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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   2283 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 21, 2025

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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Game subthread.

Review of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader in the child comment here. (if putting it like this, let the mods remind me of not doing this)

The Pathologic 3 prologue is now available, but I don't know if I recommend it. The structure isn't linear temporally, and the imsim elements were a big part of the draw of the first two for me. You play as the bachelor, and like in the second game you do a lot of diagnosing people, but as the bachelor has a proper education diagnosing makes a lot more sense to me than as the haruspex (which I appreciated) but the gameplay loop is very similar. The new survival mechanics are... Odd. This time you have to manage the bachelor's mood, and maintain a balance between depression and mania, with differential actions tilting you one way or the other, and drugs maintaining the balance. So if you see a dead kid on the sid of the road you tilt towards depression and if you see people fighting you tilt towards mania, and you can take morphine to lower mania and amphetamines to lower depression. It works alright mostly, but I think it's bugged because the bachelor is perpetually one diagnosis mistake away from blowing his brains out. Also you have to assign your drugs to hotkeys to use them without going to the inventory but it doesn't indicate what's in your hotkeys, so I keep accidentally blowing my brains out when I forget which drug is where. It does make me want to play pathologic 2 again though, I wonder if there are any good mods for it?

I also played a neat little indie horror game called Rooten which I do recommend, it's an adventure game (with minor combat elements) that sees you dropped off in a forest near a small research camp whose researchers discovered a new fungus but now have all disappeared. There's none of what I'd call handholding, but you have an objective beyond 'explore' so I don't think it would be a good fit for @coffee_enjoyer's request. (Proteus is the only game I can think of like that, but unlike @problem_redditor I don't think it gets away with anything, for the past decade it's been my go to 'this is why you need at least some direction in video games' example.) However if you like games like yume nikki and strange telephone, Rooten might tickle your tights.

but unlike @problem_redditor I don't think it gets away with anything, for the past decade it's been my go to 'this is why you need at least some direction in video games' example.

Proteus is a game that's certainly not for most people and I think it could absolutely grate on a player (it's not my preferred style of game either, I'm a very extrinsically-motivated player); it's just fine-tuned to a hyper-specific target audience which it seems @coffee_enjoyer falls into, which is what made me recommend it.

In general I’m just a fan of very targeted experiences that don’t reek of overengineering. From the start there are no pretensions that it's going for any kind of mass appeal, and I respect a game that firmly markets itself to a specialised niche without compromise, far more than I do a game that seems to be trying to achieve several mutually exclusive goals in an attempt to be a widely acclaimed hit. Most open world games in my opinion are juggling contradictory goals of telling a linear story and maintaining a constant stream of content while at the same time still trying to maximise player freedom, and as a result they very rarely deliver on most of what they promise. At the very least Proteus actually does successfully achieve what it is going for, whether the experience it's optimising for appeals to you or not is a different question. There's a difference between a bad game (i.e. one that doesn't achieve what it intended to) and a game that does what it set out to do but isn't catering to you.

Yume Nikki is actually another great example of an exploration-based game without any clear direction, can't believe I forgot that one. I can't say I like that game, but I certainly appreciate it.

I really like the premise and I'm going to watch the game carefully if it ripens into something worthy of attention.

I've been really enjoying Paradise Killer. It's a detective game in a vaporwave + visual novel style, but you still walk around the world in a regular first person perspective.

The plot is that you are a mildly disgraced immortal member of a satanic (?) murder cult that's trying to resurrect dead cosmic gods and also build a perfect paradisiacal island in a pocket dimension so that you have a place to put all the cool gods you resurrected. Unfortunately, demons keep pouring in to your pocket dimension, so periodically your cult has to slaughter the mere mortals that have been abducted to serve as slave labor on your island and all the cultists move on to the next island in pursuit of perfection.

The game starts at the end of island 24. Tragically, the entire nomenklatura of your cult has been murdered in a locked room just as the island is being wound down. The island gates are shut, none of the remaining cultists can leave, and you are brought back from your three million days of solitary confinement to figure out who killed the nomenklatura. You can't even visit the crime scene at the start, so you have to walk around the island, chat with your old cultist friends, find the clues and find the killer.

I keep being amazed and horrified at the amounts of heresy US indie game devs are capable of summoning up.

The game I mentioned has some truly choice lines for this..

Believe it or not, it's a UK based studio.

Same thing really except in the UK the rot is even more advanced.

