‘Architectcracy.’ Which is more or less, “rule by architects.”

I’m playing Caesar 3. I’m absolutely terrible at it because planning out the city is about following the esoteric rules of the game rather than logically laying the city out.

I mostly made models and textures, I was never a one-person team. I made assets for a number of students in game dev programming and I worked on some gamejams. Quite a few games, but nothing beyond the scope of a limited project. Currently I just don’t have the time in between other things to go back to making assets.

This was built inside of Unity.

My Steam recents:

Everything that’s got a finishable campaign here I’ve completed, with the exception of MCC where I only played Halo CE and ODST to completion.

To put the headline in perspective:

Despite all the numbers being down, Black Ops 7 was still the best-selling game in terms of units and revenue in Europe for the week ending November 16 (its launch week). Battlefield 6, it’s main competition right now, came in fourth in both units sold and overall revenue.

Even with huge drop, COD is still raking in cash. While I personally think the current direction of COD is terrible, these sales numbers are unlikely to be some kind of fundamental course correction wakeup call to the publishers.

I’ll never get past the Dangerous Hunts games since some management somewhere at Cabela’s had to approve a hunting game with deep lore about a literal shapeshifting demon and chimpanzee supersoldiers.

In Wasteland 2 there is a museum of pre-war artifacts. One item is an undetonated nuclear bomb. If you monkey around with it you can find a big red button. It is obviously a terrible idea to push the button. If you still decide to push it you get a special game over screen.

And then it goes into a sewer.

I blame the Tylenol.

I noticed you haven’t mentioned the actual quality of the content. Is it a responsibility to give money to a medium simply because it takes payment instead of using ad revenue?

The competition for what’s in those magazines is with independent online reviewers.

I am now.

The idea of ranking games on a numerical scale is inherently flawed. I suspect many publications still use it as a way to make nice with game publishers. Text that’s lukewarm can slap a 9/10 score on and a lot of people just jump over the review to the “objective” score.

I feel it’s important

Genuinely, why?

Not all YouTubers are quality. This is obvious. What I am saying is that I’ve found a mere handful who are quality and for my tastes they have replaced the entire legacy professional gaming journalistic media. Other people I’m sure can find similar YouTubers who cater to their tastes and opinions.

That might be exactly part of why gaming journalism is irrelevant.

If the “news” is just repeating developer hype, then it’s just useless noise. At that point the only thing that matters are reviews, and independent YouTubers are beating the professionals in quality and trustworthiness.

So what’s left? Actual dry industry news? I suppose some small amount of people care, but not enough to support the amount of gaming journalists out there.

click- and rage-bait headlines on Facebook over quality journalism

Gaming journalism has been overrun with that.

What I, and I think many people, want are trustworthy, knowledgable reviews.

I can’t trust any of the major publications. I trust a small handful of YouTubers who are giving me more of what I want than the entire professional industry.

Back in the late 90s-early 2000s the PCGamer magazine was actually worthwhile. It had reviewers who specialized in different genres and if read enough you could get a feel for their writing style and critical voice. The fact it was a monthly publication meant they weren’t racing to get a review out in the first 24 hours.

Nowadays it all seems like publications race to put reviews out online for relevance, and the reviewers often seem to have a disdain for video games and even if they don’t they aren’t genre experts.

I don’t like fighting games. My review of a fighting game would be trash. Yet major publications just pump out reviews by whoever.

Individual youtubers at least can develop a recognizable critical voice and stick more to genres they know and enjoy.

The entire industry was flooded with mouthpieces for developer statements, and opinion piece hottakes. How many of those people does an industry really need? (Or more importantly: How many of those people can it financially support?)

As for reviews, they are for the most part similarly worthless and hard to trust. There’s about five YouTubers who I actually trust the opinions of, and I haven’t felt left out at all with that as the extent of my gaming journalism intake.

I can’t be certain, but I suspect a lot of gamers are completely burnt out on the professional gaming journalism industry.

No, it’s from here:

https://terra-arcanum.com/drog/uap.html

Yes it is. Drog’s patch is the universally recommended patch that fixes bugs and has a lot of optional changes like adding new playable races, removing annoying sound effects, and more evenly distributing party experience instead of a per-hit system.

If you’ve played Halo CE, playing the Ruby Rebalance is still worth it. You’ll probably appreciate it more with the vanilla experience fresh in mind.

The Halo: CE mod is very tastefully done and improves the game. There are a lot of invisible tweaks like making the assault rifle more accurate in short bursts and tweaking spawns (the Library level is much better) as well as visible changes like adding ODSTs where it makes sense, adding new enemy types, and a few new to CE campaign weapons like a usable energy sword.

The new enemy types include a lot of new flood forms which makes them less of a slog to play against. There’s elite zealot flood still carrying energy swords, which are terrifying.

I’m waiting for Ruby’s Reblanced Halo 2. Based on the quality of the Halo: CE rebalance it will probably fix many of those issues. I hope, but maybe shouldn’t expect, that mod includes the proper shading. Part of the reason Halo 2 looks so strange is it was designed for a full dynamic shading system which was pulled late in development for XBox performance reasons. What’s left is baked shading and very limited and scaled back dynamic shading, but in a world and art style that was designed with full dynamic in mind.

I recently played though Halo 2 partially with another restored content/rebalance mod and it was alright, though it didn’t have the skill of the Ruby Rebalance in making new/restored content feel organic to the game.

