Topic is very simple: There are many western games coming nowadays that are plain unfun, boring, or shoved with ugly people and certain politics. TLOU 2receiving GOTY was a joke. Is there a game, if any, coming from the west, that you are kinda hopeful about?
Some of the western games I enjoyed playing this year were Deep Rock, Synthetik, Desperados 3, Children of Morta, Satisfactory and Hitman 2, though they are hardly recent. I’m kinda hopeful about Hitman 3 but I heavily dislike the “always online” game model.
What about you guys, though?
Also, to mods, add a gaming/ geek culture tag or whatever. Options here are limited as it is.
Maybe Cyberpunk, but I don't have my hopes up. CK3 was exactly what I wanted and expected, a base grand strategy game.
My Iberian Caliph just got austere scholar'd two years into his reign, but he had it coming. His dad was a tyrannical asshole, and the first thing he did was get his face smashed in by Pope when he tried to take Latium as a grand show of force. It was a good thing he got peacefully protested when he did because there was a lot of rebellion brewing.
Been pretty happy with CK3 myself.
The little QoL things are nice like not having to bring my troops home before disbanding. CK2 had become too patchwork, and I'm excited to see how they redevelop the world. The religion system feels like a better base.
The Prince of Darkness mod is a Vampire the Masquerade overhaul that is interesting, if a little clunky.
I've deliberately fallen a year or so behind the curve, so I'm never really looking forward to anything. I buy games 12+ months after release for 50%+ off. Saving the money is great, but it also helps to have a clearer picture of the quality and value of games outside of their release-window hype.
This all works because I don't play any online multiplayer stuff, so I never have to worry about lagging behind "the community". I can't imagine ever going back to paying full price for games on or near release day. The only exception to this would be elden ring, but we all know that's never coming out.
Evil Genius 2, I've got some respect for Rebellion after they handled the Battlezone remasters in a good way and this is a full fledged sequel and not a mobile spin off like the last 2 titles.
Startopia remake, made by Dungeons 3 guys. They've always been solid and I want to see what they'll do with this.
Nier Replicant remake looks interesting. Cavia had a bad habit of hating their player, maybe a remake can make the combat flow a bit more like Automata. Wish I could play as Papa Nier and not Onii-chan Nier though.
EDF 6, continuation off from 5. repelled the aliens but the world has been destroyed and it's just you and your squad in a ruined sandbox map with aliens that are left over. We'll see.
SaGa Frontier Remastered, that got announced recently and apparently the original was unfinished when it was launched. According to a friend of mine they've already fixed up one of the quests that was broken in the original from the trailer, so I'm curious about how it plays.
And Last Sovereign, when that finally gets finished.
Also obligatory mention of ME Legendary edition but considering how Bioware and EA have treated the series, I'll just reinstall the originals again with mods. I just wanna see what they've changed and what they've stolen from the modders.
Evil Genius was a game begging for development. I'll have to keep my eye on this incarnation. I hope it supports satanic pedophile cannibals.
Hillary as a playable char ?
Just multi level base building is why I'm in, in the original game I quickly ran out of space when I had to dedicate a 3rd of my second base to disguised turret defenses. If you want to replay it for any reason, I'd recommend the GOG copy and grabbing the improvement mod from nexus, increases minion cap to 200, gives a little more money for missions so no real grinding, removes duplicate missions and has modern aspect ratios. It's perfect.
Who could be better at being cartoonishly evil than women? They can fulfill all their genocidal fantasies or something.
Half Life 3. Because if anything, the second HL3 comes out, clownworld will flip upside down and all of this shit will go back to normal.
when Alyx came out the COVID shit started, so tbqh I think releasing Half-Life games just makes everything worse somehow
that math teacher video was good
https://a.pomf.cat/qtumve.png The Sixth World could come up tomorrow and it still wouldn't bring Valve to release HL3. (From Caldecott)
Honestly? Exactly one - the Fable reboot.
But my expectations are very, very low. And Russell Shaw had better be doing the soundtrack.
Baldur’s Gate 3 full release, kind of. I tried a little of the early access version and it was pretty good.
Doom Eternal’s next DLC
Stalker 2, the System Shock remake/ System Shock 3 if they don’t fuck them up.
