Patient Gamers

I had bought Stardew Valley the other day when it was finally discounted on Steam. I couldn't play it myself because it is too much reading. Offered it to my wife. And after a little apprehension she tried it, complained about it and is hooked to it.

So now she wants to rope the children in and play multiplayer with them. But for some reason that is bugged on Steam on Linux. So I went ahead and bought it again on GOG for full price. Makes sharing with everyone easier as well.

Well played ConcernedApe, well played.

Steam had the entire Witcher series on sale for a few dollars. I bought everything for the first 3 games.

There was some discussion of it at the time, and folks seem to agree that the first one in the series sucks hard.
As that seemed to be the worst plan, I went with it.

Yes. "It's rough." I guess the engine and content have gotten some backports and extensions. I'm not sure if you could ~~play other characters besides Geralt before, but now you can~~. (EDIT ... Sorry, this seems to be BS. My bad.) They updated the graphics a lot. Its not great, but I think they fixed most of the really bad problems.

I don't know about the story. Seems pretty awful. Awkward acting. Its been fun just trying to play the damn thing.

Um ... I sort of like it. Gonna play some more now ...

I played it on my Steam Deck, 30 FPS average with lots of audio crackling, apparently because of the CPU load. I played the game in hard mode because I was afraid survivor and grounded would break the balance.

The gameplay is great: it was insanely fun outsmarting the infected, circling around the clickers, burning the bloaters. Against those enemies, stealth really was a challenge and I had to manage my stress level (stalkers and runners were especially hard to deal with in the sewer); I'm convinced I would not be able to finish this game in permanent death as certain sequences took me 5-7 tries to do correctly (optimizing to use the least amount of gear or straight up surviving). It was really hard to aim well enough on a controller to be able to do headshot with consistency (this game with a controller and a mouse must feel like heaven to master).

Stealth against humans is way too easy though: you can easily never use your weapons and just throw a glass bottle against the wall, cleanup with a bomb or a Molotov, and you will never be punished when doing a stealthy kill if you take too long which basically means that shiv are useless for anything other than doors (I did not buy the ability to get off the grasp of clickers with shivs).

The hostage mechanic felt so cool, but I rarely used it because I felt like I couldn't afford to waste bullets because of the resource scarcity. I would have loved the game to be more punishing and to force me to spend my gear; I was never spotted and I am horrible at stealth (hello Cyberpunk 2077).

On the writing side, the game shines even more. I was so heartbroken when Sarah was murdered, when Tess sacrificed herself, when Sam turned and Henry killed himself, when Joel said horrible things to Ellie, when he murdered all the fireflies, the surgeon, Marlene in cold blood.

And that's where the game shines! It shows you this great dynamics between Joel and Ellie, this growing bond that is so precious. You despise and love Joel: you despise his lack of moral, his emotional immaturity (not wanting to talk about the hard stuff and lying to Ellie) but you understand where it comes from, you understand why the violence happened.

This constant tension, this gray area makes the game so real and gripping; you can only look with a mix of disgust and support as you're ripping your way through the enemies in the hospital with savagery.

What Joel did is unequivocally wrong and selfish but I cannot judge because I know full well I'd probably have done the same thing in this situation. Well, I'm not sure but I can see it.

This game really made me understand the complexity of moral and decision, the conflicting goals and the harshness of survival. I highly look forward to playing the sequel.

EDIT; I think the right difficulty for me is the "Survivor" one, grounded looks to hard without a mouse.

In this online roleplaying world, with a gameplay reminiscent of Ultima Online and Runescape, players develop characters along a semi-classless system, though the pace of mastery hinges on their character's attributes, engaging in strategic Rock, Paper, Scissors combat through point-and-click, delving into intricate crafting systems like the notoriously complex alchemy, maintaining immersive IC roleplay, and establishing themselves by building or renting customizable castles, mansions, or houses.

Hello fellow patient gamers!

