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R: 68 / I: 15 (sticky)

Minecraft /leftypol/ server thread

Since a lot of time has passed since the old thread was made and all the old servers apparently got nuked by the hosting service, I have decided to create a new one on the Aternos account that I have registered back in the Bunkerchan days. Just like the previous one, it runs on one of the newer versions (1.19.2) of the game with a simple custom modpack that contains tech mods like Mekanism and the Thermal series, as well as some that add new elements to the game world as a whole such as Biomes O' Plenty and Aquaculture. Some previous additions like Pam's Harvestcraft and Chisel had to be pruned however due to lack of a 1.19.x version or being too resource extensive.

Instructions on entering the new server:
>Download UltimMC https://nightly.link/UltimMC/Launcher/workflows/main/develop
>Download the modpack https://gofile.io/d/mbowsJ
>Extract the UltimMC archive anywhere you like
>Launch UltimMC
>Create an account record in the UltimMC accounts section in top right (no Microsoft account required)
>Install the modpack through Add instance > Import from .zip
>Launch the newly "LeftyCraft" created instance
>Add “leftycraftreborn.aternos.me” into your server list and join the game

To start up the server in case it is down:
>Log into aternos.org with account “leftypoluser” (password: solidarityforever)
>Press the “Start” button
>Wait until the server status bar becomes green and says "Online"
>???
>PROFIT

Matrix space:
https://matrix.to/#/#leftycraft:matrix.org
R: 0 / I: 0 (sticky)  

Hello /games/

It has recently come to our attention that the users of /games/ are seeking a reliable method of communication for online play and general conversation about games. I am unsure if anyone is aware, but, there currently exists and unoffical matrix room specifically for this located at: https://matrix.to/#/#leftypolgaming:matrix.org

Leftycraft community ( >>25060 ):
https://matrix.to/#/#leftycraft:matrix.org

If anyone is interested in gaming discussion, or, online discourse please feel free to join. That is all. Thank you~
R: 4 / I: 0

/CINEMATIC/ general

Post game animations, both official and fan made
R: 168 / I: 41

Sonic the Hedgehog

I have a weird fascination with this franchise, particularly its fans. How do they remain so loyal when there's been maybe one or two good games in the last two decades in a sea of average-to-terrible garbage released year after year? How did Sega manage to take all the wrong lessons away from their colossal fuckups of the mid-late 2000s?
R: 8 / I: 2

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Any fans? Anyone still playing? Thoughts on the setting?
R: 40 / I: 9

Disco Elysium(spoilers)

I just beat this game, I remember seeing another discussion thread about this game but I can't find it, but I want to talk about the game, full spoilers.
R: 2 / I: 0

Yet another movement study

I’ve been coding some more in vscode and learned a few important things about coding player movement for really any 3d game. I then went to test and compare results to both movement shooters like ultrakill, apex and titanfall and with games with generally pretty good movement overall but aren’t as free like mw2022, insurgency sandstorm and the latest version of arma 3

It’s hard and complicated, and should be treated with a lot of care. Generally the players overall speed should never, under any conditions be set to a specific value. What do I mean? It’s simple, just make sure the players net velocity is always open to change and isn’t locked into a set speed under any given moment(unless they’re attacking or preforming an interaction that’s a little tricker to handle) since it gives the player the inertia they need to quickly transition into other forms of movement or interaction they wouldn’t be able to preform if it was locked completely on frame one. Why locking in movement causes this is because of startup frames, if your speed ever gets locked in to a set value then every time you try to preform any other action you have to wait for the startup frame duration to end before you have the speed to preform any other action. For example transitioning rapidly between ADS while sprinting. From what I could gather if the player quickly decelerates but doesn’t lock immediately into their aiming speed they have the momentum to cancel out of that speed and go back into a full sprint without stopping. If there speed and movement were locked frames they would aim but they’d have to wait slightly longer for the end lag of the ADS animation to start and then finish before they can move at a faster speed again. There’s many more interactions that handle way better with a little acceleration like this and it’s part of why it’s important to allow some level of inertia for the players character available at all times, helps make movement feel faster even in games that don’t have necessarily strong movement in comparison to others.
R: 144 / I: 39

/leftytg/

Tabletop Games / Traditional Games
Wargames, Roleplaying Games, Board Games, Card Games, Drinking Games, and so on and so on.
What are you playing/running/home-brewing? What do you have to recommend or criticize?
R: 105 / I: 26

Baldur's Gate 3 Thread

Is it any good? I haven't played it myself
Also do I have to play the previous games to understand what's going on?
R: 129 / I: 23

Suzerain General - Uphold Sollism edition

Without Colonel Soll, there would be no New Sordland!
R: 15 / I: 4

Traditional Roguelikes /games/

A thread for traditional roguelikes.

Many of these games are free.

Traditional Roguelikes:
DCSS (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup)
ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery)
TOME (Tales of Maj'Eyal)
CoQ (Caves of Qud)
Cogmind
Brogue
CDDA (Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead)
Nethack
Dwarf Fortress (Adventure Mode)
Infra Arcana (HP Lovecraft inspired roguelike)
TGGW (The Ground Gives Way)
DOOM RL
Angband

Lazy Newb Pack for Dwarf Fortress:
https://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=7622
I recommend using the Mayday tileset.

Nethack:
https://www.nethack.org/

ADOM:
https://www.adom.de/home/downloads.html

DCSS:
https://crawl.develz.org/download.htm

CDDA:
https://cataclysmdda.org/experimental/

TOME:
https://te4.org/download

Brogue:
https://github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE/releases

Angband:
https://rephial.org/

Infra Arcana (HP Lovecraft inspired roguelike):
https://sites.google.com/site/infraarcana/home

TGGW (The Ground Gives Way):
https://www.thegroundgivesway.com/download/

DOOM RL:
https://drl.chaosforge.org/downloads

Starters / Beginners Recommendations:
+ Brogue
+ TGGW
+ ADOM
+ DCSS
+ DOOM RL
+ TOME

Brogue & Dungeon Crawler Stone Soup & TGGW & DOOM RL are recommended for beginners.

Intermediate would be ADOM and CDDA. (But they're okay for beginners also).

Caves of Qud and Cogmind aren't free.

& for CDDA, in the options menu, you can go to Graphics and change tilesets. I recommend Chibi UltiCa or MSXotto.

BONUS: Since many of these you can add a name (except Brogue). Make a character named Alunya / Rodina / NKVD chan or Stirner or Grace or Political Ideology Catgirls or Porky & tell us their story.
R: 54 / I: 19

Disco Elysium Spoilers

I like how these two characters reflected each other. I like how sad Dros is when he finds out that Rene died and that he'll never have a chance to shoot Rene
R: 4 / I: 1

The sequel to all star brawls failure

I feel like it’s important to recognize how this platform fighter both failed to compete with smash bros, it’s biggest competitor brawlhalla, and managed to go through the same player base loss as Nickelodeon all star brawl.
This game had a lot of problems at launch and still does now. It was never finished at launch, the bugs were obvious and the lack of clear physics seen in smash bros and brawl in the movement made the issue way worse for its accessibility. The game doesn’t have many playable characters and most don’t work at all when played in the same setting as others mechanically or visually.
When you throw that in with the fact that it somehow runs worse than smash, isn’t ported over to the switch and multiple other consoles for the sake of backwards compatibility and accessibility like brawlhalla, had issues with server stability and a disagreeable monetization policy, the game was simultaneously having issues pulling in players, and even more retaining them since plenty just couldn’t play the game at all even if graphically speaking it’s not anything special.

Tragic
R: 9 / I: 1

It’s been that long…

I saw gameplay of gta 5 and found myself confused seeing the player fail to drive safely and use their signals. It was then I remembered that the person was playing a gta title. In the time since gta 5 released I graduated high school, got a license, learned to drive, got 2+ years of experience, and am finding a first job, yet the only game released by rockstar was from over half a decade ago, and that’s just the release schedule of one major game company out of like 5-6 others whom we only got one star field game out of…
R: 3 / I: 0

SMT and Turn-Based General

Sorry if this exist already but I didnt see it anywhere and Id like to discuss
R: 0 / I: 0

ULTRAKILL

I woyld say this is probably one of the more interesting singleplayer shooters of the last decade. I loved the weapon and firing mode synergies, bosses with complex movesets that require you to utilize the movement techs and various weapon abilities to the max, badass voice acting by Stefan Weyte and Gianni Matragano, style combo system akin to DMC and Bulletstorm and a rather cool low-poly art style combined with detailed textures that really does remind of 90's-early 2000's games. On the bad side, I found level design to be kinda meh most of the time and I am kinda worry what will happen of it all with the recent Unity install fee shitstorm, since of the final act only the first level was finished as of now.
R: 6 / I: 1

Best games like XCOM

Here's the caveat: MISS me with games that don't have an overworld layer because IMO that's more fun than the actual battles half the time. Games like Gears Tactics feel very halfassed due to not having that layer where you can do research and get immersed.

My favourites are the 'After'X series, very underrated, but eager to see if there's any unsung gems I missed. Doesn't necessarily have to be modern day vs aliens.
R: 2 / I: 0

Joel’s isolating death and it’s significance to his character

I’ve been thinking about part 1 again and I’ve felt even more indifferent towards Joel’s death than I did than I was coming into part 2. I can see why his death pissed the living shit off so many players but I can’t see what about him specifically made it seem like it wasn’t something inevitably coming to him by his characters setup.
It’s obvious that his relationships with Tess, Ellie and later on with tommy after reuniting with him made him a significantly better person, the problem, he also spent 2 decades attacking both innocents and criminals, not just attacking, but often attacking completely isolated, to ensure his own survival that caused his loved ones to separate from him to begin with and fucked over an entire faction. It wouldn’t have mattered if Abby was even born plot wise, the amount of damage his character has inflicted onto everything around him even before he met Ellie along with the new damage he brought out with his time with her against the fireflies, and Fedra would’ve had him killed by anyone else, whether far more sadistically or gracefully the result would’ve been the same.
It’s a symptom of how isolated he was for so many years. other characters like Marlene, Abby, Tess, that guy fat Geralt, and David, they had people to fall back on for support and defence against confrontation. Joel didn’t, he only had whatever scraps were available from FEDRA and whatever he could get running around the USA with Tess as his only occasional alternative for support. You can’t survive in the real world behaving like that, you wouldn’t survive even if you didn’t if you had that little support from anyone, definitely not in a world like tlou.
For this I feel like his death was the most tragic but most appropriately done because it highlighted what his character fundamentally was like. An isolated man with little support from those around him who’ve been emotionally pushed away from his past actions. He never got to repair his relationship with Ellie because he never did enough to justify what he did to her fast enough, not to tommy either despite the progress he’s made.
Coming back, it’s also why I’m so happy knowing Ellie didn’t turn out like him in the end( for the most part). She still has a life ahead of here where she can fix things with Dina, she still has the opportunity to not spend god knows how many years isolated and constantly miserable over the family that was taken from her by others, she still has a chance at life to find new happiness soon where the man couldn’t.


God this sequel really is a special game for me in my heart.
R: 38 / I: 5

Cod is unkillable and it’s the gaming industries fault

After playing so many different fps titles made recently along with older ones I’ve come to the conclusion that the fucking giant that is call of duty is unkillable for the same reasons for why WoW hasn’t been annihilated when games like gw2 and oars exist. Outside of having larger player bases the games are mechanically better than the vast majority of their competition.

I hate to say this but it’s correct, I’ve noticed most fps titles that come out have horrible issues relating to the pacing of gameplay and responsiveness. Tactical shooters are a monument to this, crawling around for scraps of ammunition in stalker or leaning every second in a game like r6 or arma simply isn’t fun. I don’t know how they did it but infinity ward and trey arch found through years of play testing and redesigning how to craft a game that has a balance between the free movement and action of a game like half life/doom while having the restrictions and sense of weight you’d find in a game like counter strike or the last of us 2 and it just works, too well. I fucking despise the monetization and managing practices of activision by I’d be lying if I said a game like xdefiant or mw2022 wasn’t legitimately enjoyable for me to play through after waiting for a game that felt like half life 2 or far cry 2. The only games I can think of that have even done anything to bring attention away from the franchise are ADS free shooters like ultra kill or battle it remastered and phantom forces, both games that function more like battlefield alternatives than cod killers. Maybe there will be change maybe…
R: 16 / I: 3
if you had to live the rest of your life (with your family and loved ones) in the world of a videogame, which one would you choose
R: 171 / I: 34

Starfield

It actually looks like a pretty good game after skimming this video. I hope the combat will be more dangerous and punchy though and that the quest/dialogue aspect of the game which wasn't the focus the vid will be good.
Planned to release for September 6th, I think I'll pirate it on day one, or whenever empress does her magic if it's under Denuvo.
Well I would need a better PC, whenever I thought about upgrading my decade old machine to play releasing AAA titles such as Cyberpunk or Callisto Protocol I ended up not doing it because those games were shit, most of the big games recently were shit actually, hope Starfield breaks the trend.
R: 14 / I: 1

Fwrrrrrreeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I already hate shows and movies, I haven’t fuckjng watched one in years because all of the ones they keep pumping out are shit, but come on. This is gonna be what the halo show was for fallout. The games already are notorious(yes even the black isle ones) for deviating so heavily from their inspiration a boy and his dog to the point where the games barely feel like they’re related to a nuclear war at all, but this? This is is somehow even worse when it comes to writing and I haven’t even seen what this piece of shit is beyond a trailer in 240p
R: 21 / I: 2

Elden rings combat is so bad

I hate to say anything good about dark souls 2, but elden rings combat is considerably worse. The only good thing about it is the lack of enemy spam and that’s it. AOE attacks, environmental hazards and gank squads in boss fights, projectile spamming, enemies that exist as ai variants of the player character, unusually high poise enemies, and unpredictable delayed swings make running a melee play through even more painful than it is in dark souls. I’m not asking the game to have sekiros combat pacing, quite the opposite. I like the feeling of weight the souls trilogy had with their combat, it feels sluggish, fair and brutal like the world you were in. Only a few large enemies were actually fast and that’s if they were more lean than large like yhorm or gundyr. Every fucking enemy in elden ring has so much cheese attached to the way they attack that it’s meta to spam jump attacks and rolls which is even worse than the r1 and estus mashing of ds3, also poise is meaningless against spells unlike DS2. It’s a shame knowing DS2 and 3 still have the best pvp that’s far more aggressive with much less of people straight up running away, spamming spells/summons and constantly fishing for jump attacks, parries and backstabs like in DeS and DS1.
R: 347 / I: 61

/gamedev/ - Game Development General (SHARE YOUR VIDEOGAME IDEAS ITT)

So I'm not an experienced game developer or anything, but I figured we should have a general dedicated to this sort of thing, especially since I'm interested to hear peoples' ideas on lefty-orientated videogames that would be cool for me to make.
I've been using Blender since I was 11 or 12 years old (I'm 20 now) so I'm pretty much at a level now where I can model any game asset I want. I'm also in school for Computer Engineering, and have been a hobby programmer since I was around 14 working with Python, C, and GLSL shaders, so I can script pretty much anything as well. I would say my main weaknesses when approaching a task like this are Sculpting, Spriting, and Painting, so to any drawfags/artfags with skills: I invite you to contribute on whatever projects we end up embarking on.

FREE, OPEN SOURCE, EASY SOFTWARE I RECOMMEND

>Modelling

Blender: https://www.blender.org/
>Painting
Kritas: https://krita.org/en/
>Game Development
Godot: https://godotengine.org/
R: 10 / I: 3
i'm gonna get a VA monitor with (probably?) much better blacks than my current one just so i can play darker games without the immersion-breaking glowy blacks of my IPS monitor

recommend me dark games, preferably horror games pls (thx in advance ❤)
R: 1 / I: 0

Game design study: visibility and camera design

Hi everyone, I’ve been working on a web game directly coded through JavaScript than relying on an engine to get anything to learn how to make games, so I can start getting back to making even better mods. In that time I learned a bit more about camera movement but what I found fascinating is how much of a role visibility plays into the accessibility and quality of gameplay in any title.

I’ve made complaints before about cluttered MMO UI design that makes it impossible for any newcomer or casual player understand wtf is happening if they’re seeing gameplay they’re not responsible for. I learned something from this and it’s also the role auras and camera placements play into this as well. Auras are often a bigger visual distraction to players more than a useful indicator over the status of a player if they’re overused. Take the resin buffs you’d get in the souls trilogy compared to the effects you’d get off an enchanted piece of gear in wow or Minecraft, the former effect tells you directly what to expect from the weapon you’re using while the ladder can quickly be confused with any other buff. The purpose of an Aura is to temporarily provide information to players about the state their avatar, tool or gear is in. If it’s constantly glowing it becomes a distraction more than an indicator because it fails to serve its temporary function and becomes a passive element of gameplay, one whose nature impairs player vision.

Another major way games can harm the players vision is through how they place their cameras. Most third person games place their cameras an offset away from the player character, however games focused primarily on combat like for honour and GOWR or large worlds like in WoW, rain world and la noire keep the camera centred and the reason is pretty smart. A shoulder offset is great for keeping gameplay cinematic and great for shooters since it provides space for the player to see any incoming targets, however a centred camera is much better in general for third person gameplay because it provides clear context to the player characters position relative to their surroundings at all time. This also allows for traversal through larger set pieces or even fights with large enemies in combat oriented games.

However it’s important for the sake of accessibility to keep cameras a maximum distance away from the player avatar at all times, and preferably not let the player have full control over the cameras displacement from their avatar. If it were, players could often be introduced to too much information that wasn’t intended by players to see(see RuneScape 2 with the draw distance extended) or completely irrelevant to a moment gameplay where such visibility would be a bigger drawback than a benefit(1v1 duels in wow is a great example since the cameras far enough from each player that it can occasionally be harder to see what your opponent is doing or get distracted by something irrelevant in the background). Having the cameras view be manually adjusted by the player makes the problem worse as now they’d have to simultaneously manually adjust the camera to serve their needs while trying to preform potential multitudes of other tasks.
R: 1 / I: 0

VLAN thread

Anybody here plays games over VLAN? I played Terraria over Radmin for some time before and would like to have some more players on board for my modded run. Also, what other games you would like to try also?
R: 25 / I: 9
How do you guys feel about Unity planning to murder the indie games market and Genshin for profit
R: 31 / I: 1

VG soundtrack thread

I have looked all over the catalog both on /games/ and /music/ and have not found the VG OST thread so I guess it got wiped by the bumplimit, so here we go again.
R: 395 / I: 84

HoI4 + HoI4 modding thread

By Blood alone waiting room edition.

>RedFlood

I didn't realise they also reworked the Far-Eastern Collapse.
If Kerensky fucks up the Manchu's still take over the West, Republicans run off to Transamur and Vladivostok and then either become one of two different flavours of authdem, Ukrops spawn in the north, but can either be SocDem or Banderites who are now properly set to reactionary.
Harbin proper gets to keep some of the south now, Its either led by Gastev who calms down his autism a bit and becomes PopSoc

Or…
R: 1 / I: 1

Why could starfield and Elder scrolls get consistent worldbuilding but fallout couldn’t

It struck me how inconsistent thematically the fallout series is from its inspiration “a boy and his dog” and og wasteland. I don’t even know why Bethesda kept the goofy as shit world building elements from fallout 2 and stuck with it for 3,4 and 76. New Vegas could’ve been a fix but throws everything away with the sci fi nonsense and making the legion look like goodwill discount of ancient Rome. When I play TES games I feel like I’m on a separate province with consistent world building and geography containing familiar faces in familiar places, when I play star field I feel like I’m a star treck dystopia where there’s increased conflict, political discourse but most of all hope and love for a technologically advanced humanity. When I play fallout I barely can tell wtf is going on, not a single game throughout the franchise barely even feels like an acknowledgement of the realities of a post nuclear world. It feels like I’m entering another cowboy world with nuclear aesthetics to make even reference it.
R: 6 / I: 2

Skyrim: Beyond Reach

I've just finished playing the Skyrim mod Beyond Reach and thought i'd post some of my thoughts here. I'd played through the mod once before many years ago back when it was a quite a bit smaller in scope and it's questline pretty much ended at reaching Evermore and being knighted. The first time I played it because the mod author had posted about it in a thread on /leftypol/ and i decided to check it out and came away very impressed, but am even more so now seeing the progress and development made over the years since. So if by any chance you still visit /leftypol/ and see this razorkid then love to you and everyone who worked on the mod, it's an amazing and remarkable achievement <3

Anyone else who enjoys playing Skyrim and hasn't tried Beyond Reach I heartily recommend.
10/10 would save Tamriel from Ur-Dra/Ur-Fascism again
R: 18 / I: 0

How did capcom fuck up the movement so bad

The major thing keeping me from getting interested in the RE remakes and village is the movement. Compared to other third person games, it’s really unresponsive. Like I can pick up a game like fallout 4 hell even 3, the last of us 2, or gears of war and get on the move immediately. The movement of re village and the remakes feel really sluggish: you can’t sprint forwards properly, you can’t sprint backwards or to the side, the guns feel like they have trillions of years of end lag between shots, guns themselves have weird recoil physics compared to other shooters, melee combat is awful never use it and the levels are designed in a cramped fashion for lazy scares. I can’t feel scared playing resident evil because the horror element isn’t genuine. I feel weak in a game like far cry 2 because the player isn’t made a god but not unreasonably powerful either meaning actual threats feel like actual threats, like a sniper or a car patrolling the roads. Tlou2 made the infected intimidating by giving them buffs that justified the games difficulty like increased movement speed, instakills, detection + patrolling and mini bosses like shamblers and bloaters. Those things are crazy fast, faster than the player whose moving at reasonable speeds.
R: 5 / I: 0
>he Never played the game about the Irish man in nazi occupied paris who helps the resistance by blowing shit , climbing buildings, wearing disguises, carbombing checkpoints, panzerfausting blimps,grand theft tank,and worst of all, punching nazoids.
What's your excuse?
R: 69 / I: 10

NSFW games

What is your opinion on proliferation of porn games on mainstream gaming platforms?

Like when I first saw shit that I am used to downloading off F95zone popping up on Steam and GoG I got weirded out, but then I though about it and its probably for the best, maybe this will encourage higher quality games rather than shovelware trash dominating the industry currently.
R: 3 / I: 6

VRchat

VRchat /games/
R: 3 / I: 0

micro games like WarioWare

Everybody should play such a thing at least once. A new WarioWare will release November 2023.

Just played through WarioWare Get It Together for Switch and it's not bad, but WarioWare Gold on the 3DS was massively better. And not because the number of micro games is now smaller, as some people are saying. WWGIT has the twist that you visit a micro game as one of several characters with drastically different abilities (some can fly, one can teleport etc.) and it makes such a huge difference that it practically amounts to a much higher number of different micro games than what a direct count tells you. Another thing some people say is Gold was better because it had variety in controls like touch screen stuff and this one is only analog stick plus one button, but it seems just as many people found the constant change in controls in Gold annoying (though it had modes available limited to specific schemes).

What makes WWGIT the lesser entry compared to Gold by a significant margin are mainly two things:
1. The relatively low amount of bonus stuff and game modes, especially in single player. You unlock a "Variety Pack" of ten games, six of which are multiplayer only for no particular reason.
2. The high randomness even by WW standards which makes playing for score extremely frustrating. It shouldn't be a surprise that they did not tightly balance the difficulty of the several thousand possible combinations of this character & that micro game, but what is remarkable is the size of the discrepancy.
It would have been trivial to mitigate both problems.

