Playing other games

[Antilogic]

Nah, Mork's sure they were goats.

Same difference.

[Morkonan]

Nah, Mork's sure they were goats.

Same difference.

Yes, this entire exchange was hilarious.

[red assassin]

I picked up Mass Effect Andromeda the other day for £7. A slow start and a shonky interface haven't helped, but I am now enjoying it.

Man, that game was frustrating. I really enjoyed significant chunks of it, it was just all so inconsistent.

[RegisterMe]

Oh yeah, it's all over the place. And christ, the number of scene transitions / loading screens you have to put up with is mind numbing, but in spite of that I am soldiering on, and for £7 it's not bad value.

[Ronald Sandoval]

FYI argos are selling Mass Effect Andromeda on ebay for £5.99 with free post

[pjknibbs]

FYI argos are selling Mass Effect Andromeda on ebay for £5.99 with free post

Interesting. So, is the £1 saving sufficient incentive to sign up for an eBay account? Decisions, decisions...

[Mightysword]

Kenshi II is announced. Here hoping it will come out before Bannerlord 2.

[Morkonan]

Kenshi II is announced. Here hoping it will come out before Bannerlord 2.

Well, LoFi, IIRC, said maybe "two years." And, they'll be using an upgraded Ogre3D engine and staying with their current homebrew game-engine, so aside from some slight changes and then the "new content" it doesn't appear as if they have to worry about any severe change or "innovation." IMO, it's like they just want to paint a slightly different story, but with all the same paint. If so, it's likely to be out before Bannerlord.

I really enjoy the game, but the engine is not really very good. It's like M&B:Warband in a way, but not as polished as that. Because of all the limits with the current engine, I'm not enthusiastic about LoFi staying with it. I think they're staying with it in order to avoid tough work and maybe tougher decisions. The engine does just enough to help the player tell their story, but goes not one bit further anywhere at all. The game is very moddable, but anything truly interesting usually ends up breaking something because the engine doesn't allow access to truly powerful tools and they have to be kludged in there.

Great game, though, and having a ton of fun with it. Then again, I'm pretty easy to please.

[Mightysword]

I really enjoy the game, but the engine is not really very good. It's like M&B:Warband in a way, but not as polished as that.

Warband was still buggy as hell at release. And these days I think people kinda forget the Native Warband is pretty bland feature wise as well, it's just some mods have been intergrated into so many modules that it's almost feel nature.

I don't mind they're reusing the engine because frankly after playing the game, I feel like I just need an expack, and not really a fully new game which I think Kenshi 2 probably gonna be. I don't think anyone can say for sure if the engine limit has been reached, or whether it can be upgrade in meaningful way. And even if it can't, I'll pay for a more polish version of the game anyway. The new subnautica is looking good and fresh even it's still the same engine.

If it means it has less bug, a little better animation, more optimized then I'm sold. Not mentioning it has a whole new world as well, given the setting it means we won't see most if any of the current assets in Kenshi 2. The only feature I would really want is to have your own family, and build an actual company/empire with in game mechanic instead of just head cannon it like ATM, but I don't see many other stuffs that I want. I just have to do the current stuffs better.

[felter]

Just learned that Oxygen Not Included is going to be released at the end of May, can't wait.

It's now been over two years since the first public Beta for Oxygen Not Included, and it's finally time to fully launch the game! The third Quality of Life Upgrade is coming to you on Tuesday April 16th, and then there will be one last update to complete Early Access.

In late May, we will be coming out of Early Access with new content (3 new biomes, new creatures, new buildings, and more), and official mod support, making it possible for players to create game content of their own.

With that, we feel Oxygen Not Included is ready for a full launch. After we've officially launched, we will continue to make quality of life improvements and bug fixes, while the bulk of the team will be moving on to building DLC for the game, where we can explore further ideas and expansions to ONI's world.

[Morkonan]

...I don't mind they're reusing the engine because frankly after playing the game, I feel like I just need an expack, and not really a fully new game which I think Kenshi 2 probably gonna be. I don't think anyone can say for sure if the engine limit has been reached, or whether it can be upgrade in meaningful way. And even if it can't, I'll pay for a more polish version of the game anyway. The new subnautica is looking good and fresh even it's still the same engine.

If it means it has less bug, a little better animation, more optimized then I'm sold. Not mentioning it has a whole new world as well, given the setting it means we won't see most if any of the current assets in Kenshi 2. The only feature I would really want is to have your own family, and build an actual company/empire with in game mechanic instead of just head cannon it like ATM, but I don't see many other stuffs that I want. I just have to do the current stuffs better.

