Videogames: All Valves on Deck

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

My dream guys, is that live service and mobile games flop hard and die a permanent death, and we only get story rich, narratively driven, single player games from now on  not gonna ever happen of course. 

[polishgenius]

3 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

we only get story rich, narratively driven, single player games from now on

 

Why do you want the gaming industry to be much worse? 

[Heartofice]

8 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

They will also provide a free DLC which was supposed to be a regular DLC. And they intend to expand the map and add more factions. They'll pretty much merge it with Troy, because people found Troy's campaign map files within Pharaoh, so this was a likely intent in the far future. But now it will probably come sooner since they discovered there was no money to milk off this one.

I returned the game after playing 2 hrs because it wasn't worth the price even though it had some interesting campaign features. I'll probably pick it up again at the reduced price and maybe with a Steam sale on top.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the Pharaoh announcement. It sounded to me like they are keeping the game on life support to get some good will from people who bought it, but ultimately the game is dead.

It doesn’t sound like they will ever get the number of players needed to justify multiple DLCs.

[Ran]

 

[Werthead]

23 hours ago, Darryk said:

Time for Medieval: Total War 3

If Creative Assembly 2023 was to make Medieval III, the chances of it being utter dogshit are very, very high.

I'd prefer to see Medieval II Remastered on PC (it came out two years ago on mobile) with strong modding support.

43 minutes ago, Ran said:

 

Homeworld 3 is currently topping my most eagerly-awaited game of 2024 list. The series has been outstanding so far (and I'm just waiting for that tabletop wargame Kickstarter to arrive).

[Rhom]

As much as I loved RTS games back in the early 2000s, I never played the Age of Empires games.  I have recently picked up the first one and have been playing the campaigns.  @Werthead I feel like I remember you saying there was some sort of game breaking issue with the modern release on Steam, but I don't recall what it is.

[Heartofice]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

If Creative Assembly 2023 was to make Medieval III, the chances of it being utter dogshit are very, very high.

Unless they decide to start from scratch with a new engine, which seems highly unlikely, then I can’t see any real hope for a Med 3. 

[Werthead]

34 minutes ago, Rhom said:

As much as I loved RTS games back in the early 2000s, I never played the Age of Empires games.  I have recently picked up the first one and have been playing the campaigns.  @Werthead I feel like I remember you saying there was some sort of game breaking issue with the modern release on Steam, but I don't recall what it is.

There's some issues with AoE1 they could never quite fix, so they decided to start porting AoE1's campaigns into AoE2: Definitive Edition instead, which is going well (still incomplete though).

The main issue, though, is that the UI is pretty poor compared to AoE2, especially not having troop formations which makes combat a bit of a mess. That's why playing the AoE1 campaigns in the AoE2 engine is a lot better.

Edited December 15, 2023 by Werthead

[Ran]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Homeworld 3 is currently topping my most eagerly-awaited game of 2024 list. The series has been outstanding so far (and I'm just waiting for that tabletop wargame Kickstarter to arrive).

I love the idea of the series, I love the aesthetics of the series, but I've never actually played it -- something about it daunts me. I've got the remastered collection somewhere or other...

[Werthead]

1 minute ago, Ran said:

I love the idea of the series, I love the aesthetics of the series, but I've never actually played it -- something about it daunts me. I've got the remastered collection somewhere or other...

The control scheme is Command & Conquer in space, it's really not that daunting at all (it's certainly nothing like, say, EVE Online or Stellaris), and it does ease you into the game and controls very gently through the tutorials. I'd say go for it.

[Corvinus85]

Homeworld 3's system requirements are higher than a typical RTS. They recommend a RTX 2070 and 16GB RAM.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

Homeworld 3's system requirements are higher than a typical RTS. They recommend a RTX 2070 and 16GB RAM.

Given the series' traditional focus on graphics and atmosphere, that's not too surprising. Homeworld looked absolutely unbelievable on release in 1999 and Homeworld 2 even moreso four years later. The only visually underwhelming game in the series was Deserts of Kharak, due to a low budget and using Unity, but even that was fine, with some great sunsets and desert work.

Homeworld 3's thing is going to be having tons of ships, some of them massive, moving in close proximity to colossal space structures, which is going to come at a performance cost.

[IlyaP]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

The control scheme is Command & Conquer in space, it's really not that daunting at all (it's certainly nothing like, say, EVE Online or Stellaris), and it does ease you into the game and controls very gently through the tutorials. I'd say go for it.

The intense three-dimensionality was confounding for me, as I suffer from perhaps not having the best spatial awareness, which made Homeworld *extremely* stressful for me, as I constantly got lost on the map and ended up not knowing what to do, where I was looking, why something wasn't working, etc. 

Though the score was, I confess, goddamn gorgeous. 

[Werthead]

Spatial awareness in HW is key, and usually best accomplished by hitting space bar which opens up the map of the entire area, which allows you to reorient quickly. Also a useful device is to look at the Mothership, as its vertical alignment, facing and the fact you can (usually) see it from right across the level help provide orientation. There's also identifying areas in the skybox; the Galactic Core (usually visible on every map as it gets larger) is usually directly opposite the Mothership on a North-axis (or the nearest equivalent).

