#bats replies

[a-shrieking-cloud-of-bats]

Treats.

[a-shrieking-cloud-of-bats]

Hi! Saw your tags on the Oblivion post you reblogged from me and just wanted to ask you about your opinions regarding the elder scrolls games graphics in general, I find a lot of folks have very varying takes and it's really interesting to hear about them.

Personally I've found Oblivion really refreshing on the eyes after so much time with the muted tones of unmodded Skyrim, but I definitely understand that the lower resolution and clunkiness can be a huge turn off :o

Okay, so it's time for some clarification my part! What I don't like about Oblivion's graphics is the player models, mostly the heads. It's entirely possible I'm exaggerating but it feels like the skin textures are just flat, the heads are all basically just an oval shape or an oval shape With Cheekbones.

I don't really feel badly about much else in the graphics. The bloom is a little out of control, and I do think it's a Little bright (much like skyrim was a Little muted) but other then that I think it's perfectly serviceable. I'm not like super fond of it or anything, but it works.

In general I think the TES games have struggled with graphics and they're always a little wonky (with the exception of morrowind, and I'm not saying that as a morrowind fanboy, though I did like it quite a bit, and much more then I expected to), but the player models in oblivion, mostly the heads, just bother the hell out of me. I've called them "misshapen lumps of clay" in the past and I stand by that.

Oblivion was also my first TES and back when I was in school I had much more time and energy to muscle through things I wasn't entirely onboard with, and while, at the time, I felt oblivion was a little silly, as I've looked back on it I think a lot of the quest writing is very charming and fun, especially coming from DraugrFest 2011: Skyrim.

Not that I didn't enjoy killing those draugrs, I think the skyrim combat system is about as good as it's gotten.

it's a pity it's also got the worst skill and stat system if you ask me.

[a-shrieking-cloud-of-bats]

This might be a weird ask but have you every checked out Where The Water Tastes Like Wine? I can't explain it but something about it's style tells me it would be right down your alley

I haven't! I vaguely recall hearing about it at some point, I'll have to look into it.

[a-shrieking-cloud-of-bats]

This button says to ask you about video games, so have you played any of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk? Its OST is giving me brainworms and I love it

it is Always* okay to talk to me about video games, absolutely, hohoho I've only just started hearing about it and ultimately I don't know if it's my thing Exactly, but the OST is definitely fantastic! Hideki Naganuma is consistently very good (even if he does, like, one thing, he does it very well) and I've actually been listening to GET ENUF for most of the past couple of days! I'll probably look into the rest of the OST at some point.

It's one of those things where I want to buy the OST (preferably not from amazon or a streaming service) but I'm unsure if I want to buy the game because as I said before I'm just not quite sure if I'm into it. For some reason the various jet set radio-likes (I'm assuming bomb rush cyberfunk is in that vein of game, it seems to be from my cursory examinations) have just never clicked with me mechanically, and I've never really gotten the urge to actually check them out.

[a-shrieking-cloud-of-bats]

dont forget they also feed some alive people to the bus too!

it is true

honestly my favorite bit about limbus so far is that you are inevitably killing off all the people trying to attack the bus because life sucks in PM verse and they need all the help they can get including whatever is in this super nice bus here and then whoop them so hard they turn into little piles of meat with hats/swords/whatever on them

like I know lorewise some of them are Technically Conscious but a lot of times that coat is covering a pretty small pile of meat

[a-shrieking-cloud-of-bats]

What kind of audience do you think you'd recommend dwarf fortress to? It definetly looks very different from anything else I played

Hmm. that's a very good question anon and I'm going to break it down.

People that like making their own fun. At the end of the day, dwarf fortress is a game that's only as meaningful as you make it, due to the random generation. If you take everything literally it's just pseudo guided actions performed by randomly generated dwarves. What is a tragic tale of a soldier going on a rampage in the fort after a siege because his cat died in the fighting is very easily reduced to simple numbers, because the underlying systems are not very complex and they do not try very hard to hide themselves. Similarly after you've gotten over the initial hump, if the narrative stuff isn't quite selling you, you have to be willing to challenge yourself. I'm currently attempting to build a boat, in the ocean, and making a nice looking port town with it. None of this holds bearing on the world or how it interacts in any major way (I don't think, anyway, it's been a while), but it's a fun project and if I end up keeping the world it will continue to exist long after I'm finished playing it. I can go there in adventure mode, and dwarves from that fort that live can show up in other forts. That's pretty satisfying, if you ask me. Probably the most important part.

