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[Folly]

What limitations do you speak of?

I actually had some mistaken impressions from my limited research...looking into it some more, it might be worth getting after all.

[Flying Dice]

What limitations do you speak of?

I actually had some mistaken impressions from my limited research...looking into it some more, it might be worth getting after all.

The only limitation is that you'll be unable to join/start lobbies if your steam display name is excessively long.

Hit me up if you want to grind sometime.

[Darkmere]

I know it's an Early Access game and still has a ways to go but... I dropped about $8 on Streets of Rogue with zero regrets. There's regular updates, the developer is active on the steam forums, and it's got a great mix of roguelikelitealike and flexibility in gameplay to feel really satisfying to me. There's an older version up on a non-pirate place that the dev mentioned as kind of a free demo available, but you may have to poke around the steam forums to find it.

Also, there's a thread for it around here somewhere.

[nenjin]

I just remembered getting kind of pissed off at some of the tech writing, where spots on the tech tree were like "I dunno, it's a better laser than you had before, whatever."

That kind of humor isn't why I play 4x space games and when I know that's the mentality underpinning a game design it starts to undercut my enjoyment. I was really enjoying Gal Civ 2 right up until the point where it ran out of things to say and started getting derpy with the humor. And then I took a step back and realized that, once I kinda had etched out my own corner of space there was just a shit load of grinding to do to actually win. Not really different than any other 4x space sim I suppose, but Gal Civ 2 seemed to want to rub it in my face a little. I didn't like that and it caused me to reexamine what I'd been playing and I just came away with meh.

[Mephisto]

The Charnel House Trilogy is dirt cheap. It's more of an interactive story, it's super short, and the ending was kind of disappointing (read: it didn't really have one, just a setup for the sequel that was supposed to come out last year but is maybe still on for this year). There's lots of nice voice acting (I was impressed they included a whole radio segment in one of the rooms - it doesn't do anything, it's just nice atmosphere), it's a generally mind-fucky game (with lots of stuff left unexplained, probably to sell the sequel and books), and it was kind of amazing that Jim Sterling's character managed to be creepier than he is.

[Niveras]

I just remembered getting kind of pissed off at some of the tech writing, where spots on the tech tree were like "I dunno, it's a better laser than you had before, whatever."

That kind of humor isn't why I play 4x space games and when I know that's the mentality underpinning a game design it starts to undercut my enjoyment. I was really enjoying Gal Civ 2 right up until the point where it ran out of things to say and started getting derpy with the humor. And then I took a step back and realized that, once I kinda had etched out my own corner of space there was just a shit load of grinding to do to actually win. Not really different than any other 4x space sim I suppose, but Gal Civ 2 seemed to want to rub it in my face a little. I didn't like that and it caused me to reexamine what I'd been playing and I just came away with meh.

I remember one tech advance had a really corny limerick patterned on Old McDonald's Farm, ending with stereotypical growling and screaming.

I like GC2 pretty well for gameplay (it still gets tedious, as all 4X do, when you've all-but-won and are simply pushing turns until you actually win), but the techs are atrocious and ruin ''immersion.'

As for GC3

• I never did get used to the new adjacency rules for planetary buildings, especially since a) planets have so few tiles (even when fully terraformed) and b) the tiles are placed so goddamn randomly that what is ostensibly a high quality world could actually be worthless because all the tiles are separated from each other. A world of half the quality could actually be better because the tiles were better placed.
  
• It doesn't help that the terraforming only reveals one extra tile per world. In GC2, an e.g. 4 quality world could turn out to be a 20 once you research all the terraforming.
  
• Even considering it removed all the incremental upgrade (all the +1 laser, -1 size, +5% damage) techs, the tech tree felt incredibly short. But longer, because high end techs would take something like 20-40 (?) turns... to reveal a single additional tile on only some of your worlds.
  
• Worlds in general were smaller (fewer tiles), which I guess is just based around the balance of the game but doesn't leave as much room to have extra bonuses (morale, population) in addition to the specialization you planned for it.
• Worlds felt much rarer. So much so that I thought it might even have been broken, because I didn't notice any increase in habitable worlds even when I cranked both settings for number of worlds and number of habitable worlds. Also, the maps in general are smaller; GC2 could have hundreds of habitable worlds even on a standard map, whereas GC3 almost felt smaller than e.g. Civ5 because there were so few habitable worlds (compared to the number of cities you might get in a Civ5 game).

Disclaimer: my attempt at GC3 was a few weeks after release, unknown if they changed any of that.

[Sanctume]

This time around, I went for less than $5 games and finally picked up: Neo Scavenger, FTL, Massive Challice, UFO Aftermath, and Shadow of Mordor. 

