Any gamers around here?

[Hydra009]

There's a new Starfinder game coming out!  (Currently, the only official game...)

So what is Starfinder?  It's basically Guardians of the Galaxy the RPG.  So how you feel about this game will largely depend on how you feel about that.

We have, in no particular order: androids, solar-powered monks with 4 arms, rat mechanics, lizard-klingons (my personal favorite), bug druids (my brother's favorite), adorable little 6-armed ewok-like things, a gigantic undead space navy that's creepy AF, and The SWARM.  You can play as a soldier, diplomat, bounty hunter, ace pilot, scholar, mechanic, hacker, etc.  Come to think of it, it's a lot like Star Wars, too.

You know that weird bar scene in Star Wars A New Hope where the bar is filled with all sorts of strange aliens, including one that basically looks like the devil, while a band plays jazz?  That's this game in a nutshell.

Oh, and the setting is nuts.  There was some sort of Dragonbreak then God gave everyone blueprints for cheap and easy FTL (I am not joking) and so now there's a mad dash for everyone to make contact with everyone and it doesn't take long for the bullets to start flying.

It's all absolutely insane and wonderful and it deserves to be more popular than it is.

[Blackleaf]

Apparently, the music the aliens play in Star Wars is canonically named jizz music.

[Hydra009]

I'm trying to join up with a Pathfinder group in a few days and need to do a lot of reading to figure out how this system works, but it seems pretty intuitive.

Here's my character:

In his youth, he was part of a small, regional army.  An outrider who would scout ahead and let the soldiers know about possible enemy forces, nearby freshwater and game, incoming weather conditions, etc.  Someone attentive to both the enemy and nature.  And by necessity, very solitary.  But he did have one and only friend - a young swordsman in the army who aspired to be captain one day.  On rare occasions, they would share meals together at camp and swap stories..

One day, after a fierce skirmish, a druid came to the camp to heal the wounded of both sides.  My character was awestruck by that sort of magical power and was instantly obsessed with learning it.  He briefly talked to the druid, who knew that he would soon make a life-altering decision.  The druid told him (intentionally vague) instructions on how to follow her to her grove.

That night, my character decided that he'd quit the army.  In the middle of the night, while almost all were asleep, he said one last goodbye to his friend and then snuck out of the camp, taking only his waterskin.  He was technically a deserter, which is a serious crime, but didn't care.

The journey had been arduous and he'd almost died twice - once due to lack of water near the mountains (he passed out from thirst and awoke near a small pond due to the croak of frogs) and once when a bear startled him from slumber (he tried to fight it off to no avail, but locked eyes and mimicked the body language and roar of the bear and eventually, it relented).  He walked a very difficult, meandering route through hills, around craggy mountains, and finally, deep into dense woods that he'd never seen before, that by all rights, shouldn't even exist.  That's where he met a small group of druids and learned their art, seeing nature through fresh eyes.

Then one night, they told him of a great threat to their order, told him that he must venture out once again and meet a certain person and the rest would make itself clear soon enough.

Does this work?  I was shooting for something fairly generic but would have enough for the DM to work with - maybe the old friend got promoted, maybe (probably) his people hold a grudge about the whole desertion thing, maybe the druids aren't too thrilled with him either, but figure that he'd be a useful agent in the world.  What is his current mission?  We'll find out!

[Hydra009]

I booted up my old favorite, Sins of a Solar Empire for a nice, relaxing game.

2vs2 on hard, because why not?  I'll tell you why - because I forgot I had an AI mod on this one.  Hard is like Insanely hard.  My ally was under attack the whole time and I couldn't do much to bail him out because I was under constant pirate raids.  Every time I attacked the territory of one of the enemies, the other one would attack my weak front.  I lost about 20% of my fleet every battle and even though I won every battle, I was so mired in enemies that I could never muster a breakthrough, no matter how hard I tried.

Eventually, I was fighting a war on four fronts and losing on three of them.  My ally slowly lost and I couldn't do anything about it.  :(

[Blackleaf]

People are finally starting to realize how scummy Nintendo has been. This latest Nintendo Direct broke people. $70 for a bundle of Mario Galaxy 1 & 2. Not remakes, not remasters, just the same old Wii games, with 4K upscaling and minimal additions. Or you can buy each individually for $40 each.

Oh, and they have new Mario Galaxy Amiibos too. For $40 each. That means if you buy the bundle and each Amiibo, you're paying about $150 + tax just for two upscaled Wii games. But it could be worse. The new Amiibo for Kirby Air Riders cost $50 each.

