Games You Played Today Oratorio Tangram

You’re supposed to pretend you’re playing during their cutscenes and that the linear transitions are just little breaks in between shuttling your actors to the next scene. :V

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I remember when FFXIII was announced and I saw screenshots and coverage in my gaming magazines. It looked so cool and I wanted it really bad. I wonder what happened between conception and execution

The other day I got nostalgic for FF13 (mostly the battle theme, but also just… 2010) and immediately felt bad about it.

I hope I can relax long enough to get into FFXV someday.

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In looking this up I think part of the charm of Acquire games for me is that along with a shared aesthetic they tend to have the same loose ragdoll physics.

I love when every unity game released within a few months’ span has the same semi-major engine bug

a few years ago it was terrible singlethreaded bottlenecks on PS4, then it was segfaults on Linux when using a 360 controller, and now it’s “we don’t seem to have any concept of loading from disk that doesn’t just temporarily hang the app whenever I/O is bottlenecked so if you’re running it windowed with gsync it loses focus constantly and eventually hard crashes the nvidia driver”

I guess these are like, only tested on solid state drives now?

I don’t want to come across like “man unity sucks what a terrible engine” because it’s obviously been great for portability at the medium scale of game development, it’s just funny when every game suddenly has the same bug because every game uses unity

growing pains

I shouldn’t say which developer, but I was talking with some folks I worked with who used Unity for their company’s first major release. I guess all of the lighting in-engine in their game was completely and utterly broken until exactly one week before the E3 gameplay demo when an update to Unity fixed it in the eleventh hour.

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yeah, on balance it seems like it’s been an essential boon for medium-scale development, the problem is that “medium-scale” obviously gets revised upwards over time and so you’ll have, like, six-month rolling windows of game releases that are all broken in the same way until the pressure mounts to refactor the thing that no longer scales upstream

ok for real though pillars 2 is much better than any obsidian game in memory. if you actually like their work to begin with this is a fairly strong rec

I will somewhat uncharitably speculate that at their current kickstarter budgeting levels it takes about three games’ worth of iteration on the same engine to make a good one

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I have recruited the sexy fish man

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have you fucked the sexy fish man?

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The sexy times effect scales to his level so it’s wise to hold off until later.

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Caviar Emptor

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I’m on an endless side quest fucking around in a wizard’s basement, this rules

I would make a pillars 2 thread except I don’t actually have too much to say about it other than “obsidian’s whole thing is really working for a change and you should buy it”

it’s also ridiculously dense, like, I’ll play for two hours and have moved a few metres up the same street of the same section of the same town

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now I have

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Is this the game where my love for Alpha Protocol and New Vegas overcomes my unfamiliarity with CRPGs? Please lord let it be so.

I watched all of the Pillars making of videos because Josh Sawyer is hot and can spin yarn about Agamemnon but I bailed when I got to the first city in the game.

I’d still recommend original sin over this (or maybe even new torment just for the quality of the script) but I’d say it’s at least as good as dragonfall and substantially more complex. as I say often I have very minimal affection for the “let’s try and cram this into a 3D action game” school of broken-ass 360-era CRPG design (until witcher 2/3 came around and fixed it) but this feels like the first time they’ve really fired on all cylinders in ages

That’s interesting - I was interested and ultimately underwhelmed by those 360 games coming from a console-only background but I found returning to the isometric predecessors much harder than Deus Ex, Morrowind, and System Shock.

It looks like Original Sin is along the lines of new XCOM which is familiar enough given Japanese tactics games.

I also found the ABDN theme that most games could replace RPG-style representations of action with simulated action very persuasive at the time.

most older isometric CRPGs are bad actually, the post-2013 ones are way better

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Good Old Games lied to me :frowning: