Videogames Latest: Starfields of Glory

[Toth]

Finished the Red Alert 2 campaign now. The last two Soviet missions were a strange mixture of frantical defense against non-stop attacks and then just rushing the target with airships and be done with it. Given how insanely frustrating Yuri's psy-warriors were, I'm not quite sure I want to jump straight into the expansion.

In fact I somehow fell back to playing GTA V as I somehow have an urge to leisurely drive through the town. Did mostly races and parachute jumps before doing a little of the main story.

[Ser Not Appearing]

I've been playing a ton of Exoprimal. It's like Gambit from Destiny 2, mixed with a bit of Overwatch and the story Fortnite should have had.

It feels bland but solid at the start and is initially somewhat repetitive (I imagine reviewers only ever got this far because they're lazy) but, despite being multi-player, there's a single player story that unfolds and they add more mission types and variety as you play more. You also unlock more player abilities as you level up the exosuits.

It's been pretty fun and chill with no notable bugs.

Edited July 27, 2023 by Ser Not Appearing

[Werthead]

I was reading some interviews about Grounded and it's an interesting story. The game concept was developed from an internal "let's do something outside our wheelhouse" meeting and only had a tiny team and a tinier budget assigned to it. The game really intrigued Microsoft when they bought Obsidian a few months later (possibly more than Outer Worlds, Avowed or Pentiment) but Obsidian decided not to pour tons of their new resources into it. The Grounded team never exceeded 20 people - and still never has! - and it entered Early Access after only a few months to a year and a bit in development, and the bulk of the game's development took place in EA.

One interesting thing was that originally the surrounding neighbourhood was not detailed in the game - immediately outside the exterior walls was void, with a few building tops sticking up to give the illusion of a surrounding world - but they weren't expecting people to go berserk spending hundreds of hours building insane towers or platforms into the sky and then jumping off the edge, so they ended up having to build a reasonable amount of the surrounding neighbourhood to give the illusion of more world out there (even if there's nothing you can do out there and no building materials and no way of getting back into the main game area apart from reloading). They didn't want to limit creativity so didn't impose any kind of build or height limit.

To date over 20 million people have played the game. That's not 20 million sales, due to the game's heavily-trailed presence on Game Pass, but it's almost certainly Obsidian's most-played game (the next one down is Fallout: New Vegas, which sold ~15 million copies in its first couple of years on sale but its subsequent long-tail sales are unknown).

[Werthead]

GotY.

 

[Werthead]

Finished Grounded in the proverbial nick of time before BG3 hits.

The endgame is excellent, requiring a hefty defence of three important points. Just fighting off the bug hordes that arrive is impossible, you have to build and fortify. I ended up constructing Mushroom Tirith, an immense fortification of interlocking mushroom-reinforced walls with concentric rings of defence around all three points and then multiple defensive lines at key chokepoints around the area. I set up a massive mushroom wall construction facility within the defence perimeter and defoliated half the garden of mushrooms to construct the colossal fortifications needed. It took about 15% of my total playtime of the game.

The result was reasonably impressive (as usual, a quick visit to Google confirms people who went berserk in the extreme with it, with five times as many walls, acorn-shotgun cannon turrets and spike traps everywhere), but the battle was still touch and go. My tactic was good in that the enemy advance was massively slowed down but bad in that it just meant the enemy army just got bigger and bigger at the logjam point, so when it finally broke through into the base it was like a flood of death. However, several of the giant bugs present unleashed AoE attacks, which meant they unleashed a lot of friendly fire and obliterated the lesser bugs before they could become a problem, and some of the big bugs ended up fighting one another rather than focusing on my walls, allowing me to lure off some of the main threats and destroy them. Still tricky going but I managed to win, although one of the defensive positions was reduced to around 25% health.

All in all, excellent game.

[Werthead]

Whilst moving my monitors around, I had to disconnect my now-secondary monitor's Displayport cable (and was extremely careful, since the cables have a locking mechanism). Went I went to put it back in, the port itself abruptly disappeared, leaving behind only a big hole in the connection area. After checking to make sure I wasn't having a stroke, I realised the connector from the main board had completely come loose and fallen off somewhere inside the housing of the monitor.

Not the end of the world as I can connect with HDMI, but my new graphics card only has one spare HDMI port, which is currently connected to my third monitor. So I need to find a Displayport-to-HDMI converter, which apparently are very hit and miss, or require an expensive signal converter. Or see if it's even vaguely economical to fix the monitor. It's only three years old, which is really annoying (my third monitor is twelve years old and still trucking, I bought it with a new PC in 2011 to basically play Skyrim). ARGH.

Meanwhile, RPS have published their user-voted Annual Top 100 PC Games of All Time List. As with last year it's pretty credible, and it's nice to see a lot of pretty good, recent games on the list alongside the Usual Suspects.

[polishgenius]

20 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Meanwhile, RPS have published their user-voted Annual Top 100 PC Games of All Time List. As with last year it's pretty credible, and it's nice to see a lot of pretty good, recent games on the list alongside the Usual Suspects.

 

Comparing this year's list to last years it looks like a solid chunk of the readership saw a few indie games quite high on the list last time, played them, and voted them even higher this time. Fairly big jumps for Hollow Knight, Hades, FTL and Obra Dinn. 

