• Agent Karyo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    35·
    3 days ago

    The Black Isle version of Fallout 3 (Van Buren).

    Bethesda’s version had expansive and impressive maps and visuals, but the writing and world-building were subpar compared to Fallout 1/2 and New Vegas.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      13·
      3 days ago

      Black Isle Studios planned to include a dual-combat system in the game that allowed for the player to choose between real-time (Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout games and Micro Forté and 14° East’s Fallout Tactics) or turn-based combat (Fallout and Fallout 2) but real-time was only included due to Interplay’s demands.

      I suppose you’re most-likely aware of them, but if you wanted more turn-based Fallout, have you looked into Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3?

      • Croquette@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        I am most probably not good at the game, but in Wasteland 3, it felt like you needed the first round advantage, otherwise you would get blown to pieces before you could even act once. That burned the game for me.

    • Coelacanth@feddit.nuEnglish
      5·
      3 days ago

      Thanks to the design documents being leaked back in 2007 (I think) and the original designers being open to contact from some dedicated people, there are actually a couple of fan made attempts at creating what would have been Van Buren. I know of both Project Van Buren and Fallout: Yesterday.

    • Vopyr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      But would this game have been successful, given the kind of games that were being released at the time? It would most likely have been the end of the series.

      • Agent Karyo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        3 days ago

        That’s a fair point. We did have Arcanum in 2001 and while it’s arguably legendary in CRPG circles, I don’t think it did all that well commercially.

        • Coelacanth@feddit.nuEnglish
          6·
          3 days ago

          I played Arcanum for the first time this year. There are a lot of cool things in it, but it really doesn’t hold up all that well.

          • Agent Karyo@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5·
            3 days ago

            What was your experience like? Interesting to hear from someone who tried it now as opposed to when it was released. I will add that it’s not merely a matter of nostalgia, but you also have a better grasp of the core gameplay and the general storyline beats if you’ve played it several times since release.

            Did you get the HD patch?

            • Coelacanth@feddit.nuEnglish
              6·
              3 days ago

              I played the Multiverse Edition which had a bunch of patches and fixes integrated. Including HD I believe.

              I think the world building is pretty good, at least parts of it. There is some disappointingly boilerplate Tolkienesque fantasy in there, but the conflict between magic and technology is well realised and interesting and feels grounded in the world. The steampunk aesthetic is cool and I like the Victorian racism angle they’re doing with half orcs and ogres. I liked the newspapers and there are some interesting quests, like the half ogre conspiracy. I thought the peace negotiation was going to end up being absolutely amazing but in the end it is just an anticlimactic stat check.

              The combat is absolutely atrocious in every possible way, from balance to animations and whether you play turn based or real time doesn’t really matter, both are horrible. It’s quite possibly the worst AI I’ve ever seen and every fight is just every creature mashing into eachother until one dies. I don’t think anyone or anything has special abilities or different AI behaviour. You can’t use Mage followers because they don’t use their magic, opting instead to charge into melee with their fists or staves.

              The tech skills are the most interesting and unique aspect of the game, but involves a horrendous amount of parts collecting, crafting, inventory management and over-encumberance for very little rewards.

              The companions feel extremely bare bones by modern standards and it’s extremely disappointing that none of them even get ending slides. I liked Virgil but not even he got any sort of closure at the end.

              The main story was okay, it had some twists and funny moments like with Nasrudin. The whole “life was a mistake” angle by the BBEG felt a little tired to me, but maybe if playing Arcanum was the first time I came across that concept it would have blown me away.

              The actual writing itself is not bad in terms of the prose and dialogue etc and the game has some funny moments.

              The vast freedom you get with character building is probably the best part. I like how varied you can make your characters, although I don’t know that all builds are viable. Props for following the example of Fallout 1 and 2 and including specific “dumb dialogue”, even though I didn’t go for that personally. Having to balance tech and magic with your character build is a fun concept.

