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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2638 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 27, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I put Master of Orion aside for a little while, and tried playing Nox. I played it for about an hour or two one night, and just couldn't muster a single fuck to give about it. I donno.

I saw Mechwarrior 5: Clans is coming out soon, which motivated me to try Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries again. I was so god damned excited about that game, preordered it and everything. But it was just so... blah when it came out. The radar system was just fucking useless. I think it was barely better than line of sight on release? And enemies could spawn anywhere you didn't have radar coverage. Which meant while I was stomping along at 20 kph in my Awesome, enemies were constantly appearing out of thin air directly behind me on the terrain I just traversed. There was a Better Spawns mod, but it would constantly get broken, and then fixed right in time for another fucking DLC to come out and break it again.

Anyways, the game is done, no more DLC, probably only maintenance patches, I think I can count on mods to work for a while. So I loaded up Battle Spawns 2.2, a UI mod that fixes things on 32:9 displays, and I edited the unreal engine ini file to be hor+ instead of vert-. And let me tell you, the game is finally good. It's finally a Mechwarrior title worthy of all the others. Radar is vastly more functional, enemy spawns are much more sensical, often from drop ships 400m away to give you some time to regroup. I'm all in this time. No more petering out and getting distracted. I might even bust out my HOTAS again and climb that skill cliff once more.

I heard about Nox via a breathless manifesto on its alleged perfect PvP balance. I can’t find it now, but it was one of those notepad docs, and it had strong opinions on most every spell and skill interaction between the classes. Depth! Mind games! Wizarding!

So I downloaded it, started the story, and found myself standing on a beach in a t-shirt, hitting crabs with a stick. Yeah, I’m with you on this one.

Yeah, the solo and story mode of the game were... pretty uninspired. There's probably some important role they played in building toward the modern action adventure RPG (and maybe even a bit of modern MMOs) as a step away from Diablo-likes, but at best it's extremely dated, and more often it's reason to get pushed to other better games of the same era.

Multiplayer was fun back at the time. I wouldn't exactly write a big paper drooling over it, because it did develop a lot of jank pretty quickly (and then EA killed the servers), but you could tell that it was actually trying for some level of good multiplayer play (contrast eg: Mechwarrior 3's PPC meta).

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