skruncher on 30/10/2025 at 13:15
Started Rogue Trader this past weekend, the third (I think) Owlcat CRPG. Playing it with my roommates in co-op, so far it’s been a blast. Having played the other Owlcat Pathfinder RPGs, I can definitely tell that they are improving at their craft. I will say, after Baldur’s Gate 3, my expectations for a good co-op system in CRPG might be too high now.
Tomi on 1/11/2025 at 18:47
So I finished Doom: The Dark Ages and South of Midnight! Wonderful games, both of them.
Doom TDA actually turned out to be better than I expected! Yeah, it's a bit too fast for my liking and I prefer more traditional shooters, but it's also a lot of fun. It's pretty much what I expected from a modern Doom game (I haven't played any since Doom 2). I ended up finding all the secrets and doing all the weapon mastery stuff, and to my surprise that was enough to get 100% of the achievements. Finally a game with reasonable achievements! As much as I liked The Dark Ages however, I can see no replay value here, so I already went and uninstalled it. :D
As for South of Midnight, I thought that the last three chapters or so were dragging on a bit, but all in all it was still a very enjoyable experience. It's a great modern fairytale, with mediocre gameplay. And a great soundtrack, even though the best tunes were near the beginning of the game in my opinion.
Installing now: Avowed. (I have no idea what to expect.)
henke on 2/11/2025 at 10:26
Glad to hear you dug both of those, Tomi.
I got started on Obsidian's other, newer 2025 FPS RPG, The Outer Worlds 2. I only have the Game Pass for another week or so. Can I beat this game in that time? Maybe! Do I WANT to beat this game in that time? Maybe! I'm like 10h in right now, past the first world. It's good, but not mindblowingly so. The exploration is the strong suit. The combat and stealth are alright except for when you run into over-leveled enemies and you don't even get to stealth kill em. Boo! The story is... a lot. Too much for me to really care about a lot of the time.
Tomi on 3/11/2025 at 03:48
Quote Posted by henke
I got started on Obsidian's other, newer 2025 FPS RPG,
The Outer Worlds 2.
I was thinking about playing TOW2 as well, but since I've never played the first game, I chose Avowed instead. Anyway, would I be missing out on something if I skip the first Outer Worlds, or is TOW2 one of those games where it doesn't really matter?
PigLick on 3/11/2025 at 04:30
Honestly I don't think it matters, the first Outer Worlds was so incredibly mid that it is really not worth the effort.
henke on 3/11/2025 at 07:50
As far as I can tell TOW2 is all new characters and story.
demagogue on 3/11/2025 at 20:33
Quote Posted by PigLick
Honestly I don't think it matters, the first Outer Worlds was so incredibly mid that it is really not worth the effort.
Haha, I literally made a post a few hours ago to the effect of yellow paint or knickknacks guiding the player (with Outer Worlds 2 being the latest entry) is a mid mechanic for mid games. First acknowledge the fact of what kind of game you're playing before getting into how much you care about that.
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Edit: I probably don't have to explain this here, but I wasn't even really being elitist about it. I think about it like normal people think about healthy and junk food. It feels good to focus on healthy food and immersive games when you've got the energy for them, where you really don't want screen bling or junk mechanics, but when you're coming in after a hard day of work and want to vegetate, you want to play a junk food kind of game with junk mechanics. I don't have any experience with the 2nd game yet, but anyway the first Outer Worlds and id games capture the junk food side of gaming pretty well for me.
Well the punchline I ended up with was a good game designer shouldn't try to wrestle mechanics into or out of a game concept of which doesn't want them. First be honest about the kind of game you're making, and let the game concept show them what it really wants or needs. I'd probably have voted along with the rest of the team for yellow knickknacks for TOW2 too. But before that, I would have taken a job at Arcane to work on a game like Dishonored or Prey, where I think I'd have had strong opinions and put up a lot more fuss trying to divine what those games wanted, and it'd keep me up at nights. I wouldn't lose any sleep working on an Outer Worlds game.
Edit2: All that said, one of my favorite games of all time, Mirror's Edge, uses red guiding paint, and I kept it on. But at this point I've memorized the levels speed running them anyway, and anyway it's a kinetic game, not an immersive (rpg oriented) one, and I think it's right for the game. I'd have voted on the dev team for it. So the rules can work differently depending on the genre, which was my deeper point anyway.
henke on 4/11/2025 at 07:45
TOW2 doesn't really have any yellow paint. It does have multiple routes to objectives and leaves it up to you to identify them. Or are you talking about the objective markers? I think they're really well implemented, only occasionally pointing right at the objective, most of the time they'll just point at a general area and you'll have to read the objective and deduce who or what to interact with there. And sometimes you don't get a marker at all, just a text like "find a plumber hiding in the front lines".
Sulphur on 4/11/2025 at 14:30
And anyway, yellow paint is a solution to a certain kind of problem: when your art tends to have a lot of detail crusting up the screen, visible pathways and routes tend to get crowded out by other things competing for visual attention. It's the difference between a ledge being a literal dead end and the one next to it being the path up to the next bit of the game. Horizon: Forbidden West solved this by having you ping your compass and slather entire rock faces with glowing yellow lines to tell the player what was climbable, which meant players got conditioned into pulsing it every 5 nanoseconds instead of actually just engaging with the landscape.
What's the obvious solution? Choose a stylised art direction instead like, oh I don't know, Thief or Dishonored. But if you're trying to have your game open world and with bleeding edge graphics and with scarper mechanics and various gadgets to traverse various obstacles, paint of any kind of description is obvious visual shorthand for 'let's not waste your time, broski'. Which I can appreciate is not the bestest or subtlest solution in the whole wide open world, but it's better than trying to tip-toe Aloy across a ruined window sill only to have her whoopsie-tumble across the cliff face below when it turned out that wasn't where she was supposed to go.
