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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2953 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 11, 2025

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Video game thread

I've been playing Captains of Industry, and Len's Island lately.

The first is a kind of mix between factorio, a city sim, and a terrain flattening sim. The latter part doesn't sound fun, but is weirdly the most satisfying aspect of the game. If you ever wanted to dig a giant pit and dump it all into the ocean, this is the game for you.

Len's Island was described as an isometric Valheim in a review and that has mostly been true. Generally an enjoyable game if you like the genre, but nothing too ground breaking or unique.

I continue to be one of the ~1000 people still playing Post Scriptum Squad44. We're down to 1-2 full servers at any given time, with a smattering of near-empty servers where people are presumably either testing new weapons or seeding so that when one of the full servers goes down for maintenance or because it's an unstable game that occasionally just has servers go down, theirs will fill up with the players who got booted.

I just can't kick the game though. There's nothing else out there that scratches the itch. The teamwork elements of Squad44 are just head-and-shoulders above the non-WW2 competitors (Arma 3/Reforger), the realism aspects are head-and-shoulders above the WW2 FPS competitor (Hell Let Loose), and the relative simplicity of the WW2 battlefield is just much more fun than the relative chaos of the modern setting hardcore FPS offerings (Squad). So I continue to be one of the dwindling number of players, waiting for Offworld Industries to turn off the lights.

I feel like I have hit my gaming retirement, not bothering to play anything other than a new eroge. Not even my digital fast got me playing again.

Chikan Undercover Agent Rina is good, though. It's not yet another RPGM or Ren'Py VN, it's an actual roguelite game with actual mechanics. You control the eponymous sexy police agent who has to detect and arrest Japanese train perverts while resisting their molestation attempts. Get to the end of the line, defeat the boss, repeat three more times to win.

Escape from Tarkov just wiped, and I had previously been somewhat interested in playing again, after a prolonged break due to lack of interest and circumstance. I already had about 1700 hours in it over a few years, so I'm hardly a newbie.

Yet, as usual, BSG managed to screw up royally. The game already started out immensely grindy, and only got worse. Half of the actually good guns, gear and ammo was locked behind ball-busting quests. Back when I used to play with a group of buddies from Singapore and Malaysia, we'd cheese the worst of them, 5 or 6 of queuing up at the same time but separately, in the hopes we'd spawn in the same match as 'enemies' and then kill each other for the sake of quests.

And yet, like many things in Tarkov, it got worse. The new patch is supposed to be a "hardcore" one. What does that entail?

Removing 90% of the progression, in the sense you literally can't progress. You don't have access to quests, unlike before, where you could directly queue into maps, now, you have the choice of about 2 or 3 by default, and need to travel within a map to find an exit leading to the next one.

This works... terribly. The game already had abysmal queue times, now you can easily spent 30 minutes waiting for the sake of entering and running through a map for the sake of getting to where you actually want to go.

The game has a feature where you could pay to insure your gear. If your killer didn't loot you, anything left over would find its way back to you a few IRL days later.

Nikita, the owner and lead dev, in his infinite wisdom, made it so that insurance is so exorbitantly expensive that it costs more than buying an entirely new set of gear.

You can't access the player-run market. The sell price to NPCs was gutted, and the price to buy inflated.

There's hardly any actual new content, and you can't access 90% of the old one.

A change last patch made it so that you couldn't use items you didn't personally find in game for upgrades. So if you bought a pack of screws and a drill to upgrade your shelter, now, unless it came with a special found in raid status, it's next to useless.

At one point, they'd finally added a feature that had been teased for years, and which I'd looked forward to - realistic armor hitboxes. Armor plates were modeled, with proper coverage and weak spots. Then they rolled that back next patch.

I could go on and on, but the game has gone from a diamond in the rough to a lead pencil in the shit, aimed at your butthole.

The only good news is that their decisions are being absolutely roasted, with an immediate exodus of the player base. They're starting to roll back some things, but it's too little, too late. Good, fuck them, maybe someone can make a hardcore milsim extraction shooter that respects the player's time and energy.

They got my money (early on), but with how tough the playerbase was, and how they never fixed cheating I never really played the game. Maybe 20 hours.

