AgaresOaks

Things with fairly hard dates: XCOM2 - Enjoyed the remake, but the price is kinda hard to swallow with the terrible Canadian dollar right now. But given the early release there's a good chance it'll go on sale sometime this year. fault Silence the Pedant - Enjoyed the... what exactly do you call the things that release before a prequel but come after chronologically? Regardless, it's basically an interesting concept for an origin s

Things I anticipated that came out: Path of Exile - Came out with Act 4. It was eventually great. Way overtuned on launch, though. Talisman league has been great. Probably the game I spent the most time on this year. Gal Civ 3 - What I played of it was good. Unfortunately that's much less than I'd like since it runs like ass for me (probably the totally potato video card I have), so I've gotta wait for upgrades. fau

Stellaris (at least of what we've seen so far looks much like a usual Paradox Dev game) exists on a distinctly different (though similar) axis to other large-scale strategy games. Paradox exist in a unique enough niche that their success is almost entirely in their own hands. It's really the same sort of mistake that people make regarding Sony/Microsoft vs. Nintendo. Yes, they're all console makers that also make games. But Nintendo has a very different part of the market. That&#3

[quote who="Kamamura_CZ" reply="15" id="3581437"] AgaresOaks - read your writeup, interesting insights, but while introducing the new TGT cards, Blizzards have clearly shown that rather than to buff the terrible old cards nobody actually plays, they release the buffed version of the old card as a new card, to make more money and to push the old garbage in card packs as a filler. I mean - an old card, Magma Rager, a 5/1 card for 3 mana - absolute garbage, nobody pla

Welcome to every single TCG in existence. (well, there's no trading in Hearthstone so... every TCG and... I think it calls itself a CCG?) If you think cracking open packs is a good way to build your collection, well, reality will sink in and you'll realise "nope, not happening". It's also unfair to say you can't buy cards in Hearthstone. You can, it's just expensive (crack a pack and just dust everything in it). Expensive, of course, is a relative term. The buy-in for basi

[quote who="Major Stress" reply="6" id="3570290"]SoaDA was not my cup of tea ether, but i sure didn't want to see it fail. IMO DOTA type games don't do very well. Look at Demigod. It kind of fell into the abyss too. This niche i think only DOTA dominates. The question is "Why?". Why does DOTA succeed, and all others based on DOTA fail?[/quote] The problem isn't that DotA games don't do well. League of Legends, Smite, Awesomenauts and probably Heroes of the S

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="24" id="3555591"] With SK or any game I can see someone playing many hours trying to love it and just not doing so. I'm ok with that. But to go onto the Steam review page and give it a down vote? Sorry, I think that's an incredible dick move. I don't care what your justification is, if you've played a game 50+ hours you got your money's worth. It would be like me watching a movie 5 times and then going onto IMD

Basically, what Blizzard tried to do back with SC2 except they fell flat on their face when they had no infrastructure for it. This will encourage developers to make their games more moddable. Whether or not this is a good thing remains to be seen (once again, see SC2 and its lack of arcade for a very long time and arguably continued lack of support). The split is... meagre to say the least. As I think I've said elsewhere regarding dota 2, 40 modder 40 dev 20 valve seems more reas

Surprisingly little this year (that aren't holdouts from last year). Seinarukana presumably comes out this year. Probably. I think in my year-in-review I forgot to note that it might get steins;gate'd into eternal limbo (oh the puns no one will ever get), but original steins;gate had significant editing and technical problems and from what I can tell the translator of Seinarukana is much better and has worked through most of the technical problems of that game. Probably. He&#3

At the beginning of last year we had a post asking which games we were anticipating for the year. https://forums.elementalgame.com/451261/page/1 Now that the year has ended and we've had some time to reflect, how have those games stacked up? (and any others that have popped up over the year since marketing machines often aren't a year in advance) Edit: Oh right, walls of text warning. <span st

Any word on when the things that make DF palatable (the tilesets, dwarf therapist and the inevitable hotfixes) come out? Last I checked the update was mostly focused on stuff that makes adventure mode interesting, but I did hear it gave the ability to reclaim sites from worldgen in fortress mode, which might be fun.

PC Gamer has a fairly extensive interview up. http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/04/12/civilization-beyond-earth-interview-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-new-factions-aliens-technology-and-more/

[quote who="EvilMaxWar" reply="18" id="3451888"] Quoting AgaresOaks, reply 17 So there's pretty much no reason to play unranked other than to protect your precious ladder points... which you don't have. Why unranked even exists when it simply causes headaches like this, I can't be sure of other than to assume Blizzard has been completely unable to comprehend the basics of good online play in recent years. Unranked is here for many reasons.

