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PaperclipPerfector
5hr ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Video-game thread
The Crust went 1.0, playing the main campaign. Lots of elements from Surviving Mars, but with a bit more factory automation elements.
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I've been playing a little early access indie game called Half Sword. It's a physics-based medieval fighting simulator where you use your mouse and keyboard to control individual arms. It's simultaneously incredibly detailed and incredibly jank. I think I'm enjoying the jank more than the detail.
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Finished a Distant Worlds 2 campaign. Love and hate this game. It is vast - I'm impressed it still (mostly) works with thousands of automated private economy ships, like freighters, on top of the usual space 4X systems. Thousands of mining stations, too many luxury resources to keep track of, characters, fleets; and option to automate almost all game systems on case by case basis. It is delightfully idiosyncratic - rarely convoluted, just unusual and unbothered by expectations, an oldschool feel. It leaks and reliably crashes on my 6GB VRAM (and autosaves do not help if you just spent 30 minutes paused fiddling with some details; at least it did not ever crash during manual save). It is criminally underbaked, just begging for another few passes filling details in, balancing, bugfixing. There is so many details I can't resist micromanaging a campaign takes unwise amounts of time for me.
Chronicon, very complete, top quality hack & slash. Tons of fun.
I really like the concept of DW2 (and DW1/DW:U, since they're the same game), but the execution has so many issues I end up regretting any time spent on it.
It's ugly as sin. Picking the Stride engine was a big mistake to begin with, and maybe it was even necessary for performance reasons, but visually it's a complete dud. The game looks about as good as Drox Operative, which is to say absolutely lousy. The ship designs that are mostly just tortured pretzel shapes, the races that are fatally tired science-fantasy zoology archetypes, the tech tree that walks through all the generic technobabble, and the combat that's just a hot mess of oversized particle effects...ew.
Diplomacy is absolutely retarded. Playing diplomacy well requires constant busywork and exploits. Raising relations with other empires requires giving them gifts, which are always of a fixed size, and the relationship effect magnitude is also fixed - you're always giving a fixed sum of credits for a fixed relationship change, regardless of how enormous or paltry that sum is compared to your or the recipient's cashflow. So once you're in the mid-game, you're casually maintaining positive relationships with the entire galaxy, and the only limit is the cooldown on gift-giving. But oh! Instead of giving formal gifts, you could also make deals, and barter some cartographic data or technology or an archaeological discovery or a diplomatic contact. And the problem here is that the costs of those things have no relation to their value. You can trade away some archaeological discovery that's completely useless for several times the net worth of an entire empire, and buy out your interlocutor's entire mining sector, or all of the technologies they had ahead of you.
Piracy is dumb. Pirates attack you early on in the game, and you can choose to either fight them or pay them off. You'd think that fighting them off would be the harder way of handling it, but bring long-term rewards of being free of piracy, and run no risk of the pirates jacking up their prices over time...but in actualy fact, it's universally easier, cheaper and more rewarding to just pay them off. Because paying them off means you needn't raise any anti-pirate forces, raises your relationship with the pirates, and eventually they just stop asking for protection money, and and then you can barter and negotiate with them until they become your friends, and then once the endgame hits all friendly pirate factions turn all their ships and stations over to you. And there are tens of individual pirate factions in each campaign, so you need to do all this rote, repetitive diplomacy over and over. Like regular empires, pirates are 100% deterministic in diplomacy.
The UI is not up to the task of helping you govern a large empire. When you have dozens of planets and ports, which you will, the bottom half of your screen ends up filling with icons representing them all. Icons that all look exactly the same. And if that presentation isn't to your liking, you could instead use the menus that offer lists of such objects - but that are bafflingly clamped to only a small fraction of your screen size.
Ship design, if you don't just automate it entirely and resign yourself to using the game's default designs, give or take your stated weapon type preferences, is a lot of unpleasant busywork. You unlock a new technology, many of which are just iterative improvements on older ones (fuel tanks with +20% volume, that kind of thing), and then you need to go through all of your ship designs and replace the old with the new component. And you have to do that using an interface that, to cut it short, has terrible UX.
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Agreed on most things here.
It's not that bad visually. Planets look nice. Ships, well, I like how busy core worlds can get, no need to zoom in.
Writing is bad, but the race-from-beyond-galaxy total war scripting/framing surprised me positively - they are so far ahead on tech that native empires joining them can actually be catastrophic (but shame you have so little diplo tools available). But again, could do so, so much more.
Teekans talk a bit like Skaven, it's cute.
Many glaring issues, but even at 150 planets, I did not find it too bad. Only maybe a dozen are core. Character and army management is the worst.
I had all state ships on manual design, since you can do a lot better than automatic. Shame you can't do guided auto-design (exclude this, always include that; or did I miss that in the UI?). Components going V1->V2 etc do update automatically now even on manual designs, but what a pain when you get something new, only "Copy as new" then obsolete the previous version works since "Upgrade" treats too many components as same family, pain.
They should open the game source code, it can all be fixed.
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Stride as in https://www.stride3d.net/?Ah, found the blog post. https://www.stride3d.net/blog/distant-worlds-2-development-with-stride/Does it really look like ass? I remember building and running some demos and they didn't look any worse than Unity.
IMO? Yes. if you look at actual gameplay footage instead of carefully curated marketing screenshots, or actually play the game and zoom in, then it's looks very poor.
And yes, it's absolutely possible to make similarly poor-looking games in Unity. And yes, not like I can do any better. But in my personal opinion, DW2 is not really worth looking at for its visual offerings.