I really enjoy Kenshi. I like the game. It has a really interesting world and, despite being old, it looks pretty good given all that's in it. And, it's really got a nice mix of game genre mechanics in it that gives it a gameplay feeling that's a "new experience." So, it's a nice game and I highly recommend it.

But, the engine is a cobbled together cesspit of thisbarelyworks-script into a make_it_do.exe.

As I read modder commentary and responses to "can I do this" being invariably answered by "that's not possible with this engine" it's pretty obvious that the game presents something that is, in fact, just the barest essentials of what could be possible in a similar game with a better engine. There are too many things the engine can't do and too much information it absolutely can not possible track. Even the lightest, barest, sorts of "quest dialogue" things you'd want in a game are not possible with Kenshi's engine. It's not that they didn't put in something like a standard dialogue that starts a quest and has branching paths, it's that they couldn't... (I'm not making claims as to what the devs wanted, but it's not possible to create something like one would see in a classic RPG with Kenshi's engine.)

Basically, a lot of what you might think a sort of squad-based RPG should have in it given Kenshi's "presented" game mechanics environment just ain't possible with that engine.

Even so, I really do enjoy the game. It's a "good game" as it is presented to the player. But, it will never, ever, be a "Kenshi 2" unless that engine is made much more robust with new features and a lot more polish. It just won't. It'll be like a Kenshi 1.5, with an "expansion pack" and some better performance from an upgraded Ogre3D engine hooked in. I'll still buy it, of course, unless it's a buggy mess that doesn't run... But, I fear that LoFi will be publicly lambasted and strung up by their heels by a mob of gamers armed with torches and pitchforks if they do not work on their engine to give it deeper features. It'll get enough criticism, IMO, to impact sales and that could kill the I.P., which I think has good possibilities for expansion.

On a "Merchant Prince" sort of experience - NPCs can't get rid of items in their inventory that are not listed as "consumables." ie: Food. They also can't understand anything about what they're carrying, really. So, there's no way they could make a sort of choice on what to equip, so you could see your handiwork in action. This is a problem for selling things in a town to citizens/guards/etc, but the inventory limits spawned NPC groups are fine as they will just vanish later. In vanilla, NPCs can't buy anything other than food or bandages and don't really have enough money to buy much of either since they can not accumulate wealth. They get xx monies a day based upon their "status" and that's it. Even so, once the inventories of static spawn NPCs are full of purchased items, they can't buy anything else and they will be full, AFAIK, until regenerated by re-importing the save file through "Import." Mods add to their allowed items to purchase list and give them extra money, but that is the limit for what the engine allows in simulating the behavior of "shoppers." Even so, that basically causes them to run around trying to find places to spend money, sometimes all day. (ie: They run around the entire place and check every building, sometimes doing that most of the day. WHY? Maybe because the interiors of buildings are not exposed to the game until the interior is loaded by a character walking into it. And, it's reloaded every time that happens if there isn't a character already in there.)

PS - There's a mod out recently that lets you have a child or some such. Well, you have to go find it, first, I think and then you sort of pretend it's your child. No "marriage" or anything and I think that feature is specifically tied to a fresh start. I agree that a "family surviving against all odds in a harsh world" could be a great experience. But, there'd be some limitations there due to... Kenshi's engine.

On Subnautica - I've thought about buying it just for all the cool building stuffs and research, but haven't because of sea monsters and jump-scares and deep dark waters and nasty things that have big teeth that will eat you... Nope, I have enough nightmare fuel in real-life, don't need more.

Just learned that Oxygen Not Included is going to be released at the end of May, can't wait...

Looks good and I've followed it a little bit. I've hesitated on buying it just because I already have too much on my gaming plate.

[Mightysword]

LoFi already state they are "upgrading" the engine, so it really depends on what those upgrades will be. It's not like Kenshi 2 will be just purely about new assets.

And I bet a lot of the limitation came down to (bad) design choice rather than actual limitation. For example: one of the issue currently is how inefficient the A.I is hauling goods around, because they only carry 2 pieces at a time instead of as much as they have space for. They "used" to be able to do that back in Alpha, but it caused problem with crafting stations, specifically the multi-ingridient. It's because if they use up all of their inventory to fill up one ingredient and can't dump it, they'll get stuck with a full inventory and not able to get the 2nd resources. So the dev argued that this is a "fix" to solve that problem, and hey it's free Athelitic training! (which is a pretty bad argument IMO).

