Quetzalcutlass

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?

The fans have made a local server replacement to emulate unlocks and such. It even lets you run the old timed FOMO missions, so it’s technically superior to playing online.

They added the ability to neuter your pets. It won’t save an already cat-infested colony, but it will prevent the explosive breeding from happening in the first place.

It’s one of my favorite Dwarf Fortress stories! Though my actual favorite would probably be the tale of the catsplosion, which shows how interactions between complex systems can break things in unexpected ways.

Basically, dwarves in the game have infamously short tempers, and when their mood gets low enough they have a mental break and rage and break stuff, which tends to upset other dwarves, starting what is known as a tantrum spiral. These are often run-ending.

One thing that helps keep a dwarf calm is having a pet, of which there are many types to choose from. Cats in particular are popular since they clean up vermin, preventing the bad thoughts caused by their presence.

Cats also have one other unique mechanic, though. Instead of a dwarf adopting them like with normal pets, cats choose a dwarf at random and “adopt” them, becoming their pet.

Now here’s where things get messy. Animals can breed in Dwarf Fortress, and the normal way to keep their numbers down is to set excess unowned pets to be butchered. Except you can’t stop a cat from becoming a pet, and killing a pet causes a huge morale drop in its owner (often enough to cause a tantrum on its own).

So, onto the catsplosion: if you have at least two opposite sex cats, they’ll breed and grow in number exponentially with no way to get rid of them, filling your fortress until your CPU can’t handle the strain and your framerate slows to a crawl. This was the death of many a fortress back in the day until it got fixed.

Good for them. That said, it’s ridiculous that this child predation gets their attention after they’ve spent the last few years ignoring several elephants in the room.

ARK released an (incredibly buggy and half-baked) underwater-themed expansion for the original UE3 game some time after the UE5 remake was released. And several years after all the modders for the original game had moved on. It broke everything.

Conan Exiles just did the same thing recently, though at least theirs was a free upgrade to a new engine so they had an excuse.

Yeah, but it’s also Bethesda, so you could chalk compatibility breakages up to their usual incompetence.

Meanwhile, in Dwarf Fortress women used them as ablative armor.

(The priority of child care was set so high that dwarves would carry their babies into battle, with predictable results.)

That’s just RPS “humor” (or humour given they’re British). They started as a comedy review blog and have kept the decades of in-jokes and references despite all the actually funny writers being long gone.

Modern RPS is a hollow shell of what it used to be.