And Brisco County Jr.
and The Gunslunger before that.
I feel you, it’s rare that I enjoy those two genres cross-pollinating. The Gunslinger and Grim Dawn are a good exceptions.
While I agree with what you are saying, I don’t think the Post Track is a good example. That one really has nothing to do with rails… And I think the rails-part is the problem, not the track.
Hey devs, why can’t you get the size of your subtitles right? Have you ever seen a movie with subtitles? There is a certain size that had proven to be perfect over 50-70 years of subtitled cinema. Maybe you guys think you are above cinema. Well some stuff of the movies applies to games too. Now go back to your game and do your job ™. End of rant.
Also reduce the amount of text you throw at a screen. Get your dialogs right. There is at least a thousand years of theatre tradition. They know dialogs. End of second rant.
Fortunately, a lot of folks feel similarly, and some are now trying to do something about it!
Microsoft has incorporated some of this into their XAGs, which I think are an awesome idea that I hope more folks pay attention to.
Here are the two that seem to most directly cover this -
Man, you would hate the Eberron D&D setting.
There’s a few flavors of this kinda stuff, and I like some more than others.
“Weird West” settings have been a thing for ages – it absolutely predates Firefly. Old pulp stuff kinda trod that ground, but I think Jonas HEX from DC kinda injected it into the nerd parlance most directly. Some TTRPGs go here, too – Deadlands came out in '96! Like you, I don’t love this stuff, though – Westerns never really did it for me, and the whole “frontier spirit” of grimfaced vengeance-fueled gun-dudes riding on horses and shooting up Native Americans for glory and gold just feels kinda ick in 2021.
But man, fantasy steampunk/gaslamp fantasy? Good goddamn am I ever here for that shit. Again, very old roots here, with lots of TTRPG, CRPG, TV, and written antecedents. My current favorite incarnation is the default setting of Blades in the Dark, wherein criminal gangs scrap and war in a gothic Victorian fantasy city ringed by massive electrically charged walls powered by essence harvested from the whale-sized murder-ghosts that freely roam the blackened wilderness beyond the safety of the walls. That shit is cool as fuck y’all.
I am totally ok with train tracks in a steampunk fantasy world. But in a game with dragons, dwarves and elves, trolls and goblins, no thanks!
I wonder were Final Fantasy falls? It is more of a steampunky world… depending on the FF game
I mean there’s steampunk with the fantasy races. Hell, there’s cyberpunk with fantasy races (hellooooo Shadowrun!). It can be awesome, or terrible, like most fantasy, hah
I’ve fallen back in love with Westerns as a setting for TTRPGs. I love the sense of distance, the land as a character, and the ability to contrast (while still supporting) characters that are wilderness skilled versus settlement skilled. I love that the opponents (when it isn’t the land) are people not monsters or supernatural beings. And I love that there is room at the fringes for some weirdness.
While the American West has a lot of problematic racial and colonialist issues it also has some terrific conflicts between individuals, small (often isolated) communities, and the big economic/political communities from the East. Plus i’m tired of settings that are all urban all the time.
Oh wow this thread got buried a bit. This is more of a brief rant than anything else. I had a keen interest to chill with Jagged Alliance 2 and the 1.13 patch. I installed JA2 and a DX wrapper to help it run nicely in Win 10, I set about finding the recent 1.13 patch on the Bearpit. Installed that no worries, went into game and got confounded by too many options. Ok, I’ll work that out as I go. Bit amused by the zombie option… Then go ahead and create merc. I’m no stranger to some of the changes that happened a while back with 1.13, but now it is too, ummm, dense? Again, options on top of options, pages of backstory options to add to customisation and even select prejudices against gender and race (yes, I know that was in the original game with mercs not wanting to work with other mercs). It seems like I’ve stepped into a min-maxer’s dream. Too much to take in, left it and moved on.
Hire mercs. Ok now I can choose a custom loadout for them which is really just different flavours of gear. Go into first fight and see enemy. Intuively click to increase aim over enemy. It brings up a menu with stuff that I don’t understand. I guess there’s more interactions that can be had with the soldiers now? Something about reveal turncoats and radio operator something or other. To improve aim, I have to use the mouse scroll wheel. I had enough by that point and quit out of it.
