Lipala

So if this is a duplicate thread I apologize, I searched and couldn't find an old NMS thread to update. I know many aren't paying attention anymore but No Man's Sky got its 2.0 update today titled "BEYOND" Last year at the 2 year anniversary we got No Man's Sky NEXT which finally brought real multiplayer (4 player co-op) to the game along with a lot of quality of life improvements. Prior to that we had received some basic base building as well as exo-vehicles for traversing planetary surfaces outside our space ships and expansion to the frigate system. Since then base building has been expanded, environmental variation has been improved and new story elements have been added. As of 2.0 we are getting full VR support with many of the game's fundemental controls reworked to feel VR native rather than just slapping a VR interface onto the existing game. The VR clients are not sectioned off and can play with non-vr players in multiplayer. Changes to the scale of vehicles across the board to make VR feel more immersive carry over to standard play as well. Many of the disperate activities and systems that were just "things you could do" are not part of a more cohesive overlapping whole and are fleshed out. Base building is getting a power system along with logic circuits for building your own things. We're also getting industrial base buildings we can use to construct resource gather outposts. Multiplayer has been upgraded to up to 32 players in an instance. An existing spacial anomaly that's part of the story has been upgraded to be summon-able once you discover it, bringing it to your location in space and in it is now an up to 16 player social hub for organizing group play with people you didn't start grouped with. Performance improvements and optimization across the board, a move from OpenGL to Vulkan on PC. Expansions to the exploration system including full on cartography, Expansions to farming to include animals and more variety of plants. There are mechanics overhauls all over the place, more susinct and clear tech progression, blue prints are learned on finding an object of the type rather than having to do a seperate gathering and research system. The list keeps going. Most notably however, you can now sit in chairs. https://www.nomanssky.com/beyond-update/

Akala is some very good anti-colonial/capitalist rap. A feel like he's more talented at writing/performing raps than Boots but Boots is better at capturing the "mass line" feel.

TLDR On the above, IMO: Astral is the best generalist with the best pricing but needs Discord or something similar if you want text chat Rolegate is best for play by post Tale Spire is the best simulation of miniature tabletop play and I feel like it enhances the experience. The Rest - Are either outdated or priced out of what I consider reasonable. They consider themselves a niche product and price off that idea.

So we all love our games and some of us love our tabletop roleplaying games. So I figured a thread to discuss various methods of online RP goodness wouldn't be bad. Here's my first contributions. Roll20.net - Ubiquitous at this stage. It has tokens and a marketplace and the ability to break up scenes, upload images and tokens, play music via plugins to third party sites and a dice roller. It has manual fog of war feature for limiting lines of site, etc. Communicate via text chat, video, or voice chat. Supports in engine character sheets for supported or community created in-engine sheets. Lila's take: Roll20 is the 800lb Gorilla of online tabletop these days and does a lot well. However much of their early developement was in Java and it shows. Many of their page elements can be clunky and unresponsive and its sometimes hard to tell if the app has taken a dive. Astral Tabletop - Its like someone saw Roll20 and said "hold my beer" It does everything Roll20 does but better. Cleaner and more responsive UI, up-loadable assets and compendiums. Built in video/voice chat. It does not currently have text chat though they plan to add. Maps can be animated using gif and webm layers and has weather and other environmental filters that can overlay on maps. Maps can also contain interactive elements that can be updated by a single click from the GM or directly by the players by the GM's discretion. Supports dynamic light and field of view using these engines and defined barriers in the map building engine. Audio and music is tied to a given map using uploaded assets and are tied together as map layers. Supports free-form attribution assignment and linkable character sheets from any external source. "Attributes" can be called in the Dice Roller to make pre-scripted dice rolls that occur frequently. Attribute engine is Game System agnostic. Co-sponsored by DriveThruRPG which provided them the startup capital to make a better experience than Roll20. Lila's take: Astral looks amazing. I have not played it yet but i have fiddled with it and it delivers on everything it sells. Really well put together and unlike Roll20 the free tier is actually worth a damn. RoleGate - Focused on the play by post crowd and those who grew up on chat room RP. RoleGate supports IC and OOC chat as well as impersonation for the GM to allow for greater immersion. Multi-location segmenting allows players to keep RP separate without having to wonder if they are in a particular scene and built in dice rollers and character sheet engines. Very versatile and probably the best at its job I've seen. Mobile and desktop friendly. Lila's take: This was a joy to use and play with, with clear emote and act vs speech text distinction. My only concern is that you have to find a gaming group willing to respect a schedule. It turns out that a lot of people take "play whenever you have time" as meaning "always be playing" and you may miss out if a particular game doesn't have a GM that enforces post order/structure. TaleSpire - Tale Spire is in kickstarter but i have friends who had alpha access. Talespire looks an awful lot like what D&D Next was supposed to be. Full 3D with minis and animations and detailed textures and landscapes. But under the hood is a Lua scripting engine and the ability to import models as long as they're compatible with Unity. With a multi-level tile based design system its the only of these where creating maps can occur freeform without much effort. Just start laying down tiles until you've got what you want. It has a built in dice roller and a "GM Roll" feature where the roll is visible but the die faces are blank for everyone but the GM. Lila's take: I'm a backer on the Kickstarter here. I have friends who already have access from their Early Access alpha support of Talespire. Its also the only of these I'd feel comfortable running a game in myself on the long term due to my improvisational style. Both Roll20 and Astral lend themselves more to GMs who do a lot of prep work and enjoy the crafting of detailed maps and experiences. Those GMs like myself who prefer a quick and dirty narrative structure built around a loose framework and then improvised from there have a hard time with those tools, as awesome as they are. TaleSpire's simple creation engine means its simple for, if the party goes a way you didn't expect or in a direction you haven't planned for yet you can just quickly lay out the terrain tiles and build on top of them. I think last check was that the play area the game could handle was 10s of km in all 3 axis but the devs aren't happy with that and are working on engine optimizations to allow an essentially limitless play field. Likely they'll need to use a load/unload system like a lot of open world games do based on player camera proximity. Tabletop Simulator - Literally a 3D simulation of a tabletop you can load assets into. However due to partnership deals this one gets a lot of attention so "infringing" assets are locked down on. It has a scripting engine so you can build rules into a given simulation but its complicated and very involved. Adding models and assets requires modeling/coding experience and must be loaded into the game for each person playing manually or uploaded to the workshop and be subject to DMCA. Lila's take: I hear its quite good in VR but in mouse/keyboard it feels a bit floaty and hard to control in my experience. I have it and I recognize it could be good but can't rightly recommend it with TaleSpire already better than it in alpha for tabletop RP games. Fantasy Grounds - Officially licensed with several publishes and priced to match. Performance is much better than Roll20 due to being actual software as opposed to a webapp. They're feature list compares to Roll20 somewhat favorable but with the up front price tag that's not surprising. While it does support generic systems or custom built systems they focus on the licensed ones and building campaigns and running them with the suite rather than aiming for creating systems even though they market it as such. Lila's take: If you're a planner Fantasy Grounds makes a solid case against Roll20 if you're using anything more than Roll20s free tier. That said while it does have great licensed integrations that make running within the system painless, it lacks most of the bells and whistles of Astral.