That's not all. The Virtual Boy comes to NSO next year too. I was initially surprised and pleased with this, until I saw that the accessory, which is required to play, costs $100. It doesn't even come with a controller. Literally, all it does is keep each eye from seeing the opposite side of the screen, so you get that illusion of depth. Even after buying that expensive piece of plastic, you don't own the games. You need a subscription too. Not even the standard subscription, but the more expensive NSO + Expansion Pack. But don't worry. They included a cheaper option for us poors; a $25 accessory made of literal cardboard.

Think that's it? Oh, you silly Billy. You forgot about the biggest ripoff under Nintendo's belt: Pokémon! This new $70 Z-A game, which isn't even out yet, already has $30 DLC! They literally locked content out of the game, just to sell it back to us. And that's not all. At least three of the new Mega Evolutions are locked behind ranked matches, and are timed exclusives. Meaning that on top of the $100 + tax you're already spending on the game and day-one DLC, you also need to pay for an active subscription to get the whole game.

Nintendo has officially lost the plot. They went from being the budget family console to being the luxury console. Just, you know... Without the luxury quality. They're the Disney of video games now, and that's not a compliment.

Real photo of people who actually buy all this shit:

[Hydra009]

City of Heroes spiritual successor Ship of Heroes set to launch on Monday

It has a base price of $60 and also requires an active subscription of $15/month (you can prepay multiple months for a discount and the best price is one year for $144, for an average of $12/month)

The upside is that there's no cash shop or micro-transactions.  So you pay for the game and the subscription and never anything else.

So...who here wants to drop $204 for an MMO on day one?  Any takers?

[Blackleaf]

City of Heroes spiritual successor Ship of Heroes set to launch on Monday

It has a base price of $60 and also requires an active subscription of $15/month (you can prepay multiple months for a discount and the best price is one year for $144, for an average of $12/month)

The upside is that there's no cash shop or micro-transactions.  So you pay for the game and the subscription and never anything else.

So...who here wants to drop $204 for an MMO on day one?  Any takers?

I had never heard about this game until now, so I looked up some YouTube videos about it. Oh, boy. What a shit show. Imagine paying $60 plus the subscription fee, just to be banned because your criticism wasn't positive enough. $75+ down the drain on this garbage.

"You realize that wishlists are surging because it's the equivalent to people buying a ticket to a public execution, right?"

[Hydra009]

Yeah, it's not looking good.  17 players today lol.  Bad reviews on steam, reddit drama, and apparently, the devs are starting to get testy because they claim they're getting review bombed by Homecoming (City of Heroes) players who allegedly don't want them to succeed.

Well, I'm a Homecoming player so I'll weigh in.  I absolutely want them to succeed and deliver a great game.

I love City of Heroes, but its graphics are very dated, its mechanics are kinda clunky (finding event bosses or that last shiny/enemy in a mission is often more difficult than you'd think, disconnect bugs when starting raids, not properly rendering all NPCs during raids especially mothership raids, huge fps drops during raids, etc - this game definitely wasn't made with raids in mind lol) and some its mechanics are basically kludged together (like changing alignments not through the UI, but through finding and talking to a single NPC and the implementation of base portals to cut down on pretty sizable travel times between zones).  It has had numerous quality-of-life improvements over the years, and things have gotten better, but the base code is kind of a mess.  No patch is ever going to completely fix that.

So I'd love a new superhero game as customizable and open and charming as City of Heroes, but built with frequent events with large numbers of players in mind like Guild Wars 2.  I'd love to be spoiled for choice when it comes to superhero video games - sometimes, I could play classic City of Heroes, sometimes I could play a new and improved version.

Sadly, that is not the case.  I've seen footage of it now, and it's less of an "homage" and more of a straight-up ripoff of the original.  Even copied the UI.





Can you tell which one came out 20 years ago and which one came out this year?  It's harder than you'd think.

Here's an actually different character creation screen if someone thinks they all look the same - they absolutely don't.  City of Heroes and Ship of Heroes both even have that bizarre part of character creation where you choose between male, female, and muscular male (RIP muscle mommies) which never made sense to me.  You don't get that sort of identical feature by chance.  That's like identical twin levels of coincidence.  Even mirror universe Spock and regular Spock look more different than that.

This would all be forgivable if the game itself were good, but I'm looking at test footage (which is very hard to find), and it has lots of graphical and animation issues, and just an overall very dated feel.  That's not the sort of thing you want at launch.  I'm curious about how they handle events, but events are never going to happen if there's never more than a dozen or two characters online at any given time.

Apparently, the reason it's so pricey is that the devs were hoping for an infusion of cash on launch day so they could afford to hire some talent to help polish off the graphics and animations.  But not many players subscribed, so I doubt they have enough to go out for pizza, let alone get major work done.  And this unfortunate situation can lead to a heartbreaking vicious cycle where nothing gets fixed because no money and no money because the game is so janky that no one wants to pay.  Both the players and the devs end up unhappy and eventually the whole thing goes down the tubes.

