STOP RIGHT THERE. Answer these questions before proceeding.
1) When someone mentions Fallout: New Vegas, do you respond by complaining about the bugs?
2) Do you think Crysis and Metro 2033 have bad art and animation?
3) Were you baffled by S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and unable to figure out what you were supposed to do?
4) Is Uncharted 2 your favorite video game of all time?
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, LEAVE THIS THREAD IMMEDIATELY. If not, proceed:
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Let's get to the point: what are these games and why should I care?
White Gold and The Precursors are open world FPS-RPGs. White Gold is sort of one part STALKER (quest structure, loot), one part Deus Ex (character advancement), and one part Just Cause 2 (open world), in a setting reminiscent of Far Cry. The Precursors is in the same basic vein, but in a sci-fi setting with interplanetary travel (!), letting you hop on a space ship and fly to different exotic worlds, and even have space ship battles along the way.
Yeah, but even those hundred million dollar open world games like RDR end up being shallow, unfulfilling experiences after the initial sense of awe wears off. How does this obscure Ukrainian dev team manage to succeed where "AAA" fails?
By being unapologetically ambitious and having no quality assurance to speak of whatsoever. From patch notes:
Yes, prior to being patched, grenades were exploding after NPCs died from the grenade's explosion-as-yet-to-occur. Expect jank. Expect an amateurish localization. Gamers who can't be assed to deal with bugs or scripting errors or potential troubleshooting need not apply.
I buy all my "AAA" games for five bucks on Steam these days. How much do these obscure, eccentric, esoteric, janky Ukrainian games cost?
$30 each at GamersGate.
Xenus 2: White Gold
The Precursors
Don't hit the back button just yet. These games are large, and offer unique, worthwhile open world experiences. Did you buy $60 CODBLOPS just because you felt like you were supposed to get the biggest game of the year? You should feel obligated to offset that travesty here and now, then.
What's the sort of experience I'll actually have with these games?
I loaded up White Gold for the first time, and after the introductory sequence I found myself at a small seaside village. I started talking to some of the fisherman NPCs, and eventually received a quest to retrieve some sunken cargo from the bottom of the ocean nearby. I jumped into the water and started swimming. Once I got to the location, I made the dive, and when I reached the sea floor I noticed I had less than half of my oxygen limit remaining. Uh-oh. So I quickly loaded up the character advancement screen and selected faster swimming as my first perk, then picked up the cargo and swam back to the surface. Only minor bodily harm from beginning to drown.
Afterwards, elsewhere in the village I was given a quest from an old man to retrieve a vase some bandits stole from him. I traveled to their location at a mountaintop by a cliff, and the conversation about returning the vase didn't go too well, so we had to fight it out. I barely survived, since they had SMGs and shotguns and AKs and I only had a revolver and a grenade, but I was finally able to take them out with hit and run tactics. When I killed the last bandit my quest updated telling me that the quest vase fell off the cliff into the water below (several hundred feet down). I started the game with a parachute in my inventory, so, what the hell, I tried basejumping off the cliff. My parachute deployed, and I made circular movements until I got to the water. Then I dived to the sea floor, retrieved the vase, and the quest updated again: hostile paramilitary forces had spotted me, and they had a boat approaching nearby waiting for me to surface above. Fortunately for me I had the swimming perk from the first little adventure, so I stayed underwater and swam away to safety.
After climbing back onto land I was a full kilometer away from the old man in the village, so I started making my way back on foot. I found a paved road and started walking along it, and soon heard explosions and saw a government attack helicopter shooting missiles into the distance as it flew past me. As I walked further along the road I saw the exploded wreckage of a vehicle. And then another one. Both presumably destroyed by the helicopter with the off-screen explosions I heard.
I saw a hut in the distance. A literary man sat alone reciting Shakespeare, and his tropical hut was filled with bookshelves. He sent me on a sidequest to an entirely different island elsewhere on my world map.
That's about a twenty minute excerpt from my time with White Gold. Still scoffing at thirty bucks?
I downloaded White Gold from GamersGate and this shit doesn't work. What do I do?
If White Gold crashes on startup (this may end up being patched, but as of this writing the following may be necessary for the game to work): you may need to download a fixed .exe designed for the 1.0 Russian version of the game and replace your game's .exe with it for the game to no longer crash. WARNING: fixed .exes may be against the law in your country of residence, and may be hosted on unsavory websites that contain viruses, so look into this course of action at your own risk. This information is intended for legitimate purchasers only, who currently appear unable to play the game at all otherwise.
If White Gold's graphics are flickering: download and extract this archive -- http://www.mediafire.com/?adjz44z1zyz -- and put the folder in your main White Gold directory.
The Precursors started up without any troubleshooting and did not have any flickering, so you should be good to go there.
