Fraser
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Posts posted by Fraser
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37 minutes ago, cornchip said:Do aspects of the game remind anyone else of Pikmin or Darwinia?
We mention the similarities to Pikmin and Little King's Story when it comes to controlling your army of critters in the episode. I can honestly barely remember what Darwinia's like however, since it's been so many years since I played.
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On 9/4/2017 at 4:22 PM, warthurton said:I have no affinity to Total War. I owned TWW but none of the DLC.
To have good experience what, if any, of the DLC is a must have.
I answered this very question for RPS https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/04/28/total-war-warhammer-all-dlc-review/
That was published before Norsca was announced, but I would include that in the must buy category too. If you're on a budget or want to limit yourself instead of buying the lot, I reckon that the Wood Elves and the King and the Warlord DLC will keep you entertained. With that you get a mini-campaign, the Wood Elves faction, and new Greenskin and Dwarf leaders, starting locations and units.
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On 8/31/2017 at 8:11 PM, JoeR said:Great episode guys. Your diversion onto Age of Empires IV made me think of the Empire Earth series. I never played three as i understand it was kind of trash but I have great memories of EE1 & 2.
Especially EE2. I seem to remember it had a cool territory control mechanic. Did you ever play those?
(Although I did/do have a copy, I never actually played Rise of Nations!)
Empire Earth 2 was fantastic, and I can't believe none of us mentioned it.
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On 8/27/2017 at 1:47 PM, ilitarist said:I rate this episode 10 out of 10 for mentioning Rise of Nations but subtract 3 for continuing bullying of brave game journalist Fraser for his subjective opinions.
<3
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1 hour ago, riadsala said:Interesting episode, but I'm a little confused by what you mean by 'meta'. it sounds like you're talking about normal campaigns?
Specifically campaigns where it's not just a series of battles and missions, but where there's a separate but connected strategy game wrapped around them - stuff with campaign maps and dynamic events opposed to a list of interconnected fights.
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On 5/9/2017 at 0:14 AM, Qarl said:I was very interested in the general discussion about meta-plots, and progressions in game worlds for strategy games. (And the associated 40k bits also). I'd love to hear more about that at some stage.
There's definitely a good chat about strategy storytelling waiting to be had. Maybe we'll do something like that in the near future!
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On 4/28/2017 at 4:21 PM, Madmat said:What would you recommend of the 3 (War in East, Unity or Steel Division)?
War in the East and Unity of Command would probably suit you more, especially if you're looking for a game that a bit like those complex tabletop games you didn't have time to play. I'd recommend Unity because it's the more accessible of the two.
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6 minutes ago, Pearlmania said:I'm excited to give this a try. I played Red Dragon but found its systems almost impenetrable to a newbie. Are there any good let's plays or resources to help a Wargame noob git gud?
Quill18 has a couple of videos that explore division creation and then a battle - you might want to check them out!
As we said on the episode, the best battles are team-based. Find a bud (or many buds), pick a role (air support, infantry, etc) and try to tackle an AI team on normal difficulty. The real challenge is learning how to handle all the different crises you're bound to encounter in a battle, but focusing on a particular role reduces the number of things that will need your attention.
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10 hours ago, Akalabeth said:Too much paradox. Surely there are some smaller, strategy games out there that deserve a little more coverage?
Could just be my bias showing through though since my only experience is with EU3 and I completely bounced off it. CK2 looks much the same, an over-world, with a couple of large soldiers endlessly swinging at each other and the occasional detailed menu popping up from time to time. If I need to imagine the experience to such a degree I would rather just read a history book.I don't think the size of the developer has any bearing on how deserving a game is of discussion. I wanted to do a Monks & Mystics episode because it's what I've been playing and it's a fascinating expansion. That said, we have a monthly Patreon poll for this very reason - to find out what people want to hear us chat about!
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10 hours ago, ilitarist said:Does Fraser really think WW1 was the only unpleasant war and that WW2 didn't have trench warfare?
Of course not, but it was especially horrific and trench warfare in WW2 was very different.
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On 12/14/2016 at 1:52 AM, Arathain said:My goodness, Fraser, you're awfully wrong about Space Marine. Who cares if its linear? It's a lovely linear booted ork stomp. The shooting feels perfectly nice and the melee combat is gratuitously entertaining, and just complex enough to be satisfying. It's a not a great game, but it is a good one. I love how weighty Captain Bluepants feels. Stomp stomp stomp stomp.