Tried No Rest For The Wicked, a top-down ARPG soulslike. Nice actually. No real penalty for dying, so it's relaxed even though the bossfights are damn tough. It's in EA and there's a big update with a wipe coming up at the end of April, so I quit playing for now and will pick it up again after that. A little annoying, but that's what I get for EA.

A friend of mine asked me to play Space Marine 2 with him. We used to play various games back when, including Factorio and high-ish level Darktide, and we've always conflicted on how challenging and complex a game should be. I like mine to be barely beatable and only if you carefully theorycraft for an hour before playing and do an analysis session afterwards, and he likes to win by showing up. So Space Marine 2, a game so shallow and casual that I fall asleep thinking about it. He won, I guess. We even play on the lowest difficulty. Can't recommend, it's absolute console trash, but what don't I do for friendship.

That same friend also gave me a gift copy of Selaco, a boomer shooter. It's alright. The maps are too confusing for me, though.

And I'm further refining my playstile in Nebulous: Fleet Command. By relying on my allies to supply an Intel Center and getting rid of most of my Damage Control, I was able to free up enough budget on my three destroyers to give each a VLS with six cells of large, decently-built hybrid missiles. Too easily softkilled to take down capital ships or fleets, but just right for taking out lone scouts that might spot my origami ships. Switched to drives that offered better power economy and top speed but gutted my angular acceleration so that I now ned to pre-aim my spinal weapons well in advance, and I used the extra power to combine goood RADAR, EWAR, Fire Control and high-powered Point Defence on top of heavily-buffed Beam Cannons all in one, and all in the green power-wise. It's a sneaky fleet that can hide in plain sight, shoot down spotters at range, kill anything within 6km (provided I aim at it five minutes in advance), and evaporates as soon as it's spotted. Oh why can't I ever find anyone to play Nebulous with me...

What are some games that focus on exploration and vibes but with zero gamification elements? Something I’ve noticed is that games will try to nudge you into exploring an area by giving you an “exploration point”, or some other sort of positive reinforcer. But whenever this happens, it actually reduces your interest in exploring for its own sake, because the extrinsic reward interferes with the intrinsic reward processing. So when you get that point or that notification telling you that this is a new area, you now want to explore a new area already instead of actually taking in and experiencing the area you ostensibly have just discovered.

Is there any game that doesn’t do this? That encourages the intrinsic exploration element simply by not encouraging anything at all? (An old game which did this, that I recall playing briefly as a child, is The Endless Forest)

Honestly, Minecraft. Even after all these years, it's still my go-to whenever I get that freeform exploration itch. No objectives, no waypoints, no maps, just me and my terrible architectural skills. With just enough of a survival gameplay loop to keep the sandbox from getting stale.

If you've never gotten around to it, or haven't played in a decade, I'd really recommend it. That first few hours after starting up a new Minecraft world is something special I've never quite replicated in another game.

It's simplistic but there's https://slowroads.io/

Peripeteia is an immersive sim that could fit. There are some elements like that, like there are some secret stashes, but overall you're given huge levels without much direction, and it's up to you to explore them.

It has a demo on Steam, which is the first level of the game. If you don't like the demo, you won't like the game. It is in early access, but the demo works well as a self contained experience too. I played it for 10 hours, when you can finish it in one pretty comfortably.

Otherwise for games with minimal elements like that you can look at Thief 1 and 2, or The Dark Mod fan missions. You still have a mechanical goal to accomplish to finish the mission, meaning obtain enough gold, and steal something specific. But otherwise you're free to explore.

Factorio maybe? Exploration is not strictly required but is beneficial if you want more resources to exploit.

Underrail. It actively discourages exploration. It's an RPG whose entire plots takes place on roughly.. 1/4 of the game world. The rest is wholly optional. The vibes of exploring it are impeccable.

You will suffer if you try to explore. Especially if you see red mushrooms. The rewards were pain, tears and more pain and an ungodly amount of money spent on antidotes. because the reason places on the map are unexplored is a species of a cryptic, adaptive visual camo using .. insect that has a habit of sneaking up on people, traumatically injecting them with a paralyzing poison and eating them alive after it kicks in.

You have five seconds to slam an antidote or you're dead. Or be a psyker and set yourself on fire.. Oh, and there's a subspecies of crawler that, if you slam said antidote, almost kill you through forcing anaphylatic shock.

Or be a god-tier electronics guys and cobble together an energy shield out of very rare components that will bounce off their stingers (possible but very hard).

Or simply stay out of those places and keep to the 'civilized' bits of the game.

It's not entirely.. unreasonable to explore, there are a few locations with interesting gear - but generally, the rewards are very slim.