Bit US centric, but I had the day off for memorial day. I was in the mood to catch up on my steam deck wear and tear with a good round of Civ5 BNW. I have had the long term goal of beating it on deity. Did not get there and the game might be lost due to runaway civ, but slim chance of turtleing down and going for a science victory.

Any games that you are still getting use out of while you wait for sales or for something new to drop?

I bought Armored Core 6 shortly after it was released on the PS4 (one of the few games I paid for full price for). I enjoyed it very much the 1st playthrough. Stopped during my 2nd or 3rd playthrough.

Its on sale now on steam. Thinking about getting it for my steam deck, but I was wondering how different of a game it is now. Have there been any cool updates? More build options? Multiplayer still active?

How easy is it to mod on a deck? I forgot about mods!!!

Before I deep dive into my option about a game. I just want to preface that while some people believe that we should be forced into whichever house the sorting hat puts us in. We all can choose which house we feel we belong in. Like Harry in the first book, and in the movies and in this game So please keep this in mind since we are talking about a game here.

I've been playing the Harry Potter games since the PS1 and absolutely love the Zelda inspired games for the system and the RPG's for the GameBoy Color. PS1 Hagrid an all. When the games moved to the PS2 they were better, but never felt as polished and often times felt short. Where I lost interest was the DS game for Goblet of Fire and the Trophy folder games on PS3. I saw my sister play them, but even she just sticks with the early PS1 and 2 games.

So while I've not played them in a while I can say I've seen Hogwarts from when consoles could first render it. To when it could render it well.

I know I've been in the future for a while now. But the little kid inside of me never realized it until I was walking from Hogwarts Castle into Hogsmeade and I looked back upon Hogwarts castle. I was breath taking and beautiful. A sight I'd never thought I would ever see in my life, outside of recreations in theme parks or fan videos.

And I think that's a perfect way to describe this game, it is absolutely beautiful. Details are everywhere and a lot of attention was given to everything you will look at. Whether it's Hogwarts or Hogsmeade, a Dragon Fighting Tent or the Forbidden Forest. The game is a visual feast especially for long time fans of the series.

However to get to that point, you'd need to get through some of the more... unpolished aspects of the game. Combat.

Now combat in Hogwarts Legacy isn't bad, but I wouldn't call it good. Works well enough for the job it's suppose to do. But for the uninitiated, especially if you don't know what a Dark Souls is. It can be a challenge. Combat is effectively color coated spell attacks, dogging and parrying. Combo each and you have a fun system. Problem is, when every game was just mash buttons to win and you have many many non-gamers struggle to get past the tutorial. Myself included (even with my gamer cred). I eventually learned, but the reward wasn't satisfying. More enemies all looking similar with very little in the ways of weaknesses. By the second trial I just turned the difficulty down to easy and left it there for the rest of the game. Honestly it's probably the most fun when you set it to story only mode.

Since where the game wants you to be in the most is in the exportation of the open world... barf. Open World in video games is a fun idea. But for a story driven game like this... I just gets in the way. Don't get me wrong it's neat, but not a game where you are a student at school... which is where you are suppose to spend your time. Not in each and every hamlet around the castle and beyond.

And your reward for exploration... rare items and gear. I get it, but this isn't what I was hoping for in a Harry Potter game. I want a linear story, and that's here, but where I spend time at the school and maybe sneak out from time to time. Not all the time. Actually I don't think I've been to classes since the beginning of the year.

Honestly where Hogwarts Legacy could've improved was if it looked in the past, and borrow from it's contemporaries.

I am imagining a RPG style game, like the GBC harry potter games, with items purchased from a shop and all that. But with the Persona social aspects. Keep combat the way it is for those who like it, but toning down the difficulty doesn't need to ruin the parts of the experience. I think it would work and I'd probably buy it, and if no one makes it, I would... when I have time to make games again.

In hind sight though, despite there being potential to be a better game. What is here isn't bad. In contrast with previous games, this is the best Harry Potter game I've played. There's lots to do and to see. And while I am not a fan of the combat, I wont say that it's bad. Overall I do hope Avalanche games has another opportunity to make a new game, and WB Games lets them spread their wings.

