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Videogames 2023 pt. II: Can We patreon This Man an Alienware Already?


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29 minutes ago, Darryk said:

Interesting choice of setting.

I'm not that enthused personally; I don't find the tactics from that era particularly interesting. What did they have besides chariots?

I expect the game to be Troy 2.0 in terms of the battles, minus the fantasy creatures if they stick to only the historical. In Troy there was some cavalry, mainly the Amazonians, and yes everything else was infantry and chariots. They did try to infuse some tactical variety by having weight classes for the infantry and allowing some units to have two modes of fighting. The terrain features they introduced in Troy will also likely be in this one, too.

I am cautiously optimistic that it will look good at least. But it definitely won't scratch the medieval conquest itch I've been having.

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32 minutes ago, Darryk said:

I'm not that enthused personally; I don't find the tactics from that era particularly interesting. What did they have besides chariots?

Uhm... guys with spears? :P

To be fair, I can imagine an in-depth mercenary system to fill holes in your line-ups with expensive elites.

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9 minutes ago, Toth said:

Uhm... guys with spears? :P

Infantry types could include ax men, kopesh wielders, club guys, lancers. Skirmishers could include archers, slingers,  javelin men, throwing clubs. Chariots could be of various types -- archery of course, predominantly, but no doubt there'll be heavier shock varieties.

9 minutes ago, Toth said:

To be fair, I can imagine an in-depth mercenary system to fill holes in your line-ups with expensive elites.

And this, for sure.  

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1 minute ago, Ran said:

Infantry types could include ax men, kopesh wielders, club guys, lancers. Skirmishers could include archers, slingers,  javelin men, throwing clubs. Chariots could be of various types -- archery of course, predominantly, but no doubt there'll be heavier shock varieties.

I was only trying to make fun.^^ Having written a story myself about the battle of Kadesh, the setting does indeed intrigue me. And I do find ancient warfare with all the local technologies and eccentricities far more interesting than any more modern ones where everyone follows the same developments. Granted, I still haven't played much with Troy, mostly because the game ran really badly on my system for some reason (which I found odd, given how Warhammer 2 ran perfectly on it...).

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16 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Do the above Total War games have a narrative focus? Or are they more around resource management and Civ-style city/nation-state building? 

I have friends who absolutely rave about these games, but whenever I see them play it, what my brain picks up on is the (for me personally - not an attack!) tedious resource management components, which just does not excite me in the slightest. 

Resource management in the games is pretty nominal. In your settlements you can build roads, markets and ports (if applicable) and then upgrade them to generate more income, and also things like baths and civic offices to reduce squalor and corruption to keep your money up.

As the series has continued, resource upkeep has become a smaller and smaller part of the game. The more recent games it's pretty much just, "just build these things, keep open trade routes and don't go crazy buying stuff you can't afford." RomeMedieval II and Empire were probably when the Civilization influence was at their height (and those three games, along with Shogun 2, are probably the Imperial or golden age of the series as a historically-influenced wargame; subsequent games have gone in a very different direction).

Narratively, there are some story-ish based campaigns, particularly in Troy and the Alexander campaign for Rome Remastered (narrated by Brian Blessed!), and in the three Warhammer games. But mostly they're more about setting you objectives and it's up to you how you do them.

Creating alternate histories is also a fun part of the series, and that goes for the excellent mods. In Westeros: Total War I had Robb Stark and the Greatjon kill Jaime Lannister on the battlefield, besiege King's Landing and then killed Joffrey in a last showdown in front of the Red Keep. In Third Age: Total War, I had Dale and the elves of Lorien unexpectedly defeat the forces of Dol Guldur before the War of the Ring even broke out, and then had the Dalish armies swing far to the east and invade Mordor from the back door (so to speak), storming Barad-dur whilst the armies of Gondor were distracting the orcs in the west. Great fun.

ETA: EmpireNapoleon and Shogun 2 all got technical updates today designed to make them play more nicely on 64-bit system and use core allocations properly, something that was causing performance issues for them (Rome II had that fixed via its last round of expansions just a few years ago, the newer games never had it as a problem and Medieval II will likely fix it via the upcoming Medieval II Remastered), which is nice.

Edited by Werthead
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A brief peruse of the PlayStation showcase:

Ooh, Alan Wake 2 set for release in October. Nice. And Sam Lake is acting in it! Huzzah!

Bungie is rebooting Marathon?!?!? A deep cut. Also, this looks nothing like OG Marathon and is a PVP lootershooter, but okay. Some of the marketing speak about this is pure horseshit.

The PlayStation5 is getting its own Steam Deck analogue? Interesting. Xbox must be working on something similar behind the scenes.

Metal Gear Solid 3 Remake! Because why not start a remake with the middle game of a series?

