Vidya Games Thread

[Tubedude]

Speaking of Paradox games, it looks like the next one is going to be EU5. And unlike some nu-pdx games (Vic 3 being the biggest offender), it actually looks somewhat promising.

Tinto Talks #1 - February 28th 2024

Hello everyone and welcome to .. yeah, what is this really? Is this a game called “Tinto Talks?” No.. not really. First of all Tinto stands for “Paradox Tinto”, the studio which we founded in Sitges in 2020, with a few people moving down with...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Tinto Talks #2 - March 6th, 2024

Welcome to the second week of Tinto Talks, where I talk about the design we have for our new top secret game, which we refer to as “Project Caesar.” Today we’ll delve into everyone's favorite topic, MAPS! Let's begin with the projection we chose...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Tinto Talks #3 - March 13th, 2024

Welcome to the third week of Tinto Talks, where we talk about our upcoming game, which has the codename “Project Caesar.” Today we are going to delve into something that some may view as controversial. If we go back to one of the pillars we...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Oh thank fuck, they'll finally stop updating EU4 so I can finally do a CK2 into EU4 mega-campaign without having an update drop midway through.

 

[Dispirited Helmet]

didn't see this posted, Stellaris is going to go for MACHINE SUPREMACY, so prepare yourselves for another wait period as mods update:



we're nearing on Year 8 of Stellaris, and I would very much appreciate Stellaris 2 for both an engine upgrade and a point of modding stability in Stellaris 1

Supposedly they have a "custodians" devteam working on stability, but in my experience Stellaris can become nigh unplayable in later years despite the updates. It's too bad too, there's so much to that game that doesn't deserve to be consigned to a 40 year single-player speedrun. PDX games always seem to end up in that same weird space as Dead By Daylight where the base game really should have been retired 5 years ago but the creators don't want to rock the boat.

 

[ogey_rrat]

Supposedly they have a "custodians" devteam working on stability, but in my experience Stellaris can become nigh unplayable in later years despite the updates. It's too bad too, there's so much to that game that doesn't deserve to be consigned to a 40 year single-player speedrun. PDX games always seem to end up in that same weird space as Dead Buy Daylight where the base game really should have been retired 5 years ago but the creators don't want to rock the boat.

Start killing the AI civs and/or pops and you'll notice the game starts to run faster. Alternatively, use a pop growth mod and start with a smaller galaxy size/less civs.

 

[Dispirited Helmet]

Start killing the AI civs and/or pops and you'll notice the game starts to run faster. Alternatively, use a pop growth mod and start with a smaller galaxy size/less civs.

Oh I do all that: it still kills half of what makes the game fun, though. Completely ruins the War in Heaven faction stuff, makes the Galactic Community much less interesting (wow you became Custodian over 2 actual civs and a handful of vassals, amazing), no Sensor Arrays and you have to declare war on any AI that tries to repair one, no pacifist runs, no large federations, etc etc... And then of course multiplayer is even more limited, which was arguably the best part of the game. One of my favorite memories in Stellaris was forcing half the galaxy to declare war on a friend because he wouldn't kill Tiyanki, and political plays like that are just less viable when there are fewer civs and no space for extra anomalies. Maybe I just need to upgrade to a new PC with a Ryzen 9 to play it or something but my poor wallet...

 

[ogey_rrat]

Oh I do all that: it still kills half of what makes the game fun, though. Completely ruins the War in Heaven faction stuff, makes the Galactic Community much less interesting (wow you became Custodian over 2 actual civs and a handful of vassals, amazing), no Sensor Arrays and you have to declare war on any AI that tries to repair one, no pacifist runs, no large federations, etc etc... And then of course multiplayer is even more limited, which was arguably the best part of the game. One of my favorite memories in Stellaris was forcing half the galaxy to declare war on a friend because he wouldn't kill Tiyanki, and political plays like that are just less viable when there are fewer civs and no space for extra anomalies. Maybe I just need to upgrade to a new PC with a Ryzen 9 to play it or something but my poor wallet...

