unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6994|PNW

Played some sprocket. Pretty much took existing tanks, slapped some extra armor on them, and  boosted the gun to the next "usual caliber." Make a few other changes to make it handle well, with the new gun and the new weight, and hopefully didn't decrease the number of tanks in a platoon.

There are limits based on what era you're designing in, and hulls are very angle-oriented. No curves here. Embraced it, made a Panther III "Jumbo." with 180mm on its angled front plate and a 10,0 cm gun. Deflecting shots from tigers. Hopefully more content in the future. Modeling tools, better UI, a way to restore default tanks you accidentally delete (I tried removing the folder entirely from both the steam directory and my documents, I have no idea where else it is unless some profile info was stored in another steam folder).

WW1 map is a pain. Need a long boi to bridge those trenches, everything is slow. Will probably just delete all 8 of the default tanks to get them out of my sight and make a prototype TOG.

https://www.tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww2/gb/Prototypes/TOG-1.jpg
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+640|3942

Pretty cool that Konami made a story driven game like this back in the mid-90s. This and Final Fantasy 7 were such amazing projects for their time.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6994|PNW

Is 1998 still the mid-90s? Descent is like dead center mid-90s. MGS is a little more advanced than that.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+640|3942
It was released in 1998.

"Development for Metal Gear Solid began in mid-1995" via wiki
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6994|PNW

Should we really count that? According to wiki, Descent was nascent in the mid-80s, yet is still very much a mid-90s game.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6994|PNW

what mac spent $2000 in video card moneys for:

Larssen
Member
+99|2110
Bought an xbox series x and it came with forza 5. First time I'm ever playing a racing game and imho I've been missing out, shit is fun.

Also seems to make me better at fps games as your reaction speed improves a lot when driving supercars down narrow bendy roads. If you blink you crash
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6994|PNW

It's a rabbit hole. Soon you'll have a wheel, pedals, and everything.
RTHKI
mmmf mmmf mmmf
+1,741|6959|Oxferd Ohire
They need vr for me to bother using my wheel with horizon

Fun games. Hate the off road /cross country whatever they call em races.
https://i.imgur.com/tMvdWFG.png
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6994|PNW

Mentioned it before, Cruisi'n USA was the best at the arcade or restaurant. This came out around the time of Doom, mind you, and looked/felt fantastic.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,813|6328|eXtreme to the maX
A friend of mine has the full setup, I think he does 24hr endurance races as part of a team.

His wife won't let him out of the house so fair's fair.
Fuck Israel
RTHKI
mmmf mmmf mmmf
+1,741|6959|Oxferd Ohire
Those are fun tho. And much cheaper than real racing


Course mine is collecting dust. I blame my ssd failing

Last edited by RTHKI (2022-02-21 04:59:29)

https://i.imgur.com/tMvdWFG.png
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6994|PNW

Friend of mine says new release Elden Ring was made even buggier by a recent patch. They're a huge souls fan. Disappointed. Gotta love modern gaming.

Another friend of mine recently built new (for VR) and got a bunch of incorrect stuff in their shipment. ATX mobo for a mini case, thanks newegg. I suggested if they saved the link to go back and see if it's even still shown as the same item as the one they ordered.
Larssen
Member
+99|2110
Why do game stories almost invariably suck?

Like the best games I've played story wise usually approached their world either by shrouding it in mystery and less-is-more type of stuff, or were more filled with hilarity. I'm thinking the original diablo, some GTA games. Of everything I've played, Red Dead Redemption 2 comes closest to actually being a good story on its own, though it still is a pretty standard western.

You'd think between films and books, games provide the ultimate platform for conveying great stories. It has visuals, interaction and few constraints to creative writing. So why do so many games fall short, and what actually are good story driven games that aren't trope-filled, half assed derivatives from masterpieces in other mediums?
uziq
Member
+493|3674
it’s a very good question. i can only hazard that games have been concerned overwhelmingly with technology/technique, the nuts and bolts of rapid advancement, over story-telling and art.

there are some great narrative-based games nowadays. a lot of indie titles with really strong creative visions, and oodles of imagination on display.

it’s curious that early games were overwhelmingly narrative. so many early RPGs, i guess from their text/turn-based origins, were almost entirely story-driven affairs.

then 3d graphics took off in a big way and i guess gaming has become a continuous tech-demo, above all else, for the last two decades. that and a massive cash cow. gaming is now best understood as an industry and a major earner at that. it suffers from all the lamentable practices and hustles of, say, peak studio-era golden age hollywood. the art was left in the dust as the money machine took off.