Scorn
Cyberpunk , but I just already know is gonna be disappointing.
I’m tentatively hopeful for Bethesda’s future games after Msoft buying them, hopefully they’ll see how smooth-brained they’ve made Fallout and the ES and turn things around but I doubt it.
There are some big things in Mods that I’m looking forward to, fallout : The Frontier, some big Mount and Blade 2 mods, so that’ll be cool.
I’m sure there’s a lot of good stuff I’m missing but that’s about it right now.
Does Baldur's Gate 3 seem woke and If so how much and is it forced?
Is the story good? I found DOS2 to be lacking in the story department despite all the praise it got and I have a higher standard for a BG game.
I've tried to pirate it but it keeps crashing.
I haven’t noticed anything explicitly woke so far, but there are some potential concerns. You can fuck pretty much anyone regardless of gender there’s a party member from a polygamous culture and she will fuck other dudes even if you romance her.
Tieflings are kind of treated like “oppressed fantasy race that could be a stand-in for refugees or black people or indians” but I haven’t seen anything too egregious yet.
There are a lot of black characters, I don’t know much about the setting so Idk if that’s accurate or not. I thought character creation was pretty shitty, all the faces suck, if you’re creating a human male like most of the population than your choices for a face are pretty much limited to black guy, Arab, or cucky white guy.
The story and characters seem pretty good, the events that set off the plot are interesting and I definitely want to keep playing to see what happens.
I'm a bit surprised by lots of black characters. Where in Faerun is BG3 taking place? If it is in BG then having a bit of diversity makes sense as BG is a port town, although the location would make it very hard to get there from Chult having a few traders or maybe a business office set up would make it realistic. Faerun is not the regular modern day diversity melting pot that globalists are thriving for. In fact DnD forums had a problem with the fact that DnD campaigns, books and games are Medieval Europe focused and as everyone knows white men are bad.
I don’t know if it really says where you are, without going in to too many spoilers you start out washed up on a beach on some Island. I haven’t played much BG aside from 1 and 2 years ago so I can’t really speak for demographics, but I definitely don’t get the feeling that you’re supposed to be in some kind of especially exotic area, which is why all of the non-white characters stood out to me. But then again I also raised an eyebrow at the fact that the default male and female human character models are both black so I don’t know if they’re really pushing something or I’m reading too much into things.
I've finally managed to get the pirated version to work.
My conclusion: The action is close to BG so the demographic makes little sense. I assume they just glossed over the fact that black people are from Chult and arab looking tend to be around Thay. Faerun regions are inspired from Earth regions, so they tend to have similar racial + culture mix. For globalist however they came to the conclusion that white focused regions in games must be described as diverse in order to not be racist. As for the Thieflings, they are meant to represent the immigrants that came in to Europe. They use the same tactics of using children to manipulate emotions and how persecuted and good they are etc. The good thiefling archetype is so used, always the same, good innocent but prejudice because they look like devils, it stop being interesting a decade ago.
But is not that bad, I am enjoying it so far despite this things but I would like for once to stop having everything European culture related black washed. Both BG1 and BG2 had black characters but they had a nice story about how they got there. In BG3 they just assume modern day diversity.
For the first time in years none really. There's a few games I will play when they come out like Dying Light 2 & Cyber Punk, but I'm not that excited by video games anymore. I quite frankly think I'm growing out of video games, and I don't mind.
Cripes, I haven't even gotten around to getting Obduction yet.
Which reminds me, I wonder if Uru Online is still around? I think I still have that bugger installed.
I picked up the game Book of Demons last year, and loved it enough that I am genuinely excited for their next game.
I'm also looking forward to the next game from the guys behind Everlasting Summer, if Russia counts as "Western". Though its been pushed back for over two years now.
I would say Project Wingman, but that's actually out now.
If a secret santa could gift me a VR headset and the HOTAS Warthog stick I'd be soo happy.
Cyberpunk is the only western game I've been waiting for this year, and after all of CDPR's lies about release dates, my expectations for that are, at this point, pretty much non-existant.
For me, it's basically been eclipsed by Hades, which wasn't on my radar at all until it was already released, and totally blindsided me with how great it plays.
