/games/ - Games

I've started the game and there were definitely some good moments so far. The characters seem well done, the quests are accessible and combining them with the thought mechanic seems like a good decision overall. My biggest gripe so far is with the skills themselves. To explain this i need to back up a bit and elaborate on how you would build a specific character in Disco Elysium:

While skills have very diverse characterizations, their uses are mostly in line with their governing attributes. The exception to this i would call "crossover skills", like shivers, drama or composure. These serve a dual purpose: For example allowing a high int, low psyche build to still receive some context on people, and incentivizing a low int, high psyche players to invest in this skill.

The problem with Ebb Esoteric's skills is they seem even more diverse in application, while not allowing for the same degree of granularity. A talky character will need high cha, as well as decent end and wis to advance most conversations, with flirting being seemingly gated behind non-crappy str also. In my current playthrough this has forced me to use dex as a dump stat.

At the moment end also feels like the most undercooked skill. Actually it would be totally in character for volition to ecstatically support a declining political movement almost nobody talks about, but even that bit of characterization seems to be missing.

The political dialog appears very tryhard in how closely it mirrors current-day, real-world issues. I can't believe how casually it injects capitalist realism into a late-medieval society, which should very much be suspicious of trade (see the physiocrats).

It's also a bit jarring how insecure the Cleric is in his masculinity. When there isn't even anything comparable to Harry's deep-seated wömen issues, because his interactions more closely follow a lovable scamp archetype, the regular talk about feeling emasculated (dawg can't even pick up a magazine) and shame about not being in a relationship come across as lowkey incel-ish.

>>46292
i am communicating that youre a retarded politically impotent pseud 👍 its still communication even if you dont like it lmao

>>46348
Uygga I wrote what you replied to not him, but you should maybe answer him when asked

I guess i should write down some more thoughts after finishing the game. If you liked Disco Elysium, you should definitely give this a try. Narratively it is full of memorable characters and layered situations. Thematically it's a muddle though. It may be at its best when it's in conversation with genre tropes, like the mysterious progenitor races, the non-human underclass or the benevolent ancestral deity.

I think adding largely superficial modern elements was their worst thematic decision overall. They establish enough parallels to the real world to make many things quite unambiguous like the freestriders being literal hegemonic imperialists, who you would only vote for as an unironic capitalist realist, or the nationalists canonically being bought by them and really diminish any nuance there was in these ideologies differing from their real-world counterparts. Only praxian magocracy and radical agrarianism seem specifically tailored to the setting.

I particularly like how densely connected the two top layers of the city are. The dungeon layout leaves something to be desired, since it's maybe 7 points of interests connected by a few intersecting corridors and one preemptive shortcut. The environment art itself i'd say serve its purpose, while not really being noteworthy.

The quest system didn't turn out to be as good as it looked initially. For one it doesn't record minor quests, which would have helped with keeping track of some minor details or cleared up when a time limited quest expired or the questgiver was already dead. Having traits be determined by your decision, which will most likely boil down to which clearly stated bonus is better for your character, also cheapens the outcome. You're not getting any flavor text beyond things that are otherwise tracked, which are class and political affiliation. In fact i my character started refering to himself as a wizard, then pivoted to a druid and chose the associated trait. Due to both being tracked, people mentioned both at different times and i ended up chosing some more wizard option, because they gave exp for some reason, despite in no other way contributing to the final character sheet.

Some of the balancing is also off (in a bad way), as i found out after acquiring the jester halfway throughPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>46083
The women of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre of men after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of the female body.

>>46131
I found the perfect DL "straight" married guy who will fix you with his big straight cock, he lives in Brazil and is willing to move to your location. Give me your contact so I can put you and your therapist together

What do you mean by okay? There are plenty of rape video games that exist, they're just porn games because who gives a shit if you can't actually see the deed lol

It's simple to self-justify killing a nameless enemy if they're trying to kill you first. There isn't a similar equivalence for rape; if they're trying to rape you, you'd probably feel better about just killing them instead of trying to rape them before they can rape you. Rape is more personal and more explicitly about domination, and it's harder for players to feel justified in doing it. Violence is ubiquitous in games because it's easy to design, even if an ambitious designer could add in many other options like dialogue, intimidation, stealth, or a low-level henchman calculating whether it's wise to try and fight the murderhobo that killed all their colleagues. Some games do let you murder people who aren't a threat to you, but that's rarely presented as a good thing. And they don't dwell on the NPC's mortal terror and death unless it's a story beat because the reward is usually concrete within the game like experience or some other progression rather than sadism on the player's part.

>>46083
Rape isn't very versatile. You can't rape 100 people in a single minute using a machine gun or automate rape using a wall of flamethrower turrets. You can't lead a rape band of guys in a medieval europe analogue that keeps raping increasingly strong groups of people and gets resources off their, uh, out of action bodies.
A game about rape could maybe be fun but that would require real innovation and effort from the creator, and it sure won't allow for a hundred different game genres to flourish. That, and most people actually don't like rape. It's not cool, no reason to do it. But people love killing their enemies.
People like >>46085 kinda make sense if you forget that we live in a time when no one gives a single fuck about what treating anything with respect means and the aforementioned nerds can and do just make the games themselves regardless of what woke snowflakes think.

