/v/ - Video Games

i still remember my first minecraft world. i spawned in a taiga next to a beach and a desert, it was in r1.0 i didn't know how to play minecraft. i died a lot from monsters for a while, and eventually figured out how to craft. i then built a nice small house on the beach (it was small, but felt big to me), and eventually  i realised i needed food. a placed some small farming blocks down by the water, and eventually expanded it, digging a bit deeper into the sand so i made a nice wheat farm. on the backdoor of the sand house there were stairs which led down to the farm (it was a bit deep down, maybe 2-3 blocks from the surface level). i never explored, i just sat by in my  cozy beach area, but one day i realised i needed materials. so i ventured into the nearby cave entrance. it was scary. but after a very long trip and facing numerous foes, i finally made it to the surface with lots of iron, coal, redstone and a single diamond. i cherished the diamond, but i didnt know what to do with it, so i made it into a jukebox. now with all the riches i had aquired, i was sure people of long and wide would come here to make a new settlement, so i made a nice hotel. it had only two rooms, but was still bigger than my other house. i also discovered a cool technique, shearing leaves and then placing them on chopped logs to create room plants! by that point i hadn't disovered flowers, and wouldn't cotninue to do so for a very long time. other projects ensued, and eventually i had a small outpost in the desert 100 blocks from my other things, as well as a cactus-protected storehouse. then, something terrible happened. one night whilst hunting for monsters, i was low on health so i fled to the storehouse, but i poked myself on a cactus. everything i had was gone. it was one of hte most tragic moments. i had to venture into the depths of the caves once more. after many deaths and tries, i got a decent iron set again, and started to look around on the surface. i realised it was snowing in the taiga, and i could collect snow, so i made place and gathered snow and built a snow castle. it was cramped and awkward, so i wasnt satisfied with it. then, my mind was blank, and i didn't know what else to do. i looked out onto a swamp, and decided to build a few mudhuts there before leaving, it all felt pointless and meaningless. so i deleted the world and moved on to other things like smp and other games. i regret it to this day, it was the world i treasured the most, all those memories will be gone forever.

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I got tired of Minecraft because of its abysmall combat system. It took ages for the game to give the player shields and item enchantments or healing items. It took years for the stamina bar to affect combat.

However even with all of these things, I still can't justify the game, or purchase. The enemy variety is still abysmally poor, with the only unique enemy being the Spider-Jocky. But, even if there were more enemy variety there's another reason why I just can't get into Minecraft.

That being the combat animations. The combat animations to this day still sucks ass, and there's only one mod out there that actually gives the enemies animations and it's not a fully realized or finished mod at that. If you're interested in the mod's name it's Mo Bends.

There's also other things that have prevented me from playing the game though, it's not just the combat, but combat is the biggest culprit for me. Another big reason why is because I have to mod into the game Minecolonies and Millenaire to make the world feel alive, and have some sort of progression to it. However due to Java's limitations, as well as Mojang plus Microsoft's refusal to move the game to C++ these two mods are advancing at a snail's pace. 

Moreover Minecolony has been abandoned multiple times and has had to scrap a lot of features such as fortress walls and militias. There's also the death of one of my favorite Trains and Blimps mods along with my favorite furniture mods made by a /v/irgin. It hurts to say, but I just can't go back to Minecraft. For me there's been two hotness ever since they were in a playable state, those being Castle Story and Timber and Stone.

Here's my opinions on them

Castle Story is basically old school Minecraft but as an RTS. Meaning no hunger systems, enchantments etc. but I don't care. The game let's me build giant ass fortresses that I have to defend against roughly 70 waves of difficult enemies. There's two other game modes, but one is a sandbox, the other is a boring control points thing that is better played against people, not the shitty AI.

The game has its problems though,for starters the wave difficulty is based on a dice roll, so the difficulty spikes can be really unfair at times. Additionally the AI has some big problems with its pathfinding, and the civilian units constantly like doing suicide attacks against enemies, even enemies that can one shot them. There's also a memory leak bug that creeps up if you play the game for more than 3-5 hours.

Also the devs are really incompetent at game balancing and when a bug is too hard to fix they remove features from the game. In the old days of the game your units wouldn't be able to phase in our out of each other, they actually colided with each other and could create traffic jams if you designed your castle poorly. Also in the old days you would be able to build armies of around 40 before the game would crash. Now the devs put in a population limit of 15. Which you can increase but you have to do it via the game's lua config settings, the Devs are total faggots and tell the community they're never letting the player base change this setting via normal menus too.

In terms of balancing, there's a straight up hierarchy to combat units, knights are more powerful than halberdiers, which are equal to arbalests, which are stronger than archers. It's super lame, and due to the devs being lazy shits, getting zerg rushed by the weakest units in the game is perfectly possible. In single player it means you will be doing nothing but spamming Knights, and archers at enemies. However there will be a point where you will be spamming AI Sentry guns instead.

But despite this I still find it a fun RTS game due to the fact that how you build your obstacles, trenches and fort itself really determines how you play the game.

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 >>/11473/
Timber and Stone, Timber and Stone is basically Dwarf Fortress lite to be honest, it's a very fun game if you go in without high expectations. If you go in expecting the full DF experience but in 3d you're setting yourself up for failure. I unfortunately don't have that many interesting screen caps for it, so herer's another castle story screen instead.

 >>/11473/
Minecraft isn't about the combat though

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 >>/11498/
It's a survival game where the most important resource (gunpowder) for terraformation is locked behind mob farming. The combat being shit severely detracts from the overall experience. Sure you could be an autist and design a mob farming machine to do the work for you, but until you have a steady supply of materials to do so, combat is still a crucial aspect. So no, one of Minecraft's key gameplay aspects is combat, and it's fucking garbage in singleplayer and arguably multiplayer as well.