As some of you know, there were a couple of L4D-influenced games, like Killing Floor, Dead Island and Yakuza: Dead Souls for some reason.

One of these, Warhammer: Vermintide, developed by swedes in FatShark, flew under radar for a long time, until their second Vermintide game, where, with much pain, they finally brought out the product that is a highly addicting PvE coop shooter\slasher. Just like in games of old, there were certain mechanics you could abuse to become invincible, but instead of bunnyhope, there were enemy positioning mechanics and evasive dodge. It led me to put in hundreds of hours, and due to the PvE nature I rarely had any toxicity as a newby and learnt to care about other gamers as we as a squad were moving through the map to the common goal. I won't say about outstanding voice acting, character writing and stuff, there are a lot of things to love besides the gameplay, but the gameplay is the core to why I liked it.

BUT

FatShark decided to get EasyAnticheat there, and with their setup it completely prevents any online gaming from Linux unless you are a host - you get kicked out from other's games every other minute. Hosting games means waiting for others to connect or playing with bots, so it means they slashed a game in half for those not indulging into the windowsphere.

After leaving Windows for good, I had this one reason to be sad - that my favorite game is no longer playable in full. But later they shipped another one of their games.

Enter the Darktide.

This one does have anticheat, but it works right with Linux, and it presents another spin on the same formula.

When Vermintide was mostly melee based, and ranged enemies felt like cheaters, there nearly every threat has a gun like it's the US. It's narrative is based around being a random escapee from a prison camp slowly going up the hierarchy of faschist Inquisition, and every quote and every loading screen title reminds you that you are a disposable resource.

And it's gameplay, while in moba fashion depends on individual skills and equipment, still has this L4D breaking points: this games shoots hundreds of heretics onto you, and your positioning and clever timing is the only way to survive. Unless special enemies, that can disable you or deny area, would arrive. Unless someone from your team walks off and go solo only to die.

Skip the antifascist messaging, skip the cooperation implied there, this game has a hard and vulgar core of purely kinetic violence. Since the first game, they made sure, that your melee attacks feel like you are swinging the blade youself, and coming to Darktide, they worked on making the same for the guns that making the show there. Shooting there from various guns feels like in Doom 2016, and that's very enjoyable too.

I joined this hype train long after release, but I'm joyful to find a game that scratches me in all the right places without kicking me, and the one that shows real progress over what I've seen and got addicted to before.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30139581

In my case there's a huge timeframe between 2008 and 2025 I have played mainly multiplayer games like Tibia, Runescape, Realm of Mad God, Counter-Strike, Killing Floor and rarely touched singleplayer games.

I have barely touched GTA1, GTA2, GTA 4 or GTA 5 (finished GTA3 and GTA:SA not so long time ago). I have spent 30 mins in Skyrim. In Witcher 3 2-3 hours while (Witcher 1,2 stay unfinished). HalfLife series keep waiting for me to come back and lead Gordon to the end of the story.

I can go with more and more examples with classic singleplayer games which patiently wait in my library and if you ask me, the multiplayer games really "help in this regard.

Off the top I'll say that Wasteland 2 isn't a bad game, its actually quite good in a lot of ways. The ways in which it isn't though are what really end up hurting the game for me.

My main gripe is that this has the Bethesda style of choice impact where NPCs are hardly bothered by your choices and the world around you only meaningfully changes with a small handful of your choices. And when it does change, the thought put into those changes isn't all that impressive or meaningful.

The world mostly reacts to your changes by just changing NPC dialog and then there is a slideshow at the end. Thats it. So each time you leave a location you feel like your main contribution is just clearing it of enemies.