              Overall I understand why it has its cult following and I’m glad to have played it, but it’s hard to recommend it to people unless they have an extremely high retro game/clunk tolerance.

              • Agent Karyo@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3·
                3 days ago

                Thanks for the write up.

                I mostly agree. The combat is indeed terrible with both real-time and turn based. Turn based just feels off and pure real time is not viable. I play with real-time with pause.

                I had the misfortune of playing as a technologist on my first playthrough in the early 2000s. It was really rough. Over time you can figure out strategies/approaches to make it easier, but I would argue many of them almost break the game.

                I agree you need a measure of tolerance for retro gameplay/jankyness and honestly combat was subpar even for its time (Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).

                • Coelacanth@feddit.nuEnglish
                  3·
                  3 days ago

                  To be fair to Arcanum in terms of companions Baldur’s Gate 2 was really the watershed moment in terms of how companions were treated in RPGs. Arcanum released less than a year after it and so while development timelines were shorter back then I doubt they had much time to adjust and get influenced by BG2. Fallout 1&2 doesn’t have it much better in terms of fleshed out companions.

                  (Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).

                  I would definitely recommend FO 1&2 easier than Arcanum and with fewer caveats. Maybe that’s just because I think they are fundamentally better and more important games than Arcanum though and so they are more worth suffering through some jank for. They still have a fiendishly retro interface that is quite clunky and the combat is not great, especially without mods. There is some really questionable encounter design in there and they both suffer from tremendous RNG heavy potential misery and loads and loads of reloads. Not least with random encounters.

                  Also the first few hours of Fallout 2 are absolutely miserable. It’s still one of my favourite games of all time though.

      • Guitar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        I think it probably would have been the biggest success of the 3 games. But you’re also probably right that it likely would have been the end of the series. Bethesda making them into 1st person open world games was probably the best thing that ever happened to the series. At least in terms of achieveing widespread success.

  • yeahbuddy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    3 days ago

    Hawken. :(

    Edit: Started to read through everyone else’s opinions and it dawns on me that this is just going to be a giant list of things I may have never even heard of that I might want to play, and can’t. You are a sadomasochist. :)

  • nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    51·
    2 days ago

    titan fall 2. never actually got to appreciate it because by the time i found it the server matching was completely broken. all they need to do is allow private servers or fix the matching system and the game would be playable. seems like plenty of people want to play it. I don’t know why they decided let the game die instead. makes no damn sense.

  • TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org
    13·
    3 days ago

    Kerbal Space Program. Loved KSP1, but still salty about spending $60 on the pre release of KSP2 thinking it would help fund development. Never again. Learned my lesson for sure. Both versions are basically dead now. It was a fun ride while it lasted.

  • Snowclone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    Orcs Must Die Unchained. Pretty good game overall, was trying to be a league of legends type of game with 3D TD, it didn’t get a player base going, so they swapped it over to a solo game, the maps were fun as hell and picking through 10+ characters was fun, it was really dynamic and the endless mode was very fun to push. They ended all support, it’s offline. Sucks. OMD 3 came out, it’s not even a quarter the game. Theirs 4 different player characters, they are all humans. All enemies are orcs or other bad guy type of mobs, unchained had human enemies and a few other variations, there’s no where near the number of maps and most maps play in a really predictable way. In Unchained there were maps you needed to build a kill box, sell it, move it, all to get one wave killed, at least on the first few waves, anyway. It almost scratches the itch, but not well. I’m honestly perplexed on why they didn’t just include the characters and maps from unchained.

    Anyway. It’s a very ‘‘there are dozens of us!’’ Game. So. I don’t expect much here.

      • Snowclone@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        It was a must have online servers game and they stopped all support, so it’s gone, canceled, over. Idk. That’s the way I think of it at least.

        • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          For games and other media that gets “released”. Cancelled is usually the term that gets used if it doesn’t come out.

          A film that is no longer in the cinema doesn’t get said it was cancelled for example.

