The Back Room

[Nexaduro]

NEW DWARF FORTRESS VERSION IS OUT

 

... And I'm still getting killed by villagers.

[Seraphin]

NEW DWARF FORTRESS VERSION IS OUT

 

... And I'm still getting killed by villagers.

Late to the party.

 

Also, terrifying biomes are terrifying.

 

Everyone is being killed by crawling horse skin and it's raining blood.

[archimage_a]

Bad example, Archi. The DLCs there are actually separate stories, with their own additions that just happen to transfer over to the main game once you're done with their respective primary questlines, and lengthwise each one of them are far longer than most modern games not made by Bethesda.

 

I disagree. Compare them with the old expansion packs for C&C Red Alert (Aftermath and Counterstrike) which had an advanced plot, units and was generally AN EXPANSION...as opposed to a major mod, which adds some mildly new places (though really nothing that wasn't seen in the original in another form), maybe a bit of dialogue and a minor incrementation of perks and such.

 

It is, ultimately, a matter of defination and personal preference...

My personal issue with them is that they are selling the game, complete with all the DLCs, just 6 months after the last of them was released, and only 17 months after the original game was released...Which is barely 'old'...for £10 less than the original game cost at release.

 

 

In fact while Portal 2 took me 8 hours to beat, BF:BC2 and CoD: Black Opps took me 2 days, and Assassin's Creed 2: Revelation and Brotherhood took me about 3 days, I spent over a week completing a single path in Honest Hearts

Portal 2 is a puzzle game, not a roleplaying adventure.

Battlefield and Black Ops are first person shooters with a sembalance of plot.

Assassin's Creed is a linear roleplaying game, I think 2 days for revelation(15-25 hours) and never got round to playing the other.

 

Could add Deus Ex to that list, 27 hours by Steam's counter.

 

Honest Hearts took the better part of a day to complete (Say 10 hours), while the original game took a few days(Maybe 30-40 hours). I would say the actual system held my attention for maybe 60 hours overall.

 

In the same vein, Mass Effect 2 held my attention for several days because it was worth playing through again for a different story, and I liked the game so much I brought Mass Effect as well, the played through from one to the other. However I would venture that the game itself (Without multiple play throughs*) was perhaps 20-25 hours long, while the DLCs were maybe 5 hours long each, 8 if I was willing to play them again...but really the story is straightforwards and has an impact (Arrival) or is complex but has no impact (The other ones).

All of which I include as DLCs and which I would be pretty hacked off about if Bioware tried to sell me the ULTIMATE MASS EFFECT 2 for £29.99.

*If we included the time the system actually held my attention we are going into the hundreds of hours.

 

 

Compare that to Red Alert (easily 150 hours) or Avenum/Geneforge/Ur-Quan Masters (easily 100 hours per game) or, to a lesser extent, Avadon (maybe 50 hours), and the comparision is rather clear.

(The latter games would be what I would call RPGs with multi-linear paths.)

 

Yes, compared to modern games, with their weak overall storyline and a propensity to being insanely short, Fallout 4 can be considered to have 'Expansion Packs' rather than DLCs, but, in reference to Paul's picture, all Bethesda Softworks has done is COMPLETE the game that they released 17 months ago, they haven't expanded it in any serious way...If they had we would have Fallout 5 out 6 months ago, or coming out soon.

[The_Mather1]

If you played through it that fast, you can only have yourself to blame for going through the main questline first. Honest Hearts has a lot of caverns with fragments of a backstory and lots of rewards to offer. There are also a lot of areas to discover that are hard to even get to show on the compass.

And Old World Blues is simply vast, not only does it have several new kinds of enemies, but also at least two new kinds of weapons as well as great implants, armor, prototypes and upgrades and a way for you to actually make some use of all the trash you find lying around everywhere. It also expands on the history of three characters, from two of the other DLCs.

If you play these through properly and get every ending, they'll take you more than 100 hours each.

 

Let's compare them to what a DLC is; downloadable content, in other words something extra for the game, such as in Assassin's Creed 2 where the DLC was a short questline with some ok rewards. These are more like complete sequels, or intermissions if you want to be precise. They have their own settings and storylines as well as incorporating the main game's. Now this is more than the description asks for, but wait, they also each raise the level cap by 10, raising the time the main game takes to really complete significantly.

What does this sound like? Oh, yeah, that's pretty much the same as what WoW's "sequels" do, except these actually come with whole new maps as well.

[Resistance]

If you imagine games like a sponge filled with water, playing it being wringing the sponge and water being fun. Many players don't want to spend lots of effort and time trying to wring the sponge and certainly don't want to do it when only little water spills out. You shouldn't have to 'play games properly', they're games and if doing something improperly is easier or more fun then you should do that and its extremely poor level design if a player is at fault for not playing the game properly.