1) When someone mentions Fallout: New Vegas, do you respond by complaining about the bugs?
2) Do you think Crysis and Metro 2033 have bad art and animation?
3) Were you baffled by S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and unable to figure out what you were supposed to do?
4) Is Uncharted 2 your favorite video game of all time?
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, LEAVE THIS THREAD IMMEDIATELY. If not, proceed:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let's get to the point: what are these games and why should I care?
White Gold and The Precursors are open world FPS-RPGs. White Gold is sort of one part STALKER (quest structure, loot), one part Deus Ex (character advancement), and one part Just Cause 2 (open world), in a setting reminiscent of Far Cry. The Precursors is in the same basic vein, but in a sci-fi setting with interplanetary travel (!), letting you hop on a space ship and fly to different exotic worlds, and even have space ship battles along the way.
Yeah, but even those hundred million dollar open world games like RDR end up being shallow, unfulfilling experiences after the initial sense of awe wears off. How does this obscure Ukrainian dev team manage to succeed where "AAA" fails?
By being unapologetically ambitious and having no quality assurance to speak of whatsoever. From patch notes:
Yes, prior to being patched, grenades were exploding after NPCs died from the grenade's explosion-as-yet-to-occur. Expect jank. Expect an amateurish localization. Gamers who can't be assed to deal with bugs or scripting errors or potential troubleshooting need not apply.
I buy all my "AAA" games for five bucks on Steam these days. How much do these obscure, eccentric, esoteric, janky Ukrainian games cost?
$30 each at GamersGate.
Xenus 2: White Gold
The Precursors
Don't hit the back button just yet. These games are large, and offer unique, worthwhile open world experiences. Did you buy $60 CODBLOPS just because you felt like you were supposed to get the biggest game of the year? You should feel obligated to offset that travesty here and now, then.
What's the sort of experience I'll actually have with these games?
I loaded up White Gold for the first time, and after the introductory sequence I found myself at a small seaside village. I started talking to some of the fisherman NPCs, and eventually received a quest to retrieve some sunken cargo from the bottom of the ocean nearby. I jumped into the water and started swimming. Once I got to the location, I made the dive, and when I reached the sea floor I noticed I had less than half of my oxygen limit remaining. Uh-oh. So I quickly loaded up the character advancement screen and selected faster swimming as my first perk, then picked up the cargo and swam back to the surface. Only minor bodily harm from beginning to drown.
Afterwards, elsewhere in the village I was given a quest from an old man to retrieve a vase some bandits stole from him. I traveled to their location at a mountaintop by a cliff, and the conversation about returning the vase didn't go too well, so we had to fight it out. I barely survived, since they had SMGs and shotguns and AKs and I only had a revolver and a grenade, but I was finally able to take them out with hit and run tactics. When I killed the last bandit my quest updated telling me that the quest vase fell off the cliff into the water below (several hundred feet down). I started the game with a parachute in my inventory, so, what the hell, I tried basejumping off the cliff. My parachute deployed, and I made circular movements until I got to the water. Then I dived to the sea floor, retrieved the vase, and the quest updated again: hostile paramilitary forces had spotted me, and they had a boat approaching nearby waiting for me to surface above. Fortunately for me I had the swimming perk from the first little adventure, so I stayed underwater and swam away to safety.
After climbing back onto land I was a full kilometer away from the old man in the village, so I started making my way back on foot. I found a paved road and started walking along it, and soon heard explosions and saw a government attack helicopter shooting missiles into the distance as it flew past me. As I walked further along the road I saw the exploded wreckage of a vehicle. And then another one. Both presumably destroyed by the helicopter with the off-screen explosions I heard.
I saw a hut in the distance. A literary man sat alone reciting Shakespeare, and his tropical hut was filled with bookshelves. He sent me on a sidequest to an entirely different island elsewhere on my world map.
That's about a twenty minute excerpt from my time with White Gold. Still scoffing at thirty bucks?
I downloaded White Gold from GamersGate and this shit doesn't work. What do I do?
If White Gold crashes on startup (this may end up being patched, but as of this writing the following may be necessary for the game to work): you may need to download a fixed .exe designed for the 1.0 Russian version of the game and replace your game's .exe with it for the game to no longer crash. WARNING: fixed .exes may be against the law in your country of residence, and may be hosted on unsavory websites that contain viruses, so look into this course of action at your own risk. This information is intended for legitimate purchasers only, who currently appear unable to play the game at all otherwise.
If White Gold's graphics are flickering: download and extract this archive -- http://www.mediafire.com/?adjz44z1zyz -- and put the folder in your main White Gold directory.
The Precursors started up without any troubleshooting and did not have any flickering, so you should be good to go there.
.
