Diego

I know they'll probably improve it as it gets better, but right now epic store is pretty simplistic! The store is a bunch of icons representing games, you click on it and the game page has some screenshots, description and a button to purchase it. No discussions, no reviews, no stats, no favorite feature etc. And no cart either! can't buy two games at the same time yet. BUT it is just a store and works as intended About the time loop duration, 22 minutes is rather short in my opinion too. But it was probably hard to find this specific number when developing, because so many things in the game are event based (hope this isn't considered spoiler) that they must have had a good reason to choose it. BTW, I finished the game and it's pretty damn fantastic! I can't stop gushing about it. It's smart, it's cute, it's original..

It's not similar at all, I think. It looks like a space sim but besides flying a spaceship, there's not much more in common with space sims. The reason I brought up Obra Dinn is because playing it felt much more similar. It's about investigating the history of this system, piecing together a narrative. Since you're stuck in a time loop you don't even care that much about where you land or how much damage the ship takes. Just leave it anywhere, go investigate the planet for 20 minutes and it all restarts. Most of the time, at least.

I was ready to use my mouse and keyboard when a splash screen suggested a controller. I don't like controllers for first person games but I went with it because usually flight simulators are better with analog controls. At the end I was playing both the spaceship and the FPS parts with the controller. I can think of some parts where you really want fine control over thrusters, but I haven't tried mouse and keyboard to tell you how well it works.

I mentioned this game in a Sotha topic about horror games a few years ago. When I played the demo back then I knew this was going to be something special so I backed its Fig campaign, and now it's finally released. Here's the veredict: It's good, youguys. Like, really, really good. I think it might be my new favorite game of all time. My expectations were high and it still blew my mind. People are always complaining about the games industry but I'll tell you one thing, the frequency I'm getting blown away by new games seems to be increasing lately. After I played Return of the Obra Dinn I was not expecting something like this to come so soon. And before that the games that still linger in my mind are Papers, Please, Portal, and Thief. See the gap between Thief and Portal? I hope I'm entering a yearly cycle of amazing games. Anyway, I thought I'd plug it here seeing how this game isn't getting the attention it deserves. Here's the description from their site: This may seem nothing like Obra Dinn but they have some fundamental similarities. Some people are calling these kinds of games "information games", where the point is to learn stuff. For example, if the objective of a game is to find out the murderer and kill him but you start right next to him, in theory you could finish the game in 10 seconds, but exploring and learning that information is the game. In Outer Wilds you play in 20 minute loops, each iteration keeps nothing from the previous loop. You gain no upgrades, no keys, nothing is persistent, you just accumulate knowledge in your regular brain (ok, the game does save information in a computer terminal inside the game but that's the only compromise it makes). So when you finally beat the game it will be a sequence of things you do within these 20 minutes, which you could have done at any moment if you knew what you were doing. Right now it's available on Epic and Xbox. And you should be playing it.

Heyall It's been a while since I showed my face around here. Even though I haven't been playing TDM or been involved in its development in any way, I always felt somewhat welcome in this community. So hello there! o/ Here's a fun article: https://theconversation.com/how-we-found-the-source-of-the-mystery-signals-at-the-dish-41523 If the "wow signal" has a similar story I will be deeply disappointed.

I didn't receive anything from this forum, but I did get this scam from other sites before. Needless to say, although the email is a scam the information leak seems real. It's password changing time.

I thought about this for years. What really bothers me is that the difference between killing and knocking out is almost entirely contextual (as in setting and story, everything on top of the abstract game rules), minus some extra scream and blood stain. I mean, there is no difference in terms of practical game effect; Entity goes from active AI to simple movable object. The only thing that makes any difference is context, the whole dress we give the game. It goes to show how important context is to stealth. Anyway, I get really absorbed in the game and in my head killing is always a last resort, meaning purely contextual difference is sufficient to influence my decision making. But it would be nice to have a different effect on a gameplay level too. But simply having them wake up after some time would be a harsh penalty to knocking out and just discourage doing that. To put that in, there would have to be some other effects also in killing as well. Maybe knocking out makes AI wake up confused but not alerted, even if the unconscious body was found by another AI. While finding a dead body would raise the alert level. This would create a game mechanic distinction between the two actions and it would make some sense in the context of the game (it's sufficiently realistic, within the range of our suspension of disbelief). I like how it is though. I'm just throwing my two cents.

