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[Frumple]

... isn't star citizen that one that's drummed up like half a billion dollars and still hasn't produced a finished product despite over a decade of development? If that's the same thing it's pretty infamous for having a whole slew of problems, iirc.

[Jopax]

A few things, first off, today I learned that one of my all time favorite RTS games, a little known cult classic Battle Realms which came out right before WC3 has a sort of remaster edition going on? The original was available for free on GoG a while back but that one had issues, mostly relating to trying run an early 2000's game on a modern system. The remaster has been out on Steam (linky) for almost three years now and has been updated and polished up in that time. I am super happy to be able to lose time with it since it was such a well made take on the classic formula, with enough changes to make it interesting but nothing that was so out there that it felt like a gimmick. Plus it's kinda cheap at only 9-ish euros.

Second thing, that will probably warrant a thread eventually but I can't be arsed to make one right now is that ORX (linky) is out on EA on Steam. There was a demo for it a while back and it's what got me excited for the game in the first place. What is ORX you ask? Well it's this funky little mix of a tower defense, deck-building roguelite and Carcassone of all things. All packed in this very striking graphic style and with some nice music to boot.
It's fairly simple of a concept, you have your town center you gotta protect from several waves of ORX on each map. You do that by playing cards which build roads to give you money (your main resource), place down support buildings that buff or heal or do any number of weird effects, cast spells, put down troops and finally, assemble castles from many tiles of different shapes. It's super satisfying once you get the hang of it to be able to plan out and daisy-chain a massive fortress that envelops most of your other buildings and rains absolute shitloads of arrows on anything that comes near.
And this is just one of the factions, the other one being very different in that it doesn't really build castles but instead relies on amassing troops and using those for a mobile defense.
They're planning more factions/cards/enemies/everything else down the line, but the game is fairly feature complete even at this point and I've sunk more than enough hours into it to make the price of 12-ish euros well worth it.

[Folly]

... isn't star citizen that one that's drummed up like half a billion dollars and still hasn't produced a finished product despite over a decade of development? If that's the same thing it's pretty infamous for having a whole slew of problems, iirc.

Yeah. Again, I haven't played a ton, but in my short time with the game the major issues I've encountered are a lack of ownership system, which allows me to rob everyone blind and none of the NPC's even notice. Held items frequently bug out, preventing me from picking them up or putting them down, which can completely break quest progression. And AI is super derpy, to the point that it's more unusual to find an NPC who is not calmly walking straight into a wall in the middle of a firefight.
But bugs and unimplemented features can be fixed. My greater concern is that even if all of those things were addressed, you would still be left with an underlying game that is very basic. It's an MMO with absolutely nothing to incentivize player interaction; they could make it a single player game and nothing would be lost. And the missions have no dynamic range; you read the description and know exactly what you're going to be doing, exactly the same as the last time you took one of these missions.

[Il Palazzo]

ORX (linky) is out on EA on Steam.

ORX is fun. Not terribly deep, but addictive. I especially like the 'corruption' mechanic that basically lets you adjust the difficulty as you play while tempting you with some bonuses. I invariably get greedy and get myself killed.
It can feel somewhat front-loaded with the difficulty, though. Most of the time the biggest (or only) challenge in a stage is surviving the first, maybe two waves, as you struggle to get the basic infrastructure going. The remainder tends to be a foregone conclusion.
But since you unlock more cards for the orx as well as yourself as you play, it gets harder overall with time.

[askovdk]

The Tomorrow Children
Is back on PS4/5 and this time without monetization. It also means that it's not free-to-play (it's actually somewhat expensive), but it's great to be back being a benevolent worker for the greater good in a Soviet children TV style.

The shortest description I can give to newcomers is, that it's the altruistic helping unknown others from Death Stranding in a world of soviet wooden dolls.

https://www.q-games.com/en/ttc-pe-en/

[Aoi]

Stacklands: Like the gameplay of Cultist Simulator, but if you'd rather have it as a village survival game, as opposed to a kind of kind of rambling puzzle game.

It's kind of rough around the edges, very 'breakable', but surprisingly entertaining.

Spoiler: Spoilery tip if you want to avoid a surprise loss halfway through a run. (click to show/hide)

Do NOT 'activate' the Temple building unless you can field an absolute army.

[Aoi]

Foretales... feels like Underhand with the narrative progression of Stories: The Path of Destinies. And if that makes no sense, it's a card-based game where you're shuffling around limited resources trying to get enough of a specific resource to overcome the upcoming challenge, and a storyline that forces you to decide between conflicting goals. It's narrative-based, and entertaining enough.

