You take that back right now!
But dang, that sucks...especially since most people consider it a pirate game with AC trappings as opposed to an AC game with a particular theme.
Gaming thoughts, bite-size chewables - new orange flavor!
- Thread starter pauli
- Start date
You take that back right now!
But dang, that sucks...especially since most people consider it a pirate game with AC trappings as opposed to an AC game with a particular theme.
I thought they all just moved to video content on YouTube. At least gamefaqs is still around with all the older guides.
You know, I like the idea of pirate games, but the last one that really grabbed me was Pirates!You take that back right now!
But dang, that sucks...especially since most people consider it a pirate game with AC trappings as opposed to an AC game with a particular theme.
A re-re-remastered version of Sid Meier's Pirates! would be good about now.
Funnily enough, Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat feels like kind of a proto-modern-AC game. You've got your own upgradeable ship that you can sail around a bunch of islands, engaging in a very similar kind of ship-to-ship combat. Once you've cleared the immediate area of any ships, you can land on and explore the islands on foot, digging up treasure and clearing icons off the map while slashing up some pirates, skeletons and what-have-you.
Feels strikingly familiar to play, just with that good old PS2-era charm/jankiness.
Oh and it's one of the last games Westwood ever made. So there's that, too.
This and all the niche gaming sites that popup with wiki's and guide info. When I was just playing through FONV for the first time, I lived on the wiki as a companion guide. Because when searching for different tips to specific quests or interactions, the wiki kept popping up to the top.
I'd opt more for reimagined, changing up some of the mechanics instead of just another modernization pass on it.
Yeah, I don't know that the "people don't have time for guides anymore" is true. Sure, video results (the least skimmable/scannable and therefore worst guide format) get pushed to the top, but I have yet to find a game for which I can't find a text version of "that thing I'm stuck on" and/or a walkthrough of the Chapter I'm stuck in. It's just all over the place instead of being in the GameFAQs-controlled repository.
Whelp.. it's happened.. my CPU [8700] is now minimum recommended for new AAA games. GPU is still higher at least
Looks like an upgrade is somewhere in my future when one of those AAA games is one I want to play..
** shuffles off to see what's up in CPU land these days **
![:\](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/civis/data/assets/smilies/slash-1x.png "Slash :\")
Me and my Haswell CPU say hi.
You can often get by with the lower-than-minimum-spec CPU, though that is getting harder and harder these days.(I was going to replace my gaming PC early this year, but decided that buying an e-bike instead would be better for my health, lol. My Steam backlog is deep enough that I have plenty of older stuff on hand that my old build can handle just fine, so I'm not hurting for games to play.)
I haven't played Odyssey yet (it's in the backlog), but I have to ask: is it just comparatively difficult to the rest of AC games, or is it objectively difficult? Because (and there's no way to say this without sounding like a jerk, so I'm just gonna own it), AC games in general are extremely easy, and I would actually welcome a section with a bit more difficulty.
It's not usually that difficult, it just takes forever to level up to about 20. After that, advancement is much closer to what other games do.
If you want it to be harder, you can go to areas with higher level enemies earlier than you otherwise would.
IGN at least has some modern guides/walkthroughs that aren't information sparse YouTube monstrosities.
Most games have at least one or two wikis as well.
Also, games that include an automapper obviated a huge need for whole classes of literal walkthroughs. Random/generative content did similar from another direction (what does the level right before the Amulet of Yendor look like again?).
Finally, DRM took care of having to ship esoteric spell code manuals or Fordor's travel guides with the games.
Yeah, many gaming sites now have lots of guide content because they know people search for it.
Odyssey and Origins are open world with specific defined areas that have their own level ranges. So glad you are level 3 and in a 1-5 area and find it easy you could go to a 6-10 área and try you luck there.
Not sure about Origins, but Odyssey also has like bounty hunters that will come seeking you out. And you can see them in the map so if you want the challenge you can seek them out. And some of them will be many levels above yours and generally tougher than regular mobs. I used to sell them out... The ones with deep angry red skulls to indicate their much higher level.
Odyssey has ship to ship combat. And again, difficulty is in level discrepancy usually. Sometimes it's numbers though. You might agro other nearby ships while in combat with one or two.
I should add, difficulty is in combat, not in puzzles nor mission objectives.
The biggest challenge (which I've recently griped about here) is that there are so many shitty SEO content farms cranking out content designed to rank high in SEO while being either A) next to useless/inaccurate, or B) just reposting stuff they found on Reddit.
