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STEAM announcements & updates 2013 II - ITT we buy $1 games and complain about them

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J

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
nexen said:
Yeah, I can see being happy with that but I personally want more from them. I want them to push the genre like they used to. Hell they invented the FPS. I want to see that kind of innovation from them again.

I don't want id to be a one-note nostalgia act that continually releases ever more polished versions of the same thing they've already done.
Click to expand...

I'm not against id sticking with what they do best, because what they do best is sorely lacking in this day and age of Call of Duty-inspired tripe. When it comes to moving the FPS genre forward, we have the likes of Valve... though I can see how that'd be a problem when Half-Life 2 is nearing its 10th birthday and Half-Life 3 is still nowhere in sight!
 
N

nexen

Member
JaseC said:
I'm not against id sticking with what they do best, because what they do best is sorely lacking in this day and age of Call of Duty-inspired tripe. When it comes to moving the FPS genre forward, we have the likes of Valve... though I can see how that'd be a problem when Half-Life 2 is nearing its 10th birthday and Half-Life 3 is still nowhere in sight!
Click to expand...

I can see that, I just want new experiences, that's all.

Valve is raking in so much cash via Steam I think their game development days are numbered. Would love to be proven wrong but it just seems like they devote less and less mental effort to putting new product on the shelves.
 
S

sibarraz

Banned
Could somebody explain me the gameplay of coh? I get that is an RTS but is a bit different of what I had ever played

The beta seems fun, sadly, no offline play, but well, Maybe I will give it a chance
 
D

drizzle

Axel Hertz
sibarraz said:
Could somebody explain me the gameplay of coh? I get that is an RTS but is a bit different of what I had ever played

The beta seems fun, sadly, no offline play, but well, Maybe I will give it a chance
Click to expand...

Company of Heroes is a Base Building, Point Capturing, cover-based, no-hero-unit kind of RTS.

I mean that there's no single unit that is not replaceable on the battlefield: You can always rebuild whatever unit you lose, as long as you have resources to do so.

There's a base building component to it, because which buildings you have defines which units you can pump out of them. The short version of it is that you need a "Weapons Support Center" to build... mounted weapons to help your Infantry units that come out of the "Barracks" building, you need a "Heavy Tank Factory" to build Heavy Tanks, so on and so forth.

The "unique" part of CoH is that you get resources not by mining anything, you get resources by controlling points. There's three (four, really) different types of points. The resource points: Fuel Resource Points (that give you fuel as long as you're in control of them), Ammo Resource Points (ditto, but for Ammo), Blank Resource Points (that in Company of Heroes 1 only gave you +2 manpower per cycle. Now, on CoH2, you can use manpower and build other resource gathering upgrades in them - Ammo or Fuel) and, finally, for "Ticket-based" games, the Control Point.

The more usual way CoH works is on Control Point games, where the amount of control points you have MORE than your enemy dictates how much "tickets" they lose every cycle.

For instance: There's 3 control points on the map. If you have all three, you enemy will lose 3 points every cycle. If you have two and the third is uncontested, the enemy will lose 2 points every cycle. If the enemy captures that uncontested point, and you still have the other 2, he'll lose 1 point every cycle, as 2 (yours) - 1 (his) = 1 (difference). In CoH1 you could play on Annihilation mode, where the end game was to kill the entire enemy army. I never liked Annihilation mode (as people would just fence themselves off and go Artillery).

The other thing associated to Company of Heroes is the cover system: Anything on the environment is a cover point (and it's indicated by the dots around any area on the map when you mouse over it with a squad selected). There's three levels of cover: High Cover (Green dots), Medium Cover (yellow dots) and.. not cover (red dots). High and Medium cover provide you with Damage Modifiers that lowers the amount of damage you take when being shot at in these covers. "Not Cover" (roads, for instance) actually increase the amount of damage you receive when being attacked.

CoH2 adds in the "Blizzard" weather, which makes your soldiers freeze to death if they're not near a heat source (fireplaces that already exist on the map and can be built by your engineers) or inside houses.

Oh yeah, you can garrison buildings as well.

Depending on the army, there's the concept of single unit promotion (your squad will get better with more units they kill). There's also the concept of "building upgrade to make all your soldiers better", both in ranking and in extra abilities.

For instance, in regular CoH, for your American Rifleman to have granades, you have to upgrade the Barracks (using ammunition) to have grenades available to all "Rifleman" squad. That particular squad will level up as they kill enemies, getting better accuracy, better defense rating, so on and so forth.

On the German side, each individual unit doesn't level up by themselves, you need to create a special building and level up that building. Each time you level up a building, all units of the option selected will go to Veteran (there's 3 levels) and get the bonuses described earlier. However, there's still unique abilities that require upgrades, either on a unit-by-unit basis (Flamethrowers for engineers, for instance, need to be upgraded on a unit by unit basis) or a "all-units-get-this" model (Grenades for Rifleman, as explained earlier).

