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Brolo
BroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered User regular
BroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered User regular
Coming soon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRf_039N1hI
Swords of Ditto - April 24th
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxqmd_tE2WI
Battletech - April 24th
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgCTt02KTYg
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire - May 08th
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqQ5bSMiEN0
State of Decay 2 - May 22nd
https://www.pcgamesn.com/upcoming-pc-games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRf_039N1hISwords of Ditto - April 24th
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxqmd_tE2WIBattletech - April 24th
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgCTt02KTYgPillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire - May 08th
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqQ5bSMiEN0State of Decay 2 - May 22nd
https://www.pcgamesn.com/upcoming-pc-games
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What’s holding you up?
also archimedes is the best pilot. blocking an extra vek each turn is hugely useful
Yeah, that seems like a good way to go.
Still so glad you can get everything by playing on easy
Normal is just so stingy with cores
I just destroyed it with the loss of only a single building.
Now time for my hubris to bring me down.
one of the cheevos is "beat the game on hard" tho
Ok, so full disclosure, I was always going to at least give this game a look because I've been a fan of Battletech the setting, or the IP, or transmedia property or whatever, for a really long time. Not so much the tabletop wargame itself - which I only played a couple of times almost 25 years ago - but I've had a lot of fun with the video games, the cartoon, some of the tie-in novels and big roleplaying books and tomes of setting information. I used to take "Technical Readout: 3025" with me to school and read it between classes.
So I should probably just explain the appeal of Battletech in general to me.
Firstly, I really like its take on Mechs: specifically, I like that it takes a kind of silly idea (giant walking robots) and tries to treat it with semi-rigorous hard-sci-fi seriousness. Battletech mechs aren't lithe and nimble, they don't do graceful kung-fu flips over buildings. They're big stompy tanks and they feel heavy and powerful, but they also suffer from real-world things that afflict real machines and military hardware: they overheat, their guns jam or their ammo sometimes explodes inside of them, or they're just put together kind of crappily and break down sometimes.
I like the fiction of the setting. It has a setup not entirely unlike Game of Thrones - a great interstellar empire fragments after its ruler is assassinated and five noble familes (and various other factions) step forward to try to claim the throne. There's a lot of scope for Battletech stories to weave personal drama (politics, romance, courtly intrigue, friendship, espionage, sex, betrayal, etc) into the pulpy mech action and it's an entertaining mix. It's the kind of world where the climax of a story might see the hero confronting their evil twin and fighting a final duel in their respective Mechs on a crumbling bridge over lava.
I like what a lot of the video games have done and married the mech combat to a mercenary or moneymaking game, where you do jobs for money to buy better gear to do harder jobs. I love that stuff. Privateer and Freelancer are two of my favorite games, and that kind of gameplay featured in several Battletech games - like Mechwarrior on the SNES (the thing that got me into Battetech, in fact), MW2: Mercenaries, and MW4: Mercenaries. I am immune to the charms of your Hearthstones or whatever but give me a shitty spaceship or robot with one lousy laser and tell me I can do dangerous jobs for money to buy a second, slightly better laser and I will play your game for 300 hours without fucking blinking.
I'm looking forward to Harebrained's Battletech game because I think it'll succeed in all three areas - particularly story, which has never really been a feature of any of the previous Battletech/Mechwarrior games and is absent entirely from Mechwarrior Online (part of the reason I couldn't get into that game). HBS tells great stories and I think this is going to be the first Battletech game that really does the setting justice in its own right instead of just as a tissue-thin backdrop for robot action. I already know that the little intro cinematic for the game has more authentic human emotion than some entire previous games:
As for the other two things I listed, the robots and the moneymaking, I know the basic robot gameplay is good because I played the beta a lot last year, and what I've seen of the campaign has totally sold me that I'm going to love the business-sim side of the game - managing time and money, negotiating contracts, hiring and firing pilots, etc. It looks like what I've always wanted in that regard.
