SSTF

Lords Of The Realm II just keeps winning.

Adding ancient eldritch gods into Fallout, with such large and sprawling plot lines was a huge mistake.

People will say, “Yeah but what about the ghost in Fallout 2?” Yes FO2 had one side quest with a ghost. It was a one off, with no huge backstory propping it up, it wasn’t constantly revisited. It didn’t change the whole vibe of the world. It was one side quest that made you go “Huh that was weird.” and was quickly pushed aside.

In comparison, including eldritch horrors in a front and center way, with quests like the Cabot questline being the most egregious. There is also the Dunwich building, the Dunwich mine, the cult and eldritch creature in FO76, and more.

Any one of these, one their own, as a one off isolated thing might be alright. The Dunwich building especially works as a weird unexplained oddity. It is the dose that makes the poison though, and now there is so much Lovecraftian stuff packed into Fallout that it has changed the texture of what Fallout is. The more the Lovecraftian stuff is added, the more of the original “an apocalypse of our own making” 1950s militarist, corporatist setting gets diluted.

Homefront: The Revolution is actually a super fun game. Dare I say…a hidden gem?

It has an atrocious metacritic score for a few reasons. Mainly, some of the enemy AI was broken on release, which is fair, but it’s long since been fixed. The other big issue is that it’s a sequel to a genuinely bad game and most people didn’t bother playing it, and most who did came with the goal of trashing it.

However, this game is fun if you want something kind in the modern Far Cry style vein, but set in urban environments. It run on the Crye Engine and the gunplay is rock solid; the shotgun in this game is fantastic. The guns all have absolutely preposterous alternate fire modes. The assault rifle has its upper swapped out to turn it into landmine launcher.

The story and setting is a complete reset compared to the first game. It isn’t just a lazy “Red Dawn but China North Korea”. There is an elaborate alternate history backstory going back to the 1950s that sees North Korea take the role of the high tech manufacturing hub for the west, eventually becoming what some in the west in the 1970s feared Japan would become- a powerhouse of tech that was rich and had a grip on all western nations because of it. Then this cyberpunk reimagining of North Korea takes over a poor and downtrodden USA after the U.S. had made so many bad choices that NK could plausibly send “international peacekeepers”. Absolutely nuts plot, but so weird and strangely high effort. Also means the bad guys are coded so cyberpunk and have all kinds of drones and stuff.

This choice is a real cold shoulder to the true sub zero hero.

Tim Cain is a creative guy. I would rather he spend his time developing new things rather than revisiting old.

I personally want a Fallout 1 remaster/remake, but I don’t see what value is added by Tim Cain being part of it. He already gave his input, somebody else can riff on it. (You know, hypothetically, since God Howard has declared his holy rays will never illuminate a remaster).

Counterpoint: “War has changed.”

The guns in the original games would share ammo pools if they were of the same caliber, the article described a simplified pool by class of weapon.

So now rather than separate 5.45mm and 5.56mm you have “assault rifle ammo”. It sounds minor, but one of the aspects of STALKER has been inventory management and making the choice when to main one caliber. At least for me. Hence my waiting on mods.

As for the minimap, the article is describing an additional always on compass with quest markers in the style of the modern Fallout games. I hope to be able to turn that bit of visual clutter off, and also hope that the game isn’t designed so much with the assumption I’m using it that I can’t find objectives without it.

It seems better set up for mass market success, and I support this for the sake of the devs, but for me personally when I read:

Most weapons thankfully use interchangeable ammo types across the class

minimap has been replaced with a compass permanently affixed to the top of the screen, pointing to nearby points of interest and quest markers

I can only think “mods will fix this”.

Doesn’t it? The people making the new game don’t want to dilute focus on their new product. When somebody searches for Delta Force on Steam, they want it only to return the new game. This is like when Rockstar pulled classic GTA: SA before dropping the remaster.

And that explains why the original games are getting pulled from steam/gog.

I haven’t even read the comments yet and I already know what they look like.