The second half of Wind Waker is pretty good. Basically, you are given a goal (collect the 8 plot coupons and restore your weapon to full power) and absolutely no direction on how to accomplish it. It's up to you to sail around the 50 islands that make up the game map exploring landmarks and talking to people and doing random quests until you eventually get rewarded with a treasure map revealing the location of a MacGuffin shard or manage to get into the two dungeons you must clear to upgrade your blade.

People hated the exploration phase so much that Wind Waker HD gave you a fast sail and reduced the number of steps needed to complete the game, but I really liked it.

The big problem I had was the two-hundred-rupee-a-pop deciphering fee for each of the eight McGuffin shard maps. That made the whole thing feel bloated and not worth replaying.

And the lack of tacking.

I believe what you are looking for is the 2013 indie game Proteus. There is no extrinsic goal or gamification at all, and the entire point of the game is to wander around a large procedurally generated world with strange fauna and sights to see. It's a world made solely so the player can explore it.

I share your sentiments about this by the way - I find that many open worlds have so many gamified elements and nudge you in the right direction so much that it barely even feels free anymore. Sure, you can deviate from the main quest markers if you want to have some fun, but you always know you're going to be returning to the main story, and the world is generally such a content desert that it barely gives incentive to explore. Sure, you can circumvent the quest markers and skip major sections of the story, but you'd only do that on a first playthrough if you want to have a significantly worse experience and miss most of the properly fleshed-out content in the game. This was my exact issue with Breath of the Wild - it felt very gamified and on-rails, and the open world not only seemed irrelevant but was also fairly unrewarding. And don't even get me started on the goddamn weapon durability system.

Games like Proteus are also empty. But games that are explicitly all about exploration and vibes get away with liminality and emptiness better than stuff that tries to meld it with a plot and a combat system and collectibles does. The latter frames itself in a goal-driven way which leads you to approach its open world in the same manner, the former does not. This is why "gamifying" open worlds barely ever works.

I've spent last two months playing the roughly 2 year old CRPG Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader.

TL;DR: "What if X-com was an RPG, had a personality, Doom levels of gore, brain-melting amount of builds and a few waifus that drop you if you flub one dialogue option?" (also husbandos, ranging from nice chekist to a sadistic serial killer elf)

I really, really enjoyed it. I'm not 100% sure of it, but it seems to me to be almost as enjoyable as classics like Jagged Alliance 2 or Baldur's Gate 2.

  1. if replying/discussing, please use spoiler tags when appropriate
  2. if you have questions, feel free to ask
  3. the review:

Short review, no spoilers here:

It's an A production game, so the budget was probably <20 million$. There is one DLC -it's a must have, seamlessly integrated, makes the game better, very high quality. There'll be more later I'm told. The story is pretty simple: you are a distant relative of a Rogue Trader, and because said relative learned that you're a fairly capable individual, recruited by the same to act as a middle manager for someone who is basically a dictator of a fairly large tributary empire. Something like 40 billion people over five planets. Yes, in the grim darkness of far future, it's tributary empires all the way down.

Fans of the setting say that lore wise, the game stays pretty true to the setting. I enjoyed it bigly. I'd say moreso than BG3, perhaps almost as much as I enjoyed BG2 or Jagged Alliance 2 when I first played those absolute classics. If you liked either, I think you'd like this one, so don't read the spoilers here!

Looks pretty nice - almost as nice from tactical view as BG3, but character models are much less detailed up close, there's no face animations etc and it's almost always drone's PoV. The explosions, magic effects and blood look just fine. The only thing that's missing is human/ xenos torches but the game has a 'T' rating which is really funny as it's, at times, very grisly and a heretical playthrough requires doing stuff that makes Auschwitz look like a tea party. Generally the really grisly stuff is only in dialogue / decisions so, off screen. Indeed, being in charge of a large starship, there are gigadeath decisions at times.

It's a combination of tactical combat, two layers of it - personal(95%) and ship (5%), the personal part being pretty much like BG3 or X-com, though more convoluted if not greatly more complex and of a fairly decent RPG with ..lots of text and pretty good writing. And also has a light 3x layer, where you manage planetary development. That part is almost completely optional.

It's no Disco Elysium but it's actually quite good. I'd say it's easily on par with BG2, perhaps better at times. It has a three variable alignment system, with the axes being dogmatic, iconoclast and heretic. Iconoclast here means being a bleeding heart do gooder, too good for the setting.