You're absolutely right that the game is complex, but the thing is that it's the kind of complexity I can get with: complexity that arises organically from the interaction of systems that model real-world things and whose properties you the audience member can infer from your own real-world experience. Like, your mech has different weapons on it. Some of them are most effective at short or medium range, some of them are long range. Your enemy is vulnerable in the back. What's the best place to move to where you can hit the bad guy from the rear with the most weapons with the best chance to hit? Or say your mech is hot and in danger of overheating. Do you take a minute to not do anything and let the temperature drop naturally or do you make a beeline for the nearest lake? What if standing in the lake leaves you open to an enemy's attack?
These are complicated tactical problems but they aren't questions where you need to memorize long lists of arbitrary properties of made-up things. It's not about knowing that there are only three Pentaslots in a standard-rarity Akuma Crystal but that only the first and third pentagrades are immune to fartomancy spells; that's not to say there isn't plenty of specialized Battletech knowledge (which mechs make good scouts versus which mechs make good assault vanguards? How can you tell the difference?) but that the systems governing those things won't be foreign or opaque to anyone who's had any experience with strategy games. Get the high ground, obtain local superiority, focus down your enemy. It's real and it's tangible.
None of this is saying that you personally should be into this, because I don't know what you're looking for in a strategy game. But I am legitimately 100% certain that this is going to be a terrific game for people who are into what it's doing.
@Mr. G
I feel like a high school athlete who peaked early
This is me but with the rusting hulks. Give me any other mech team and I'm a careless toddler who swings their arms around gaifully destroying anything valuable in arm's reach.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
can't stop retraining my rogue
I want her to use gun, but going dual-wield and cutting something into pieces is just mechanically works so much better
now depending on how guns go in Deadfire, they may get another chance
flintlocks akimbo gooooo
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
Moonlighter has a release date!
May 29th, 2018
Unfortunate... Extinction is apparently pretty bad:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/04/extinction-review-shadow-of-the-colossal-disappointment/
So yeah, I guess they are a great design but urghhh.
The world needs more games where your tiny hero conquers titanic monsters.
Oh shit, they're the Slug Cruiser of the game. That makes a lot more sense, actually.
Yeah the default squad is the most well rounded and forms the basic archetype of the game -- not flashy or gimmicky, just a solid, flexible team that will get you great mileage. All the other unlockables pile on the gimmicks that can be exceptionally powerful when played well, but you have to play them with specific tactics and mindsets, and they are prone to exacerbate misplays because of that kind of relative inflexibility.
Rusting Hulks may be my favorite team though as long as I can grab Smoke Bombs and have a mech piloted by Camila. Just smoke and death everywhere.
I don’t think I’ve ever bought a sub-weapon in any of my runs
Abe is also a slam dunk for Bltzkrieg - his armor works for chaining!
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
Also the Swap Mech is the secret MVP of the Flame Behemoths once you’ve gotten the +2 range upgrade
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
So many of the mechs are fun on easy and then I get cocky and try a normal game and everything keeps breaking my toys and it sucks
It's definitely a hell of a lot more hokey than I was expecting though. It feels like a spiritual spinoff of the Resident Evil games more than anything.
The save system still sucks a big old poop.
Steam ID - VeldrinD
It's cool.
I have been rubber-banding the right controller to my arm, so even though I'm missing that hand I can still move the controller around and hit the trigger on it with the end of my arm. For any other buttons I have to reach over with my left hand and hit them, which is a little awkward when I can't actually see the controllers.
(also on a personal note, it is a little odd seeing a right hand when in a virtual space)
Anyways, here's my experience with the games I've played:
Payday 2:
Controls fine, I can do everything I need to do without much trouble...except it gives me really bad motion sickness. I'm going to work on adjusting the settings to see if I can make it easier to stomach.