Videos - for now - tend to escape that trend, just because the cost (time, resources, actual effort) to turn around videos tends to be higher than blog posts.
Of course, videos aren't exempt from it. GameRant used to really capture a LOT of low-effort guide video content; Elden Ring was just awash with bad "This is truly OP" guide videos that were actually so, so weak it was hilarious that they even made the effort to put out a video. That was before AI tools were accessible, though.
Oh, and on the wiki front.. Fextralife has to be the biggest offender as far as low-value content goes.
Even IGN has been failing hard on guide wikis for a lot of titles; probably just because so many games require SO MUCH effort to crank out detailed guides, walkthroughs etc. now, and there is a lot of competition.
Before the AI content farm revolution, I could write a single detailed guide on a game mechanic (and even some 1 or 2 year later "is it worth it now" reviews) and absolutely wreck the big names when it comes to SEO.. Now these content farms tend to destroy both me AND the big folks in the industry as far as article content is concerned.
Low-value content sites don't care if they get a dedicated following; they don't make their money from consistent repeat visitors.. They make it from the millions of rubes out there who haven't figured out their scam yet. It can take 3-4 clicks to their site before someone realizes "Man, GameRant sucks".. And new gamers are coming out all the time, unwilling to make the effort to scroll down to see if a legit producer has anything worthwhile.
Eventually I'm hoping Google gets wise to the trend, but I'm worried that it'll be at the cost of making it hard to gain traction for new gaming content creators via authority-based rankings.
/EndRant
My experience in Origins is that yes, you can seek out higher-level enemies for greater difficulty, but only to a point. The game seemed to have a level-based damage scaling function that would more or less zero out the damage you did if the level disparity was too great. I assumed that was a way to impose some sort of loose progression order onto an otherwise wide-open world, but I guess it also could have been a way to push people to pay to play.
But so much of it is, at best, bad and, at worst, absolute garbage. Used to be GameFAQs was where people who cared to write a good guide posted it and you'd end up with some really good information. Early on it was the active forums that you'd find it on and after some time it was all in 2-3 solid guides with a dozen smaller contributors putting up some focused guides on specific parts of the game. The more popular the game the longer the legs such that you'd come back a few years later and the information would have exploded (there are guides for Persona 3 that break down every single computation in the Persona crafting cycle; it's insane).
These days IGN is fine if they don't get bored and leave a guide half-finished with placeholder pages. Neoseeker is probably the best, overall, if they cover a game as they hit a level at about what the old Prima and Brady Games strategy guides managed to do. Youtube can, generally, hit most of the general "I'm stuck, what do I do" but you often have to scan through multiple videos (titled "XXX Playthrough 33/47.324") to find the information. For really popular systems heavy games you can usually find in-depth system analysis videos but those have quality (and accuracy) that's really inconsistent and, unlike text guides, don't really get updated if they end up being wrong (because making videos, compared to writing text, is hard).
So it's not really like there are no guides but there are no consistently good guides that were findable the way there used to be. That means the onus is much more substantially on the developer to communicate their game within the game and make it discoverable and traversable for the player because it's increasingly unlikely that they're going to find that information from external sources. Developers that end up being known for games that are inscrutable had better hope they get received like FROM has because that reception is rare and the most common result will be people just bouncing off their game and it doing poorly in the market.
My main issue with IGN is they break everything into so many pages and navigation is a chore. I know they're trying to get page views for ad revenue, but it's so much harder than an txt file with a table of contents.
Last edited:
This is interesting. Hope this works out. What if you could take your favorite TTRPG sessions/campaigns and turn them into a TV series?
https://geekknights.com/
https://twitter.com/GeekKnights
https://geekknights.com/
https://twitter.com/GeekKnights
Frosty Grin
Ars Legatus Legionis
Me and my Haswell CPU say hi.
(I was going to replace my gaming PC early this year, but decided that buying an e-bike instead would be better for my health, lol. My Steam backlog is deep enough that I have plenty of older stuff on hand that my old build can handle just fine, so I'm not hurting for games to play.)
The thing is, GPU demands are rising higher than CPU demands. So my Haswell CPU is being less and less of a bottleneck over the years - even as the framerate you can get is going lower.
And with so many games on the backlog, I don't have the time a proper well-researched, well-tuned upgrade would take.
