Dawn of War 3 sales and recent 4x games

[WolfWhiteFire]

This brings up the question of why they release them in that state to begin with.

Probably so they can fix that with hundreds of dollars of DLC, which they usually do. Or, as with Crusader Kings 2 when I was playing it, release a free update alongside a DLC that more or less breaks the game without it, then fix that way later on (though there was mods fixing the biggest problems with the newest updates). They make some pretty good games, but they cost a lot to get the most out of them too.

[Mánagarmr]

This brings up the question of why they release them in that state to begin with.

Generally, I think Paradox just sets a date and finishes the game by that date, but to them game development isn't a static thing. They want to keep developing their games for almost forever. Make them better all the time. They're generally not that good at game design though, so most of their "good games" comes from years of community feedback.

It sounds a lot like an open beta, and I guess it kinda is. Only you have to pay for it. One might have opinions about that, but to me, it seems similar to what Arcen does. Release AIW and keep updating and changing it "forever". AIW 1.0 wasn't that fantastic either, compared to what we have today.

[Draco18s]

Re: Paradox.
I picked up Cities:Skylines over the weekend. I'm pretty satisfied with it. Got the public transport dlc right of the bat (because seriously, how can you have a city without decent public transit?)

I will say that I prefer playing with unlimited money and "evening unlocked" at the start, although I wish the game would stop with the "have you noticed this new building?" popup that covers the building menu. If you close it without looking at the actual item it just reopens itself 30 seconds later.  hug off game,  yes, I did see it. DID YOU FORGET THAT I STARTED WITH EVERYTHING UNLOCKED?

[eRe4s3r]

Distant Worlds

Very in-depth sim, lots of automation that's actually halfway competent. But after I saw what was happening I disabled all the automation and gradually figured out how to do it all manually (takes quite a bit of effort, because your economy can and will stall in various ways). Result was a wonderfully efficient empire, but it was then too easy to steamroll the AI that wasn't playing very efficiently. Though I suppose I could have made it harder in various ways.

So basically I had a blast for several hours solving a deliciously complex optimization problem, but then I was kinda done. No regrets.

For the price they ask (60€) I would have had regrets ,) I'd call the pricing for this particular game even obscenely high...

But that gameplay is actually one of the reasons that made me put Distant Worlds and Stellaris on 2 extreme opposite ends of a scale. In between you got, right in the middle, CIV and CIV alikes, because everyone clones that much to my detriment and even 2K managed to break CIV with CIV 6 (which I honestly found really meh, but that's beside the point)

Distant Worlds nearly seems like someone had the idea to make the most complex intricate interconnected fake-space-empire math based sim ever, and then noticed that "playing" that was exactly 0 fun, so they added a competent AI and now suddenly nobody played the original game anymore, and those who did did that once and never returned, because it's always the same after the first time. And worse, if you ever dig in what the automation DOES you notice you can do it 10 times better if you understand the systems, but if you don't disable automation, you are basically watching a "paint dry" simulation that plays itself and watches itself, it doesn't even need you around. Distant worlds is the first game (afaik) where your empire will fare better on full automation if you DO NOT INTERFERE and give it full diplomatic powers. Is that still a game? ;P

That's one of the biggest things I start to REALLY dislike about 4x games, they have no driving motivator behind them. No point. And I fear it's something I am gonna bring up in AI War 2 at some point when I post my first impressions of the "real" release version too. I find games that exist solely for their core gameplay to be incredibly boring lately (must be the heat), a game has to at least *try* to aim higher than that for me to consider it as something great and worthy of my time.

But my taste changes and sadly, games do not (not in the quantity nor direction I want, anyway)

I mean, it's downright depressing if you'd ask me what my favorite game of this year is, I mean it's already more than half-way done.
I'd have to say...
Nier: Automata

It's the 1 game I have played that I would say manages to achieve the "art" moniker not for sake of trying, but for mere existing. And the audio design as well as the soundtrack is just flat out a unique never before heard nor experienced masterpiece.

Ehem, anyway, I think instead of 4x, I'd rather play Realm Grinder... that is not a compliment for the state of 4x (and RTS) games so far.

[Misery]

That's one of the biggest things I start to REALLY dislike about 4x games, they have no driving motivator behind them. No point. And I fear it's something I am gonna bring up in AI War 2 at some point when I post my first impressions of the "real" release version too. I find games that exist solely for their core gameplay to be incredibly boring lately (must be the heat), a game has to at least *try* to aim higher than that for me to consider it as something great and worthy of my time.

Out of curiosity:  What does this bit here mean?

I read that whole thing, but I didn't understand this part whatsoever.


Also yes, the year is halfway over and frankly it's been a bloody boring one as game releases go.  I don't mean AAA games, don't care about or pay attention to those much.  Even indies are kinda bleh so far this year.  20XX and Caveblazers have been the real highlights for me so far (frankly 20XX is enough of a highlight to eclipse a few years here) but other than that, and Isaac's expansion, there hasn't been too much interesting.   Heck, I didn't buy a thing over the course of the summer sale, because there wasn't anything interesting I could find.  And any major upcoming releases I might be after, chances are I'm already playing them in some beta form.   Granted, Steam's absolutely awful horrible terrible store pages are NOT helping when it comes to finding stuff lately.  I find most games via the activity feed or sometimes Youtube, now, because it's gotten so bad.

Just.... feh.    That's a whole other rant really.

I'm at least glad I'm not stuck with just consoles.  That'd be REALLY boring.  Heck, I don't even know where my PS4 is.  Havent seen it in months.  Cant get the motivation to bother looking for it.  Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure why I have one.  It probably made sense at the time.  I sure use the controller, at least.

[eRe4s3r]

Out of curiosity:  What does this bit here mean?

I read that whole thing, but I didn't understand this part whatsoever.

Simple said
random meh game I start, it has 1 gameplay loop, when I play it more than once, that gameplay loop never changes in any way = boring to me

It's how I would sum up nearly every RTS and 4x ever made. ^^