Spoiler: For more details... (click to show/hide)

The general gameplay is pretty simple; you have a location cards, action cards, and consumable cards. You play your cards on locations, resolve it, replace the location, repeat. The game is pretty good about telling you the results of an action, and the locations are in a fixed, viewable, order; there's actually very little RNG in this game. Each mission consists of multiple areas, resources persist across areas, but (outside of storyline items) are reset between missions. You have a finite amount of actions with limited restores, often at a penalty. Each area has a specific objective (which can have multiple solutions), and there's usually a peaceful solution to each area. The downside is that, unless you've memorized how your cards interact in a given area, you're going to be doing a lot of mouse waggling back and forth to check what the best option is. Also, much more notably, I don't think there's any indicator as to what your action cards do in combat when you're not in combat, so you're going to have to memorize those too.

Does get a tad less interesting on subsequent playthroughs if you're astute though, as about half the areas can be rigged such that you can cycle profitable locations infinitely.

As far as storyline goes, it's fine. You're some pickpocket with a Big Job that involves you stealing an artifact that gets triggered that lets you see the branches of fate (major storyline events that you have to choose between), and watch as the world burns down around you, metaphorically speaking. Zombies, pirates, cultists, bandits... it's pretty hodgepodge, but it works out. There's also a lot of storyline altering events that develop organically (or at least feel like they do), which is a nice touch.

"Can I plunge my coconuts into your tar barrel?"
"Buy me a drink first."

[Robsoie]

Finally completed Vampyr and enjoyed it tremendously.

some spoiler-free wall of text :

Spoiler: yeah no real spoiler (click to show/hide)

Took me a long time because i had to restart from scratch at some point of my first run as i didn't had fun anymore due to the constant near impossible odds.
My mistake was my original choice (trying to keep Jonathan Reid as a good guy by murdering no NPC), this made my character simply too weak in comparison to how the difficulty progression had set my enemies (and me not really managing to get used to my keys choices, that was a disaster), and mixed with my a bit underestimated difficulty level this wasn't fun for me at some point.

On my 2nd run some NPC were turned into food to help Reid rising in power quickly.

... And what a difference it did as the only difficulty were then the bosses fights (and not all of them) as once i got used to my dodge key , along his "powers of massive killing" my character became nearly unstoppable doing an absolute carnage in the ranks of the skals, vampire hunters and other monsters that in my previous run were too strong, tanking everything the enemy was throwing at me with a smile (maybe he was just ready to drink more blood) instead of being nearly one shot everytime. 

Interesting system to build your own difficulty and challenge, refrain to murder npc to keep your strength in check or go full serial killing monster and become unstoppable. Though it's a bit hard to judge where you should put the limit to not overtake the difficulty progression if you still want to be challenged a bit, as i went beyond that limit in my run (those poor NPC paid a big price )

Anyways, i was really impressed by how very large and detailled the London environment was when free roaming around , either for some refreshing night tour, or just for grinding items and XP, especially as i was often walking instead of running (because i noticed the streaming engine sometime paused to dynamically load the environment if i was moving too fast, while walking everything was completely smooth and seamless) .

And also very impressed how the many NPC have their own voices, their own tones that fits so well their characters and the situation in the era the games takes place into, the amount of vocal dialogues is incredible and contribute to build up the atmosphere superbly.
Also each of those NPC have some kind of background story and mini storyline (sometime mixed with other NPC) that you can follow for a while by finding/getting hints with your actions in some part of the town, your discoveries and dialogue choices (assuming you don't outright murder them for XP) or to their end.

I felt the town management with the diseases and you manufacturing cures and travelling to give them to the NPC also took a far away background role the more overpowered i got, because you're so strong that you don't care anymore if a sector danger level rise or if the sector simply fall in ruin/ goes full hostile, as if you get too powerfull the stronger enemies can't do anything to stop you.

So i think that to keep that part of the gameplay relevant, you need to refrain from killing too many NPC, but that is also an interesting choice to do instead of the game forcing you to balance things, so if you think it's too hard you can overpower yourself (but unfortunately it's one way, you can't depower yourself a bit if you got too strong).

Anyways, the global overall story was very servicable even if a bit drown by the many, many personnal stories of the NPC.

Oh and for those that like the free roaming into that huge city, an important notice : once you're in chapter 6 there's a point of no return (once you reach the area that will have the boss of that chapter) that will close you to the free roaming in the city completely.
The next chapter that will end the game takes place in a different and much smaller location. And with no postgame (as the game just end when you reach the end of that chapter) you will not be able to go back to free roaming around unless you start a new game. 
So if you want to keep free roaming after completing the game with your current character, make sure to make a backup of your save (as the game do not have manual saves and will automatically overwrite it with every action you do) to replay it after ending the game.

