Succession is a great show though. You should watch it. Much funnier than I thought it would be and the cast in it are great.
I'm just doing my best to spread the good word of Ace Combat. Would you be interested in a personality test to assess your need for speed?
As for Rogue-Like and deck building games being popular with indies, you hit the nail on the head. They are a lot easier to develop (and also fun to develop). You set up a bunch of rules that can interact with each other and then let those rule interacting with each other create unique gameplay challenges and variety.
Saying that, it might be easier to develop (and also makes it easier to expand on in future updates) but it's also a hell of a lot harder to test and balance, although with these games having the games be slightly broken is part of the fun as well. However with indie games you kind of release in a semi tested state and have the community do the testing for you through early access and patches. It also helps that the likes of Chunsoft's Mystery Dungeon series and Spelunky have laid the foundations for these games to be built off of. So yeah, it's really well suited to small developers.
I'm so guilty of this as well. And I've been blue in the face recommending people play games and them not doing so:
Funny enough it's exactly the kind of game where people will recommend you go in knowing as little about it as possible, simply because there a bunch of weird twists and mechanical layers going on. It's 'game within a game within a game' sort of material.
It's as much a creepy pasta style, mysteriously cursed horror game as it is a deck builder :)
If/When it comes to PS5, I might check it out.
I'd recommend you try Thronebreaker - it's a full adventure game set in the Witcher universe, where all the battle gameplay is done through Gwent. Your Gwent cards are actual characters that join your party and there's an excellent story and a lot of choices you make through the game which influence the deck you have. The actual adventure outside of Gwent is mostly going through dialog and conversation trees and walking around a fairly simple 2d overworld, but it's just so well written and acted that it kept me hooked throughout - there's a lot of those moral grey area decisions to make where there's no good option and I really had to agonise over some of them - they often influence both the narrative and the state of your deck, and sometimes seemingly innocuous choices can come back to bite you later.
After I completed it I went and downloaded the actual full Gwent game, but I played about three battles and got bored and turned it off. Just building a deck and battling with no other game behind it held zero appeal for me.
No, story is as important to me as gameplay. Best gameplay in the world and I can still be bored if the story is not engaging. A good story can keep me engaged even when the game mechanics are not 100% (The Witcher is a prime example of me not liking the combat)
Ninty don't just use tropes (like the examples you give) they use the same story beats, characters, progression, key points, upgrades etc.
If I'm playing a Zelda game I know who I'll meet and (generally) in which order
Metroid: Get these weapons/upgrades in order to progress.
Leaving Pokemon out as it's a game series for young players, in the main.
Must keep a look out for Thronebreaker to go on sale. I loved Gwent in the Witcher 3 but found the standalone game boring. This might be a good balance.
Gwent in The Witcher 3 was amazing because it was not balanced - it was more a narrative quest, designed to ensure the odds were increasingly stacked in your favour as the game and quest line progressed.
The stand-alone is boring because it needs to be balanced. Might be better for ‘competitive’ play, but has none of the satisfaction you get in the original version. Or at least it’ll take you a long time to get there. Also, they changed the bloody code game too!
Havent tried Thronebreaker, but I’m sure it’s more the former than the latter - it kind of has to be as a single player game.
Madness as the game isn't even out yet
He would want to get the game out quick before that NFT bubble bursts in the next 6 months. It's fine putting a value on those NFTs now but they will probably be worth nothing in a few months time.
It wouldn't be him that loses out on it though, it's the people who paid in order to own a f*cking receipt.
Everything about NFTs just sounds inherently cynical and scammy - whether it’s a game item or right-clickable JPG. But this ‘game’ just sounds like the most horrid, exploitative piece of ****. ‘Virtual landlords’? Jesus.
Yeah but they kind of deserve it falling for this shite.
Bunch of idiots. They should be more like me. I can't wait for Nasa and the Russians to land on Mars and realise just how much of it I own.
Oh and STALKER 2’s getting in on the **** NFT racket 🤮
Truly the most moronic, desperate trend in modern gaming.