Ray tracing is one of those technologies that has been around for a long time but its only recently we have the hardware capable of doing it in real time. It does produce more naturally lit scenes and more realistic behavior from transitions in variable light environments. However, we've had quite a long time of learning different lighting tricks in our game engines that do a good enough job at faking what ray-tracing does that its not as revolutionary as it might have been had the tech come 5-10 years ago. All of that said. Its "nice" and from a coding perspective actually requires less work than modern lighting methods, Its just more computationally demanding. I'm not on board with RTX because while the it has dedicated raytracing cores you still see FPS drops because those cores end up bottlenecking the rest of the graphics render. I'm not saying anyone else has something better, just that we are definitely in "early adopter" years. Still, for anyone who doesn't have unlimited money with which to buy computer parts with raytracing is awhile off and what we see in next gen consoles will probably be on par with what we have right now, as opposed to where the tech will have gone in the next few years.

Looks at her never-played Black Cube box for Invisible Sun and a tear drips down her cheek.

I live in a Capitalist nation state where any given thing i say or do, including purchases made from "secure" merchants, is skimmable by government agencies at any time and those backbones are not secure enough. Epic security concerns are a drop in the anti-privacy/security bucket so I'm on there and have bought a few things. The free games are nice too. GoG is my preferred marketplace though. I'm excited about GoG Galaxy 2.0

This one is still in early access, they're planning all gameplay core functionality to be in place by the end of this year and polish/elaboration on that to be finished sometime next year. However, even in its early state, this game is phenomenal. Rogue-like isometric action game where you play Zagreus, son of Hades, trying to escape the underworld. Currently finished zones are Tartarus, Asphordel, and Elysium. https://www.supergiantgames.com/games/hades/

So updates, the code is live, multiple groups hosting servers, several working together in the "Pleideas" ring. Pretty much everyone who isn't the "Homecoming" team is working together and collaborating/federating.