Of those 5, I only installed Neo Scavenger and played it in between DF breaks.

[TD1]

I got Total War: Warhammer for around £15. I'm really enjoying it, though I also bought some DLC. Forward, my Dawi minions!

[IronyOwl]

Picked up Civ VI and Grim Dawn.


Civ VI is good but infuriatingly unpolished. It's mostly very occasional, minor things that stick perfectly in my craw, like units very occasionally going to sleep for no reason or thinking you clicked one tile over from the one you were aiming at, but for a game that's at AAA prices and already releasing paid content packs I don't think those are unreasonable complaints.

Some of the new things they tried worked, some didn't. Districts and wonders that go on the map are excellent ideas, but they're underdeveloped; not bad, just very flat and mild. Great people selection and abilities feel arbitrary and weird, though I think that's mostly continuing a theme of not being entirely sure what to do with Isaac Newton once you've shoveled him into the game. Ranged units are stupidly powerful, I assume because they tried to speed up combat which made first strike and striking without retaliation godlike.

The best way I can describe it is More Civ.


Grim Dawn seems pretty good, though in my experience all ARPGs are fairly similar in general gameplay. It's by the Titan Quest people and it shows, with the same stat bar unlocking tiers of ability tree style progression, a first and second class, and a focus on autoattack replacements I don't really see elsewhere. It's sort of a Renaissance zombie apocalypse setting/story, which is pretty cool, though in retrospect I guess almost all ARPGs are medieval to Renaissance fantasy zombie apocalypses of some sort or another.

I wish I had more to say, but "A Good ARPG" is about as deep as I can get without going into minor details or explaining what an ARPG is.


So a good sale, but with the usual brevity that comes to hardened veterans of Steam sales.

[Darkmere]

Grim dawn lacks any kind of real endgame. The item pool is so grotesquely large you'll never finish a character. The arena rush DLC is awful (there's one wave near the end that will insta-kill the tankiest character I have. No fuckin clue what does it, can't find out because it's in the middle of a swarm). The roguelike dungeons are a chore, and the nemesis hunts are worse than Baal farming for Diablo 2.

But if you only want to play the game once on ultra-easy, you can probably autoswing your way through everything til the final boss on any class you like, so there's that, I guess.

[ChairmanPoo]

I concur. I found GD's gameplay kind of dull

[Kadzar]

This year's sales have made me realize how, despite my 5-year-old laptop still performing well for its age, it's rather underpowered as a gaming machine. I'll need to build a desktop to relieve that burden from it, but, for now, I need to restrict myself to games that it can handle.

So, not in any particular order, but first off, I got Darkest Dungeon, because, though I have some doubts about it, I have to admit to myself that I like the idea of managing a bunch of shell-shocked adventurers.

I also got Hyper Light Drifter, because it looks nice and apparently has good gameplay, and since I recently got a USB controller I wanted something I could play with it besides platformers.

I picked up SanctuaryRPG: Black Edition, because after playing a lot of Dungeon Robber recently, which got me interested in the idea of roguelikes (or just RPGs in general) that abstract your exact location, plus it has an interesting battle system, and it's currently going for less than a buck.

Then, because I lived a deprived childhood/teenagehood/youngadulthood, I picked up Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout: New Vegas. I got both Morrowind and Oblivion because I wasn't sure which one I would prefer, so I figure I'll start with Morrowind and move onto Oblivion next, like I did with KOTOR I & II, so I can appreciate interface improvements (and I'll download a mod to fix level-scaling in Oblivion if it gets too annoying). And I've heard good things about New Vegas. Also, I picked up the versions with all the DLCs bundled in for Oblivion and F:NV, since I hear some of them are pretty good, and I'd rather get them now while they're on sale than be left wanting or having to pay full price later.

[Rolan7]

Oh man, you're in for a treat with NV or Oblivion, or Morrowind if you're particularly hardcore.
For Oblivion, you might want to grab a mod that makes the levelling system less... arbitrary.  Unless take perverse joy from minmaxing, like I did.

[BigD145]

Oh man, you're in for a treat with NV or Oblivion, or Morrowind if you're particularly hardcore.
For Oblivion, you might want to grab a mod that makes the levelling system less... arbitrary.  Unless take perverse joy from minmaxing, like I did.

Sheogorath is the best part of Oblivion. Nothing else compares within that game until you hit up mods. I do recommend the graphics overhaul for Morrowind.

[heydude6]

I've heard people say that skyrim was better than oblivion. Mainly because oblivion was the turning point when the series started to get dumbed down while skyrim was just an iteration of this new formula. Correct me if I'm wrong, I've played neither so I would like to hear the arguments for why oblivion was the better game.