That's a quick pass on all of CoH's mechanics. There's much depth in the game - I didn't even tell you about the Commander Trees and the special abilities they provide, which also unlock throughout the round, like strafing runs or unique units not buildable anywhere else - but i'm not nowhere near good enough to explain everything to you.

Just a side note, there's no actual single player campaign on CoH2 beta, but you can create Skirmish battles of whatever size you want, up to 4x4 with a varied mix of human players and AI players.
 
jediyoshi

jediyoshi

Member
Leviathin25 said:
Do Capcom days ever go sale really? I want to pick up DMC but havent found any good deals yet.
Click to expand...

DMC specifically seems up in the air. Capcom sales can be pretty good though, GMG had a sale for pretty much everything last winter when they started stocking Steam keys
 
R

RibbedHero

Member
drizzle said:
Company of Heroes is a Base Building, Point Capturing, cover-based, no-hero-unit kind of RTS.

I mean that there's no single unit that is not replaceable on the battlefield: You can always rebuild whatever unit you lose, as long as you have resources to do so.

There's a base building component to it, because which buildings you have defines which units you can pump out of them. The short version of it is that you need a "Weapons Support Center" to build... mounted weapons to help your Infantry units that come out of the "Barracks" building, you need a "Heavy Tank Factory" to build Heavy Tanks, so on and so forth.

The "unique" part of CoH is that you get resources not by mining anything, you get resources by controlling points. There's three (four, really) different types of points. The resource points: Fuel Resource Points (that give you fuel as long as you're in control of them), Ammo Resource Points (ditto, but for Ammo), Blank Resource Points (that in Company of Heroes 1 only gave you +2 manpower per cycle. Now, on CoH2, you can use manpower and build other resource gathering upgrades in them - Ammo or Fuel) and, finally, for "Ticket-based" games, the Control Point.

The more usual way CoH works is on Control Point games, where the amount of control points you have MORE than your enemy dictates how much "tickets" they lose every cycle.

For instance: There's 3 control points on the map. If you have all three, you enemy will lose 3 points every cycle. If you have two and the third is uncontested, the enemy will lose 2 points every cycle. If the enemy captures that uncontested point, and you still have the other 2, he'll lose 1 point every cycle, as 2 (yours) - 1 (his) = 1 (difference). In CoH1 you could play on Annihilation mode, where the end game was to kill the entire enemy army. I never liked Annihilation mode (as people would just fence themselves off and go Artillery).

The other thing associated to Company of Heroes is the cover system: Anything on the environment is a cover point (and it's indicated by the dots around any area on the map when you mouse over it with a squad selected). There's three levels of cover: High Cover (Green dots), Medium Cover (yellow dots) and.. not cover (red dots). High and Medium cover provide you with Damage Modifiers that lowers the amount of damage you take when being shot at in these covers. "Not Cover" (roads, for instance) actually increase the amount of damage you receive when being attacked.

CoH2 adds in the "Blizzard" weather, which makes your soldiers freeze to death if they're not near a heat source (fireplaces that already exist on the map and can be built by your engineers) or inside houses.

Oh yeah, you can garrison buildings as well.

Depending on the army, there's the concept of single unit promotion (your squad will get better with more units they kill). There's also the concept of "building upgrade to make all your soldiers better", both in ranking and in extra abilities.

For instance, in regular CoH, for your American Rifleman to have granades, you have to upgrade the Barracks (using ammunition) to have grenades available to all "Rifleman" squad. That particular squad will level up as they kill enemies, getting better accuracy, better defense rating, so on and so forth.

On the German side, each individual unit doesn't level up by themselves, you need to create a special building and level up that building. Each time you level up a building, all units of the option selected will go to Veteran (there's 3 levels) and get the bonuses described earlier. However, there's still unique abilities that require upgrades, either on a unit-by-unit basis (Flamethrowers for engineers, for instance, need to be upgraded on a unit by unit basis) or a "all-units-get-this" model (Grenades for Rifleman, as explained earlier).

That's a quick pass on all of CoH's mechanics. There's much depth in the game - I didn't even tell you about the Commander Trees and the special abilities they provide, which also unlock throughout the round, like strafing runs or unique units not buildable anywhere else - but i'm not nowhere near good enough to explain everything to you.

Just a side note, there's no actual single player campaign on CoH2 beta, but you can create Skirmish battles of whatever size you want, up to 4x4 with a varied mix of human players and AI players.
Click to expand...

That's a fantastic write-up. I played CoH back when it first came out in 2006, but I haven't played it in a long time. Playing the new Steam version and CoH2 I realised how bad I've become (or have always been). Really need to practice, though I've never been very good with RTSs, especially with the micromanagement one needs to do in CoH.
 
