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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1095 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 2, 2024

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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General video game thread time once again.

Has anyone here played Outward? Holy shit it's so fun. I've been playing with my fiance and I've got to say, I haven't been this excited about a game in a looooooong while.

It's a standard medieval fantasy RPG, but more 'realistic' so to speak. You have to carefully prep your food, water, and really read all the tips and plan your routes to get places. In the beginning you will get your ass beat by hyenas if you aren't careful and strategic about fighting. It's also built for co-op, so there's online and couch co-op right out of the gate.

Good God I wish more RPGs had couch co-op!

There's no fast travel, no detailed quest log, you can't even see where you are when you open the map. You have to plan for the weather or slowly get diseases and die of cold and/or heat stroke; then again you could just get a disease from a hyena bite that will kill you as well.

The game has magic, but it's locked behind a tough dungeon in the beginning, and you have to sacrifice health and stamina to get it. You don't just get to pick mage at the beginning and get some cool magic missile or whatever.

But what's most impressive about the game is that the world feels alive. The characters have realistic motivations, there are serious, major consequences for bad decisions right off the bat. There are very few elements of the world that are just taken for granted. I think the difficulty and all the planning/weather/food stuff adds to this as well, by having to take care of survival needs you really get into the mindset of "Okay I'm here, I'm planning a trip here, what exactly do I need?" instead of just clicking a button and porting to another city.

I haven't played too far into it so please don't spoil anything, but damn I love this game. If anyone else has played it and liked it, I'm curious! And if you haven't, well it frequently goes on sale for $6 or so, so I'd recommend checking it out.

Victoria 3 has received a lot of criticism for betraying the ideals of Victoria 2. I don't have a strong opinion on that controversy. I'm just having fun with modding the game and watching the AIs duke it out in the modified copy.

  • By default, the game makes only five autosaves before overwriting the oldest one. But you can correct this behavior by editing a single line in a plaintext file.

  • By default, the game uses several different fonts—some nice, some ugly. But you can correct this behavior by editing a few lines in a single plaintext file.

  • By default, the game allows countries to build only the Suez and Panama Canals, and they cost exactly the same quantity of resources to construct. But you can correct this behavior (to add, e. g., the Kiel, Nicaragua, Tehuantepec, Atrato, and Kra Canals, and to make the Panama Canal more expensive than the Suez Canal) by editing a few plaintext files.

  • By default, the game's map is divided into several hundred "state regions", of which each (1) can be split between multiple different countries and (2) can contain both rural and urban buildings. This results in many weird situations. For example, (1) a great power that is rebuffed by Colombia in its efforts to build the Panama Canal will get a claim on the entire state region of Panama rather than on the single province where the canal can be built, and (2) a revolution of the "rural folk" interest group will also rally major cities to its banner. But you can correct this behavior by editing a few dozen plaintext files (plus one PNG file) to split all the state regions into separate rural and urban portions.

Et cetera.

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