The other side gripe I have about it is that the story and characters aren't of particular interest. It has a couple good storytelling moments in it (that I won't spoil here for anyone interested) but otherwise I just can't say it pulled me in. I was initially interested after hearing the 3rd game got good reviews and this series is somewhat similar to fallout but I can still see why Fallout maintains its charm all these years later and Wasteland does not. You see glimpses of greatness with certain voices or ideas or plotlines but you are ultimately just edged by these stories and the payoff isn't really there.

This isn't just a space to complain though, I had a lot of fun with the combat and gore and other aspects of the game. They also feel light in a lot of ways but still are satisfying. I enjoyed my time here, looking forward to playing Wasteland 3.

So did anyone else play this or are interested in it? I'm curious if anyone shares these thoughts. Its a game I definitely feel like classic RPG fans will enjoy more than I did.

For both PC and Xbox

cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/Bside/t/2024449

An open-source reimplementation of the most famous civilization-building game ever - fast, small, no ads, free forever!

Build your civilization, research technologies, expand your cities and defeat your foes!

Both Unciv and Freeciv are games inspired by the civilization series. Freeciv is basing it gameplay on older game of civilization series like civilization II and Unciv on the newer games like civilization VI.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28444430

Background

I've been a big fan of LucasArts games since the 90s, especially their adventure games with a run of back-to-back classics very reminiscent of Pixar's first decade in terms of creative output. Tim Schafer was one of the prominent developers involved in a number of these adventure games, particularly as project lead for memorable classics such as Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. As LucasArts shifted away from adventure games in the late 90s, Tim Schafer eventually left to found Double Fine Productions, whose first two games were Psychonauts and Brütal Legend.

While I didn't play any of these games on release, I appreciated Double Fine's remasters of classic LucasArts adventure games, which prompted me to eventually take a shot at some of their original releases.

Production

Brütal Legend is an open world action game with major set pieces that include elements of the real-time strategy (RTS) genre. It's also a love letter to the heavy metal music genre and has one of the strongest examples of art direction I’ve seen in a game. This starts from the game menu itself, which is a charming live action FMV showing Jack Black, best known as the Chicken Jockey guy from the Minecraft Movie, flicking through a vinyl album. The game world feels like you've stepped into the cover art of a heavy metal album: a fantasy realm filled with magic, demons, medieval weaponry, umlauts, and V8 hot rods. The locales and factions are inspired by various metal subgenres, from gleaming glam towers to spooky fog-swathed gothic swamps and hellish wastelands.

The soundtrack is a comprehensive library of licensed music across heavy metal’s many subgenres. Not being particularly well-versed in music, I personally discovered a number of songs and bands that are now part of my regular playlist. The music is so integral to the game’s feel and atmosphere that it would be a real shame if any tracks had to be removed in the future due to licensing issues.

The voice cast is stellar, from Jack Black and Tim Curry providing the star power to voice acting veterans like Jennifer Hale, along with cameos by heavy metal legends such as Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, and Ozzy Osbourne.

Gameplay

Brütal Legend’s gameplay is split between open world action and real-time strategy battles. Both modes have significant overlap, as you're always controlling the main character from a third-person perspective. The open world starts off as a basic hack-and-slash action game and gradually introduces new elements such as magic and a car for traversing the map. Magic is creatively implemented as heavy metal riffs, cast by playing a short rhythm minigame. Combat is serviceable but lacks the responsiveness of more polished melee-focused titles.

The world has a few settlements and outposts but isn’t very interactive. There’s some local wildlife, some of which can be tamed as temporary mounts, and enemy mobs, but nothing especially challenging. Sidequests and minigames are scattered throughout, but none are particularly memorable. You can spend currency, earned through story missions and side activities, at an upgrade merchant, but there’s no meaningful economy.

Early missions are mostly linear dungeon-like segments with boss fights, but the game later adds new mission types like races and the showpiece Stage Battles.

Stage Battles introduce the RTS elements. These take place in closed-off arenas with a stage at each end. Your stage acts as a base where units are spawned, and your goal is to destroy the enemy stage. The stage can be upgraded to unlock better units, with the full upgrade level tied to story advancement. Capturing resource nodes provides currency to spawn units and upgrade the stage.