We are getting pretty close to being able to have games where bullshit like 'memorizing where loot is' and 'memorizing great ambush spots' stop mattering.

I'm (still) playing Anno 1800, in between finishing FFVII rebirth, my NG+ of Metaphor: ReFantazio, and returning to low-level LotRO. My biggest takeaway is that the newer LoTRO writers are far, far worse than the original dev team.

I really should get back to playing M:RF. I liked it a lot but dropped it while upgrading my GPU, months ago. I think I'm like 1/3 or 1/2 through it. Played around 33 hours.

Please help re-kindle my interest without spoiling anything. :) I assume there are good reasons why you are playing it not just once but twice.

33 hours, roughly halfway through? Dragon Temple, I'd guess? That one can be a bit of a slog - probably my least favorite portion of the game - but hoo boy do you have some plot and characters coming up! As well as some solid challenges, but aside from one specific fight, the game is good about giving you the tools to overcome its bullshit, which I rather enjoy.

But even outside the main plot, a lot of the Rank 8 bonds are just fantastic, and I really do enjoy the gameplay. Enough thinking, enough action mixed in with the turn-based, and I actually find the grinding reasonably enjoyable. I really like every single party member, which is fantastic, and while you can customize them, you're also incentivized lategame to keep them in their original roles somewhat.

A good portion of the reason behind my replay is admittedly that I'm very close to 100% achievements, but I wouldn't bother if I didn't love the game. I find myself re-looking forward to scenes, dialogue, and even some boss fights.

TL;DR: Louis is a top tier villain, Fantasy is real, Esperanto-esque chanting is a bop, and Peerless Stonecleaver (or Wanton Destruction, I don’t judge) goes brrrrrr.

Also, the manga is being released and translated. It changes a few things around, and can be a bit odd in the pacing, but it's pretty fantastic. Worth reading, and it won't spoil anything for where you are (the manga is just reaching Martira, the first town along the way to Brilehaven after you get the gauntlet runner -- I say because I myself always forget Martira's name).

Haven't heard of the Dragon Temple before now.

I've barely gotten started in that port city in the south-west. Can't remember its name. It's where your little fairy girlfriend sneaks into Louis' gauntlet runner.

It wasn't tedium that made me put the game down. Happened sorta by happenstance, and I always have a hard time getting back into a long game after a break from them.

Yeah unfortunately the dragon temple is... real bad, imo. Though to be fair I got through it, whereas the final dungeon was so hard that I can't actually make any forward progress and kinda stopped playing the game as a result.

Overall I felt that Metaphor was a pretty uneven game. There are some real high points, but also some real low points (like the aforementioned dragon temple). I enjoyed it well enough, but I don't think I would ever play it again (and haven't even managed to finish my first playthrough due to the difficulty issue I ran into).

When you say "Final Dungeon", I assume you mean Skybound Avatar? Yeah, that one was a bit tough, with no good enemies to mage-MP grind on, but it's also slightly shorter than I expected. ...And I just now remembered those teleporting liches. Man, fuck those guys, but I guess it wouldn't be a proper Atlus game without them and the legged fish.

Yeah, that's the one. I'm currently at the part with the teleporting liches, I believe. They fuck me up, such that if I don't get a perfect first round (i.e. not randomly getting the "enemy has recovered from stun" when I hit them), I pretty much have to restart the fight because I won't be able to burn them down before they leave my party seriously hurting. As you might imagine, having to restart fights that much got tedious pretty quickly. If/when I start the game back up, I'll probably go back to earlier parts of the dungeon to grind EXP and A-EXP on the weaker enemies. That way I won't be so outmatched with the stronger enemies.

Aside from overloading on strike damage and synergies just for them, I wound up being very conservative with my early turns - If they didn't get unstunned by the first few attacks, I'd just buff or pass turn with my remaining icons, then let loose in the second round. Made it slightly less frustrating than having to sit through their bullshit before I could hammer that rewind button.

If it's any consolation, you should be near the very end of the dungeon, if I recall. Just that last miniboss, then the boss (who isn't who you might expect, to avoid spoilering others reading this - the game teases an additional boss fight afterwards, with a save point and everything, but it's just a conversation, so no need to burn through recovery items).