Space-taxi guys can shoot in one direction sideways & fly around freely. Ninja girls can shoot in one direction sideways & constantly jump and can only be steered left and right. Take a guess who does worse on average (should have a charge-up ability for the shot to make up for that). 9-Volt zips around automatically and you can't make him change direction unless you hang on to something. Couldn't they have made it so that the stick modifies his movement just a little bit to make him bearable, jeez. Wouldn't even use him if he had a 1-up mushroom in his pocket. Penny has a cumbersome control concept made even worse because it uses button toggling to hover in place instead of button holding. (Oh and why doesn't any character know how to duck? Clumsy bunch.)

The game makes you select characters for a team and then one of them gets randomly chosen to do this or that micro game. They should have put in a mode for tackling a mix of all micro games with just one character (with each character having their own high-score table). Another nice mode would have been to keep the random selection from five characters or so to tackle all micro games, but to allow the player to temper the randomness by marking a team leader who then gets drawn twice as often plus a limited number of options to throw away an ongoing micro game and have the current character go at another or throw the character out of the ongoing micro game and restart it with another.

Even with all these hypothetical improvements it would only become a WarioWare Silver. Gold is sooo much better with its extra modes. Gold got a mode where you can change the speed of the micro game you are playing by angling the 3DS. Gold also got a mode where you are a kid secretly playing games at night and you have to pretend to be asleep whenever your mom checks on you and it's absolutely brilliant with random noises faking you out and stuff. Oh my God, it even has an autograph-writing simulator. So Gold set a high bar this one doesn't even come close to touching, never mind clearing. One day of fun, now I am already done.

WarioWare Move It will release early November and will have motion controls.
R: 16 / I: 8

Game recommendation thread

A thread where you can describe what are you looking for and others give you recommendations, or just recommend an interesting game you found.
R: 11 / I: 1
It's better than Fallout 3 in almost every way except the world itself. Bland and mostly empty space, no random encounters or anything worth exploring that made the capital wasteland fun and unpredictable. The New Vegas Strip is too small and boring. I'll admit that Obsidian has nothing on Bethesda in terms of immersive and atmospheric worlds (Ahem, The Outer Worlds). Yeah, yeah it was made in only 18 months. We need a remake of the game for this reason.

Oh yeah, pic related.
R: 5 / I: 0
the ray tracing mod for Half Life 1 has been released! Not gonna post a link because it's gonna look like spam(?), but you can find it easily. i'm really enjoying playing the game again with a new coat of paint
R: 14 / I: 6
most proletariat videogame genre:
most bourgeois videogame genre:
R: 6 / I: 0
To display some of the ingenuity of Ohshima, and his unfortunately scorned cohort Naka, we must look at the Box Fox. The Box Fox is a powerup from Balan Wonderworld that has gained infamy; yet, the source of its infamy is entirely the incompetence and slow-mindedness of e-celebs.
The player will acquire the Box Fox powerup in the 4th level on a cliffside abound with slopes, at which point they will be told that the Box Fox will randomly transform them into a box. Almost all players will then start walking backwards down the slope, at which point they will be turned into a box and slide off the cliff to their death.
The humor of the moment is unmistakable. The Box Fox is based on the shapeshifting kitsune of Japanese myth, known for their pranks and mischief. To kill the player in such a comical manner is befitting of their nature. The player will lose, at the very most, 30 seconds of progress, due to the Box Fox being discovered very shortly after a checkpoint. The player will lose nothing but the Box Fox powerup itself.
So why did the internet at large mock Balan Wonderworld for the Box Fox? It's simple. Low IQ people don't like a joke being made at their expense. The concept of a game killing them for a joke is too far, especially in a game like Balan Wonderworld which most of them were already predisposed to hate because of its reputation and dogpiling at the time of release. Rather than identifying the Box Fox as a clear joke, they instead ascribed it to poor design, due to the aforementioned low IQ. That being said, if a powerup like the Box Fox were in Mario Odyssey or some other Nintendobab game, they would have posted about it on Reddit on mass numbers praising it for its wittiness. Herein lies the idiocy of Balan Wonderworld's critics.
R: 11 / I: 4

Completionism

I’ve beat
Celeste
Just finished Dark souls 2
Far cry 2
MW 1 and 2, (the originals)
Sly cooper
Fancy pants, (every game)
And the first infamous game with my uncle
How many games have you finished?
R: 2 / I: 0

Shouldn’t vault tec been the enclave?

I don’t get the writers decision to keep vault tec and the enclave as separate factions, or even not make the first antagonists of the first games explicitly the corporation. They’re the first roadblock to the health and longevity to a substantial portion of humanity, they’re responsible for most of the major innovations used by settlers, raiders and officers alike, they should’ve been the first major faction.
R: 6 / I: 1
Ken-Xi Jinping?
R: 33 / I: 7

I hate game over screens

David Cage was 100% right on this one, they are failure of game design. Both immersion braking and challenge trivializing, because what are you going to do when you loose the game? Hit the reload button and continue like nothing happened.
I recently finished Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, and just now rage-uninstalled its sequel, and these two games perfectly illustrate why game over screens are bullshit. In the first game, you loose the game when you loose 50 systems to enemy (and also final mission I guess), other than that you can fail any single mission and continue the game, but of course, now having to deal with consequences of your failure. You failed to protect a system? You get debuff until you reclaim it. You failed to protect a system in one of the story missions against Planet Killer? You get debuff, but no way to remove it because there is no longer a system to reclaim. Failed to keep artifact out of hands of Chaos? They are more aggressive now. Got your ship damaged? Pay to speed-repair then or make do for couple turns without it. Even if the story is basically linear, it still lets player build their own narrative this way.
Now in Battlefleet Gothic 2, whats that, enemy decided to focus fire and blow up your admiral? Eat shit, game over, reload. Nothing, no consequences, just bad taste in your mouth. And there is no reason it had to be this way. Even if he just respawns, you still at very least get punished by loosing a ship. Or have player pay for having him respawn, of reset his level, give him some negative trait, anything.
Anyway, because I am a retard with no self control, I am currently trying to recover the deleted save files so I can reinstall the game and continue. I am going to make my own "game over" free houserule, reload right before the battle, delete my fleet, and continue from there.
R: 241 / I: 44
Get in the hype train Communism simulator is coming in 3 days. Which will be your starting nation?
R: 6 / I: 3

Fires of rubicon can’t fix the hole left by anthem

For a studio like from software that has so much experience with visually interesting world design it’s astounding knowing they couldn’t beat anthem. This isn’t an issue with FOR its just a reality of how much potential was wasted on the ladder. It’s crazy knowing how much was just fucking lost the day BioWare fully pulled the plug on their own game, and even crazier knowing the closest title to come close to fulfilling what the game was trying to be still couldn’t hit it almost half a decade after it launched. Fuck fuck, I’ll still look into playing rubicon but man the pang of sadness felt knowing there was a game just like it that could’ve been so much fucking better and in some ways is in comparison to the one released today hurts, so much.
R: 19 / I: 6

Games where you kill cops

Hard mode: no GTA games
<specially GTA V where you're more likely to just end up fighting 12 year old in oppressor bikes

right now i'm playing:

>XCOM

<you fight corporate cops there's nothing more cool than cornering them into cover at the end and blasting their asses with all my modded guns

>Red Dead Redemption

<Literal illegalist-pilled game every heist mission is such a thrill even if they start a bit slow

>PAYDAY 2

<old game with mods i love making blursed weapons and blasting cops with them then making them surrender and executing them anyway
R: 0 / I: 0

Jesus the older version of Abby was brutal

From the concept art it’s clear ND toned this character down from what they were going for by like a lot. Abby was way skinnier, used guns and blades like Ellie but she was as vicious as her when it came to kills, protagonists no exceptions. The fact that the first encounter she has with Ellie after straight up slicing off Joel’s arm happens when the several members of Jackson are captured by WLF soldiers and executed collectively, only to have Abby fully armed against Ellie is really dark. I don’t fucking know what happened during the writing phase that saw her have such a drastic change in character but man, this version is horrifying and I’d hate having her in the game wether or not she gets killed by Ellie just for how terrifying she is. Hell her post enslaved concept is so brutal I’d question if the game would get straight up banned like mw2 for being too violent.
R: 20 / I: 3
are you legitimately good at any game? The only games I'm actually good at are Tetris Attack and Pokémon Puzzle League. I love racing games and strategy shooters, but I'm probably below average at those even though I have thousands of hours playing these games.
R: 2 / I: 0

Light attacks

I know to so many animators this doesn’t and shouldn’t matter at all but I feel Iike it’s something worth the effort to acknowledge for hack and slash titles. (I’m not a professional so take this with some level of criticism) typically most attacks meant to come out fast, barefisted or with a blade/blunt don’t involve the any part of the body moving backwards at all. In fact the entire point of faster attacks is to use the individuals body to quickly throw out a generally short but swift attack. This typically means these kinds of attacks wether it’s a basic jab, thrust or swing ends up covering little area but enough that it’s not entirely reactable for the person receiving the hit. In nearly all hack and slash titles this doesn’t happen, monster hunter, Witcher, Skyrim, dark souls, I could keep going. It makes the combat feel a lot less brutal and a lot less difficult when every normal attack has someone taking ages to throw something out in the most overly dramatic fashion possible. If there was a mix between fast, and swift attacks followed by highly telegraphed swings covering a large area, attacks you’d find with some of the lothric knights in dark souls 3, or basic jabs in tekken, it would help make these titles feel just a little more interesting.
R: 30 / I: 3

Warhammer and Leftypol

There was an abortion of a thread in the main leftypol. This is for discussing W40k from a leftist reading, sort of Sigmarxist lite.

Interestingly enough, first, the Imperium is actually a great deconstruction of how booj and sheeple in the first world can justify their imperialism and inhumanity. Basically, you have folk justifying child soldiers, lobotomizing dissidents, etc, just because if they didn't do it, either AI or Xenos would overrun the Imperium.

A second focus of conversation might be Genestealer Cults as a deconstruction of proletarian revolts.
R: 17 / I: 2

switch will support denuvo

nintendo switch owners are going to have their games even more laggish than usual now LOL
R: 1 / I: 0
Truxton, Truxton, we want Truxton.
R: 49 / I: 7

now you can make your own epic memes in Disco Elysium

>Create the Disco scenes of your dreams.
>Introducing Collage Mode: the new functionality that gives you the creative freedom to stage just about anything in-game.
lmao ZA/UM usurpers come up with worst possible choices for the franchise now that they kicked out the creators and have become just an Amazon subsidiary now, expecting to see Disco Elysium NFTs soon
R: 13 / I: 2

A document on why Skyrim’s combat sucks in comparison to other games and TES as a whole

Have fun reading to anyone here that does that.
R: 18 / I: 3

World of Warcraft

Old thread fell off at some point. I've been trying out the hardcore addon for classic and it's been a lot more fun than I thought it would be. Only level 20 so far on my warrior but it makes what's usually a long slog to max a lot more dramatic with trackers for its own achievements like only using certain gear or not using professions. It's pretty sobering seeing all the death alerts too, knowing what a huge time investment it is for someone to get to the 50-60 range only to die from fall damage or something. There's also a big sense of community with all the hardcore guilds and people tend to look out for each other even if they're not "officially" allowed to, which is cool.

Not being able to trade (even if to hand off things you can't use), no grouping unless in a duo/trio or in a dungeon, and only being allowed to run each dungeon once before max is annoying, but I'm hoping the official servers will be able to smooth out the rough edges whenever they come out. I don't think they should make trading/dungeons unrestricted, maybe just put a level band on grouping (no group member can be more than 4 levels apart from anyone else, for example) and prevent trading gold before max level while making traded items soulbound so they can't get passed around.
R: 16 / I: 2
Guy undergoes failed blood transfusion gets crazy hallucinations and starts murdering randos and wild animals in southern Britain
R: 1 / I: 1
anyone play Cyberchinlet?
R: 18 / I: 2

Build design and mechanics

Do you advocate for classless societies or do you prefer classes in your games? What about advancing skills/attributes on use vs a point buy system?
R: 2 / I: 0

I don’t get this aspect about ubisoft

During the development of splinter cell and AC unity, Ubisoft was developing their still widely used methods of node based animation. It’s why the games feel so smooth and responsive movement wise to this day, but there’s an issue. Shortly after the conclusion of splinter cell the studio would go onto develop another technology, motion matching. Basically it’s a similar technology to uncharteds physics animation system, but it’s specifically links the movements of an actual person to any character. The difference between it and NDs techniques aren’t huge but it does bring a question. Why exactly does AC mirage and Valhalla not use this tech they just made. Mirage is especially weird for this, the animations are fine but they lack the physics based transitions the team made for splinter cell and previous AC games. I want to feel like this was a deliberate choice for the sake of improving responsiveness to the player, similar to what the studio did by downgrading physics from far cry 2 after the Dunia upgrades. But that still doesn’t explain to me why the animation transitions had to die with those downgrades. Was it budget? Did the team have collision issues with the anime? What happened.
R: 10 / I: 2

I think tlou2 would’ve been worse if it started off with Abby

I’ve seen some anons on community forums and mainstream social media sites like Reddit, YouTube or 4chan suggest the story wouldn’t have gotten as much backlash if it started off with Abby and not when players would hate her the most. I don’t believe that’s wrong, but I don’t think the story and the experience would’ve been better as a result.

It was clear on druckmanns end that starting off with Abby right after Jessie gets shot was fully intentional, and was supposed to piss off the player. The entire first half of the game is specifically setup to get you to hate Abby as much as possible, having it suddenly transition to her perspective at such a specific moment would be considered suicidal by any other director if that wasn’t the goal. By having the story start off with Ellie, a character the fan base already connected with and ending off with her resolution with Joel, the story feels more closely connected to her as a character and Abbys impact on her. Letting the game conclude with Ellie stating how she felt about Joel’s actions and then not being able to state what she wanted to do with her relationship with him at the same period when Ellie is moving on with her life past Abby makes it way easier to understand not just why she was so angry, but how she was such in a miserable state of mind well past the death of Joel. It’s not just the fact that Joel died horribly, it’s the fact that he died at a point in her life where she wasn’t able to let him know that she forgave him and wanted to make sure he wasn’t completely abondoned by those that loved him during what were his final days. If the game introduced abbys arc just after that, it wouldn’t have hit right. I wouldn’t have felt as angry, I wouldn’t have as much of an understanding of Ellie as a character, I wouldn’t have been as open to understanding the conditions required for Abby to even go after Joel to start. Obviously the way the game was paced pissed the living shit out of so many players, but I think it was a risk worth taking if it meant getting a new, and in my own opinion, thoughtful and experimental way of concluding a character arc.
R: 26 / I: 17

What are your "Fuck you I liked it" games?

Babylon's Fall was done dirty.
Friday the 13th isn't anywhere near one of the worst NES games.
R: 12 / I: 2

Spectacles in game design

I’ve been thinking about the last of us 2, a lot and something stuck out to me for why the game felt so different from so many others; there aren’t any spectacles at all throughout the entire game. For those that didn’t ready debords book, a spectacle is a thing to stare at, a thing to grab your attention. They exist everywhere, as billboard ads, celebrities, online variants of click bait, exaggeration in news headlines etc. Games have them too but they’re designed in a much subtler ways, typically through UI pop ups to reward the player with something they did. Achievements, damage text, shaky cam during action scenes, flashy combat effects, epic music. Tlou2 feels different, outside of a minimalist hud design the gameplay never feels like it’s trying to grab the players attention in anyway, similar to how dark souls 1 makes no attempts to impress the player with anything outside of what exists in the game world. It feels brutal, the music is subtle and is synced with the emotions felt by all characters in it, takedowns and fights aren’t overly flashy or stealthy like in far cry, they’re fast, vicious and filled with flaws. It’s strange for me to play something that makes me feel physically and emotionally exhausted, but I want more spectacle free games like dark souls, far cry 2, tlou2, and more barren in visual and auditory rewards. It makes me feel a lot more connected to the game as a game and helps sympathize with the crushing realities of the characters in them as they grow past their own problems.
R: 180 / I: 45

Pokemon general

ITT capitalist guilty pleasures

which tier is your favorite teir?
i leik little cup (lvl 5 only)
R: 4 / I: 1

Worst souls 2

Dark souls 2 sucks mainly because of the health management and world design. The ladder is bad for a lot of reasons but the former is cartoonishly awful for much simpler ones. I don’t think the hit boxes are a problem in comparison to other souls titles considering hit boxes in general weren’t that great until ds3 anyways. What I do find infuriating is the health management of ds2. I feel like the development team was trying their hardest to address estus and roll spamming found in DeS and ds1 but addressed it in the shittiest way possible. Like wtf is point of effigies? New players just get punished and will quit for how shit it is and veterans will never use it because they don’t suck or farm it brainlessly because it’s farmable, and none of that shit matters because they made healing fucking infinite for no reason and without consequence. Fucking blood vials in bloodborne at least got nerfed by making them progressively more expensive and making blood vial farming unfun, and pointless. In ds2 it’s so fucking easy to blast through the game entirely by spamming this shit and even worse on NG+ its way more efficient to start mashing shrooms since they’re the even more OP version of life gems.
R: 36 / I: 2

Grand Strategy Thread

I really wish this game had been good but it isn't, the design is completely boring. I just want a good game where I can run a country (preferably in the modern day) that isn't yet another HOI mod. Any suggestions outside of the obvious Paradox fare?
R: 5 / I: 0
Can't think of anything else to do, so I'm voicefagging. Anyone want me to say some stupid junk as Papyrus? I've attempted Soldier in the past, but people haven't been happy with that so don't choose that unless you're okay with it being terrible.
R: 1 / I: 1
stalin shouldn't have stopped at berlin
trotsky wouldn't have stopped at berlin
according to the world's most accurate history simulator
R: 1 / I: 0

Damb, epic should release a third fortnite title

The engine and qol updates in present fortnite are really impressive. The game looks so much better to me than when it first released, and I’m glad the studio has put so much effort to bring it to where it is now. It would be wonderful to see a third fortnite title with all these features.
R: 10 / I: 4

Is kojima a marxist

Yes or no?
R: 356 / I: 76

Fallout General - What side is do you choose in Fallout new Vegas ?

of course most /pol/tards side with caser's legion but looking at it almost every single faction is awful one way or the other, The NCR is literally a reboot of America that is in the middle of a manifest destiny, House is a egotistical maniac and probably appeals to Musk bros and Yes man is just a libertarian wet dream
R: 7 / I: 0

Why not just spam support turrets

They’re easy to produce, last long, can fuckup thousands of other aliens and even humans, cost little to maintain and can be deployed anywhere. Why not skip the process of training, educating and deploying tau soldiers and just automate defensive lines to preserve the taus existence in the most pragmatic way possible. It’s not even like the tau aren’t politically inclined to rely on automated warfare
R: 50 / I: 16
My game is about to come out! For those who don't know, Demolish or Die is like Red Faction: Guerilla meets Infamous, meets Ratchet & Clank, meets Zelda. I have improved it drastically since my reveal here (>>22346), in all aspects.

It's out in early access, but it's actually already finished. The release date (June 16) is for marketing reasons. I completely butchered the marketing, by the way. Really should've hired a marketing agency or something… Wish me luck!

Anyway, here it is in case you're interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2147890/Demolish_or_Die/
R: 5 / I: 1

I hate the world design of world of warcraft

I dunno how there art team managed to do so much but fuck up something so simple. Most games don’t fuckup world design as badly as wow has. What I’m referring to is the dramatic changing of biomes and climates over laughably short distances, the fact that the games lore and aesthetics is based on “the lost Vikings” and Tolkien’s work yet barely features any coniferous trees, Southern and eastern European style infrastructure or the fact that you can have East Asian inspired tigers and dragon like mounts occupying the same space as African and indigenous American buffalos and bulls and on occasion, cybernetic elephants. I dunno wtf happened after mists of pandaria that just saw what the games sense of place eradicate completely but I’m not liking it. Azeroth is the size of a continent not a planet as large as earths that can have so many different identities all in the same place at the same time and make any consistent sense.
It’s like the world design of dark souls 2 to an extreme
R: 50 / I: 26

/Morrowind/

A thread about Elder scrolls 3 Morrowind
R: 3 / I: 0
>persona 3 official design works interview with the developers
>the reasoning behind the mechanism of social links differing based on the characters gender

every time this gets posted it conveniently excludes the part directly following this where they say "yeah so that's why we had a woman in charge of writing the social links"
R: 601 / I: 192 (full)

Leftypol gaming

What games do leftypol play? I played through Stalker recently, I also like Deus Ex, Mount and Blade Warband, Dark Souls. I play supreme commander daily and generally enjoy strategy games.
R: 2 / I: 0

Cruis'n Blast sucks

🎶 Cruuuuuuuwuuisan DAS RITE come mong go cruisaaaaaaan AWYEAH Lesbo Cruuuuuuisan 🎶

Cruis'n Blast for Nintendo Switch is colorful fast food. First time you race a course feels like your life turning into an amazing action movie. Second time you race the same course is also movie-like, but in a bad way. You suspect that explosions and stuff are rigidly scripted to coincide exactly with where the player is. In time trial you can slow down and see how the game falls apart: Animals slow down just like you, rockets and even falling rocks idle in the air.

Worst of all is how rarely collision detection happens. No experienced gamer expects the collision geometry to be as complex as what you see, especially in a racer that doesn't present itself as a very serious affair, but here the amount of things you just pass through almost touches the negative record for a game made this century (still your the winner, Big Rigs). Massive monsters and explosions can't ever hurt you as human-controlled cars take no damage from anything, which is a tolerable design choice for a 90s style arcade racer IMHO, but you don't even slow down and just clip through. Most of the chaos is just purely optical. Do you like the squid item in Mario Kart that does nothing but obstruct your view a bit? Would you love a racer to throw many variations of the squid idea at you? Well that's what you get here with the rockets & and explosions & dinos & UFOs and nothing else. 30 years before this Switch game F-Zero on the SNES had tracks with wind coming from the side you had to steer against, in Cruis'n Blast you have a storm or torrent of water crossing the track and there is no effect whatsoever on the steering.

You play a course for the first time on the lowest difficulty and in the last few seconds you make it from third place to first place. Then you practice and practice and practice and level up your car and what not, play the same course on the lowest difficulty and… in the last few seconds you make it from third place to first place. The amount of rubberbanding is off the charts here. The beloved Mario Kart is notorious for rubberbanding too, but most people playing that can achieve an early and persistent lead in first place on the lowest difficulty and better gamers can do it on higher difficulty as well. Here it is impossible even on lowest difficulty. Buy five extra "blasts" (nitros) to add to your default three. Use them all up at the beginning of a longer track and see that this does not put you in the top three for even a moment. Do the first half of a race without steering at all and then put in some effort and see how much rubberbanding happens. This is just asinine. (I've even seen one play a hacked version with infinite blasting reaching 1st place on normal mode only in the last 10 seconds of a 1:38 race.) Hey game designers, if you don't like the thought of a player getting the lead early, just spread out the starting positions.