Last edited by uziq (2022-03-19 16:32:07)

Larssen
Member
+99|2110
Well even in today's hollywood you have directors who are given big budget productions and who can still produce pretty good stuff. It's not all Marvel superhero part 32. Villeneuve has made a few great movies and gets to translate dune to the big screen now. There hasn't been an era in filmmaking without at least a handful of directors and studios who had popular appeal, industry backing and tons of creative talent. You also have plenty of series that are A+.

Where's the game industry equivalents? Asking around for a good RPG gets you referred to mass effect, which is an alright game, but would've been absolutely trashed as far as story goes if it were published in book or film form. Is the gaming community standard for a good story on par with its perception of 'cool aesthetics'?
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+640|3942
A lot of modern games have novelizations. This one sounds interesting.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71qJksVnKgL.jpg
I think this is a problem with your expectations and taste. You can go to a comic con and find hundreds of people dressed as modern characters that they strongly identify with.
https://static0.gamerantimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/The-Last-Of-Us-Cosplay-By-TickleTumTum-And-King-Of-The-North-Cosplay.jpeg?q=50&fit=crop&w=1400&dpr=1.5
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6994|PNW

Larssen wrote:

Well even in today's hollywood you have directors who are given big budget productions and who can still produce pretty good stuff. It's not all Marvel superhero part 32. Villeneuve has made a few great movies and gets to translate dune to the big screen now. There hasn't been an era in filmmaking without at least a handful of directors and studios who had popular appeal, industry backing and tons of creative talent. You also have plenty of series that are A+.

Where's the game industry equivalents? Asking around for a good RPG gets you referred to mass effect, which is an alright game, but would've been absolutely trashed as far as story goes if it were published in book or film form. Is the gaming community standard for a good story on par with its perception of 'cool aesthetics'?
For awhile there was a phase in gaming where your game being "x on rails" was considered bad mojo. "Shooter on rails. RPG on rails. Haha, lazy devs, this game sucks." But open world freedom can tend to make things feel less focused.

You must be looking or asking in the wrong places, if all you get are recommends for Mass Effect. There are a lot of story-driven games, with at least passable stories. What are you looking for in a story game, exactly? Cohesive? Compelling? A lot of "best of" lists look very much the same as far as triple-A is concerned. Where there's a lot of differentiation is when they pluck indies out of the ether to pad it. Look into the indies. Even PC gamer dips into indie whenever they roll out a top list. They're out there (some are literally nothing but text), or you could just read a book.

Ones that made me feel somewhat invested: check out Thief 1, 2, Mafia 1, 2, Tacoma, VtM Bloodlines. Subnautica is a satisfying short story, but there's a lot of exploring in between piecing together the mystery of the planet. Subnautica: Below Zero is a bit of a different take on it in that your character isn't a voiceless immersion puppet like Gordon Freeman.

Get lots of recommends for Firewatch, Disco Elysium, Pillars of Eternity.

Look at Telltale's catalog. Also Choice of Games.

Some games can tell a good story simply by showing you, rather than dragging your skull through it.

Try looking for interactive stories (Tacoma is pretty much one of these in disguise) in the Steam store. Games that actually sell themselves on being a story. Sometimes you'll get ones where the writer is featured in the blurb.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6994|PNW

Dark Forces: Jedi Knight was a rather hilarious series in that your struggle against the dark side pretty much came down to skill point investment rather than your actions. Take your sweet time torturing an entire imperial military base with lightning, telekinetic strangling, or yeeting hapless stormtroopers into bottomless pits, and you can still be uncorrupted as long as you put more points into passive light side stuff. Then you get to watch the cutscene of Kyle Katarn struggling with hatred as if he didn't just wade through the imperial military like a sadistic superman. I think there were some maps where you could even execute civilians, though those weren't counted until kotor iirc.
uziq
Member
+493|3674
newbie makes a good point. there's been an aversion to rails/themepark-based game design for the last few years now. i suspect a lot of this stuff is highly circular and driven merely by consumer trends/fashion; the market gets saturated with one sort of game, so we get another genre/design philosophy/franchise for a half decade or so. 'open world', 'sandbox', etc, have been the games du jour. that and lootbox-heavy battle royale, and so on.

