Empire of Sin - Brenda and John Romero's turn-based Mafia strategy

[thesheeep]

when is the patch coming to remove women from the game?

Same day you'll get one to actually talk to you.

Spoiler

 

[Saduj]

Anyone play this since the patch came out?

 

[thesheeep]

Anyone play this since the patch came out?

I did see a streamer play it after the last bigger patch (?) hit - that's probably the closest you'll get to a first-hand account right now, as quickly as this game was dropped by people.

Let's just say the streamer played it for half a day and I haven't seen him go back to it since. And he's the kind of guy playing Battle Brothers, XCOM, TW: WH2 for days straight, so it should be in his ballpark.
The words were: "It is better than on release, for sure, but... eh... *shrugs*".

Very forgettable is not the best thing that can be said about a game.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

list of games designed by women that were actually good:

 

[Morblot]

list of games designed by women that were actually good:

Gabriel Knight?

 

[ferratilis]

Soul Reaver

 

[zapotec]

Portal

 

[prengle]

list of games designed by women that were actually good:

most of roberta williams' games?

 

[Zombra]

If we're doing this, let's cut right to the heart. Wizardry 8 is a fucking masterpiece. Go ahead and look up who the lead designer was. I dare you.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

If we're doing this, let's cut right to the heart. Wizardry 8 is a fucking masterpiece. Go ahead and look up who the lead designer was. I dare you.

 

[J_C]

list of games designed by women that were actually good:

Gabriel Knight?

Soul Reaver

Portal

most of roberta williams' games?

If we're doing this, let's cut right to the heart. Wizardry 8 is a fucking masterpiece. Go ahead and look up who the lead designer was. I dare you.

 

[LESS T_T]

https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/en/year-end-report-2020/

In the fourth quarter we released the mafia game Empire of Sin, which takes place in 1920s Chicago. We are not satisfied with the launch, neither with the quality of the game nor how it was received by the market. After a game launch, we always do a thorough review of the project so that we can learn and become better at ensuring quality in our games to get closer to what players expected. For Empire of Sin, we have now released a number of updates to develop the game in the right direction and we will continue to build on the game for the future.

 

[Alienman]

Basically, Paradox is learning what Codex had to learn these last couple of years, and well, it was a hard pill to swallow... and that is that all the old legendary developers have nothing left to give and is just a waste of investment money. See the Vampire thread for more on this

 

[AdamReith]

Basically, Paradox is learning what Codex had to learn these last couple of years, and well, it was a hard pill to swallow... and that is that all the old legendary developers have nothing left to give and is just a waste of investment money. See the Vampire thread for more on this

If they brought back these teams in their entirety instead of the token attention whore of each one I gaurantee it would be a different story.

 

[thesecret1]

It really depends. The sad fact of the matter is that most older developers no longer play games. Sure, they still move around the industry and all, but the time they spend to actually play videogames is zero. As such, they professionally stagnate – they aren't exposed to the new advances in the genre, they reinvent the wheel because they don't know their genius idea has already been tried and perfected many times, they lost all touch with what the target audience actually wants, they do not see the flaws in design (because seeing the flaws in design straight away comes chiefly from personal experience), and they themselves got rusty and forgot a lot of things. I'm sure that many would say something like "they're old, games are for young people and children, if you play games after you're 30, you're a no-life manchild" and similar dross, but whatever your opinion on that matter may be, the fact is that if you are a game developer, and want to be good, you just need to play games. There is no going around it.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Older devs aren't willing to subsist on a diet of mountain dew and pizza while living in an office and sleeping on the floor.
Neither are the younger ones anymore either.

Unless you're willing to sacrifice for it you're going to produce mostly junk. Do you think michelangelo worked 40 hours a week?
Most of the good games recently have been passion project indie games.

 

[AdamReith]

Older devs aren't willing to subsist on a diet of mountain dew and pizza while living in an office and sleeping on the floor.
Neither are the younger ones anymore either.

Unless you're willing to sacrifice for it you're going to produce mostly junk. Do you think michelangelo worked 40 hours a week?
Most of the good games recently have been passion project indie games.

Older devs worth their salt have a well established pipeline that allows them to hammer together a high quality game on a tight schedule that ticks all the boxes. They also have the confidence to refine and expand the gameplay in meaningful ways that don't involve challenging our perceptions of what a game "is" or similar sales spew.

Unfortunately that sort of person is the same kind that wouldn't touch modern game development with a pole, leaving it for clueless "innovators" and wannabe celebrities.

 

[J1M]

Soul Reaver

Does writing dialogue count as designing?

