Video Games- Game of the Year

[Gorn]

7 hours ago, Heartofice said:

What features are you waiting for in CK3? I didn’t play 2 very much so no idea what I’m missing, but 3 is just so massive with almost infinite replay ability I’m not sure what DLCs will add.

 

The biggest two things that bothered me are the game's ahistorical insistence on gavelkind as the only inheritance method (other than elective) in early game dates, and the lack of ship management. Not that CK2 had great naval mechanics, but at least ships didn't appear out of thin air whenever me or AI wanted to cross a body of water, and naval routes weren't part of pathfinding. I guess it just bothers me that I can order an army to march from Norway to England without worrying about any logistics other than gold.

There are also smaller balance issues, such as the ridiculous amount of seduction plots with pretty much everyone in the game being a secret bastard, and dread being overpowered to the point of being gamebreaking.

[Heartofice]

4 hours ago, Gorn said:

The biggest two things that bothered me are the game's ahistorical insistence on gavelkind as the only inheritance method (other than elective) in early game dates, and the lack of ship management. Not that CK2 had great naval mechanics, but at least ships didn't appear out of thin air whenever me or AI wanted to cross a body of water, and naval routes weren't part of pathfinding. I guess it just bothers me that I can order an army to march from Norway to England without worrying about any logistics other than gold.

There are also smaller balance issues, such as the ridiculous amount of seduction plots with pretty much everyone in the game being a secret bastard, and dread being overpowered to the point of being gamebreaking.

I think some of your later complaints have been fixed with the newest patch, certainly there are less bastards and seduction plots. As a tribal nation like Norse dread is simply too easy to come by  and it is pretty powerful.

I think you mentioned the ship thing before, and here I don’t agree having played EU4 and found the naval system unnecessarily awkward and annoying. I like that it’s more of an after thought in CK3.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

On 12/23/2020 at 2:06 PM, The Anti-Targ said:

Good to know thanks. It would be nice to get that kind of bonus without the pain and suffering of crunch, but hopefully there was some solace in knowing that a large bonus was likely to be coming their way.

I'm with you. I think that profit sharing model they use is certainly "overlooked" as reviewers and game sites "review" CDPR as a moral company in the Cyberpunk game reviews.

On 12/23/2020 at 2:15 PM, Werthead said:

CDPR's crunch is something that does need looking at a bit more as well. It's not really the same thing as American crunch. EU legislation restricts overtime to one day of hours extra over the course of a week, so the maximum number of hours you can theoretically do in a week is 48.

Of course, there aren't police wandering around enforcing that, and if people want to work longer than they they can, and in theory shady businesses can make people work longer than that, but it's very risky (because the pay receipts leave a paper trail that can be used to expose that, and the liability for that is quite expensive).

It's not a US situation where a company can basically force someone to work 60 or 75 or 90 hours a week for months on end without extra pay (which happened in Rockstar's US offices when RDR2 was coming to an end, whilst the UK offices had considerably greater protection). Workers have significantly greater protection in Europe. Polish workers are also guaranteed 4 weeks holiday a year (20 weekdays+associated weekends), which is not the case in the US.

I think crunch has to go, but I also wondered how bad crunch was for CDPR (could be terrible for all I know) compared to what we do in the U.S. Hell, when I was a middle school teacher, I was reaching 60 hours of work a week with no overtime during the school year.

I want all employees to be treated better (and actually have a shared percentage of control of the company), but in terms of CDPR, I don't know. Something just feels off to me about all their hate.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

On 12/24/2020 at 7:10 AM, Corvinus85 said:

It feels very immersive but also ridiculously difficult. I'm not sure I like the combat. Now I'm trying to learn how to ride a horse, with Cumans chasing me, and I keep dying. 

That early part of the game, in order to get the items requested, I had to sell my scarf to actually have enough money, and then the scarf magically re-appeared during the attack on the town.

I practiced the combat with the guy at the arena for a couple of hours one days, (real two hours of game time), and suddenly the game opened right up. And I realized it was kind of empty and repetitive, sadly. 

[Mexal]

Hades is a blast. I get why people here enjoy it so much. Played a few hours this morning in between Cyberpunk and just want to play more. Something to say for simplicity and funny writing.

[Werthead]

51 minutes ago, Simon Steele said:

I'm with you. I think that profit sharing model they use is certainly "overlooked" as reviewers and game sites "review" CDPR as a moral company in the Cyberpunk game reviews.

