Legends of Pegasus

[Hotfoot]

This game just released today, and I'm holding off on getting it because, well, 4X Space games have been utterly disappointing me as of late, and I'd rather not spend $40 on yet another disappointing failure. That said, this one holds more promise than the latest crop of contenders. It has pausable real-time combat, a proper research trees, a turn-based strategic system, and what appears to be deep and meaningful ship and planet customization.

But will it have proper diplomacy, espionage, economy, and civil management? Will the interface not suck ass? Will combat be fun or more of a chore? These things I cannot be certain of, and so I wait, wait for someone to give me hope that this game will not cause me to further lament the state of 4X Space games.

Seriously, the last 4X Space game I really enjoyed was Space Empires 4. That was a long-ass time ago, and it's frankly sad that in that time, nobody has made a game fundamentally superior to it.

GalCiv 2? Too simplistic with yawn-worthy combat, fun mostly for the (visual) ship design system.

Space Empires 5? Terribly coded and crafted, that I can't run it at more than single-digit framerates is maddening, never mind the terrible balance of the baseline game.

Sword of the Stars? Oh, yes, I want unstoppable alien menaces to show up out of nowhere and completely fuck my game. Oh, and while we're at it, let's throw in ham-fisted morality into the tech tree that results in additional super-threats being created because I was audacious enough to research some tech that looked useful, hell, necessary. And the Sequel? Hah!

Sins of a Solar Empire? Man, I've given this game more than its fair share. It wants to be a blend of RTS and 4X and manages to do neither of them well. I liked this game better when it was called Conquest: Frontier Wars. Each expansion, I've hoped they would make it better, but no, each time I am sorely disappointed. The fact that the tech tree lasts all of maybe eight hours if you go up in gradually doesn't help, because at a certain point, you just have all the technology and that's that.

Armada 2526? Buggy, nearly unplayable shit with massively edited trailers that did a disservice to what the game actually was.

Distant Worlds? Okay, I've heard good things about this one, but there is no fucking way I'm paying the nearly $200 price tag to get this with all the expansions. News flash, when you release an expansion, nobody is going to want to buy it if both it and the base game are $60. This goes even more for second and third expansions. What the hell?

Endless Space? Yeah, if I want to play a game where I have basically no control in combat, I'll go back to playing GalCiv 2, thanks.

Star Ruler? Supreme Commander in space. Sure, the ship design is cool and all, but I just can't get behind the way this game is run. Real-time games that force me to put entire solar systems on auto-build orders to crank out ships just aren't fun. I spend more time managing construction queues and sending blobs of ships I don't care about into battles that are just bloodbaths of industrial bases.

So, yeah...I'm hopeful this is good, but more out of desperation than any actual news. Anyone play it yet?

[Josh]

I'm waiting too, but more out of budgetary constraints than anything.

In the defense of Sword of the Stars, the sheer sadism of the game engine could make for interesting challenges. I had one game where I was the Terrans and the Planet Killer fucked my nodelines along with eating three of my worlds. Then my neighbor had an AI rebellion.

The tech tree wasn't really making a moral statement, to my way of looking at it. The AI rebellion is an old, old concept in science fiction and if they had a punitive moral stance about it, they wouldn't have made the AI Slavery tech so profitable and rewarding. Likewise, the biowarfare fuckups were kind of a risk of researching bioweapons, which makes sense. I loved how streamlined SotS was, until you hit the ship cap. I'm sorry, but like in that mega game where I got fucked every which way by the random events I ended up with a colossal war with the Hivers where I had over a hundred and fifty dreadnoughts vs. their eighty or so. That should lead to titanic and epic battles, not an endless repeat of 'Three dreadnoughts vs. three dreadnoughts' for over forty turns.

Overall though SotS has been my favorite post-MoO2 4X. What I do want in a 4X is minimal hassle with planets these days. Customization is cool, but filling endless build orders for every world colonized or conquered gets tedious. That was my main dislike for Gal Civ 2, especially when you got to the various terraforming techs and would have to go back and add buildings to every. World. You had.

What I really do miss in 4X these days is care and attention to the diplomacy, and a personalized feel. Thus far, no game has really matched the coolness of seeing your opposite number get pissed off like in MoO, or having them personally insult you like in Alpha Centauri. Gal Civ was the last good one on that, out of the games I've played.