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="10" id="3451539"] My post is 50% satire. The big problem from a casual perspective is that the matchmaking doesn't take into account "getting rusty" (they do have degrading MMR which causes its own problems) but the reality is that if I've been gone a few months and I come back I'm probalby going to lose a lot of games in a row because I'm out of practice and new techniques have been added.[/quote] Actually, give

Slam dunks: Age of Wonders 3 Official Steins;gate translation Slam dunks, pending timeframe: Seinarukana translation GGXrd Rimworld Looking good: Galciv 3 Endless Legend Possibly: BB Chronophantasma translation (urgh... Brokonoe) Not really a game, but still really hype: Mahoyo translation

[quote who="Jythier" reply="7" id="3393817"] You can change the game speed depending on what's happening, though. And it's more the enormous time span rather than the gameplay being slow - you could fight hundreds of wars, or you could sit and coexist peacefully through most of your days, but you can set the speed to match whatever you're doing at the moment.[/quote] As someone who's put a lot of time into EU4 and enjoyed it, the gameplay can be quite&

[quote who="XATHOS" reply="5" id="3391004"] It literally looks like they copied from the Elemental franchise and threw in stuff from Civ V. Regardless, I do have some interest. Meanwhile: "hugely popular 4x space strategy game" Lulz. No, it wasn't. [/quote] Is... is that you Yoichi Wada? Cuz seriously. 500k. Random nobody team. Unless you're Minecraft, that's about as good as you're getting. For a ba

Oh, I was just about to post that you were on the Polycast after listening. An interesting discussion on AI, layers, and how design impacts AI (and how AI can impact design, interestingly). Also on youtube if you enjoy consuming it that way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI3uk9lD4SE Brief table of contents at: http://civcomm.civfanatics.com/polycast/polycast/</

Firstly, your estimated cost is shall we say... "absolutely insane" for something with an estimated remaining development time of one year. IMO everyone should look at Skullgirls' Indiegogo campaign. If you're doing better than that on every front you miiight want to reassess. Secondly, for a small company DRM is probably a bad idea. As others have said, it's an investment that is highly unlikely to save you anything. And just because something's on Steam doesn't m

Differing levels of macro are actually distinct at basically every level of SC2 and probably the defining advantage at everything below diamond or plat. Arguably everything below masters. http://imgur.com/jmMNR The phenomenon you observe is actually a perception problem. Silvers and golds actually have almost exactly the same macro, so it feels very much like you hit a wall because there's actually a large hurdle to overc

[quote who="Kamamura_CZ" reply="32" id="3354942"] Try settling in a terrifying biome near a necro tower, where animal skins and skulls from your refuse pile crawl back to kill you, and strange mists and rains cause your dwarves' skin to peel off and turns their flesh into stinking green puss, and then we will talk When an undead whale emerges from the ocean to wreak havoc on your settlement, you will know what "difficult" means. [/quote] I did that a while back. It

Dwarf Fortress isn't overly hard once you know how to play it. If you know what you're doing it's not particularly challenging unless you're doing some VERY wonky stuff. Unless you count managing FPS induced "death" part of the "gameplay". Then that's moderately hard.

[quote who="DsRaider" reply="24" id="3330277"]No it actually is. I know some hardcore Starcraft players and they all click none stop, just to keep themselves on edge so they can react within 1/2 a second. They literally just never ever stop clicking as fast as possible.[/quote] I know a lot and they... don't do that? It's pretty wasteful outside the first few minutes of the game where literally almost nothing happens (your opponent literally can't get over to where you are

[quote who="DsRaider" reply="4" id="3329622"]but the always online stuff ruined it for me.[/quote] [quote who="ARESIV" reply="3" id="3329606"]1. Always online[/quote] Um. What? http://i.imgur.com/KijLBdG.jpg Game also had similar functionality prior to 2.0, for the entire lifetime of the game as far as I can tell. (you could in fact abuse it at one point to use the limited two hour play time demo codes that came from

1) Influence. Too good if you're Altar, worthless if you're anyone else. Scale back the cost of the Sion tech a bit, give Kingdom some unit to spend influence on and maybe make wonders cost influence? 2) Buildings that are cancelled don't refund resources. It's kinda annoying when I'm building the Spell of Mastery towers. 3) The Spell of Mastery victory is a bit too easy compared to the others. It should probably cost more itself and/or be later