[archimage_a]

If you played through it that fast, you can only have yourself to blame for going through the main questline first.

Worst line ever.

In actuality I explored all/many of the other parts. I didn't 'finish' the game (Though the majority was done) but I never claimed to have finished the game, I said I tired of the system...The game has a very limited replayability, and the stories are not hugely different from one and other...You also don't really have that much of an impact on the world.

In short I grew tired of hoping that the next quest would do something that I could point to and say 'Yes, I achieved that thing'. Skyrim has the same problem, as do many of the current crop of games...Flashy graphics are all very well and good, but they actually need something to change between quests, between missions...some sense of progress.

Red Alert is a perfect example of that because the map would alter as you completed missions (Not substantially it is a very linear game made in 1995) but you actually felt like you were progressing, rather than merely doing something and, oh, wait, I appear to be in the same place as I was with a slightly better gun.

 

but also at least two new kinds of weapons

You mean they have a new graphic, with a new sound effect, with a new animation?

Unless they added something like the slave device/explosive collars from Fallout Three, or they actually developed some sort of new way of interacting with the game (At the end of the day you have remote combat (Mines) ranged combat (Lasers and bullets), close combat (Fists), unless you actually expand on that it is all pretty much the same)

 

If you play these through properly and get every ending, they'll take you more than 100 hours each.

If I brought paint and watched each brushstroke dry it would take more than 1,000 hours...That doesn't mean those 1,000 hours wouldn't be the most boring 1,000 hours imaginable.

There are only so many times you can wander down the corridor, into the obvious trap, and go 'Man I am so psyched!!!!'...Or wander into the building and search for the McGuffin after defeating a hoard of bandits/ghouls. Or wander towards the map marker, find a few enemies, shoot the enemies and then steal whatever it was they were guarding... You would think that someone would have the imagination to combine the Resident Evil style puzzles with the Fallout/Skyrim massive world system and come up with a game where you could walk into 150 dungeons where each one had some degree of cleverness about it (I mean I would be happy with a dozen dungeons with a degree of cleverness about them), but as it is you walk into the dungeon/building (Skyrim/Fallout) and lo and behold its a 'press these buttons in the right sequence' or hack this terminal (In fairness I MUCH prefer the word puzzles of Fallout to the simplistic button puzzles in Skyrim) after slaughtering your way through myraid beasts.

Compare that to something like Avadon, where you have an actually endless tunnel that can only be reconciled by giving up and leaving. Or puzzles where you need some degree of rational thought to work out what the clues mean.

 

 

I am not, in many ways, a completionist...I like to complete things, but it is not an overwhelming desire. Far more I want to see the game respond to my decisions...and to make decisions of merit and note...One of my pet annoyances right at the minute is that games seem to be tuning down the variation between the ends (and the effort required to achieve those ends). Deus Ex being an example of that.

The Fallout Vegas endings were not impressive, true there were many of them, but but you got a simple clipshow of very slightly different endings.

Avenum, Geneforge...hell, even Exile managed to do more than that. I want several pages of information with a dozen sentences altered on each about what happened after the game ended.

I want to know that I actually made a difference in more ways that 'The people in this area lived happily ever after' or 'The people in this area were all killed'

 

 

Let's compare them to what a DLC is; downloadable content, in other words something extra for the game, such as in Assassin's Creed 2 where the DLC was a short questline with some ok rewards. These are more like complete sequels, or intermissions if you want to be precise. They have their own settings and storylines as well as incorporating the main game's. Now this is more than the description asks for, but wait, they also each raise the level cap by 10, raising the time the main game takes to really complete significantly.

 

Thats some real fine slight of word there.

"DLC=Downloadable Content. This game has a rubbish DLC. Therefore all DLCs are like this DLC. Therefore this other game's DLC isn't a DLC."

 

No, more accurately:

DLC= Downloadable Content....Which doesn't really mean anything more than saying CD-Rom Content or DVD Content or even Floppy Disk Content.

The medium by which the content is transfered is rather insignificant.

 

The real issue here is whether I, or you, would have gone to the store, brought the 'DLC' on a disk with our hard earned monies, gone home and installed this extra content.

That the content is downloadable, and that we have more money, has lead to the expansion content being reduced tremendously, down from the hugely expanded games of Counterstrike and Aftermath, to the fairly trifling DLCs that accompany Assassin's Creed and Fallout.

Really expansions for Roleplaying games should be, either Mass Effect->Mass Effect 2...Where you play a new game, where your changes carry over from one game to another.

