What are you playing? (games)

[juansolo]

Mass Effect Andromeda is actually quite enjoyable.

So it's not Mass Effect 2. It shipped utterly broken and unfinished. I played it a little pre-patch (scary!) then played it post patch and have stuck 80hrs into it completing the game.

The main things they did wrong:

Actually finish your game before releasing it - The backlash from the state it was in on release was utterly justified. This game hadn't been polished or tested at all. The animations were a joke, the bugs were rampant. Anyone who played the game could see that Addison needed re-recording. It's like they got a cleaning lady who was passing to go into the booth and record all her lines. click for the full horror...

Remember your audience - The combat's great, "people will play multiplayer", I suspect was the thought going through someone's head as they stroked themselves into a frenzy thinking about the loot boxes. Totally missing the point that Mass Effect fans are in it for it being a Sci-Fi RPG. So when you water down the story and remove most of the role playing... Well that's not going to go down well.

Post patch it's not actually that bad. Certainly worth every penny of the £6 new I picked it up for. Had it been in this state at launch I think it'd have been a reasonably solid 7/10. It's not any higher because it's still rough. Addison is the poster child for everything wrong with Andromeda for good reason. The choices are limited to straight vs sarcastic with no real consequence to either. The story is a bit meh.

There are still bugs though there's less. Massive slow down in the Tempest happens a lot, I've had Ryder's head on backwards during a conversation, also her face go textureless so she looked creepy as hell. I've had a few broken quests. All stuff we've come to expect and to a degree accept with modern AAA games. I say we, if I'd paid £60 for this I still wouldn't be very accepting of it. At say £30 in the post patch state. Sure, I can accept an un-polished, un-tested game that still manages to actually be quite fun.

That's the thing, the underlying game despite all the bugs and the corner cutting, is actually fun. You think to yourself, invest a bit more in the story, put choices back in there and, you know, QA your product and this could have been the Mass Effect game everyone wanted. Instead, ME gets cancelled. It failed because nobody bought it, and that means the IP is obviously done.

No it failed because people are getting sick with lazy, broken games being sold on the back of a strong IP. Look at Deus Ex. Hey, this is a really strong popular franchise. "We can make so much more money from it if we sell the game twice by splitting it in half". People found out and didn't buy half a story because what's the fucking point!? So they cancelled the 2nd half of the story and cancelled the IP. Because it's obviously the IP that's at fault.

To a degree I understand them. They're not interested in the games they're pushing. They've got IPs that they can re-skin and re-sell annually and people lap that shit up. FiFA, Assassin's Creed (there's only two good games in that franchise and one of them is a pirate game dressed as an AC game), COD, etc. RPG's actually take a bit more effort. Effort that they're not prepared to put in. Which is a crying shame.

It's how the likes of EA work. Soak up companies with strong IPs, release mediocre products that push their games as a service agenda, then when they fail, close the studio and buy another strong IP. We've seen it with Visceral where they took a magnificent Sci-Fi survival horror game and turned it into an action game filled with weapons and MTX (basically COD). It failed, they shut the studio and and have now bought Respawn. So many legendary and innovative studios have been gobbled up and shat out by the likes of EA and Activision, and it just keeps happening over and over. It's a crying shame. But that's why we are where we are with modern games I suppose and the fact that AAA has become a dirty word.

[Muadzin]

GOG has recently added Warcraft 1 to its roster so I got it for old times sake. Wow, speaking of a gaming culture shock. No selecting more then 4 units max, no clicking on a place on the map or enemy to get them moving or attacking, not even getting the screen to move to a different position on the map by moving the mouse, only by clicking inside the mini map. How far we have come since those days of old.

[juansolo]

Make it Orky!

[alanp]

Challenge yourself and play Dune 2.

I could never bring myself to play C&C or the like. They always felt like huge, massive Dune 2 rip-offs to me.

[Willybomb]

I could never bring myself to play C&C or the like. They always felt like huge, massive Dune 2 rip-offs to me.

I would say that they're more evolutions as it's the same company.

[juansolo]

Indeed Dune 2 on the Amiga is the daddy of them all, then refined with Dune 2000 on the PC. Westwood then went on to make Command and Conquer and Red Alert. I think Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 were the last pure Westwood games before EA started to devour them. On the other side of the fence was Blizzard doing Warcraft, then Warcraft 2 and Starcraft. All outstanding games. Once they all went hero based I lost interest, though C&C Generals is a blast.

I was big into RTS games back in the day. Some other great games are Warzone 2100, Total Annihilation and Ground Control. If you really want to blend your mind, try it in 3D with Homeworld (Cataclysm is the best of the bunch there)

[Willybomb]

Yeah, we had many LAN sessions around AoE2, KKnD, Total Annilation, Warcraft 2.  Duke3d, Xwing Vs Tie Fighter, Quake 2... all good fun.

[Muadzin]

Challenge yourself and play Dune 2.

I once did. Got reasonably far into the campaign, then in a mission I hit the production limit for the number of buildings I could build and haven't touched it ever since. I'm a huge turtle player so I like to build more fortifications and gun turrets then the Maginot line.

I could never bring myself to play C&C or the like. They always felt like huge, massive Dune 2 rip-offs to me.

Oh, I LOVED C&C at the time. I only got Dune 2 a long time after those, so C&C and Warcraft 1 were my introduction to RTS games. I also became a huge fan of the Wing Commander games, well, III and IV at least, as III was my first exposure and compared to III and IV the older ones were basically unplayable.

[dan.schumaker]

I was big into RTS games back in the day. Some other great games are Warzone 2100, Total Annihilation and Ground Control. If you really want to blend your mind, try it in 3D with Homeworld (Cataclysm is the best of the bunch there)

Age of Empires II was always my favorite RTS game

[Willybomb]

I once did. Got reasonably far into the campaign, then in a mission I hit the production limit for the number of buildings I could build and haven't touched it ever since. I'm a huge turtle player so I like to build more fortifications and gun turrets then the Maginot line.

My general strategy for Warcraft 2 was to build anti air towers out from my central base constantly.  Each tower was covered by two or more. If I was feeling like a bit of fun I would build a cannon tower and hedgehog it with AA.  Wasn't hard to do, basically had a peon working on expansion covering the routes to any mines and whatnot.  Half the map would be dotted with towers.

I also became a huge fan of the Wing Commander games, well, III and IV at least, as III was my first exposure and compared to III and IV the older ones were basically unplayable.

WC1 came out on a budget label in the mid 90's and came with all the hard copy maps, posters, books and I played it to death.  Moved onto WCIII when it came out, finished that, but I failed at any WC after that.

[juansolo]

I remember the one with Clive Owen being really good... Privateer 2, I think...?

[EBK]

I was never any good at RTS.  I much preferred turn-based games, like the Warlords series.  Anyone else remember those?

[juansolo]

LOVED Massive Assault when it comes to TBS games. People always used to complain about how hard that was and I never really understood that, until I tried to replay that recently. I suspect I'm more than a little rusty at them.

[alanp]

Started playing _The Bureau: X-Com Declassified_. I was having a lot of fun (apart from the fiddly squad management crap) until it crashed. I don't feel like playing through those first couple hours again. (Stupid me forgot to save.)

You can definitely tell the game is set in the Sixties, though. Everyone smokes, constantly, everywhere.

[madbean]

Finally found something I want to play.