Edited August 4, 2023 by polishgenius

[Ran]

Complete lack of space sims both in this list and the actual RPS list annoys me. No Freespace 2, no TIE Fighter, at the very least that's just wrong.

[polishgenius]

Hey, FTL is a space sim. Technically. 

[Werthead]

4 minutes ago, Ran said:

Complete lack of space sims both in this list and the actual RPS list annoys me. No Freespace 2, no TIE Fighter, at the very least that's just wrong.

I think it's just a niche genre that's become more niche over time, not helped by Elite: Dangerous (which was on both critic and public lists until 2-4 years ago) running out of content, Star Citizen still being MIA and Star Wars: Squadrons being underwhelming. The big GoG re-release of TIE Fighter did send it back into the lists, but that was a while again now and the excitement has died down a bit. Starfield might reinject some excitement, but the space combat element is only part of the game in that.

Personally I'd have either had Mass Effect: Legendary Edition or the individual games, but not both. Effectively ME1 and ME2 are on the list twice each.

I do have my personal group of games that should be in such a list, but fair enough that their profile has fallen lower so it's no longer a surprise they are not (Hostile Waters, Ground Control, Anachronox).

 

[Ser Not Appearing]

Give Starfield a bit more time and you'll have a space game high on the list ... assuming no trash voting from angry PlayStation fans.

More immediately, I wonder what the ratings for Starfield will look like. It's so massive and I feel like they've got a solid lid on content so I wonder how many will get access to it and how much time they'll have. Feel like it might be hard for anyone to adequately rate it.

[IlyaP]

Gave Baldur's Gate III a try. Hated pretty much everything about it - especially the turn-based gameplay, which I unreservedly hate, and went back to playing Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition. Looks like the rest of the month will be quiet before we get whammied with the two big releases coming in September - Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty. My partner has already been warned that on 25 September she'll lose me for a day or two, as I plow through the CP77 DLC like an absolute maniac.   

 

[Werthead]

16 hours ago, Ser Not Appearing said:

Give Starfield a bit more time and you'll have a space game high on the list ... assuming no trash voting from angry PlayStation fans.

More immediately, I wonder what the ratings for Starfield will look like. It's so massive and I feel like they've got a solid lid on content so I wonder how many will get access to it and how much time they'll have. Feel like it might be hard for anyone to adequately rate it.

Starfield is mostly a Bethesda standard open-world CRPG, the space elements appear to be more reasonably developed than expected, but it's not the main focus of the game (and I suspect you'll be able to fast-travel past the actual space travel once you've visited enough places). I think you'll need Star Citizen/Squadron 42 as the next major space game.

Bethesda were pretty locked down on review copies for Fallout 4 (and even moreso for Fallout 76), but they and Microsoft may want to appear bullish by letting reviewers play the game for longer than 5 days before release. That was very silly for BG3.

[Darryk]

On 8/4/2023 at 10:19 PM, Ran said:

Complete lack of space sims both in this list and the actual RPS list annoys me. No Freespace 2, no TIE Fighter, at the very least that's just wrong.

Those lists are pretty much always problematic, I mean it's so subjective.

Edit: WTF no Knights of the Old Republic? Get out of here.

Edited August 5, 2023 by Darryk

[Darryk]

Well I'm at least glad the list wasn't overly biased toward new games.

[polishgenius]

I mean there's 100 spots and way more than 100 great games. There's always gonna be things missing. At least the reader list generally does consist of games that are either generally considered classic or (in the case of more recent ones) are almost certainly going to- the in-house RPS list has a lot of crossover but also seems to include a lot of games that a given writer thinks are really cool and is using the list to advertise. 

 

 

Like I loved Little Gator Game, it's a delight and I maintain everyone should play it. But including it but not even mentioning A Short Hike is unserious journalism. 

(the reader list does have A Short Hike, and it is right that it should do so)

[Werthead]

Red Dead Redemption is getting a low-effort relaunch on PS4 and PS5. Reportedly just 30fps on both systems, but available in 4K on PS5. No remastering. No multiplayer. Only playable on PS5 via backwards compatibility, no PC version and they want to charge $50 for it.

Seems mildly ridiculous.

[Rhom]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Red Dead Redemption is getting a low-effort relaunch on PS4 and PS5. Reportedly just 30fps on both systems, but available in 4K on PS5. No remastering. No multiplayer. Only playable on PS5 via backwards compatibility, no PC version and they want to charge $50 for it.

Seems mildly ridiculous.

I don't think its all that ridiculous considering it currently isn't available at all on current gen consoles.  I had to dig my PS3 out of mothballs earlier this year when I wanted to play it.

Heck, I was even able to play Red Dead Revolver on my PS4, but there was no Redemption for me unless I hooked up the old console.

[Caligula_K3]

I do think the price is ridiculous. I've been wanting to play Red Dead Redemption since it was first released, but never had a console that could run it. A Switch port should be a day 1 buy for me. But there's no way I'm spending 50 dollars on it if it's a straight port. Hopefully it goes on sale soon.

 

[Rhom]

5 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

I do think the price is ridiculous. I've been wanting to play Red Dead Redemption since it was first released, but never had a console that could run it. A Switch port should be a day 1 buy for me. But there's no way I'm spending 50 dollars on it if it's a straight port. Hopefully it goes on sale soon.

 

What would you pay for a new game on Switch?