Spider-Man 2 out in the autumn. No word on further PC ports of PS megagames. No Bloodborne (still!) and I suspect Forbidden West is at least another year away.

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15 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The PlayStation5 is getting its own Steam Deck analogue?

Sad to see it's streaming only though. 

Quote

Metal Gear Solid 3 Remake! Because why not start a remake with the middle game of a series?

Maybe they're going chronologically? 

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Metal Gear Solid 3 Remake! Because why not start a remake with the middle game of a series?

Probably the easiest of the early games to remake.  The first two would basically require ground up reworks like the first few Resident Evil games did, but the third was essentially already a third-person shooter by the time Kojima had tinkered with it enough.

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3 hours ago, Werthead said:

Bungie is rebooting Marathon?!?!? A deep cut. Also, this looks nothing like OG Marathon and is a PVP lootershooter, but okay. Some of the marketing speak about this is pure horseshit.

This is a very weird one. It looks nothing like the old game, as you said, and its not like the old game was some huge IP that will help boost sales by getting slapped on something new. Probably no one under age 35 has even heard of it, and even among those old enough it was not an enormous seller. All just feels very odd.

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I was complaining a while back that almost every upcoming action-RPG has the same, getting-boring Dark Souls aesthetic, with the odd tweak here and there in era or culture. Looks like that's... not changing any time soon?

Not that I'm ever going to play it, or most of these, but ffs. You can do hardcore action combat and make the setting look vibrant: the crab game knows. 

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I do remember Marathon, or at least the hype in my mom's Macworld magazines. I convinced her to get it for me for Christmas the same year she'd purchased a PowerMac something or other that was pretty bad-ass back then. 

I don't remember anything about the game except being underwhelmed by the weird graphics even back then, and selling it almost immediately to a GameStop or whatever for a paltry credit. Seems like a really strange thing to reboot.

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The Marathon teaser is pretty slick:

I didn't ever own a Mac, but Marathon was basically the game that people always trotted out to prove Macs could not only run games, but run great games.

 

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OK, I think I'm getting the hang of Crusader Kings III. I'm struggling with some stuff, still stumbling at times, but I am having a decent time playing as that petty king from Munster that the game recommends to plays as the first time.

Somehow I managed to keep him alive well into his seventies. He's lost both brothers, though all his children are alive, reasonably healthy and married. I am curious what will happen once he finally dies, because of the partition succession that seems to be the only option at this time for the Irish.

My character has become a veritable warlord in terms of martial command abilities, but I've only fought one war so far when I finally managed to get a casus belli against the petty king of Connacht thanks to having a daughter marrying one his sons. I won the war and the duchy passed to my son-in-law, though unfortunately we only became allies. I had hoped to make him my vassal, so either I did something wrong or that was never an option.

Prior to said war, my only war experience was twice fending off Viking raiders from Iceland. The highlight of my playthrough so far has been that I had the opportunity to get a daughter or granddaughter married to the Icelandic jarl that's been raiding me, so that stopped and we became allies and then I called upon him to aid me in my war with my neighbor. Maximum historical accuracy achieved!

I'm not doing well with the gold, though I've slowly developed my two holdings. But I am doing extremely well with prestige which has allowed me a greater number of knights. (another reason why I won that war) And I've done pretty well with piety. 

Other than that, there has been a lot of just staring at the screen speeding up the timeline, with the occasional activity, mainly hunts. I've done a few intrigue moves as well.

Why do vassals only provide levies (and themselves if they're your knights)? Where are their men-at-arms? Not very historically accurate I'd say.

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14 hours ago, Ran said:

I didn't ever own a Mac, but Marathon was basically the game that people always trotted out to prove Macs could not only run games, but run great games.

It looks like they've attached the name Marathon to the game, but didn't really care to have it really connect with the original games in any way, as they were smart, almost 0451-style predecessors to System Shock and System Shock 2. It's...weird.

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9 hours ago, IlyaP said:

@Werthead is currently doing the work of the gods. His Total War write-up went live this morning, and hot staggering fuck it's comprehensive! 

A nice write-up indeed. @Werthead your write-ups of the latter games were a bit shorter than the older ones. Can I assume it's partly because you didn't play them as much?

Ilya, I would add a few things if you want to know more:

Rome Total War was such a game changer in its time that they partnered with the History Channel for a show called Decisive Battles which aired in 2004, where they used the game's engine to depict the battles they were discussing.

While Napoleon and Attila were improvements over their direct predecessors, the question remains as to why CA didn't dedicate more initial efforts to fixing Empire and Rome II and simply hightailed it to the next game. Ironically, CA did go back and quietly improve Rome II with multiple updates (and even released more DLCs) to the point that Rome II is now better optimized than Attila.

