Weekly ‘What games have you been playing’ thread #25

Been watching ESA, nothing of note (except the trainwreck of an Elden Ring blindfolded run), but it’s certainly better than GDQ.

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s_a_n_t_b who/whom Computer User 1yr ago #4684156

Semi-current game: Crying Suns. Basically FTL type game where the ship-ship combat is a pausable RTS on a hex grid where carriers send out squads of smaller ships. That part is good simple fun but sadly they completely ruined it with the "clicking around on the map between combat" part. You just wait and wait and wait for UI animations and interstitial visuals. When you make one of the "I will risk my crew in this random encounter" choices, it will fade to black for 5 seconds before revealing the outcome, just to be annoying. You get to send your crew on a ground mission: pick a commanding officer according to your crews' skill-based loot/casualty probabilities, and .... sit there for two minutes watching skill checks. They have a better storyline/writing than a lot of games, but are too hopped up on it and have you clicking through endless exposition. Would not recommend for these reasons.

Retro games: The original inconsistently named spaceshit FPS, Dark Forces/Jedi Knight.

Star Wars: Dark Forces: It's spaceshit DOOM! Its engine has several advances over DOOM such as "jumping" and "looking up/down". You are Kyle Katarn, space private military contractor. Introduces a key facet of the series which is ridiculously scaled Star Wars architecture with bottomless pits all over. Good levels, good guns.

Star Wars: Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight: It's spaceshit Quake! Still its own engine, it's at the pinnacle of the pre-Half-Life FPS. All storyline development remains in amazingly cheesy greenscreen live action cutscenes. Surprisingly it turns out Kyle Katarn has fun space wizard powers to aid him and a lightsaber to fight the Dark Jedi bosses. Great guns and good levels.

Star Wars: Dark Forces 3: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast: Spaceshit Quake 3! Now it is literally on the Quake 3 engine. Not gonna lie, now it sucks as a shooter. Guns mostly suck now, ranged combat feels tedious. It is great as a space wizard simulator. You run around with your lightsaber and powers absolutely massacring hordes of stormtroopers or alien criminals, occasionally having a miniboss lightsaber battle. The villain figures a way to trans space normies into space wizards so you have plenty of miniboss lightsaber battles rather than just the few boss battles of the last. Power usage is more integral than the last one. Unfortunately they made Kyle Katarn forget how to be a Jedi so you have to play like 1/4 the game as a shitty shooter before you become a Jedi again. Once you get the lightsaber you mostly abandon the guns except for an occasional sniper rifle or anti-material heavy weapon shot. Levels feel pretty generic.

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loli_esports h/vidya s_a_n_t_b 1yr ago #4684587

Oh hey, I was playing crying suns a bit recently. Yeah, it's surprisingly similar to FTL, especially in the combat, which I found interesting since it was such a departure from FTL’s mechanically but very similar in how the ideas worked. I think one of the worst features of the game is the lack of randomization in the random pop up encounters. Once you figure out the right choice in the text options, you will always get the same result unless you have a specialized crew member (this really is limited given how you’ll always be starting with only two, so you’re just going to figure out which is the best unspecialized choice super fast and always pick it). The ground encounter things were better than most text based choices because they were at least randomized and you could math out which specializations to buy as ‘intel.’

Also resetting the ship/crew each sector seems like a cover up for some design issues. The game is already a bit low on content and you max out the ship pretty much every successful run, really feels like they went half way to designing a good amount of progression and rather than balance it so you have to make some decisions or minmax, they just said frick it and reset the player each chapter. Related, it seems like the sectors/chapters all have a ship that is meant to be used and hard counters the enemies in a way that devalues all the other ships for that zone, like the pirate is op in the 3rd or 4th chapter since it can spam bombers to counter the long deployment ships that have high value.

I should finish it, I think I have one chapter left.