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Video-game thread
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.
And many more.
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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