There is a mode that demands you do four races in a row and it gives you an infinite amount of race retry options. Money to win literally lies on the street and you collect it even if you don't quite manage to touch it. It is all too easy to make CPU-controlled cars explode and then doing it isn't useful unless the end of the track is in sight because they immediately respawn (sometimes in front of you). You can do a side wheelie, but where are the narrow openings for shortcuts that would make this move really useful? Falling off the track doesn't lead to a game over or a restart of the race or even the loss of two seconds and a teleport back because… falling off the track simply cannot happen since your car bumps into invisible walls or just floats in the air above a chasm. What these design decisions add up to is this: There is no feeling of mastery here and no thrill of pushing your luck.

So is this game a solid 10 or what? HAHA. No slipstream effect, no other game modes beyond the basics, no ghost data in time trial, no option to watch a race replay, no sexy people waving flags and handing me awards, no message from the makers telling me I'm a good boy or girl or robot for collecting all the keys on the tracks. There are loading times even for just getting to the main menu or redoing the same race (there were games on PS1 like Wip3out that avoided this). All courses are A to B only (unlike Cruis'n World on the N64). What else can I moan about? Oh yeah, for a game with such a goofy over-the-top style, there is a remarkable lack of air control. But if you only play it for half an hour, it feels like one of the KOOLEST GAMES EVER M8. So despite everything I said above, it's an excellent choice for kids having a party. No need to tell them that the odds for getting pushed down a cliff or destroyed by a meteor or eaten by a giant ape are zero ;) Let them sweat in terror I say. I rate this a 3/10 for serious gamers such as myself since it has so much rubberbanding and so much stuff you just clip through it almost ceases to be a game! With a few simple tweaks it could have easily been a solid 7. Oh well.
R: 12 / I: 4

Man fuck Amazon for blue protocol

This game learned nothing off ff16 or isekai anime. Overly flashy combat effects, endless screaming, unnecessarily high pitched voice acting, anime faces that don’t look like faces all stacked on top of the most generic fucking world building design that I would expect from any generic isekai slop. God I can’t fucking illustrate how much I loved the worlds of made in abyss, Tamriel and avatar for how much care went into making those places feel organic.
R: 7 / I: 0

Spec Ops: The Line

>Still the only game in this generation that had american soldiers as the main baddies you kill.
R: 2 / I: 0
i was a few hours into the game, but it got kinda boring, and i sucked at sneaking by BTS, i feel kinda bad about not beating it since my brother told me it is the kind of game that i like, and just now i discovered i could sneak past BTS…
im at this part
https://youtu.be/CjKOfjcVNbg
R: 4 / I: 0

I can’t get over anthem. I CANT GET OVER IT

I don’t think there’s any case in gaming history where a game this large and this ambitious managed to not just have a shit launch but end up completely abondoned even with having core elements of its gameplay finished. I know the development cycle for this was fucked up, I know EA and BioWare could give a rats ass for this title but knowing they just flat out gave up, not just move on to another IP like it but give up on everything they wanted with it and never bring any of the concepts suggested by what could’ve been one of the most unique third person shooters to date, it hurts. I’ve been waiting for another game since elden ring that could make me feel the same way about open worlds as anthem during its trailers could. God damb what could’ve happened with this…
R: 2 / I: 0

Free market in vidya

I love it when video games have a free market of some kind. It’s really enjoyable to exploit the economy in some way and to watch it crash and burn after a few years.

Recently I tried to revisit some games I used to play, the game had a player based market system. In few years the entire economy was ruined and huge inflation happened where items grew in prices and newer players lost the ability to even participate since everything became overpriced and the stunted player base was not growing thus creating a rift between older player who have been playing for a long time and new player who either came back or just started and thus have nothing to offer the older players and thus cannot really participate in the economy in any meaningful way.

Do you enjoy having a free market in games?
R: 92 / I: 13

Escape from Catalunya

This is a thread about a third-person shooter game featuring Alunya.

It is a free-and-open-source game made using Godot and Blender. Contributions are welcome.
R: 4 / I: 2

A pretty simple solution to first person hitscan

For those not familiar with the term, hitscan refers to a design choice game developers of first person shooters use to make sure the projectile ends up hitting the target and not the environment around them. What’s important about this is that rather than having the bullet eject out of the ingame muzzle the bullet itself auto hits a target based on a position vector from the center of the players monitor/screen to the target. Thus bullets may occasionally pass through objects clearly obstructing the position of the firearm being used by the player but still hit the opponent because of this, an easy example is with a box in front of an opponent while the player is angled just enough so that the position vector still points towards their target even if the gun itself visibly is colliding with the object in front of them.

Here’s an easy fix, just do what modern warfare 2022 did by adding leaning and mounting guns on fixed edges. Similar to third person leaning in the first gears of war titles, having the gun simply go into ads and pivot as the player stops and aims near a wall can allow developers a way to keep projectiles eject out of the muzzle of the gun without relying on hitscan to make sure those rounds end up where they should be. It’s also semi realistic and adds new styles of gameplay by offering the player multiple positions they can fire in to keep themselves protected without having to rely on leaning seen in games like r6 where the mechanic at a high level can be abused
R: 269 / I: 109

/games/ meme thread

!
R: 12 / I: 3
Thank fuck Nintendo never made an edgy "realistic" copy-cat of Ocarina/Twilight Princess Zelda again. That Wii U demo they showed decades ago looked like ass.
R: 8 / I: 2

So what happens to all those metro cops and soldiers?

Since 3 isn’t out and after finishing episode 1 I’ve been thinking about where combine troops are after the transmission got cut. After all, with no advisor or threat of annihalation by the rest of the combine some of the combines human members like the metro cops have the opportunity to flee for the first time in 2 decades. My best guess offers three cases

Former metrocops joined the resistance for two reasons: to fight back against xens wildlife and the remaining combines alien forces, or to rebuild society. Overwatch soldiers stopped finding a reason to fighting and simply came to either wander the planet, without memory of the world before the 7 hour war. They simply roam without purpose and may have been abducted by either the remaining forces of the combine to resume their war, or taken captive by the resistance to be studied and potentially regain their memories and humanity. Case three, the combine now operate similarly to the aliens and still continue fighting against the resistance. Here they would be at their most vulnerable without clear coordination from advisors or any other leaders and may be overwhelmed by earths remaining human population, seeing their conclusion as the last remaining threat the combine offered before humanity comes to restore itself and the planet.
R: 0 / I: 0

Margaret Thatcher's Techbase

>A mini documentary about the little Doom WAD that could - and did!

I had no idea this was a thing. Someone should make a sequel, Ronald Reagan's Techbase or something idk
R: 49 / I: 16

/leftytesg/ - Elder Scrolls General

Always wanted to make this thread, but could never find time for it until now. Discuss lore, art, modding, headcanons, C0DA and other stuff related to the games.
R: 14 / I: 0
is it ok to skip the first games before playing the following games (?):
-Resident evil 4;
-Metal gear solid 5;
-Diablo 4;

I want to play these games, but I'm afraid that not playing the games that came before them is going to hurt the experience and make me a poser + cringe
additionally, is playing the remake of resident evil games first instead of the originals morally wrong? Thanks in advance ❤
R: 42 / I: 21

Indie games recommendation

please post your favorite indie games and tell us something about them,
any description will do, all are welcome

presenting: The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1272160/The_Life_and_Suffering_of_Sir_Brante/


The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante is a narrative-driven RPG that comes to life on the pages of the protagonist's journal. Set in a ruthless world where any form of dissent is mercilessly crushed, the story follows a man who has dared to challenge the existing order. Set out on a lifelong journey and become an individual able to carve out their own destiny… But remember that freedom never comes cheap.

Life in the Great Arknian Empire is harsh and its hardest Lot is yours by the circumstance of birth. You are a commoner, holding no rights and no title. To seize your fate and become the rightful heir to the legacy of the Brante family you will have to come to grips with ossified tradition and prejudice. Embarking on a life-long journey from one's birth until true death, you will have to endure great upheavals, face adversity, and make many difficult choices. Every decision will affect not only the protagonist, his family, and loved ones, but may even topple the foundation of the Empire itself.
Key features

At the turn of time
Every imperial citizen's life is predetermined by their estate. The deities known as the Twin Gods have bestowed this truth to the world, dividing mortals into Lots. The nobles lead and rule over others, while the clergy guides people on the one true path, and the lowborn suffer, toiling away for the glory of the Empire. You may accept your fate without question, but it is also in your power to change the cosmic order that governs all.




Your choice is not an illusion
Divided into chapters, the game keeps track of the player's deeds, the skills they acquired, as well as other overlapping circumstances that shape a unique plotline for each playthrough. Every decision has its consequences and you will be held accountable throughout the entire journey. To protect your family and loved ones, to impose the rule of the Emperor and make a fortune, or to try and change the world as you see fit… Make your choice, but beware of the follies of pride and ambition.




Find your own path
The first complete walkthrough can take you upwards of 15 hours! The unpredictable conclusion to the game's story hinges solely on your actions: the fates of your character and members of his family, their friends and rivals, as well as the outcome of the monumental events that shall determine the future of the Empire – you can decide it all!
R: 15 / I: 9

I'm modding new Vegas now

Been fidling with the geck and decided modding new Vegas's overworld to feel less empty and it's components to be ever slightly more balanced. currently starting small with revamping some locations in good springs, gonna learn how to create new cells later.

Just like with the skyrim thread all updates will be posted here
R: 73 / I: 11

when will the game industry crash?

i am hoping for an industry crash, a reset of this whole mess, gaming as it is now its bad, you have to look outside the whole mainstream media and sites for good releases of indie games, triple A games are mostly generic, boring copy pasted versions of each other or remakes that capitalize on nostalgia, and lets not forget, multiplayer games, its good to have some uncompromised fun from time to time, but where are the mainstream single player, rich in story and world games? im not asking for the 50th open barren world, im asking for something creative, captivating, for me gaming is not a passtime its something that can teach us, like a book or a movie
R: 28 / I: 11

Final Fantasy XVI

The graphics and combat look fucking incredible in my opinion. What do you all think?
R: 3 / I: 1
Cleveland irl vs hillcrest in the tlou2 🥴
R: 6 / I: 1

Starbound source code leak

It has been a long time since Chucklefish pretty much abandoned further development of it, but as it turned out the source code leaked month ago from Steam's Git and was cloned to several repos since. Here it is:
https://git.leftypol.org/hexenkatze/Starbound
Clone, fork and compile it at your leisure.
R: 2 / I: 2

Todd was right. Simpler games are better

I used to hate the idea of major game studios simplifying their IPS to appeal to new players but coming back to those games and older titles. He’ll even older RPGs makes me understand why these decisions were made. I feel it’s because on the developer end, game designers can do a lot more with less systems ingame because having less systems and mechanics to constantly account for is far easier to manage than a game with many.

Take wow for example. If you tried explaining how the game works to someone that’s never played it, it take you hours or even days before they fully understood the base aspects of the game; coincidentally if you told someone that played it in the mid 2000s and left they still wouldn’t understand what’s going on ingame after several hours. Simpler games are easier to understand, they’re approachable to a wider audience. They don’t have to be easy by any means, just meaningfully complex in the sense that their mechanics are understood with a lot of depth for anybody that’s played the game for a reasonable amount of time - typically it’s 10 hours - before going to do other stuff in life they want to do. I guess that’s why I liked oblivion, far cry 2, half life, rain world, tlou2, diablo 1 and 2, fallout 3 and many more simple games so much. They were unique, short, understandable and I didn’t have to do much to see why they were fun compared to heavier titles like S.T.A.L.K.E.R, wow, d3, Poe, warframe, apex. I can understand why some would disagree but those are my reasons for why I think Bethesda had the right idea to simplify their RPGs
R: 131 / I: 29
It's 2022 and TF2 still slaps.
R: 18 / I: 1

Battlebit

>game made by 3 people
>has features at launch that battlefield added months after release
What isn't there to love?
R: 10 / I: 0
I recently replayed the trilogy and tried out Andromeda for the first time. I don't want to talk about the ending of 3 because it's been discussed to death, but more about the direction of the series and some of the underlying themes.

In Mass Effect 1, the central idea is about humanity's place in the galaxy: will they work together with the council species or advance their own interests at the expense of everyone else? The framing itself is (although not that unusual for fantasy/scifi) worth commenting on because every species is governed by an ethnostate, and representation on the council is through a representative from each ethnostate deemed worthy of joining its ranks. The games never reject the framing either, only examining some of its consequences like the sterilization of the krogan. Humanity's government is expansionist, militaristic, and dominated by corporate interests, with entire planets handed to corporations for colonial settlement. Other species have corporate worlds as well, the asari in Mass Effect 2 are even shown to have a world with legalized slavery. Mass Effect 2 drops Mass Effect 1's theme and goes for a "grittier", action movie/heist story. Andromeda tries to address them but they lose all salience when the conflicts are an entire galaxy away and 600 years in the past. 1, 2, 3, and Andromeda all bring up AI and organic/synthetic conflict but they take it in 20 different directions and use it as a convenient plot device more than something to explore.

The art and music for each game is great, and the combat and level design gets progressively better with the series, but it really feels like they lost the sense of exploration the first game had. Not as in exploring with the Mako, which sucked, but reading planet descriptions for interesting tidbits and getting the sense that the galaxy is much bigger and more mysterious than the player will ever realize. With each installment the galaxy feels progressively smaller as the overall stories get more focused, but the pacing isn't any better for it. Looking back, the Reaper invasion seems like the wrong direction for the series, and I sincerely hope they aren't setting up for another synthetic vs organic storyline but that seems like all they can write about anymore. I expect they'll lean even more into action movie explosions-and-narrow-escapes stuff with 4 as well.

Hot take: half the squadmates in ME2 didn't even belong in the story.
R: 1 / I: 1

Let's come up with the ideal and worst possible game out of different genre features

Along the lines of the following joke: "in Heaven the cooks are French, the policemen are English, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and the bankers are Swiss - whereas in Hell the cooks are English, the policemen are German, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss and the bankers are Italian."

I'll start, we can do it one genre at a time

Heaven: JRPG music
Hell: JRPG combat system
R: 129 / I: 26

Late Capitalism Simulator

Lately I’ve seen a huge influx of good games that try to update the outdated capitalist realist Cyberpunk genre to the current political and economic landscape. Stuff like Disco Elysium is getting more and more recognition they rightfully deserve for depicting the hopeless and bleak death of modern revolution. However they’re still have some semblance of hope like with Ghostrunner having the corporation being destroyed by a revolution in contrast to the sad oppression of the system.

Another great but obscure example is whatever the fuck Cruelty Squad is. It’s fully embraced the boring drug fueled dystopia aesthetic while delivering basically Deus Ex but without the stealth. Compared to the faux shell of a Cyberpunk game 2077 was (full of cyber but nothing about the societal implications of such technologies other than some edgy infantile “message” about “soul”), this game have everything and everyone be miserable using the cyber-enhancements. Space colonization and AI being pipe dreams. Corporations are not knowingly malicious but only apart of the rot of capitalism.
R: 25 / I: 6

whats the best ending for disco elysium?

i think lefty harry with cuno, if you see that idle animations with cuno they seem to be bonding, also cuno deserves a second shot at life, what do you think friends?
R: 4 / I: 0
Did any of y'all buy any games during this steam summer sale? I wanna get something, but I have no idea what I want, and the sale is about to end. I think I want to buy something indie, since I usually pirate AAA games.
R: 40 / I: 7

Why YOU should pirate Paradox's game and products

As a latin american, its always good when these companies care about localization,regional prices etc, back in 2022 if im not wrong the Latin american representative was fired, the reason? latin america is not "profitable" enough so they will focus on NA and EU, mind you these are the same people that say they value equality, if they arent getting money you aint worth a rat's ass to them.
Second, Matthew Dawkins a Freelance Writer and Developer for Vampire: The Masquerade, is racist prick, who thinks and writes all native people as "Savages" ( he is writing about the Abya Yala ) ill add the prints

TLDR: dont give money to fascist pricks who only care for money and parade you like a prize
R: 22 / I: 1

Go/Baduk/Weiqu

Holy shit holy shit did you know comrade Xi Jinping is childhood friends w/ Nie Weiping and plays Go

Holy shit the great helmsman plays Go wow

Also a Go game general
R: 1 / I: 0
your favorite niche IP finally gets a new title….but its a musou game
R: 5 / I: 3
Ngl, I'm kinda excited for this
R: 5 / I: 1

I dont have high hopes for silent hill 2 remake

i dont have my hopes up for this remake
Even tho the story of the game is already stablished, Bloober seems to not understand what psychological horror means, take for example the blair witch game, in the good ending you kill yourself, to bloober team people with trauma are so dangerous, they're better off dead, the solution to mental health issues to them is bullet to the frontal lobe, if this game is a "re-interpretation" of Silent hill 2, we can expect the most shallow portrail of mental health issues, that game has good portrayal of menetal health issues, and dont even get me started on the medium game and their portrayal of a survivor of sexual assault and how they handle that narrative.
and before people say "oh what about the in water ending"
Difference is that In Water is never stated to be the definitive solution to the Jame's situation.

In The Medium, you only have one option and the game tries to hammer it in your face that its the only """""logical""""" way out. Even the achievement for beating that game acts like its a definitive solution to the topic, which is gross and irresponsible.

Considering Bloober Team already doesnt understand, or willfully changed the main character's behavior just from the trailers alone, do you REALLY think theyll handle the other characters and endings well?
R: 8 / I: 1

Little Big Planet thread

Does anyone remember this gem?
R: 3 / I: 0  
Hi, My name is Zachary Zacharias, and I am the zookeeper at the zoo here in Goron City, and I'm here today participating in the fundraiser. Our zoo is greatly in need of some additional resources to help house and feed the animals, and continue to provide a wonderful opportunity for the children in the city of Goron. To help me here today, I've brought one of our animals with me. This is Tommy Turtle, from the zoo. Tommy is one of the outstanding attractions that many children come to see here. Obviously, they feed Tommy, you can see how large he is. He is far beyond the size of an ordinary turtle. In spite of the fact that he seems well fed, most of our animals are not, and we do need addition help buying food and helping to shelter the animals. So I'd ask you, please, if you're here in Goron City, just stop by the zoo, say hello to Tommy and some of our other fine animals, and we'd appreciate very much a donation to help us keep the zoo going. Thank you!
R: 1 / I: 0
For anyone who's played it…How many parents can you murder right in front of their children? I really need to know, realism is a big thing for me in games like these…
R: 15 / I: 1

Diablo 4 was a step forward for blizzard

The game in some ways does feel like d2 or even like d1 in some moments. What matters for diablo, well really for blizzard in general, is a shift away from power creep and convoluted rpg progression.

Bethesda did this with oblivion and Skyrim and now blizzard is doing this with dragonflies reduced level cap and diablo 4s progression and combat mechanics. Things like 100+ level caps, damage in the millions being seen casually in endgame content for either games listed, enemy spam, and more are visibly gaining attention from the studio as legitimate problems to these games and I'm hopeful for where they go. Personally I hope they fix the awful crafting and profession system of wow to make gold a primary resource for crafting materials and just scrap professions all together since even hardcore players barely understand their purpose
R: 90 / I: 40

Visual Novels

Im making a thread about VNs because there isnt one on the catalogue and i wanna talk about my experience. I just finished danganronpa 2, which im not certain counts as a VN or if it's a point and click murder mystery social deduction game, and i think im pretty confident to say that it presents a pretty interesting moral dilemma. On one hand, the hope faction is pretty clearly a technocratic organization who obsesses over "Ultimates", or people who possess immense talent in a particular field or study, for example the world's best scientist, or the world's best doctor. It is revealed in the story of goodbye despair that before despair took over, hope's peak academy created a method of artificially forcing someone to become extremely talented, which dialectically had the potential to equalize mankind and develop the talents of anyone, which would make the idea of meritocracy, or ruling over others due to better talents or knowledge, completely obsolete. Despair on the other hand spawned as a result of the mass movement of reserve students, malcontents who became disaffected with the idea that people with talent mattered more than the rest, since hope's peak academy was formed to research peoples' talents and how to cultivate them.
I think it would be pretty easy to side with the latter out of frustration, especially if you're talentless like i am, but i think the idea that talent could be forcibly cultivated out of someone who never realized it before would be the "productive forces" argument. Not to mention that junko destroyed civilization, which is dialectically bad.
Your turn to die is a great game too, very similar to danganronpa on a surface level, i finished it a while ago and im glad i played it. Free btw. Anyone got visual novel recommendations? I need a weeb fix.
R: 17 / I: 3

Rdr2 and tlou2 are technical marvels

I can’t get over these games years after release they’re just really that well put together. Nearly every single action of these games is animated and with a noticeable amount of detail.

These animations can include limb specific hit reactions when an npc gets burnt in a specific section of their body, transitions from gameplay to cutscenes being seem less, weapon upgrades, looting animations, or simply just having NPCs and the player have their foot properly match up to the terrain they’re standing on the list of small details that build up to provide a super immersive experience for the player just goes on and on. It’s so so easy to pass by these qualities when you’re used to playing games made with this much love. Oh man I really truly do hope the technology that goes into engines like euphoria physics, or proprietary or even just the things both studios have made with havoc directly become more available for smaller studios. These games show a better direction for games overall and what they can be
R: 22 / I: 1

This is E3 2023

This is E3. You know it. You love it. Come and get your slop, gamers.
R: 7 / I: 2

Yakuza / Like A Dragon

What do you think of the Yakuza / Like A Dragon series? I love it!
Thread for everything Ryu Ga Gotoku
R: 5 / I: 2
/games/ does anyone want to start an online tabletop RPG group with other anons? what games would you want to play? What games would you want to run?
R: 4 / I: 0

Space Station 13

Is it possible for this type of game to have a good playerbase? The concept is amazing but it has possibly the worst online community I’ve seen in a game. I just want a comfy co-op space outpost autism simulator without dealing with uncreative griefers or admin abuse.

Goonstation was the closest thing to this back I the glory days
R: 8 / I: 0

AI implications for gamedev

AI will be good for games, actually.

It will allow games like Morrowind to have fully voiced characters without needing to have either the hours put into voicing or the many audio files. Voice work will no longer consist of doing hours and hours of reading lines. It will instead consist of creating a distinct voice characterization with the most important lines and for the AI to read the rest (including procedurally generated ones). That is good news for voice actors because it will make it easier to voice characters, especially the more demanding ones. The actor will only need to read a small percentage of lines where the character screams and shouts for example, and the AI voice model will be able to use that for a wide variety of lines in the game. Since voiced characters has become standard (and creates bottlenecks with games like Skyrim), meaning that with similar amounts of effort from actors, there can be much more content in the game. If you combine that with chatbot-like systems to flesh out the dialogue, it means the writers can create more content with the same effort. It will allow much bigger and richer games with a much more efficient use of people's labor.

