Videogames Latest: Starfields of Glory

[The Anti-Targ]

I can't remember the last time I played an Activision game, so I have no personal stake in the MS/Acti merger. IIRC Acti is the biggest game publisher in the Biz which would normally raise some competition eyebrows. But I think there is still so much competition in game development / publishing (at the mega corp end of town), and there is a large and active indie game development scene that it's not as big of a deal as it might be in other business sectors. Rather than MS taking properties like CoD off competing hardware platforms is it more likely that MS is motivated to take CoD off competing PC sales platforms, looking mostly at Steam?

Also, because I can't be arsed resurrecting the LoU HBO thread I'll just note that TLOU has been nominated for 24 Emmy award, which is the second most nominations this year only behind Succession. So it not only broke the video game curse from an audience and critic perspective, it has also earned video game adaptations some serious cred among its peers. I don't expect it to win all that much, because in most of the categories that get a lot of public attention there are better nominations, but to use a well worn and usually insincere cliche, just being nominated is an honour. The success of this adaptation, whether you personally liked it or not, carries a lot of weight for those who want to see more good quality TV/movie adaptations of video games.

[Werthead]

With all the big summer releases coming up, the venerable Team Fortress 2 has stolen some major PR by, er, introducing a friendly seal to the game.

[Werthead]

Started playing Grounded, since I was looking for something to stress-test the new PC without being too insane. I have to say playing this in 4K with everything up to max just looks amazing. Actual next-gen stuff.

Also, a very good game. Shades of Subnautica except, er, on land and very small. But a similar mix of approachability and sticking up signs saying "DON'T GO OVER HERE" (usually do to easily-visible massive fuck-off spiders) at the start of the game. Quite funny as well.

Interesting moral quandary by giving you lots of recipes that need aphid stuff and the only way to get is kill aphids, which is a bit harsh as they're defenceless and make horrible sounds as you bludgeon them to death. Oh well.

[IlyaP]

On 7/16/2023 at 8:44 AM, Werthead said:

Started playing Grounded, since I was looking for something to stress-test the new PC without being too insane. I have to say playing this in 4K with everything up to max just looks amazing. Actual next-gen stuff.

How's the gameplay? From the videos I've seen, it's played in first person - but is there a third-person POV option as well?

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

Forget starfield and all these big budget games, I can’t wait for Hades 2 !!!  The first one was the best game I had played since Witcher 3. 

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, IlyaP said:

How's the gameplay? From the videos I've seen, it's played in first person - but is there a third-person POV option as well?

Yes. You can switch between first person and third person at will.

[Argonath Diver]

Spent a day off carefully deconstructing my PC then installing the parts and my new 6800xt in a great Lian Li case (3rd one by them now). Cable management is amazing with the SSDs tucked behind the mobo, no more DVD or hard drives clogging up space and more wires. Didn't get all the fancy RBG lighting stuff right but frankly I don't care. Temps are running great even under heavy load in Diablo 4. 

Looking forward to Starfield down the road to push it - the card can chew up anything at 1080p (til I upgrade monitors eventually). Mostly though I can't wait to set up my PC VR with the Oculus so I can finally dive into Fallout:Alyx.  

For now I'm playing a very low-graphics Vampire Hunters ripoff called Halls of Torment that's been great for the 4 bucks I paid. Pretty funny that I spend double what I ever have on my first gfx card upgrade in years and I'm still playing games with very simple grapnics.

[IlyaP]

7 hours ago, Argonath Diver said:

Looking forward to Starfield down the road to push it - the card can chew up anything at 1080p (til I upgrade monitors eventually). Mostly though I can't wait to set up my PC VR with the Oculus so I can finally dive into Fallout:Alyx.  

Book in your holidays now kids, 'cause September's gonna be lit!

[Toth]

So, am on my summer break and my... gaming selection is eccentric, to say the least.