Robo Recall:
This game is great. I can do the controls just fine, except I only use one gun instead of two so it makes it a little harder for me. I have trouble tearing robots apart with my bare hands though, as it requires using both controllers at once in a way that's not easy for me. No motion sickness with this one. On another note, my wife loves this game and has played it more than me.
Dead & Buried:
A lot of fun, and again it controls fine but I'm only using one gun instead of two so it makes it a little harder for me. I tried the Horde mode alone and got easily overrun, so I guess I'll need to find other players to play that mode with.
Lucky's Tale:
I've only played a little, but it seems fun and is perfectly controllable with one controller. It makes me a little motion sick though.
Valkyrie's Blade
Again, only played a little but it worked fine. I just switched the sword to my left arm and went to town.
Air Car
This was cool, but I had trouble with the controls because a lot of important functions are on the right controller. I need to test to see if I can plug in a 360 controller and use that instead (I don't have an Xbox One controller).
Some Disney Thing:
This was just some free thing I downloaded because I think my nieces and nephew may like it. It doesn't have much though. Two notable things put you into the live action Jungle Book movie, seeing through the eyes of Mowgli. It's essentially just a video and you can't move or interact, just watch. The first scene is when Mowgli meets Kaa. I noped out of that one because a giant snake curling all around me with me unable to move is not a fun time. The second one is Mowgli's meeting with King Louie. If some primal part of your brain screamed "that monkey is too big" when watching the movie, then just wait until he comes out of the shadows and towers over you in person. Sadly, the scene ends before he starts his song.
The other notable thing is sitting at the dinner table in the live action Beauty & the Beast while Ewan McGregor's Lumiere sings "Be Our Guest" and the plates and everything dance in front of you. In this one you can interact and grab things that fly by, and there is a checklist at the end of all the things you managed to interact with or missed. My nieces are obsessed with that movie so should love this.
BBC's Home:
FUUUUUCK. Okay, so you're on the International Space Station. You're pulling yourself around in zero gravity. It works fine because the only buttons it uses are the triggers and that's the one button I can easily hit on the right controller. So they want me to go out into space and pull myself over to a damaged panel to take some pictures of it. No problem, it's a little trippy pulling myself around in Zero-G but whatever. Then...
Google Earth:
Okay this is pretty amazing. Being able to stomp around cities as a giant, or zoom out so far you can hold the Earth in your hand, or swipe across the sky to turn day into night. It's also cool with how certain landmarks allow you to go inside and look around. I may have spent more time with this than any of the other programs so far. It's also super easy for me to control.
Also I looked into that Nicholar Cage VR thing, but it's kind of dumb. It's just you in a VR space watching a movie on a theater screen, except for certain scenes it will fold out into 3 screens so you can also look left and right at those.
I also got a free Chess and free Solitaire game, just because I was amused by having an expensive VR rig and just playing Chess/Solitaire. Both of those games controlled fine and didn't make me sick or anything. There was also a free Wingsuit game I tried, but it didn't work. I've also downloaded some horror games that I haven't tried yet.
Overall I'm happy with it and have had a lot of fun. I do have to figure out a way to handle the motion sickness though. I'm also debating getting into streaming as a one-handed VR player or something like that.
I bought this a few years ago, played a few matches, and figured “I’ll play it more when it’s closer to release.”
Looks like that’ll be this Thursday.
The price is currently $15, and will go up to $25 once it’s on Steam. Buying now will get you a Steam key.
I'm not going to be porting a character over, despite having played the first game probably three times now (once when it was first released, once when the first expansion came out, and once when both expansions were out). I'm just not sure if I have the save games available or if I want to revisit those characters or whatever.
So far I've played an Aumua chanter, a human (I think) cipher, and a pale elf barbarian. So I'm probably not going to repeat one of those, although I remember very little about my cipher so I might dip into that well again. Plus I know they changed some things about how classes work so maybe I can revamp a concept I've done previously and pull it off better this time?
It seems like it's been pushed out before being ready for public consumption.