Or they need to be Avenum/Red Alert/Most Series games, where you play one game, and then it takes one of those paths and moves forward with it in the next game.

Basically so your understanding of the game world expands the more you play the game, and the decisions you made/decisions you could have made, have outcomes which you didn't neccessarily envision when you made your choice...

 

Not simply 'Hey, look, you have a slightly larger map, with slightly more levels and slightly more perks and slightly more graphics, oh and we have this plot that isn't AT ALL related to the plot you were doing earlier and actually probably won't be carried over to anything else...'

That isn't an expansion of the game in the true sense...it is the completion of the game...including the stuff that SHOULD have been in there from the start.

 

I can understand it from the other side...I can understand the add-ons as being interludes, intermissions or otherwise between this game and the next...That much is fine, and yes Fallout does provide quite hefty interludes...But there is a somewhat large difference between providing an interlude and repackaging the game as 'The Ultimate Edition'.

 

My personal issue with them is that they are selling the game, complete with all the DLCs, just 6 months after the last of them was released, and only 17 months after the original game was released...Which is barely 'old'...for £10 less than the original game cost at release.

[The_Mather1]

So in your opinion, DLC for a game should be the sequel to it for half the price, with the bonus of starting as powerful as you were at the end of the original game, which is exactly what was done with New Vegas, yet you're not contempt with it because they now also have a deal where you get all the DLCs along with the game for an even lower price?

Yes, new kinds of weapons, introduced in Old World Blues are energy melee and thrown weapons, and a ranged weapon with customizeable effects (note there are other new weapons as well, but these are completely unique).

 

And the storylines are related to the main stories. Old World Blues and Dead Money pertain the story of Elijah and Christine, two characters important to Veronica's story arc. Old World Blues and Lonesome Road pertain the story of Ulysses, the original seventh Curier and an important character in ED-E's story arc. And Honest Hearts pertains the story of The Burned Man, an important character in the Legion story arc and the history of Hoover dam as well as the story of Crimson Caravan's struggles.

[Nexaduro]

NEW DWARF FORTRESS VERSION IS OUT

 

... And I'm still getting killed by villagers.

Late to the party.

 

Also, terrifying biomes are terrifying.

 

Everyone is being killed by crawling horse skin and it's raining blood.

Fashionaby late.

 

I used a Bronze Colossus for a practice dummy in adventure mode. It wasn't intentional, I fell into the lair and, well... Someone it didn't cave in my ribs.

 

UNfortunately, after getting most of the relevant attributes and skills maxed "fighting" that thing, it finally got a single hit in as I was walking away. My head was turned to chunky salsa, and the rest of my body painted the wall of a nearby peasant's home.

[archimage_a]

So in your opinion, DLC for a game should be the sequel to it for half the price, with the bonus of starting as powerful as you were at the end of the original game, which is exactly what was done with New Vegas, yet you're not contempt with it because they now also have a deal where you get all the DLCs along with the game for an even lower price?

 

Sorry, bolded bits are massively incorrect...as you would know if you had played...any...game that I mentioned.

 

1) The DLC should not exist, or, if it does exist, should be sold as that and not then packaged as PART OF THE GAME, unless they were actually PART OF THE GAME, in which case they should have been released WITH THE GAME.

This idea was originally summed up by reference to Paul's picture, which states, quite clearly, that you would originally get a game, and then the expansion packs for those games would be games in their own right, building on the original. Modern games, instead, sell the game, and then add in the bits they didn't include in the beginning as expansions.

 

2) If you are basically starting in EXACTLY the same position as you left the game then you haven't finished playing the game (hence my original argument). If you looked at Mass Effect, or Geneforge, or Avenum, or Exile (Not Avadon since only 1 game has been published as of yet) then you would see that you start each game as a relatively new character, either with the story being a natural continuation with your skills reset to their base level, the skill tree reworked and a number of system changes....Or the same basic systems with minor refinements, but all new characters so you can get another side of the story.

 

I didn't make any reference to how much it should cost, or that the game should basically have you start at level 50.

 

My 'contempt' (Which you blow out of all proportions, I am mildly entertained by the example) is that they are selling the complete game 17 months after releasing 'the game'...Ergo fufilling the exact specifications laid down by Paul's Picture.

 

Yes, new kinds of weapons, introduced in Old World Blues are energy melee and thrown weapons, and a ranged weapon with customizeable effects (note there are other new weapons as well, but these are completely unique).

 

Sigh. So they have developed new close combat graphics and new ranged graphics?

