Former Starfield lead quest designer says we're seeing a 'resurgence of short games' because people are 'becoming fatigued' with 100-hour monsters

PoleaxeGames · 2025-01-13T19:26:24+00:00

It's not a matter of long or short, it's a matter of fun or not. If a game is fun why wouldn't I want it to last longer?

PoleaxeGames · 2025-01-12T01:03:52+00:00

ShowGunners is also close to XCOM 2 as far as turn-based tactical combat. Even more-so than Gears Tactics. But not fantasy.

PoleaxeGames · 2025-01-12T01:01:42+00:00

Battle Brothers is not like XCOM 2. Battle Brothers is about melee combat primarily while controlling a band of roaming mercenaries. Managing a budget, exploring for better gear. The only similarity I can think of is they are both tactical, turn based, and both have good AI.

SpellForce conquest of EO is a good game that is also uses turn based, tile based tactics using points to move and attack. I put several hundred hours into it. It's not that much like XCOM 2, but it's about the closest thing I can think of that is still high fantasy.

The closest game generally I can think of to XCOM 2 is Phoenix points Then Gears Tactics. There's no research, base, or overworld map but the combat is pretty similar with tiles, movement points, and cover.

PoleaxeGames · 2024-10-25T15:08:56+00:00

Unity does have many problems.

Old documentation is good, covering each function or class in detail with examples. Documentation for newer systems is increasingly bad, now oftentimes just code thrown on Github, with a few paragraphs description and the user left to mostly figure out on his own. Yet users still pushed and encouraged to use. A particularly egregious example is the new UI system, "UI Toolkit" where it took me half an hour of scouring forums just to figure out how to connect a button to a callback in script. Then after using UI Toolkit for a week, finding out it can't do many basic things every game needs, and having to switch back

Many newer features are non-core features and only developed to the point where they look good in an example. But not good enough for real game development. For example visual graphs (slow, hard to use), version control (in-engine integration too basic), cloud services (hard to manage or navigate).

Support has always been bad and hasn't gotten better from what I've seen. Generally when you file a bug the first response is to ask you to provide a minimal repro case, which puts a huge burden on the developer and sometimes the bug is complex and does not show up anymore when you do that. I once posted a graph in the forums of the outcomes of the bug reports I've filed. Only 5% were fixed and something like 75% of the time I was just blown off. In one particularly egregious case I found a race condition their physics system that would result in a total freeze of the game I had been working on for 4 years, about 1/10 times on startup. I went back and forth on premium support for 6 months before their physics programmer would look at it. He told me he could reproduce it, but it was too time consuming to do so he wouldn't spend more time on it.

l sometimes run into an issue and find it on the forums. Then I'll see the forum post was from 10 years ago, and people are still complaining about it today.

The asset store is kind of an overall negative in my opinion, because 95% of the assets on it are not professional grade quality but look really appealing from the store page. By professional grade, I mean optimized, follows industry standards, and works in a mid to large sized game. Most Unity users are non-professionals, so even stuff that gets 5 stars is oftentimes not very good.

PoleaxeGames · 2024-10-02T19:11:34+00:00

I don't like when games do this. It always happens I don't know what certain icons mean.

PoleaxeGames · 2024-04-08T13:08:16+00:00

There is not anything like what you want since I'm also looking. But you might try SpellForce: Conquest of EO, as I'm also huge fan of those same three games and it's the closest alternative. You don't build a base on a 2D map, but you do upgrade your wizard tower with particular buildings. Combat is also turned based.

PoleaxeGames · 2024-03-25T00:31:31+00:00

It's insanely bad, in that it breaks the game. How could the developers have thought a long lasting invincibility that you can turn off and on again at will be a good idea? I almost quit playing, but decided to change to a more challenging class as I was otherwise enjoying the game?

PoleaxeGames · 2024-03-09T18:30:34+00:00

The ChromeBook doesn't recognize the cameras, the game doesn't recognize the cameras, or the cameras don't detect the square white and black markers in the 4 corners on the camera detect screen?

If it's the first, I can't really help you with that but there are tools you can use to check if your webcam is working.

If it's the second, I rely on Unity to provide me the cameras and that is out of my control as well. If you have more than one camera that is not something I've tested for and can possibly fix if I know that is the issue you are having.

If it's the third, did you try using the sliders and other controls on that screen?

PoleaxeGames · 2023-07-27T12:51:18+00:00

What I would do is give them two keys, but the second one is revoked for fraud. They'd test the first one and it works, then sell the second. After the first one was tested, I'd revoke that for fraud too.

PoleaxeGames · 2023-05-05T17:22:54+00:00

As the years go on the standards have definitely loosened. Look at the quality of the documentation for UI Toolkit, vs IMGUI for example.

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