 

[Harthwain]

Soul Reaver

Does writing dialogue count as designing?

Amy Henning wasn't just a writer of Soul Reaver. She was also a creative director, co-producer and co-designer.

 

[J1M]

Soul Reaver

Does writing dialogue count as designing?

Amy Henning wasn't just a writer of Soul Reaver. She was also a creative director, co-producer and co-designer.

I have a lot of respect for the writing she did on that series. This is the first I've heard that she was involved in its game design. With 4+ job titles on a single game, I am curious which gameplay systems she designed?

 

[Harthwain]

I have a lot of respect for the writing she did on that series. This is the first I've heard that she was involved in its game design. With 4+ job titles on a single game, I am curious which gameplay systems she designed?

At the time Hennig was already busying herself with a novel game idea of her own: a third-person action/puzzle solving game called ‘Shifter’ where the undead lead character could alternate between the worlds of the living and the dead.

Source: https://seonaidhceanneidigh.wordpress.com/2015/03/09/legacy-of-kain-retrospective-soul-reaver/

Beyond that it's hard to say, because she isn't taking the sole credit in the interviews:

And as a designer, I still take pride in the originality of Soul Reaver’s vision, and the unified way we were able to mesh the game mechanics with the fiction – e.g., devouring souls for sustenance, and the way the spectral plane was integrated into the health system; how the combat mechanics were designed around defeating immortal vampires; the ability to glide on broken wings; and the balance between Raziel’s mechanics in the spirit and material realms, especially the ability to use the morphing terrain to your advantage.

Source: https://legacyofkain.fandom.com/wik..._Talks_Soul_Reaver_Secrets_(PlayStation_Blog)

 

[gurugeorge]

It really depends. The sad fact of the matter is that most older developers no longer play games. Sure, they still move around the industry and all, but the time they spend to actually play videogames is zero. As such, they professionally stagnate – they aren't exposed to the new advances in the genre, they reinvent the wheel because they don't know their genius idea has already been tried and perfected many times, they lost all touch with what the target audience actually wants, they do not see the flaws in design (because seeing the flaws in design straight away comes chiefly from personal experience), and they themselves got rusty and forgot a lot of things. I'm sure that many would say something like "they're old, games are for young people and children, if you play games after you're 30, you're a no-life manchild" and similar dross, but whatever your opinion on that matter may be, the fact is that if you are a game developer, and want to be good, you just need to play games. There is no going around it.

My impression of game developers is that they don't play videogames, beyond a basic level. I've never seen a developer do a live play who isn't a klutz who, bafflingly, doesn't seem to understand their own game (from the end-user's point of view).

But I don't think they can actually. It's an opportunity cost thing: playing games "properly" takes a chunk out of the day, time people no longer have when they're spending most of the time actually making games and raising a family. It's analogous to the situation with the dumbing-down of games generally: you grow up, become a professional of some sort, have a family, and then you only have maybe a precious hour every now and then to play games, so the games you prefer to buy are games that can be taken in bite-sized chunks with a heavy emphasis on visual immersion, i.e. relatively dumb games.

IOW, you can no longer afford to be really obsessed by a game so that you can do nothing but live and breathe it for a few weeks or months. (Of course the developer lives and breathes their game, but not in the playing sense, in the sense of being buried deep in the sausage factory.)

Certainly, they must have been gamers proper at some point in their earlier lives, to have developed a love for the thing, but the irony is they probably stopped playing games soon after they started making them.

And that isn't such an awful situation, provided they have a good Q&A dept and get feedback from players (there's enough back-linkage to being a gamer for them to understand the feedback); the only problem is that their gut feeling for games was developed when they actually played them, so their sense for ideas for games gets out of date eventually.

That's my impression anyway, from years of seeing, reading and reading about developers.

 

[J1M]

I diagnose that problem differently. So many people want to become game designers that those that do are rarely the best candidates. The industry selects people for that role that are the best at becoming game designers (through personal connections, luck, nepotism, doing menial tasks on previous projects, etc.), not the people that are the best at designing game systems that players enjoy.

It is absolutely possible to be an avid game player of respectable skill level that also has a family and a decent career. It's the bare minimum the industry should expect and there's hundreds of qualified candidates out there, but to get to them you have to turn down those that are at the top of the list due to adverse selection parameters.

EDIT: Forgot to mention how common it is for game designers, especially those that got into the industry in its golden age, to say that you really just need a General Arts degree so that you are "well-rounded" because that's what they happen to have.

