Hello all and welcome to the weekend! We made it. Or if your weekend doesn't begin until later, you'll make it yet!

Let's talk cozy games! You know the ones I'm talking about, Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon. Games we used to call something else before the collective zeitgeist of the Internet decided to lump them all together under (which I'm personally fine with, I mean what do you call Animal Crossing anyway?)

In a stark contrast to my younger and more vulnerable years, I've become much more of "casual" gamer, and I find myself enjoying shorter bouts of play rather than becoming engrossed in the same world or story for hours on end. Games like Animal Crossing are perfect for this, in that I can just pick it up, talk to some villagers and go fishing or whatever, and put it down whenever I please. Not just that though, but I just absolutely love the warm and well, cozy vibe games like these offer. I've best heard them described as a warm mug of tea by a window as it rains outside.

Enough about me, let's talk about you! What "cozy" games do you enjoy? Feel free to lump them all together, who cares, it doesn't matter! We are all cozy games on this day.

11PM - Animal Crossing: Wild World

What game mechanic, boss or puzzle in a game got you to give up?

For me it was a drivers license test in Gran Tourismo 2 on the Playstation. I was so into racing sims that I had a decent steering wheel and pedals set (like $80 in 1999). I even found a better coffee table to more comfortably fit it all. I had so many hours into GT1, various NASCAR entries, MOTO Racer, various Need For Speed games, etc.

GT2 had a system where you had to upgrade your license to unlock more tracks. There was one where you had like 15 or 20 seconds to slolem through a course and then do it in reverse. After hours almost every night for a month straight of getting to within .5 seconds of qualifying for the license to unlock more tracks I just couldn't anymore. I gave up racing/car sims for nearly 15 years until XBox heavily pushed Forza Horizon and I gave it a try.

It certainly didn't help that I had just recently been scarred from being stuck in a similar system in X-Wing vs TIE. There was a training mission where you had to take your X-Wing through a course with barrel rolls before you unlocked something (another ship or more dangerous missions?) that I was stuck on. After like 6 weeks of getting within a second or less to completion I finally found a cheatcode to bypass it. By then the damage to my enjoyment of the game had been done and I never did finish that game.

There's a popular trend on Reddit at the moment that they're struggling to engage with. The idea is that someone will post the question

"Ask me anything about my world"

And this does two things. It gives them an opportunity to show off their setting, and more importantly it gives them a prompt. Someone may ask a question you don't have an answer to, so you're supposed to come up with one. Doing this enough will help you flesh out your world in ways you may not have considered on your own.

I think the reason this is failing on Reddit is because there are a dozen people jumping on the bandwagon and filling the RPG subs with spam, which is causing other members to lash out at them out of fatigue.

I think we here on Tildes could probably handle it a little better, and it would be better served as a single thread. Top level comments are for asking questions, and then anyone is welcome to reply to those with their answers. By sharing the same pool of questions this will allow us to compare and contrast our worlds with our friends here and maybe help spur on the creative juices.

October's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games:

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

Completely ignoring gameplay, which game do you think has the most amazing graphics? Which game do you look at and it makes you question how far technology has come? Or maybe which game has such effective art direction it completely sucks you in?

For me, it's Horizon Forbidden West. I just went back to the DLC after taking a break from it. I forgot just how good it looks! I swear it looks like every grain of sand is modeled, and the character models are insane.

Now the topic may be inflammatory, so let me walk it back and say "in some cases" - let me explain;

Just got me this gamepad and I absolutely adore it - for folks not wanting to click on a link, think of it as a fancy SNES pad.

I got it as a fightpad and for that it is marvelous - and while I have no intentions of playing a 3d action game with it, I booted up some 2d indies and platformers to take it for a spin ... and realized that apparently, 6 buttons + dpad just aren't enough anymore.

Since when do you need to have a light and hard attack as separate buttons? And need an analogue stick on top of the dpad to navigate through inventory? The amount of "simple" games needing to use all the buttons on the modern controller - without a viable alternative - is ridiculous.

Yes, there are some workarounds but just wanted to vent.

I'm installing some random titles from my backlog (I have 800+ on my backlog through bundle deals, giveaways, etc.) and it's a crapshoot, not in my favor.

Thanks for coming to my TedTalk.

Edit: Yes I realize the modern controller is standardized to the "two sticks + pad + 4 face buttons + 4 shoulder buttons" design; what I'm saying is that while for some game that design is essential, a lot of other games use up all the buttons without a baked-in viable alternative, or worse yet, use buttons for the sake of using buttons!

So I recently tried to replay Prototype on PC, only to learn that it's essentially incompatible with modern hardware and crashes instantly past the main menu.

I've tried searching other posts on other sites and most people recommend super hero games and Infamous. Well, I don't have a PS, so Infamous is off the table, and super hero games really are not the same. Call me immature, but if I can't massacre civilians in my power fantasy game, it's not really like Prototype.

I've seen pretty much all the AAA games of past and present that get recommended, but I'm wondering if there are any Indie games that aren't at the forefront that I've missed.

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links
• Each deal must include a short statement of why you think the game/games are worthwhile, or a question to the community about the game/games

If you don’t want to see threads like this, add deals or sale to your personal tag filters.

Server host: tildes.nore.gg
Dynmap: https://tildes.nore.gg

The server operates on a soft whitelist. Anyone can log in and walk around, but you need a Tildes account to gain build access.