After my Star Trek Armada playthrough I guess I got into the mood for old school RTS and installed C&C Red Alert 2 again, which I got from an Origin giveaway ages ago. Getting it to work was a bit of a hassle, but going through the campaign is a breeze with only minor hiccups. Already finished the Allied campaign (though I was quite frustrate with the pretty much constant artillery and air ship attacks in the last mission, which somehow always got through despite plastering my base with patriots) and am now in mission 8 of the Soviet campaign. I like the game and it gives me nostalgia to playing it at my cousin's place back in the days, but oh god, it's so stressful in the higher levels.

Which brings me right to my current obsession: Space Engineers. I vaguely remember playing a demo of an early alpha ages ago, but now got the finished game for a few euros in a sale. And... damn... it is strangely addicting despite offering barely any goals itself, but goals still just generate themselves out of the game. It's basically a mixture of Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program. You mine ore, refine it into ingots and use those ingots to create parts out of which you can build blocks that you can slap together to make bases, rovers and ships that have to deal with gravity and fuel consumption. In the end it all revolves around figuring out how to get from A to B and then how to get three thousand tons of stuff from B to A.

I started a Survival game on an Earth-like planet, stranded with just an escape pod and some basic tools. I spent my time squeezing iron out of rocks in order to build a drill rig to get more rock to squeeze stuff out of, then built a small Rover to drive around and scan the area for more valuable ores, occasionally crashing horribly and/or getting stuck in a ditch. Built a second rover as a mobile base, used it to construct two more outposts, then built a flying drill ship that was just a large cargo container with some drills and thrusters taped onto, which still drastically decreased my mining time as I didn't have to keep manually replacing drill arms with bigger ones. Then started to build my Space Brick, a massive very cuboid ship with massive hydrogen thrusters that I then wanted to use to get to space... but had a severe shortage of hydrogen, so I built an even more massive flying umbrella of thrusters with a wall of drills at the bottom that I could use to dig up underground ice deposits... which barely moved the needle on my fuel gauge, so I grew desperate, trying to fly up to a mountain top to shave ice off it, then luckily found a mountain lake while up there.

Having properly fueled up, I managed to get into space... and initially it was my idea to stop there and bask in my achievement, but while using my space brick to mine astoids and filling it up with hundreds of tons of platinum ore, my refinery got clogged up and now I'm building an automatic refining station in space where I can offload ore and move on. And this time I try to give it a more realistic looking tube like shell and an array of solar panels.

[horangi]

2 hours ago, Toth said:

Which brings me right to my current obsession: Space Engineers. I vaguely remember playing a demo of an early alpha ages ago, but now got the finished game for a few euros in a sale. And... damn... it is strangely addicting despite offering barely any goals itself, but goals still just generate themselves out of the game. It's basically a mixture of Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program. You mine ore, refine it into ingots and use those ingots to create parts out of which you can build blocks that you can slap together to make bases, rovers and ships that have to deal with gravity and fuel consumption. In the end it all revolves around figuring out how to get from A to B and then how to get three thousand tons of stuff from B to A.

I'd like to hear if the interest sustains.  Its one game I've considered because it sounds right up my alley for a low stress sandbox.  But it was a bit raw last time I checked a few years ago.

[Toth]

12 minutes ago, horangi said:

I'd like to hear if the interest sustains.  Its one game I've considered because it sounds right up my alley for a low stress sandbox.  But it was a bit raw last time I checked a few years ago.

Just looked up... it... entertained me for 18 days now. Which I guess is already paying off its price. Can't say in the really long run. The NPC factions that offer missions and trade are pretty much worthless in single-player as they don't give you anything that you can't easily make for yourself, with the sole exception of "safety zone" fields that shut down griefing in multiplayer. So far the only motivation is to build ever more bigger things to make getting around and hoarding resources easier, which you will in turn use to build the next bigger and hopefully prettier thing. And I guess there is the challenge of trying to get to different environments and build stuff that can easily lift off of them. The solar system you play in consists of an Earth-like planet with a moon looking like ours, a Mars-like planet with its own moon, an ice planet, an "alien" planet that is infested with aggressive bugs like in Starship Troopers and a high-gravity desert world.