 

[Infinitron]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-some-stuff-to-resolve-automatically.1460328/

Changelog - Beta Branch 1.04

The Highlights

• Autoresolve - The goal of combat auto-resolve for Empire of Sin is to create a reliable and useful source of information for the player that appears before every fight. When the Player initiates a fight or a Faction AI initiates a fight with the player, the combat auto-resolve screen will appear.
  • This screen presents players with information about the fight, the participants in the fight, their professions, and equipment, as well as a number of options that the player can select.
  • Players can select the "Fight" option to manually enter combat and manually fight the fight or select the "Auto-Resolve" option to attempt and auto-resolve the fight based on the projected odds at the top of the screen.
  • A word of warning, your Bosses and Gangsters can and will take damage when using the auto-resolve option. If your Boss dies, it's game over.
• The Safehouse healing exploit has now been removed. The passive healing in the Safehouse is now 2x normal passive healing rather than instant heal.

Spoiler

Combat

• Fixed Ally Threat being wrongfully applied when you are not at war
• Fixed issues with the lifeline ability; one which could cause it to be applied incorrectly to combat actors and one where the bonus could become stuck on a character
• Fixed a formatting issue in a combat error message
• Fixed a bug where characters could be warped out of the combat bounds at the beginning of combat if that character had been knocked down or killed by an overwatch shot in a previous combat
• Doubled the chance of getting healing items in combat and reduced their cost to buy in the shop by 30%
• Characters not moving back into cover after an Overwatch miss shot from a step out position should be fixed now
• Peeking, switching sides from a 90 degree angle and multiple cover values should now be fixed
• Smaller miscellaneous changes and fixes related to cover and peeking have been implemented
• Crew members who have been fired or who have quit will now hold a grudge, and can not be instantly rehired
• Factions you are invited to war against are now revealed
• Double Tap now uses the correct icon on ground tiles when selected
• All higher tier doctors now start with the Heal ability
• Fixed an issue where dead bodies and civilians would block the mouse when trying to move to squares in combat
• Remedy will no longer be absent on the talent tree, if the player had saved the game when Remedy was a consumable item instead of a persistent talent and their current talent tier is greater than 3
• Fixed First Aid Kit, no longer applies the Bandaged status effect when used outside of combat.
• Standardized how Heal abilities work
• Now only showing "Difficulty X/5" on thug owned buildings
• Guard Inventory Improvements: Added healing items to all major faction guards, removed short barrelled shotguns from shotgun guards, replaced short barrelled shotguns with primary shotguns
• Racket Guard Improvements: Increased the Marksmanship attribute for all tiers of racket guards by +10
• Reworked how Bullet Shield behaves
• Removed always bleeding out and removed shared damage
• Gave law enforcement the subdue action at the start of combat
• Unleash Fury and Exhaustion improvements have been made
• Changed the effect of the exhaustion debuff and now show an animation at the beginning of Frankie's turn if he's exhausted
• Improved the UI for stackable status effects
• Reduced Unleash Fury's attack count from 4 to 3 to match its animation
• Cover animations and transitions are now faster
• Added new double fire animations and transitions
• Adjusted starting cash based on difficulty
• Fixed selection bug after combat
• Hired Gun - Iteration - Sweep - Removed sweep as talent, making it an SMG and machine gun ability, replacing the talent with Can Opener
• Added the Can Opener ability
• Unleash Fury Changed: Updated action panel description to mention exhaustion. Slightly reduced the base damage and critical hit chance, but increased critical hit damage modifier
• Initiative changes for NPCs and player characters. Improves the layering of characters during combat
• Stopped z-fighting on target reticles
• Changed the behaviour of Unleash Fury so that it refunds AP instead of costing none
• Stopped the AI from throwing too many knives during fan of knives. Apologies to all knife fans.
• Reworked Hair Trigger
• Added basic combat personalities to bosses and RPCs
• Handgun Changes: Added Double Fire Handgun Ability
• Fixed issue with melee damage modifiers not working as a percentage
• Hitting a target from the back with a Knock Out now puts the target in the Knocked Out state
• Applying the Knock Out state on a character not in cover no longer generates a console error and a 1 second freeze on the target
• Unleash Fury now plays hit and miss audio correctly
• Added a fade after auto resolve
• Further weapon balancing
• Fixed an issue with animators gettings stuck after auto resolving certain fights