So first, it's not because the engine can't have the A.I hauling a full load. The issue comes down to the design choice of making those crafting station with specific slots that can use different ingredients base on different recipes (like the cooking stove or the armorcraft station). I looked at this and wonder "why design these stations to work that way then?". After all, there exist another station already in the game that don't have that problem: the research bench. It utilize different recipes and consume different resource as needed, it just need to have a free inventory instead of the slot inventory like the crafting station, we wouldn't have issue. And second, they decided to "hardcode" this behavior, so the fix is taken out of the hand of the modder.

For the majority of the development Kenshi was done by one guy, talented but probably inexperience as well. The first quality had only improved since, and I bet he got plenty for the latter as well. So I won't write off the possibility with what he can do with Kenshi 2 and what does he means by "upgrade" the engine.

[felter]

Got introduced to Green Hell, personally I don't own it, a friend let me play it, but it's now on my games wishlist. It's a survival game where you are in the Amazon jungle, while it's pretty darn hard my first couple of tries I only made it to day 5, but as you play you learn a little bit more about how to play so you can survive. Normally it's find food and water to survive, this game takes it a little bit further you need to find Hydration, Carbohydrates, fats and protein, different kinds of food gives you some or one of them and the game doesn't tell you what does and doesn't while eating the wrong thing may give you something like food poisoning. Being in the jungle a little scratch may kill you so you have to figure out how to deal with little accidents and don't wait. And those darn snake bites you have to watch out for them or shoudl that be listen out for the snakes mind you they do make a tasty little snack, don't forget to check for those leaches and don't stand on ant hills for too long. It looks pretty good too. I highly recommend it if you like survival games. My biggest gripe is that it only has limited save slots, which I do not understand, why only 4 save slots.

[Morkonan]

LoFi already state they are "upgrading" the engine, so it really depends on what those upgrades will be. It's not like Kenshi 2 will be just purely about new assets.

That depends. For instance, it really does sound like aside from upgrading the version of Ogre3D they use for the display engine and tweaking the AI pathfinding a bit while making the basic hand-crafted engine a bit more efficient... that's all they're going to be doing aside from generating new content. (I don't know if they're currently using the recommended ray-trace pathfinding algorithm or not, since it wasn't created since after they/he started development. They could be meaning that's exactly what they're doing with a pathfinding upgrade...)

And I bet a lot of the limitation came down to (bad) design choice rather than actual limitation.

That's true and likely goes hand-in-hand for the engine that was written to bring all this stuff together. (Just an additional disclaimer - I really enjoy the game, even so. )

...So first, it's not because the engine can't have the A.I hauling a full load. The issue comes down to the design choice of making those crafting station with specific slots that can use different ingredients base on different recipes (like the cooking stove or the armorcraft station). I looked at this and wonder "why design these stations to work that way then?". After all, there exist another station already in the game that don't have that problem: the research bench. It utilize different recipes and consume different resource as needed, it just need to have a free inventory instead of the slot inventory like the crafting station, we wouldn't have issue. And second, they decided to "hardcode" this behavior, so the fix is taken out of the hand of the modder.

As far as I can tell, within certain limits of course, the behavior AI for the characters doesn't know what any of this stuff is. IOW - It uses the Storage Container Type to trigger its "go get Building Materials." For instance, you can't put Building Materials in any other container than a Storage Container for Building Materials and expect a character to draw Building Materials from it. That may be in order to keep characters from searching the entire zone for building materials.

But, they will search "the ground" for Building Materials. That's one concession, since you can't build a Storage Container without Building Materials. And, of course, they look in their own inventory for Building Materials. But, IMO, they don't know much about what a Building Materials is at all and don't have behavior keyed on any deep properties of the item.

They "know" to search the ground in the immediate chunk and then go to a keyed storage container to get what's in there. (I suspect that there is a "list" of containers and their locations, to be honest, and that they aren't "searching every series of coordinates for the container in question.") Then, they go to the crafting bench, because they fulfilled the "get" job, and are told the current bench job requires them to put in a certain material. They search their inventory and transfer that material if they have it. At that point, I don't know how that final bit works from anecdotally witnessed behavior.

For the majority of the development Kenshi was done by one guy, talented but probably inexperience as well. The first quality had only improved since, and I bet he got plenty for the latter as well. So I won't write off the possibility with what he can do with Kenshi 2 and what does he means by "upgrade" the engine.

"Upgrading" the engine is in terms of upgrading the current, very old, version of Ogre3D (the display engine) to a newer version. There's mention of an "efficiency" improvement for the game engine, which I'm not sure what they mean by that, and then them implementing a new pathfinding algorithm which they maintain is their own design. Not sure on that one.

