I can't believe today was a good play (Games you played today)

Did he ever fix this game, because when I played it everyone was just making combinatorially difficult houses where you just had to make blind guesses 10 times in a row. I’m not really sure how you stop that, so I’m very curious if he attempted to fix that design problem.

I do legitimately think One Hour One Life is his best game, but I refuse to play it after writing that post for fear of ruining it in some way. I now largely interact with it by reading his weekly update posts, which are still pretty enjoyable in terms of the scope of design problems he’s trying to solve.

Rohrer makes video games that I would never attempt making because I “know” they won’t work. I guess that’s probably why I find them extremely fascinating when they do.

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I think there are still some combination lock houses at the high end of the wealth scale, but a lot of those places are valuable enough that a dedicated crook who actually invested in ladders and blowtorches and dynamite could earn a big return on their investment.

Personally, I’ve always been satisfied with the early/mid-game of trying to do a lot with a little, building dummy defenses that aren’t hooked up, slowly working my way toward a house that actually makes use of all available space, which inevitably adds enough complexity that it ruins half my traps in ways I didn’t anticipate. It’s a lot like Dwarf Fortress in that regard: I’m more interested in the fumbling, accident-prone early days than I am in maintaining some exhausting machine.

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after 3 houses thought i would give the older fire emblem stuff another chance, got most of the way through 7 just playing a map or two every other night and frantically skipping all of the cutscenes because they’re boring

yeah it’s kinda bland, may give thracia a look at some point since it got a proper translation last summer

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I worked out you confirm by pressing the button a second time.

I think it’s an action RPG? The tactical combat is mostly choosing which caravaneers to put up close and which to hang back, the missions exist to move the plot forward and not the other way around.

The combat design borows a lot from original X-COM without considering why some mechanics/skills were in the game. Take overwatch! Here, it’s a skill you learn, and is kind of pointless: in X-COM, you use it because you don’t want to creep forward and activate something horrible, and are waiting for it to patrol into you. But enemies don’t patrol in A2P: Fallen Protocol & there’s no fog of war (just LoS obstructions). So there’s only two use cases:

  1. defilade traps, retreating out of LoS with shotguns ready to blast raiders as they come around the corner
  2. snipers out of range

Sniper rifles have a reversed range table, with max accuracy at max range. Every other weapon has a normal range table, so you never want to take a shot as soon as an enemy comes in range, but want to close the gap first. So, instead of using APs for Alertness, you should move closer (or move into range, snipe, then back away).

The most useful skill gives you a bigger inventory, which you need so you can pick up all the ammo/medkits/grenades from defeated enemies since shops randomly generate their inventories & thus you roll up to buy any pistol magazines, please, just one, but only have (unloaded) miniguns and hats on sale.

I grinded out some levels fighting roving bands and going in with a melee weapon+some medkits, rush the first enemy, grab whatever gun they were using + their ammo, repeat. I hit a squad of corp soldiers early, who had the best weapons in the game, so once the first one went down the rest followed quickly.

I got impatient with the main story line so used a Unity disassembler to see how many missions were left. What I thought was the 6th-last mission ended with a story dump, a surprise death of the main driver of the plot by a named enemy, and a call-to-action to escape impending disaster, and then the credits rolled!

Massive Chalice next.

do we have a thread on pathologic 2 somewhere? it’s so incredibly good.

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fair warning, the mid-game drags really hard

but I’d love to hear your thoughts, I think I’m the only one here playing it

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theres an eerie feelings thread which is closest but MAKE A THREAD MAKE A THREAD

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I got the Pathologic 2 PS4 port but I’m waiting to be in the right mood to play it. Which could take weeks

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museum of other realities is neat

Kiwami 2 was great. Some weird pacing shit in like Chapter 14 that is really tied into the original being a PS2 game, but overall much better than Kiwami 1.

Onward to Judgement/Judge Eyes, the worst title switch in the series since we lost Of The End.

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I’m still early in and it’s extremely stressful to play so haven’t been making steady progress but still god damn what an experience

don’t have much smart to say about it yet…

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it’s wonderfully oppressive, I think the actors-on-a-stage vibe was an accidental result of them learning unity and they actually leaned into the text

I really like how they got a stealth mechanic out of hiding your face and trying not to make eye contact with people

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And I finished Judge Eyes. Really took it’s time to bring the story out but it really ends at a good place. I get what it was doing now but it is overbearing.

What is a lawyer story?
What is a detective agency story?
What is a (y)akuza story?

It eventually becomes bigger than any of those stories and becomes about Justice is collaborative. It takes a lot of people doing the right thing.

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Please give the game designers with a background in theater some credit. The first game was full of this too (there is literally an Important Stage Play in the game where they address this as well) but the tech was more limited. There is nothing accidental about Pathologic 2.

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I wonder how much Kentucky Route Zero learned from Pathologic, which is very literal about its players-on-a-stage trappings.

I liked when games journalists were getting mad at the Pathologic 2 guy for putting out that statement calling them all baby westerners for not just playing the game the way they made it and apparently I was the only person with the context that he has Deeply Held Opinions about the stage and an actor’s role which is why he got so pissy about it.

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finally someone with the right opinions about videogames

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yeah the dev has talked EXTENSIVELY about theatre being important to games, but even if i didn’t have that context the stageplay ness is obviously by design (and my favorite thing about pathologic games)

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every time ice-pick lodge releases a game it’s almost guaranteed to be the most interesting game that’s come out that year, crazy that we got disco elysium to give them some competition in 2019

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They pair well together, too

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