Egobyte83 最近的評論

Ok, let's dissect this sucker.

- THE PROS -
* An intricate, captivating story where two vanished stellar empires, one ancient but powerful and one newer but recently fallen, keeps your curiosity going in this other universe where mankind is about to take it's first steps with you at the helm

* Multiple various factions to contact and contend with (some good, some bad, obvs) makes the universe feel alive and dynamic

* Exciting tactical space warfare

* MARVELOUS graphical details

* You get to research & develop your own ship (!!!)


- THE CONS -
* The randomly generated planet surveys can get a bit repetitive and you will most likely recognize surveys you have already carried out, even though they are parsed out quite well

* Using the map doesn't pause time in this single player game, so you have to remember that while you are deciding where to go, your ship is a bit of a sitting duck. Moreover, if you have fire-weapons bound to your mousebuttons and decide to use mouse controls, you will be discharging your weapons every time you grab the map and move it around with the mouse. I could have wished that the map screen was entirely separate from the top-down world, but it is what it is. Just make sure you aim your ship away from any friendlies when you grab and move the map around.

- CONCLUSION -
The pros pretty much have it with this one. A few nitpicks doesn't take away the fact that this game is everything that the old arcade gem "Asteroids" could only dream of being. Simple top-down multidirectional navigation pays homage to the old grandfather which started it all, but the massive universe, engaging story and multiple events that play out makes sure that this game keeps you hooked way beyond the limited range of a few quarters.

I bought Rust on sale, thinking I would experience something akin to DayZ meets Minecraft. I didn't get that. As a matter of fact, I didn't get a game at all. I got 90% loading screens and 10% in-game menu.

First, let me be clear; while I may not be sitting on five inter-linked RTX 6000s, I do have more than enough processing power, memory capacity and graphics assets for a game that was made available to the public in 2013. I am able to have every graphics setting on "extreme" or the cinematic quality equivalent in games like DayZ, Sea of Thieves, Apex Legends and The Isle without issues. As you will see, Rust seems to be the odd, special-needs child of the bunch.

The first issue arose when I wanted to connect to a server. "EAC authentication timed out", every time, no matter which server. So I verified the game files and true enough, four files were apparently in need of verification just after initial download. However, this didn't fix the problem. So I googled around and was made aware that I needed to repair Rust from within the EAC utility. So I did that and "repaired" the freshly installed files of the game Rust (which shows up as "Game 12" in the utility for some inexplicable reason), and finally I could actually attempt to log on to a server.

Next problem. The loading time. Dear. God. Grand Theft Auto Online has got nothing on this, what with "Asset warmups" and "warming prefabs" which take between three to six years to complete. Another round of googling told me that apparently these things don't even do anything vital for the game because you are adviced to "skip" them by clicking "cancel" and then "reconnect" in order to skip it...... sort of an in-house workaround for your own pointless problem, eyh, Facepunch?

After finally having had the patience to sit through roughly 20 minutes of watching a counter go down from 8463 to 0 things to do while setting up the game, I was immediately shoved into the Rust experience.

Oh boy, was I going to be griefed on the very first day? Or was I going to be able to have time to get to know the game?? Tee hee.

Turns out, my first Rust experience was low-quality textures and a massive lag spike which got me killed by a wolf as soon as I finally loaded in. As I was in the process of being eaten, I realized that the grass looked like something being puked out on Jabba The Hutt's toilet, so; knowing that my graphics card was beefy enough to support the highest settings of most games, I went to the in-game menu, found the slider for graphics quality and adjusted it accordingly. However, as I did that, the game decided to crash and went on to freeze me in time on a slanted screen with a set of static wolf jaws chomping down on me. When the game decided to respond again, it had booted me back out to the server menu where I was meant to experience the wonderful pain of loading times all over again.

Couple this with the pitiful fact that there is no character customization whatsoever because the lead dev Garry Newman thinks that we as players spend too much time with the creative process and need to have our customization privileges be arbitrarily set back a decade or two (you basically spawn in as a character with randomly generated ethnicity and gender which is PERMANENTLY attached to your Steam account; this one guy, you can never change it) and it was easy to decide that this game was not for me.