I think crunch has to go, but I also wondered how bad crunch was for CDPR (could be terrible for all I know) compared to what we do in the U.S. Hell, when I was a middle school teacher, I was reaching 60 hours of work a week with no overtime during the school year.

I want all employees to be treated better (and actually have a shared percentage of control of the company), but in terms of CDPR, I don't know. Something just feels off to me about all their hate.

The scathing attacks on CDPR for crunch and the utterly deafening silence about American, Japanese and Canadian developers forcing far worse crunch on their workers is quite, quite baffling. It's quite clear that Red Dead Redemption 2 was made under far worse conditions for far longer for far more people, but apart from Schreier, no-one mentioned or talked about that at all, especially not in their glowing reviews.

It's not a competition and all crunch has to go, but there are some distinctly double standards being applied here.

[Poobah]

3 hours ago, Mexal said:

Hades is a blast. I get why people here enjoy it so much. Played a few hours this morning in between Cyberpunk and just want to play more. Something to say for simplicity and funny writing.

Yesss another soul claimed by Hades!

[mnedel]

It seems I am the only person on this board that didn’t like Hades. It was fun at first but, after downing Hades a few times, it became tedious and boring. We basically need to play the same few levels over and over again (with some minimal random changes) and then pray to rng gods to have the right NPCs spawn so we might get to progress the side stories an itsy-bitsy bit. That to me is not fun. This was the first, and probably the last ruglike I ever played. Guess this type of games is just not my cup of tea.

[Rhom]

Scalpers threatening long term health of PS5

Quote

But based on Japanese sales data from Famitsu, Sony sold around 213,000 PS5 consoles in the product’s first month of availability and just 63,000 physical games, meaning consumers have bought less than one packaged game for every three consoles purchased.

Lucrative software sales are particularly important at the start of a console’s lifecycle when the hardware is sold at a loss, Bloomberg added.

There are other factors that could be impacting early physical PS5 software sales, most notably the shift to digital. In Sony’s last fiscal year, digital software sales accounted for 55% of total PS4software sales, and they represented an even greater percentage of the total in the first half of the current fiscal year.

PS5 also comes pre-installed with a game, Astro’s Playroom, and is backwards compatible with PS4 titles.

“Even if we consider digital download software purchases, the percentage of sold PlayStation 5s actually in use is not that high, meaning the current demand is constrained by profit-taking resellers,” according to Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Ace Research Institute.

I was so focused on being disappointed that I couldn’t get one for my son, I never even considered how it might otherwise affect the market as a whole.

[Jace, Extat]

6 minutes ago, Rhom said:

Scalpers threatening long term health of PS5

I was so focused on being disappointed that I couldn’t get one for my son, I never even considered how it might otherwise affect the market as a whole.

We must seize the means of PS5 production.

[Rhom]

14 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

We must seize the means of PS5 production.

The first industry we should nationalize.

[Corvinus85]

1 hour ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

We must seize the means of PS5 production.

and NVidia's production of graphics cards.

[Jace, Extat]

Collective server farming will modernise our micro-economy.

[Caligula_K3]

On 12/27/2020 at 5:27 PM, mnedel said:

It seems I am the only person on this board that didn’t like Hades. It was fun at first but, after downing Hades a few times, it became tedious and boring. We basically need to play the same few levels over and over again (with some minimal random changes) and then pray to rng gods to have the right NPCs spawn so we might get to progress the side stories an itsy-bitsy bit. That to me is not fun. This was the first, and probably the last ruglike I ever played. Guess this type of games is just not my cup of tea.

I liked Hades more than you, but I also found the RNG of hoping you can progress a character's storyline to be annoying, and it turned me off replaying the game after 30ish hours and getting the ending.

Has anyone else played Immortals: Fenyx Rising? It's one of the three Ubisoft games released this holiday season and the one that got least fanfare; but I got it for Christmas for the Switch and it's been very fun. Essentially it's a Zelda: BOTW ripoff with some Assassin's Creed: Odyssey thrown in as well. It's definitely not as great as BOTW in terms of polish, world design, or puzzle design, and some of the writing is pretty sitcom-eye-roll-worthy, but otherwise it's a very solid and enjoyable game. I definitely recommend it for those of you who, like me, can't wait for BOTW 2 or for those of you who wanted to try BOTW but don't have a Switch.

 

 

[briantw]

Picked up Crusader Kings III during the Steam sale.  Holy shit do I suck at this game.  And the tutorial explains approximately 5% of the game mechanics and then just throws you to the wolves.