Dear Star Citizen simps/haters:

Yes hello, I’d like to order one Star Wars Rebellion remaster please.

I really should try to get Fallout Nevada working again. I downloaded it but it glitched out for me in the main screen and I never spent enough time fixing it.

NV was non-Bethesda developers creating a game with Bethesda’s software. Hence the very different writing and structure.

If you want something that captures the experience of older Fallout games, the new Wasteland games have a lot of overlap while still being their own thing. Wasteland 3’s main structure resembles New Vegas in that you’re always trying to figure out what faction or combination of factions to support.

I have no interest in playing FO76, but for games where I really want to play but can’t rebind I use autohotkey. It’s trivial to write a rebind script to run before opening the game.

I don’t see many people saying that. I see more people expressing disappointment in the apparently underwhelming and abrupt demise of the NCR, which for all practical purposes resets the west coast to a lawless Fallout 1 type state.

I’m not sure where I stand on that, because I could see the unraveling of the NCR as being interesting if expanded upon, but the point is that it is a reasonable opinion to hold. This Tim Cain video isn’t saying people shouldn’t criticize things or that they are unreasonable for not enjoying things. He’s saying that regardless of the merits of a production, you shouldn’t level personal attacks and moral judgements on creators just because you don’t personally like what they made.

I wouldn’t say that. If you take Fallout 1, 2, and NV as a trilogy you can see the rebuilding of society in a post-post apocalyptic story. Things change, but I don’t think they get better, it’s just that the problems take different forms. It’s actualy pretty cynical. No matter how much rebuilding happens or how many iterations of different societies are created, people will always find a reason to be at each other’s throats. You might say: war never changes.

I just finished the final episode of the season. I liked it for the most part. The characters- both the actors and the writing kept me engaged. The show felt like it kept moving and didn’t ever plod. Some of the larger lore implications I’m either lukewarm or not thrilled about.

That criticism is okay. It’s strange to see this and other threads full of people trashing fans who didn’t love the show. That kind of personal attack for a differing opinion is managing to completely twist Tim Cain’s comments, and in a way be the kind of person he is cautioning against.

I think people are taking the wrong takeaway from this. It is okay to dislike the show, it’s okay to criticize it. There is a difference between not liking a final production and declaring that the people who made it are terrible.

This might seem like an obvious distinction, but I’ve ridden this ride before. Different factions of fans declaring themselves more “loyal” or “correct”- some of them hating everything new and getting nasty about the new creators, and other factions blindly loving all the new things. Each faction declaring the other as fake fans and trying to banish them. It is perfectly fine to not like some things, to express it, and to discuss it back and forth. The smug dismissal that fans have of other fans who have a polar opinion of specific productions in a franchise is exhausting.

Tim Cain seems from his channel and his many talks like somebody who tries to think in this multifaceted way. Unfortunately many people clip his words and run off on tangents against his bigger ideas.

I like the idea of evil playthroughs, but I agree that the execution of them is unsatisfying.

For me it boils down to the bluntness of the evil options and the inability to be effectively deceptive. I want to play an evil character who betrays people after gaining their trust. Most games don’t make that a normal route, as good dialog choices usually give me good boy points.

I envision a game with good/evil dialog options that doesn’t change my alignment based on most verbal choices but instead on my large scale actions. I want to be able to have a heart to heart conversation with an NPC who then opens up to me allowing me to betray them even harder. I want to play as Senator Palpatine, not be forced to act like Emperor Palpatine right away.

While I don’t mind morally simple evil, the inability to play it properly means I tend to go to more morally complex games. Something like Wasteland 3 where the presented choices are rarely obvious in which is the truly morally ideal. The games runs more on conflicting faction reputations and only has a perfectly good (according to the writers) ending if you play an exact perfect combination of factions, which you probably won’t do without looking up a guide.

The next best morality system example is something like Metro 2033 or Frostpunk where the game simply doesn’t mention that it has a morality system until the end, and that brings out the more honest reactions of first time players.