[Hotfoot]

My issue is more one of, since I never bothered reading the fiction around SotS, since as far as I'm concerned, a given 4X game should make its own story as it goes, the AI revolt seemed out of nowhere and punishing. That it happened two turns after I researched the tech, and the AI Slavery is random to the point where you might not even get the damn thing (hell, it took me nearly 100 turns to get the killswitch tech), and the AI rebellion world is IMPOSSIBLY better than whatever world you had there (which is stupid as hell, it shouldn't turn small moons with crap resources into Dreadnought factories), it felt particularly unfair. Maybe it was just luck of the draw on that one, but even a tooltip of "this research may blow up in your face, FYI", would be nice to know where the potential land mines are. When nearly every other tech simply progresses and doesn't result in potentially game-ending effects, to have a handful of nuclear land mines like that is just unreasonable. The benefit of AI is so limited in comparison to the risk that it might as well be a banned technology, because I will never research it again, not when I can spend my time researching other, more useful things, instead of something that not only prevents me from researching said useful things, but then demands that I spent potentially the next decade doing nothing else but researching the solution, all the while the rest of the game plays on without me.

[Josh]

Well, tastes differ and all. I'll totally agree with you on the lack of warning with regards to AI- SotS is often called the 'Worst best game' for a reason, because what it does it does so well, and what it doesn't do is a product of an extremely smug lead designer who has a habit of claiming that bugs and oversights are 'features'.

That said, AI tech is actually bitchin' awesome and that's the heart of the gamble. A lot of people will flat out avoid it if they're doing good because the potential consequences of it going awry aren't worth the payoff, but if you're getting your ass kicked it might be the only edge between victory and defeat. The research bonus is worth it by itself, but when you add in the factories and the cash bump from AI admin and you can totally rock the galaxy. I know one game where I had an AI revolt after I'd researched the AI virus (which spiked the revolt and deactivated all AI tech) was downright damn painful because I had been cruising along at seventy miles an hour and suddenly hit a twenty mph school zone.

But regardless of whether you liked it or not, it's definitely showing its age these days. So let's hope that Legends of Pegasus turns out to rock and gives us all sorts of cool times vaporizing pixel ships and pixel worlds full of little pixel people.

[White Haven]

I'll just copy-paste my post from the Kalypso forums, why don't I. Yes, I took one for the team so that none of you have to.

What in the name of all that is blasphemous is going on with this sub-alpha pile of trash? I say sub-alpha because both Endless Space and, of all things, bloody Minecraft were in more functional, more playable states than this piece of garbage when they were in alpha, never mind beta or release. Sign me up for a full refund, and SHAME on you, sleazebag developers, for trying to pull something this shady. Bullshot trailers/screenshots with graphics far better than the game itself, frequent crashbugs, multiple-MINUTE load times, absolutely pathetic and incredibly obnoxious voice-acting, horribly-tuned economy balance, randomly-teleporting enemies that refuse to engage ships at point blank range...and that's just what I noticed in two hours of...I'd call it 'play,' but that implies that there was some form of fun involved. Please hang up and try again, in a year, when you have something approaching a finished product. That or have the minimal level of decency and personal responsibility displayed by Richard Nixon and resign from your positions, if you feel like being a bit ambitious.

In case any of you are unclear on the subject, stay the fuck away.

[frigidmagi]

Is it me or is releasing unfinished games turning into a fucking thing?

[Josh]

Is it me or is releasing unfinished games turning into a fucking thing?

Good practices are born in pain, basically. When people are allowed to be sloppy, they get sloppy. Some companies (Kereberos and the ilk) are going to have to flat go out of business in order for us to start getting decent release practices going again.

I was hoping for more than Endless Space turned out to be, but I have to say that in alpha state it was still a beautiful and well-polished game that could've passed for a completed game just a few years ago. So even if the game hasn't (yet) lived up to my hopes, I'm glad I bought in at alpha in order to support a company that is doing things right.

[Hotfoot]

Looks like Kalypso is now going, "Oh, crap, um, sorry guys."

Guess they thought that would be enough after the SotS 2 debacle.

Fuck that and fuck them.

[Josh]

What gets me about this is that there seems to be a large market for people who'll pay to play beta. If a company needs the cash infusion, they can open up a paid beta and get a shitload of contribution from people who are basically paying to QA the product.

SotS 2 specifically could've benefited from this, because honestly a lot of people were expecting a comically buggy product before release and would've happily paid in to help clean it up.

Mind you, the very architecture of SotS 2 militates against fun so Mecron and company might not have wanted the input. But still, there is a way to work with the fans out there.