My prediction, this game will meet Champions Online in the trash heap in the sky very shortly.  Such a shame.  It could've been planned and polished better and taken things in a more unique direction, it could've been very successful.

[Blackleaf]

The customization tools for the new Jurassic World Evolution 3 game look amazing. I love JW2, and I love how the developers respond to criticism. Like, they've rescaled dinosaurs and changed how features work to make fans happy. In their forums, I even suggested more hybrid dinosaurs, similar to those Chaos Theory toys they used to make, and their developers directly responded to me. Soon after, they made a hybrid dino themed DLC. lol

In this new game, you can breed dinosaurs (meaning we have males and juveniles now), you can place natural barriers as an alternative to fencing, you can customize buildings. It really feels like they just gave us developer tools to let us do virtually anything we want. You can even check online for things that other players have created and uploaded, take it, and place it in your own park.

[Blackleaf]

https://www.reddit.com/r/videogames/comments/1nwa17v/because_of_xboxs_new_change_steam_wins_by_doing/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

[Hydra009]

You beat me to it.  Link

[Hydra009]

While other games/companies/platforms are imploding, let me tell you about what I'm doing.  I'm playing a 100% free MMO (yes, it's City of Heroes) and loving it.

The Halloween event is basically just a whole raid getting together at the Bates Motel parking lot, running around knocking on the doors to "Trick or Treat".  If you get Treat, you get cool costumes that would probably be microtransations in other games.  No $18 for Blue here.  Want a badass NPC costume?  Here ya go.  Hell, stay for a while and get 49 more for the achievement.  Get as much as you want.  If you get Trick, you spawn a bunch of mobs and the raid blows 'em to hell for $$$ and xp.  It's a win-win.  Bring your alt and get 'em halfway to max level in a day, because why not.  You're going to make 20 alts anyway, so you might as well level them up.

And to break up the monotony, Giant mobs spawn every now and then and the raid temporarily relocates to hunt them down.

This is how gaming should be.  Cheap, easy, cooperative, fun.  No frustrations, no worries, no predatory business practices.  Just people cycling in and out of a perpetual skirmish.

[Blackleaf]

I should really give that game a try. I've watched a couple of beginners guides, but I still feel kind of lost. lol

[Blackleaf]

While other games/companies/platforms are imploding, let me tell you about what I'm doing.  I'm playing a 100% free MMO (yes, it's City of Heroes) and loving it.

The Halloween event is basically just a whole raid getting together at the Bates Motel parking lot, running around knocking on the doors to "Trick or Treat".  If you get Treat, you get cool costumes that would probably be microtransations in other games.  No $18 for Blue here.  Want a badass NPC costume?  Here ya go.  Hell, stay for a while and get 49 more for the achievement.  Get as much as you want.  If you get Trick, you spawn a bunch of mobs and the raid blows 'em to hell for $$$ and xp.  It's a win-win.  Bring your alt and get 'em halfway to max level in a day, because why not.  You're going to make 20 alts anyway, so you might as well level them up.

And to break up the monotony, Giant mobs spawn every now and then and the raid temporarily relocates to hunt them down.

This is how gaming should be.  Cheap, easy, cooperative, fun.  No frustrations, no worries, no predatory business practices.  Just people cycling in and out of a perpetual skirmish.

Okay. So, Googling "City of Heroes," first thing that pops up is "Freedom." That website wouldn't let me make an account, so I figured I was in the wrong place. I found Rebirth. That one seems to work, but it only has one server, and I remembered there being choices in the videos I watched. Lastly, I found Homecoming. What is the difference? Is there a correct choice? Are they just different hosts for the same game?

[Hydra009]

Homecoming is the main private server - the server with the most players and has been officially given a license agreement by NCSoft, so no cease-and-desist- iirc, Homecoming's version of the game is more modified than Rebirth (on Homecoming, the game is still in active development, pro bono of course) but less modified than several other private servers.  Homecoming has come out with many new patches - a few new powersets, some tweaking to existing powers (usually buffing underperforming powers), and lots of quality-of-life improvements.

Homecoming is a fantastic starting place for new/returning players - so I recommend starting there and getting used to that, then changing it up if you wish.

I'm on Homecoming's Everlasting shard, which is notable for having several legendary players - the experience is basically like storming Normandy with Patton and Ridgway at your back.  It's hard to describe feeling both awe and pressure to not screw up in doing what would otherwise be somewhat difficult content with them.  But when you're doing what you're supposed to, you can clear just about anything no problem.  It's unreal.

The player base is generally fairly knowledgeable about most things and eager to help.  Just be nice and most people would be delighted to take you through the basics and maybe even donate a couple things to make the leveling experience easier.