I had a similar experience with Stellaris last month.
I used to kinda know how to play it before, but they changed a lot of stuff. ~8 hours (multiple games - I really like the space exploration stuff at the start) and I still had no idea what I was doing. Uninstalled out of frustration when the one rival I had started claiming my planets.
Unlike Dungeon of the Endless there didn’t seem to be a tutorial for anything new.
jsnell
2968
It’s a roguelike tower defense game. Does that help build a mental model?
That’s a bit reductive… “Everything you do in Civilzation is build stuff with resources, and move units around”. The decision making density is actually pretty high. The strategic choices in the game are:
- Party composition
- Where to explore
- Which rooms to power up
- Guns vs. butter resource allocation
- Where to build your defenses
- Which defenses to build
- Which building upgrades to research
- Which items to buy
- How to distribute the items within your party
- Which characters to spend resources leveling up
- Pushing your luck with how few defenses to build vs. how many resources to carry over to the next level
- Pushing your luck with how few heroes you assign to exploring / defense, vs. on operating buildings for more econ.
- Pushing your luck on how long to stay on a level (for econ), before running the end of level gauntlet
On the tactical level, even though you don’t have direct control over the exact position / targeting of characters, you’d be doing the following during combat:
- Triggering skills
- Triggering healing / skill cooldown recharges
- Moving characters between rooms to defend from attacks, or moving them to safety if they’re getting beat up
- Using the movement mechanisms to kite enemies
Despite the limited amount of direct control, there are various tactics you’ll want to use against specific enemy types.
Well, that would make for a very hard game! With mouse & keyboard, it should be very obvious how to control multiple characters.
Oh, man. Now I really want to play some Dungeon of the Endless.
That does help. I came across a crystal thing on which I could press the “X” button, to build stuff on it, but I didn’t have enough resource to actually build anything. But I don’t understand, if the only fighting seems to happen when you open a door, then why would I build a tower defense? If you have something built in the room where you’re opening the door, does the tower defense built there help you fight the enemies in the room that you’re entering?
At the end of each level, there’s a big endless wave.
Also as you go deeper in the dungeon, the number and difficulty of the monster-boxes becomes larger.
Maybe the shortest-and-sweetest version of the internal logic of the developers is in the ironic naming of the franchise. The “Endless” race in the Endless X games are, in fact, ended, and a long time before the game.
Once you get used to how everything works, it’s a pretty great game. There is a lot of RNG in which way you decide to go on a new level, but there is quite a bit you can do when you know all the tricks of the game. Mobs won’t spawn in a room with a person in it for example…so you have to micro manage your team to keep from being overwhelmed by too many rooms spawning mobs. There is actually quite a bit of subtle strategy as to what to upgrade, when to use it, when to stay and farm and when to bail.
It’s worth investing some time into, because once it clicks, it’s pretty great.
jsnell
2972
Combat doesn’t just happen in the room you explore. Monsters can spawn in any unpowered room, and then beeline to the crystal. You can’t afford to power up every room, and the power economy gets tighter and tighter as you progress through the game.
(And sometimes you’ll choose to leave rooms unpowered even if you could power them, just to spawn more enemies…)
XBLG deal is back up for $50/year.
Conan Exiles developer has confirmed that the game is coming soon to Game Pass. Yay! Remember when we all got excited for a week that we were going to get it for free on Epic Game Store and then we didn’t?
I’m 99% gamepass or free to play at this point. I can’t remember the last game I purchased. I’m sure at some point there will be something I liked from Gamepass that leaves and I’ll buy but that hasn’t happend yet either.
Gamepass has taken the place of bundles and “that’s cheap - better get it now, might play it later” for me. I still buy games I know I’ll give a go right away
I just finally managed to get into Resident Evil 7, after postponing it for 4 years…and after finishing it, went and bought Resident Evil Village for full price, knowing it will likely end up in gamepass. I wish I had the resolve to wait, but…yeah. I have free time now, and I want to play it right away.
Petey
2979
I’m really enjoying RE8 right now. Never really liked RE games in the past.
I have an XSS and usually am a Playstation fanboy but the game pass is too good to pass up…it’s just crazy good.
On top of that there just isn’t many next gen exclusive games out for either console. If I was the type of person who was probably going to eventually buy both consoles at some point, I think I’d get the Xbox first, play the heck out of the gamepass stuff for a while, then maybe sometime next year when PS5 are more instock and more exclusive next gen games are out, pick that up and play those. Obviously, this only makes sense if gamepass is something that interests you. Some people buy and play a lot of games throughout the year so maybe they’ve played a lot of what gamepass has to offer right now.
I missed this and I’m late to the party, but this would have only worked if you already let your gamepass expire, right?
I’m mostly GP at this point, but I do check the sales every week for anything interesting on steep discount- I almost never buy anything at full price, no matter how cheap. This month is an exception, however. Just today I saw that Lost Planet 2 was on sale for $4, and I do love that game, and thought it might be cool to see how the XSX handles it (auto HDR, framerate, etc) but I kind of felt bad about just buying one $4 thing. So I also threw Subnautica: Below Zero and BioMutant into the cart. SBZ is only $30, and the original is legitimately one of my favorite games ever. BioMutant was the big hope. Fingers crossed.
Regarding that Game Pass article I have seen aspects of that with kids and families. My son plays with friends that have Playstations and Switches too, but for the ones that have an Xbox system and Game Pass there is much more freedom to explore shared experiences.
Prior to Game Pass a lot of families seemed to limit their kids to F2P games which is why Roblox and Fortnite became so huge, but many also purchased Minecraft. If my son wanted to play something else with his friends it was a struggle since parents often didn’t want to keep buying full price games. One kid would excitedly talk to their friends about a game then the whole process of begging parents would start, and talks about allowances and chores, etc. Which is quite fair since parents sometimes don’t quite know the content of the game they are buying, if their kid will play it past 30 minutes, and so on.
For the families that have Game Pass that eliminates all the barriers to trying new games and experiences. Want to check out Garden Warfare, Rain on Your Parade, Halo, or Goat Simulator? Tell your friends, they say they will download it and give a call back when they are ready to play. No hassling parents for money. It’s quite nice.
I know, I know. But I’ve watched a bunch of vids. I think it looks like it’ll be a winner. Frankly, its systems look more polished than CP2077 at this point.