MP should in theory run better unless people have slow connections since there's less AI. But yeah, Pdx games usually require a beefy CPU if you want to do lategame stuff, but in return you can get away with using a cheaper graphics card.

 

[thhrang]

The TF2 voice actors appear to be going a bit stir crazy with no major updates for 7 years too...

 

[John Vtuber👁️]

Imperator: Rome is showing signs of life, with an implication that work will resume on the game if more people play it:



if you think about the Roman Empire enough that you want to see it rebuilt, put your money where your mouth is below:







and the mod that is keeping the game alive, recently updated for the Ides of March:

Imperator: Invictus

 

[God's Strongest Dragoon]

Imperator: Rome is showing signs of life, with an implication that work will resume on the game if more people play it:



if you think about the Roman Empire enough that you want to see it rebuilt, put your money where your mouth is below:







and the mod that is keeping the game alive, recently updated for the Ides of March:

Imperator: Invictus

Launch numbers (all team peak) was 41k. Meanwhile the game for the past 6 months has hovered under 1k and just recently hit 2.7k because of that tweet. Good luck with hitting 41k.

 

[Abomination]

Imperator: Rome is showing signs of life, with an implication that work will resume on the game if more people play it:



if you think about the Roman Empire enough that you want to see it rebuilt, put your money where your mouth is below:







and the mod that is keeping the game alive, recently updated for the Ides of March:

Imperator: Invictus

I was going to laugh at the absurdity of all that, but for the price, I may bite. So let me ask, would you consider this a good game for someone wanting to learn grand strategy games to try out? I enjoy 4X games, but have minimal experience in grand strategy games and have been wanting to learn. Would like to learn in a game that's good for beginners to ease into the genre and use the knowledge from that to help make learning the large, more complex ones not such a large undertaking to start out with.

 

[Tubedude]

I was going to laugh at the absurdity of all that, but for the price, I may bite. So let me ask, would you consider this a good game for someone wanting to learn grand strategy games to try out? I enjoy 4X games, but have minimal experience in grand strategy games and have been wanting to learn. Would like to learn in a game that's good for beginners to ease into the genre and use the knowledge from that to help make learning the large, more complex ones not such a large undertaking to start out with.

Considering gsg can take so long to just figure out at a base level, personally I'd suggest trying out base version Crusader Kings 2 (free on steam) and doing a tutorial Ireland run (1066 start), so you don't have to worry about refund windows and other nonsense. Each gsg has it's own quirks even if most come from the same company, so you could try other ones too. CK2 was my entry into gsg, so I look at it fondly, but it may not be for you. At least it's easy to try out the base version.

 

[John Vtuber👁️]

Considering gsg can take so long to just figure out at a base level, personally I'd suggest trying out base version Crusader Kings 2 (free on steam) and doing a tutorial Ireland run (1066 start), so you don't have to worry about refund windows and other nonsense. Each gsg has it's own quirks even if most come from the same company, so you could try other ones too. CK2 was my entry into gsg, so I look at it fondly, but it may not be for you. At least it's easy to try out the base version.

building from that, Crusader Kings III has some of the best onboarding out of most grand strategy titles, so if you are willing to learn how to play the game through a combination of its tooltips and other people playing it, it's a good place to start:



honorary mentions:

 

[Abomination]

Considering gsg can take so long to just figure out at a base level, personally I'd suggest trying out base version Crusader Kings 2 (free on steam) and doing a tutorial Ireland run (1066 start), so you don't have to worry about refund windows and other nonsense. Each gsg has it's own quirks even if most come from the same company, so you could try other ones too. CK2 was my entry into gsg, so I look at it fondly, but it may not be for you. At least it's easy to try out the base version.