I have picked up Quasimorph the turn-based extraction shooter and have been enjoying it so far (still mostly at the stage where I stay at Mars and Mercury). The recent announcement that promises the player being able to set up his own trade outpost is, let me be excused for being repetitive, promising.

I have also looked into The Rose of the World, the schizo-cosmological tract the game pulled the parallel reality stuff from, and it is a fascinating read as well. It can be freely found here for inquiring minds.

Len's Island is interesting: it's a technically well-executed game with a lot of effort put into it, that's also just painfully shallow. Lootless-Diablo-clone could work even if it wasn't unique or groundbreaking, there's just not enough meat on the structure. I finished the third dungeon a couple days ago, and there's only been six normal mook types (+3 reskins) so far, one unique boss per major dungeon, and most 'mini-bosses' just consist of rooms with a ton of mook-spawner cocoons. You can beat the first major dungeons just by dodge-rolling and spamming normal timed hits, the second starts to force you to use a shield and/or weapon skills, but there's only a couple skills per weapon, and that seems to be about as deep as combat gets. In theory, build variety around the enchantment system or skill point system should drive a lot, but they're pretty easily solved, too, and there's not a ton of choice economy around what items you'll upgrade in what order or how you focus on getting specific gear. There's several weapons, but most of them suck for the mook-heavy fights, and of those that do work there's not really enough difference to justify enchanting multiple. It wouldn't matter as much if the rest of the game was really compelling -- I love Vintage Story after all -- but so much of Len's Island focuses on combat or dungeon splunking that it's pretty frustrating, not just a chore, but a boring chore.

((Also, struggling with the UI. Why is the inventory and the build menu tied so closely together that you can switch from one to the other by mouse-click, but if you use the build button you can't interact with world items and if you use the inventory menu you can't place a structure?))

Maybe a slightly more complex combo system, or changeable special skills, or more reason to hotswap weapons, or cheap area denial combat potions? There's a lot of set pieces in the dungeons, maybe make them matter more than just being 'don't fall into this lava'? The devs are allegedly still working on the game, so maybe it'll change down the road.

The SO's gotten back into ARK, with Survival Ascended's Ragnarok release, so I've been pulled a bit into that when I can. The game is and always has fallen into the 'great idea, awful execution' from day one, both on the technical side and on the game philosophy one, and it still shows now. ASA and the new map release are better than ASE: gone are the fifteen-plus minute load-times, the frustratingly bad building system, and there's been at least a little effort to avoid the numerous outright glitches. ASE's Ragnarok was never really completed, and while there's a few missing critters in ASA's Ragnarok, it at least doesn't have whole biomes that were stapled on without being populated. Other parts aren't improved; whistle commands are still painful to use without a long keybinding session, combat is very floaty and weightless and depends on gameish stats that often don't make sense. I'm not as opposed as some to stat sticks, but if you're going to let a solo direwolf easily take down a pack of five carnos that each individually outweigh her, I need some way to actually tell that's going to happen other than jumping in and hoping, or memorizing a breakdown of how a critter's stats tie to their levels. And some parts are outright worse: the devkit is an astounding 1TB, which manages to break my record for 'western game developer was here', the new engine is very GPU-intensive even at its lowest settings, support for unofficial servers manages to be worse(!) probably downstream of the new owners partnering with a server provider, and ASA's Ragnarok manages to have more mesh errors than the already-notorious ASE version. There's a bunch of more interesting taming options than the old 'hit it with a club/tranq arrow and shove food up them', but a some of them suck, and a lot of the better modded solutions to the taming dilemma haven't been ported from ASE. Running a small dedicated server with wildly tweaked rates gets away from mandatory no-lifer play while still making most tames weighty enough to be meaningful... and it's still more commitment than I can really put into it.

But it's very much the only effortful game of its kind, with maybe Palworld as competitors. Nightengale devolves into a dungeon spelunker and the pet system is a joke, and a lot of the few others in the genre either don't exist or work even worse. I have some hopes for Amiino -- Palworld meets Hi-Fi Rush-style combat is a match made in heaven, even if the music integration ends up more muzak -- which when you're looking at Chinese gatcha f2p for innovation is a worrying sign, and that's eta 2026.