The same will also apply to all other assets once dynamic generation is good enough. There will be better dynamic models and textures, lighting systems, etc.
R: 22 / I: 4
Once you find out that the same people own both the grading houses, and the auction houses, it all just clicks into place.
R: 0 / I: 0
What are the geopolitical implications of elite gamers from China, France, and America competing for the fastest Only Up! speedrun?
https://www.speedrun.com/only_up?h=Any-No_Major_Glitches
R: 5 / I: 0
The FNAF trailer just dropped. Need it or keep it?
R: 3 / I: 0

I brought cyberpunk phantom liberty, but i have one concern

The story will make V a federal agent of a corrupt government and that NUSA will try to annex night city, i think it will be a battle between who's worse the corporations or the NUSA
R: 6 / I: 2
I just found out that H. G. Wells was the original manchild
I was looking for his "russia in the shadows" book on libgen when I found this book he wrote about a tabletop strategy game he was inventing
there it goes, the only science fiction author I didn't consider cringe
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3691/3691-h/3691-h.htm
R: 2 / I: 2

Gaming daddies

Post some gaming daddies
R: 10 / I: 2

Daggerfall, Skyrim, and new Vegas: a problem with scale

Fallout 3 is my favourite Bethesda title to have ever been released and even after beating nearly every dlc I still feel like I haven't truly finished the game with all of it's quests and discovered locations. One thing that hit different about 3 that I didn't feel while playing daggerfall, Skyrim and new Vegas was a proper feeling of scale. All three of those games have larger worlds but they feel emptier to me because their structures are too small or not densely packed together.

Most towns and locations in new Vegas and Skyrim rarely go on past a single room for a building about the height of the player and everything is too far apart in daggerfall for me to appreciate anything in the game world without spamming fast travel, I think Bethesda should stick with their world design choices they made in 3 and apply them to starfields worlds. It would make travelling not just between planets but in them alot more enjoyable - at least for me, if it means there's something to explore through even if it's not entirely interesting.
R: 6 / I: 2
>ass creed puts marx in one of their games
>chinlets get to have it both ways
>they get to say "our society is literally marxist they put him in the mainstream bibeo gam!!! i'm oppressed!!!"
>they also get to upload videos of themselves killing marx where every comment is the same upvoted soyfaced reddit joke of "you sir have saved ten gorrillions"
R: 9 / I: 2
Babe wake up, it's time for your new anti-communist survival rpg rts train game.
R: 9 / I: 6

The Screen

All video games must have the same UI now. There's a lot of western devs that think game design isn't about creating unique experiences, but about reaching the singularity of game design, the one true correct way to make a game. You see this every time a game doesn't follow the formula and they get mad.
R: 45 / I: 8

bad games thread

Inspired by Lord of the Rings: Gollum.
somebody get the franchise out of Amazon's hands
R: 18 / I: 1

Star wars: outlaws

what's everyone think???
R: 17 / I: 0

Avowed

New trailer dropped. Cringe chosen one narration, but gameplay looks really fun. The vibe I get from it is trying to be to Skyrim what New Vegas is to Fallout 3 (i.e. hopefully making it good).
Also its rather striking how pretty and intriguing the world looks, despite being generic fantasy, in sharp contrast with Bethesdas Starfield, which is sci-fi filled with the most boring alien planet designs imaginable.
R: 15 / I: 1

witcher 3: 10 year anniversary of gameplay debut

debut gameplay trailer of witcher 3 turns 10 this day depending on your time zone. one of the most famous and influential rpgs of all time, now time to talk about your views on it in this thread, whether positive or negative
R: 5 / I: 0
I really don't care about 30 fps. And if the game pushes software, hardware or gameplay boundaries, I specially don't care.
R: 102 / I: 7
The gameplay just looks like morrowind if it was third person and didn’t have absolutely abysmal combat
R: 30 / I: 6

Xeno- thread

I want you to look past the big titty anime women and gags and tell me this isn't the most dialectical game of all time

No xenoblade 3 spoilers I haven't finished it yet
R: 7 / I: 0

ExeKiller

Post-Apocalyptic retro-futuristic cyberpunk/western hybrid game about being a bounty hunter. Basically the Mandalorian but cyberpunk.

Anyone else looking forward to this? Is this the next Cyberpunk 2077 but with (hopefully) a better release?
R: 5 / I: 3

DayZ

Anybody here play DayZ?

PC or console?

Could make a bunker base
R: 60 / I: 6

Sims is a nightmare

Wake up, get ready, go to work, come back, level up some skill for a bit, eat some shitty food and shower, go to sleep, repeat until you receive paycheck to spend on AESTHETICS, do it all over again.

Why did I find this fun when I was younger? What's the POINT? Earn virtual money to CONSUME virtual decorations? For what purpose? Nice """escapism""" Will Wright
R: 25 / I: 13

Virtual Divegrass General

A general permanent thread for the ICUP and /pol/eague meme tournaments.
Previous thread: >>10211
Note that during a cup, a thread will be made on /leftypol/, then merged into here after the end.

>ICUP: Infinity Cup, a competition between a wide range of small imageboards.

info - https://anon.cafe/icup/
vids - https://archive.org/details/@icuparchive
>/pol/eague: A 4chan Cup invitational league for /pol/ generals.
info - https://implyingrigged.info/wiki//pol/eague
vids - https://implying.fun

Aesthetics files: https://git.leftypol.org/comrade/divegrass_aesthetics/
R: 2 / I: 1
Today is the 17th anniversary of the Falador Massacre in runescape

https://runescape.wiki/w/Falador_Massacre
R: 29 / I: 7

in search of lost time

>drop $100 on diablo 4
>become bored after an hour two
>skip all the story
>feel no pleasure from the gameplay
>feel annoyed the dialogue is preventing me from absorbing podcasts
>feel annoyed that i can't follow the story because they didn't make it engaging enough for me to bother.

maybe ff16 will be a better experience. afterall, i enjoyed playing ff7.
R: 17 / I: 0

Elysian Eclipse

It seems that someone is finally up to making something akin to Spore, 15 years since the game's release. Not only the devs are making considerable progress over time, but it also seems that its stages would have more gameplay to them rather than be just window dressing to the editors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU-m1DPvjWg
Thoughts?
R: 5 / I: 2

Mega Man

What are your favorite Mega Man games? Me, I like MM Zero series the best. The first game is pretty rough, but the fundamentals are already in place. It has some of the most fun 2D combat I ever experienced. 2-4 are just pure greatness.
Classic Mega Man I'm not attached to as much, but I'd say the first 6 are all very consistent. 5 & 6 is when it started getting a bit old maybe, but they are still good games.
Mega Man X though, that's where it gets wonky for me. I only REALLY like 1 and 4. 2 and 3 are fine, just not very exciting. Everything past 4 feels pretty bad.
Never played much Battle Network, just not my thing.
Legends, that's another great short series. First one is better in my opinion, especially the way the overworld is structured. 2 is still very cool, fuck Capcom for letting this series die.
R: 23 / I: 3
>Stop making games for your handheld
>Most of its online games are dead aside from Pokemon
>Discontinue it
>Kill the eshop so you can't buy games
>Only effective way to use it at this point is to hack it and pirate games
<A few months later spend time and resources to put out a "stability update" that prevents people from putting CFW on it if they don't already have it, making it a virtual brick unless you pay insane prices for physical copies from some guy on ebay that wants you to pay $60+ for nearly decade old pokemon games

What's even the point? I get porky wants to maximize the hecking profits but they're not making a single cent off the 3DS anymore. I doubt there's a significant amount of people who own a 3DS but don't want to get a Switch.
R: 79 / I: 33

Kart Racing General

Kart racing general

You may now play as Alunya in SuperTuxKart.gentooGentoo
R: 13 / I: 3
based wholesome kulak bisexual harem isekai
R: 98 / I: 27
What is your personal best game of all time?

To me it's Portal. I think it's a flawless game:
>beautifully elegant execution of innovative gameplay mechanics
>beautifully elegant level-design
>beautifully elegant storytelling and dialogue
>beautifully elegant audio and soundtrack
>haunting liminal spaces and magic I can't describe

if a 10/10 game is possible, I believe it's Portal. I really wish I could unplay it, so I could play it again for the first time. I guess I'll have to wait until I'm an elderly man with dementia :C
R: 6 / I: 2
A new Marathon game by Bungie has been announced… but it's a PVP extraction shooter. Who even wants this shit? With Bungie's experience they surely could have made a Doom 2016 or Wolfenstein New Order style re-imagining and pulled it off, but instead it's a cashgrab. Honestly what was I expecting considering all they've been making for the last decade is a franchise so shit it makes me want to blow my brains out playing it. It's a shame because the original Marathon games were great. Porky is going to be porky.
R: 24 / I: 3

Games set in communist/socialist nations

Check this out. An erotic visual novel set in a Soviet pioneer camp. WTF.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/331470/Everlasting_Summer/
R: 9 / I: 0

Atari2600 games

A place to talk about Atari2600 games
R: 42 / I: 6
The game has now come out, what are your thoughts on this comrades
R: 3 / I: 1

Tetris Movie

So how bad are they going to butcher this?
R: 73 / I: 18
Are Undertale and Deltarune leftist games?
R: 10 / I: 2

Is fallout 3s engine actually bad?

For bethesdas first real shooter this actually turned out to be a pretty good game on a such a “dated” engine. Yet things like real time shadowing for objects, actors and items is fully possible, the team did have cinematic camera animations(admittedly for first person but there’s some rare 3rd person ones aswell). They even got a pseudo train by attaching a train to an NPCs head which just makes me ask, how much of the constraints behind this engine really a victim of its age and how much of this was to avoid save bloat and wasting time before release?
R: 8 / I: 0
the game cube world apparently is getting an update on it called cube world omega which has been shown recently in a blogpost from the game's creator

so if anyone is interested in talking about the game then this thread is here
R: 12 / I: 0
So what's our opinion on myhouse.wad?
R: 3 / I: 1

Texture splatting and procedural modeling

I’ve been walking out more often and coming back to some of my pc games and found that a lot of them look fake, granted a lot of my favourites are games like oblivion, fc2 and fallout 3 which are old but some are also new games. I took some images of nature and my city and came to the conclusion that video game graphics still look fake because they’re fake in nature

In real life, materials are never consistent. Similar in qualities yes but multifarious when observed on a larger scale. Grass is constantly deviating in colours, types and scale, cracks and bumps on alloys always come in different patterns and frequencies of their appearance. Same goes for objects, you can work around this but it’s really taxing on computers to implement a sort of procedural/splatting technique for modeling 3d objects and texturing everything to make games feel a lot more believable than solely rely on rearranging meshes and cover ground textures with instances grass
R: 8 / I: 0

Harvest moon... home...

the remake is comming soon
R: 13 / I: 3
post in this thread if you ever lost girthy saves

i just lost a TEN HOUR long save from the game Dredge because of some bullshit bug it has. and that's a massive amt of hours considering i barely have any entertainment time :C. the game's spectacular though, i highly recommend it, but buy it from like a month from now when they fix this
R: 17 / I: 3
Favorite racing game:
Favorite action game:
Favorite adventure game:
Favorite shooter:
Favorite RPG:
Favorite puzzle game:
Favorite strategy game:
Favorite (other genre here) game:

Ignore the genres you don't like, and don't think too much, just answer with whatever game in the genre that you'd want to be playing
R: 0 / I: 0

Anthems aesthetics

I can’t believe knowing that after it was abondoned so many years ago that I’m still torn over it. I’ve never seen a game in my life that looks distinctly like anthem, the sense of scale that brings back memories of morrowind, the unique geometry of the terrain similar to earths or Minecraft’s new caves that makes you want to explore every inch of terrain out there, the fact that unlike most games that keep you grounded in anthem you become airborne as a core element of gameplay.

I NEED a game that has these kinds of mechanics and aesthetics so bad. Every time I come back to this game I get hit with a pang of sadness knowing what could’ve been, it’s like seeing rdr2 and tlou2 or kill zone 3. You always wonder where games could’ve been if that level of quality and uniqueness in game design became a standard for the industry
R: 77 / I: 16
quick, name a communist video game that is NOT disco elysium
R: 23 / I: 5

Horrible disappointments

ITT we complain about overrated games or games we were looking forward to but ended up not living to our expectations.

My number 1 spot would go to Witcher 3. I was a fan of books and games, played Witcher 2 on lowest setting at like 10fps because thats the best my old computer could handle. When Witcher 3 came out it swept the awards, everybody was praising it a the greatest RPG of all time, so when years later I finally got a new laptop I was so excited to play it. And then I was greeted with a generic ubisoft-tier open world gameplay, repetitive combat, lacking RPG mechanics, god-awful progression system, and frankly a bastardization of Gerald as a character for the same of making him into the Elder Scrolls protagonist. Even the quality of writing ended up squandered because every quest just boiled down to blindly following a quest marker.

Warhammer: Total War is a contender though. Again, was stuck playing Medieval 2 because computer couldnt run newer titles, picked the specs for the new one based on Warhammer 3 requirements, only to finally get to play it and realize how much that series regressed over the years. Even fucking visuals got in some ways worse.
R: 92 / I: 9
Is Dwarf Fortress the most Historical Materialist game of all time?

>Simulates thousands of years of history

>Simulates individual lives
>Simulates entire economies
>Simulates private property, families, cities, states
>does not privilege the player with any kind of protagonism. You are simply an entity in a larger civilization
>any entity can be wiped out at any given moment and replaced with a similar one.
>deep physics simluation that includes erosion, precipitation, and the formation of continents
>can instantaneously generate an entire encyclopedia of interconnected occurences spanning thousands of years
>simulates marriage, divorce, courtship, cheating, betrayal, coups, assassinations, persecutions, and purges
R: 6 / I: 1
>the timeline has been reset three (3) times so far
This is getting ridiculous. Ed Boon seriously needs to learn about story roadmapping and pre-planning. Don't turn every game into an Ultimate Showdown of The Ultimate Destiny where there's no further room for anything, save that for the last one.
R: 7 / I: 1

My inference for why Ellie couldn’t kill abby

She was tired of killing and seeker revenge again as a way to deal with her inability to resolve all the grief she’s endured throughout her life since she met Joel. Based off the story it’s known to the player that she didn’t hunt down abby a second time out of a want but to make peace with her own trauma she felt from the death of Joel, the murder of Nora, the mass casualties she’s caused in her hunt for Abby, the motivation to hunt for Abby once again did not come from her directly but out of a heated argument Dina and Tommy had with Ellie nearby. Thus the second attempt at revenge wasn’t truly off a want for vengeance, something she demonstrates by saving abby instead of killing her and almost contemplating leaving Jackson for a life of isolation before another flare of her trauma comes back to motivate her to try and fulfill her initial goal. Ellie doesn’t truly want abby dead, she wants some way to come to terms with the pain she’s experienced, something she wasn’t able to find when she was with her family and friends and something she’s now having to dealing with by the ending as she leaves her home one last time.
R: 31 / I: 4

BEST GAME OF 2012?

Best Game of 2012?

Def BO2
The black ops series in general is amazing
The action
The Characters
Also some really iconic weapons like the DSR 50 and the Peacekeeper
I recently finished Black Ops 1 and i loved the campaign but BO2 has better multiplayer by far

I love reznov
R: 0 / I: 0
We are not `hostile'. Hostility is unwarranted aggression! SNORT!

If you want to know about hostility, let us tell you about Culture Twelve!
R: 23 / I: 4

Point lookout shows hope for the post atomic world of fallout

Based on the lore most of the damage dealt from the mass bombings took place between cities and not the vast amounts of and occupying earth. Granted a lot of land isn’t good to farm on either due to deficiencies of nutrients like nitrates or being too far from convenient water sources, the list keeps going but it does show that people could sort of thrive in a post atomic world with minimal repercussions and that’s sweet lore wise because it sets up a lot of questions about the world outside of the USA.

What’s the NCR doing in Mexico that makes travel there worthwhile enough to establish new territory, how’s china doing with all the infrastructure it’s built today and will build from 2076 to the years after the bombs, is the only region that still couldn’t get past the war just the USA? Is the rest of the planet just fine from all the years and since then people have gotten a lot better. Interesting
R: 14 / I: 11

Political simulation

Anyone else into games centered on political simulation? A fav of mine is The New Campaign Trail, which is focused on the campaign - the mods included on the website are the bread and butter. Recs are 1864, 1972d, and 1996Powell.
Can be played here: https://www.newcampaigntrail.com/campaign-trail/index.html
I've been trying to get into The Political Process but my eyes glaze over trying to parse it.
R: 6 / I: 2
I beat Celeste for the second time
R: 5 / I: 1

Average Nintendo Switch Enjoyer

It's funny how the advertisement for "Tears of the Kingdom" featuring a sad man playing the game after his wife goes to bed and on the bus, syncs perfectly with Gary Jules version of "Mad World".
R: 10 / I: 0

How realistically does it portray violence

I understand that in real life modern wars are generally slow due to the time it takes to actually schedule, strategize, mobilize and actually give commands to troops before any actual time is spent fighting and also the time it takes to do all of that once each firefight ends but in arma it feels noticeably slow compared to the violence seen in wars like the Tigray thing and Ukraine. Are wars really that slow paced or does it really depend on the region?
R: 11 / I: 0
In Reggie’s autobiography, he talks about his time at Panda Express, and how he was excited to push the chain to compete against small family-run Chinese food restaurants. He left the company after they decided to pull back on expanding.
The book is a real eye-opener, because he just comes off as a vapid, asshole business guy who kept failing upwards until he lucked into working at Wii-era Nintendo and became famous on the internet because of e3 banter memes.
Anyway, the new Zelda has leaked onto the internet and it is incredibly easy to find and emulate.
R: 11 / I: 3

It’s pretty scary knowing there’s more runners and stalkers than bloaters

Due to the lore most of the infected should ideally be bloaters due to how long the games take place in after the outbreak but based off demographics of the infected it’s obvious there’s way more runners and at times clickers than the fully blown mutated shamblers and bloaters running about indicating most of the infected are fresh victims, not casualties that got bit when the cordyceps started spreading for the first time. And that also means that in the timespan the last of us games actually take place in the spread of the fungi has actually gotten worse not weakened with time
R: 3 / I: 8

Ambient lighting ruins games

Tlou2
Dark souls 2
And rainbow 6 look so much better in the trailer for one reason, the lighting. Same goes for unrecorded. Games use ambient lighting way to fucking much and rarely will you be in any space that’s genuinely dark in a natural sense since that hides shit the player needs to see for gameplay purposes but in the end games look generally way fucking worse no matter how advanced the graphics are. Which makes me question how can games use ambient lighting less to make games look significantly better…

sad
R: 72 / I: 10
>Create a video game
>it's an RPG where you're basically a Lenin-type figure
>you're trying to lead a revolution
>the main quest is class struggle
>all the side quests and distractions are idpol and culture war nonsense, where you're trying to get people off that path and back onto the main questline
>this is the message of the game, as conveyed through its structure

good idea or bad idea?
R: 6 / I: 2

ITT: we discuss actually obscure games / 'hidden gems'

What unknown games are you playing that you think are worth talking about? And I mean actually obscure not EYE Divine Cybermancy obscure.

I just finished through playing Kandria, which is a very small indie open world platformer. The gameplay is a lot like Celeste most of the time except much more difficult, and this is applied to a metroidvania like open world, except there isn't anything that unlocks new areas like that and you've got your entire arsenal at the beginnin of the game. The platforming is fun but as I said it is incredibly difficult in later areas, though in earlier areas they added a bunch of pointless underground office blocks to like make it an open world or something. Those areas are very tedious and pointless. It also has a combat system which sucks and I try to avoid it except when you can use it for platforming. The game is very open as to how you approach obstacles, there are often different ways of getting past a room or you can go a different way through the map. The most standout thing for me was the story, which I wasn't expecting to be sort of good even if the twist is predictable. It also has a good soundtrack. All in all its a heavily flawed and rough indie passion project that nevertheless managed to fulfill my need for open 2D platforming.
R: 3 / I: 3
kriselle is based and you cant change my mind
R: 11 / I: 1
why do we call them video games?
Theyre not video, theyre realtime graphics. Video is something thats playing prerecorded.
R: 9 / I: 3

Back 4 blood vampire edition

Seriously why was it so bad on release? Oh wait I figured out why it was both made on unreal instead of bethesdas creation engine and also only had 2 years of development which for a modern game is satirically low when you need typically 4 - 6 years of development time just to finish anything.
R: 5 / I: 2
Who is your favorite civ leader?
R: 9 / I: 4

weird tie-in vidya

I miss tie-in videogames
Sure, shallow porky merchandising

But man, there was always potential for fun
Has there ever been a rom com tie in videogame?
R: 2 / I: 0

Is real time loading actually hard to implement?

You know how some games separate interior from exterior world spaces so games run better hence why there’s random loading screens when you enter a building or some new zone?

Yeah why not just load in all that information based on the players position and not off some trigger for the purpose of keeping the player immersed in the game world? I don’t think it’s hard to implement as it would prevent instances of players being stuck on loading screens, sudden crashes or lag spikes being attributed to suddenly unloading and reloading shitloads of assets all at once in one area, issues with dynamic entities like ai or physics being reloaded upon entering a scene then list of shit wrong with the standard loading system goes on for me
R: 7 / I: 0
I misread the title, thought the game was a remaster or sequel of sim city 4. Realized what it was and frowned :|
R: 3 / I: 0

Just beat cod 4 on hardened

What should I expect from veteran difficulty from both of mw and mw2?
R: 2 / I: 0

Violence in hotline Miami, tlou2, and far cry 3

I was thinking about how these games approached violence and just came to the following conclusions on what these games had to say about it.

Violence is multifarious.
Violence is expensive.
The disposition of someone may not necessarily be directly tied to how violent they’re within a given period of time nor how much they’ve suffered.


>violence is multifarious

I think tlou2 and to a lesser extent hotline Miami 2 do a the best at expressing this idea. Throughout tlou2 you play as both Ellie and Abby and how each character kills is influenced by how much they view their targets. Generally these games take a realistic approach to how humans rationalize violence towards one another by using factionalism as a tool the protagonist’s use to justify their actions. You see it all the time, the WLF vs the fanatic seraphites(whom were not initially violent lore wise oddly enough without the WLFs influence), how the residents of Jackson justify the killing of WF soldiers under the guise that they’re harming their communities despite only one group, a group consisting mostly of fireflies actually causing real damage to Ellie and her friends. With the infected they’re always the prime targets no matter what, NPCs, the characters and sometimes even other infected recognize that they’re creatures with convulsive motion, easily and desperate to infect anything and anyone near them and likewise no one feels any remorse for killing them despite some also being aware of how much pain victims of the fungi go through and how you can observe them ingame showing sadness over their inability to control their actions. In hotline Miami factionalism again plays a role in the justification behind the mass deaths seen in game with the Russian mafias tenacity to maintain their control over the drug distribution in Florida up until jacket comes into play without knowledge of what he’s doing to the country he shows so much love for. These games through how violence is setup and how the reasons for it are explored show to the player that how people kill and why people killed shares a direct relationship to how much people are willing to distance themselves emotionally to their targets. It’s quite powerful for the tlou2 to show every npc including seraphites will beg for mercy for themselves or loved ones only when they became vulnerable to one another’s violence as a guaranteed outcome of every encounter
R: 8 / I: 2
anyone playing marvel snap?
i love this guy's design


shame it's money hungry as usual and no friends feature or i would add you guys
still in early beta, so idk

fucked up how like this and multiversus, they use it to fund now
R: 28 / I: 4

Oppan Emulation Style!

Retroarch for everything or standalone for some stuff?
How do you #retrogame?

I like beauty, customization and ease of use but also understand how much performance and smoothness matters

So which systems you shouldn't go for a retroarch core and download the standalones?

