I quite enjoyed DA2. I liked the stories and the characters, and the combat was extremely fun.
As a massive fan of DA:O, I was very disappointed at first by the dramatic change in gameplay. But after I gave it a chance, I grew to really like it. Not as much as the original, but I still liked it quite a bit. I played a rogue in that game and zipping around with a pair of short swords ripping folks up was a freaking blast.
Just to clarify: which game do you think made it “lose its identity”?
That’s basically how I feel about it. I now find that the combat is a bit dull when I replay the original (DA:O).
Is DA:O available on a modern system? I miss it.
I can play it on my Xbox One, but that’s hardly modern nowadays.
You can still buy it on Steam. Probably on EA store too (I didn’t check). I assume it still works on modern systems:
GOG has DA:O (on sale, by coincidence, 60% off).
Remember that GOG stands for “Good Old Games” and was originally meant to give people a way to run old games on modern systems. So, if you see it there, it should run on a current computer.
I recently got back into Age of Wonders 4. It’s sort of like a Civ style campaign map which like a Total War game drops you in to tactical battles, but unlike TW these are turn based instead of realtime.
I’m still banging my head against the last campaign mission in the base game. There’s a paladin leading a host of angelic orcs that are just impossibly tanky. And he’s got an incredibly annoying spell that gives all his units Steadfast, making them stay alive at 1 hp and unkillable for the round whenever you first drop them to 0 HP. He starts the game already having a massive empire and is impossibly aggressive.
I’m finally beating him with a Lolth Drow style build. Sneaky elves (bonus damage on attacking from a flank) riding spiders (their webs can immobilize people at range allowing me to lock down particularly dangerous melee units just out of range of doing anyone any harm). I picked a culture that focuses on debuffing opponents. I’m able to remove all the stacks of Strengthened the orc paladin can put on his army, slap Decaying on them to nerf any healing, then flank and kill the enemy by focus firing one target at a time.
It’s incredibly stressful and even my Tyrant Knights (who should feel very tanky) feel like glass cannons. But I’ve fought my way to the orc’s capital now, and if I manage to take it he’ll finally stop respawning and his empire will collapse into Free Cities. (Which will be great because a major part of the culture I chose is forcibly vassalizing free cities for increased bonuses, but there aren’t really any city states on this map).
Dated now, but I last played (according to Steam) DA:O Ultimate edition in 2020 and it worked fine (would have been in Windows 10 then though). So likely to still work, especially through GOG which tends to do better optimization than Steam.
I finally tried Terra Invicta and discovered it’s the game I’ve been looking for ever since I finished XCOM2 with the LongWar mod. It’s frustrating, takes hours just to learn how to play, is ridiculously complex, and a single play-through can take 100hrs.
It’s not a game for everyone. But wow, what a masterpiece.
Yessss, it’s exactly like that, isn’t it?
I played when it first released into early access, haven’t come back to it for a while because I was waiting for the full release.
It’s everything I loved about XCOM but also the base building resource management space colonization portion is exactly what I wanted endgame Kerbal Space Program to feel like (obviously with more of a focus on piloting ships yourself, but as far as getting resources and building up bases across the solar system).
I just looked at the page and the fact that the map changes as everything rotated the sun broke my brain.
It’s not too bad because you don’t move ships from one orbit to another manually, instead you lost the body you want to send them to and it tells you the fuel cost and time, and also when the next transfer window is.
Hey, fellow Satisfactory/Rimworld/Factorio nerds: new automation game just dropped!
I bought Starrupture over the weekend, and have already put a dozen hours into it.
Briefly: it’s a Satisfactory-like game in most ways, lots of factory-building and a bespoke (not randomized) map. There are two major differences. First, the planet undergoes periodic intense solar flares that scour the surface of all life (including yours, if you get stuck outdoors during the burn). Different resources are available immediately after the flares end, so the cycle of build/explore/research is linked to the flare cycle. Second, the wildlife is a lot more aggressive. Certain crucial exploration sites are overrun with dozens of insectoid enemies.
It’s Early Access, and I can definitely see where a lot of stuff will hopefully be added: there are the hints of a story but the main story isn’t there, and a lot of quality of life features don’t exist (e.g., smart inventory options, blueprints, etc.) But it’s beautiful, and the gameplay loop is already pretty tight, and it’s worth checking out if this kind of game is your jam.
More video game news, but I find it interesting that Ubisoft has fully cancelled their Sands of Time remake. It must have been atrocious.
Thanks, wishlisted. Are there settings to adjust the difficulty, such as animal aggression?
I don’t think there are, but there are ways to manage the difficulty. One key measure is that once you upgrade your base core, you’ll start experiencing much greater attacks by the critters; but there’s no real requirement to upgrade the core (you can easily build multiple cores and gain the same advantages without the attacks). Upgrading the core seems to be there for players who want to mess around with tower defense mechanics.
Ughhh. That’s seriously tempting, which I’m not sure is a good thing considering it looks like strategy-gaming rabbit-holes all the way down. Not sure I’m in the mood for an obsession.
Thanks for this!
I tried Sins of the Solar Empire 2 a while ago and it seemed a bit too simplistic. This looks interesting.
I wonder how it compares to Endless Space 2.
The PCGamer article blames it mostly on their restructuring. Ubisoft recently spun off many of their core franchises into new investment ventures co-owned with Tencent in order to focus on Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed, and Rainbow Six.
Ubi closed a bunch of studios and laid off a shit ton of people. In its place, Tencent will help oversee several hybrid producer-publisher “Creative Houses”.
Creative House #4 will be “dedicated to immersive fantasy worlds and narrative-driven universes, […] including Anno, Might & Magic, Rayman, Prince of Persia, Beyond Good & Evil”.
Guess the much-delayed Sands of Time didn’t fit into that…
Yeah, it’s quite early… felt like Satisfactory’s first year. The basic systems are there, but it’s quite unpolished, the tutorial wasn’t super helpful, and a lot of things in-game weren’t very clear. If I didn’t have previous experience with factory games and specifically with Satisfactory, I think it would’ve been quite confused.
It’s not easy to tell different minerals apart from the background geology, for example, and the game doesn’t make it super clear when a structure is working or when it needs power or some other configuration. (They actually have color-coded failure modes, but the tutorial doesn’t discuss them.)
I think this will be great in a few years, but I stopped playing after an hour or so in order to give it some more time in the oven. Didn’t want to get burned out on Early Access frustrations. I’m impressed you got a dozen hours out of it already! Maybe I just have low tolerance for early access “quirks”. It’s not exactly a janky game, even in EA, it’s just obviously unfinished.