          For games that cease to be playable after release they are more often described as being shut down or being sunset. Like I’ve never read about an ongoing game being cancelled unless they were specifically talking about an originally upcoming piece of dlc or content being cancelled.

  • simple@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    Loadout. It was a casual PvP (and later PvE) game where you can make your own weapons with wacky combos. It was a bit pay-to-win, but I thought it was very fun. The game crashed and burned because the studio wasn’t sure what they wanted to do with it and kept ignoring fans.

    I think the PvE spinoff never came out of beta. I was looking forward to it.

  • brot@feddit.orgEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    Back in the day I played a browser game called “Inselkampf”. That was way before anybody did the whole monetization and one of the earlier browser games. Totally free, no micropayments. It was awesome: You had a level playground. People formed alliances on their own without the game having such a feature. We hang out in IRC channels. We plotted wars, starting in the middle of the night in order to surprise the other alliances. We had diplomats talking to other alliances. People started alt accounts and snuck into the enemy alliances in order to spy on them. Some rose to top ranks, leading to epic betrayals and epic wars.

    Everything from that is gone. The game is long offline. The players dispersed, the IRC channels abandoned, everything never to be repeated

  • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
    621·
    3 days ago

    Cancelled or shut down? If you wanted a cancelled game to come out, 99 times out of 100, it was your imagination making it into a great game, and they cancelled it because it wasn’t coming together.

    For games that were shut down, for me, it was Robocraft. It was only shut down recently, but the version of the game that I loved from about 2017-ish was basically replaced a year later with a version of the game that I was not a fan of, and it stayed that way until the game’s and studio’s closure. I had to get burned by Robocraft in order to come to some realizations about the rot at the core of live service games, and it informed a lot of where I spend my time and money now.

  • Guitar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    3 days ago

    Star Wars 1313 is a big one for me. Same with Battlefront 3, both would have been amazing. RIP og Lucasarts, you were a real one.

    Also, Retro Studios has had a few concepts that sounded awesome. They were planning a few Zelda spinoffs I would have really liked to see. Heroes of Hyrule and the Sheik project looked cool as hell.

    • SpruceBringsteen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 days ago

      Star Wars Galaxies was such an ambitious MMO at launch.

      Crazy in depth crafting system, especially with regards to pets. With how materials were randomly generated and cycled out it created a market that actually experienced booms and scarcity.

      Some of the servers went almost a year before all the materials required for certain weapons spawned. And the materials all had random stats that would affect the item you crafted.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        5·
        2 days ago

        Also a surprisingly advanced and customizable… ‘class’ system, which was really more like a whole bunch of branching skill trees you could mix and match basically various ranks of… allowing many weird, but often effective, hyrbrids of ‘classes’ that… could either focus on one main ‘class’, but augment it with certain abilities from other ‘classes’…

        And then the Combat Upgrade happened, and everything got streamlined.

        Also… being a Jedi/Sith used to be… exceptionally rare and difficult to pull off.

        IIRC, basically, some kind of insane random seed type thing gave each of your characters a very, very tiny chance of being force sensitive… but you wouldn’t even know this unless you also found basically a hidden event/questline, and then that would unlock a whole set of force skill trees, allowing for a range of jedi to sith abilities, with some kind of mix effectively being a ‘gray’ jedi.

        Finally… SWG … still appears to me to be the only MMO that actually attempted to implement a working, player vs player, bounty hunting and tracking system, within an mmo… as a core game mechanic of a player ‘class’.

        Though I haven’t played all mmos, so I may be wrong about that.

        … Also an entire skill tree for basically being a mayor and running your own player built town. A whole skill tree dedicated to like… administrative capacity and zoning laws.

        Do MMOs even… do player built cities anymore? Or did they just mostly switch over to ‘you have a house in the set aside ‘suburb’ instance’?

    • slimerancher@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      Came here to mention Star Wars 1313.

      Haven’t played Outlaws, but I guess that’s the closes we have come to that. Maybe a non-ubisoft game similar to that?