City of Heroes/Villains was one of my favorite games for years and when it was shut down in the middle of development of the followup and new content coming on the horizon because NCSoft decided that if a game wasn't popular in Korea it didn't matter how well it was doing in Europe or the US it hurt. The devs weren't even allowed to release a final story-arc to give the game some closure, it was rough for many players and a lot of us stuck together as communities after. Mutliple spiritual successor and emulation projects have struggled for years since then to bring the game back with varying degrees of success. Some of the most promising are just now hitting playable states this year. Recently we discovered that one of the devs leaked source code and database files to a community member who had stated intent to reverse engineer the code to allow for the game to be played on private servers much like SWG. However, instead of doing that, they created their own private server and a new parser so the version of the game they compiled would be unusable with the code they were provided. They invited a small number of people to play, made them agree to NDAs and actively censored them on Reddit and other CoX community sites where members of this secret server were admins. This may have been a measure to protect them from NCSoft but the end result was that a secret group of players never lost the game and actively told the community that the very thing they were doing was impossible. That went on for 7 years. About 2 weeks ago now the silence was broken. A youtuber managed to release a video with documented proof of the private server and a games journalist published a piece on it. This piece included a statement from the owner of the secret server confirming its existence as well as his holding of the character database of everyone's old characters, costume, powers, etc. In fact one of the draws of the private server was that they could restore your old characters. The community was incensed and felt betrayed. Some of its most well regarded members were the culprits and it hurt. A week later, the journalist was in a voice chat on Discord with the leaker and a few community members, interviewing to get our words for a followup article and the head of the server showed up, was convinced to release the source code he was leaked and the binaries for the version of the game he was running. The character database would not be shared due to privacy concerns and the legal ramifications of distributing potentially personal data in the EU where the server was based. Within a day of this release we had a test server up, named "Bree" after the reporter who exposed all this and by the end of the weekend when it had to be taken down it had over 3000 players (enough to fill 2 of the old pop-capped servers). The community has organized around a discord server that due to various interpersonal drama has become a neutral ground with 3 other discords started, one for the reddit community, one for the 4chan community, and one for the "Homecoming" team who are hosting currently 4 shards with 2000 player cap each. Those of us in the know on what's going on are dubious about Homecoming. While the rest of the community has agreed to transparency and sharing and nominally so have they, when it came time to actually share something they clearly had and the rest of the community didn't they refused and instead offered to configure it for individual server teams, requiring admin access to be given to them for all the teams. This is ultimately unacceptable because while they have access they could do whatever they want, including installing backdoors and the like. This is exacerbated by that team being closed about who they are, whose doing the work, etc. That said we have the files and the ability to run servers locally, and if you've got he hardware you can even host a few people. My partner is working on setting up a private server for a few of our friends, all old refugees from CoX. Not sure why I'm talking about all this but felt the need to. If you used to play CoX and want to play again I can point you in the right direction.

That said, last night I hopped on for an hour with a regular crew I play with and we proceeded to, in this order: Raid an inactive skull fort for its gunpowder, take out a Ghost Ship, head to an active Skull Fort, getting attacked by a Megladon along the way that we killed,and take out the crew who was already there. Get all the loot from that ship and the fort added to what we got from the Ghost Ship and Megladon, sink another Ghost Ship and get its loot and then turn all that in at the nearest Outpost. An ok crew probably would have sunk twice in all that. We did not.

If you liked the core experience but felt like there wasn't enough to do, definitely. If you weren't a fan of the core experience then no.

Gib is solid you just have to know how/when to take point and your squad needs to know when to let you. I tend to main LIfeline or Bangalore but Pathfinder and Wraith are fun too. Pathfinder gets the most fun when you realize you can use the grapple to "swing"

Didn't see a Topic on it but this one's worth the look. I despise EA but this was made very much in spite of them and shows it. Monetization isn't predatory (aside from lootboxes but you can direct purchase everything) and gameplay is phenomenal. All 3 man squad play, no solo with abilities a la Overwatch. I tend to play Lifeline whose passive is reviving downed teammates faster and with a directional shield and her active is a drone that heals nearby teammates. Her "Ult" is a called in supply drop that always has at least one top tier support item or weapon attachment.

Sorry for the necromancy but has anyone else been playing SoT since launch? I came back in because Gamepass was like $1 for a month so hopped back in and they've added so much. Its still fundamentally the same game but with so much more to do. Additions so far (this is pre mega-patch expected later this year) Multiple types of Megaladons The Kraken Ghost Ships for some PvE ship to ship. Cargo Run Merchant Missions Proper inventory management "Curse" balls which are cannonballs that have status effects on either ships or players Brigantine Ships (3 man ships) A map expansion including volcanic islands "Crates" that hold up to 50 cannonballs, bananas, or planks that have a high value if turned in for Merchant rep. And we're expecting Fishing and Cooking mechanics in the next big update as well as secret campaigns that make you find underwater caves and the like.

It was the visual style more than anything.

Super excited about this one, it looks absolutely amazing. First impression when I saw the motif was being reminded of Policenauts weirdly enough

For real

Legit surprised to see I know it sold well but all the conflict with the Kaizo community I expected to turn them off to making it.

You're good, In fairness a lot of those really long videos (hour or more) are just recordings of livestreams. She hasn't done full edited videos in awhile. Her further back videos for Oxygen Not Included, Slime Rancher and Blacksmith Simulator are produced/edited and not just livestream saves

I believe she reshared it, she's streaming right now actually

Her name on Twitch and youtube is Nihilana but as I said her videos are currently marked private due to a existential blegh that happened last night for her. Happens almost every time she plays Overwatch or pays attention to her viewer count while streaming. Honestly she just needs like 5 or 6 regular people active and participating in chat on her streams and she'd be happy. As it is she has friends who all say they'll pass her stream along but don't watch them themselves, or say they'll watch but never do. And when she's autistic and unable to work due to its severity.... this is kind of all she has