As I decided to refund Rust on the count of technical issues, I didn't even get to experience what I had heard was a notorious toxic community, but... maybe I should thank the powers that be for that. This is so far the only steam game I have ever decided to refund and I am not looking back.

Aaaah, DayZ. What can I say about DayZ that hasn't been said yet?

The game was in early release since 2012 and didn't see a proper release until 2019, and it has since seen extensive development, with new features, tweaks and adjustments still rolling out on a regular basis. Of course, there are rough spots here and there, but this particular game is nowhere near the broken conditions of other games that shall remain un-named at this time. And why would it be? With such a long time spent on development, the game's alpha phase has thoroughly been left way back in the rear-view mirror.

The setting is a fairly blank slate. You start out as a survivor on a massive realistic map where you have one goal, to survive. That's it. No story, no objective, no over-arching plot of any kind that keeps you going. The only plot-device in use is the fact that most locations (especially cities and other urban areas) are now homes to infected humans who have all succumbed to some kind of zombie apocalypse (though they are technically not undead, think of it more like the darkseekers in I Am Legend), meaning you are food to them and you have to be quick, smart and careful in order to live through another day. You also have to be mindful of your needs; at all times, you need to stay dry, warm, healthy, satiated and hydrated. You find medicine, food and water all over the map, but it's not readily available; sometimes it can take a long time to find that exact type of medicine or a fresh-water source and it can be a real challenge to just reach your next filling meal. In addition to this, as this is a multiplayer game, other players who are online are freely able to interact with you as well, usually in hostile engagements.

But what really makes DayZ special (or rather, it made it special when it first came out, as I'm sure several other games work like this nowadays), is that it is whatever you make of it. The devs basically gave us the tools and then just sat back, folded their arms and said "here you go, now you go create your own story". And that is what you do, both lorewise as well as conceptually.
If you only want PvP action and feel the need to shoot the very first player you see, you can totally do that as there is an extensive public server lobby to choose from where there are no rules and where more or less everything goes.

But if you are more like me and want something more fullfilling with a little more substance, there is also a vast amount of private roleplaying servers in the communities list; a lot of them with their own discord server, where you can join a population of likeminded individuals who have all agreed to terms of engagement, rules regarding conduct and where focus is placed more heavily on character design, player-created stories, social interaction and group dynamics rather than just mindless, open warfare. In addition to being a survival game, DayZ also focuses on crafting and base-building. This makes for hugely immersive experiences on roleplaying servers where factions protect their bases with a parent's ferocity and trade with some groups while engaging in war with others over any and all concocted reasons; some of them really intricate, amounting to political plots that only dedicated hardcore fans can churn out.

Now, I wanna make this crystal clear. Don't believe any old Youtube video that has titles such as "Why DayZ is dying" or some exotically fragrant cow-manure like that; they are usually posted by embittered ex-fans who haven't been able to adapt to the slow development cycle that BI is putting the game through. Contrary to what they might say, as DayZ was among the very first zombie apocalypse survival games, the fanbase as well as the mod-community have all grown at exponential rates and are extremely well-off these days; allowing anything from dedicated roleplaying servers with immersive modded content to just straight on PvP combat arenas where you pretty much die if and when someone sees you first.

I wanna say that while many people see dying as a negative thing in this game (it is true that it can be a bit of a hassle to have to gear up again from scratch), to me it is almost the most fun part of the game, like "what am I going to find this time, how is my character going to look, what weapons will I appropriate and will they give me an edge over the next guy I meet", that sort of thing.

I personally began my DayZ journey back in 2017 during version 0.62, and though it was a rough cut of what we have today, I still enjoyed it immensely for what it gave me. Some people have complained (mostly on public servers) that you can go hours without seeing another person, and to those people I have a couple of counter-arguments:

* (1) Check the server list and make sure you don't log on to a server with 0/70 players.
* (2) It actually makes it into a heart-pounding event when you finally DO spot another player; first time around for me on a public server, I saw him inside a building and I was so scared to die because I had all this good ♥♥♥♥ on me and I didn't know what to do. As it was a public server, sure enough, soon I ended up on the receiving end of pot shots right before I managed to empty my SG5-mag in the guy's face and I was thrilled.
* (3) Some of us actually enjoy the mellow downtime of just being in the open countryside, trying to figure out what's in a particular direction or scavenging towns without being hassled by tryhards. For me personally, DayZ got to that point where it was almost therapeutic to just log on and doing the nomad-thing, feeling like the only human left alive in the world and going from house to house while having chillaxing music on in the background.