      • Guitar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Oh damn, I forgot about that. I think you’re right. Wasn’t it supposed to be a more mature take on Star Wars?

        • SexDwarf@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          It’s been a while but I think so. No idea what the genre was supposed to be, a soulslike maybe or something combat/combo based like DMC?

  • Delta_V@lemmy.worldEnglish
    23·
    3 days ago

    PlanetSide 1, the MMOFPS that was the former record holder of “Most players in an online FPS battle,” which was eventually surpassed by PlanetSide 2.

    In its heyday it was a fascinating sociology study.

    During EU prime time, players would self-organize into squads of about 10 players. They would apply light pressure to the entire map simultaneously. Territorial gains would be made by attacking undefended bases.

    During USA prime time, players would self-organize into platoons of about 30 players. They would press a few strategic locations with medium force. Territorial gains came from fixing operations (using a small force in an easy to defend location to keep a large population of opponents busy) and local numeric superiority at lightly defended bases.

    During Chinese prime time, players would group up into a singular mass. Everyone just ran face first into the meatgrinder. No territorial gains were made.

    • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
      5·
      3 days ago

      I played ps2 heavily for a couple of years. Fun game.

      I remember organizing several squads to play tactics when the main zerg pushes were off doing random stuff. There was a lot of planning and tactics that had to happen specifically around guessing what the public players would end up naturally pushing for. Colloquially known as “the zerg”. Almost treated like a mass of self-organizing players, but in reality they were just individuals who happen to follow each other to random places.

      Eg. leadership comms would be flooded with plans of “The zerg is pushing towards Tawrich, We should send Alpha and Bravo over to Zurvan to split the TR forces (maybe recapture that) and Charlie to crown to intercept backup/vehicle spawns. Delta needs to fuck off with pulling those tanks… get in the fucking building.”

    • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      I regularly play gw2 and in it there’s a mode called world-vs-world that’s a three way team “bigger” scale battle (bigger than 5v5 pvp) that often has hundreds of players in (I’m not sure exactly how many, I just looked it up but there’s little concrete information because it looks like the devs change it over time, but I’m guessing like 300 total players per map that often gets maxed and you have to queue for).

      Players can spend a chunk of gold to enable a toggleable commander status tag on their entire account (you get 1 gold for base dailies, costs 300 gold for tag). In WvW, those commanders often lead larger scale pushes for claiming territory over a ranked “tournament” that ends and resets each month.

      I’ve noticed it’s also an interesting sociology study, but from what I’ve seen, the Chinese commanders do coordinate and split up and do pincers and stuff. It seems like one big zerg isn’t as effective since yeah you’ll take what you go for no matter what, but it’s all about allocation of resources and fighting the actual battle… and that takes actual work, when a lot of people are just interested in farming out crafting materials, currencies, achievements, or other reasons. Which is fine, but part of me wants to see the game mode go 100% and see what it’s capable of.

      Depending on time of day around the world and when people are awake or home from work, there are huge spikes in activity.

      I never played much PlanetSide 2 because at the time my pc was a potato and I was still wrist deep into counter strike. Would those maps ever end? Or was it also like a perma-sisyphean timeless battle? Was there ever a winner?

      • Delta_V@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        3 days ago

        In PlanetSide, there’s just one big map that never resets.

        The team I played with would try to bring the front line to a bridge before logging off for the night. Contested bridges were notoriously difficult to cross, so you could count on no major territorial changes happening while you sleep. The zerg was content to snipe across the bridge all night, and when organized Ops resumed the next day, the bridge would simply be bypassed by mass airlift.

        IIRC, there have been a few times when one of the three factions controlled the entire map, but it never lasted more than a few minutes. During the PlanetSide 2 beta test, one side came close to taking the entire map, but the whole game crashed because the entire population of all three factions was trying to pile into the same base at the same time. They eventually implemented a mechanic where if too many people were in the same place, the ones who arrived most recently would be teleported to an adjacent map tile.