Quetzalcutlass

Unfortunately, they were unable to be added because YouTube won’t let you add children songs to an adult playlist.

The save to playlist button is only blocked in the player IIRC. If you like the video, you can go to your Liked Videos playlist and add it to a different playlist from there. YouTube is stupid.

First time reading RPS? They’re what’s left of a humor blog after all the actual humorists left. It’s nothing but awkward attempts at randomness and making constant references to the time when they were still good.

It sucks, because 15-20 years ago they were one of the best sites to follow for PC gaming. Now they’re a hollow shell of their former self that thinks being “quirky” and filling their posts with impenetrable in-jokes is a substitute for good writing.

It’s one of my favorite early access games of the past few years. My only problem with it is that they give you an awesome backstab alongside stealth mechanics that rival Thief, then make half of the enemies past the tutorial immune to stabbing. My preferred way to play stealth games is to clear out everyone without ever being spotted, but this makes that playstyle impossible.

I remember reading that the guy behind the original overarching plotline (where the Reapers’ motivation for culling spacefaring civilizations was preventing early entropy of the universe due to overuse of Element Zero) left Bioware after EA bought the company, then the Mass Effect 3 script got leaked several months before release so the ending was hastily rewritten.

I’ve also heard that due to said leak the rewrite was done in a locked room by just two people, a writer and a producer, with no input or feedback from the rest of the writing staff. Given how abrupt and out of place the ending is (and what we have now is the expanded, retconned version - it was much worse at launch), I can easily believe that rumor.

It’s mostly a problem for indie games where novel gameplay is often the main selling point. Imagine if a hundred Katamari Damacy or Patapon clones came out months before the originals, and whether they’d have made the same impact when they finally released in that scenario.

Clones are already a huge problem in the independant games space (see the myriad of “dig for buried treasure in a backyard” games last year). AI gives cloners the ability to churn them out so rapidly they can steal the original’s thunder entirely.

RimWorld released a beta of the upcoming 1.7 version that moves to their new Waylith engine, granting massive performance gains over there old Unity builds. I haven’t done a real playthrough since before the Anomaly and Odyssey expansions released, so I’m thinking now’s a good time to revisit the game. I’ve heard Anomaly was kind of disappointing, but here’s hoping Odyssey is the less buggy vanilla version of Save Our Ships 2 I’ve heard it referred to as.

Though I’m not looking forward to rebuilding my mod list after all this time. Anyone have mod recommendations for someone who’s been away from the scene for a few years?

I’m worried that companies will stop releasing demos again out of fear of AI-driven clones stealing their work and beating them to the market.

“The player can look and be anywhere in the world at any time, and the traditional ways of doing optimizations on a game is knowing that the player is only in this space, and that means the rest of the world can just be forgotten.”

You can tell it’s been a while since he’s been in the trenches, because over the last decade or two game technology has moved away from this paradigm and into heavy use of level-of-detail and asset streaming. Vision-based culling still happens, but it’s done at the engine/shader level and not something level designers are forced to laboriously set up triggers for anymore.

Not that it matters anyway. I can’t imagine an amount of improvements and visual upgrades that would prevent even the largest Black & White world from fitting entirely into memory at all times.

Well yeah, that’s to be expected. Chris Roberts wanted to be a big Hollywood writer/director even more than he wanted to be a game developer, and then people handed him hundreds of millions of dollars. Is it any wonder he spent a fortune hiring all his favorite actors?

Genesis: Generations

Genesis: Regenerated

Genesis: Dreamcast 360 Slim

I returned to Warframe a few months ago after nearly a decade away from the game. I got my brother-in-law to try it for the second time and this time around he got hooked.

It’s surprising that multiplayer is still so rough nearly fifteen years into the game’s development. Story missions can only be played single player, and they’re also the main way of unlocking new content. Nearly every single session he’d have to drop out of co-op to do a quest or junction challenge - it got better the further into the star chart he got, but this was a constant problem up until reaching The New War.

The story is also incomprehensible to a new player since story bosses pop up at random places in the star chart and take place at different points in the timeline. It took ten minutes just to explain Alad V, this game’s Revolver Ocelot who has missions with him on every faction’s side including the player’s.

Despite that we’ve been having a ton of fun. The game has a ludicrous amount of content and constantly introduces entirely new gameplay modes. We’ve put in probably 100-200 hours so far but, looking at the changelogs on the wiki, we’re only caught up to what was released in 2019.