As for next year and beyond, I'm waiting for Gloomwood and the full release of Baldur's Gate 3.
I understand that, but I've always preferred the classic Id software release date: "When it's done".
Sort of, but Id typically didn't waste anyone's time or get anyone's hopes up with false promises. "When it's done" was, for the longest time, their official release 'date' for the majority of their development cycle.
As Throwaway531 mentioned, I'm keeping an eye on Evil Genius 2, as I liked the first one. And trying to stay hopeful for 2077 as a couple people have said.
Does waiting for Bannerlord's full release count? Cause that's on my list too.
Outside of that, whenever it comes Total War Warhammer 3. CA's had some suspect moves recently and they've been riding a semi-Paradox monetization scheme for a while now, but still want the Warhammer world to finish up. And I want my evil dudes with funny hats implemented already, darn it!
If the next Stalker game counts as a western game, then that. Otherwise absolutely none.
I am going to get Born Punk if I can get it without paying Valve or CDPR
none, because my poor potato can't handle things like she used to.
I'm hoping the next Metro game is a return to form, though with the talk from the studio about multiplayer I'm not holding out that much hope. That said the first two games are still excellent and sorely underrated.
Might see if S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is worth anything.
Speaking purely from Vanilla and not Redux experience, the second Metro was so bad I couldn't even pretend to care about the third. The being Epic fiasco certainly did not help.
If bugs were your issue then they are all cleared up in the redux. And in fairness to the devs it was entirely people above them forcing unrealistic expectations which made it bad. Like it got to the point where they had to smuggle equipment into their country to get the job done.
It was not bugs but the entire genre and thematic shift. It went from slow, anxiety inducing horror FPS to fast-paced action FPS with scary elements. I finally realized why it felt off when Khan, a calm spiritual man in the first game, was screaming at me like a madman in the second. Same with generic "baby makes the world less awful" plot often seen in apocalypse games, though this one was at least a monster baby.
These are all intentional changes that I cannot imagine they had zero control over, though it is unfortunate to hear how much struggle they had to go through. Its not like its an incompetently bad game, just a massive step down from the first.
And while I'm told Redux is a much better game, expecting people to buy bug fixes (at the time both were on the store and you only got a small discount for owning the original) is quite greedy. Metro 2033 was old enough to be somewhat valid as an updated version, but Last Light was barely collecting dust when they wanted me to buy it again.
Well, the redux version also includes a more 2033-esque "survivor" mode which makes ammunition scarcer and enemies tougher.
Mind you the redux versions go down to like $3 every steam sale so might be worth a try.
Is Exodus bad? I played and enjoyed the first two but haven't taken the plunge on the third.
So it's not bad, but it's not a great metro game IMO. Rather than being an atmospheric game set in the metro and the well thought out world therein, it becomes another open world survival crafting game in some field somewhere.
Yeah. it's not bad, but it's not a Metro game essentially. I played it and finished it but I wasn't exactly blown away by it like I was the first.
The next wave of Star Wars: Armada. The Republic will be getting the Venator class.
Well, on my Steam wishlist, I've got one called "Biomutant", and another based on the tabletop RPG "Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory" (ironically enough.)
I heard of a Werewolf: the Apocalypse game coming out, I think. Well, I liked first and second edition, anyway. They never should have added the "no eating humans" to second ed; in fact, if anything, that's where the slide towards more "political correctness" started. :P
Then there's Starfield, of course, because I like bethesda games, and I like modding. I really should figure out how to learn Blender so I can make my own player character replacements.
I don't have a console. I might get one, but I don't expect to be able to until Feb or March at the earliest. :P
Cyberpunk looks too much like all the shit-asses I dumped behind me in my past.
Stalker 2 if that counts and whatever comes next for Half Life.
Even if stalker turns out not great, the original games weren't amazing either. I just like the setting a lot. And Alyx shows me Valve has that spark for the series again, so I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with it, VR or otherwise.
None, still playing stuff from 2013 and earlier...
Kinda hyped for the new Metal of Honor. Respawn hasn't let me down yet, so hopefully this isn't the one to buck the trend
Vampire Bloodlines 2