Also, please post your setups and how you decide the play old games
R: 4 / I: 2

Tech demo games

Apparently during the development of games like half life 2, gta 4, far cry 2, la noire, the last of us 1 and 2, halo, well this list can keep going for games that pushed the technological limits of the tools available for developers to use and gamers to experience the teams behind them had one universal goal. Connect the player to the game world as much as possible. The reason for this was simplistic, by having games be generally more immersive and responsive to the players actions said players could directly play test new features developers implemented and help the studios they worked at understand what to do with the technologies available and produce the games that are made today.

This is why the UI and environment art for so many old games is noticeably minimalistic and for the case of UIs it was almost nonexistent compared to the constant tags and indicators seen on todays screens. Or why the physics were much more detailed before clashes would game designers would have them removed due to interrupting the handling of a game. Or even why developers stopped prioritizing adding a lot of detail to games upon realization that most players would never actually play long enough to see them. Pretty interesting
R: 9 / I: 4

Active ragdolls and animated rigid bodies

Thanks to this lovely presentation from naughty dog I found their tech interesting and it explained a lot about how their present day releases function so well when it comes to realistic animation.

To summarize the most important sections of the video the developers at naughty dog animate rigid bodies by first giving characters like Joel, or Nathan real ragdolls that simulate human behaviour as closely as possible, and then have certain collisions of those ragdolls stay active while keyframed animations play. For animations that are used to transition between other animations ragdolls are only active in the instance that the animation itself has an event requiring one. What ends up happening are the characters of naughty dog titles having natural looking motion and playing these games communicate a sense of weight to the player because that weight is real in the game world than doing what most developers do by not giving the players avatar physics but random objects and vehicles. It’s beautiful how many emergent details come up because of this, Nathan and Sam will bounce in response to ruff terrain while driving, NPCs slump over but don’t twist in weird ways when shot at, while climbing certain objects Nathan will move said objects along with his own body, the list goes on and I wish more developers had the time to implement and appreciate and implement such details in their own games.
R: 18 / I: 3

Rightoids are suddenly getting mad at Red Dead Redemption 2

Naturally all of their critiques basically amount to "I can't be a confederate revanchist and hate crime former slaves and natives".
R: 2 / I: 0

WotC sends Pinkertons after "leaker"

Wizards of the Coast sent Pinkertons to a youtuber's house because he made a video about promotional materials for Magic: The Gathering, which he received early probably due to a clerical error (happens all the time). Wizards is currently trying to cover up and censor any discussion of this, including on subreddits about their products that they control.

This comes not very long after Wizards tried to update an existing license for their Dungeons and Dragons products, which would effectively make any home-brew content published by the community retroactively the property of Wizards. They publicly backed down and claimed the new license was only an internal proposal (it was leaked by an employee), but this was almost certainly fake damage control because the controversy was causing them terrible PR just before the release of the Dungeons and Dragons movie which the community was threatening to boycott.

the youtuber discussing it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD9HRueI6Js
R: 236 / I: 50

Chess

I'm making this thread here, because the other boards are practically dead. If a mod chooses to move it to /hobby/, that's cool, I just wanted some exposure on /leftypol/.

As you might now, chess played a large role in the Soviet Union. They outright dominated the game for decades and it was commonly played ever since the inception of the union.

I think chess does possess the potential to develop and train the strategic thinking skills of players, if they abstract from the game and attempt to apply it to the real world.

But it's also a fun game. Because of that I made a /leftypol/ club on chess.com, which is a great website with a nice UI and plenty of resources to learn and improve at chess. I've been using it for months now and got far better at chess and I even do the puzzles on it for fun every day. The way the website is designed makes learning chess and improving really, really easy. Making an account is free and would be quick. I know this sounded like an ad, lol.

So, I'm inviting you comrades to start learning chess or improve whatever skill level you are at and join the /leftypol/ chess club. We could play against each other. Perhaps even organize tournaments. I think it would be really cool if we could get something like this going and make it the community wide hobby. If only 3 people join that would be good enough honestly.

[b]Link[/b]
https://www.chess.com/club/leftypol
R: 2 / I: 1
which is the most likely to help a person successfully evade a police chase by car:
-if this person played 1000 hours of a need for speed game with police chases;
-if this same person played 1000 hours of gran turismo;

which is the most likely to help a person successfully survive in the wild:
-the person played 1000 hours of minecraft;
-the person played 1000 hours of skyrim;
R: 13 / I: 0

Do we all agree that they should ban these nazi rp servers from GMOD?

or not?
R: 25 / I: 7

Scrolls > mana

Mana systems are stupid and make magic in games feel common and uninteresting. Scroll systems as a requirement for spells make magic both scarce and feel both like a choice in games and rewarding to use
R: 5 / I: 0

Can the emergence of a gameplay meta be avoided? Should it?

Metas emerge as players learn more about the game's mechanics, both through datamining game files and trial and error within the game itself. Once good practices are found, guides are made and continually iterated upon as the game (and its playerbase) evolves. A common complaint is that players feel pigeonholed into certain playstyles, because the fastest, easiest, or most effective way to play becomes the expected way to play, and the developers in turn cater to the players who follow the meta. It doesn't matter if a player in an MMO can easily clear the vast majority of content without a meta build, other players expect them to follow the meta and not doing so is considered bad etiquette in group content. This mostly comes down to risk aversion on the part of the other group members, as people are more willing to group with someone they know put in the time to get their character geared up and using the "right" build.

Metas aren't restricted to character builds either; there are guides for leveling efficiently or gaming mechanics for the best possible rewards. In the former case you have old-school MMOs like Everquest or Final Fantasy XI where they're essentially solved games and it would be difficult to find anyone willing to just explore the world, since farming mobs in one spot for hours at a time with a group will always be the most efficient way to play.

Back to the question in the title, if you wanted to encourage more playstyles how would you go about it? Some games (or players acting on their own accord) do it by reframing the game, adding in rules like hardcore/ironman modes in WoW or Runescape. It keeps things fresh for a time, but even those have extensive guides now aimed at minimizing effort and risk and maximizing rewards.
R: 4 / I: 0

Every expansion world of Warcraft sees an engine update

Istill how the team managed to make the flying physics for dragons legitimately good in dragon flight but now I’m wondering why they didn’t fix the base movement. And by that I mean being able to keep the mouse hidden and move backwards without backpedaling, it wouldn’t be a huge change, I don’t think it would even require any new features. Just a tweak to make the base game play better…
R: 6 / I: 1

Cod devs left for ubisoft and made a game with them

This actually plays really well and the movement is fast paced enough to allow for cool plays without being so overly jumpy you get a slide spam fest like in mw19. What a pleasant game and I’m interested to see where the team goes with this….

Also it would be pretty funny if this ends up hampering activisions success with cod considering the circumstances for how this game came out
R: 126 / I: 44

Balancing skyrim with my own mods

I’m going through the effort to do something I never thought I’d do and it’s patching out all the broken and busted shit you’d find in a TES game. I mean specifically the meta

I am
>patching out all the health magicka and stamina offsets that make certain enemies unkillable without exploits and magic
>patching enemy stats so they scales with the players armoury and not their level as the player progresses through the game
>patching out projectile speeds and magic damage so that projectiles are easier to dodge and armour rating matters to the effects of how much damage magic will deal to you than getting one shotted by level one NPCs spamming ice bolts
>patching out the effects of all hidden damage multipliers ingame the player can’t use(I actually finished this)
>patching out nondedicated attacks so the player can dodge out of certain attacks
>patching out attack speeds for certain enemies like ogres whom barely have any recovery on their attacks
>and rebalancing the inventories, and appearance of enemy tiers so they aren’t just copycats with a slightly different name
>and patching out everything else like health regeneration, stacked effects, potion scarcity, etc

Wish me luck because I’m gonna be fucking exhausted after all these patches but satisfied knowing I’ll finally force this game to be more than a chaotic mess of an rpg but a playable boring rpg with a simple meta anyone new can easily work and have fun with :)
R: 15 / I: 1
Seriously the writers for the game could’ve given her way better circumstances for killing Joel. Like literally at the start of the game she has legitimate reasons to not shoot the guy considering he saved her life like several times which only partially erodes any inclination to kill along with the fact that upon meeting him she could’ve also just talked to him to understand wtf happened and decided to kill him based on Joel’s response or simply just leave which would make way more sense considering how violent both characters were in nature.

Like fuck I couldn’t be the only one to think how fucking idiot it is knowing the writers wanted players to sympathize with Abby and her reasons for killing Joel despite literally having their first experience with Abby be her having reasons not to kill joel
R: 15 / I: 5

A list of technologies and techniques that made games more immersive

>3rd person bodycams
>locomotion based animations
>procedural animations based off the above parameters
>active ragdolls physics for enemy’s upon being collision with objects having a lot of momentum
>diegetic user interfaces seen in games like far cry 2 and dead space
>dynamic and minimalistic 2d user interfaces for accessibility
>destruction physics for randomly placed objects and infrastructure
>enemies/allies as factionized NPCs players had the option to side with seen in classical rpgs to today
>interaction animations seen in games like rdr2 and again far cry 2
>water physics
>LOD’s for rendering at high distances
>volumetric clouds over skyboxes
>dynamic foliage(grass and plants that fold and burn, trees that break or bend in response to winds)
>weather systems

Keep adding to this list
R: 6 / I: 4

Minimalistic vs diegetic

I was playing fallout 3 with most of the ui disabled then I played wow in similar conditions and then went back to far cry 2 and came to the conclusion that having a minimalistic ui doesn’t necessarily mean that a game is minimalistic in nature. Why I feel like that’s wrong is because it can end up harming how fun(at least for casual gamers like me) games can be

Minimalistic UIs are preferred because of two reasons, they keep the players screen generally clear of distractions and show information that’s relevant but with diegetic UIs they take a step further by integrating elements of the UI directly into gameplay. I find the minimalistic approach is bad for games coming in the future because it doesn’t fix one problem, how complicated a games systems are. In far cry 2 there’s barely a UI because the game fundamentally isn’t complex in nature and that means the developers can use the games base mechanics to their fullest to create a memorable experience. A minimalistic UI wouldn’t work for a game like world of Warcraft(or just any mmo really) because there’s so many systems interacting with one another all at once with little responsiveness from the game world to tell the player what’s happening especially in moments where such responsiveness would be fervent. Because of this it’s easy to find yourself in constant need of several tabs onscreen at all times and as a result the gameplay of world of Warcraft just isn’t as deep gameplay wise as you’d find in games that came after it.

In my opinion it’s great that games like the last of us, rdr2 and the Callisto protocol have done more to ensure games become more responsive to the players actions. I hope as time passes a greater transition to diegetic UI and minimalistic game design will be found among major studios and also the possibilities of games without UIs can come with it for a much more immersive and in depth experience for gamers like me

That’s all thank you for reading
R: 9 / I: 2

Bethesda Game Studios

What are the issues that make their games end up so glaringly flawed? Is it Todd Howard sniffing his own farts too much, shitty workplace practices, general lack of competence among the staff and/or their parent Zenimax corporation's meddling? Or maybe it is something else?
R: 8 / I: 0
Huh would you look at that
R: 120 / I: 30

Atomic sisters

Isn't this lazy? Titties and ass with no face. Will the game have good gameplay and story to compensate?
R: 1 / I: 0
I am creating a gta san andreas with ideas of punk and oi music, I changed the grove street gang for skinheads s.h.r.p.s, the enemies, that is, the ballas, I changed for hammerskins/boneheads/ the pistols I changed for bats, mitts, by little I am adding gangs, I also plan to change the radio,I post some photos of my project
R: 4 / I: 0
What a piece of shit. I get there’s plenty of freaks like him all over the capital wasteland but fuck Vance anyways for being that organized about it
R: 4 / I: 0

Resident Evil

Do you like the series? Which one is your favorite? Did you enjoy RE4 Remake?
R: 17 / I: 2
you might think the reason Rockstar Games have been so slow to make GTA 6 is that they're still making money off of online DLC for GTA 5…. but the real reason they haven't released GTA 6 is because Amerikkkan society has become so insane that GTA's attempts at parodying it would be tame by comparison
R: 11 / I: 1
Thoughts on the jc141 crack scene? They attempt to bring pirated Windows games to Loonix in an easy way to use.

>The motivation behind the project is based on the communist and anti-capitalist ideology. We re-distribute games on the GNU/Linux operating system which is not directly controlled by a corporation such as Microsoft and provide blocking internet access from prying eyes in an environment where the user is viewed as a target for marketing schemes.

https://github.com/jc141x/portal
R: 1 / I: 0

Far cry 6’s guerrilla mode after 2 on infamous difficulty

This was an experience for me after playing 2. this entry by far the weirdest one being its considerably easier even on harder difficulties most notably guerilla mode due to how easily exploitable the game is, similar to what Bethesda and obsidian did with fallouts difficulty curve. In far cry 2 on infamous difficulty you kind of have to know how to get around without a map to guide you since enemies do just spawn in cars or isolated on roadways and not paying attention to where your going could easily get you killed immediately, this can’t be said for 6 beyond enemy spawn placements and even then
<I’m guessing due to the engine switch this was actually a preformance issue due to script lag on top of new graphics
The ai of far cry 6 was drastically nerfed thanks impart to the whole detection meter thing 3 introduced on top of enemies in general not having the same level of mobility, sense of self preservation and resourcefulness they have in 2. Another major thing is resource management in 2, I actually didn’t have a problem with being constantly low on ammo on infamous as I already got somewhat decent at the game after beating it on hardcore which made running out of ammo for poor sim frequent but not impossible to get over with good positioning. This just doesn’t matter at all in guerrilla mode because Ubisoft gave the player way too many guns and gadgets they can carry at any given time to the point where I felt like I was playing doom at times due to how little thought I could give towards stealth in favour of just rushing through outposts. What a difference in time and game design
R: 4 / I: 0
I’m kind of amazed knowing this was released this year. This feels like a 2000s game idk, maybe I was expecting too much of what gaming would look like in the future than accept that living in a vr fantasy or playing some super well animated and detailed physics based masterpiece of a pc game would be common in the 2020s
R: 2 / I: 0
Wow needs an activate button. Games since the mid 2000s have been implementing a designated hotkey to interact with NPCs, objects, and items and it’s a shame wow doesn’t despite all the accessibility features it’s given to its users paired with the addon support. Same goes for osrs. Also I find it weird how they still don’t have an option to keep the mouse locked with the camera to move around like again nearly every other game has since the mid 2010s
R: 3 / I: 0

War, Commericilzation & Video games

It is crazy how CoD and these other games are basically help train and reframe the US military's image


Are there people who play CoD games that are still anti-us military?
R: 3 / I: 0
The Chinese assault rifle from fallout 3 is literally just a rusty version of the ak74 wtf how is it Chinese????
R: 19 / I: 1

Losing my mind over first person physics

while modifying skyrims movement behaviour files I discovered something really awful about bethesda titles I thought was only an issue from morrowind to new Vegas. Bethesda doesn’t attach grounded momentum to movement, whenever you walk or sprint in a bethesda made game you will always without a shadow of a doubt always immediately move at full speed on frame one. This is also why the games feel noticeably janky and dated despite having their graphics and animations updated each release and why npc and third person movement tend to feel like you’re controlling a character with absolutely zero weight. Turns out it’s not just Bethesda a lot of game developers for first person titles will pull this same kind of trick aswell here’s some recent examples of this

Dying light 2
Cyberpunk 2077
Modern warfare 2
Ultra kill
Not just that even third person games especially the pvp ones don’t hide this or even try to
Fortnite
The division 2 pvp
Destiny
Literally every 3d MMO
Nearly every assassins creed title has this same issue of weightlessness

This doesn’t sound bad but play any souls game, naughty dog, Bandai rpg, rockstar title or any game with half decent physics and it becomes way more obvious how much better movement in those types of games handle, it’s also why those games feel so much more advanced
R: 48 / I: 21
Post TES IV Oblivion memes
R: 18 / I: 6

Minetest thread

Since joining to my Minecraft server has proven to be quite a headache for a lot of players, I want to propose the board admins to host a server for its free, open-source alternative: Minetest (minetest.net).

The prime upsides of this would be:
- Much less resource consumption on both client and server end due to Minetest using an engine written C++ rather than Java.
- Extremely deep and wide maps compared to Minecraft, with the estimated maximum size being 60000 chunks on every axis. Minetest's terrain generator also creates caves and mountains much larger than any seen in MC even after the Caves & Cliffs update.
- Ease of moddability due to the game's modular nature and a built-in modding API based using the Lua language, as well as automatic mod fetching from the server eliminating the need for players to download mods beforehand. Also, the game does not need to be quit from when editing mod files, just for the world to be reentered.
- No need for third-party plugins for stuff like sethome and logins as this functionality is already built into the base game.

Thoughts?
https://strawpoll.com/polls/NMnQ5BBXBn6
R: 6 / I: 1

🤡 🤡🤡

Pfffftahahahahahaha on par with the definitive edition of gta
R: 15 / I: 2
Ok last screenshot
R: 8 / I: 1

Diablo 2 invented grind in gaming

Slow progression in older games feels way less brutal than in contemporary ones and I finally understand why. It’s diablo 2s fault, and the reason is balance. Progression based off understanding vs progression based off a players stats is what makes grind feel terrible, in the case of the former the effect is far less severe as you can still progress through the game you play without interruption but for the ladder suddenly the gear you have on you, or your items, or your team if your playing a turn based games becomes everything about the games progression itself and suddenly when that gear isn’t constantly coming the game feels like shit

Diablo warrior didn’t have this problem despite progression being even slower and more painful because it was closer in its setup to a classic rpg, diablo 2 made the original generally more casual and soon after it caused hordes of titles inspired by it to emerge including the even bigger grind fest that is d3 and this cancerous component of game design that used to be ignorable is now what greedier game devs abuse to push micro transactions in the form of boosts and p2w bs in their games
R: 39 / I: 11

Fanmods, total conversions, and independent projects

I was kind of intending this thread to be a storehouse of replies for

<hurrr but who would work without profit motive???? you ever thought about that commie?


where fans have for one reason or another put in a great deal of time and effort to maintain or recreate digital experiences.

For example, I stumbled on some videos for a fan recreation of TIE fighter which, from the clips of it, looks really neat. It seems like video related is a mod based off of another mod for the million year old X-wing Alliance engine. I need to look further into it and see if it's built off of the original game, or its own standalone deal meant to mimic it.

Then there's also Tamriel Reborn that seems like it isn't just a remake of the original, but actually expands on the original Morrowind, I guess to add back in all of the content that had to be cut. Apparently they've been going at it since 2001.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKyrzZRo-O0

Then there's DOOM, which has just had an insane amount of work done on it and with it since it was released. It's actually pretty amazing to see what people are capable of doing with it after so long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3bwKzHEpbA
R: 0 / I: 0

Please be different. Please be good PLEASE DONT SUCK

I can’t take bethesdas morrowind like philosophy attached to how they balance their popular titles, all it creates are broken highly exploitable and simultaneously highly difficult games that feel horrible to play and completely reliant on cheese and mashing to succeed in. I don’t want this for a completely new untouched IP

Ubisofts art and writing teams have no understanding of the concept of character development and worldbuilding at all and consistently make boring open worlds with terribly put together content that only the power of half decent gameplay can hide that grow less and less immersive as detail and physics is cut out of them

D4 I am hoping turns out like D1 if something happens where blizzard actually listens to veterans of their community, and dont overbloat its progression completely over the other elements of its environment and lore purely to appeal to casual gamers. I don’t want to spend hours coming up with trillion DPS builds while loot falls from the sky while basic elements of open world design in an open world game are ignored

I fucking love these IPS and really want to see genuine change for the better for them. They don’t have to suck as much in their current state as much as they do, please be different
R: 3 / I: 0
all that was once directly power-washed has receded into dirty
R: 5 / I: 0

African pmc simulator is shockingly alot of fun

This is by far the most grounded and consistently enjoyable game I’ve ever played and that’s by fps standards where they’re either over the top completely with their movement aesthetics or are so fucking slow and overly tactical to the point where unless you have thousands of hours clocked in do they feel aggressive and enjoyable. This game with its simplistic design, actually good gunplay that still holds up pretty well as old as it is, aesthetics and consistency of its environment setup make it so enjoyable for me so consistently that I can pick it up expecting I’m gonna have alot of fun without ever feeling like the game is getting ridiculous with its content that it becomes immersion breaking.

Oh man what a game
R: 2 / I: 0

Republic Commando

Anyone else love this game? I played it so much on the Xbox in like 2011-2012 along with Battlefront until my familly got a 360 and I could play Halo 3 and Halo 4, though I never finished it. Replaying it has been an absolute blast, the gameplay loop of it is good fun if a little tough on higher difficulties. Just dealing with Super Battle droids can be a challenge if you don't have enough explosives, but its satisfying killing them and seeing their armour fall off. The weapon diversity is good and you can approach most encounters in a number of ways. The squad manages to be useful even if the command system is a bit primitive, and I'd say that the droid generators actually help this since you basically need your squad to blow them up or to cover you or you'll die by your self. Its just a good tactical shooter that I think we need to see more of today rather than COD clones and Doom clones. The game is also SO immersive, its one of the most immersive shooters I have ever played. The HUD was perfectly integrated as your own helmet's HUD and it just works so well. Missions were designed so immersively as well and the dialogue was good if a little cheesy.
R: 16 / I: 6
Name a game where the following isn’t a problem
R: 22 / I: 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjMJy22N8e0
valve releases a new game………and its just a semi-better looking version of cs go….(the mod/map tools will be nice still, i guess)
R: 1 / I: 0
Video game protagonists be like
R: 6 / I: 0
I was playing fallout 3 with mods equipped to make the game way harder since I was used to the insane inventory space and weapons barely dealing damage to me and found myself dying as you can imagine often. Despite the experience the reasons for why o died werent different from how I would die in other fps titles
>running past edges where I could easily get myself at a frame disadvantage against enemies
>only reloading after wasting a ton of ammo or running out
>reloading in bad positions
It’s those kinds of things but it also made me realize how much movement can impact all these things because if a player has access to multiple techniques to enhance how well they can avoid getting hit as a relief for making these mistakes, while gaining the benefits of having extra options of positioning themselves to shoot their opponent with themselves at advantage in their position then an fps become way to how do I phrase it “jumpy” where the entire skill expression ingame is reduced to who aims the best and nothing else and I’m guessing that would actually make gameplay worse because what ends up happening is no one hitting anything and reliance on camping and abusing ingame traps becomes common. To me this is why casual fps titles are so much more grounded, why they prioritize tactics and team decision making and also why they’re way more commonly played than arena shooters. Those are just my thoughts on movement
R: 48 / I: 11

Why are there so many FNV fanboys the game is like every other 3d fallout title

Obviously my opinions are gonna be biased since I work with bethesdas engine often and know a lot of the mechanics present in how their games function but I really am honest when I say that gameplay wise FNV is about as awful as your standard 3d Fallout game on top of being horribly under developed

Level scaling is still thing
Enemies just have random weapons some don’t have any at all including the enemies you’d think should be armed like NCR
R: 8 / I: 0

the unbeatable problem with MMO world design

They’re functionally too big to actually create

When I say that I don’t mean in the sense that someone can’t just create a map for players to relax in I mean in the sense that creating all the levels and ways for players to interact in every sector of the map on the scale servers provide is functionally impossible for any modern sized team to accomplish


Reasons established in post 2
R: 7 / I: 3

D4 beta review

Summary: it’s not hard enough

Explanation: it’s not balanced in a way that makes progression feel as meaningful as it was in diablo 1. That’s not to say that the scaling back of power and feature creep from d3 wasn’t a massive improvement on top of the shift in aesthetics for the game but the implementation of health globes, low damage dealt from common enemies and too an extent bosses even against ranged builds that should be vulnerable for poor zoning to compensate for the range of their attacks, on top of mandatory minimaps and other accessibility features that waste the effort animators and level designers put into this don’t still make this game feel really casual like d2 does take me out of the sense of grounded-ness and genuine feelings of anxiety over how my performance would dictate wether or not I could complete an area/boss with how I was playing I felt from d1. That’s all I gotta say beyond the fact that sorcerers are completely busted
R: 5 / I: 1
I just finished this game and holy shit the historical revisionism in here was insane. While I love the setting, the whole thing with the assassin's was so horribly done. Remember when the assassin's actually had an interesting philosophy and didn't pick any side of the christian vs muslim conflict and instead assassinated those who they perceived to be actual bringers of war only to realize that the Templars wanted something similar to the assassin's just going about it a different way. But in this game, or at least with the later games you actually are fuckin picking sides like Connor siding with the Patriots or Bayek and Aya siding with Cleopatra despite the fact that the Ptolemies were colonizers. They act like Cleo was this "true Egyptian" what the fuck? I remember this one side quest where there's this woman fighting because of Greek colonizers and you don't get any choice but to kill the Egyptians fighting to decolonize Egypt, a Medjay of all things. Also Medjay disappeared after the New Kingdom fell a thousand years before. Wouldn't it had made sense for Bayek to be an anti imperialist as well?
R: 24 / I: 1

XBOX vs PS5

Which console is better if im looking into getting a gaming console?
R: 10 / I: 0
I’m going to be genuinely surprised if they somehow manage to mess this up completely. I know that sounds weird but this time it really feels like noting bad should happen
R: 15 / I: 2

Truly she was…a Super Metroid…

Starting to understand why the best Metroid games have barely any dialogue. Great game but this made me lol when I saw it.
R: 10 / I: 6

ITT critically acclaimed games you hate and why

I have never played a game that felt like a bigger waste of time than Stardew Valley, and I've played my fair share of clickers and life sims in my youth.