I thought that about my Skylake i5, but it really depends on the game. Moving to Ryzen 7600 (you know, AMD's cheapest Zen4 option) gave a 40% boost in frames for Far Cry 6, and pretty much 0% for CP2077.
I managed to get a couple of minutes last night to download Robocop Rogue City. Haven't had a chance to play it, due to new puppy, but the reviews and bit of a Matt McMuscles playing on YouTube got me interested in it. I am curious how UE5 will run on my system. Most UE games I have are UE4 and a couple of UE3 ones.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a great port/version/rogue-like for Android and iOS https://shatteredpixel.com/shatteredpd/
Been playing Talos Principle II. It's much like the first Talos Principle, with enhanced puzzles and so far I've not seen any of the more notorious puzzle types from TP1. There's one time where I actually yelled at the game but it was outside of a puzzle and more about a very poorly designed hint for a Star. I've only had to look up the solutions to two puzzles and I'm in the 5th area.
We've been replaying Odin Sphere, since PS+ has the remaster, Odin Sphere Leifthrasir.
At least, I thought it was a remaster. It's much more. Not a remake, because all the dialogue and story are the same; and it's not just stuff from the cutting room floor, so it's not a "Director's Cut," either. It's like the Extended Cut, but that hardly does it justice. There's all new bespoke areas/rooms on every map, secrets to find, and most importantly, a complete overhaul of character progression, which now has vastly more skills and abilities. All that, plus many QoL improvements makes the actual playing of the game markedly improved. And the full widescreen lush colors and hand-drawn everything with gentle motions and fantastic parallax layers is just a treat; it's up-to-date in a way to be as good as my memories. Highly recommended if you have a fondness for the original.
At least, I thought it was a remaster. It's much more. Not a remake, because all the dialogue and story are the same; and it's not just stuff from the cutting room floor, so it's not a "Director's Cut," either. It's like the Extended Cut, but that hardly does it justice. There's all new bespoke areas/rooms on every map, secrets to find, and most importantly, a complete overhaul of character progression, which now has vastly more skills and abilities. All that, plus many QoL improvements makes the actual playing of the game markedly improved. And the full widescreen lush colors and hand-drawn everything with gentle motions and fantastic parallax layers is just a treat; it's up-to-date in a way to be as good as my memories. Highly recommended if you have a fondness for the original.
Warcraft Rumble released over the weekend. It's a Warcraft flavor of Clash Royale if you liked that, with seemingly a lot more options and depth. Early on, it seems F2P gold is pretty generous. Haven't hit where I "need" to spend gold yet, but some of the early package deals seemed good enough to throw some some Play Store credit at.
There's a guild functionality too but I haven't been able to join any to see what it's about. If there are any Arsians playing, I could start a new thread and guild to group up.
There's a guild functionality too but I haven't been able to join any to see what it's about. If there are any Arsians playing, I could start a new thread and guild to group up.
The Invincible is on both Steam and GOG. An adventure game based on Stanislaw Lem's novel.
https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_invincible
View: https://store.steampowered.com/app/731040/The_Invincible/
https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_invincible
View: https://store.steampowered.com/app/731040/The_Invincible/
I tried the demo of The Invincible.
Couldn’t get into it - mostly because the display options were so bad. Made it unplayable on my ultrawide - couldn’t even have it render as a 1920x1080 chunk w/black bars, and most of the UI elements, subtitles, and everything else was rendered mostly off of screen.
Then I read some of the reviews and took it off my wishlist. Which was a bummer, but oh well.
Couldn’t get into it - mostly because the display options were so bad. Made it unplayable on my ultrawide - couldn’t even have it render as a 1920x1080 chunk w/black bars, and most of the UI elements, subtitles, and everything else was rendered mostly off of screen.
Then I read some of the reviews and took it off my wishlist. Which was a bummer, but oh well.
And the framerate doesn't tank completely once battles get a bit more busy, which is very helpful.
I agree with all the rest, too, Leifthrasir greatly improves the original game. I never ended up finishing even just a single character on the PS2 original, but couldn't stop until I got the Platinum trophy on PS4. It's good fun.
Hear, hear! Honestly, that would have been enough for me (well, maybe and widescreen) to play it again, but this has been an incredibly pleasant surprise.
I'm on the fourth area [North 1] in TP2, and am really liking it so far. I've found all the stars so far, and I'm guessing I know which Star hint you're thinking of:
Area three, where you have the 'map' that is completely unreadable.