Continuing this chain you will eventually be thanking Isaac Newton. (I just dropped by to make this joke)

This game is the one to blame for me being a gamer today. When it came out I was getting bored at videogames. My last consoles were all from 16 bit generation, I didn't bother with newer consoles, and I was mostly playing on PC. And every game was starting to look the same to me. "yay, another FPS. How original". That same year half life came out too and it had no effect on me! today people hold it to such high standards, but I remember that back when it was released it felt like just another shooter to me. A well made one, and its main contribution is its story telling techniques introduced. But to me it was boring and samey (FPS were boring and samey to me 20 years ago, if I could go back in time and show myself a 2018 FPS it would depress more than impress me) Thief on the other hand blew my mind so much. I realize that I'm still always bored with games but I keep playing because there might be a "thief" around the corner to blow my mind again. And there definitely were other games like that, so I'm happy Thief TDP came when it did. Fun anecdote: I remember showing this game to a friend and said "this is a little harder than most FPS games if you never played it" and he scoffed at me, stating he was a Quake champion or finalist (and he was!) and it was going to be a piece of cake. So I sat there trying to repress my smile while he charged Bafford manor's front gates with a bow and arrow, jumping back and forth. Ah... fun times.

Finding this topic today and reading the first post to the last has been quite disappointing. "oh wow! I didn't know this existed... oh dang" edit: it was just released though. Nowadays it's customary to save money on testing by releasing it half finished and patching it up. I'm not saying this is super great but it is what it is.

Well, now I'm afraid I oversold it. But it's cool! I stand by that.

Diego's recommendation of the week*: The Messenger. Started playing with zero expectations. I had this on my wishlist but I don't remember when I put it there, so I just bought it blind during a sale and started playing. Man, what an amazing surprise I had! What I'm about to say would be qualified as spoiler in my book but the trailer and the game description on steam seem quite proud to announce it. But I'll put a spoiler tag anyway. Maybe play the game without watching the trailer or reading the description lol that's what I did and I'm glad I did it. As a snob and picky gamer it's nice to have more than one contender for game of the year. (Return of the Obra Dinn is still ahead) Should we maybe make a topic just for game suggestions? I played TWO good games this year so I feel like I'm spamming now. * More like biannual

Half Life made great use of silence. There is a particular part of the game that really stuck with me. It's in HL2 episode 2; you are defending this crossroad of tunnels shooting creatures. They come in waves, with their numbers indicated by lights on each tunnel. Each wave gets stronger but all you hear are gunshots and the other characters talking. Then, after several waves, a moment of peace, then all lights go up at the same time, every characters starts to panic, and THEN and only then, music starts playing. It's truly glorious. Amazing moment in gaming during a ridiculously simple gameplay loop of glorified whackamole, achieved by a careful buildup with music sitting at the very top of that buildup. At 13:28 this youtuber gets to this part: https://youtu.be/tp7Mk1IAGRo?t=808 Music starts at 24:10

This is a good topic. I never thought about music serving this purpose before. I do believe music to be terribly misused in most games. Music has so much power over us and we still mostly use it like a white noise looping in the background. All elder scrolls games abuse their tracks. They have these beautiful orchestrated tracks and it plays 100% of the time, nonstop. It's too much; It waters down the epicness and you get tired of listening to it. There's a lot of talk about procedural music generation to synchronize game states and music. And that's all fine and dandy for the future but right now I feel there is A LOT to be accomplished simply by choosing when to have silence and when to have music. Or, like you're suggesting (teh_saccade), to solve specific problems like making obligatory and uneventful long sections seem less so. I play a lot of simulation games and these long uneventful sections are part of the package. For orbiter, whenever I started a long boring part of the travel I would play some classical music to get in the space-travel mood. Suddenly, the long boring of waiting for the next maneuver becomes the most memorable parts of the game, when I allow myself to go into an existential crisis while looking out the window. I think something similar could work in TDM and thief-like games. We're not traveling through the dark empty space, so the mood is different and it requires different music, maybe this long sewer walk is the ideal moment to drop some acid jazz heist tune or something similar. Because I love this kind of music but it has no place in a game where you need to use your ears, with horns and drums blasting. But in this specific moment? I think it could work! Let me illustrate my point. Well, don't use THIS because of copyright, but this is what I'm thinking you should use on your long walks through the sewers (which sounds like a weird Tinder bio): If this started playing during a boring section, I swear, I would not notice if this was a 10 minute walk and it would make my thiefy experience much richer.

Ah! that makes sense. I naively didn't make that connection.