>>46352
Everytime they turn it on it hurts my eyes. I hate that framerate upscale every TV seems to come with by default and it's sad how many people leave it on. Don't they get that movies have long been shot on 24 fps intentionally because people like the look of it better. I just watched the examples on a little screen and I could still feel eye strain. The unfiltered games look kinda like a toy, but the DLSS looked like one of those fake HDR renders which doesn't look "realistic" to my eyes. Also, some of their choices of games look intentionally stylized so why would anyone want to see the anime girl AI regenerated as a photorealistic woman?

look at the comment kek, digital foundry is "independent" now btw

>>46353
horrifying
there are probably decent use case, but largely it will just kill any coherent, unique and cool graphic design and uniformize everything.

apparently they could only do this shit with two 5090 cards running together, so it's just bullshit for investors

Also found one of the teasers on fucking bleachbooru lmao

>>46332
Wut

I am considering making a schizo/joke mod where Fred Trump, leader of the KKK, leads a coup d'état against the American government in the mid 1930s. Is this something people might find interesting?
It will actually be for DH but there's no thread for that game.

Don't think you can have political changes in game in DH, no focus tree and all the other politics-fluff

>>46362
You absolutely can, though I'm still debating if the coup should occur before game start.

>>46302

my entire team couldn't leave the spawn because of it.

>>46305

i don't think i even saw a single Zarya

keep in mind this was like earliest Steam release

>>45885
Zenyatta dealt a lot of damge, but he absolutely needed to headshot you to hold an entire team back like wtf?
Also there always was a counter to that strat, you pick reinhart lol (or genji counter and two shot him if he just spams spawn with no rest if you feel it's tooooo braindead)
Now tanks are overpowered on purpose since there is only one (or maybe they changed back yo 6v6? I don't fucking know)

I hate the Far Cry series, but Far Cry 2 is my favorite FPS by far.
It's a slow and brutal open-world immersive sim that requires both planning and improvisation. There's so many ways in which you can approach anything in this game, but if you just mindlessly rush head-first into problems the game will hit you back hard. The game is actually very minimalist in the sense that there's no bloat or interruptions or restrictions, it's just you and the world's systems. All the game does is it gives you some generic objective and then leaves you to your own devices. The real challenge is the world itself.
It's a completely different game from the rest of the series and should be released under a different name. I wish it had become its own series separate from the FC3+ power fantasy / mini-game / crafting slop that treats its players like they're idiots.
Also, the game looks very beautiful despite being almost 20 years old, the way sun rays shine through trees, the way shadows are crushed and lifted when the sun is low, the way it gets foggy in the morning. It's all very well optimized and runs smoothly on Linux (via Wine) on my potato laptop. And I actually prefer the original unsaturated warm look to the modded garish/cartoonish colors that clash with each other too much and take attention away from the beautiful light in this game. (If anyone decides to play with the usually recommended realism+redux mod, there's an "original colors" version of that mod on moddb.)

ultrakill

The story and voice acting is extremely cringe. Good gameplay thoughbeit.

>>46337
Whats wrong with the story?

>>46337
what's wrong with the voice acting?

>>46339
>>46341
Every SL is a caricature and we even have awful fourth-wall-breaking culture war "jokes" like pic related. Pirate voice lines are way too tryhard. Hayflick sounds like a junior intern fresh out of school rather than a military adjutant. Just a really shoddy plot and voice acting and writing all around but that's to be expected for this genre since it's not like XCOM did any better.

>>46344

pirates being cringe is nice because it makes me hate them.

rarely cringe at any other voicelines tho.

>>46301
Stuntman
They haven't made anything like this since

>>46322
>the secular west is a lot more prudish when it comes to cheating
For men. That is a common attitude in patriarchal societies, it is no biggie when a man cheats, but capital offense for a woman.

>>46324
dont ruin my only sort of formed thought with a mundane yet accurate observation

games peaked somewhere in the mid to late 90s. post 9/11 it was already too late.

>>46301
grand theft auto san andreas

you probably havent heard of it it's really good

Can I have sex in this game?

i really like the games those 2 beautiful brothers make. i wanna make my own ascii/text adventure game

>>46035
you can not only have sex but turn right wing judges into your loyal sex slaves

>>42770
LCS has a way lower learning curve than DF

I only go on imageboards(bad)
>>45661
and I only watch youtubers who I already know pre-AI(good)
It's the sloppiest of gamer tubers who adopted AI shit

>>45661
It's just really sad to me since this series had such a nice community back in the day. They were out here doing like 3D animations before PSO came out, actual fanart (pic related), fanfiction, it all looks so much more human than what it is now.
Like I can't in good will look at some douchebags praising some AI slop bullshit recreation of the PS2 title screen, which actively takes away from the original art (because AI prompts are specifically coded to draw women a certain way), as anything other than sheer irony.
They literally exemplify everything the original game warned us about, but they can't see that because they literally don't value old games, they only like them BECAUSE they're old. If they came out today they'd probably never even glance at them.

>>45661
Maybe because it's all hot garbage
Battletoads? Cucked platform beatemup where the floor itself is a texture or hit box when it feels like it.

Fire Emblem? Convoluted gooner slop and the gooning is behind seven proxies of requirements anyway.

FF Legends/SaGa? Nonsensical resource management and non coherent threat levels proportional to level or assumed level. (But still turn based because easier coding)

Earthbound? Take the worst elements of FF Legends and now make it insufferable. Reddit of course praises it.

If you like any of this shit you should be dragged out of your home by ice and beaten

I don't wanna hear your excuses either. You're supposedly a communist and hear your are doing monkey tricks for the bourgeois who couldn't even bother to program a decent game and still expected to make money off it because millenials were even more retarded than zoomers.

>Is it fun and whimsical?
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>45896
>retro games le bad
What about
>STGs
>Arcade fighters
>Adventure games
>CRPGs
>RPG platformers
>2D Metroid
>2D Sonic
>Pokemon ROM hacks
>Katamari
though?

>>45898
peaksauce

>>46225

but birdo also lays eggs!

>>46222
>Yoshi is male but lays eggs??
Another Epstein reference btw

>>46227
what was his reply

>>46227
It's like 911 All over again.

>>46259
he doesn't reply in the full video