Man I’d really love to get into Total Warhammer, but the pricing for DLC leaves me so cold. Particularly since the factions I’m more interested in are the DLC factions. Throwing down $70-80 for a game I’m not super sure about gives me pause. (And it was a whopping $40 instead of $50 for the winter sale, which didn’t…

This probably isn’t even technically the right forum for it, but what the hell is going on with the VR industry? There are now something like three platforms for VR now (Sony, Occulus, Vive—four if you count Samsung’s Gear and its knockoffs), and it feels like we’re all still collectively talking about its ‘potential’…

I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t wait to pick up games I’ve been missing all year, like “Sorry” “The Steam Store is experiencing a Heavy Load Right Now”. Plus “Error 503".

I wonder if they’ll bring back the old classic though “Random Steam Accounts that aren’t yours?” and the weird mini game where you…

MMOs are a business. Game companies are making products, not sports. There’s a reason MMOs don’t cater to so called Hardcore (when in reality, a LOT of what makes an MMO player eligible for ‘hardcore’ difficult content is time. Yes, there is skill, but in order to reach the literal math to get at the top-end of…

Interesting. My first one was removed well after a traumatic event, during the middle of a Tabletop game. Not even like, during a particularly tense moment, just out of nowhere.

My own pet theory is more like you’re not fully ‘forgetting’ the source of the anxiety in the first place, and somewhere in the back of your…

The whole reason for Laserboats being top meta is a tale as old as the entirety of MW’s game series. In a game series that rewards consistent, pinpoint accuracy as a way to cripple your opponents, the most consistent and accurate weapons are going to be king. The only real way to fix it would be to somehow bring back…

Mechwarrior/Battletech games are like a poster child for weird translation issues in taking a tabletop experience into a game and the challenges therein. So much of the ‘balance’ of the big three kinds of weapons—ammunition, heat generation, and hit/location consistency, just doesn’t translate well into a realtime…

For this very specific genre of game I guess? it also requires more material to produce the games so I dunno if I’d call it a net win.

Yeah I imagine this was a lot harder to produce as a Legacy game. The first two Legacy titles had established games with underlying mechanics understood (particularly what worked and what didn’t) for years and so could tailor the Legacy mechanics to accentutate the strengths (Pandemic) or compensate for its weaknesses…

There are ‘replacement’ cards in the box that are constantly added in in successive playthroughs, altering the game mechanics and generally replacing ‘destroyed’ cards. In theory, after like 20-30 playthroughs the game is exhausted and you’d have to rebuy (if for some reason you wanted to play Legacy-style boardgames…

It isn’t, not really. The draw is that the game is narrative in its design: Your actions in one game reverberate through every game past this. Rules disappear and are replaced by new rules (in various boxes throughout the game). The cards change, the board changes, the game ‘evolves’ over time. I mean, if you really…

He already blew dash to get across. Don’t think it would have been off CD, but yes, he would have started moving again. You can also see in the background Mei icewall off an approach—likely Genji was flanking during a push, and the push was delayed, giving players ample time to deal with him, and leaving Genji…

The problem in a nutshell for Evolve wasn’t actually that it was a pared down version of L4D, but that it was a L4d Successor that had missed the most fundamental lesson of the game.

L4D is essentially one laser-focused gameplay loop with subtle variations, but it’s the pacing of that loop that makes it satisfying.…

It’s a pretty common DM mistake, I think, and very much a ‘road to a bad campaign paved with good intentions’ situation. One of the worst mistakes you can make as a DM is getting too enamored with the ideas of your own campaign: Maybe a mechanical set of challenges you like, or an NPC whose backstory you love (this is…

Pre-gens are fine, as long as the players are okay with it. That’s really the key there; in this particular case, the DM didn’t read the room properly; players felt like they didn’t have much agency in their own characters. People play D&D for pretty different reasons, and while some people may enjoy the novelty of…

Reminds me of a DM who had gone to exhaustive lengths to set up a really intricate backstory for his campaign setting, complete with dedicated roles for each ‘class’. He put a lot of time into it and as settings went it was really good—but it bored the shit out of players, because it railroaded them during character…

Yeah I tried to get into it but it felt like every game devolved into both sides angling themselves against the nearest wall and taking turns popping up and taking shots at each other. The losing team was either one that didn’t protect support from a diving corvette or someone over committing and being punished for…

I think there’s a disconnect between how ‘gamers’ think games are developed and how games actually get made. I have little doubt the reason for a lot of ‘downgrades’—early reels and builds of the game are aiming for a graphical fidelity that doesn’t work once you start implementing the features/scope/whatever into the…

The problem is the premise behind ‘mixing things up’ is to provide an interesting alternative.

Most brawls are fundamentally not interesting. They’re not worth ‘mixing it up’ because they aren’t worth playing for more than a round in the first place.

Assassin’s wouldn’t get the auto critical off it since it’s not actually a surprise round, and enemies don’t give up their turn, so yeah it’s not the same