Server Changelog

• All registered players now have access to /co inspect. This command will allow you to see block changes from the last 14 days so that you can hopefully resolve land disputes without admin/moderator intervention.
• There is currently an alpha version of a treasure hunt script (source) running on the server. Once every few days you'll see a TREASURE HUNT! message in chat and a 10 minute race for an elytra or netherite loot begins.
• There is a page to see each player's time on the server in the last 30 days.
• I have disabled Phantoms entirely

Minor Starfield lore spoiler's ahead

Originally written for /r/games, but the last discussion thread of Starfield in that place saw many user who said they personally like the game downvoted and replied to by mentally-questionable individuals that said not-so-nice things.

As I pass 170 hours in Bethesda newest, hottest, controversial game. I am happy because it is just as fun as I had hoped it to be.
Yet as I explore the cities it has to offer there is always a small detail that I keep failing to ignore (whenever I'm not busy thinking of new ship designs that is).

200,000 units are ready with a million more on the way

So say the slender being that has been tasked with creating an army to defend a galactic spanning government of countless worlds. At this point Montgomery, Zhukov, MacArthur, Jodl, or any-other-WW2-command-figure-of-your-choosing are rolling on the ground clapping each other's backs laughing their socks off. Because 1.2 million is an absolutely puny and pathetic number of troops for a galactic war.
I'm no Star Wars deep lore fan, I understand that fans and later authors has since tried to 'fix it' by making the Clone War more that just the clones. And yet those 1.2M clones was all there was when episode 2 released to theatres.
Most Sci-fi writings has similar a problem with scaling to their subject. It is not news. It even has a tv tropes page (the page is more about distances, but it's in the same ballpark).

Quest for the Peoplefield

So where does Starfield go wrong in this? The ships are puny. The wars and the numbers stated are puny.
Certainty more ways than one, but the one that I wish to focus on is this: where the hell are all the people?
A brief summary of the lore. Humanity has invented FTL and has seemingly solved all energy problems. They had to evacuate Earth, but this was successful and so the starfield should be absolutely teeming with tens of billions of human souls spreading to all corners of the galaxy and its many already habitable worlds.
And yet, Starfield feels so barren. I see no grand interstellar civilizations. Only dirt huts on a hill surrounded by walls that support barely a thousand people. Yet this dirt hill is supposed to be a capital or an interstellar superpower. Heck, they are even scared shitless of their own fauna.
The opposites capital is no dirt hill, yet still smaller than a modern earth country town.
And it's not like the main population centers are just outside player-accessible areas. All the NPCs ever talk about are Akila, New Atlantis, and Neon. These tiny puny cities.
It doesn't feel like the evacuation of Earth was a success. It feels like it was a catastrophe, and all that remains are scattered remnants playing civilization.

And yet... The Starfield is actually lively, just not where it should be. There is a scale imbalance, because spread across nearly every world in the settled systems are countless research stations, outposts, deserted or populated, you name it.
Yes, those procedually-generated buildings that spawn nearly everywhere you land in the settled systems.
Where did these come from? Surely the UC couldn't have built them. Manning just the ones that I have come across in my playthrough would empty New Atlantis 10 times over!

Bethesda built their open-world game style upon Fallout and Elder Scrolls. For both it makes sense that the worlds are sparely populated. One being post-apocalyptic wasteland, and the other a medieval society.
But now they have built something in a completely different realm. But they way in which Bethesda built the scale at which the game is presented remains the same.
So why did they go with this approach? I don't know. Maybe they just like making "small" worlds and didn't want to fit the new universe. Maybe the idea of 'climbing any mountain you can see' is a very hard rule and they didn't want to limit player movement in metropolises, that would undoubtedly be unfeasible to make fully traversable.

But lets pretend they actually tried. And perhaps it can be done without really changing how the game is designed or played.

So you can do it better huh?

A Microsoft executive plays the game as it's nearing launch. He feels there is something missing with the scale of the Starfield universe.
So he does the only rational thing he can think of and storms into the street and picks the first rando he can find, puts the Bethesda crown upon his head, and orders him to fix Starfield's problem of scale.
The exec is later found to be mentally ill and fired, but it does not matter for I am now king of Bethesda and my words are design directives.

Tell, don't show

The simple solution that requires no real work but some change in lore. New Atlantis is no longer a capital, just a administrative and diplomatic outpost. Akila is now just a small border city. The real population centers are now on entirely different worlds. Inaccessible to the player.
Why can't players go there? Well it shouldn't take much suspension of disbelief to acknowledge that governments might not want any random idiot, in a flying hunk of metal capable of tearing space-time at it seams, to go anywhere near their main population centers without considerable control.
NPCs should no longer talk of sprawling New Atlantis, Neon, or Akila, but rather these other places that you can see on the map but are not allowed to go to.

Show enough

The population planets are now accessible, but restricted in where you can land freely. On the map it should show big cities. And just like how you cannot land in water, you can neither land anywhere in cities or its surroundings.
Just like with New Atlantis and Akila, you can land at a designated spot. The difference is when you look into the horizon, because rather than a procedurally generated landscape you will instead see a sprawling metropolis that tells you "Yes here! Here are all the people!".
The other change would be that, unlike the landscape, if you try to go beyond the player-area of the city you will hit a wall. But that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.
New Atlantis and Akila can stay, but like the other solution they would change status.

All in all the scale issue is no big problem and the game is fine as it is. This was just something that has been on mind for some time and I wanted to put it to writing. So do you agree that Starfield has a scale problem? If yes, how would you fix it? Or maybe I missed some crucial info-dump and the entire premise of this writing is wrong?

I had been waiting for this game since 2012, when it was first announced. I bought it day one, without reading any reviews, and it was an instant refund for me.

Now that update 2.0 supposedly makes the game better, I'm thinking of giving it another shot. Has anyone tried this update? What do you think about it?