few years, I saw "seal clubbing" as a big problem. It must be really discouraging for new people to get strangled by veteran players without comment or instruction, and often with a dose of ridicule and insults on top of it. For the conscientious veteran, taking advantage of inexperience and punishing errors without explanation is not fun, yet we're obliged to do it periodically, whenever we start a new family, or 'line', of vehicles. Either we have to spank people in order to move on quickly, or we have to avoid playing the lower-tier vehicles with any intensity.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I started Far Cry Primal over the weekend, since it was on sale, and I'm enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. The gameplay is Far Cry-standard stuff, but the setting makes it better in a number of ways. The lack of vehicles slows you down, obviously, which improves the exploration aspect of the game and makes it harder to flee predators - I had to jump off a cliff to get away from a mountain lion. Your meta-mission to gather your scattered people and establish a new home gives you a plausible reason to get out there and find trouble (the main character's involvement in the previous games always felt tenuous to me), and seeing the village grow is kind of gratifying (you don't do it all yourself, thank god - with the exception of a handful of special buildings, the people you rescue and/or recruit construct the additions while you're away on your adventures). And there's some novelty in the Stone Age setting, which is important to me. It isn't as creative and interesting as Subnautica, and there is a little bit of 'magic', but at least it's not another [gosh-darned] pseudo-Medieval Europe Tolkien/Howard ripoff.

Initially, I started playing on normal settings, but after 3 or 4 hours I went back and started over on Survival Mode. So far, Survival Mode seems to make many of the game's systems more important, and seems to be where the game is meant to be played. It dramatically cuts the number of weapons you can carry (1 club, 1 spear and 4 arrows initially); makes night darker, longer, and more threatening; and makes more of the Skill Tree useful. Crafting is still much too easy and fast. I'm considering a 'roleplaying' house-rule, where I'll only craft when I'm at the village or in one of the camps.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Everspace, basically a roguelike space shooter.
Tough, sometimes frustrating, but after death you can spend get some upgrades and start again with slightly better stats.
Still haven't made it to sector 3.

 

[Commodore]

I guess I'm not sure what "streamlined" means in this context, but I think the game must be terribly unfriendly to new players. I had the sheer luck to get into the game during the open beta, when everybody was more or less a 'newbie' and nobody was an expert yet. At the time, there was no tutorial at all, and learning the game consisted of your tank exploding under you. Even simple controls were opaque. I remember having to ask the open chat channel how to swivel my camera view without moving my tank's turret. Still, the spectrum of player skill wasn't too broad, so I was able to catch up pretty quickly. I think there's a tutorial now, but I'm not sure how comprehensive it is, and a tutorial probably can't mimic 'live' play anyway.

After I'd played for a few years, I saw "seal clubbing" as a big problem. It must be really discouraging for new people to get strangled by veteran players without comment or instruction, and often with a dose of ridicule and insults on top of it. For the conscientious veteran, taking advantage of inexperience and punishing errors without explanation is not fun, yet we're obliged to do it periodically, whenever we start a new family, or 'line', of vehicles. Either we have to spank people in order to move on quickly, or we have to avoid playing the lower-tier vehicles with any intensity.

Yeah maybe streamlined was the wrong word. I am talking about the barriers to new players though. They are simply too high for me to want to even attempt to get good at the game and have fun with it. If there are a lot of other people out there that feel the same way, that's going to spell trouble for World of Tanks once the veteran players start moving on. In fact, a quick Google search shows the game is already having a problem with losing players.