A unique mechanic during Stage Battles is the main character’s ability to fly, letting you view the battlefield from above and quickly respond to threats. You can also fight directly and take control of specific units for unique abilities. Dying as the main character in this mode is a minor setback, as you will eventually respawn back at your stage. While you can issue basic commands, the lack of a traditional RTS top-down view makes micro-management clumsy. There is also an enemy commander that flies around with similar abilities to the player character, although the limited AI makes them mainly a nuisance in the single player.

Unfortunately, Stage Battles become tedious as most battles devolve into zerg rushing to the nearest flashpoint with your units and dropping a few spells to press the advantage. Some missions can take over an hour if you aren’t optimizing every step, made worse by the lack of mid-mission saves. There are only a handful of Stage Battle missions throughout the single player campaign, so when they occur there isn't much variety in how they play. The only other game I’ve played that tries this hybrid formula is Giants: Citizen Kabuto, a janky cult classic from 2000 which also struggled to balance such gameplay. Brütal Legend might have benefited from cutting down the RTS layer and focusing on third-person action, similar to MOBAs like League of Legends, which interestingly launched the same year.

The Stage Battles are also the core of the multiplayer mode, although I didn't spend much time here as it's not that enjoyable for me.

Technical Note

I played the PS3 version, which should be avoided at all cost. Besides the typical performance issues of PS3 games compared to the Xbox or PC versions, there’s a game-breaking bug that corrupts your save if you get too far into the 100% completion checklist. This remains unpatched in the PS3 version and effectively forces you to skip sidequests and exploration until after the main story. The game also includes DLC with trophies that is no longer accessible on the PS3. Despite these issues, I pushed through to complete the game because I appreciated the artistry behind it.

Conclusion

Brütal Legend’s artistry is second to none, and stands as a unique heartfelt tribute to heavy metal. However, its gameplay, especially the RTS elements, struggles to keep up. For me, this makes it a mid game overall, though one that's definitely worth experiencing for the world, the music, and the style.

7/10 Worth playing for any gamer, if you get the PC or Xbox version

or

3/10 for the PS3 version - avoid

Usually I’d be making this post from my main account, cod, but for some reason I’ve tried posting multiple times today and it hasn’t let me, it keeps giving me an error. So here we go! Weekly post from a different account this week. Hopefully next week I can go back to my main again.

Let's start by saying that while the game is still early access, it has been playable for years. It first released in 2021, and has been continuously updated since (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timberborn#Development). To be fair, with what is possible in the game now, I would consider it a complete game.

I'm not the best at game critics, so I'll just try to tell what's good, what can be improved, and whether I recommend it. Keep in mind I only started playing it this week-end, so I'm quite new, but hopefully this is still relevant.

For the context, I'm a very heavy Caesar III fan, and have been looking for a long time for a modern game that would give the same relaxing feeling of "solve one issue at a time" that C3 is (also, for C3 fans, check out Augustus, it's amazing)

The good

• Cool concept and theme: beavers and water are refreshing compared to the usual city builders. The general art style fits the theme as well
• Building can be stacked vertically, allowing for more creativity for city building
• No too many "risks" mechanics: food does not decay, buildings don't collapse. That's usually a thing that I was not that much of a fan of in C3, seemed like it was there just to add an unnecessary layer of management
• the Districts mechanics allows you to expand your bases in a nice way, you have quite a lot of control of what is sent between districts
• the easy mode allows for a quite chill experience. Not sure how challenging the other modes are.
• the devs listen to the community feedback, they recently made a "you were right, we were wrong" announcement: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1062090/eventcomments/830458962613745838

The potential improvements

• I got a few hiccups running it on Linux using Proton. Nothing too critical, got one crash at some point, I just reloaded the autosave. It was a one time occurrence.

Should you play it?

Definitely a solid game for people who like this type of city/base-builders

I was super bummed when it reached EOL. I wish they would let folks host their own servers for it.