X

xJavonta

Banned
Deques said:
Grief got banned? What offensive image did he post/use? (Note: don't post it if you dont want to get yourself banned too)
Click to expand...

An image that wasn't particularly offensive, just pretty juvenile.

Also bought Don't Starve yesterday night. Pretty fun, glad I got it while it was on sale. I suck though lol

Edit: Hell Yeah! is on sale? FINALLY AT A PRICE I CAN AFFORD
 
D

drizzle

Axel Hertz
I fucking died AGAIN in Don't Starve.

I really know the game is meant to be a "roguelike" game (for lack of a better term), in which you die and you DIE and everything you collected throughout the game is gone, including the world itself...

I really love the game, but I really hate the fact that there's no alternative to that. I really wish there was some sort of revive (not talking about the revive stones or the Meat Effigy, I mean an actual reload). Hell, I don't care, make a save point on each weather change. Roll me back 15 days of winter, but at least give me SOMETHING.

Starting from scratch EVERY SINGLE TIME is so frustrating. I died again yesterday after finally having enough food to manage winter, a good knowledge of the map, I even managed to capture a Summer Elephant on a small rock cage I made... and all is gone because I got attacked by dogs and had to go out look for food in a quick succession - everything else that went fine so far is gone forever.

Now, I might as well not play until the next update rolls next week. So frustrating, but so good at the same time... :D
 
C

cpp_is_king

Member
Nabs said:
logitech f710 or the wired version. You should probably try the PS3 controller again before buying anything.
Click to expand...

Are you saying it's supposed to "just work" straight out of the box with no 3rd party software? I was under the impression there was no official driver for the controller that worked with Win7.

Fonz72 said:
Have you tried MotioninJoy? I use it with Windows 7 64 and it works great.
Click to expand...

Don't want to derail the thread, but I fucking HATE that thing. For one thing, it doesn't work right and I could never get all the buttons to work. Secondly, if you try to uninstall it it can sometimes corrupt your registry settings and lead to unstable USB functionality in general and just general system instability. And finally it has all these shitty ads. Anyway, there was a whole thread about it a while back:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=510044
 
X

xJavonta

Banned
cpp_is_king said:
Are you saying it's supposed to "just work" straight out of the box with no 3rd party software? I was under the impression there was no official driver for the controller that worked with Win7.



Don't want to derail the thread, but I fucking HATE that thing. For one thing, it doesn't work right and I could never get all the buttons to work. Secondly, if you try to uninstall it it can sometimes corrupt your registry settings and lead to unstable USB functionality in general and just general system instability. And finally it has all these shitty ads. Anyway, there was a whole thread about it a while back:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=510044
Click to expand...

THIS. Fuck that piece of shit software. I eventually caved and bought a wireless controller adapter for my 360 controller. For you DS3 fans, you're pretty much shit out of luck. Either deal with shit driver software or buy the Logitech controller that looks similar to the DS3.
 
K

Killthee

helped a brotha out on multiple separate occasions!
drizzle said:
I fucking died AGAIN in Don't Starve.

I really know the game is meant to be a "roguelike" game (for lack of a better term), in which you die and you DIE and everything you collected throughout the game is gone, including the world itself...

I really love the game, but I really hate the fact that there's no alternative to that. I really wish there was some sort of revive (not talking about the revive stones or the Meat Effigy, I mean an actual reload). Hell, I don't care, make a save point on each weather change. Roll me back 15 days of winter, but at least give me SOMETHING.

Starting from scratch EVERY SINGLE TIME is so frustrating. I died again yesterday after finally having enough food to manage winter, a good knowledge of the map, I even managed to capture a Summer Elephant on a small rock cage I made... and all is gone because I got attacked by dogs and had to go out look for food in a quick succession - everything else that went fine so far is gone forever.

Now, I might as well not play until the next update rolls next week. So frustrating, but so good at the same time... :D
Click to expand...

If you're really having trouble with it you can always cheat by either backing up your save file or using a mod like Camp Res.
 
S

Snuggles

erotic butter maelstrom
I made a little thread for Don't Starve so I'll probably post that in a minute. Until now we've mostly just used this one.
 
E

Enco

Member
xJavonta said:
THIS. Fuck that piece of shit software. I eventually caved and bought a wireless controller adapter for my 360 controller. For you DS3 fans, you're pretty much shit out of luck. Either deal with shit driver software or buy the Logitech controller that looks similar to the DS3.
Click to expand...
Agreed.

At first it was great but I started getting BSODs and I realised it was down to MotionJoy. Piece of crap. Always looked like garbage too.
 
M

morningbus

Serious Sam is a wicked gahbidge series for chowdaheads.
Durante was talking about a new solution that biases motionjoy the other day. I'll see if I can find his links.