On to the actual game. It's mostly a logistics game, as you're attempting to wrangle a big group of mostly autonomous dwarves into doing things that will make the fort better and bigger and more like what you want it to be. The semi autonomous part is a big part of what seperates it from say, factorio, you are not exactly working with precision tools here. About the only thing you can guarantee is that you can build what and where you want to build, and the military control is pretty direct (but not setting up the military! Oh God No). Dwarves will take personal time, dwarves will sleep, dwarves will eat, dwarves will throw parties, dwarves will make artifacts (randomly generated, so there's that first point again! is that artifact sword with broccoli on it fun or dumb? that sort've random gen thing will be happening a lot.), dwarves will generally dick around a lot without any explicit order to do so. Sometimes for a startling amount of time. But that's kind've part of the fun too, even if it's sort've frustrating sometimes.

Combat and adventure mode. I mean.... it's not nothing? I've found the military more frustrating then anything and winning direct fights is usually pretty hard. But setting up an airtight fort with loads of traps and misdirection is fun too, to the right person, I'm sure. The adventure mode combat system is sort've neat and has an impressive amount of depth but you have to grind forever to get anywhere with it and it's extremely long winded, even as deep as it can get. There's an entire thread on the DF forums (or was, it's ben a while) about dwarf martial arts and how catching incoming attacks can be used to perform various complex actions. Any game where that's possible is pretty neat! It's still very long winded and nothing is easy as a result, though. I can't really speak on this much.

That's about it.

If you want to get started yourself, look for the lazy newb pack (it's a staple, don't feel bad for using it, mostly everyone does) and a video tutorial, I dunno a modern one but people used to be reccomending krugsmash I think it was? Maybe still good? Dunno. Also the wiki, which is an exhaustive source of information, but worry about that after you're done with the GUI. The dwarf fortress GUI is absolutely jam packed with information and learning how to navigate it is task number one. It's also the thing most people get stuck on, though I think it's probably a bit less of a difficulty wall now that easier alternatives are out (rimworld, gnomoria, I guess? it never really took off honestly) and some of the concepts have been used in a different place. Though dwarf fortress is still hard to start even considering that. Thankfully it's also the easiest thing to learn through a series of youtube videos.

You're never really Done learning the nuances of the UI but once you know how to make your dwarves do things, and how dwarves do things, you're through most of the meta difficulty that you don't impose on yourself.

I hope that helped! I kind've went on a bit.

[a-shrieking-cloud-of-bats]

finished the first chapter and limbus company pretty good

some issues I’m noticing

- I don’t seem to have anything to spend stamina on? there aren’t really any currencies in the game that you get by farming so I’m left wondering why the stamina system is even there; this might be something that ends up making more sense with events/future content and they just didn’t want to make it super taxing to play the main story which is fair and I encourage that

- as usual the UI is a screaming mess and I’m Still parsing a lot of it; there’s a post on the subreddit if you’re having issues that goes through it

good shit

- the visuals are exactly what I expected and I am already waiting for fucked up fan art of the apple guy

- the enkephalin capsules or whatever are super interesting and I Really Really hope they turn those into a quick way to dump stamina into something that you can spend on like, I dunno, exp tickets or something, I would love for this game to recognize that I don’t have fifteen hours a day to fucking play it holy shit get the memo gacha games

[a-shrieking-cloud-of-bats]

might be a hard question but which version do you think is the easiest to get into dwarf fortress?

if you've never played I will always recommend the newest version; the majority of new features are not that hard to understand compared to the brick wall that the UI was, and more importantly most new stuff is not nearly as urgent to understand as basics like setting up farms, understanding how levers and the things they're attached to work, understanding fluid physics, and digging out a fortress; you're pretty much always going to be dealing with the "hard part" of DF because the entire game is layered on top of it, unless you're going all the way back to the 2D versions or something, and that's almost an entirely different game at that point

it's also worth noting that the new free version (that will be releasing in a few days I believe? watch the bay 12 news feed to be sure you're getting the New Version if you're not in the market for buying DF, it may be a few days yet, check the news post dates) will have all the UI improvements from the steam release, though it'll still be running through a very chunky terminal based GUI which might be hard on the eyes