My gaming tastes have changed so much now that I have kids. In many ways the shallowness of the game is a plus rather than a negative. It's just wrapping a bunch of game elements I've played dozens of times into an isometric action game that I haven't officially completed. And that's enough to occupy my brain in my few hours of off time, or during my partial off time when I need to drop the game at a moments notice to handle something happening.

The sailing and exploration is fun. I think I'm getting close to exploring just about every game mechanic it has. I'm not sure I want to grind out the fishing mini-game. It's similar to mining other resources, but with a failure option. I've always hated fishing in games. I'm still confused why devs bother adding it. (Dave the diver was great, but that is mostly spear fishing).

I'll play it for another week and then leave on vacation and forget it/drop it while I'm gone from my PC.

That's fair. I'm one of the weirdos that likes fishing minigames, but still has seen times where it goes too far. And the multiplayer for Len's works well enough that I could see it as a fun family thing.

I don't know, I only ever played Ark on the official servers. The game .. may feel fun for ~800 hours if you play by yourself in the PvE mode but it's about 1/20th of the entire game experience. PvE itself can be challenging and fun, especially on Aberration, but the real experience is vastly more 'rewarding'. The issues is, permanently running servers reward no-lifers, so even those who could dedicate 4 hrs of it each night, as much as people used to watch TV, would be unable to compete with students, unemployed, part-time employed people who love the game..

The whole reason why it seems more fun is because people are smart, and you really find out what you're made of when there's no reload or do-overs.

Ofc, with Ark, the big issue is, that devs can't program and can't create good rules.

I'm not as opposed as some to stat sticks, but if you're going to let a solo direwolf easily take down a pack of five carnos that each individually outweigh her

That's because they wanted to reward players and the level scaling is absurd. A tame high lvl direwolf with a dozen lvls into HP is going to have about the same HP as an alpha carno. If in the game high level tamed animals weren't absurdly stronger than wild ones, navigating the map could be an actual challenge. People wouldn't like that at all!

Ironically, you picked a pretty bad example because direwolves are notoriously 'squishy' due to having no saddle damage reduction. They're a niche animal with limited uses, mostly bred as pets. You want a high level direbear with a decent saddle, but ideally a high level t-rex. That's going to eat everything except a giga or titanosaur. (as to fighting those, the only safe way is trapping them and using weapons or dinos that do % damage, like another giga or allosaurus)

Anyway the meta to understand is relatively easy and in any case, there's always the wiki.

I keep trying to break into Captains of Industry, but the tutorial is so dry, hand holdy and long I just get bored and wonder back to a game I know better. I get maybe an hour to play a game a night, and not even every night! I can't spend the whole hour being locked out of the interface until I click the exact button the tutorial tells me it's time to click, over and over and over again!

I really wish there were two levels of tutorial sometimes. The "Yes, I've played a game before" type where it has a much lighter touch, just gives me some short term objectives and a quick summary of how to get there. Then there could be the "wHaT iS cOmPuTeR?!" tutorials that explain what a mouse and keyboard are, and how to click on buttons and shit.

I reviewed the game here.

The game feels kinda long, but I think it's mostly bc I suck at it. E.g. I'm always dealing with some problem and running it at slowest speed.

Even though the supply chains are less complex than Factorio, the extra details and infrastructure related stuff means there's more..problems that can crop up.

Don't think I played the tutorial, I just did the in-game one.

If I were you, I'd give you this advice:

  • remember that you'll need to scale up .. almost everything. (my current big issue is I can't expand my settlement without dumping a megaton of crap into ocean)

  • plan ahead knowing that and you'll do fine.

My biggest peeve with the game is truck dumping. You lose gigantic amount of terrain-moving capacity if you incorrectly set up allowed dumping and truck drive across half the map. NEVER allow a dumping designation outside of a designated mine!

Can you just entirely skip the tutorial? I've owned the game for a long time, so I can't remember taking the tutorial, or it's possible it didn't exist when I first started playing.

The research tree progression acts as a pretty good tutorial. For most game content as long as you can figure out the basics.

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