The combat was honestly subpar (especially guns), but the quest design, character design, conversation and skill/clan system was super well done (I would argue these are critical elements for gameplay).

But those 81 cities take up a tiny portion of global land area.

A quick Excel import of the table from Wikipedia suggests that the “urban area” for those 81 cities is 190 K KM(2).

Total land mass on early 148.94 M KM(2).

So the world land could hold ~63,400 such cities.

It would likely take many years to build a city like Guadalajara (#81 on the wikipedia list).

So basically it has little to do with the original VTMB and what made it great (other than the brand name).

They should have just made a random vampire adventure game.

I think The Chinese Room makes solid games, but they have zero experience in immersive, complex RPGs.

Was going to try this on the weekend.

Too bad the demo is so bare bones.

I wonder if it would be possible to make a single-player release for EOL.

I’ve been meaning to try this out.
Thanks for the reminder!

It also depends on the genre/community.

For city-buildet (especially indie ones), tycoon games and economic strategy in general, people are usually very chill with the most heated discussion being about nerdy gameplay issues.

For what it’s worth, this has always been their style (I started reading them in 2010), even before the Eurogamer acquisition in 2017 or so.

I agree that it does feel more forced now, they a bit more subtle and tasteful back in the day.

I loved many of Bullfrog’s games (Theme Hospital, Theme Park World, Syndicate/Syndicate Wars) and games like Dungeon Keeper, Populous, Magic Carpet are widely respected (I didn’t get to play them back in the day).

The problem is that Peter Molyneux has arguably become a scammer.

Before even launching his previous “game”, Legacy, he got £40 M selling virtual land where making real money was the key driver (the theory was you would rent to players who didn’t join the pre-sale) .

It was a complete failure and the core gameplay was shit. Like playing an underbaked, extremely grindy mobile strategy game, but on PC. I played about an hour of it out of curiosity.

Molyneux claims money from Legacy is being used for Masters of Albion. That may not be as good of a thing as one would imagine (what he said can interpreted in different ways); as Masters of Albion looks and feels a lot like Legacy.

I think it’s done well, with style and flair.

Noticed that as well (even though I didn’t include it in the heading). :)

That’s not fully true, a decent amount of Steam games have zero DRM. It’s not as convenient as the GOG installers, but you can make an archive of the installed game and run it again without Steam.

I say this as a long time user of GOG who tries to get games from them over Steam (when possible).

Yeah, that sounds about right. Although it does a bit funny. :)

There is no mention of asynchronous online gameplay on their page. Just single player or “classical” coop.

I clearly am a gamer, but I hate that term. I wish there was a more neutral, almost formal term.

I am not American, I have a completely different perspective on this topic than most North Americans (lived there for a decade, as well as Europe and Asia for many years).

I was using the term in a very broad sense. Think of it as more of an “off the cuff” remark.

I generally use Steam forums/news for relatively niche indie/AA games in the economic strategy/city-builder genres. Rarely do you encounter overly heated discussion with some exceptions around Denuvo use or a particularly intense debate about gameplay approaches.

But I have seen some sections of Steam that honestly look surreal due to the level of toxicity and the overall bad faith tone.

Valve should honestly police this stuff, they have more than enough resources to do so, but they won’t since it goes against the “scalability and automation” mantra of modern technology companies.

P.S. I don’t consider free speech issues to be relevant in this case. One can always start their own site/forum and spam it with whatever they like. If product owners finds this valuable, they can join the shitbox.

The Roottrees Are Dead are on my wishlist, promising to hear folks give good feedback in the wild.

Discoverability is an issue with the OG name, although I agree with you in general.