A hilariously broken economy, that neither emulates real life agriculture nor attempts to create pros and cons for the sake of balance. Swathes of "content" for the sake of content. A plot (small business vs Amazon) I couldn't give less of a shit about, and funnily enough not because of my socialist leanings but rather because of how badly it's integrated with the game. Characters with the depth of random Elder Scrolls side NPCs. Basically I could go on but I'll spare you the suffering.

What about you?
R: 15 / I: 2

The state of the gaming industry

Do corporations just hate people? Once I used to think that sure you have big bourgeoisie who act in their class interests but you still has creatives who could flex their muscles and produce something great and then it would make a shit ton of money for publishers. But it seems that publishers these days just absolutely hate developers and moreso despise the consumers and now you have what the modern gaming industry is today, record profits with absolute gutted and half made releases with microtransactions to "buy" the full game. Also physical copies aren't useful anymore and digital copies can basically be "erased" at any time. All of these problems make me think that they just hate, like actually hate their consumers.
R: 5 / I: 0

Overextended returns in game design

I was playing far cry 2 again and thought a bit about the healing system and compared it to other games. I came to the conclusion it was one of the most balanced forms of healing in games to date but how it was implemented matters more to me than what it simply is.

There’s a tendency in games to make components of them at the start scarce in quantity for the player only to then be trivial in later stages as the player progresses essentially rendering that component pointless to even include in. for the player this can take the form of stamina attached to sprinting in games like blood borne and fallout 4 only to then become trivial as the player levels stamina with time. Another example could include high tier loot of diablo 3 that becomes increasingly worthless as it starts dropping in excess once the player is either high level enough or is already too strong for any of it to significantly affect their playstyle.

When sub components of a game are implemented to stay scarce or have their supply scale logarithmically not only is their impact on gameplay more meaningful, it also provides a basis for a far more consistently fair game overall. Take sekiros resurrection mechanic, unlike a simple potion healing system seen in standard rpgs how often you can save yourself in the middle of combat much like far cry 2 has an established limit that doesn’t change regardless of how much time you have ingame, when your allowed to gain the option to save yourself again depends directly on your performance as a player and in the end it allows for fights to last for reasonably long periods of time against generally tougher enemies without having those fights take ages to end. This both encourages the player to play aggressively but also rewards them for skillful play simultaneously. A highlight of such of a mechanic that directly contrasts the “run and chug after a direct hit” mechanics of estus healing of its predecessor’s that worked against such a level of consistent fairness in combat.


Theres plenty more examples I could list right off the bat about how to use elements of a game world with a level of consideration over its supply and how it could impact how people would play but this post is too long. That’s all for now, thanks for reading
R: 4 / I: 3

That is rather strange

I’m aware that during fallout 3s development the development of the gunplay was strangely enough not done by bethesda(the parent studio) but by ID software. The creation of the areas, story, and DLC however was done by bethesda directly. What I’m trying to understand was where was ID, experience wise that somehow led to Bethesda creating generally better developed gunplay mechanics for fallout 4 that the both the teams for new Vegas and fallout 3 failed to achieve

I’m looking for any responses due to the fact that ID has worked on FPS, titles like wolfenstien and doom, while obsidian has the outer worlds whose gunplay mirrors again fallout 4s
R: 6 / I: 2
Are the Sabbat the good guys or the bad guys in Vampire the Masquerade? On one hand, they're a reactionary organization that values vampire supremacy, but on the other hand, they're the only ones that promote communial solidarity, want to stop the apocalypse, and they expose the corruption of the anarchs and the Camrilla. The anarchs always take a side alongside the Camrilla whenever things get serious like with the introduction of the Sabbat or the Keul Jin as threats.
R: 13 / I: 3

Bethesda is an amazing studio, Skyrim is shit and the mods are worse

I wouldn’t say it’s fair to say bethesda games are buggy and unstable
Why because I’ve played a lot of their games especially creation ones and generally the bugs I do find are rarely game breaking, hard to find and dissapear as fast as they come

Skyrim on the other hand is where I think most of the criticism towards the studio comes from. The games objective garbage, you can’t readjust texture detail because the game launched several times without low res textures for in game assets. Bugs are fucking everywhere to the point where it’s noticeably bad, the game is horrendously optimized to the point where my game crashed over and over again several times and sometimes wouldn’t open at all and when it was running it ran at a terrible frame rate compared to any Bethesda game I’ve played(yes even fo76). This game solidified the belief that the entire studio doesn’t have to give a shit at all about actually trying to produce finished, stable, mostly bug free well made games and it shows in any game they’ve made post Skyrim

No the mods don’t fix the issues with Skyrim often they make everything worse as mods can be divided into three categories for this game
>mods requiring files from mods completely unrelated to it causing save bloat and adding more bugs to the base game
>mods that just straight up don’t work and are as buggy as the base game
>mods that are so disconnected from TES as a franchise lore and gameplay wise you’d question if the modder even opened any file from Skyrim other than the creation kit

I can’t say Bethesda’s a bad studio I’ve played enough to know they can do so much better but the community surrounding the studio is making things so much worse for any room for genuine improvement. God damb
R: 5 / I: 0

Gunplay

I was thinking for a bit about this and I’m beginning to realize how hard this aspect of gaming is to actually design properly, and it’s because shooters are foundationally flawed. Shooters aren’t like other games.
In hack and slash, action or even fighting games you have a mix of movement, blocking, attacking, maybe even dodging, and some projectiles in some scenarios. With shooters you only well shoot and move around and that’s it, when these games work they feel about as fast paced as any other fun game, wether or not that level of pacing translates into quick and smart decisions being made consistently is up to debate on the game your playing but generally it’s rare just to even make a shooter feel fast(I think that’s also why dealing with bullet sponges in these games often feels unusually worse compared to other genres of games). Some shooters like the doom remakes tried making gunplay feel fun by implementing bash and kick mechanics while introducing the player to hordes of players meant to be killed quickly which had varying but well recieved results, others like far cry tried implementing stealth mechanics so even if a player didn’t have the skill to quickly take on a barrage of enemies they could still use their understanding of the levels they were in to clear areas swiftly. There’s plenty more I can say but generally I don’t think there’s any way to make these games as consistently enjoyable for a casual audience as much as 2d and 3rd person titles
R: 234 / I: 48
Is there a chance it will be good?
R: 0 / I: 0

Joe Rogan Interviews the Mighty Caesar (ai)

Joe Rogan discusses the Burned Man, radscorpion attacks and more with Caesar and Legate Lanius.
R: 10 / I: 1

genshin impact is still really boring for me

I forced myself to play this boring game again on my shit phone and it’s about as boring as a remember it here’s why
>pop ups and the game being way way to flashy
The games developers think their players are completely incapable of thinking for themselves and constantly flood the screen with endless UI elements and popups distracting anyone like me trying to find anything interesting about the game world. Not to mention the VFx and sound effects are cranked to overdrive for absolutely no reason whatsoever it’s hard to go longer than five seconds in any quest or combat related scenario before the screen again gets flooded with damage text, flashy explosions and weapon trails pointlessly added everywhere, it feels like playing an mmo at times with how hard it is to pay attention to anything. Then there’s quests, I hate unskippable cutscenes and this game is full of them every few seconds in the main campaign. I genuinely and I can be confident that others wouldn’t care if there was just ordinary dialogue mixed in with ordinary gameplay between interactions or even just plain text with a lot of dialogue options like in morrowind than whatever the devs are doing. It feels horrible, I wanna play and go on an adventure not listen to some white haired midget screaming about generic isekai nonsense
R: 6 / I: 0

Kingdom Hearts 3

Why did they have to put smartphones in this game? It kind of threw the vibe off for me personally, compared to a lot of the previous games. Especially that scene where they scan a fucking QR code. I know it's not really relevant to the plot, but the vibe of this series just gave me the idea they would communicate using magic or something, instead of this imitation of reality. It kind of threw everything off for me. What do you think?
R: 9 / I: 2

Are health bars unnecessary?

In Minecraft and home front damage is communicated through stun or watching enemies flash red upon being hit. Generally most players work fine with this and throughout the years these 2 games along with games like cod in their campaigns also have not needed to implement this visual indicator in their games. In my opinion health bars for enemies are unnecessary and ruin immersion because health bars distract the player from the entity they’re dealing damage towards as it’s likely that they’ll be having to pay attention to their own, and their enemies bars over their actions.


I imagine I could be wrong about this when taking into account groups of enemies where it can become less clear what the player should prioritize attacking
R: 3 / I: 0

operation harsh doorstop

anyone heard of this? its f2p will all features. Love the guy complaining about no season pass lol
R: 17 / I: 9

Goofy armours and weapons

I think art designers run out of creativity when designing high level gear in games that don’t look out of place because they’d have to imagine that gear being functionally better than all the rest but don’t know what it would have physically that would suggest that so they end up making armour and weapon sets look absolutely ridiculous to make them stand out and you end up with the OP

My suggestion to fix this is just base weapon and armour progression to crafting so you can visualize what the gear should have and cap off how good gear can get
R: 14 / I: 4
Anyone here play yugioh?
also tcg general.
R: 17 / I: 4
Which console's visuals do you dislike the least, n64 or PS1?
R: 8 / I: 1

So are games just gonna take even longer to release now

Beyond good and evil 2: 15 years
Skill and bones: 11 years
TES6: 12+ years
Diablo 4: 11+ years
Cyberpunk 2077: 11 years

Notice something? All of these games have been in development for a decade. It’s kind of jarring to think about too knowing most are still being worked on to this day, sure you can blame things on god awful management but generally speaking games have been taking longer and longer to release leading to less and less games. How long is it gonna be until every studio is so busy trying to finish a playable game that we won’t even see any new announcements for any new title
R: 4 / I: 0

Mahjong General

Anyone here play mahjong? The consumerist and racist game based on historical lies? It's so fun. :3
R: 9 / I: 2

Fallout 4s gunplay is awful

I’m not here to brag about new Vegas or fallout 3 or even say the original 2 games had better combat I’m specifically talking about things unique to fallout 4 that make its gunplay awful

>inconsistent staggering and locational damage

In shooters made by experienced developers that don’t constantly cut corners during production actors with zero armour typically stagger upon being hit by a barrage of bullets or any form of heavy ammunition capable of penetrating whatever protection they’re wearing especially based off location. In fallout 4 where you aim at NPCs doesn’t matter at all if it’s not the head coupled with the fact that most enemies just straight up tank bullets outright make most shootouts feel similar to bethesdas other open world titles where combat just comes down to a whack festively of brainlessly mashing the attack key until someone dies. And no don’t apply this same rule of stagger to the player just restrict movement somewhat similar to someone caught in stagger to make getting hit feel impactful

>too many popups and camera effects

This is self explanatory the amount of camera shake and effects on screen do more to make combat feel worse. Simply sticking to the games hp bar and a red indicator for where you’re being shot at would be enough

>bullet sponges. So many bullet sponges

I can register that this game is a post apocalyptic rpg(which is weird to think about lore wise being the world should actually be healing itself significantly) but enemy design in shooters is different from hack and slash games. You can’t have enemies just casually tanking dozens of rounds until death it doesn’t work for a game like borderlands or destiny it’s not gonna work for fallout either. Simply just making certain creatures like the gator claws immune to certain forms of ammunition that can be killed easily by high calibre rounds from a AT rifle or some gimmick that causes enemies to take a massive amount of damage like in DOOM would be more than enough to make certain enemies feel like they take on a reasonable amount of hits without needing to create a reliance on making weapon damage differences extreme to the point where certain builds become inviable

>bad movement bad level design

Stamina being attached to sprinting is stupid and just flat out shouldn’t even be a statistic in post top down era fallout. I mean this for both NV and FO3 aswell it genuinely made combat worse and the implementation of vats was only meant to hide how bad gunplay already was. Level design that’s obvious bethesda and Ubisoft don’t actually put any time into that much like almost anything about their most popular games that require any significant amount of effort

>bad guns

This is due to a mixture of sound effects, bullet speeds, recoil, weapon models themselves being too large, poorly animated weapons in general, the weapon mod system being underdeveloped, and not being able to use the iron sights on certain weapons all working together to provide a terrible sense of feeling when handling guns. At its best gunplay feels like playing something out of wolfenstein and at its worst it feels like your playing FNV

And that’s every reason
R: 0 / I: 0

More like picrel?

anymore weird ass games with clapped ass graphics and funny characters like cryptworlds and haunted.cities? also anyone got advicee on how to actually advance in cryptworlds
R: 13 / I: 6

Vehicular building

Anyone into vehicle building games such as KSP, Space Engineers, SimplePlanes, Sprocket (picrel), etc?

Share your thoughts, building tips and post your designs!
R: 2 / I: 0
I just finished this game and it was a bit of a let down tbh. It had been hyped up as a really difficult game but I breezed through it and first time'd every boss in the game after the first, including the final boss which I beat no hit first try. The gameplay was alright but nothing special. The story is such a mess, the whole thing is made up in Selene's mind because she felt guilty over driving off a bridge with her child even though it was an accident… all the worldbuilding is thrown out for a shit and cliche 'psychological' story. Visually it looked very same-y and the camera had too low FOV for you to take things in, and the visual storytelling sucked, all the worldbuilding was done through text (and again it doesn't matter in the end). The only standout part of the game was the 4th boss which plays a song that's significant to the MC on an organ and its really badass with a great buildup, but this is the only time where story and gameplay work together (I guess the final boss also has like a astronaut face in its final phase but it was so easy and I killed it so quick I didn't notice until I watched a video on it). Most overrated game I've played in recent years.
R: 7 / I: 7

Metal Gear Solid Series

Is metal gear solid a leftwing series of games?

I ask this question because there are multiple videos made by the Kavernacle that say that this game series is socialist

I played mgs2 and mgs3 and mgrr, but I was getting mixed messages from the games, and I think that they were not fully leftist games.

For example, Inside of Revengeance when during the final fight with Armstrong, the "Standing Here" song plays, it essentially equivocates an ancap fascist with raiden, and tries to say that the two would both agree when their guard is down.

That is essentially the game saying that "both sides bad", which is a centrist idea.

Maybe Kojima is a left leaning liberal, but I have doubts about him being a socialist.
R: 9 / I: 2

2022 Interactive Fiction Competition Ballot

https://ifcomp.org/ballot
Also IF General I suppose
R: 9 / I: 3

Tlou2 show comment

What I’m gonna say isn’t actually restricted to the show itself but something really fucking dumb about movies and visual entertainment that got me to quit watching it.
<Cinematic bullshittery
What it is is basically when any form of film sets up an event to provoke a mood in the audience but then follows up that even with something contrived so that the story can continue. This just ends up in the story itself feeling less tense knowing how little impact certain events can actually have on the plot.


An example of this show wise is that bloater scene where the dudes with guns stood there watching a massive fucking truck getting consumed by infected while those same infected were literally fucking screaming at them. They then proceeded to waste their time for several seconds continuing to stand idly than do something like throw a bomb, or get in their fucking trucks and gtfo with Ellie. Unsurprisingly they all died there like the disposable side characters there and this bullshittery is fucking everywhere in the show, which is why I refused to watch past the first 2 episodes. Also fuck hbo max for what they did to cn
R: 3 / I: 2

Poise

I hate this mechanic
I hate seeing it in souls games
I hate seeing it in kh games
I hate seeing it in ARPGs in general and it’s existence is only partially justified in monster hunter where it makes sense

Everywhere else in the genre it’s fucking stupid and the only way to make it as a mechanic not fuck over offensive play is to make weapons that basically kill anything in 1-4 hits. Unsurprisingly this makes trying to make low level builds in games that aren’t called kingdom hearts viable in endgame content fucking atrocious because every enemy in these games basically can just wake up immediately after getting hit and landing a successful hit feels horrible since you might as well be slashing at a wall. Not to mention how much pvp content gets fucked over knowing that in games like elden ring pvp just devolves into projectile, bloodhound step and roll spamming because people are gonna lose immediately after like one whiff punish or a parry. Better off poise as a mechanic in action games only affects the stun actors and players receive after being directly hit without blocking not if they’ll even be put into hitstun at all
R: 13 / I: 1
Someone on the art team really thought giving this bigger more teeth would somehow make these ogres scary. Pftaahahahaha they’re adorable regardless
R: 20 / I: 11

/Genshin/

any more degenerates who like this chinese propaganda waifu collection game?
non of my friends play it and i thinks it's fantastic gameplay- and art- wise.

post your mains
R: 39 / I: 7
I've never played a final fantasy game before. I want to start with FF7 remake, and play it soon. I don't really want to play the original, since it says online that it will take 33 hours to beat on average, so I'm leaning towards just playing the remake.
It also has good reviews on opencritic, 88%, so that makes me want to play it more.
If FF7 is an iconic game, I want to be able to experience it some way, and i like the graphics of the new game. Should I get the game?
R: 25 / I: 12
Why did the level design in both IPS get so so much fucking worse
R: 12 / I: 7

Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War

A thread to discuss Dawn of War series.

I recently got back into the game, played through all campaigns, checked out the modding scene. It really speaks to the quality of the game that fans still maintain it almost 20 years after the original came out, despite the sequels coming out.
Mod-wise, Titanium Wars feels obsolete for multiplayer/skirmish games, however, does have functional campaign if you are looking for a real challenge (kind of a slog though).
Ultimate Apocalypse used to be my favorite, but it has very different feel from vanilla game. Tactical considerations are pushed into the background in favour of never ending waves of OP units.
Unifications Mod adds whole bunch of new races and units, with varying degree of polish and balance. Probably the most popular mod currently.
Redux mod and Pro mod are similar in that they opt for smaller scale tactical combat, more faithful to vanilla, high degree of polish, and focus on PvP balance. Personally I appreciate the simplicity. Pity they have no campaigns.

Anyway, does anyone here want to play some Dawn of War multiplayer? I am down for vanilla or modded.
R: 2 / I: 1

There is a Stalin Minecraft mod

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/hungry-stalin
R: 4 / I: 0
I have never seen shittier player tracking in my life and even worse like nearly all enemies and half the bosses are exactly like this holy fuck
R: 10 / I: 1

I like ds2

The slow paced almost turn based aspect of the combat made things slow enough that I could better understand how to use rolls and heals than just mindlessly spam them in other action games, coupled with the enemy tracking made me focus more on actually engaging than constantly trying to run around or straight up run away from enemies to get them to miss for a free hit.

Even if it’s not the most loved ARPG for what it’s associated with it’s still my personal favourite:)
R: 75 / I: 12

FREE SHIT

They're giving away Borderlands 3 at the Epic Games Store

I don't know even know why they are doing this
There's no special festival this summer
R: 6 / I: 0
Steam removed the fucking "-no-browser" option in its shitty client that actually made it usable. Does anybody know a workaround or something
R: 22 / I: 5

Ubishits open world design

It’s bad but not because the lands this company makes are barren in content but the content in it is badly designed.