In conclusion, this game is whatever you make of it. Expect the old rough patch here and there on the technical side, but overall, the game is fairly well-polished and brings you the foundation of a massive amount of freedom.

As it is, the good taken with the bad, I do recommend it.
Highly.

It is an interesting concept and I much enjoy the prospect of being on the other side of the fence when it comes to alien invasion. Alas, this game does not have that much substance when all is said and done.

I went into this thinking and hoping for animated sequences when you abduct people or mind control them (animations which, by all means, also should be skippable if that's not your thing), maybe something more along the lines of a fleshed out XCOM experience, but this game is more about statistics than anything else. You get lists of cool things to do, actions to take, but you rarely see anything happen, except for the animated still shots whenever you transition between the decades (going into the next turn). Whatever action you have taken simply adds neatly into the list as resultant statistics and off you go to administer some more.

Speaking of which, when you administer your alien fleet, you are given the ability to do certain missions; abductions, mind controlling important people, murdering threats to our cause, etc. But the first time I did this, I had no idea about whether or not I should keep doing it or if I should do something else. I had no real perception as to what each thing did and what it cost me, and thus I had no idea what I should do in order to make a balanced go of it. The game lacks in explaining the reasons for why we should to things. Except for a brief tutorial that explains the most basic things, there is not really that much to explain to you why you should abduct people rather than murder people, why you should activate agents instead of mind controlling people, etc. The tutorial isn't clear at all.
It wasn't until later that I realised that these missions don't actually do anything other than providing various amount-oriented goals to reach which are criterias for your mothership being upgraded. Which is another thing that didn't really matter; you see the upgraded mothersip in one of the menus, but that's pretty much it; it doesn't help during the invasion or anything.

The stats aren't that helpful either. You are going to see a lot of numbers by symbols, but you have to guess what they mean. And in many places, the devs haven't even bothered to translate, as even when I picked english, agents are marked as "Novo" and the continents are prominently displayed as AmericaNorte and AmericaSul.

Then we have the resource micro-managment; something that took me completely by surprise at how forced onto you it is.

Let me explain. You get two types of resources, minerals and energy. Minerals are used mainly to construct and upgrade ships and components. But you need energy to even do anything at all because energy is consumed whenever you take an action. It is ALL about energy. You can't do anything without at least a minor amount of energy. And this is a major problem. You see, every turn is made up of ten steps, with each step being used up when you perform an action. But every action costs at the very least an X amount of energy, and if you run out of energy at any point during your turn, you basically waste all remaining actions in your turn.
And what's even more annoying is that major events can happen in this game; like in Sid Meier's Beyond Earth, suddenly something major happens and you are supposed to respond to that event. But the response also costs energy, usually a lot. And because you have spent energy on doing pretty much anything at all already in the turn, most of the time when these events appear you are so low on energy that you can't respond to the event at all. You have no choice but to just archive the event and move on, forced to be penalized because you were simply playing the game, before you realize that the game actually ties your hands behind your back right from the start.
Sure, you can mitigate this experience some by starting out with full-on resource collection in mind; wasting the first two turns just building up your energy, but nowhere was this stated in the beginning. The game completely blindsides any beginner with this newbie-trap, forcing you to play it again with the mindset that energy is everything. And the micro-managment of resources just feels like an unnecessary mechanic; you keep being forced to go into the resource tab and manually adding resources to your inventory, wasting steps as you do it. It should have been automated in some fashion.

In addition to all this, the game is also very buggy, with invasions not starting up when you want, some screens not reacting when you click, upgrade windows disappearing when you are pressing "activate" so you can't actually activate the upgrade because the window needs to be there for the full three seconds it takes for you to complete an activation sequence, etc...

I wish I could recommend this game, but I can't. It offers up an interesting concept (not to mention a really interesting and original idea in the intro sequence), but the whole package is somewhat lacking in bells and whistles as well as the gameplay being underwhelming and infuriatingly lacking in comprehension.