Arcanum. (with Drog’s patch)

Somehow I’ve never played it. As a 90s cRPG veteran it is interesting to go fresh into a cRPG and be smacked with a lot of confusion about mechanics and stats that I don’t have from games I’m used to playing. It took me a frustratingly long amount of time to figure out how to use the world map travel.

As seems to be a trend with Tim Cain games, the combat isn’t very good but the game is carried by the social detail, world, and variety in how to approach quests. I’m going for a social build with a lean towards magic in order to get the most out of social interactions.

Fallout 4

I’ve got a lot of mods installed (200-ish). The commonwealth in my version of the game is absolute hellscape with radioactive storms that kill visibility, pitch black nights, hoards of feral ghouls, and upgunned raiders. What it means is that I actually invest in building proper settlements now. I console command for all the resources because I can’t be bothered picking through trashpiles. With all the mods, I have huge concrete walls surrounding my settlements which have comfortable bars and hangout areas. It can be very comfortable just chilling in a settlement while a storm rages outside.

When I do go outside I’m playing additional mod loaded content most of the time and doing my best to ignore that default story.

I’m currently experience grinding random low level encounters the wilderness in Arcanum. As a speech/lockpicking character, I need high success rates with those skills in the actual quest areas since I’m no good in combat (and the combat feels pretty terrible anyway).

I think the original trilogy (plus Reach and ODST) work because while there’s a ton of lore, the really convoluted stuff is kind of at the background to the moment to moment feel of the game. The most forward facing content is a pastiche of other easily digestible scifi that’s all mixed together in a fun, interesting way. You’ve got conventional humans who feel like a straight expansion of the colonial marines from Aliens up against a diverse and interesting array of aliens. The Covenant are a refinement from Pathways Into Darkness and then the Marathon games. You’ve got the flood as a space zombie change of pace.

It all mixes together well and the more detailed lore can be built on top of it. There are many intentional gaps and hooks which can suggest things without having to be addressed explicitly, leaving room for some mystery.

After those games, the series kind of imploded under the weight of its own lore since the developers/writers chose to bring all of those mysterious elements to the forefront. It gave less interesting enemies to fight, and less motivation to care. I doubt many people have moments from those games burned into their memories the same way moments from the original trilogy are.

The MCC Halo had a graphical remaster on the original engine, that’s why you could swap between original and remaster visuals on the fly. The upcoming project is a remake on a new engine with changes to gameplay and design.

No I only played 3.

So much, let me recount some of it.

There’s a lot of invisible tweaks like the assault rifle has a smaller initial spread which makes it usable at medium range with short bursts. The needler fires faster. The warthog accelerates to top speed faster. Hunters no longer die to one magnum shot. Flood popcorn forms don’t chain explode nearly as much and they do a little more damage to the player so you can’t just totally ignore them anymore. The player can jump ever so slightly higher allowing them to reach certain areas during combat more easily. Vehicle damage has been tied to speed so tapping (or being tapped) by a slow vehicle isn’t an insta-kill. Ghost and plasma turrets have tighter spreads, both when firing at the player and when the player is using them. Marines will now drive unoccupied vehicles and follow the player.

The energy sword, flame thrower, fuel rod gun, and sentinel beam gun are all usable in the campaign now.

More enemy types are added. This is especially noticeable with the flood which has elite-flood forms using shields now. There are zealot flood with swords. There are cloaked spec op flood. This makes the flood more interesting to fight and keeps plasma weapons important to the mix against them.

There are now ODSTs in addition to the normal marines. They have slightly more aggressive AI than the standard marines, so they are more active in combat but can also get killed faster if you ignore them. They replace marines where it makes sense in the campaign.

Enemy mixes have been tweaked throughout. The Library had work done to make the spawns less of a slog to get through by placing the additional spawn waves more heavily behind rather than in front of the player.

There are non-combat animals on the ring now. From butterflies to big grazing creatures.

I replayed Halo CE by way of the MCC, with Ruby’s Rebalanced mod. The mod adds a lot of value by for the most part seamlessly improving aspects of the campaign that felt a little under polished in the original release.

It very much appeals to what I like, so that’s a big help for it.

Star Control 3 is really good.

The Blake Stone games are unexpected and kind of a random choice, but now I may get to experience what Civvie was ranting about.

It is tedious, with repeated samey layout and a limited selection of flood enemy types. The mod mixes up the environment and adds more flood enemy types for variety.

In videos he has mentioned both reducing the damage from the sniper rifles so they aren’t one-hit kills, and allowing jackels to use carbines which will replace some sniper jackels.

Yes, it was in the CE PC multiplayer. And, to refer back to the post:

It adds new weapons to the CE campaign

Repeat from the other thread:

I beat The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

It was alright. A third person shooter where you are theoretically giving tactical orders to two NPC followers. In reality, good or interesting tactics go out the window in favor of just spamming special abilities as much as possible in a chaotic mess of fights. The story was decent and gets interesting near the end, although for my money after the big reveal it feels like it drags out a bit longer than it needs to. For $3 I got my value.

I beat The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

It was alright. A third person shooter where you are theoretically giving tactical orders to two NPC followers. In reality, good or interesting tactics go out the window in favor of just spamming special abilities as much as possible in a chaotic mess of fights. The story was decent and gets interesting near the end, although for my money after the big reveal it feels like it drags out a bit longer than it needs to. For $3 I got my value.

COD4 was the first Modern Warfare game.

World At War wasn’t numbered.