UI

• Added hotkey numbers to the combat HUD
• Changed the badass bonus for better telegraphing to the player
• Gang leader equipped description added
• Made cash values in diplomacy dialogs cleaner
• Removed held items from AI inventories in the trade screen
• Adjusted visuals of learned/unlearned talents so that they look less similar
• Added difficulty warning on the "Are you sure?" combat attack popups
• Added [GREET] to boss intro pop ups
• After the black market tutorial involving the radial menu has been completed, the allowed selectable buttons that were previously disabled from the tutorial's white list now get enabled when the player comes back
• Fixed the highlighting on "review" button on Crew screen
• Added missing titles to events
• Passive scroll now resets properly in the Racket info screen
• Added a warning window to sell building dialogue if selling the building may fail or relocate a mission
• Now showing "0" instead of "-" for characters who are forced hirable
• Added titles to hire confirmation windows
• Added tooltips to diplomacy tabs
• Adjusted tooltip for notifications to use accurate timing
• Added modifier name for life lesson
• Added notification for when s temporary alliance times out
• Ensured that visualization of customers and earnings are up to date
• Added extra tab to journal to separate boss/side missions from bridging/empire missions
• Now showing info about racket takeover and notoriety gain/loss in post combat screen
• Now allowing scrolling on "events" section of post-combat screen
• Added "Discuss" option to Diplomacy tab
• Added new icons for Can Opener
• Updated status effect tooltips to calculate effects based on stacks
• Stopped clock icon in resource summary panel from highlighting and playing mouse enter and click sounds
• Made the mission tutorial open on the correct tab in the tutorial
• Made the resource summary buttons non-interactive when ui is blocked
• Tooltip polish

Missions

• Fixed an issue with marking buildings as mission critical when they are acquired from placements
• Delayed mission fails that happen mid combat now wait until combat has finished which should prevent softlocks from characters being deleted mid combat
• Fixed Lost and Found where a softlock could happen after interaction with thugs. The game would get stuck on a loading screen trying to enter racket
• That issue where some missions would give rewards even when they failed. It’s gone, boss. It could cause an error with other missions completing if one of the rewards was an item
• The Broken Menagerie mission that wouldn’t continue if the fight happens before thug fight? Yeah that got whacked.
• Mission text fixes
• Mission critical NPCs now fall unconscious if they are involved in other combats, rather than dying and getting up when you need to talk to them. If we had zombies, they wouldn’t snitch
• Mission fixes - Monks quest not completing if you kill Wally without talking to him, converting a derelict to brewery for two brew completes brewery objective, adding the and a to dialogue where derelict building appears, not finding Stanley and Bert in In The Trenches and Red Handed if the building is sold, moving NPCs away from buildings in an attempt to make them easier to select by controllers
• Added warning to mole event if making that gangster a mole will fail their personal mission
• Adjusted Fail Mission text to mention specific gangsters, fixing small typos, changed mission description text in Cop Bar mission
• Fixed issue where blowing up 3rd polling station is sometimes unavailable in DMJ’s mission, It Came From The Lake event not showing proper racket name, checking that gangsters aren't injured or sent away before making them a mole
• Fixed softlock after upgrading brewery in Whatcha Gonna Do. Fix for npcs stuck in cowering animation when combat ends too early, Fix for instant fail on Izzy’s Been Busy
• Fixed Reyna House On Fire failing when someone dies
• Fixed gangster personal missions activating with moles
• Fixed cash being deducted twice from Hit Em Where It Hurts
• Fixed the softlock happening after clicking on NPC quickly after conversation in Mock mission