Talos Principle 1 is so far my favorite puzzle game, eclipsing even the Portal games. The gameplay is great, the philosophy and melancholy worldbuilding fantastic, and just overall a massive surprise for me. If you told me Croteam, the guys who've made checks notes nothing but Serious Sam games for 2 decades, were going to make an amazing and thought-provoking puzzle game, I would have laughed in your face.
I finished 100% The Lego Movie 2 Videogame. Not at all like most of the other recent Lego videogames, but a nice change of pace from Starfield, for sure!
Yep, that's exactly the one.
And yea, Talos Principle is my favorite puzzle game of all time. It's so good and even though I've beaten TP1 twice fully, I still can play it again because I don't remember the puzzles.
I'm not susceptible to motion sickness in a game. That being said there's an old freeware game called typhoon 2001, which is a remake of the Atari Jaquar game tempest 2000, which was a remake/sequel of tempest. If you are not familiar with the game there's some sort of geometric shape of the playfield and your ship moves around the edge shooting enemies. Well there's a certain setting where instead of moving around the shape, the screen rotates around with your ship being fixed in the middle. At best the game is so colorful and hectic that there should be a possible seizure warning on it. This different play mode just made my head hurt.
Here's a video of it in that mode
View: https://youtu.be/qBv4lFu6k54?si=rGqHEDYxKnJh2o1r
Here's normal for comparsion:
View: https://youtu.be/ViXRY7fR6fU?si=EJ8TrrDmgK3MVAWM
:
Man, Tempest in both iterations are such great games, but that movement variant is just the wrong amount of two-action movement. Ugh.
Interesting note, you can trace a line from Tempest to Guitar Hero through things like Frequency and Amplitude. And things like Audiosurf. It's amazing how there ended up being a whole subgenre of rhythm games that play with the whole concept of playing to the beat, and literally using the flow to make the level. Beyond just music playing games like Beatmania and all its decedents.
And that hardly touches on Geometry Wars and its decedents, like the absolutely wonderful Everyday Shooter. (which, if you haven't played, you owe yourself to play. It was originally on PS3, but there's a Steam release for $10)
And things like Beat Saber and Thumper in VR...
Sorry, kinda got lost thinking about how music games evolved in so many different ways, and how Tempest is a spiritual antecedent to so much of the genre.
Also, short video of Everyday Shooter to give you an idea of how different it is even inside the genre.
View: https://youtu.be/vuZc90OOcYA?si=Cr1yYMKPlr1VhdFi
Interesting note, you can trace a line from Tempest to Guitar Hero through things like Frequency and Amplitude. And things like Audiosurf. It's amazing how there ended up being a whole subgenre of rhythm games that play with the whole concept of playing to the beat, and literally using the flow to make the level. Beyond just music playing games like Beatmania and all its decedents.
And that hardly touches on Geometry Wars and its decedents, like the absolutely wonderful Everyday Shooter. (which, if you haven't played, you owe yourself to play. It was originally on PS3, but there's a Steam release for $10)
And things like Beat Saber and Thumper in VR...
Sorry, kinda got lost thinking about how music games evolved in so many different ways, and how Tempest is a spiritual antecedent to so much of the genre.
Also, short video of Everyday Shooter to give you an idea of how different it is even inside the genre.
View: https://youtu.be/vuZc90OOcYA?si=Cr1yYMKPlr1VhdFi
Tempest 2000 was an official sequel. There was also a tempest X3, a tempest 2000 clone for PSX.
Also a sequel tempest 3000 for the forgotten flop the nuon. That made tempest 2000 look mild in comparison.
Also the alternative movement was supposedly in the First test version of tempest but it made so many sick that they went with the claw moving around the field
I don't see it. Tempest in all it's variations is not a rhythm game in any way. They may share some visual aspects , mainly the look of the vector graphics , but that's really the extent of it. I dont think the original tempest even had music
Ahh Geometry Wars. Everyone's favorite part of Project Gotham racing 2
Also again, outside of the visual part, Geometry wars was a twin stick arena shooter, ditto for everyday shooter.
Never played Beat saber, but Thumper is really great. Don;t know how they manage to convey a sense of dread while playing a rhythm game but they do
It's the misc thread, so that's pretty good misc material
It's interesting how some of these games came about and how there's certain games that just form complexly new genres because they are so differnt then anything else.