How terribly exciting, I can press a button and see a different graphic and hear a different sound, and fighter monsters slightly more powerful than before, though on aggregate the take the same amount of time to defeat because the difficulty is scaled.

 

 

And the storylines are related to the main stories. Old World Blues and Dead Money pertain the story of Elijah and Christine, two characters important to Veronica's story arc. Old World Blues and Lonesome Road pertain the story of Ulysses, the original seventh Curier and an important character in ED-E's story arc. And Honest Hearts pertains the story of The Burned Man, an important character in the Legion story arc and the history of Hoover dam as well as the story of Crimson Caravan's struggles.

 

Burned Man = Background Character

Ulyssess = Background Character

Elijah = Background Character

Christine = Background Character

 

In and of themselves, yes, it is nice to know stuff about the background characters...not massively relevant considering Ulyssess can be forgotten about almost as soon as you hear that there was supposed to be a different sixth courier.

They are not really developing the character, plot or the story in any real way...Which is the basic requirement for an expansion in roleplaying game.

 

Ultimately you will disagree because you think they are expansion packs; because the truth that you have been conned into paying almost double price for a game (I hesitate to say paying but still) that has been released in stages, is beyond you.

 

I will disagree because it is through disagreement that ideas are refined, and because I am very disagreeable.

 

At any rate.

[The_Mather1]

Just realized my thumb is sprained and has been that way for as long as I can remember. By god, I'm slow.

[archimage_a]

Sigh...If I ever say I need new headphones remind me that buying cheap headphones is ALMOST as annoying as having ones that don't work...One side cuts out every time I make any sort of movement....Its rather annoying.

[Corvus]

Sigh...If I ever say I need new headphones remind me that buying cheap headphones is ALMOST as annoying as having ones that don't work...One side cuts out every time I make any sort of movement....Its rather annoying.

My trick is to buy cheap name brand headphones as they tend to work sufficiently

[Grim_]

Has anyone here got/looked into Wargame: European Escalation? I'm very tempted to buy it on Steam (even though it has an extra DRM) simply because it looks like a breath of fresh air (and a nice compromise between games like starcraft and grand strategy games) and I would kind of like to know other people's experiences.

[The_Mather1]

The trick to buying good headphones, is to buy headsets. They can be somewhat more expensive than most headphones (not including such as Skullcandy and the likes), but nothing beats the sound quality and comfort intended for hardcore gamers.

If you need them for something other than the computer though, make sure it doesn't have to use USB.

[archimage_a]

Mmmm, I use a headset at home (a wireless one) because they are considerably better....But headsets are a pain in the neck to use when you are out and about.

And it is actually surprisingly hard to get headphones in this town...you can either buy headsets or excessively cheap headphones...but the interrim part, the brandname cheap headphones seem to be nowhere in sight... :thumbdown:

 

 

As to Wargame:EE

From what I hear the game is...too realistic.

Tanks run out of petrol (By some accounts way too early)

You can't see the rest of the battlefield unless your tank is actually within line of sight (Which is to say firing range, so 9 times out of 10 you see the enemy tank just before it blows you up)

If you make a mistake at any point your game gets a hell of a lot harder (Where as if you ambush the enemy really well, they just have more tanks/such)

There are literally hundreds of units, so its not like you can build a spearhead of 4 Sherman(Not the name they use, but I like it) Tanks and they all move at approximately the same speed...Instead you have maybe 2 Shermans, a Firefly and some other tank, which all move at different speeds and usually just blow up when you wander into the computer's ambush.

 

The battlemaps seem rather sterile at this point as well, mostly flatland....everywhere...No cityscapes or mountain ranges.

No planes(You get helicopters but mostly for recon, so don't expect to lead air charges), and Infantry are semi-overpowered (By sheer weight of numbers).

Artillery, though powerful, is excessively vunerable and lacks ammo (Which is good and bad. It means you can blow up the enemy if they are caught with their trousers down...but more often than not it means that your hard won unit is blown up before it gets to its firing position...or it runs out of ammo so...)

Anti-Air weapons are too accurate, Anti-Tank weapons are not accurate at all.

 

In short, lots of little issues which are inherant to all games, from Grand Strategy to Tactical Combat...basically you need to work out how to play it, then it is fun, though occassionally you make mistakes and everything goes to hell in a handbasket and you rage quit.

 

So....Not really a breath of fresh air...but synergy of two imperfect game types.