Funny enough, I've had CK2 long enough to have bought it. According to Steam, I last played it in 2014 for about a half hour, clearly not knowing what I was getting myself into when I loaded up the game at the time. Maybe I will buckle myself down and try working with it.

building from that, Crusader Kings III has some of the best onboarding out of most grand strategy titles, so if you are willing to learn how to play the game through a combination of its tooltips and other people playing it, it's a good place to start:



honorary mentions:

CK3 is the one I hear recommended a lot for what I was asking about, so I've been leaning towards trying with that, but was wanting to see if anyone said anything different.

As for your other mentions, I've been playing AoW4 off-and-on for a bit now. Pretty fun. I haven't played too much Endless Legends, but been wanting to go back to it. Endless Space 2 is one of my favorites, and I go back to it all the time. I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up getting Old World because I've heard it's a favorite of a lot of people in the 4X genre right now, and I've been wanting to try it out for a bit now.

As for the rest, I haven't played them, but have my eye on some of them too.

Thanks.

 

[Willemshaven]

Have you play the call to arms series?

Made by some of the same people as men of war team.

Rts game that has mechanics of going fps with your units if you wanted to

I'm aware of all the GEM engine games. I didn't mention them because they aren't a few pennies during sale and I didn't want to make my post a mini-review for all the games.
Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront is what I've been primarily playing

(Sidenote: I'm surprised that I got it running at a somewhat playable framerate on a old GTX 580. And that was from before the game got performance upgrades.)

Spoiler: Long tangents about the recent GEM games and Men of War II

I've been closely following the development for all GEM engine games since like 2015. I've been playing the Men of War series since Faces of War.

Call to Arms (DMS)
I was only aware of Call to Arms when a alpha version got put up on a pirate site. The game had been fully crowdfunded and entered early access in 2017 (after closed beta's). Coming from the (pirated) alpha version, some features were just removed for no particular reason. Offline multiplayer over LAN was removed, which was extra terrible as the new online netcode was less stable than before. The game also uses 4K textures, which affects performance even if you don't play in 4K (and even then, the game UI doesn't even scale to 4K). The factions are very balanced but that makes them all play the same. A Toyota pick-up shouldn't be as resistant as a MRAP. You also had to level up to unlock units in multiplayer, which can't be bypassed without changing lobby settings (which don't give XP). The first/third-person Direct Control mode is completely unbalanced (especially against the AI) as there was nothing stopping you from hitting targets beyond the intended maximum range.
Also during the early access period, one of the devlogs did say that modders could revert to the classic Direct Control mode if they wished to do so. The issue was that the code to do so kept breaking so modders had to find workarounds for it. At some point, all the workarounds stopped working. This and other engine regressions at the time caused many modders to stick with Assault Squad 2, effectively making the modding scene dead on arrival.
Call to Arms was fully released in 2018 with a free (multiplayer only with no mod support), paid (mod support and singleplayer) and deluxe editions (more factions and no grind), and a season pass with early-access to the then-missing factions from the roadmap. Many backers and early-supporters were pissed off at this.
The game has had improvements, such as adding a official option for the classic Direct Control mode and a 64-bit engine. But it hasn't caught more attention outside of sales bumps and the multiplayer died. Development has since been sidelined in favor of some new unannounced game.

Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront (BWS)
Originally was going to be published by Best Way, using the same engine as Men of War II. In 2019, Best Way dropped Gates of Hell along with their devs' rights to their engine. BWS ended up converting to the (then) much-maligned Call to Arms version of the GEM engine for the game to eventually release in 2021 as Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront. That was the reason why until as late as 2023, Gates of Hell required you to own Call to Arms to play it as a standalone DLC. The game launched with some of the same technical shortcomings as regular Call to Arms, such as broken netcode (drifting tanks and broken artillery towing) and unresponsive AI, as well as being half-baked in some areas. The missions are more varied in comparison to Assault Squad 2. Unlike for Call to Arms, a few modders from Assault Squad 2 did see enough promise in the engine to switch over. Over time, new (and restored) features and content as well as slowly fixing the engine and netcode issues made the active playerbase steadily grow over time. Nowadays, Gates of Hell has a similar median of active players as Assault Squad 2 along with a decent-sized multiplayer size, compared to what it used to be. There's also a few upcoming mods I'm exited for, such as a Star Wars mod and a better modern combat mod.