Owning and trading virtual goods already exists in many many games, Eve Online is perhaps the best example. Storing them as NFTs rather than simple database tables on the player profile on the game server would make sense if you could take the item out of the game, but the reality is that as soon as the game shuts down the item is gone, and NFTs do nothing to change that.
So the justification for them isn't particularly valid, and aside from being a marketing buzzword they currently serve as a rallying call to try and pile on to the latest pyramid scheme. Axie Infinity pioneered this a few months ago in Asia and the bubble has already burst in that game.
Yes, It's pretty much let's do what we are already doing except exponentially more damaging for the environment.
https://i.gifer.com/JmZo.gif
Trading virtual goods for real money is bad, doesn't matter that it's not new, it's still bad.
Stalker 2 going this way just killed all what remained of my expectations, not that they were too high to begin with. We are never going to gen anything close to the original series (or even anything at all) and I have made my peace with it :|
At least with Eve online, or any of these things (which I don't agree with), the market value for assets is entirely within that sphere of influence.
NFTs are so inherently tied to wild crypto swings, it's practically impossible to see them as valid ownerships of assets.
I'm not against NFTs or crypto in principle, but I think the way it's done now is not stable enough. There are stable coins which make far more sense and remove the speculation, but Ethereum isn't one of them.
I still have around a grand's worth of Eth I mined on my PC and I don't even know what to do with it or how to sell it. I'm just going to mine again when it gets cold here where I live in January.
I wonder will there be a similar backlash against GSC as there was against Ubi. You'd like to think so, but (newsflash) gamers can be fickle.
I do have to say there’s been something rather ‘off’ about STALKER 2 since it was announced. Maybe it’s all the legal chaos and stop-start projects that preceded it that leave that impression. The glimpses of video and the screenshots we’ve seen obviously look visually impressive. But this announcement does little to alleviate fears!
I've been catching up on some of the acclaimed games I missed this year, and the critics weren't wrong about Chicory. It's a really special, memorable game. Some of the 'wholesome' games can kind of come across feeling twee to me - but this is just loaded with smart storytelling and gameplay devices. The central painting mechanic is surprisingly agile, with lots of cool twists on the idea as the game progresses. The writing does its often grim themes justice. It looks brilliant too - the black and white world filling up with colour (which stays on environments persistently, like a record of your progress) as you fling the digital paintbrush around. Funny, smart and charming stuff.
Today, I finally traded in my PS4 Pro, because GameStop have a crazy credit trade in price right now for it. I also traded in BF2042. So I picked up a Series X and 3 months Gamepass for €145!
I have it set up for the last 2 hours downloading Forza. But I have no excitement for it. Hard to explain, but I was like a giddy child opening the PS5. Once set up, there's no fanfare or excitement. With the 5, you had Astro to dig straight into and it showing off the DualSense and console features. Nothing with Xbox. Just pick and game and download. It doesn't feel like I have a new console, just a more powerful 360 (I skipped the One).
I know I'm a bit of a Sony fanboy, and maybe the gameplay will make me excited. Any cross platform game I'm interested in will be played on the 5 simply because of the DualSense. Saying all that, I still couldn't turn it down for €145!
I hear ya. Great hardware and great deal for 145 though! Yep, no sense of excitement for me with the MS consoles. No killer apps unless you love FPS games. But there is certainly good stuff available on game pass.
Eg
Ori and the Will of the Wisps
Psychonauts 2
Halo Infinte
How much did you get for the Pro on its own if you don’t mind me asking? I have one sitting here gathering dust since I got the PS5 so if the price is right I may be tempted.
My ps5 is gathering dust. I can't get enough of GamePass. I feel guilty for having both when people are struggling to find a ps5.
The ps5 controller is class though, I can't stand constantly changing batteries on the Xbox, so annoying!
In the long term, I think you'll get a lot out of the X even if it doesn't have the most exciting exclusives for you right now.
I hour every ready battery charger + pack of re chargables. Or rechargable battery packs. Isn't that the same? Let's not start battery gate again though. 😀
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