Something I was surprised no other RTS picked up was the use of band-boxing for things other than selection: Ctrl-boxing an enemy group tells your currently selected units to attack all units in that box, which is very useful (no need to keep clicking on new enemy units as old ones are destroyed). Alt-boxing a group of units switches the camera focus to that group of units. F is also maybe the most important key in the game, as it snaps the camera to the currently selected unit.

When in doubt, switching to the Sensor Manager (space) and basically carrying out the whole mission from there is viable, if not exactly showing off the graphics to their best potential.

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

10 hours ago, Werthead said:

If Creative Assembly 2023 was to make Medieval III, the chances of it being utter dogshit are very, very high.

 

Umm why would you say this ? Historical games were their OG bread and butter. I want this and empire 2 badly. 

i haven’t played their fantasy games, but people who have like their quality and other than the shameless dlcs, their ability to make good games has not diminished.

Edited December 16, 2023 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[The Drunkard]

1 hour ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Umm why would you say this ? Historical games were their OG bread and butter. I want this and empire 2 badly. 

I really like the Warhammer games but there are heaps of features they've stripped out from the older games that would make me skeptical of a new Medieval game. The battles and world map are pretty great but the game is otherwise extremely simple. I'd also be wary of them trying to gouge the player base given that seems to be a recent trend.

On the other hand, I heard Three Kingdoms was pretty good and was received pretty well prior to all its DLC being cancelled, although I never played it.

[Heartofice]

3 hours ago, The Drunkard said:

I really like the Warhammer games but there are heaps of features they've stripped out from the older games that would make me skeptical of a new Medieval game. The battles and world map are pretty great but the game is otherwise extremely simple.

I’m not sure that is true any more. CA constantly bring back in old features from other games and reskin them for new purposes. Now Warhammer 3 has some relatively complex campaign mechanics which are far more unique than anything in historic titles.

The historical games were never complex, the campaigns were always side shows for the battles.

But I think the current engine has hit its limits in terms of what complexity it can achieve, developers are running out of runway in their ability to make something new. 
 

So any historical game would probably look similar to existing games, unless they start again. 

Edited December 16, 2023 by Heartofice

[Werthead]

9 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Umm why would you say this ? Historical games were their OG bread and butter. I want this and empire 2 badly. 

i haven’t played their fantasy games, but people who have like their quality and other than the shameless dlcs, their ability to make good games has not diminished.

Their last unambiguously-praised historical game was Shogun 2 which is almost 13 years old. Rome II launched in a horrendous state and it's been fixed up some since, with some excellent DLC, but the base game still has huge design problems. Attila inherits some of those issues but does have a more interesting campaign. Three Kingdoms is okay but is designed for crossover appeal with the Warhammer games and has a lot of fantasy-ish design ideas that don't mesh well with the historical setting (and historical mode is an afterthought at best). The Saga games have mostly been crap. Pharoah is a reskin of Troy that they're pretending is a new game.

The Warhammer games have some interesting ideas that they've largely failed to integrate into the historical games, but also a lot of issues they have imported into the historical games (gimped sieges, no naval battles, massive over-focus on heroes and cooldowns) to their detriment. 

The imperial period for Total War historical games was Rome through Shogun 2, and that was a long, long time ago now.

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

17 hours ago, Werthead said:

Their last unambiguously-praised historical game was Shogun 2 which is almost 13 years old. Rome II launched in a horrendous state and it's been fixed up some since, with some excellent DLC, but the base game still has huge design problems. Attila inherits some of those issues but does have a more interesting campaign. Three Kingdoms is okay but is designed for crossover appeal with the Warhammer games and has a lot of fantasy-ish design ideas that don't mesh well with the historical setting (and historical mode is an afterthought at best). The Saga games have mostly been crap. Pharoah is a reskin of Troy that they're pretending is a new game.

The Warhammer games have some interesting ideas that they've largely failed to integrate into the historical games, but also a lot of issues they have imported into the historical games (gimped sieges, no naval battles, massive over-focus on heroes and cooldowns) to their detriment. 

The imperial period for Total War historical games was Rome through Shogun 2, and that was a long, long time ago now.

Ya but my point is that they still have the capability to make a great historical title because unlike a studio like  BioWare which has been thoroughly gutted by EA and is unrecognisable today in terms of its team, most of the core CA folks are still there. 

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Ya but my point is that they still have the capability to make a great historical title because unlike a studio like  BioWare which has been thoroughly gutted by EA and is unrecognisable today in terms of its team, most of the core CA folks are still there. 

A lot of the old-skool CA creatives left a long time ago. A lot of the team that made Shogun was gone by the time Warhammer II came out (most notably Mike Simpson, and Tim Ansell who got treated like shit during and after his departure, although he went earlier during the Sega buy-out), and I believe only one long-term director remains with the company (Ian Roxborough) and he was moved out of creative into business some time ago, and has only come back to perform emergency surgery on Warhammer III. Troy and Pharoah were made by their new studio in Bulgaria. 

Amusingly, now, most of the really long-standing staffmembers are actually on the non-TW side of things, and developed Alien: Isolation and the Total Warrior games (and EA sports ports before that).

Edited December 17, 2023 by Werthead