Men of War II (Best Way)
Originally started as Soldiers: Arena. In 2019, it got picked up by Men of War-series publisher 1C Company and got renamed to Men of War II: Arena. The original Steam page was later closed. In 2020, a open beta was released in Russia on the 1C Games Launcher. If you weren't in Russia, you could simply use a VPN to play anyway and the game interface was available in English.
As a multiplayer-focused f2p-game, it plays more like a MOBA with a bunch of simplified mechanics. You can only bring a limited amount of units as a deck (similar to Wargame or Steel Division). You use in-game currency to purchase units for your deck. To unlock new units, you use the points you get for finishing matches. In-game, you can only have a few units before hitting a unit limit to encourage teamwork between players. Artillery had no range limit, which made them hard to counter with infantry and tanks as they would often get destroyed before getting close. There was also your standard premium currency to buy premium units, which surprisingly weren't more unbalanced than the non-premium units. There was also a premium subscription that would give you extra points in matches and no artificial currency limit.
Then the devs decided to make higher tier units only useable with a premium subscription. It would have a negligible impact as Arena would shut down in 2021. Besides being limited to some launcher, the game was barely promoted (the only English review video was from AirshowD, which you might only recognize for recently having a warplane as a vtuber model).

A few months after Arena shut down, Men of War II got announced on Steam as a paid upcoming new game. 1C was also bought by Tencent and later renamed. After a release date delay, throughout 2022 and early-2023, MoW II actually got marketing outside of a Discord server or some Russian service. The release date was set to September 2023 and much more fans of the series are actually noticing it and getting excited for it. This was especially so after the consecutive letdowns of all the GEM engine games that involved DMS (Call to Arms, Assault Squad 2 - Cold War, and Gates of Hell).
The open beta released in March, and it turned out to be similar to Arena (including the always-online requirement and balancing problems) but without microtransactions and premium subscriptions. Reactions from the older fans were very negative with a bunch of YouTube videos bashing the game for it's more arcade gameplay. In August, the "final" beta releases which added a classic game mode and a realism settings that makes the game play more like the past Men of War games, which was a welcomed addition. But you could only play them with a custom lobby, and there weren't any other significant changes in the beta.

As September rolled around, the game got delayed at the last minute to 2024. It was stated that the game was "feature complete" and just needed "more time to fix bugs".
In the official Discord, there was a lot of whining as well as impatient players blaming the older fans for causing the delay with the added classic mode and demanding the game to be released without it. My favorite part of it is that a Chinese fan translating group got so butthurt over the delay that it dissolved itself (my current about page is the message announcing it).
Another open beta released in November, but the only major changes were adding matchmaking for the classic game mode and new demo missions.

After months of no updates, in March this year, a update was finally made. With the amount of changes and additions, it doesn't really seem to be a few bugs or "feature complete". Fortunately, they're finally giving artillery limited range so they can't just pick off tanks at very long distances. MoW II will even launch with some official mods from Assault Squad 2, so most modders that have stuck to it are looking forward to it. The game (still) has some engine-level stuff I don't like, such as squads can't be mixed and matched into custom groups. I'm going to get the game when some good mods gets released.

 

[God's Strongest Dragoon]

Considering gsg can take so long to just figure out at a base level, personally I'd suggest trying out base version Crusader Kings 2 (free on steam) and doing a tutorial Ireland run (1066 start), so you don't have to worry about refund windows and other nonsense. Each gsg has it's own quirks even if most come from the same company, so you could try other ones too. CK2 was my entry into gsg, so I look at it fondly, but it may not be for you. At least it's easy to try out the base version.

