~The Game Pass Thread~

Dungeon of the Endless - This is on the “leaving soon” list. I tried it out last night, and it completely confounded me. It seems like some kind of turn-based game at first, but you can pause time so I guess it’s real time. And you can’t do much as far as I can tell, besides opening doors or building things with resources. You start with two heroes in an escape pod, but I couldn’t find a way to control the second hero until the first hero died from opening too many doors. Every time you open a door, your hero fights what’s inside the new room with no input from you. And I think the new room gets power from the old room, or something? It’s so weird.

The game doesn’t teach you anything, but I did notice that there’s a tutorial in the menu, so I guess that’s where they expect you to learn things. I hate that as a game design template. Make your game confusing, don’t teach the player as they go, instead tuck your advice in a separate tutorial.

Anyway, it’s leaving Game Pass, probably mid-May so good-riddance.

Dungeon of the Endless makes sense to me but I don’t actually remember how I learned to play it - I think though there’s a big issue with the actual button-pressing interface at this point, as it’s been ported to everything and every platform at this point, and honestly a Controller is probably the worst of the three possible ways of playing the game (K&M, touchscreen, gamepad).

I think it’s called “press your luck” in board gaming. It’s not especially hard to understand the game, but like a lot of the Endless games has a totally idiosyncratic logic to it, so yea, if you’re not willing to try the tutorial, it’s probably DOA for you.

Anybody can still do the full value conversion, but you do need to let GPU completely expire first and it’ll cost $14.99 to convert XBLG to GPU rather than $1.

I sort of liked the mysterious presentation and obfuscation at the start of Dungeon of the Endless, though I can see that being a big turnoff to people. It was fun to click around and explore the interface trying to figure things out like inventory and shops…and then OH MY GOD SOME CREATURE IS ATTACKING YOUR CRYSTAL PANIC.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Go Ducks.

I missed this and I’m late to the party, but this would have only worked if you already let your gamepass expire, right?