Eventually I'll try my own hand at modding stuffs for it and get a better understanding of the engine and what it can do. But, even though I enjoy the game and am having a lot of fun with it, I still have to admit that the whole thing feels pretty kludgy. Sure, it "works after a fashion" and I don't really mind that it's kludgy, since a great deal of my enjoyment is being fed by my own imagination. But, expanding on kludgy and staying on the same basic platform isn't exactly a good thing for existing fans who really want deeper mechanics and more complex options. So, there I worry that Kenshi 2 will get hammered by people who expect a "new iteration." By the way, this happens in a ton of IP's, so Kenshi2 wouldn't be alone in that crowd.

Got introduced to Green Hell, personally I don't own it, a friend let me play it, but it's now on my games wishlist. It's a survival game where you are in the Amazon jungle, while it's pretty darn hard my first couple of tries I only made it to day 5, but as you play you learn a little bit more about how to play so you can survive. Normally it's find food and water to survive, this game takes it a little bit further you need to find Hydration, Carbohydrates, fats and protein, different kinds of food gives you some or one of them and the game doesn't tell you what does and doesn't while eating the wrong thing may give you something like food poisoning. Being in the jungle a little scratch may kill you so you have to figure out how to deal with little accidents and don't wait. And those darn snake bites you have to watch out for them or shoudl that be listen out for the snakes mind you they do make a tasty little snack, don't forget to check for those leaches and don't stand on ant hills for too long. It looks pretty good too. I highly recommend it if you like survival games. My biggest gripe is that it only has limited save slots, which I do not understand, why only 4 save slots.

It has a "Wheel" in it... A Clicky-wheel-choices-thingie.

Nobody likes those. Ever. I'm not kidding in the least bit. There's something about a decision/clicky/choice-wheel thing that everyone friggin' hates. Hates. I don't care what else the game has in it, if the developer doesn't get rid of that "Clicky Wheel Thing of Pure Anxiety-Inducing-Hatred" the game is going to fail. Not kidding. Nobody likes those darn things.

One reason is that devs tend to end up getting locked to them in their UI and they then end up just "expanding" on them to the point where the game becomes "Click on this friggin' wheel again and keep clicking on it until I tell you to stop clicking on the damn Wheel! DO IT! CLICK ON TEH WHEEL OF PAIN!"

So, what happens when the devs realize they've created a Wheel of Pain and then start expanding the UI to reduce the amount of clutter on the Wheel of Pain? Yup, you guessed it. "So, why exactly do we have this dumb Wheel of Pain in the UI if we can do everything else differently?"

Developed using Unity, btw.

[Mightysword]

On Subnautica - I've thought about buying it just for all the cool building stuffs and research, but haven't because of sea monsters and jump-scares and deep dark waters and nasty things that have big teeth that will eat you... Nope, I have enough nightmare fuel in real-life, don't need more.

If that's the only reason you haven't checked it out it would be a shame IMO. I know people like to talk about that particular element, but that's simply because it's "kool" to talk about, but it's hardly the defining trait or what the game is about. Say, if you go on a camping trip and the guide say "beware, Bears sighted in the mountain", that certainly would put you a bit on edge right? And if you're "lucky" enough to run into one, assuming you don't die from a heart attack you will run away and tell "EVERYONE" about it. But ... running into a bear is hardly the point of a camping trip right?

What I'm trying to say is the "scare" factor in Subnautica is natural rather than manufactured. If you play a horror/thriller game, then everything is designed to scare you, monster put at place you're least expected, event is scripted so that the wind slamp the door shut exactly when the light go out ...etc... In Subnautica the monsters don't specifically come out to hunt you, it's a big ocean, there are fodders and there are predators, they come after you because you enter their "space". It's like if you go into a mountain, then the expectation is to run into a bear.

[Morkonan]

On Subnautica - I've thought about buying it just for all the cool building stuffs and research, but haven't because of sea monsters and jump-scares and deep dark waters and nasty things that have big teeth that will eat you... Nope, I have enough nightmare fuel in real-life, don't need more.

If that's the only reason you haven't checked it out it would be a shame IMO. I know people like to talk about that particular element, but that's simply because it's "kool" to talk about, but it's hardly the defining trait or what the game is about. Say, if you go on a camping trip and the guide say "beware, Bears sighted in the mountain", that certainly would put you a bit on edge right? And if you're "lucky" enough to run into one, assuming you don't die from a heart attack you will run away and tell "EVERYONE" about it. But ... running into a bear is hardly the point of a camping trip right?