This is very true. It took me a little bit of time to get into CK2. Then I tried to play EU4 and it just didn't fit for me until something clicked. Stellaris took me like 2-3 playthroughs to fully grasp. Eventually I'm going to sit down with HoI4 and give it another go, the "frontline" mechanic was just so mindbogglingly shit to me because the AI is so garbage.

CK3 is definitely the easiest to get into though with how much work they put into developing the tutorial experience, mainly because they were expanding to a console audience that has no experience with the gsg genre.

 

[That Chuuba Enjoyer]

Anyone got experience with Battletech? is that any good? Been on my radar for years, but haven't pulled the trigger yet. It's 10 bucks right now base game.

 

[John Vtuber👁️]

Anyone got experience with Battletech? is that any good? Been on my radar for years, but haven't pulled the trigger yet. It's 10 bucks right now base game.

if you get BattleTech, you're going to want the DLC + RogueTech mod, so be sure to look into that to see if you're interested. no sequel because Microsoft owns the rights to BATTLETECH, and Paradox doesn't want to have less of a profit margin (alleged) if they make it. there's also a lot of [CURRENT YEAR] nonsense the developers put in the game, and derided people through the development and release cycle if they didn't like it, that's another dive and a half into the unending culture war if you need to kill a few dozen hours looking it up.

on the FPS side of the spectrum, MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries finally released it's last DLC (allegedly) before it moves onto the Clans game, so the modders can finally work from a stable build - similar situation where the modders make the game worth purchasing/playing, do not underestimate the amount of content they add:

 

[That Chuuba Enjoyer]

if you get BattleTech, you're going to want the DLC + RogueTech mod, so be sure to look into that to see if you're interested. no sequel because Microsoft owns the rights to BATTLETECH, and Paradox doesn't want to have less of a profit margin (alleged) if they make it. there's also a lot of [CURRENT YEAR] nonsense the developers put in the game, and derided people through the development and release cycle if they didn't like it, that's another dive and a half into the unending culture war if you need to kill a few dozen hours looking it up.

on the FPS side of the spectrum, MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries finally released it's last DLC (allegedly) before it moves onto the Clans game, so the modders can finally work from a stable build - similar situation where the modders make the game worth purchasing/playing, do not underestimate the amount of content they add:

I kind of forgot about Mechwarrior 5. I played Mechwarrior Online and I actually kind of enjoyed the gameplay style and mech mechanics. Damn, now i'm actually thinking about getting Mechwarrior 5 instead. Cause I kind of wanted more of a PVE style game than a pvp one Mechwarriors online offered.

 

[MrProcessor]

I like the way the Sweet Baby Inc thread back on the homeland turned into a vTuber bashing thread. I'm so proud of them! (I'm not really sure how they got from A to B here, but that's not really important now is it.)

Anyway, I bought all the games I said I was thinking of buying during the Steam sale. Hopefully I'll get to play them someday.

 

[Lee Crabb]

Recently started playing DayZ again since they (finally) added the PASGT/kevlar helmet. I tend to play the game in a way that most would find boring (build bases inside the commieblock highrises in low population servers, hiking the nature paths, etc) but its kinda relaxing while listening to chuubas.

So I was running near the middle of the map in Novy Sobor and noticed this bloodbath.

The piles of meat on screen? Human meat and fat. Someone has turned the general store into a cannibal lair. Given the amount of meat laying about, I'd say at least 4-5 people got butchered in here.

The cannibal victim's loot was spread all over the shop. Guns, clothing, etc

Not pictured is the bear trap blocking the back door. Needless to say I bolted out of here as soon as possible.

 

[BlueSharkTV]

I finally got around to finishing Devil May Cry in hard and DMD, and DMD was the most annoying experience I would absolutely go through again, damn I love this game, fuck griffon 3 though.
Now I'm trying to finish DMC3 in all difficulties to unlock everything, and holy shit do I hate mission 15 and 17, mission 15 is long as shit and I fucking despise Doppelganger in 17 more than any other boss, so far very hard is barely any different from hard, fuck enigmas though.