There are romances, and they're notably well more done than in BG3. E.g. there's a few horny characters who will make advances, but generally the romance options are believable. E.g. the noble lady will drop you like a bad transmission if you violate propriety, the attractive religious fanatic has no time for romance, the century old magical chekist is of course straight and an option but it'll take time. The incredibly arrogant (optional) eldar party member sees people as little more than animals and has a hilarious sequence of complaining about having had advances made toward them. etc.

Overall, the party members are well written, generally not annoying, sorta believable and in some cases incredibly voice acted. If the game has any weaknesses, it's mostly technical - the engine is not well optimized, there's sometimes 20 second loading times on a PC that can run C2077 in RTX at 4k / 40 fps. There are a few bugs still, there were a lot on release.

After playing through it, I discovered that with the exception of voice acting, it was written entirely by Russians. Coded too, ditto for graphics iirc. That explains the refreshing paucity of marvelesque dialogue and cringe, something that marred by enjoyment of Baldur's Gate 3.

Tried it, hated the combat. "Use a dozen skills to completely cheese the action economy, then stack a million buffs on your guys and pulverize the enemy in one turn. Else, die.", repeat ad nauseum for every fight.

That was my experience with Mechanicus, a game that I really enjoyed until I was beating every fight in a single turn. Except it was so easy to fall into that part of character-build-space that you didn't even have the "else, die" to worry about.

I went into WH40K Rogue Trader blind except with the experience of having played Underrail three times and have gotten 3/4 through it on the 'Dominating' difficulty. Underrail is actually not that hard .. if you're an RPG veteran and listen to the advice to optimize and not waffle. Apparently RockPaperShotgun doesn't have such people reviewing Underrail and panned the game for being 'too hard'. Kek.. It's really not.

Unless you're playing on Dominating where you're always one slightest misstep from getting killed and it's actually somewhat tedious.

Rogue Trader - The second hardest difficulty level (with saving) was pleasantly difficult, at first, but got not that difficult as game passed. It's probably pretty doable on the hardest if you don't mind save-scumming a bit.

Underrail has a .. complicated build system but that's nothing to Rogue Trader lol. But RT's is.. not really balanced. There's nothing much in the way of infinity turns like there was at the start I think..

..there were some exploits like that early but it's not like that now. Seems to me, based on what I've read. People said something about infinite turns.

You can extend everyone's turn by 50% now using the officer class. But not more, because after being targetted, the beneficiary gets 'overxerted' for 1 round. Unless you use a heroic act right out, but that's only doable late game with a specific build. Then you can have 2.5 turns for one character. There's a few other abilities but I don't think any is equally powerful.

Certain psykers also can take slightly more turns by time related fuckery but it's like 3 turns when others have 2 and also a mid to late game thing.

The big problem I noticed was that it took forever to fight battles bc buff animations are turned on by default. Once I turned it off, it got a lot smoother.

then stack a million buffs on your guys and pulverize the enemy in one turn.

If it's like that you can just up the difficulty. It was getting like that for me on my first playthrough towards the end unless it was a boss fight.

But it's not unfair to say that the tactical gameplay is often

  • be put into a completely unfair situation
  • use your completely unfair builds to make it even and win

If it's like that you can just up the difficulty. It was getting like that for me on my first playthrough towards the end unless it was a boss fight.

The problem with that is that by upping the difficulty, you shift the balance so that instead of merely being able to break the game with cheesy overpowerd builds, you are required to do so.

"OwlCat makes least intuitive RPG level up system and perk tree, asked to leave".

Seriously. I played about a third of the way through the game before I gave up on trying to build my own characters up and just re-rolled them with an online guide. It's so damn unintuitive, and the vast majority of builds are underwhelming.

Another gripe I had with it was the gear system. A Rogue Trader, even one down on their luck, has more money than God. I should be able to buy the vast majority of weaponry with cash, no questions asked. I can understand very rare or heretical weaponry being gated behind the expenditure of influence or building rep with factions, but it pissed me off no end that Slightly Better Bolter/Lasgun was something I couldn't just buy.

The game also ends up with damage-spongy enemies the moment you cross the early game. You can ameliorate this to an extent, since the game has the great feature of letting you tune damage sliders in the settings with decent granularity. Even so, I think it ruins immersion for a bog-standard human Cultist to take more than a couple Bolter rounds to the chest and not be reduced to a puddle.

I enjoyed the writing, but I wished the game had a wider variety of recruitable characters, or that you had more freedom to choose back stories for your player character. You can recruit a member of the Mechanicus, but I want to be able to be one myself.

