I’ll give a shout out to Fictorum, which is kinda janky but is a physics-heavy wizard simulator with on-the-fly spellshaping and some real wild spellslinging combos. Between the combat levels, there’s a travel/encounter-type rpg thing vaguely similar to FTL as you try to stay ahead of a wave of Bad Thingstm
Did they release a 5.5 PHB
Pretty much
3.5 crunchy
Naaaaaaah.
Congratulations! Your players have become the villains of the campaign. What should you expect when this happens?
Well, summoning an elder god is an extremely stupid foolish idiot thing to do. An Elder God cannot be reasoned with or controlled by a pathetic mortal and attempting to get its attention will likely get a dozen square miles flattened like God swatting a flea.
But if you’re arrogant or greedy or shortsighted enough to want to do it anyways, then you’ve got a lot of work to do. At the very least, you’re going to need a complete copy of the necronomicon, which will be near-impossible to find and definitely impossible to retrieve without committing some heinous crimes. Plus you’ll need some ritual artifacts from cyclopean remnants deep beneath the sea or under the ice in the antarctic. And to get all those, you need money, power, and connections so I hope you like dealing with the Mob. Plus your body will need to be altered to survive channeling that much arcane power, so I hope you like mutating into something that makes Wilbur Whately look like Adonis.
And naturally while you’re doing all this, a group of random shmoes will stumble onto your conspiracy and band together as a group of Investigators to try and stop you beginning an apocalypse. There’ll be some back and forth as you send minions to deal with them, trap them, race them, etc., but they almost certainly will be there right as you are culminating your great summoning ritual. Then it’s all up to the dice: either you win, summon an Elder God, and get everything in the zip code including yourself killed for annoying it; or you lose, and an investigator puts a .44 through your soft cartilaginous skull.
I can already hear the “Dongchuckler dry heave bubbleslide”
Right up there with the ergonomic comfort and ease of use of the N64 tripod!
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Man, I remember I got Minecraft right after the Nether’d been introduced. Played pretty constantly until right around the oceans update, and then I got distracted and fell off.
Now looking at it there’s so much it seems almost unrecognizable.
Later in the article:
I’m writing about the Silent Hill 2 Remake in this scrambled, back-to-front, obnoxious way partly to piss off whoever edits this (to be 100% clear, Team Silent are the creators of the original Silent Hill 2, which Bloober are remaking), and partly to make a point about remakes: that they tacitly or openly position the original game as an “obsolete” museum piece in need of replacement, dismissing the old artistic choices as primitive and incomplete, re-defining the old creative parameters as constraints that need to be lifted. It’s all in the service of the market’s cannibalistic mania for the new, its structural need to ceaselessly bury “the past”, often by directly obstructing non-commercial preservation efforts, and sell you Progress that starts to wither and fade the second you peel away the cellophane.
Only if you think the campaign means that companies must pay for the multiplayer servers forever which Ross has said on MULTIPLE occasions is not reasonable and not what he wants.
Giving players the tools to host their own servers or adding LAN functionality, though? That’s entirely reasonable seeing as that’s how multiplayer always used to work. I mean, there are still plenty of Unreal Tournament servers active today without any involvement from the developer in decades.
Especially since, if this initiative works, developers will make games with that functionality in mind.
See, I like RTS for the same comp-stomping enjoyment because I like the spectacle of it more.
Quoted in the article:
“i propose a new fortnite rule: if you see someone in a cybertruck, you are now in a truce with everyone else in the lobby until they’re taken out. this repeats as many times as necessary until everyone that bought this stupid thing is gone. normal gameplay proceeds.“
Digital media of any sort, really.
I really enjoyed The Last Days of the Third Age, a lord of the rings TC for Mount and Blade: Warband.
It takes Warband’s medieval lord sim and focuses hard on the warfare side of things with lots of huge battles on giant maps, but even tiny skirmishes can affect a faction’s strength. (And with so many factions on both sides of the War of the Ring, you need to pick what to focus on)
Oh, don’t get me wrong, minecraft’s art style is absolutely charming and a perfect fit for the “blocky” nature of the gameplay. See how many of its imitators try to look more realistic and end up looking genuinely ugly. But to speak to the top comment’s point, when fancy shaders are added minecraft’s simple style gets elevated so much and it goes to show how simple and effective design paired with good-looking lighting can make even the lowest-poly games look absolutely gorgeous.
Hell, minecraft’s vanilla textures look downright gorgeous with lighting mods.
Bioshock is most specifically about Randian objectivism, which promotes a version of extreme laissez-faire capitalism, not libertarianism in general.
And I think that’s the most economic philosophy buzzwords I’ve put in a sentence before.
Ross and the team have been very specific about not wanting to force companies to pay for server infrastructure forever.
They’ve said quite a few times that what they want is for game companies to at least patch their games so they can keep running without the online connection or provide players the tools to host their own servers so that the company can end support without the game becoming a brick.
Hopefully by requiring games to be playable after support ends and the servers shut down it will also change the way games are made so that they no longer require the constant connection.
I’ll take any opportunity I can to link the legendary RPG.net review of FATAL.
Have you played Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry? It’s not a perfect fit but you do get to hunt down slavers and slave ships.