D_W

@trulyalive: I think a lot of the "villains" feel they're in over their heads. That's why she was crying at the end.

I think this episode did a good job humanizing the three "villains" fairly well. There's some conversations you can have with David before going to class that sheds some light on his motivations. He's still a dick head and terrible step father though. Nathan is a scumbag too and apparently according some of the diner folk so is the rest of his family. Doesn't surprise me though.

What did you all do with the train? I tried to do it the less destructive way but thought the big wheel was some how involved and before I realized there were multiple ways I had already saved Chloe.

I was very disappointed when I looked at "Omega Quintet" and found it had nothing to do with Omega Boost.

So a tabletop podcast I listen to recently did a playthrough of a game aptly called The World Wide Wrestling RPG. It's more focused on story telling and seems like it would be right up certain members of the crew's alley. Hell, Jeff might even dig it, if was a video game. It could be a great premium series if they had a DM familiar with the rule set.

@otakugamer: Yeah, he's pretty cool. Very funny guy. All his main solo series are great. Skyrim is a classic. His current series on Fallout 1 and Grim Fandango are both fantastic. He also did a series on Sim City 5, Banished, and a bunch of other city building type games.

@monkeyking1969: Banished does, indeed, sound more of what you're looking for then. (It's fantastic too.) I will say though, supposedly you'll be able to make small towns and suburban areas. Not just big major cities. They also simulate all the people (up to 1mil) and you could supposedly follow them around on their day-to-day lives.

But for right Banished seems your best bet.

Here's a stream archive with some dev commentary.

This is only speculation and mostly from Sips video, but it seems way more robust than Sim City 5. Sips is... well frankly pretty bad at these sorts of games yet manages some how (though always entertaining) so it may not be as great as it could be.

My main thing in games like this is actually kind of RPing. Maybe that sounds weird, but I love the idea of building a little town and imagining all the little lives the people in it. One of the reasons I loved Banished so much. Sim City 5 didn't really scratch that itch so much. From the looks of it this game may.

I just watched Sips' video about this game and it looks like everything I wanted Sim City 5 to be. While I wasn't as disappointed with Sim City 5 as some folks it did leave me feeling pretty empty. But after watching that video and a bunch of the trailers, Skylines seems like it would be right up my alley.

Unfortunately it doesn't come out til March 10th. It'll be a long wait. My only worry is performance issues. This game is made by the same team that made Cities in Motion 2 and I had some issues with that game.

@rethla: Maybe I'm unlucky, but it feels like the enemies have an unshown advantage. For example, I tried to get Bleed on an enemy that had 25% resistance to it. I hit it 4 times and it resisted each time. Yeah that could happen, but 25% is not that large. As a game designer myself I see stuff like that and think "they could do something about this." What I would do is have it so every time something misses or fails the chance of it happening goes up a little bit. Every time it's successful then the chance resets if modified. It could be completely hidden from the player, work the same way for monsters, and obviously not happen if there's a 100% chance of failure. It would just be something that helps ease the frustration.

Another option is a card-like RNG system where there is a stack of numbers. Each time something attacks it pulls a number out of that stack, "discards" it, then randomizes the stack. So let's say you have a hit chance of 75% it would create a deck of 100 "cards" that contain 75 "hit cards" and 25 "miss cards." (or 60 and 20, 15 and 5, 1 and 4, or any ratio.) Then it would remove the cards until there are no more and recreate the deck again. You'd subtle "feel" the percentage more that way. If there were only 5 miss cards you'd know that you can't miss 6 times in a row. Again this isn't something that has to be spelled out to the player at all.
(EDIT: Think "7 bag" in modern Tetris. That's an example of a system like I'm describing above)

Of course I don't know how they're actually doing the RNG in this game. It's probably just percentages since that's the easiest.

@rethla: @tru3_blu3: RPGs are my favorite genre. I'm an RPG veteran. It's not that there is RNG it's the way it effects can be so devastating with little input. There's too much "rocks fall everyone dies" and not enough explanation so players could figure out how to avoid or minimize stuff without hours of failure. Even just some tool tips on stats or small suggestions on what may be encountered in a particular mission. (The debris is particularly frustrating because as far as I know you can't leave an area and go around.)

It's not difficult. I understand how to arrange my party based on their move sets. That part is cool. They should lean more into that. The reasons why characters died or lost a ton of health is always because they only hit 1/4 of the time but the enemies hit 100% and I can only heal 1 to 4 health. I have no idea how turn order is determined or why it seems like so characters go twice during a round. There's no sort of display or anything. So you can't reliably build effective strategies around all the BS the game throws at you. Variance it way too high. I'll go into two battles against the same type of group of enemies and one time come out unharmed and healthy, but another by the skin of my teeth all because in one I was super lucky and in another super unlucky despite doing basically the exact same thing.

Maybe I'm just getting older and less tolerant of games wasting my time through bad RNG and poorly explained systems. There's a cool game here, but it note quite there yet. They need to surface more, and make more it more on resource management and less about complete randomness. Right now it feels too much like you're rolling 100 dice instead of playing a game.