(Also Follie is absurdly OP. With literally zero investment she can summon a Thermian RPG that does high seven figure damage, enough to one-shot even raid bosses like Eidolons. The crit-specced Vectis Prime I’ve Forma’d several times and filled with maxed out mods can barely hit low seven figures on red-crit headshots and does maybe 20-40k damage on regular hits.)

Dune: Awakening was on my list after it went single player due to enjoying their previous title Conan: Exiles (which also started as multiplayer-only before Funcom eventually capitulated), but I downloaded it during one of the free weekends and it’s the first game I’ve encountered that won’t run on my CPU due to missing instruction sets. I’d have to replace my motherboard and RAM to upgrade my CPU, which means it’s an absolute no-go at current prices.

I’ll have to remember to pick it up in a few years. Well-realized virtual worlds are my jam.

Was that common? Off the top of my head I can only recall the Metal Gear Solid games doing that.

And now I miss old DVD menus with their hidden Easter eggs.

S&box started evelopment in 2015 before getting stuck in development hell for over a decade. This sort of game would have made a lot more sense if it’d released in the 2010s as planned.

The whole thing stinks of the Sunk Cost fallacy.

Counterpoint: development of Physint was dropped because it missed multiple development milestones and kept going over budget, something Kojima (a noted perfectionist) has a long history of doing. While Kojima’s games are amazing, I can easily understand why a publisher wouldn’t want to work with him.

You’re thinking of Icewind Dale 2, which tried to implement Third Edition rules.

A full playthrough of the trilogy (BG1+ToSC+BG2+TOB) is usually stated as 200-300 hours, for the record. That was before Beamdog’s additions so it might actually be much higher now.

Right, but I feel it’s still important when recommending it to note that it plays differently to every other game in that list. Not bad, it just might not be what people expect going by other D&D games of the era.

(I think Deekin has popped up in a few other D&D products and storylines, which always makes me happy. Party on, little Dragon.)

Neverwinter Nights has one massive caveat though - it’s not party-based like the Infinity Engine games. IIRC in the original campaign you can only have one other party member at a time and they’re entirely AI-controlled. I think you can have two AI companions in the DLCs, which still pales to BG’s parties of six fully controllable characters.

The DLCs are great though. Hordes of the Underdark is a top-ten RPG.

The biggest mental shift is how in 2e lower defenses are better than higher ones, a completely unintuitive system that they dropped for later editions. Everything else is, while not the same, at least similar enough that you wouldn’t get confused.

The lack of cantrips is another, making low level casters miserable to play due to how carefully you need to ration their handful of spells. The lack of bounded accuracy and weapon proficiency system means they won’t be any use in melee, so they’ll mainly spend their time in combat dealing a few points of damage from a distance using weak slings.

(Though higher-level casters are absurd and can basically carry your party, as is tradition for old-school tabletop RPGs.)

2e follows an old-school power curve where you’re pathetically weak at the start and overwhelmingly powerful at the end, but it takes it to extremes. A single bad roll can be a game over in the first game (especially since this edition loves save-or-die effects), while Throne of Bhaal, the final entry in the trilogy, gives every common enemy a +3 or higher magic weapon just to give them a chance against your party and you still mow them down by the dozens.

The sweet spot in 2e is around levels 7-13, which just so happens to be where BG2’s first act sticks you at.

If you loved BG1, the second game will blow you away. It’s a massive step up in quality in every way from the first game.

Second Edition. It’s… not great, especially at the low levels the first game starts you at.

Rockstar claiming that the (vetted for employment) Discord could be infiltrated and become a source of leaks, and stating their own mole is evidence it could happen, would be hilarious if it wasn’t so disgustingly disingenuous.

I could swear I read an article just a month or two ago where they stated they had no plans for story DLC.

Never played it, but I do remember Let’s Game It Out released a video where he completely broke the game (as usual for the channel).

He rarely shows off more than a few mechanics before getting into shenanigans, but what he did show looked interesting.

From what I’ve heard through the grapevine, there’s a serious favoritism problem. If you have an in with a Valve employee or work on a project they approve of, getting assistance from them is easy. Everyone else gets a token response followed by radio silence, and if you’re working on something they don’t want to deal with (like the payment processor mess the OP stepped in) you get straight-up stonewalled.

Did they ever fix the problem where most of their featured community content was AI slop? Facepunch was discussing adding filters and disclosures to weed AI generated content out of search results after most early reviews called it out as a problem, but I lost all interest in the project and never checked back to see if they implemented anything.

A quick and dirty search shows about ten thousand words starting with un-, so gun puns are safe for the foreseeable future.

How long until all the good portmanteaus are taken, I wonder?