Edit: give this a shot : http://betterds3.ciebiera.net/

From my basic understanding, it uses the same custom motionjoy driver, but entirely replaces the frontend that requires you to be online.
 
G

Glass Rebel

Member
Got quite late today because I had a football (soccer for plebs) game and here I come to Shovel Knight and Frozen Endzone being greenlit. I probably missed the discussion but that's a lot of games, much more than before.
 
K

kafiend

Member
morningbus said:
Durante was talking about a new solution that biases motionjoy the other day. I'll see if I can find his links.

Edit: give this a shot : http://betterds3.ciebiera.net/

From my basic understanding, it uses the same custom motionjoy driver, but entirely replaces the frontend that requires you to be online.
Click to expand...

I'm not defending motionjoy - in fact I hate it with a vengeance and only use it because it works now and I'm too worried about uninstalling it.
However, there's a local button near the top next to Home that turns off all them ads.

I have suffered from a poor uninstall of motionjoy and it truly does fuck things up.
That and I've never seen a tutorial that a) works as stated. b) makes sense.
 
S

SteveWinwood

Member
Why do I have a duke nukem 3d coupon in my inventory?

Is this their apology for DNF? I'll need more than that for playing it.

And Dungeon Hearts (which is only a 25% off vs DN3D's 50% off). Both are published by Devolver Digital so that must be it. Must be sent out to people with Serious Sam or Hotline Miami since those are their only real games of note.

Dungeon Hearts only came out like 2 weeks ago. Must be selling poorly I guess. Wouldn't have thought it would have been that big of a sell at $2.99.
 
Wok

Wok

Member
Wok said:
Speaking of Dustforce, here are the sales figures.
Click to expand...

SteveWinwood said:
It might look like people are ignoring you, but in reality it's because we just talked about that yesterday :p
Click to expand...

Oh... okay. I missed that. Sorry.

YianGaruga said:
Anyone interested in sales data?
Here's a great write-up by Hitbox Team on the sales for Dustforce, including the first Steam sale and the Humble Bundle:

http://hitboxteam.com/dustforce-sales-figures
Click to expand...

I am usually not late catching a piece of info, thanks to Twitter, but in this case, I am.
 
S

SteveWinwood

Member
Wok said:
I insist a bit, because I like the graph they have used.

EhfbpVA.png
Click to expand...

It might look like people are ignoring you, but in reality it's because we just talked about that yesterday :p
 
1

1-D_FTW

Member
cpp_is_king said:
Are you saying it's supposed to "just work" straight out of the box with no 3rd party software? I was under the impression there was no official driver for the controller that worked with Win7.



Don't want to derail the thread, but I fucking HATE that thing. For one thing, it doesn't work right and I could never get all the buttons to work. Secondly, if you try to uninstall it it can sometimes corrupt your registry settings and lead to unstable USB functionality in general and just general system instability. And finally it has all these shitty ads. Anyway, there was a whole thread about it a while back:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=510044
Click to expand...

Pretty sure it just gets picked up as a 360 controller. Other benefits include clicky buttons. There's also a button on the bottom that can turn it into a legacy controller. So for older games (say a Prince of Persia), which were pre-360 standards, the controller works. Which is something a stock 360 pad wouldn't do.

Wok said:
I missed that. Sorry. Is it in this post?
Click to expand...

It's actually kind of what I was talking about (that you quoted). But it was the tail end of the conversation. And, well, we do like to ramble off-topic a bit. So it's easy for things to get lost in it all.
 
S

Salsa

Member
made a thread for Monaco.

Remember that if you buy it on the official site you get a Steam key + a DRM free copy of the prototype + part of the OST, for the same price.
 
M

Megasoum

Banned
So is it me or was Vampire: The masquerade bloodline on sale recently? Like a couple of weeks ago? I can't find the link for the sale history website right now (it's not in the OT afaik) and I have a feeling I just missed it.
 
C

cpp_is_king

Member
RionaaM said:
I still can't believe I skipped that bundle.
Click to expand...

I still don't even know what the Groupee's bundle that everyone keeps talking about is, but I got La Mulana a few weeks ago when it was like $4.99 on pre-order. Still though, having played it for about 6-7 hours now, I would say it's worth the full $15 price tag.
 
M

MrTeachwell

Member
cpp_is_king said:
I still don't even know what the Groupee's bundle that everyone keeps talking about is, but I got La Mulana a few weeks ago when it was like $4.99 on pre-order. Still though, having played it for about 6-7 hours now, I would say it's worth the full $15 price tag.
Click to expand...

Totally, if I had more expendable income and a friend who appreciated good games I'd be delighted to gift it to them for the $15 because it's definitely worth it.

Groupees is a bundle group that hold a selection of indie, alpha, and music bundles.
 
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