I did make it about fifty years with Count Haesteinn before the wheels came off after I foolishly joined an ally in a war against King Alfred of Wessex.  On the plus side, I occupied his capital and took his wife, Aelhswith, hostage and then promptly sacrificed her to my gods rather than accept an insulting 50 gold in ransom.  

Unfortunately, this being a holy war, another country decided it was time for me to die.  Not sure why they singled me out rather than my ally who actually started the holy war in the first place, but I soon found my capital besieged by an army twice the size of mine.  They beat the shit out of me, my son Ragnarr died in the battle, and I was taken prisoner.  

All in all, not a great ending for Count Haesteinn.  They did eventually release me, but everything was so fucked at that point that I decided to start a new game rather than rebuild from scratch with my near-death character and lack of any adult heirs.

I feel like it's going to take me months just to figure out how everything in this game works.  On the plus side, after that particular incident I did figure out how to call on your allies for aid in battle.  Didn't help Haesteinn, sadly.

[RumHam]

I thought Hades was good but I didn't get why it was quite so praised. Still haven't gone back after killing Hades ~8 times. I didn't really care about advancing the plot but it was annoying not knowing how to unlock things like the things below the accessories, or the hidden aspects of the weapons. I just felt I wasn't making any progress anymore and once I could consistently beat Hades what was the point? 

And the mirror upgrades filled up too quickly. If there was more of a "base management" aspect that wasn't just decorative it probably would have held my interest more. 

[Poobah]

On 12/27/2020 at 10:27 PM, mnedel said:

It seems I am the only person on this board that didn’t like Hades. It was fun at first but, after downing Hades a few times, it became tedious and boring. We basically need to play the same few levels over and over again (with some minimal random changes) and then pray to rng gods to have the right NPCs spawn so we might get to progress the side stories an itsy-bitsy bit. That to me is not fun. This was the first, and probably the last ruglike I ever played. Guess this type of games is just not my cup of tea.

1 hour ago, Caligula_K3 said:

I liked Hades more than you, but I also found the RNG of hoping you can progress a character's storyline to be annoying, and it turned me off replaying the game after 30ish hours and getting the ending.

39 minutes ago, RumHam said:

I thought Hades was good but I didn't get why it was quite so praised. Still haven't gone back after killing Hades ~8 times. I didn't really care about advancing the plot but it was annoying not knowing how to unlock things like the things below the accessories, or the hidden aspects of the weapons. I just felt I wasn't making any progress anymore and once I could consistently beat Hades what was the point? 

And the mirror upgrades filled up too quickly. If there was more of a "base management" aspect that wasn't just decorative it probably would have held my interest more. 

I don't think any of these complaints are necessarily unwarranted - some I think are simply that the rogue-like/lite genre isn't for everyone and while I personally didn't really feel especially "gated" by RNG (if anything I felt somewhat blocked by dialogue pileup possibly the result of the constant additions throughout early access where all the NPCs I encountered all always had something to say, more content to give, but not always the specific thing I was looking for at that time and not always I thought in what would have been the perfect sorta priority or order from the standpoint of creating the tightest narrative/gameplay through line) I can appreciate that if one doesn't find the core gameplay compelling and enjoyable for its own sake and simply wants all the narrative bits then it might end up feeling tedious. The only thing I found a little slow/tedious was the rate at which it was possible to gain Titan Blood in order to unlock and upgrade all the weapon aspects, though I suspect if I only cared about that and wasn't saving my other resources to upgrade the house and have Nectar/Ambrosia available to gift people and was instead converting it all to Blood then it would likely have been way faster.

To some of the specifics from @RumHam's post I felt like the mirror filled up at a reasonable rate, though I suppose it depends how quickly or slowly you managed to get to the point where you're beating the game. Glancing at my run history I'd long since finished the story before I maxed out those final bottom tiers on the mirror, if anything I think I remember being a bit irritated at how much darkness I needed to max all the talents on both sides of it, because I wanted them all available to start getting in to higher difficulty runs and speedruns at full power and flexibility. In case anyone wants to remain unspoiled on the answers to your questions I'll stick this in a lil spoiler box:

Spoiler

You said you didn't care about the story but if you want to see the credits you need to win 10 times. There's some endgame epilogue story that takes a bit longer beyond that but you might just wanna get to 10 wins at some point at least if you have a hankering to see it through.

The thingies below the keepsakes are Chthonic Companions a latageme thing you get from developing your friendships/subplots with some of the characters, specifically Meg, Thanatos, Sisyphus, Dusa, Skelly, and Achilles, to the point where you are able to gift them Ambrosia, at which point they give you the companion usually after the first Ambrosia gift.