If you like, I can give a little bit of a tour:

My first rover: https://i.imgur.com/fX5guNj.png

Building a launch site for my space ship: https://i.imgur.com/94arRwS.png

Building my Space Brick: https://i.imgur.com/apOEf8J.png

My base at the end at the time of lift-off: https://i.imgur.com/RDCQQyO.png

My mining ships in comparison: https://i.imgur.com/PQdaDzG.png

The lake that saved my hide: https://i.imgur.com/7lus39c.png

I had to build a conveyor of O2/H2-generators towards my ship, as otherwise it would have taken forever: https://i.imgur.com/vjhpFeE.png

Waiting for my fuel on the bridge: https://i.imgur.com/ZJi2vr8.png

The inside of the Space Brick: https://i.imgur.com/QQJMPy5.png

Looking out my "promenade deck": https://i.imgur.com/rTsFRHB.png

Finally getting into space: https://i.imgur.com/V6S6qYA.jpg

... and immediately starting with the construction of a space station: https://i.imgur.com/hqx9h2Y.jpg

[horangi]

41 minutes ago, Toth said:

If you like, I can give a little bit of a tour:

Very cool!  Space Brick indeed, looks like the first steps of the future Borg civilization.  Seems like the resource and build requirements are more in depth than something like No Mans Sky.  I'll have to check it out.  As you said, 18 days is worth the price of entrance.

[Toth]

50 minutes ago, horangi said:

Very cool!  Space Brick indeed, looks like the first steps of the future Borg civilization.  Seems like the resource and build requirements are more in depth than something like No Mans Sky.  I'll have to check it out.  As you said, 18 days is worth the price of entrance.

Yeah, the mining and the building are pretty much the life-blood of the game. I didn't spend much time building bases in No Man's Sky, in the end just placed some auto-miners and a teleporter into the dirt and called it a day before going on with exploring. Meanwhile Space Engineers forces you to do it since you NEED bases to get electricity to power drills for resources, generators for air and hydrogen for your jetpack and refineries and assemblers to make more blocks. You NEED rovers and ships to get around as the distances you need to traverse are quite vast and most ore deposits deep underground. Preferably your builds have airtight insides that keep the vacuum out and your precious air in. So you have to build something to make your life easier and while you are at it, you get motivated to make something that is efficient at its job and maybe even looks good. And then that's your baby and your home. You spent several evenings putting it together piece by piece after all.

The resource management... actually is a bit less of a hassle than No Man's Sky. The resources are iron for just about everything, silicon for solar panels, nickel for batteries, ice to generate air and fuel, cobalt for pretty much all medium to high tech blocks, magnesium for weapons, silver for medical equipment and gravity manipulation, gold for high efficiency refineries, platinum for highly efficient ion thrusters and uranium as an advanced energy source.

The kicker is that all except platinum and uranium are available on every single planet, every moon and every asteroid, with platinum spawning only on moons or asteroids and uranium only on asteroids. Meaning you don't even have all that much incentive to actually go anywhere else (you probably still want to see if you can), especially once you've managed to get to space in a ship designed to eat asteroids and churn out supplies. I've actually made life probably unnecessarily difficult for myself by going to space with an empty ship to save weight, now having to scrounge up all my resources again as I zip around from asteroid to asteroid. Though I have narrowly dodged some pirates here and there, so I'm thinking I have to dabble a bit with the combat mechanics... once I found an asteroid with magnesium again. And yeah... if I don't manage to create anything less cube-like , I am considering going for a massive Borg Cube as my mothership.^^ I have already thought about how, since the exhaust damage of thrusters is just six blocks long and they don't really need to be in the open beyond that, you could build a giant block of thrusters as the centerpiece of a ship and then build a ship around that. Would probably also be very advantageous in regards to protecting the thrusters from damage in combat.