Got one of the bad ending with all the carnage i did with the NPC (but not really bad ending for the monstrous psychopath i had transformed Reid into, it's more a bad ending for London )

[Kagus]

Yeah, if you lay the S U C C on any NPC, including that one in a special situation who seems like they should be a freebie, you'll get permanently locked out of the good ending.

I can see the merit behind the concept there, as making the "evil" route actually be more powerful than the good one gives players a legit motivation to go down the route of selfishness... Something uncommon in a lot of moral choice games. But that said, the implementation seems a teensy bit sticky to me. Especially given that the gameplay itself between start and finish doesn't really change much between a good run or a naughty one. And also the slight dissonance where it's apparently perfectly fine to gorge yourself on the blood of nameless mooks, just so long as you never ever bite one of these people in particular.

[Robsoie]

In the same time every nameless mooks are actively trying to murder you at every opportunity.

There's a case though regarding a named NPC that killing does not bother the "good guy no NPC killing" ending.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The nurse Dorothy Crane on the end of her storyline.
At that point you'll have a choice regarding her having a clandestine dispensary for the poor activity, after somehow solving the her blackmailing Lady Ashbury situation :
 - killing her for the blood XP and/or making sure she'll never blackmail again (preventing you to reach the "good guy ending")
 - letting her continue and probably helping too and trusting her she will not reveal anything about Ashbury
 - or using your mesmerizing power (without killing after) to convince her to forget things about Lady Ashbury

Choosing the 3rd choice seems interesting but doing so will let her completely haggard for a while, and she'll then get attacked and infected and turned insane skals, meaning she'll murder every poor guys and gals going to her place, and you'll be able to kill her if you visit her again.
Such kill does not count and you'll be able to still get the "good guy ending" despite you absolutely ruined her life before killing her

[dragdeler]

-

ptw


I can't understand where the rts have gone feels like they went from 15-20% marketshare to a noteworthy title or two per year... There is just so much stuff we could add to the formula using our computing power... real fire trajectories, ragdoll stuff, voxel terrain, track a ton more stats and bodyparts and dmg types, you name it... meanwhile modern rts releases tend towards the warcraft side of things, small armies, unique units playing a huge role etc. Looking at all this it still feels like cossacks1 was some sort technological marvel, just look at the measly specs it resquires to put thousands of units on the screen. Who cares about batttles right?! This is a rts pump out the top 5 percentile graphics on those 25 models it's what the people want, i judge my rts by their shaders..

[Robsoie]

Currently on a replay of A Plague Tale : Innocence that i completed a year ago (after epic had it as a freebie of the week)

And i'm still super impressed how incredibly good it looks even on low settings, and how smooth it is even on a potato computer, i don't know what magic coders they had but that's a jewel of optimisation.

Still very good even despite the storyline does not have anymore surprise on a 2nd run and the railroaded linearity, but the dialogues and vocal actors are so good that you still feel immersed in their adventure and want to help them overcoming those crazy odds.

[Stench Guzman]

Real time strategy games were popular from the mid 1990s to some time in the early 2000s.  Then people fiddled around with Warcraft 3's custom map maker and that spawned Tower Defense games and MOBAs.  Then there are Paradox's strategy games, which are a bit different but still fairly popular.

As far as "conventional RTS" games go, I enjoted Meridian: New World.  Single player only and something of a budget title but I recommend it.

[nenjin]

Most of the RTS' that are getting made have just slipped back a tier or two from AAA. There's stuff like Dune: Spicewars and others. That's how it goes really with genres, don't you think? It's big, everyone is trying it in the AAA space, then interests shift, there's now hotness, and only a small handful have the money and resources and interest in a specific genre to keep making games, and only some of those actually get finished. And so you end up with 1 or 2 big titles a yearish.

[Great Order]

Real time strategy games were popular from the mid 1990s to some time in the early 2000s.  Then people fiddled around with Warcraft 3's custom map maker and that spawned Tower Defense games and MOBAs.  Then there are Paradox's strategy games, which are a bit different but still fairly popular.

As far as "conventional RTS" games go, I enjoted Meridian: New World.  Single player only and something of a budget title but I recommend it.

Personally I prefer PDX's because the games are longer and they're pausable. I'm not a fan of RTSes being high-tension, having to jump from one place to another to make sure you're producing the right things, you're not being flanked, the army you sent off needs new orders, etc. all at the same time. That can happen in, say, EUIV but at least you can pause it to deal with them all.