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[TurboDwarf]

weird. I haven't heard anything about the game 'till this thread, and still don't know what the game is all about. Some kind of city builder? shrugs.
Which is funny because i tend to like games like that.

[Persus13]

I think it's just good ol' fashioned marketing. IIRC Legend of Total War got his copy for free from the devs. So they probably hit up a lot of people in the scene with free copies, and probably have a competent marketing department that knew how to talk to Steam. Steam does clearly pick winners in the top banner ads. And it may not even be total wishlists but by how fast it gets wishlisted. And there could also just be plain paid placement. All that, combined with it actually looking like a decent game, can go a long ways toward shaping perception.

Good marketing is certainly a factor, and Hooded Horse is a publisher that's got a good track record of interesting strategy games (Against the Storm, Terra Invicta, etc.) but not at these numbers. Skill is certainly a factor but luck is as well.

All sorts of games have positive press coverage, good demos, and give free copies to YouTubers. But that doesn't always translate to 3 million wishlist and 1 million sales in the first week.

Also from what I can tell, it's a solo dev project, although he's certainly being helped by a good marketing department as you said.

[Jopax]

Hades 2 just hit EA.

It is fun as hell, everybody is hot and the stuff they added/changed from the first one is pretty nice. Best things so far is the big fuck-off axe that's super satisfying to use and the second region bossfight which has the sickest music so far.

Whole thing feels surprisingly complete too, compared to the original. Like, there's stuff that's clearly not finished or hasn't been added yet, but it feels like at the moment the game has about as much stuff as the fully completed original did, which is pretty neat.

[Mephansteras]

Huh. Maybe I should get around to actually finishing the first Hades...

[nenjin]

I loved Hades but I dunno, I'm just not interested in Hades 2. I think because I'm not really about the story this time. Escaping Hades and fighting your dad made sense to me; this feels like trying to put lightning in a bottle again. Mechanically I'm sure it's an upgrade. I just don't know if I really want to sit through the dialog I'm not interested in though.

[Buttery_Mess]

No disrespect to the Manor Lord devs but....the game looks wildly over-hyped.

I've been playing it for a day or two and it's really nice. It's like the Settlers meets Cities Skylines.

It's close to being the game I've been fantasising about for decades. Yeah, it's unfinished, but it's good. I'd imagine fantasy elements could be modded in.

I think if it's the sort of game you've been wanting but never had, it probably hits the spot; it doesn't need to be everything to everyone.

[None]

I know we had a thread for it a lifetime ago, but...

I picked up AI War: Fleet Command again. I'm hooked. I'm so hooked. I'm 'whoops it's well past midnight, just five more minu-one thirty?!' Cracktorio, if Factorio was realtime/grand strategy. Can't believe I've been sleeping on it for so long; I'm trying to get some friends/acquaintances to play with with small success.

Tension of a tower defense, decisions with ramifications, several fronts to fight the fight on, different requirements to tackle different planets, give-and-take as the AI reprises against your assaults, big blob of spaceships...

[quinnr]

I loved Hades but I dunno, I'm just not interested in Hades 2. I think because I'm not really about the story this time. Escaping Hades and fighting your dad made sense to me; this feels like trying to put lightning in a bottle again. Mechanically I'm sure it's an upgrade. I just don't know if I really want to sit through the dialog I'm not interested in though.

I found the Hades 2 announcement a little disappointing. Gotta sell what sells, but I've always deeply appreciated the unique care that Supergiant puts into building a whole world with its own character and narrative for each game. Bastion was fun, but the narrator's charm is really what carried it for me. Pyre I wasn't a fan of the gameplay but I loved the dialogue trees. But I'll have to give it a try, I did enjoy Hades but more for the gameplay than the plots which carried their other games.

[Il Palazzo]

Hades 2 is fun. It is very much what it says on the tin: the same game as Hades, only more of it.
If, having completed H1 you thought to yourself that you'd fancy a few more runs but you've already mastered all the mechanics, met all the cast, and the sense of purpose is gone anyway - then this one's for you.

ed: although, I gotta say, the hammy time puns are getting on me nerves

I picked up AI War: Fleet Command again.

First one or 2nd?

[None]

The original. I went and bought the second while it was on sale for future enjoyment (plus it's nice to support Arcen), but I'm still enraptured with the first. It doesn't have to look great, and while a couple of the keybinds are a little kludgy, and while the game hitches for a millisecond when directing a thousand ships, there's plenty still for me to get out of it.

[Akura]

Blade & Sorcery has had it's 1.0 release, adding the campaign mode: Crystal Hunt. I did have to stop playing after the first dungeon run because after I bought some armor, I went the the mirror to put it on, only for my framerate to tank even after walking away from it.


Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is also releasing its 1.0 in a couple of days. 7 Days to Die, dumpster fire that it is, is also supposedly leaving Early Access some time this month.

[dragdeler]

7 Days to Die, dumpster fire that it is, is also supposedly leaving Early Access some time this month.

Peh, does anybody care anymore?  All they did was rearrange the chairs for a decade and inflate graphical assets so you can rest asssured that the game will run just as it did on your ivy bridge 10 years ago.

It's worse than project zomboid, contrary to pz, yes you could actually feel some amount of change between the versions of the 7dtd alpha, but there is no more feature to look forward to in7dtd, contrary to pz... All they had to do was increase the scale of 7dtd, more zombies, bigger buildings, more optimised destruction. That was litterally it and they did anything but. The old version where you don't upgrade a block a dozen times feel about as good as the new fancy looking ones, that tells us evertything there is to know.




Fundamentally: a zombie game that increases difficulty by making the zombies tankier is just lame. If you can't overwhelm the player with more ennemies because of technical limitations, just pick another type of ennemy.

[Akura]

It's worse than that, actually. Apparently they removed the ability to craft jars for water collection. Now the only to get water is to either find it(mostly in toilets), drink straight from a river/pond, or craft a dew collector - the last of which, like many other basic survival things is locked behind randomly found books.

On the other hand, they apparently also removed to ability to actually die from thirst/hunger.

[dragdeler]

It's just an endless list of sidegrades, makes me sad to think of all that work. You know like we couldn't say that mechanically, DF gained a lot since the steam release so what, in the last 3-4 years? But it's super apparant that the codebase is being cleaned up to enable further progression... Whereas those decade old early access titles I somewhat resent them, even though I shouldn't I got like 800h out of the game afterall...

But yeah the changes you cited are super silly, but a perfect continuation of their trends: sidegrade the nitty gritty of the meta towards more tediousness, so more playtime can be extracted, so we can remain more relevant in the steam charts. Ironic how all the most ambitious indie studios where incentivised to do that instead of the hard stuff they set out to do.

[nenjin]

I could deal with 7D2D's idea of challenge.....but the performance is still completely unacceptable for long-term play.