Edited July 19, 2023 by Toth

[Werthead]

Hit a huge difficulty spike in Grounded until I realised the supreme value of setting up massive rumbles between enemy creatures. A lot of the tougher early-ish game bad guys live in close proximity to the two red ant hives north of your base, so a viable strategy is to kit yourself out in red ant armour (making all red ants nonhostile towards you), pissing off some stinkbugs, spiders or mosquitoes and then luring them towards the ant mounds. The red ant soldiers come charging out and make mincemeat of them, allowing you to rifle their corpses for materials later on. Sweet.

Another amusing strategy for ground creatures is to jump on the back of a ladybug when danger threatens, and whatever's trying to hit you will hit the ladybug (instead of or as well as you) and trigger their wrath (ladybugs are surprisingly tough when pissed off), allowing you stand back and delve in to deliver the killer blow.

[grozeng]

I was all psyched to get Baldur's Gate and then looked at my computer and my hard drive is full.  I have tons of pictures from the past 20 years.  So, do I offload them to a portable drive, or buy a new computer for the game?  I know nothing about computers so not sure how hard it is to add another TB of memory for the games.  I only play Baldur's Gate and Dragon Age (which has a new one coming out soon too), so seems a shame to buy a whole new computer.

[IlyaP]

23 minutes ago, grozeng said:

I was all psyched to get Baldur's Gate and then looked at my computer and my hard drive is full.  I have tons of pictures from the past 20 years.  So, do I offload them to a portable drive, or buy a new computer for the game?  I know nothing about computers so not sure how hard it is to add another TB of memory for the games.  I only play Baldur's Gate and Dragon Age (which has a new one coming out soon too), so seems a shame to buy a whole new computer.

An external SSD drive is a worthwhile investment, as they have a longer life-span than standard external hard drives. 

They're a bit more expensive, but they're better quality and more reliable than standard external drives. I recently bought this drive, which is 1TB in size, and which I've used to back-up photos, music, home videos, etc. 

Once you've cleared your drive of stuff, you should be fine. Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition only takes up about 4.9 gigs of space, and Dragon Age: Origins requires 23.67 gigs of space. So really, you don't need a new computer. Just an external backup drive or two, depending on how much stuff you want to store elsewhere. 

[Relic]

 Baldurs Gate 3 takes up 150gb. Buy an external drive, for your photos,  but make sure your PC meets the minimum specs to run BG3

[IlyaP]

9 minutes ago, Relic said:

 Baldurs Gate 3 takes up 150gb. Buy an external drive, for your photos,  but make sure your PC meets the minimum specs to run BG3

Jeezus. 150 gigs? 

Fucking hell.

I'd honestly not looked at the specs, as I was likely going to skip over it, as I do not like turn-based games.

[Rhom]

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Jeezus. 150 gigs? 

Fucking hell.

I'd honestly not looked at the specs, as I was likely going to skip over it, as I do not like turn-based games.

Is it turn based?  I assumed it was real time with pause like the others.

[Rhom]

8 hours ago, grozeng said:

I was all psyched to get Baldur's Gate and then looked at my computer and my hard drive is full.  I have tons of pictures from the past 20 years.  So, do I offload them to a portable drive, or buy a new computer for the game?  I know nothing about computers so not sure how hard it is to add another TB of memory for the games.  I only play Baldur's Gate and Dragon Age (which has a new one coming out soon too), so seems a shame to buy a whole new computer.

 

8 hours ago, IlyaP said:

An external SSD drive is a worthwhile investment, as they have a longer life-span than standard external hard drives. 

They're a bit more expensive, but they're better quality and more reliable than standard external drives. I recently bought this drive, which is 1TB in size, and which I've used to back-up photos, music, home videos, etc. 

Once you've cleared your drive of stuff, you should be fine. Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition only takes up about 4.9 gigs of space, and Dragon Age: Origins requires 23.67 gigs of space. So really, you don't need a new computer. Just an external backup drive or two, depending on how much stuff you want to store elsewhere. 

Yeah, I have a couple of TB drives.  They really aren’t that expensive these days.  They plug in with a USB and basically function like a really big thumb drive.