I would also have appreciated more in the way of enemy variety, beyond Chaos and flavors of Eldar. Where are the Orks? They should be everywhere.

Honestly, I would loved to have more DLC if it meant that we had more potential companions and enemy diversity.

It's a good game, but I ended up dropping it for above-mentioned reasons well before the end of the story, and I don't see myself replaying over 50 hours to get to that point without drastic additions in terms of new content.

Another gripe I had with it was the gear system. A Rogue Trader, even one down on their luck, has more money than God.

I personally felt the gear system did a really good job of capturing that. There's no such thing as money for you, you can always afford to buy everything that the vendors have on offer. The only gating factor is rep and game progression (which is really what profit factor boils down to). The latter wouldn't be a thing in the fluff, but eh... the nature of video games requires that the player have a power curve, so I give them a pass on that one.

I'm happy to concede that RT does a far better job at diegetically gating stronger gear than the average RPG, and the setting of 40k makes rare relic gear and one-of-a-kind antiques very easy to justify.

I still felt that the profit factor was wack, a single gun could cost as much as you deciding to be merciful and preventing a planet from starving by providing subsidized grain. It very much wasn't the kind of gear where that would make sense, such as some kind of adrathic weapon or a set of Terminator armor.

I'd much rather have had some form of accounting, even if the units of exchange you had to bother to consider were millions of Thrones, or have the weapons be doled out through quests or loot drops in the kind of scenarios where that makes eminent sense.

Maybe I just didn't get far enough in the game (I'm only in chapter 2), but I never saw a situation where you spent profit factor to get gear. It was always a check where as long as you had enough profit factor, you could buy everything the vendor had and not take a hit (because as you said, rogue traders have more money than God). The only times where I would gain or lose profit factor were based on quest decisions I made.

It's entirely possible that I'm the one remembering things wrong. If that's the case, my criticism would lean more towards the rather disproportionately high profit factor that certain weapons were locked behind.

While I could see the gameplay justification behind doing so, there were things like krak grenades, explosive charges and standard med kits that were limited purchases.

I can only reiterate the level of ludonarrative dissonance that induced in me. Even an impoverished RT should be able to buy enough explosives to blow a factory sky high. They can certainly afford standard issue militarum medkits. It would have made far more sense to limit players in how many could be brought at once into a mission, which is already the case thanks to inventory limits.

If you do nothing with your planets, it's going to get impossibly high, but if you develop them which costs you only a little of time on decisions, you're going to easily have the profit factor.

It's not hard at all.

Also the weapons don't cost you anything - you simply unlock them by having

  • enough trader reputation unlocked by giving them common items they likeň
  • are in general rich enough

...isn't it copied from the TTRPG ? I used no guides and ...enjoyed the finding out but I do admit to feeling a little overwhelmed with the variety.

There's a lot of stuff there, yeah. Too much? I don't think so.

Could be more balanced I think, could be harder/ longer fights.. I'd also enjoy a more realistic style with going prone etc but .. this is fine.

human Cultist to take more than a couple Bolter rounds to the chest and not be reduced to a puddle.

Depends on the armor. IF you're using a bad build and a low quality bolter, someone with high deflection can shrug off most of it. I saw the 'Annihilating Astartes Bolter' which increases your crit damage with every round or something equally insane. A burst was doing 8x 200-300 damage per hit and turning greater demons into bits very fast.

I had a different problem - the hardest fight was the mini boss at end of chapter 1 the first time through. After that the game kept getting easier bc with more levels, you can build more broken builds and I don't think I got wiped out at all until some difficult fights in chapter 3 and 5.

Especially psykers.

Honestly, I would loved to have more DLC if it meant that we had more potential companions and enemy diversity.

There's going to be 2 more DLC, not sure how much content each.

wider variety of recruitable characters,

You can make custom fighters, but come on, how is this 'low variety' ?

  • very judgemental tech priest who's a holy terror with a plasma rifle

  • diviner/telepath psyker

  • slaughter nun

  • impossibly arrogant sniper

  • absolutely contemptible sadistic serial killer

  • actually pretty nice & reasonable magic chekist

  • young noble lady who's a bit snotty and sheltered but still a joy to have around because she loves seeing the world even if it's crap after a lifetime of boring study

-'what if Han Solo but a disabled MENA baddie and actually rich/successful'

-the very reasonable and very hinged death cultist

-a psycho space marine who makes Doomguy look like David French.

Personally my biggest complain is that there's so many awesome characters but you can only ever used six per one battle.

I'd not mind more party characters, sure, but ...too few? Nah.

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