Do you know who doesn't get eaten by bears in the mountains while on a camping trip? The guy who doesn't go camping in the mountains where bears have been sighted, that's who.

What I'm trying to say is the "scare" factor in Subnautica is natural rather than manufactured. If you play a horror/thriller game, then everything is designed to scare you, monster put at place you're least expected, event is scripted so that the wind slamp the door shut exactly when the light go out ...etc... In Subnautica the monsters don't specifically come out to hunt you, it's a big ocean, there are fodders and there are predators, they come after you because you enter their "space". It's like if you go into a mountain, then the expectation is to run into a bear.

Oh, I get it - I comprehend the design of the game. Sure, there are dangers there, but there is also a very rewarding reason to go where those dangers are. And, sometimes, those dangers aren't even there. Great!

But, I'm just not up for an "alone in the dark" sort of "survival" game where the dangers are reflected in the end results of experiencing them, like "dying." It's a beautiful game in many respects and it is certainly really "cool." But, it's awful lonely. (From what I have seen.) It might be on my playlist in the future, but I prefer less stress right now, to be honest. And, I like having multiple NPCs and the appearances of not being "alone" in a gaming environment like that. It makes for a lot more of a roleplaying experience that way and I don't think there's much roleplaying support in Subnautica in those respects.

PS - I play it up for the laughs, but I'm not really a very "scared" kind of person. Well, I do not like being dumped in the middle of the friggin' ocean, I suppose. And, yeah, while Black Bears don't really concern me that much, the rest of large bear kind are not to be @^@&'d with... So, yeah, sharks and bears are things that make me "uncomfortable." The rest of nature can go @%^ itself. I can take a shower whenever I want. I can release my bowels in quite, private, comfort with a soothing balm afterwards if I should so desire. I can take a bath! I can eat hot food or even purposefully frozen and cold food if I want! I am not covered in dirt, mud, or chiggers and ticks munching and sucking on my flesh. In short - My desire for sweating my butt off or being thrust into a "survival" situation where these things are absent from my in-game life is pretty low... Even though I don't believe I have ever had a game where I had to take a dump while propped up against a tree. (I also do not play "The Sims" because "The Sims" is stoopid because it doesn't have sharks and bears trying to eat people... Ironic.)

[Mightysword]

Do you know who doesn't get eaten by bears in the mountains while on a camping trip? The guy who doesn't go camping in the mountains where bears have been sighted, that's who.

And that will also be the person who miss out all the other wonderful experience of a camping trip.

For the record I'm not trying to goad you into playing it btw, just by your previous comment I'm just making sure you're not skipping the game due to a misconception of what it is about.

[Morkonan]

Do you know who doesn't get eaten by bears in the mountains while on a camping trip? The guy who doesn't go camping in the mountains where bears have been sighted, that's who.

And that will also be the person who miss out all the other wonderful experience of a camping trip.

See, you're making the assumption that there are "other wonderful experiences of a camping trip."

I was talking to a friend about this subject just today. He hates the darn things, too. Back when he was a kid, the relatives would get together and go on "camping trips" where the kids stayed outside in the tents with the bugs and the adults got to sleep in the Airstream... That's "Smart People Camping." And, like he said, "Everyone can go on the camping trip and I'll sit around the fire and all that, but there had better be a hotel nearby." And, I'll add, the first time your own "log" rolls down to squelch up against your own foot, you'll hate camping too.

For the record I'm not trying to goad you into playing it btw, just by your previous comment I'm just making sure you're not skipping the game due to a misconception of what it is about.

Oh, I know the whole bit. I've watched several "Let's Plays" on it and most of an entire pre-release playthrough. Sure, it's pretty neat and I might get it one day. But, it's not really "my thing" since it's a kind of lonely solo experience. I love single-player games, but a single-player "survival" game really doesn't appeal to me. I do think some of the mechanics are neat and if it were something like a squad-based game or one with multiple NPCs in it, I'd have already bought it.

[Ketraar]

Its not really a survival game either, yes you can play with the option enabled for nutrition, but you can also turn it off. Its only a thing at the very beginning and serves only to keep the player worried, but you really have to make an effort to die from lack of food. Subnautica is more of an exploration and gathering game with base building elements. Yes there are some creatures that will harm you if you are careless, for most part its just inventory management and experiencing a very beautiful underwater world. I love it and I dont like horror, creepy games either.

There is no MP/Coop though, still worth it.

MFG

Ketraar

[Mightysword]

Head up, Anno 1800 is available as open Beta during April 12-14 (this weekend). You can get it via the Uplay launcher.