Let’s look at the outpost system found in AC games, these outposts are randomly scattered across each map, generally really small when put taken into account which makes upfront combat in them tedious due to how cramped close encounters become all while these same outposts have nothing functionally unique to separate them from each other due to being too physically small for anything noteworthy to be found in them DESPITE the size and land available for the devs to use to fix this issue. The reason why this exists is due to the development team that designs these worlds not adapting to games outside of far cry with open world design in other genres
R: 2 / I: 2
i think sonic frontiers is inspired by evangelion
R: 10 / I: 1

RTS games

Is this genre dead or what? At best we get reboots, like the upcoming Age of Mythology: Retold
R: 4 / I: 3

Random Brown Brazilian

Does anyone wanna play Overwatch with me?
R: 7 / I: 3

Mods are working out great

Shits been going well since I finished up the patches, special weapons feel really good, heavy weapons fee really good, I don’t feel like the pace of gameplay is ever interrupted knowing enemies drop healing items in Skyrim now

Things are going really well
R: 28 / I: 0
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/steam

Jeeeeeeeeeeesus… I really should delete my Steam account, shouldn't I? Like, complete wipe from their records, or so they say in the deactivation section.
But the thing is, I've spent a lot of money on it, how do I get over this literal sunken cost? It feels nice to play multiplayer games and have unique items, but that's literally just pixels…
R: 2 / I: 0

Rain World Downpour

I just finished the More Slugcats campaigns and they were all great. Downpour is such a good DLC, the base game worked fine on its own and the DLC expanded it in a really natural way and the story and world were presented awesome as always. There's as many new regions as were in the base game and they're all exciting to explore. They also managed to keep a sense of wonder despite expanding the world into places only teased at before, like I still was thinking about what was out there in the distance. Explaining and expanding on a lot of things in the story could have made it boring but they didn't ruin the important things and most questions just created new answers. This is especially important since explaining the void sea and the cycle would ruin a lot of the mystery and horror. Wordbuilding lore was great though and it was so cool to see the world change over time and see the similarities in places which had drastically changed. This was greatly helped by the greatly expanded soundtrack with both new songs and previously unused ones (including some real bangers). There's just so much new stuff like dozens of new creatures as well as slugpups! That's not even mentioning the mountain of bonus content in the form of expeditions, challenges and safari mode as well as jolly co-op. Theres so much to explore, its an awesome expansion for an awesome game. It's not a half baked AAA DLC which adds some gimmick, its more like Echoes of the Eye in the way it perfectly expands on a game most people considered complete, adding things the developers didn't have time for in the base game or hadn't thought about.
R: 8 / I: 2

Pathfinder CRPGs

Anyone play Kingmaker or Wrath of the Righteous? I enjoy playthroughs until I get near the endgame where things get sorta bullshit, the encounters drag on way too long (especially if playing turn-based) and you pretty much have to take the same feats on every character to make the fights tolerable. Higher difficulties severely restrict the number of viable builds, which is a shame. I'd hoped WotR didn't go the same direction but they doubled down on everything I disliked, still fun games overall.
R: 80 / I: 20

/Elder scrolls 6/poll

Where would you like Elder Scrolls 6 to take place and what would you like to see in it ?
R: 49 / I: 5
This is never coming out and it shouldn't
The Elder Scrolls squeezed out its last drops of creative energy in Skyrim and is at its end now
Bethesda should kiss and say goodbye, and focus its energy on newer IPs
R: 2 / I: 0

Can we please talk about bad ui design

I know I’ve already shit talked mmos for this like months ago but this shit is everywhere in modern games now except for elden ring and tes shockingly. The rest is all of this visual aids and it’s fucking horrible. What’s even the point most game designers make it so that players can still register wtf is happening in them even without all this clutter which makes most of it pointless

Think about it like this. Attach hp bars on an enemy that go down in response to damage but then add damage text right after for every hit even though the player can figure out which attack is good and which is shit just by looking at the fucking bar, now imagine this retarded ass design philosophy attached to everything else about your design

<pic of og halo is not representative of the above it stands in contrast to it
R: 12 / I: 0

Seriously why do MMO RPGs still exist at this point

They’re not profitable
They’re not good no none of them are fun at all especially not in comparison to single player coop games
And they’re also outdated mechanically and literally considering how old the genre is


Outside of how fucking retarded companies like nexon, blizzard, Amazon, and BioWare are there’s legitimate reasons for why this genre seriously should’ve went the way of club penguin at this point and it’s that MMOs have stayed functionally the same since EverQuest 2 was a thing. I mean the closest thing you have to a “modern” level example of these games is new world because it has collisions and basic as shit combat mechanics you’d see in action games from over a decade ago, rather than the lazily shoehorned tab target spam keys to win nonsense you’d have fun with on your dads shitty probably broken janky as shit pc you’d use in your kid years and those aspects of that game are still badly implemented and complained about to this day


There’s no fucking hope for these games even the technically popular MMOs like WoW and ff14 struggle to maintain server counts that aren’t community servers(or the fact that some of their servers are shutting down completely) and any attempt at a revolutionary change that’ll bring what’s seen everywhere else in gaming to the mmo seen in Asian countries is laughably bad or insidiously implemented with layers and layers of microtransactions like BDO. I don’t get why there’s still whales for these trash games when there’s so much else to play you could be having fun with that don’t require an entire communities worth of people to pair up with(ignoring how most people that played these games have already moved on to other aspects of their lives)


I don’t understand this at all at how long they’ve lives
R: 3 / I: 3

/leftypol/ Fighting Game

Expanding on this idea
>>15974
>>25395

Post ideas for characters, moves, stages, mechanics, etc for a fighting game starring political ideology catgirls or other characters from /leftypol/ lore.
R: 4 / I: 0
The dead space remake is finally out. What do you guys think about it?

I watched the digital foundry video about it and they had a glowing view of the graphical and gameplay upgrades
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpqAAOgUrCg
R: 7 / I: 1

Snap point turning

I was goofing off with oblivion ds2 Skyrim and some other older games and after watching maulers video on ds2 as a game I realized snap point turning a bug that existed was ds2 was actually extremely common to find in a shitload of older games in general including gta. Snap pointturning to someone unfamiliar with this concept is the instance where a 3d game has restricted areas a character can actually turn in relative to the cameras angle ingame that ultimately make moving that character visibly infuriating to pull off and janky

What I want to understand is why this particular bug even exists or why it ever did considering how easy something like this should be to fix or work around
R: 19 / I: 2

Rage bait

I don’t get it or wtf is wrong with the people that fall for this shit, I didn’t watch any gameplay or play forspoken, I didn’t watch Velma or care for it, i didn’t watch or play back 4 blood all for the same fucking reasons. I don’t care or want to play them cause I don’t find them interesting but why tf are there so many retards buying these dumbass games or shows whatever they fucking hate and advertising about how much they dislike them, not in the sense that you’d advertise that hate out of passion for the IP I mean literally just buying the fucking thing to bitch and complain about it. Wtf is the point
R: 4 / I: 0

Pokémon arceus

Let’s say only gamefreaks staff were working on the game and only 15 of their workers were actually animating anything ingame and it took 30 minutes at most to animate a single move ingame for a single animator


That means for the game to have fully unique(and even that’s not entirely necessary) animations for every Pokémon ingame game freaks animation team would only need to spend 9 months actually working normal hours and even then that’s under the worst conditions possible while ignoring the reality that they could just reuse older animations or copy paste them for other Pokémon, or outsourcing like what happened with sword and shield etc. why the fuck then was the game launched in such an unpolished state, you can’t just use the size of the studio as an excuse for this shit they work with other companies and just look at what they managed to pull off over 2 decades ago man
R: 16 / I: 4

Sekiro is one of the only arpgs that got blocking right

The purpose of blocking in most fighting games is to give players a defensive option so they aren’t discouraged from disengaging from conflict for the sake of trying to avoid an attack. In most aroma or just action games in general this basic concept of attacking is often overlooked and what ends up happening is blocking as a mechanic becomes completely useless which results in players running around waiting for bosses or enemies to throw out some basically unpunishable attack first and then decide to do anything after waiting for several seconds for the enemy to finish their trillion hit combo or whatever.

From softwares souls games and square enixs usage of kingdom hearts is notorious for this bs and their games end up becoming the passive garbage ever with the player essentially running away and spamming safe moves until they’re in a position where blocking is useful again and suddenly the games fun

This is probably why people consider sekiro to have good combat due to its parry system that actively rewards not just staying in conflict but also just being really good at defensive play without relying on disengaging and jumping back in only when the enemy throws out something completely stupid. Just something to think about knowing how many more of these games could be so much more fun if this one basic aspect of design was considered and handled with more care
R: 1 / I: 0

Cramped games like ds2?

The ingame world is 50+ hours of content, the level design is amazing but the world design breaks a level of cohesion and trying to navigate through it without bonfires feel like a maze. I think the shaded woods are a perfect example of this considering the region is technically like what 6-8 zones? But then it’s all sectioned off into room like zones that occasionally break each other by having enemies be visible behind invisible walls the player should be able to move through or just how fucking drastic moving from one major location to another can feel like majulua to the forest of the fallen giants for the first time after walking through a literal fucking dungeon


Any other games that feel like they have way to much ointment to justify how small their maps are like ds2
R: 2 / I: 0

Hitman: World of Assassination

Figured we could do with a thread now that Freelancer and the big trilogy rebrand is out. Anyone else playing this? I've sunk an embarrassing amount of hours into it since 2016 and am still discovering new things. It's a very satisfying sandbox to fuck around in.
R: 24 / I: 4

Rougelikes

I hate rougelikes. Randomizing the map every playthrough is an awful idea since it entirely removes map design. Enemies are spammed without a thought for their place in the level or even room (or worse, they're always in the same predictable place every time). Every room is completely independent of one another rather than being a cohesive world. This ends up affecting gameplay, progression and also the atmosphere and worldbuilding.

Permadeath is only a good idea in slow paced games where it has actual concequences, so even if it is frustrating it is meaningful. However rougelikes are necessarily fast paced so you don't get bored repeating the same 10 room types over and over again, even if this doesn't work and they are extremely dull anyway. With this fast pace you often die without thinking about why it happened or it being consequential whatsoever, its like dying in a MOBA where you have to wait 5 minutes every time you die. I have way more fun playing DayZ for example since in that game despite losing all your items on death et cetera, it is slow enough paced that you can get immersed in moving through the landscape, and when I die it always feels a lot better than dying in a rougelike.

This would be more acceptable if the gameplay was fun enough to keep me engaged through the re-runs. Dark Souls (especially DS2) manages to keep me engaged through boss runs 10x more than every rougelike out there does for dying at any point. The gameplay just sucks in every game and it always has MMO like legendary epic monster enemies to pad it out, this also destroys the atmosphere which rougelikes have a massive problem maintaining. Even the supposed best of the genre (Hades, Risk of Rain 2, The Binding of Isaac) had me feeling like I was working a desk job. I think the reason comes in two parts, firstly they can't make individual enemies and rooms too punishing since runs would end too quickly, so instead of making the game hard through difficult encounters in 9 times out of 10 they have to increase the difficulty through limited health recovery which sucks in the fast paced rougelike structure. The other reason gameplay sucks is because its all based around rng builds. It's always based around getting the best build and the best boons which is ALWAYS RNG. You can't just play the game, you've got to interact with annoying mechanics you don't want to because the RNG gave you the lung or something. The Binding of Isaac is literally all about making the most epic broken build and the actual gameplay suffers, it isn't fun to fight things normally in that game. Hades is one of the best in presentation but it suffers the same problems as all the others even if it does have much better core gameplay. Just look at the bosses in that game, there's only 4 in the entire game and its not a short title by any stretch, and it can only get away with this by padding the game time out with repeating the same damn rooms over and over again. Honestly now that I think about it they're the same sort of deal as Diablo, where its all a massive grind with no reward except Diablo is way worse since at least in rougelikes the reward is skill.

I think there's a space for rougelikes for the people who love to spend hours doing the same thing but I just wish indie devs especially would focus on hand crafted experiences even if they're much smaller rather than bloated rougelikes.
R: 7 / I: 0
So what's really going on with this company and Microsoft? I don't wanna here random bullshit, I want to know what the hell are they doing because as far as statistics are concerned Halo Infinite is failing and they're getting future single player development by gutting single player workers. I know that they were on a contractor hiring spree, is that one big reason? But this can't be it because they're letting go even in-house developers. When it comes to business sense how does any of this make any sense? I know that tech companies are laying off tons of people but these skeleton crews can barely manage and it's only hurting their profits or am I wrong?
R: 14 / I: 1
WHY is he making my laptop OVERHEAT and CRASH even when hes paused?
R: 9 / I: 0

chudchan is holding its 38th iteration of /int/craft

And this upcoming war is WW2. I think /leftypol/ should know because naturally there is a Soviet Union nation and this would be your great Patriotic War. Also some of yall have nothing better to do.
>After the success of ww1 /int/craft the intcraft community has been waiting for 2 years (since jan 2021 lol) for the new server! This intcraft is set in ww2 with the release date being February 17th. Join the fbi.gov to pick a nation and get defences up before the exciting weekend wars where every nation battles to gain territory. Set up nice builds to get materials from madmins, and craft gun parts to produce a wide variety of guns (brewery plugin also included). It'll be better the w*jcraft big promise
>DISCORD fbi.gov gg/hhM7acfKgm
>DYNMAP: map (dot) intcraft (dot) gay
>INFOPAGE: intcraft (dot) gay
t. /vm/
R: 2 / I: 1
Noelle the Idea vs Noelle the girl
R: 4 / I: 1

Man far cry 2 is a weird one

For a game that heavily prioritized realism in its design I’m a little confused as to why they didn’t go all the way with interactivity in the game

<How? A few reasons

The map of far cry 2 is small, like it takes less than 10 minutes to reach the end of the map by driving kind of small despite the game having cars you can tell the map really wasn’t designed with them in mind

NPCs in the game are really really static which is shocking because the enemies are really responsive to your behaviour and can cooperate with each other, with NPCs you can only talk to them briefly, not trade, not heal, not see them trading with other NPCs etc
For some reason they designed the players stamina to be unnaturally low and impossible to upgrade meaning you literally might as well be walking for most of your play through while although the devs added in things like jamming and breakable weapons they for some reason didn’t do what fallout 3 did and add in a limb system where the theirs penalties for getting shot too often in certain places

So many weird design decisions and missing features. At least to me what do y’all think?
R: 14 / I: 3
what is ur favorite videogame input (for each type of game)
R: 6 / I: 4
recommend me an android game pls. I got a new phone and I want to stress its mad grayphx chip
R: 22 / I: 1

PC Building Thread

Not sure if this should go here or on /tech/ but I will try here since I'm more interesting in a functional gaming PC than a linux box.

My PC is currently dying as I write this post, I got it around 2016-17 I think and since a week or two ago it is starting to lag horribly off and on just opening folders or trying to play a game at minimum settings.

What are the best resources for picking/building a setup? I want mid-high range PC probably but as I am in the UK prices are horrible and I will easily have to spend over £1000 to get anything decent.

Also any tips to revive my PC in the short term appreciated.
R: 38 / I: 40

/Blender/ general

>Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software tool set used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D-printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality, and, formerly, video games. Blender's features include 3D modelling, UV mapping, texturing, digital drawing, raster graphics editing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animation, match moving, rendering, motion graphics, video editing, and compositing.

This is a thread for discussing, learning blender and 3d modeling + animation.
R: 155 / I: 24

best/leftist videogame youtubers/content creators

what do ya'll watch on youtube? and which do you consider leftist-ish?

i personally can't get enough of

>SsethTzeentach

<probably more of a libertarian but has given a couple more jabs at capitalism lately
>Civvie11
<keeps his politics to himself but a lot of people agree is more left leaning
>Scott the Woz
<definitively a consoomer but even if unintentionally can be critical of capitalism at times
>Angry Videogame Nerd
<not likely leftist but it's always a classic
>Vinesauce
<not a leftist either but funny as hell
R: 0 / I: 0

General thoughts on flash party

It feels janky compared to smash bros and Brawlhalla but less janky and floaty in comparison to multiversus that’s it.

It’s not in the sense that the game is necessarily bad it’s just not anywhere near as developed as older platform or even traditional fighters. There’s no options to recover out of shield, it’s just on and then it’s not meaning if you block an attack you will still be hit by another attack right after. The only one that does exist is jumping and holding shield to air dodge back down to the ground which doesn’t save you from anything. Fast falling is the most useless shit to be implemented ingame, unlike in ROA, brawlhalla and melee your forwards momentum with it actually decreases to near zero while using it, coincidentally so is jumping. It is not fully controllable, there’s a limit to how high you can jump and how low you can as well something not seen in smash and brawl and because a lot of your momentum isn’t carried with it the mechanic feels really fucking bad to use



Actually there’s a lot of issues with this game similar to multiversus related to actions constantly stopping you in place for no reason or having no level of control over drifting. Outside of how janky movement feels and missing components old ass fighters from the 2000s already fixed the game is missing a lot of features. There isn’t actually a training mode at all, sure there are tutorials but like an ingame lab for players to test out exploits, combos, movement maneuvers whatever just aren’t there. There’s no gamemodes outside of ranked and randomly queuing against people online, the game has no campaign to speak of or a tournament mode, etc. I don’t know about it’s optimization being I’m having no problems running it on pc though others might. No crossplay, no availability on console or switch etc



Obviously the game is new and as time passes it may receive updates or changes that fixes the above but right now
R: 59 / I: 59

Rollerdrome

Best shooter of the last years. Mœbius in roller skates.
R: 24 / I: 10

Steam christmas sales 2022

so what did you all bought on the Steam sales?
let's share good games to play together or alone
have you refunded anything?

I bought

>Sea of Thieves

althought idk if i should refund it, i kinda like the game but the PVP always takes me down a rabbithole i don't wanna get into, specially since i'd be 1v3 at worst but i love pirates but i have no friends to play with me :(

>Intravenous

Refunded the shit out of it, it has the shittiest story i've ever seen and the workshop do be kinda empty
i liked the tacticool hotline miami idea but jesus, the fucking edge
<"a hobo killed my brother so now i'm gonna kill every fucking degenerate hobo in the city"
absolute cringe white trash power fantasy

<RUINER

had to refund it, is too hard and tbh i just bought it cus the OST has "Sidewalks and Skeletons" in it
not a bad game just not something i wanna spend my money and
time on

>bought Project Zomboid so i can play with my brother


he liked the game and i saw a mod that has the Striker 12 as a weapon

>"do you play games based on which weapons you can use in the game/mods?"

<Yes.

i have 100 MXN coming back from the refunds and i'm thinking of getting Bastard Bonds, saw Sseth review and i'm sold it looks like a fun game and i like tactical RPGs
R: 0 / I: 0
Were they based? They certainly seem to redistribute wealth at the very least. I played as an Advance supporter without hesitation the whole way
R: 13 / I: 1
do you agree with this pictures sentiment
R: 15 / I: 1
What games did you beat (for the first time) in 2022?
I really like single-player games, so I beat a bunch:
Loved:
-Megaman Legends
-Amnesia: the dark Descent
-Twisted Metal 2
-Twisted Metal: Black
-Half Life 2
-Half Life 2 episode 1
-Gran Turismo 4
-Supraland
Liked:
-Wolfenstein: the new order
-Need for Speed: Heat
-Gran Turismo 3
Disliked:
-Among the Sleep
-Amnesia: a machine for pigs
R: 9 / I: 2
any of y'all ever dabble with speedrunning? I find speedrunning fascinating, but I wouldn't want to try it, because it sounds miserable to me
R: 3 / I: 0

What do they mean by this

>Live in a fully automatized post-capitalist commune
>Kill each other to escape to a world they know is broken

This franchise is globocapital propaganda
R: 5 / I: 2

1945 turn-based game

Next month I'll be running a text-based, turn-based game set in the world of 1945. You can find the rules and who has signed up as what here: http://eregime.org/index.php?showtopic=20098

>ach turn represents a month gone by in-game. The game itself can last indefinitely, so long as players want it to continue and the world isn't destroyed by nuclear warfare. Each turn lasts for at least six days IRL, with the next turn normally posted on the seventh. However, a turn can be delayed up to four additional days if either the leaders of the United States or the Soviet Union requests it. All turn ETAs are located in the turn threads.


>

The game is played through carrying out actions (aka turn orders.) These can be whatever the player wants, although actions that are unrealistic or not possible will be pointed out to the player by the GM. The GM assigns the chance of success for your actions and their possible results, and will run the chances (on a scale of 1-100 with 100 being the most successful and 1 a total failure) through a random number generator to come up with said result. You can ask the GM what the probable chances of success are beforehand.
R: 7 / I: 1
I fucking love shitty mobile game ads

let's share the best we have, I'll go first
R: 27 / I: 10

Tactical RPG thread

i got 90 hours into XCOM 2 just this week, i'm enjoying the game almost as much as i enjoyed Jagged Alliance 2 the first time i played it.

let's talk about why Tactical RPGs are the best turn based RPGs and what is your favourite ones

and why we haven't seen as many decent ones in recent years

also XCOM 2 OST is the best thing i've heard in a good while
it also has an accidental anti-capitalist message about how easy is for olligarchs to take control over the world through corporate overlord puppets to harvest the life out of us.
R: 10 / I: 2

i just beat golden eye 007

i just beat golden eye 007 on secret agent difficulty (medium) and I don't feel good, because it was much harder than I thought it would be, this janky ass douchebag game. all of the levels in this game NEED to be really long, and then at the VERY END some bullshit happens that gets you killed instantly (like a bunch of enemies get spawned right behind you, and you only find out when they kill you, because they make no footstep sounds), and the game has n checkpoints, so you gotta do it all over again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the game is rly technically impressive though, and the gunplay feels great, so i get why it's so beloved, but it aged AWFULLY in my opinion

anyway, i didn't have anyone to tell about my feat, thx for listening to my scribbles
R: 2 / I: 0

Fear and Hunger: Termina

Anyone else has played the sequel to F&H? I‘ve played like half of it and also watched others play it. It seemed like an improvement in every game mechanical sense and new elements were added which gave it a novel touch. I‘m only disappointed over some of the endings. But the last game was also changed and expended over time, so perhaps the creator will change some things.
R: 5 / I: 0

Dark souls 2

It’s crazy knowing how much fromsoftwares design team started mutating the way they’d build future 3d action games like these based off this. And I specify dark souls 2 because it brought in the most significant amount of change, ds1 and demon souls were not necessarily hard or even complex games but with ds2 outside of just shitty mechanics that were later removed like the health or item durability thing shit like actual parry mechanics, stances, and a fuck ton of new animations the developers rolled out would see games like blood borne and sekiro brought out into fruition. You’d still see games like dark souls 3 and to a lesser extent elden ring that didn’t deviate to much from the original demon souls era design but man to say elements of ds2 didn’t heavily influence the design decisions or even just simple things of how enemies functions is naive.


This game changed alot
R: 23 / I: 4

Callisto Protocol

Are horror games the last bastion of anti-imperialism and leftism in the video game industry?
>Government experimenting with bioweapons research on prisoners
>Corporations profiting off the research
>Innocent proles who accidentally stumble onto their black sites getting arrested on dubious charges and thrown into the prison industrial complex
>Robots answering to Porky who can kill workers on demand
>Experimenting gets out of control (just like Covid) and Porky deciding to cover it all up by killing everyone
R: 10 / I: 0
Do you think people would want to play this? Asking because this project would cost a lot of time and money.

A game where you live in a giant robot with lots of people who survived a cataclysmic event. You're tasked with taking care of the people, and with appointing people for dealing with certain things (like engineering for the robot, health, politics, safety, and so forth). The giant robot would have to be almost always moving, for plot reasons, and the player would have to find resources and manage the politics in the robot to keep it moving. You'd also be able to upgrade the robot with better performance and/or a fancy interior and so forth.
R: 6 / I: 3

Minecraft Server Agitprop

I recently stumbled upon a mod that lets you export MineCraft books to a text file, and import them from clipboard. Seems like it could be worthwhile, or at least fun, to build libraries in various public MineCraft servers with leftist literature among their repertoire. Especially on cracked servers where people there will likely already have strong opinions about capitalism. Plus v1.20 is adding chiseled bookshelves, which can store books, so players will be actively curious about any library builds that use them.

What would be some good reads to try and make into Minecraft books? Keep in mind pages are limited to 798 characters with books containing 100 pages. Books longer than that would need to be multi-volume.

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/textbook
https://github.com/The-Fireplace-Minecraft-Mods/Textbook
R: 8 / I: 0
Does anyone here have one?
R: 0 / I: 0
Irrefutably the best game ever made hands down
R: 10 / I: 1

A few ideas for making elden ring combat more interesting without relying on parrying

Variable recovery time on hit.
3 hit movesets for weapon types.
Shield breaks


I thought about it but it would make the act of hitting enemies or enemies hitting you much more decisive if the attack speed when an attack is whiffed is lower than if you successfully hit an attack allowing for moves to be flowed well into each other encouraging aggression and faster play.


Additionally a quasi combo system could exist for these weapons that would rely more on motion input rather than button mashing and looking in the general direction of your opponent. How this would work would look like this
Each weapon has 3 moves
an opener(the attack you open with)
A followup(the attack that leads into the final one)
And a finished that closes off that specific attack but by adding in motion input for each weapon that allows for at least 12-9 basic three hit but blockable combos for each weapon allowing for a higher level of play. How motion input would function would be to allow both the player and the npc to be locked into a specific position at the same time while both figures are stuck in action and stun frames to ensure the player doesn’t have to be too concerned with positioning while preforming defensive or offensive actions after an attack is finished.