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Still playing some Darktide with my brother. I finished all of the Psyker penances that required class-specific activities, and now the only ones left are the supremely grindy mission count ones. 43 missions to go. I'm currently either running a support built that goes all-in stunlocking an entire view cone indefinitely via smite (and which gets inevitably knocked out by something sneaking up on me from behind), or a melee psyker build. The latter really wants to use the Blaze Greatsword, but I already mastered that one, so right now I'm making myself play it with all kinds of other weapons, all inferior. Our gaming buddies almost entirely quit on us. Tired of Darktide, I suppose, and unwilling to accompany us as we go for higher difficulties.
Privately, I still play the odd round of Nuclear Option. I'm actually getting proficient at it, slowly, and I enjoy sinking my teeth into the technical details while still having to make snap decisions based on gut feeling. But now that maintaining stealth, landing without ruining the plane, evading missiles and picking targets are all somewhat in hand, I'm unfortunately free enough to realize that the NPC behavior is entirely too predictable. But playing Multiplayer is not satisfying, on two counts: 1) I can't pause, so in other words I'm certain to eventually just waste lots of team resources by going AFK, and 2) it's all co-op, hardly anybody in my time zone plays PVP.
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The users of 4chan's /v/ (video-game) board often post titillating images (both official and unofficial) of characters from various gacha games—Goddess of Victory: Nikke, Blue Archive, Senran Kagura: New Wave, etc. Occasionally, they also post videos (both official and unofficial) making fun of the rather pitiful-looking gameplay in Goddess of Victory: Nikke. However, it recently occurred to me that I had never seen any gameplay of other gacha games.1 Therefore, I investigated Blue Archive (source of such prominent sex symbols as Ichinose Asuna, Izayoi Nonomi, and Hanekawa Hasumi), and found it more of a game than I was expecting it to be.
The gameplay is mostly, but not completely, auto-battling. You set up a unit of six characters (girls wielding guns), of whom four are "strikers" who traverse the 3D battle map and two are "specials" on the sidelines. (On the battle map, the strikers are represented with chibi/SD 3D models, significantly different from the 2D art that you see in the menus.) The characters have both passive skills that activate automatically and active skills that must be activated by the player.
Each character is a tank, a damage dealer, a buffer, or a healer. Enemies include grunts (rifle infantry, small flying robots, etc.), snipers (they hide in the back and attack the player's damage dealers, encouraging the player to counter-snipe them with his damage dealers' active skills), minibosses (large humanoid robots, tanks, etc.), giant bosses (in certain game modes), and even duplicate playable characters with their own active and passive skills.
Characters and enemies also have weapons and armor (two separate characteristics) in a simple rock-paper-scissors system. Prior to each mission (which, in the main story mode, comprises multiple separate battles on a very simple strategic map—there are several other modes), you get to see what enemies you will be fighting, and must assemble your unit in order to take advantage of this system accordingly.
Outside of gameplay, the interface is surprisingly good for something that obviously was designed for phones. There's no right-click, but left-clicking on any item reveals a drop-down menu listing all the places where that item can be obtained—not just "you can get this item by completing missions", but "you can get this item by completing Mission 4-3; click this button to go to that mission"! Keyboard shortcuts, including use of the Escape key to cancel, also have been implemented.
This game has been accused of catering to pedophiles and ephebophiles. If you care about that:
Nearly all the playable characters explicitly are listed in their biographies as being under 18.4 As mentioned above, during actual gameplay the characters are represented, not with sexy 2D art, but with unsexy chibi 3D models.5 However:
Each active skill plays a fancy animation when you use it. When performed by characters who wear miniskirts, these animations often include suggestive camera angles, all the way up to (non-blatant) panty shots. Additionally:
Some enemies are delinquent students, presumably in the same age range as the playable characters. In that capacity, they show up in battle maps (again, as unsexy chibi 3D models) wearing miniskirts, with (blatant) panty shots in the dozens when they are knocked unconscious.
After 20 hours of play, the game seems reasonably fun to me. But my new-player bonuses haven't yet run out, so I haven't yet had to deal with the stamina system.
1Other than Gundam Battle Operation 2, whose praises I have sung before. Unfortunately, however, that game is PVP-focused, and in that context has so few players on PC that queue times for matches on that platform are absolutely intolerable.2,3 As determined from my multiple terabytes of recorded footage, I played it from 2023-05 (the PC launch) to 2024-08 (when a bug was causing the game to repeatedly crash during matches and then give me a penalty for leaving the matches early), and from 2025-02 to 2026-01. RIP.
2Unless you go out of your way to play only during the narrow daily peaks in player count. And, even if you go to all that trouble, the other players may be filling the queues for frantic high-cost matches (e. g., Unicorn Gundam vs. Kshatriya) and leaving empty the queues for slower-paced lower-cost matches (Zeta Gundam vs. Gundam Mk-II).
3The game also is available on PS4 and PS5, where it allegedly has more players. But I definitely have no interest in buying one of those.
4According to the wiki, the ages of the playable characters (including variant forms of the same character) are as follows.
Therefore:
Or, alternatively:
5Insert obligatory link to community of people who find chibi characters sexy. I hear Lalafells are pretty popular lately among the sexual roleplayers of Final Fantasy 14… Slightly more (but still not very) seriously, see the artistically impressive Deformed 48 Positions (also loosely translated as Chibi Kama Sutra, but actually referring to a separate Japanese concept).
The pictures on these pages are weird. They look AI-generated, but at the same time I'm not entirely sure they are.
Much of the imagery and audio in this game has noticeably lower resolution/fidelity than one would expect in a PC game, presumably because it was just copied from the original mobile version.
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