It's not the linearity on its own that's the problem. Linear is fine. No issues with that. The problem is the way it's inconsistently restrictive. One moment you're going over a wall, and the next you can't even step over what is basically a 1 foot tall rock. You get a jetpack, opening the game up, changing the format of the battles, and then it's ditched because it won't fit in a gargantuan cave you have to briefly pass through, even though you can clearly see that it does. Honestly, though, my biggest problem with it is that it's simply dreadfully dull. The combat is decent, but there's nothing beyond that. No surprises. No exploration. Dismal characters. And aside from the aforementioned jetpack bits, it's content to just plod along, doing the same crap over and over again.
Anyway, I'm totally right. It's shite. But it's shite that a lot of people really enjoyed, and that's fine. I like a lot of garbage too. I gave Rome 2 a 7/10, after all. -
2 hours ago, bobbybintang said:Over an hour on warhammer and not one mention of the greatest warhammer game of them all: Blood Bowl.
Blood Bowl 2 was literally the first game mentioned. That has to count for something!
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you were wondering why there are no modern games in the tradition of pirates, that are as sprawling and allow you to do a thousand different things while playing a single character in a large world. I believe there is a clear successor and I would very much like a tma episode on it sometime: the mount and blade series.
I feel very silly for not bringing that up when we were talking about things like Sunless Sea and AC4. M&B definitely has a lot of Pirates' DNA. Though M&B itself is getting on a bit too (it's only a few years younger than Pirates) and even Warband is over six years old. Thank goodness Bannerlord is on its way!
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I think the topic of "How Do We Learn Games?" would be an interesting one. Manuals vs. wiki vs. tooltips vs. "Let's Play" videos on youtube, etc. I'd just rather the topic didn't take up so much of this particular episode. Essentially, the first half hour of this episode was a complaint about how Paradox expects gamers to learn their games, followed by complaints about game systems that boiled down to "I don't know how this works." I make this criticism as a big fan of you guys. You have a much better HoI4 episode in you. I hope you come back to it in the future.
I don't think any of us planned to talk that much about documentation or tutorials, but when the point was raised, we all obviously realised we had a problem with it. Such is the nature of these chats! I definitely agree that it could be an interesting standalone topic though.
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Not sure whether to pick this up really. Despite the lads' glowing recommendation, other reviewers have found that the AI is awful and not challenging and there are few maps (although probably more to come in the future).
With so many other good games out right now, maybe it's one to wait on a sale for.
I wouldn't say the AI is awful, it's just very scripted and quite conservative. Also, in SP the maps are brilliant. Diverse, often sprawling, full of interesting geography. In MP, the maps are great, but there aren't many of them. I'm pretty sure Blackbird Interactive said they were working on more though.
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What will Fraser have to do to remove this 7/10 staint from his reputation?
I think I'm stuck with it forever. It's been well over a year now.
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Battles are horribly balanced. Cavalry wins against pretty much everything. It's severely hurt the multiplayer gameplay, and you often see almost three times more people in the RII battle lobby because of it. I don't know if y'all are much for multiplayer battles. I don't remember y'all really mentioning it, but I could be forgetting. But for those into multiplayer battles it's a pretty significant system that they've not really addressed in favor of launching DLC's, which is where some of the DLC hatred comes from - why should we buy DLC factions when you can't even balance the factions already in the game? Don't get me wrong, I like Charlemagne, and I even enjoyed The Last Roman, though I felt like they were both somewhat low effort campaigns like Wrath of Sparta.
I'm not sure about the other chaps, but I'm not really into Total War multiplayer. For me, it's always been a strictly single-player experience, and in the campaigns I haven't really had a problem with balance and have won countless battles against AI enemies with a heavy cavalry focus. Honesty, balance isn't really something I care about all that much, anyway, because I confess that I'm not particularly competitive. Perhaps that's one of the reasons that my favourite multiplayer strategy games are things like EUIV, because they makes imbalances fun rather than something to worry about.
It's been further disconcerting the lack of optimization and balance passes given to the game, issues well known in the community and expressed to CA. It feels like CA is very much being pressed to move onto the next project by SEGA, which probably explains the state Rome II was released in. Certainly not good for future iterations in the franchise if this push to release is going to become the new norm. Hopefully the increased funding and development staff can offset that.
I think people often forget just how inconsistent performance can be in any given PC game across different PCs, even ones that are, on paper at least, identical. Chances are, if a critic doesn't complain about a game's performance or optimisation problems, it's because they didn't experience any. That's certainly been the case for me, because Attila runs perfectly fine on my rig. Sure, if I turn everything up to 11 then I get some issues, but that's because Attila was designed with future GPUs in mind as well, so the maximum settings aren't really for a PC like mine. I'm still able to crank them up pretty damn high, though, and get an acceptable and mostly consistent frame rate.