Last edited by uziq (2022-03-21 18:26:57)

unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6994|PNW

On that, I do have to give a nod to the advantages to open world, largely aimless, goalless games, in that you can build your own brief narratives. Unforgettable moments in Skyrim, Oblivion where one thing leads to another. Weird NPC interactions/encounters in Starbound, Kenshi. Scheduled quirkiness of Stardew that can make a lot of playthroughs different because you aren't going to see everything unless you follow a guide. Unique series of events in Rimworld, especially modded Rimworld, that can morph into a tale very unlike what you can find in other games. A lot of games that focus on world building will allow your imagination to run wild in its sandbox. You can either learn more about the story, or not.

At least some of the more on-rails and theme park stuff have been getting increasingly positive press attention, though I don't have the market share numbers in front of me.

There are so many games out right now, even old ones that you can run on modern systems without having to manually fiddle with special launchers, that there should be plenty of options for people who look.
uziq
Member
+493|3674
thinking of it in terms of big business, which now gaming surely is, no longer being a pimple-faced teenage pursuit but rather an industry that outgrosses hollywood itself ... it's really a no brainer why the biggest titles put out by the major companies are all highly unoriginal, DLC-drenched, lootbox-riddled affairs.

the amount of time and investment it takes to make a AAA game is pretty enormous. the potential profits of making a game with dopamine-trigger labrat mechanics versus. the potential profits from making an amazing piece of narrative art ... are plain to see. even the very best single-player games of all time, from RPGs to FPS games like half life or deus ex, tend to have limited replayability (if at all for the vast majority of meh so-so releases). investing team/company efforts into making a highly addictive multiplayer package makes total sense when AAA games really ARE essentially just the marvel franchise transpored to the medium of videogames.

like hollywood at its most bloated apogee, the mainstream of the games industry is now highly conservative, risk-averse, and focussed on killer profits.

GTA games used to be fairly frequent and have crazy, ribald, funny, pretty unforgettable storylines. how old is GTA V at this point? 5+ years? all they've been doing is shovelling more DLC for GTA:online. totally indicative tbh.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6994|PNW

This rings largely true. As to Larssen's complaint though, there definitely are artsy/story games if you look. Some are quite well known and often repeated in recommends. I've ragged on Steam's "overwhelmingly positive" score before for sometimes representing the latest twitch bandwagon, but there are lots of indy/indy-esque titles filling those ranks (and some still very good games at the next rank down).

tbf, GTA 6 is being made with a release date around 2024-ish, according to news in recent days. That still makes it the longest gap between games if you don't count the online upkeep. There was recently a remaster, though at release I'd heard it didn't have the original soundtrack because licensing I think.

from rs blog, 2022 feb:

What’s Next

With the unprecedented longevity of GTAV, we know many of you have been asking us about a new entry in the Grand Theft Auto series. With every new project we embark on, our goal is always to significantly move beyond what we have previously delivered — and we are pleased to confirm that active development for the next entry in the Grand Theft Auto series is well underway. We look forward to sharing more as soon as we are ready, so please stay tuned to the Rockstar Newswire for official details.

On behalf of our entire team, we thank you all for your support and cannot wait to step into the future with you!

https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/ … e-20220204
After everything I've heard about RDR2 (I have the title and a good card, but am feeling close to building a new system so I can play it on something that isn't over a decade old), I very much look forward to see what GTA6 has in store.

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2022-03-22 02:51:51)

uziq
Member
+493|3674
RDR2 was pretty good for videogame narrative. wouldn't win the nobel prize for literature or anything, but it was very good for a game.

the fact rockstar have this amazing world and IP sitting around and do nothing with it, insofar as single-player/narrative-driven stuff is concerned ... shows you where the industry's biggest players and their priorities are.

the game world of RDR2 is huge and insanely intricate. their attention to detail is nonpareil. they are surely no strangers to the idea of wasting an inordinate amount of time on the smallest, most quizzical detail. and yet. even they've moved away from actually making new stories to bring that world to life.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6994|PNW

That doesn't surprise me. The amount of detail in GTA 5's city environment alone, a game like 10 years old now, is still astonishing by today's standards. RDR2 is yugely more recent. I imagine many were sold by videos of a horse taking a dump on a cowboy.

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