General

• The game now randomly unlocks 1 gangster from each tier every month and makes them hirable on start
• Added building textures
• Fixed minor inconsistencies between VO and text in sitdowns
• Fixed issue with Synergies not disbanding when buildings are taken over by other factions
• Fixed missing gun cabinet mesh in Character Select Screen
• The traffic that was stopped in place after the Tutorial is now moving again
• Fixed an issue with loot screens popping up when other factions find them, removing cash from loot crate drops for 1.03
• The Steam overlay no longer causes an error on the console
• Found the missing letters on the map for the Municipal Pier
• The player won't be able to talk to the bartender during the tutorial anymore
• If Hugh and/or Maria are spawned in the world and the player skips the tutorial: they now storm off in a huff if they weren't hired by the player
• If tutorial meat packers spawn and the player skips the tutorial without going into combat with them: we automatically just kill them - they deserve it, the dirty rats
• Anyone hired in the Tutorial now continues to get the employment loyalty bonus
• Added a new line of sight indicator icon to show bleeding out characters
• Fixed a potential blocker on the alcohol tutorial when re-enabling the tutorial during the game
• Allowed alcohol storage limits for diplomatic actions to be spread across all available storage
• Updated localisation
• Additional checks by minor faction AI to ensure target faction has requested alcohol before making trade request have been added
• Added mouse wheel scrolling to the Alcohol and Finance screens
• Fixed an issue with buildings changing racket type too soon when given as a reward causing errors with thugs trying to find space
• Fixed issues with the camera when focussing on a character
• Made sure the alcohol tutorial only triggers if the player is on the correct tab.
• Fixed non-interactive Skip Tutorial prompt
• Added miss animations when a player is peeking out
• Removed sound effect when AI picks up loot crate
• Halved the take floor on Earl Weiss
• Explosion vfx updates
• Fixed an issue where guards and squad members could have their movement indicators activated
• Changed Safehouse discovery chances
• Sit-downs can no longer happen at invalid buildings
• Fixed an issue where two location loads could be called at the same time, leading to the camera ending up in the wrong location
• Slider in trading menu has louder SFX
• Button select audio improved
• Re-recorded Antonio's voice
• Fixed an error when hovering over interactable safehouse objects (blackboard, world map desk etc.) with virtual cursor in combat
• Added "begin sitdown" cursor
• Fixed Elvira’s evil laugh
• Audio added for "You've made a terrible mistake" after declaring war
• Stephanie is now as loud as the other bosses
• We now trigger an investigation event before launching a FactionMet conversation
• Limited alcohol amount setting to prevent going negative
• Skip tutorial option now inaccessible if coming from a conversation or sitdown
• Fixed text in It Came from the Lake event
• Moved all floating lamp posts down to the ground
• Implemented the L Train
• Standing Orders are removed when one of the factions involved is eliminated
• Factions will wait at least 2 minutes in world time before breaking pacts they've formed
• Removed unnecessary loading screens for player on accepting a sitdown request
• Requesting a sit-down now always focuses on the sitdown building on the world map
• Fixed incorrect default camera position when entering interiors
• Fixed several issues around combat and location locks and transitions
• Fixed slight overshoot on world map camera pans
• Long distance pans on the World Map will now take up to 2 seconds to complete (to avoid crazy fast panning
• Adjusted decision to ignore rating of war target when determining whether or not to uphold pact
• Fixed issue where attacking a building with a gangster while your boss is elsewhere would load the boss's location first
• Ensured that the combat grid calculation uses the proper combat bounds
• Make boss abilities use a kill cooldown
• Fixed Earl Weiss missing ragdoll
• Reduced the costs to buy and upgrade rackets by 50%
• Updated safehouses and Large Casino environments
• Fixed Safehouse chair colliders and Safehouse desk not being interactive
• Made tutorial responses consistent, small fixes to text in tutorial
• Fixed issue that prevented you from selecting moles
• Now displaying the ability cooldown in ability tooltips and on the action information panel description
• Fixed camera position in all interiors
• Fixed occasional issue on Mac where the game hardlocks on boss selection screen
• Updated Frankie Donovan’s Base stats
• Lowered bartering value of items/weapons. Better visualization for disguised alcohol. Instant discovery of disguised alcohol bought-back
• Removed Kill requirement from boss abilities
• Added a delay to the bandage scenario when bandage will revive a character to allow time for the animation to play
• Ensured that loans are removed after economy lock is over
• Changed the take over option in the investigate introduction to start exterior combat, requiring the player to declare war before attacking
• Player is no longer incorrectly notified that police refused to turn a blind eye for another faction
• Added new guard combat VO lines
• 2 new combat songs, Safehouse songs and Racket songs added
• Double VO on boss execution fixed
• Characters now shut the hell up when the game is paused
• Meat Hook / Lion Tamer fixed: character who is the target says "Shit" instead of the attacker
• Made sure investigating police spawn at different locations
• We no longer show a message when a character is healed of their injury or is released from jail if they are no longer in your faction
• Tweaked gear score item rarity contributions
• Stopped the extended combat tutorial from triggering outside of full combat
• Made sure the equipment tutorials don't fire when the game menu is open
• Cancelled the equip ammo tutorial if the player doesn't have a primary weapon equipped when it starts
• Changed Black Market health item quantities
• Changed Norah Quinn's notoriety gate to 0
• Increased loot tables for health items by 10%
• Fixed placeholder button prompts showing up when loading a saved controller tutorial step

 

[Lhynn]

I played this game for about 5 hours last night and i thought it was alright. The sheer amount of wombyn felt really off, the benefits from making pacts were pathetic, and the weapons you get at the start of the game from the DLC? make you an unstoppable killing machine. But i believe that as long as those numbers get tweaked it should be fine.