 

---review ends----

 

Reminds me a lot of playing MoW:AS, having the enemy tank coming round the side of a building, you have set the speed to 1(slowest), got your bazooka ready....And you click....and nothing happens...you click again...nothing...The tank clicks and your whole squad is blown away, while the tank proceeds to slaughter your army at a distance...You get angry and quit the game, come back after a few hours and vow to build better defences...you build them, they prove inadequate and the 1 medium tank the enemy sends destroys two heavy tanks you have salvaged, your heavy artillary and one of your AT guns....Meanwhile your ultra heavy tank has been destroyed by a lucky shot by a single AT gun after you shot at it twice.

Eventually you decide to just go with all infantry and the whole thing repeats =P

 

On another unrelated note:

[Nexaduro]

With LOTPW gone, I don't have anywhere to post spammy videos from youtube. :(

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsGoNUAAg-k

[archimage_a]

To be fair, spam only begets more spam, and threads like Last Post to Win just forge senses of 'Its ok to spam because other people spam'.

 

You could also argue that Last Post to Win is a lot of Falador Tavern...Group of people who think they are entitled to bypass certain rules by virtue of not being 'adequately' modded in the past, or who close ranks when the Admin/Mod try to 'reason' with them.

 

 

Really, if you focus is on law and order, it is better to spread spam out amongst the whole forum...Because the Admin/Mod team is large enough to fight that, but a single thread with dedicated posters, and more importantly, the idea of a unified thread FOR posters...that is something the Admin/Mod team are very ill-equiped to handle.

[archimage_a]

Unfortunately, due to wanting to collect Spain as well, I was almost 2 years late for my target of Continental Germany by 1886. However, it was completed:

[hide]

[/hide]

 

After the war of Unification (1840) and the war of French Reconquerment (1848)(They wanted Elsass-Lothringen back, so I took Normandy and Picard) France restored the House of Bourbon to their throne under the auspious gaze of German Imperialists. However in 1884 the House of Bourbon was deposed and Germany felt that France could no longer be trusted to look after its own affairs.

Russia, Spain and Brazil(of course) tried to check German Imperialism, but it was to no avail as Russia was fighting Austria at the time, and by the time their war had ended France had been subdued and Germany was ready turn on them. Brazil played no major role in the war. While Spain earned the wrath of Germany by interfering during the Battle of Limoges, and, though they only played a small part, were also deemed unfit for self governance.

 

The majority of the war was fought within the first year, with a triple encirclement tactic employed by von Molke, which saw the German armies facing the French Armies in Nacey (53,000 German Guards to 98,000 French Peasants), Dijon (36,000 German Guards to 60,000 French Infantry) and Chateauroux (23,000 German Hussars to 40,000 French Peasants). With some assistance from a roving band of 30,000 German Guards the French army was smashed, allowing the long process of occupation to begin and the Russian Menace to be destroyed.

 

:thumbup:

[Leiana]

-begins to think I have an eating disorder-

[The_Mather1]

[bleep] yeah, only some pigmentation left and I'll have a circle beard (or possibly a Van [bleep], hard to tell which).

EDIT: Fine, I'll have to spell it Van Dyck. Can't see how that is any less swearing than the other though, as it is closer in spelling to any non-name word.

[archimage_a]

CENSOR EVASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSION :rolleyes:

 

On a more serious note I have it on good authority that avoiding the censor is MASSIVELY against the rules, so it may be a good idea not to use it anyway.

[The_Mather1]

Actually Van Dyck is correct way of spelling it as well, I just don't like it. The name I prefer is actually two letters different (not one as you may think at first) and I believe it may be synonymous to creek.

[archimage_a]

Or

 

 

 

 

?

 

Both are technically 'Van Dyck' beards.

[The_Mather1]

A circle beard is when they connect, a Van Dyck is when they don't.

 

 

Anyways, I just had the weirdest dream ever. I dreamt that I was in jail, with a longsword, and I shared a cell with a weird guy and a badass chick with a katana. When an earthquake struck the facility, the first thing I did was to run up to the helipad and make sure the jail's manager, who looked like he'd been pulled straight out of an anime, was safe. I then surrendered myself, got shot in the gut and sent back to my cell where the badass chick used a pair of forceps to extract what looked like a very thin, high-tech slug from the wound. Eventually I started relocating around, going such jails in such places as Mexico, Eastern Europe and eventually Africa where I became cellmates with a cat, whom I gave all of my food until my release.

Some things of note are that there were these weird breaks where we were outside and it was seemingly random what we were and weren't allowed to do and that all the food looked like bars of soap.

Also this dream seemed to last for an eternity, as the story lasted for months and there were no time skips.

 

Pretty sure this could give any dream analyst a headache, but if you remove the fact that my cellmate in Africa was a cat, it would've made a pretty good dystopian prison game book or movie.

[Nexaduro]

That sounds like every Tavern game ever.