The hidden aspects I feel are kinda supposed to be hidden? Like it isn't particularly explained because it isn't supposed to be. The hidden aspects and how to unlock them are:

Spear: This is the first one you need to unlock for some reason, once you've unlocked it you're qualified to unlock any of the rest. Once you have spent 5 Titanblood in total on weapon aspects (and reached the final boss I believe) Achilles will tell you a phrase to say to the spear that will unlock the Aspect of Guan Yu, the Frost Fair Blade.

Sword: Once you've unlocked Guan Yu and have at least 5 blood spent into Sword aspects you can get a dialogue with Nyx telling you a phrase to unlock the Aspect of Arthur, Holy Excalibur.

Bow: Once you've unlocked Guan Yu and have at least 5 blood spent into Bow aspects, and have talked to Artemis at least once while having the bow equiped so she'll talk about it, she can then tell you the phrase to unlock the Aspect of Rama, Celestial Sharanga.

Shield: Same thing with needing to spend 5 blood in shield aspects and having GY unlocked, just assume it from here on our. You need to have talked with Chaos while having the shield, then at some later point he can tell you how to unlock the Aspect of Beowulf, Naegling's Board.

Fists: Talk to Asterius as a miniboss while having the fists equipped, later he will give you the phrase to unlock the Aspect of Gilgamesh, the  Claws of Enkidu.

Rail: It's Zeus for this one who needs to have seen you gun, then he can tell you that you can unlock the Aspect of Lucifer, Igneus Eden.

I think much of the praise for Hades comes from all the other stuff, though the gameplay certainly is fun and compelling for most and I think for roguelite fans it'd be a hit without just the gameplay, it's the characters that you can get invested in, the writing and interactions, the subplots, all the wholesome and lovable and positive stuff as Zagreus builds a family by befriending, getting to know, and helping everyone in the underworld, the top-notch music, the beautiful art, the great voice acting. And also it's a game that costs between 15 and 20 quid and yet has better production values, is more polished, offers more content, and is more complete than basically every £60+ AAA game on the market. Supergiant's reach never exceeded their grasp, they knew what they wanted to do and managed to do it extremely well.

[Rhom]

Hey @Werthead I finished up Shadowrun Returns.  Feel like I made a big mistake playing as a Decker since it was entirely situational and had zero application for the final stretch of the game.

I just downloaded Dragonfall.  Am I better off going with a different class?  Or do they utilize the Decker better in this one?

[Werthead]

50 minutes ago, Rhom said:

Hey @Werthead I finished up Shadowrun Returns.  Feel like I made a big mistake playing as a Decker since it was entirely situational and had zero application for the final stretch of the game.

I just downloaded Dragonfall.  Am I better off going with a different class?  Or do they utilize the Decker better in this one?

Deckers get a better deal in Dragonfall and Hong Kong, from what I remember. It was years ago that I played them. I played as a Street Samurai with some decking side-skills, which I think worked better.

[Guy Kilmore]

20 hours ago, briantw said:

Picked up Crusader Kings III during the Steam sale.  Holy shit do I suck at this game.  And the tutorial explains approximately 5% of the game mechanics and then just throws you to the wolves.

I did make it about fifty years with Count Haesteinn before the wheels came off after I foolishly joined an ally in a war against King Alfred of Wessex.  On the plus side, I occupied his capital and took his wife, Aelhswith, hostage and then promptly sacrificed her to my gods rather than accept an insulting 50 gold in ransom.  

Unfortunately, this being a holy war, another country decided it was time for me to die.  Not sure why they singled me out rather than my ally who actually started the holy war in the first place, but I soon found my capital besieged by an army twice the size of mine.  They beat the shit out of me, my son Ragnarr died in the battle, and I was taken prisoner.  

All in all, not a great ending for Count Haesteinn.  They did eventually release me, but everything was so fucked at that point that I decided to start a new game rather than rebuild from scratch with my near-death character and lack of any adult heirs.

I feel like it's going to take me months just to figure out how everything in this game works.  On the plus side, after that particular incident I did figure out how to call on your allies for aid in battle.  Didn't help Haesteinn, sadly.

There are lots of things to figure out in Crusader Kings 3, I am barely scratching the surface.

Starting from Ireland is good, they are pretty isolated from random fights and it gives you experience in consolidating land.

Starting off as someone's vassal isn't bad either, you get protection from your liege and you can do some work inside the domain.

Loss aren't always as bad as you think they are.  Sometimes you can recover in a generation or two.  I tend to go under my knights tab and make sure my heir is not allowed to be a knight too.