None of this invalidates the issues other players are having, but it's worth keeping in mind that it's much more likely that a critic simply hasn't experienced the problem in question and it doesn't mean a game is being given a pass. We're bastards, we never give anything a pass!
Anyway, I'm sorry I was a bit hotheaded. I should have sat down and read my reply and not posted some of that.
It's not a problem, and I was happy to clarify a few things.
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I seem to remember when Rome II was first covered one of the hosts (don't remember who) panning the intro movie at the games launch that had Egyptian chariot archers, talking about how ahistorical the game was because Egypt would have had Greek phalanx armies. If any of the hosts had actually bothered to play as Egypt, they'd see that it does rely 90% on Greek style units and warfare. But the anti Rome II circle jerk was too strong to bother actually playing Egypt - clearly the intro movie was enough.
Can't remember which of us brought up the intro cinematic (it was Rowan, Rob and I on that episode as well) but it was probably just as it appeared: poking fun at the cinematic rather than condemning the game for not being historically accurate enough. I think it's a wee bit unfair to say we were "anti-Rome" too. Rowan and Rob ultimately didn't like the game at all, and for good reason, but I ended up defending it quite a bit because, despite the many, many issues, I actually enjoyed it a fair amount, giving it a 7 in my review.
At the end of the day, Rome II does feel a bit hollow to me. It doesn't have the heart of some of the other Total War titles. But to continue to talk about it like it never improved after launch is ill-informed at best, disingenuous at worst. A glance at Steam player stats would show that people by and large prefer Rome II to Attila, precisely because of post launch support and the fact that it turned out to be a very solid title.
Look, I understand there are only so many hours in the day to play games, and you have to pick and choose, but Rome II is simply not the same game as it was at launch. Some of the problems were too big to iron out in patches, and unfortunately will be with the game forever, but it still ended in damn decent condition. A solid B game at the end of the day.
I don't think any of us said that it was still bad. I believe Rowan, at least at the time of recording, had only played the original launch version, so he can only talk about what he knows, while both Rob and I have played the Emperor Edition extensively and have on more than one occasion noted that it's improved. But since Rome II didn't come out in 2015, the wrap-up wasn't really the right time to go into that again.
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Oh ilitarist, you jest so well!
On the game and podcast itself, I'm curious as to why game like this would come across as overtly discrete pieces woven together (to this game's detriment since none of the pieces seem to stand all that well alone)... apologies for being pretty broad there but it is a very broad sentiment. Afterall, all games are ton of very simple interactions woven together but very rarely do you see it pointed out.
Like another game that had similar reception was Hand of Fate. I suppose any time a more traditional genre mold is altered, the additions and subtractions must seem more jarring than the rest? Hmm...
It's more overt in Thea because all of these disparate elements are normally given their own game. There are card games, 4X games, RPGs, survival games -- but Thea attempts to make one game out of all of them. While other 4X games might draw from RPGs or other genres, Thea's different because it doesn't have one part that's dominant. It's not a 4X game with extra bits, because the 4X stuff is given no more attention than the other elements.
I think it's also worth noting that none of us found this jarring. Indeed, I think one of the reasons that some of us liked it despite its flaws was because it wasn't traditional. The problem was that, on their own, none of the game's pieces really work particularly well.
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I agree with this. The podcast was a bit of an oddity to hear, with less experienced players telling a more experienced player that he was being too hard with his misgivings about a game's depth and longevity.
I don't think we really believed Rob was being too hard on the game. All of his misgivings were valid, and were shared by both Rowan and I to a certain extent. And in regards to experience, while Rob had put the most hours into the game, we were all at the same stage, getting to end-game easily enough and focused on pushing past all the portals. Indeed, I believe that Rowan was actually the furthest along, and had been closest to the win condition.
My point, as I said on the episode, was that for all of us, the game was still, in part, a mystery. None of us knew what the end really was, or if the game had more in store for us. That's why I wanted to keep playing.
Episode 408: Tooth and Tail
in Three Moves Ahead Episodes
Posted
"Most" is a wee bit of a stretch. Rob didn't talk about multiplayer because he's still playing through the campaign, but Bruno and I did. I'm pretty sure I even recommended that Rob play at least one MP match before he's done with it because it's the best part of the game. That said, I don't think we've had any particular attitude towards MP or SP on the show for years. SP campaigns are a big draw for a lot of people, and in many cases it's the only part of the game that they'll play, so we'd be remiss not to spend a big chunk of time talking about it.