The mod has gone off the rails and it actively takes away from the gameplay. Where I should have been able to hit play, make a merc in a couple of minutes, hire a few more and get to saving Arulco, I ended up wading through too many features, details and obstacles. And that’s fine, I’ll respect the designers and their vision for the mod. But I’ll uninstall it and if I want to play JA2, will stick with the original game for now. It’s such a shame though that what was a fantastic mod for the game is now something I would not recommend at all.
Unless I can download an older version of 1.13 (or hope it is somewhere on my desktop PC some 400km away when I next go home) I think JA2 is looking close to dead to me. After writing that, I remembered the bugs that were still in JA2 1.12 that 1.13 did address. Arrgh.
I had no idea there was a third person PS2 Dune game made in 2001.
That’s news to me as well.
Responding to this oldish post, 1.13 has indeed jumped the shark. The solution is to use JA2 Stracciatella, which fixes the game while not being insane.
Thank you so much for the recommendation. It has come at the right time too because I’ll be gaming on a laptop soon for a bit while I rebuild my gaming desktop water loop.
I was really-reading my original post and I’m still so annoyed at how badly 1.13 devolved. I ended up playing xcom 2 after that debacle.
I’ve been watching some less well-known YouTubers lately, and I ran across this recent, lengthy review of Deus Ex by someone calling himself Grim Beard. His script is surprisingly well-written, and I was amused that, at about the 10 minute mark, our own @tomchick gets a substantial mention (for the obvious reason).
Why am I so familiar with the town of Eugene Oregon? I know it’s from a game. I’ve never been there in real life or know anyone from there or seen it on a real map. But I know I saw it a lot in a game. Was it the original Railroad Tycoon maybe?
I still get sad that Shogun 2’s naval AI was totally broken for me and many others. In the demo it worked fine so it seems an update introduced it and was never fixed. Incidentally: what’s the ‘best’ Total War game now? I’m eyeing up Three Kingdoms or a Warhammer.
After playing The Crew, Need for Speed: Most Wanted and now Forza 5: I hate XP and the showering of little awards and achievements for doing pretty much anything in driving and racing games. You drifted 2m, here’s 300XP! You hit a lampost, here’s 100XP! You scraped your car, you mad bastard, here’s 50XP! Whoa, big air, 500XP! You’ve levelled up, here’s a new paint job! It feels like such a lazy way to engage players and so downright insecure, like I’m going to lose interest any moment. Forza even gave me a spin-the-wheel-style prize draw for fuck’s sake after a couple of screens of progress bars going up. Look, award me money for coming 1st, 2nd or 3rd to buy new vehicles and upgrade them. Lock new events behind vehicle requirements or completion of other events. Boom, done. Be quiet. Let’s drive. Everything else is fluff to me. Wreckfest does this but bizarrely it also has XP to unlock stuff.
I’m playing Aliens: Fireteam at the moment and even guns have XP and levels on top of the attachments and cores/modifiers systems. It’s madness!
This is an absolutely stupid trend that has been infecting gaming since around 2009~ by my recollection. At least I first noticed it when I bought the original Need for Speed: Shift. It was bad there, but now it’s so bad it’s just a parody of itself. I fully expect at some point they’ll release a patch that gives you XP for receiving XP which will create an infinite loop and crash your computer.
“Our focus group tells us they like getting rewards, so let’s reward the player for doing literally anything and everything.”
Warhammer has an insane amount of varied factions. Many factions play dramatically differently with fun overland mechanics and of course, magic you can actively use in battle (for RTS micro fun).
Warhammer 3 will drop in 2/17 on xbox/pc gamepass too. Warhammer 1 works as DLC for warhammer 2. Warhammer 2 is what I would pick up now.
What 3 Kingdoms has is very good strategic layer play. It finally had diplomacy that made some sense unlike the normal let’s all gang up on the human player that should be familiar to a shogun player
Thanks for the thoughts! I feel like Warhammer could edge it, despite it looking overwhelming with the three games and DLC.