Unfortunately, something similar happened to Three Kingdoms. But this time it wasn't because the game had technical issues; the game released quite well and as Wert said it had big sales, especially in China. But only for the vanilla game. In this case, CA flubbed the DLC releases, which had significantly less sales, and the game lost many players along the way. So CA stopped all support for it instead announcing a "Three Kingdoms 2" that no one is quite sure what it will focus on, and it's even unclear if they are actively working on it. 3K was based on historical Han dynasty, but also on the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is why it has superpowered heroes, not unlike every Wuxia film that is inspired by the period as well. But it does feature a historical mode of play, where your generals are regular people that need to be protected by a bodyguard.

In recent years CA have expanded, becoming the largest video game employer in the UK and also opening a partner studio in Sofia, Bulgaria. This studio made Troy, which was a marketing mess as Wert points out. But the game improved about a year ago with a massive release that allows for three modes of play, one being fully fantasy, one being historical with just blessings from the gods adding bonuses, and one in between. (which was the original release) 

CA's expansion has allowed for them to work on multiple Total War content at the same time. While the Sofia studio was making Troy, the main studio team was busy making Warhammer III. The Warhammer trilogy is expected to have a long life, with multiple DLCs of various size continuing to add flavor and replayability.

The upcoming Pharaoh game is also being made by the Sofia team. And the Warhammer team has already been reduced to just the personnel needed to continue to offer the game support and more DLCs. The rest of the team is working on a new project. Remains to be seen what that is. Wert is right that either a Medieval III or Empire II would require enormous investment in time and resources.

 

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13 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Rome Total War was such a game changer in its time that they partnered with the History Channel for a show called Decisive Battles which aired in 2004, where they used the game's engine to depict the battles they were discussing.

And don't forget the British show "Time Commanders" with Richard Hammond of later Top Gear fame as a host and historians like Mike Loades as advisors. It was such a uniquely insane concept of a game show where teams "commanded" people playing historical battles in the Rome: Total War engine while the historical advisers would explain tactics and technology of the time. Great fun. They did a three episode revival special a couple of years ago where they played Napoleon, Rome II and Attila with much higher production values.

Well, I guess I myself eventually have to try and get back into the franchise. I utterly loved Rome I and played all its various mods and somehow nothing really captured the magic of stuff like Europa Barbarorum back then again. I played Medieval II a lot as well, but somehow despite all the praise never as much as Rome and also didn't dabbled much with mods. I somehow had a bit of a problem with how much of the game boiled down to throwing cavalry at everything and I also in my first ever playthrough had some rather ghastly pathfinding breakdowns that caused whole units to suicide jumping down walls or somehow dying in droves getting stuck on enemy siege engines and I never forgave the game that.

Empire I played somehow inexplicably far more than Medieval, even though my very first playthrough also felt infuriating because of the dumb AI getting strokes at all the map clutter or when pathfinding through needlessly complicated forts. But at least shooting stuff worked and Napoleon was a marked improvement as well, even though its more linear campaign caused me to only play through it once and then never touch it again.

Oddly, I... have Shogun 2, but never really played it. I had serious trouble running the game, which was two computers ago, but never got around trying it again.

The next game I then played was Warhammer 2, which I had a lot of fun with, especially with the vast variations between the different factions. Warhammer 3's faction don't really interest me however. I also got Total War Troy from the Epic giveaway, but as I said, the game didn't run very well and I ended up just briefly fooling around in my Penthesilea campaign.

Ah, I just remember I also bought Attila in a Humble Bundle, grabbed the Belisarius DLC and played that... well, until I got Italy, but then somehow wandered off. Never played the main game. Also never picked up Rome 2 either, despite the setting being very much to my liking. At some point at Empire I had started to resent its 'gameified' development and how uselessly fragile infantry became and that essentially if you don't want to have ludicrous casualties in every single stupidly fast engagement, you should just sit on your ass shooting things.

Three Kingdoms would interest me a little however, so I will see when I get it at a great discount...

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I pretty much just play Rome II and Attila. I would play Empire more if it were sharper (I'm a graphics slut sometimes, I admit it). 

I don't care for the fantasy games, as the historical settings kinda feed my creative sub-processes as I'm playing. 

I WANTED to love 3 Kingdoms, and I like almost do. But I don't like that it feels pared down compared to its predecessors. 

Edited by Secretary of Eumenes
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1 hour ago, Toth said:

And don't forget the British show "Time Commanders" with Richard Hammond of later Top Gear fame as a host and historians like Mike Loades as advisors.

Loved watching that one back in the day. Also, weirdly hilariously, a 21-year-old Ruth Wilson (Mrs. Coulter in His Dark Materials, etc.) was part of the Pharsalus episode:

As I've aged, the pace of the Total War games has seemed too fast to me (at least in multiplayer), and makes me wish there were more turn-based, large scale battle-focused games out there. One of my favorite historical games of this sort was The Great Battles of Alexander.

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