It’s not really that Concord was bad, and more that it was unremarkable.

The game was trying so hard to be a clone of Overwatch that what they ended up with was the gaming equivalent of those knock-off GI Joe clones your mother would buy you from the dollar store. Except that Overwatch is free, and Concord was $40. Why am I going to spend more money on getting the knock-off version?

Copying what works only gets you so far. At some point, you have to actually step ahead of the thing you’re copying.

For anyone not familiar with this game, or anyone who’s only familiarity is through the trailers (which really focus on tone and visuals), I really want to recommend the videos by YouTuber Riloe, who has been playing early builds with the devs and chatting to them extensively about the game. They’re really well produced videos, and they really help to explain the tone of the game, the interesting mechanical ideas behind it, and what exactly this company is trying to achieve. Obviously, take with a grain of salt, the guy is clearly a fan and these videos aren’t really trying to be critical, so this should all be read as basically press releases;

This antishooter game is beautiful and horrifying

The living war ecosystem where you don’t matter

The beautifully dark warscape of the antishooter

I’m really excited for this game. Not just for the visuals, but for everything they’re doing with the mechanical design. The idea of playing as scavengers trapped between two warring factions is incredibly cool, and based on early previews it sounds like there are a lot of very clever design elements, especially in the AI, all built to back up that core idea. For example enemies intelligently prioritize targets; a tank won’t focus on infantry if there’s an enemy tank present, and even when it does target the infantry it’ll use its machine guns, not the main cannon. Enemies will focus on you if you make yourself the biggest threat, but if you’re smart and follow the flow of battle you can keep their focus elsewhere.

That’s really smart stuff, and by all accounts it works very well. I also really like what the studio is doing more broadly. They’re really trying to push back on a lot of the toxic practices in the gaming industry. I’ll be getting the game day one, mostly just to reward them for trying to do something different.

Frankly, I think this is a very good thing. One of the worst things to happen to roleplaying was a generation of GMs thinking they have to be Brennan Lee Mulligan or Matt Mercer.

Stop worrying about how marketable your game is. Stop worrying about how good your writing and your performances are. Roleplaying games are, by their nature, intimate. Every single game is an experience shared between a small group of people. And that’s exactly what makes them so powerful.

I’ve lost track of how many times players have literally cried during my games. I’m talking “Grave of The Fireflies” kind of tears here, not “My GM is an abusive dick” tears. Just the other day one my players told me that I’m the reason they can’t listen to a particular song without crying, because it reminded them of a particular moment in one of my games. And that’s the sort of thing that makes you think “Holy shit, I should be recording/livestreaming this.” But if I did that, none of those moments would have ever happened, because my players aren’t professional actors, and they would have been so self conscious about performing to a crowd that they would never have lost themselves in their characters like that.

Enjoy the intimacy. Enjoy the imperfection. There’s nothing else like it.

The second one is definitely me. I’ve had so many players cry during games that I’ve lost track.

To be clear, always the good “This moment really emotionally resonated with me” kind of tears. I do very narrative heavy games, and I like to really crank the drama to 11.

The reasonable way to approach this problem would have been to ask a follow up question, rather than bitching at someone for not answer in the exact format you required. You’re the beggar here, you get zero fucking say in how much or how little people choose to help you.

Is everything supposed to be black and white? Also, how does one access the purported customisability? I can’t seem to find a settings option anywhere, and the readme.me is just a vague list of selling points.

Edit: NVM, figured it out. For anyone else wondering, long press on the desktop and select “Tweaks” from the menu that pops up.

Yeah, Saber basically bought themselves back from Embracer (Embracer are desperate for money after they absolutely fucked an investment deal), and in the process bought back a bunch of other companies, including New World Interactive (Insurgency devs) and 3D Realms. They also have an outstanding option to buy 4A and Zen Studios.

No microtransactions

Saber off to a good start after getting themselves out of Embracer. I hope this pays off for them. The game looks great and I’m excited to play it.

Yeah, the immediate problem with comparing gun to non-gun kills is that anything involving a gun is automatically more likely to result in someone dead. So it doesn’t really give you a picture of how Indy likes to approach problems. And once a gun does become the tool of choice in a scene, the body count is likely to rack up a lot faster. You can show five people getting gunned down much faster than you can show one Nazi getting his head propellered off. Guns tend to be how disposable mooks die, but signature enemies get the more elaborate deaths.

Super excited to try this out. Darktide has taken over from Vermintide for my normal play, but getting to play as a Skaven sounds fucking awesome.

God I forgot how hard the editing on that video goes

That lack of variety would absolutely suck if you’re not super into the specific gameplay it does offer. SAO would have a very small player base, because you’d never pull in those players who like support or backline roles.

Very different to the games that came after it, and probably the actual inspiration for SAO in the show. The whole thing about players speccing into crafting or whatever and then setting up their own shop was a really big thing on UO servers. Players would literally build entire towns together, and then fill them with shops that they would run. There was a huge part of the player base that were basically civilians, kind of like Arma modern life roleplay servers.

Also, for the record… It’s still running, somehow.

Actually the closest thing in terms of the classless skill system would be pretty much the granddaddy of all MMOs, Ultima Online.

Also, only melee builds. No ranged, no magic, no healers, no support. Everyone is either tank or DPS, that’s it.

New Raycevick video? Fuck yeah!

I love Marathon. I am obsessed with Marathon. Durandal has a goddamn four story mansion, condo and summer home in my head, all rent free.

I have zero interest in this game.

There’s no backend server to do the transcoding in this case. Kodi can access raw NFS/SMB file shares the same as accessing local storage, so it’s just reading the file over the network, the same as if you were playing it in VLC on your PC.

Certain domain names are locally routed only. So if you use internal or local as a tld, you can just assign whatever names you want and your computer won’t go looking out on the internet for them. This means you and I can both have fileserver.local as an address on our respective network without conflicting. It’s the URI equivalent of 192.168.0.0/16.