Shield breaks are a lot more straightforward. Simply input a heavy weapon specific 3 hit command to break someone holding blocking for too long to force them into a long duration of stun

What do you think? I think it would provide more incentives to play using close range and heavy weapons more outside of the damage.
R: 89 / I: 13

Space Station 13 (SS13)

ss13 thread
what servers do you usually play on?
what do you think of offshoots such as SS14 or unity station?
any greentext moments you want to share?
R: 2 / I: 1

hey commies

if communism is so good then why didnt the helghast succeed in their rebellion against earth?
R: 4 / I: 0

YEEEESSSSSSSSSSS

Helll fucking
YEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS😭😭😭
R: 10 / I: 0

Why does this mentality exist between these two communities

Why do fighting game players generally blame themselves for mistakes more often than fps and moba players. It sounds like a joke but this happens alot
R: 46 / I: 2

VICTORIA 3 PLAYABLE LEAK

I played it myself already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78TSMThTf-M
R: 18 / I: 10
>no thread for the game awards at all
>kid gets to sneak in and say some funny shit, /pol/ tards claim responsibility

holy shit this board is so dead lmao
R: 4 / I: 2

Congrats to epic games this was really well put together

This is fucking gorgeous and to all the people that spent their time developing the software and the team behind the art to make this game come so far you did great
R: 15 / I: 0

dead space remake

they're remaking dead space which is cool I guess
R: 5 / I: 0

Barotrauma

>2D coop "sidescroller" submarine indy game
>set in the icy seas of the Europa moon orbiting jupiter
>underwater aliens attacking your sub
>lovecraftian abyss horrors after a certain depth
>distinct roles doing various different tasks (captain, mechanic, engineer, medic, security)
>ragdoll physics
>brutal gameplay
>excellent, oppressing atmosphere
>amazing coop campaign
>can play solo, still fun
>can do RP
>can do one shot missions with a traitor on board or PVP sub vs sub
>a bit janky but definitely fun
>open source, big modding scene, no DRM
>can be grabbed for like 5 bucks on key resale
>inspired by "Pressure"

Discovered this gem with my regular gaming group recently. Anyone knows it? Any good story to tell?

https://barotraumagame.com/
R: 4 / I: 0

Foss alternatives to animal crossing?

I recently got a phone because my old one burned out a few years ago, and I saw there was a mobile animal crossing game called pocket camp. It was fun for a week or so, but they fucking drown you in mechanics that are just there to make you discontent so you buy the solution. Unplayable by level 42.

But it's still an endearing formula, and I'm wondering what FOSS games out there are the closest to animal crossing? Doesn't even need to be on mobile, my main concern is modding. And if there isn't anything all that close, I think a "Super Tux Crossing" game would be a cool project.

Art sauce: https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?illust_id=88013230&mode=medium
R: 13 / I: 1

Hell Let Loose Free Weekend

Never played it but installing now, anyone fancy grouping up?
R: 23 / I: 36

SCREENSHOT FRED

post screenshots!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!(?)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
R: 37 / I: 18
>Dose not see a oblivion thread
>Fine I’ll do it myself
R: 10 / I: 1

You know what. Single player action games will never have complex combat

Kingdom come deliverance and sekiro were the closest games ever to contain a mere fraction of the level of complexity and depth found in the average fighter with sekiro essentially serving as a block punish simulator made easy and kcd as the closest example of the skills in spacing and parrying needed in the average fighter but still gets too easy a few dozen hours in.

Action games certainly can have fun and rewarding combat systems but having systems that are as deeply complex and difficult to truly master found in a game like tekken, melee, guilty gear, injustice, brawlhalla, kof… Definitely not and that’s alright but that also means these games shouldn’t be so concerned over these systems and focus on literally anything else
R: 29 / I: 11

Command and Conquer thread

>Me
>Check leftypol games
>No Command and Conquer thread
>Fine, I'll do it myself

Post Command and Conquer comrades, whether it be Tiberium, Red Alert or Generals.
R: 4 / I: 0
>Be building the Refugees workers city
>The lords come
>Kick them out
>They come back, they're gravely ill
>Kick them out again
>They try to steal our resources
>Catch the thieves and execute them
>My people the workers are becoming violent towards the lords
>Have the resources to build guard depots and stop them doing violence
>Choose not to
>Game ends on the workers gong to the lord's camp and wiping them all out
>mfw
R: 15 / I: 1

Free unused steam codes thread

I'm going to post a master thread for fellers who want to share codes for games they are not going to use, I will specify that the codes I am posting are for steam, so please leave a note if the code is for another platform.


NXWDT-5JZP0-56NNP
N3IEA-8HYH7-J7V9I
P4JJQ-459NN-YM9AX
MNNG2-070FK-PPYTM
M2ZDL-MA4XE-IFCTQ
MCLLL-BDXKP-AGMK9
KTBTF-Y4QLL-59NGJ
M0VJ9-08GQN-WT94H
LVLJM-GFA62-G9RQH
PNAMA-22K6Q-HG4AQ
LCRM6-MPN2H-JXTG4
P9FXL-JNR5N-YCP7R
P50TK-WIMYZ-0ZV3W
Q8V89-TR8GQ-TKIGY
QMI2M-LEYL0-L8CXB
PFQXP-6NPDM-3IYYG
VE2BW-KZT7I-ZYNNY
RZ0AR-A2Q2N-QJIEY
V0YGQ-KA3TT-EYZCC
TK83C-PD40D-RHKZJ
XQRGX-VFA49-3765K
TIAEB-4DPZ4-HTIMY
XI8RN-T6AHX-ZBR98
R0YLZ-43W8Z-MBYRK
ZQ9N3-M4JNG-WFXM8
PXPCX-0CY9P-8HJ4R
Z55KV-GFFPY-PIA99
QNWYV-AG0NG-YI0KD
RJW4J-H4Y5H-6Q85W
XGHVD-28W6N-TIBVY
YT2P6-2WQFA-RKFD3
T4QCW-KVI9B-F0GZX
R: 21 / I: 5

To the Surprise of Absolutely Nobody: CoD is National Security State Propaganda

https://www.mintpressnews.com/call-of-duty-is-a-government-psyop-these-documents-prove-it/282781/

https://archive.ph/98mhA

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II has been available for less than three weeks, but it is already making waves. Breaking records, within ten days, the first-person military shooter video game earned more than $1 billion in revenue. Yet it has also been shrouded in controversy, not least because missions include assassinating an Iranian general clearly based on Qassem Soleimani, a statesman and military leader slain by the Trump administration in 2020, and a level where players must shoot “drug traffickers” attempting to cross the U.S./Mexico border.
The Call of Duty franchise is an entertainment juggernaut, having sold close to half a billion games since it was launched in 2003. Its publisher, Activision Blizzard, is a giant in the industry, behind titles games as the Guitar Hero, Warcraft, Starcraft, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Crash Bandicoot and Candy Crush Saga series.
Yet a closer inspection of Activision Blizzard’s key staff and their connections to state power, as well as details gleaned from documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Call of Duty is not a neutral first-person shooter, but a carefully constructed piece of military propaganda, designed to advance the interests of the U.S. national security state.

Military-Entertainment Complex
It has long been a matter of public record that American spies have targeted and penetrated Activision Blizzard games. Documents released by Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA, CIA, FBI and Department of Defense infiltrated the vast online realms such as World of Warcraft, creating make-believe characters to monitor potential illegal activity and recruit informers. Indeed, at one point, there were so many U.S. spies in one video game that they had to create a “deconfliction” group as they were wasting time unwittingly surveilling each other. Virtual games, the NSA wrote, were an “opportunity” and a “target-rich communication network”.
However, documents obtained legally under the Freedom of Information Act by journalist and researcher Tom Secker and shared with MintPress News show that the connections between the national security state and the video game industry go far beyond this, and into active collaboration.
In September 2018, for example, the United States Air Force flew a group of entertainment executives – including Call of Duty/Activision Blizzard producer Coco Francini – to their headquarters at Hurlburt Field, Florida. The explicit reason for doing so, they wrote, was to “showcase” their hardware and to make the entertainment industry more “credible advocates” for the U.S. war machine.
“We’ve got a bunch of people working on future blockbusters (think Marvel, Call of Duty, etc.) stoked about this trip!” wrote one Air Force officer. Another email notes that the point of the visit was to provide “heavy-hitter” producers with “AFSOC [Air Force Special Operations Command] immersion focused on Special Tactics Airmen and air-to-ground capabilities.”
“This is a great opportunity to educate this community and make them more credible advocates for us in the production of any future movies/television productions on the Air Force and our Special Tactics community,” wrote the AFSOC community relations chief.
Francini and others were shown CV-22 helicopters and AC-130 planes in action, both of which feature heavily in Call of Duty games.
Yet Call of Duty collaboration with the military goes back much further. The documents show that the United States Marine Corps (USMC) was involved in the production of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty 5. The games’ producers approached the USMC at the 2010 E3 entertainment convention in Los Angeles, requesting access to hovercrafts (vehicles which later appeared in the game). Call of Duty 5 executives also asked for use of a hovercraft, a tank and a C-130 aircraft.
This collaboration continued in 2012 with the release of Modern Warfare 4, where producers requested access to all manner of air and ground vehicles.
Secker told MintPress that, by collaborating with the gaming industry, the military ensures a positive portrayal that can help it reach recruitment targets, stating that,


For certain demographics of gamers it’s a recruitment portal, some first-person shooters have embedded adverts within the games themselves…Even without this sort of explicit recruitment effort, games like Call of Duty make warfare seem fun, exciting, an escape from the drudgery of their normal lives.”

Secker’s documentary, “Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood” was released earlier this year.

The military clearly held considerable influence over the direction of Call of Duty games. In 2010, its producers approached the Department of Defense (DoD) for help on a game set in 2075. However, the DoD liaison “expressed concern that [the] scenario being considered involves future war with China.” As a result, Activision Blizzard began “looking at other possible conflicts to design the game around.” In the end, due in part to military objections, the game was permanently abandoned.

From War on Terror to first-person shooters
Not only does Activision Blizzard work with the U.S. military to shape its products, but its leadership board is also full of former high state officials. Chief amongst these is Frances Townsend, Activision Blizzard’s senior counsel, and, until September, its chief compliance officer and executive vice president for corporate affairs.
Prior to joining Activision Blizzard, Townsend spent her life working her way up the rungs of the national security state. Previously serving as head of intelligence for the Coast Guard and as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s counterterrorism deputy, in 2004, President Bush appointed her to his Intelligence Advisory Board.
As the White House’s most senior advisor on terrorism and homeland security, Townsend worked closely with Bush and Rice, and became one of the faces of the administration’s War on Terror. One of her principal achievements was to whip the American public into a constant state of fear about the supposed threat of more Al-Qaeda attacks (which never came).

As part of her job, Townsend helped popularize the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” – a Bush-era euphemism for torturing detainees. Worse still, Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, the officer in charge of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, alleged that Townsend put pressure on him to ramp up the torture program, reminding him “many, many times” that he needed to improve the intelligence output from the Iraqi jail.
Townsend has denied these allegations. She also later condemned the “handcuff[ing]” and “humiliation” surrounding Abu Ghraib. She was not referring to the prisoners, however. In an interview with CNN, she lamented that “these career professionals” – CIA torturers – had been subject to “humiliation and opprobrium” after details of their actions were made public, meaning that future administrations would be “handcuffed” by the fear of bad publicity, while the intelligence community would become more “risk-averse”.
During the Trump administration, Townsend was hotly tipped to become the Director of National Intelligence or the Secretary of Homeland Security. President Trump also approached her for the role of director of the FBI. Instead, however, Townsend took a seemingly incongruous career detour to become an executive at a video games company.

Enter the War planners
In addition to this role, Townsend is a director of the NATO offshoot, the Atlantic Council, a director at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a trustee of the hawkish think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a group MintPress News has previously covered in detail.
Funded by weapons companies, NATO and the U.S. government, the Atlantic Council serves as the military alliance’s brain trust, devising strategies on how best to manage the world. Also on its board of directors are high statespersons like Henry Kissinger and Conzoleezza Rice, virtually every retired U.S. general of note, and no fewer than seven former directors of the CIA. As such, the Atlantic Council represents the collective opinion of the national security state.
Two more key Call of Duty staff also work for the Atlantic Council. Chance Glasco, a co-founder of Infinity Ward developers who oversaw the game franchise’s rapid rise, is the council’s nonresident senior fellow, advising top generals and political leaders on the latest developments in tech.

Game designer and producer Dave Anthony, crucial to Call of Duty’s success, is also an Atlantic Council employee, joining the group in 2014. There, he advises them on what the future of warfare will look like, and devises strategies for NATO to fight in upcoming conflicts.
Anthony has made no secret that he collaborated with the U.S. national security state while making the Call of Duty franchise. “My greatest honor was to consult with Lieut. Col. Oliver North on the story of Black Ops 2,” he stated publicly, adding, There are so many small details we could never have known about if it wasn’t for his involvement.”
Oliver North is a high government official gained worldwide infamy after being convicted for his role in the Iran-Contra Affair, whereby his team secretly sold weapons to the government of Iran, using the money to arm and train fascist death squads in Central America – groups who attempted to overthrow the government of Nicaragua and carried out waves of massacres and ethnic cleansing in the process.

Republicans for hire
Another eyebrow-raising hire is Activision Blizzard’s chief administration officer, Brian Bulatao. A former Army captain and consultant for McKinsey & Company, until 2018, he was chief operating officer for the CIA, placing him third in command of the agency. When CIA Director Mike Pompeo moved over to the State Department, becoming Trump’s Secretary of State, Bulatao went with him, and was appointed Under Secretary of State for Management.
There, by some accounts, he served as Pompeo’s personal “attack dog,” with former colleagues describing him as a “bully” who brought a “cloud of intimidation” over the workplace, repeatedly pressing them to ignore potential illegalities happening at the department. Thus, it is unclear if Bulatao is the man to improve Activision Blizzard’s notoriously “toxic” workplace environment that caused dozens of employees to walk out en masse last summer.
After the Trump administration’s electoral defeat, Bulatao went straight from the State Department into the highest echelons of Activision Blizzard, despite no experience in the entertainment industry.

The third senior Republican official Activision Blizzard has recruited to its upper ranks is Grant Dixton. Between 2003 and 2006, Dixton served as associate counsel to President Bush, advising him on many of his administration’s most controversial legal activities (such as torture and the rapid expansion of the surveillance state). A lawyer by trade, he later went on to work for weapons manufacturer Boeing, rising to become its senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary. In June 2021, he left Boeing to join Activision Blizzard as its chief legal officer.
Other Activision Blizzard executives with backgrounds in national security include senior vice president and chief information security officer Brett Wahlin, who was a U.S. Army counterintelligence agent, and chief of staff, Angela Alvarez, who, until 2016, was an Army chemical operations specialist.
That the same government that was infiltrating games 10-15 years ago now has so many former officials controlling the very game companies raises serious questions around privacy and state control over media, and mirrors the national security state penetration of social media that has occurred over the same timeframe.

War games
These deep connections to the U.S. national security state can perhaps help partly explain why, for years, many have complained about the blatant pro-U.S. propaganda apparent throughout the games.
The latest installment, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, is no exception. In the game’s first mission, players must carry out a drone strike against a character named
The latest installment, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, is no exception. In the game’s first mission, players must carry out a drone strike against a character named General Ghorbrani. The mission is obviously a recreation of the Trump administration’s illegal 2020 drone strike against Iranian General Qassem Soleimani – the in game general even bears a striking resemblance to Soleimani.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II ludicrously presents the general as under Russia’s thumb and claims that Ghorbrani is “supplying terrorists” with aid. In reality, Soleimani was the key force in defeating ISIS terror across the Middle East – actions for which even Western media declared him a “hero”. U.S.-run polls found that Soleimani was perhaps the most popular leader in the Middle East, with over 80% of Iranians holding a positive opinion of him.
Straight after the assassination, Pompeo’s State Department floated the falsehood that the reason they killed Soleimani was that he was on the verge of carrying out a terror attack against Americans. In reality, Soleimani was in Baghdad, Iraq, for peace talks with Saudi Arabia.
These negotiations could have led to peace between the two nations, something that the U.S. government is dead against. Then-Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi revealed that he had personally asked President Trump for permission to invite Soleimani. Trump agreed, then used the opportunity to carry out the killing.
Therefore,, just as Activision Blizzard is recruiting top State Department officials to its upper ranks, its games are celebrating the same State Department’s most controversial assassinations.
This is far from the first time Call of Duty has instructed impressionable young gamers to kill foreign leaders, however. In Call of Duty Black Ops (2010), players must complete a mission to murder Cuban leader Fidel Castro. If they manage to shoot him in the head, they are rewarded with an extra gory slow motion scene and obtain a bronze “Death to Dictators” trophy. Thus, players are forced to carry out digitally what Washington failed to do on over 600 occasions.

Likewise, Call of Duty: Ghosts is set in Venezuela, where players fight against General Almagro, a socialist military leader clearly modelled on former president Hugo Chavez. Like Chavez, Almagro wears a red beret and uses Venezuela’s oil wealth to forge an alliance of independent Latin American nations against the U.S. Washington attempted to overthrow Chavez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, multiple times. During the sixth mission of the game, players must shoot and kill Almagro from close range.
The anti-Russian propaganda is also turned up to 11 in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019). One mission recreates the infamous Highway of Death incident. During the First Iraq War, U.S.-led forces trapped fleeing Iraqi troops on Highway 80. What followed was what then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell described as “wanton killing” and “slaughter for slaughter’s sake” as U.S. troops and their allies pummeled the Iraqi convoy for hours, killing hundreds and destroying thousands of vehicles. U.S. forces also reportedly shot hundreds of Iraqi civilians and surrendered soldiers in their care.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare recreates this scene for dramatic effect. However, in their version, it is not the U.S.-led forces doing the killing, but Russia, thereby whitewashing a war crime by pinning the blame on official enemies.

“Call of Duty, in particular, has been flagged up for recreating real events as game missions and manipulating them for geopolitical purposes,” Secker told MintPress, referring to the Highway of Death, adding,


In a culture where most people’s exposure to games (and films, TV shows and so on) is far greater than their knowledge of historical and current events, these manipulations help frame the gamers’ emotional, intellectual and political reactions. This helps them turn into more general advocates for militarism, even if they don’t sign up in any formal way.”

Secker’s latest book, “Superheroes, Movies and the State: How the U.S. Government Shapes Cinematic Universes,” was published earlier this year.

Game Over
In today’s digitized era, the worlds of war and video games increasingly resemble one another. Many have commented on the similarities between piloting drones in real life and in games such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Prince Harry, who was a helicopter gunner in Afghanistan, described his “joy” at firing missiles at enemies. “I’m one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think I’m probably quite useful,” he said. “If there’s people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we’ll take them out of the game,” he added, explicitly comparing the two activities. U.S. forces even control drones with Xbox controllers, blurring the lines between war games and war games even further.
The military has also directly produced video games as promotional and recruitment tools. One is a U.S. Air Force game called Airman Challenge. Featuring 16 missions to complete, interspersed with facts and recruitment information about how to become a drone operator yourself. In its latest attempts to market active service to young people, players move through missions escorting U.S. vehicles through countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, serving up death from above to all those designated “insurgents” by the game.
Players earn medals and achievements for most effectively destroying moving targets. All the while, there is a prominent “apply now” button on screen if players feel like enlisting and conducting real drone strikes on the Middle East.
U.S. Armed Forces use the popularity of video games to recruit heavily among young people, sponsoring gaming tournaments, fielding their own U.S. Army Esports team, and directly trying to recruit teens on streaming sites such as Twitch. The Amazon-owned platform eventually had to clamp down on the practice after the military used fake prize giveaways that lured impressionable young viewers onto recruitment websites.
Video games are a massive business and a huge center of soft power and ideology. The medium makes for particularly persuasive propaganda because children and adolescents consume them, often for weeks or months on end, and because they are light entertainment. Because of this, users do not have their guards up like if they were listening to a politician speaking. Their power is often overlooked by scholars and journalists because of the supposed frivolity of the medium. But it is the very notion that these are unimportant sources of fun that makes their message all the more potent.
The Call of Duty franchise is particularly egregious, not only in its messaging, but because who the messengers are. Increasingly, the games appear to be little more than American propaganda masquerading as fun first-person shooters. For gamers, the point is to enjoy its fast-paced entertainment. But for those involved in their production, the goal is not just making money; it is about serving the imperial war machine.
R: 2 / I: 1

amsa is fucking inspiring man

He really makes you realize how dedication can make you just flat out dominate people whom you never thought you could
R: 41 / I: 8

Gunplay differences between retro and modern FPS games

>retro
Typically will use static crosshairs
Recoil patterns are often predictable
Focus on precise shots are encouraged
Typically aiming isn’t a feature
Either deeply encourage motion as a core part of progression like with quake and doom or actively encourage slower tactical focused gameplay like in CS or SWAT 4
>modern FPS
movement is a core component along with fast reactions
Focus on precise aim isn’t fully encouraged with more focus on immediate action to resolve conflict
Spread and recoil may be predictable but typically will rely on other factors like distance, weapon inertia, the environment itself with things like wind and bullet drop
Aiming is heavily encouraged to focus shots properly often especially with sniping requiring more focus with things like scope wobbling

What do you guys think about these two variations of shooting in these games?
R: 0 / I: 0

An AI named Cicero can beat humans in Diplomacy, a complex alliance-building game. Here’s why that’s

https://theconversation.com/an-ai-named-cicero-can-beat-humans-in-diplomacy-a-complex-alliance-building-game-heres-why-thats-a-big-deal-195208
>An AI named Cicero can beat humans in Diplomacy, a complex alliance-building game. Here’s why that’s a big deal
Also Diplomacy general I guess
R: 20 / I: 7

Far Cry 2

Is Far Cry 2 a leftist game? It's setting is Africa and it's factions are based on groups that vy for power in Africa with mercenaries on either side and the main antagonist "The Jackal" who sells weapons to both groups and who despite doing this he heavily criticizes the US exploiting Africa for cheap goods people in the US use.
R: 7 / I: 3

Experimental

Post experimental games. Doesn't have to be modern or particularly abstract.

Short rushed game-jam creations are fine (like Receiver, or the SUPERHOT 2013 prototype, although that was inspired by the Flash game "Time4Cat").
R: 7 / I: 0

Watching cod fans rage over movement tech in arena shooters is some funny fucking shit

B hopping and sliding has been in these types of games for fucking ages and it’s not even something that’s hard to learn either it’s just a fundamental skill that takes a few minutes to get the hang of and alot of practice to hit consistently. Cod fans rage quitting and screaming over cod veterans playing arena shooters as arena shooters is funny and also clarifies why activitision doesn’t and shouldn’t give to flying shits about whatever the fuck their fans screech about


Like imagine if capcom redesigned street fighter 6 completely simply because new players were bitching and whining about projectile spam ahahahahah
R: 15 / I: 6
Name a worse father
R: 10 / I: 2
Well yes I play Mercy as a DPS how could you tell?
R: 27 / I: 20

Glowie Games General

Get a load of this shit lmao