Hearts of Iron IV or HOI4 for short is a grand strategy game from Paradox Interactive AB. Right now on Steam, I have 822.7 hours played of the game. The game is very fun and captivating as it was able to hold my attention for so long. I have found the gameplay to be very satisfying, but it can sometimes be annoying when the AI decides not to cooperate with you.
Gameplay is very complex, but also very enjoyable to master. You pick a nation during WW2 and have to naviage it through the war by managing the politics, military and economy of your nation. Countries have "National Focus" trees that let you pick a path for your nation to go down and improve yourself. Most are unique to each country. Factories can be used to build infrastructure, railways, other factories and an assortment of buildings like forts, airbases, anti-air towers and fuel silos to improve the capabilities of your nation during warfare. War is where the game really gets interesting. You move around individual units, but can assign frontlines. Warfare is dynamic and complicated as you can customize almost every aspect of your armies like your division composition and creating your own tanks. Visually, the game does not stand out, but is by no means bad. The graphics are detailed and pretty but aren't anything to be impressed by. Animations are smooth but not complicated and the map is clear so it's easy to see everything going on. The UI can be a bit challenging for new players as there are a lot of menus to naviage through, but once you learn where everything is, there isn't any issues with it. Controls are simple and the game can be played entirely with a mouse although keyboard shortcuts make things faster. Options for graphics and audio are on the more basic side but are perfectly servicable and fuctional. There is a tutorial but I suggest for players to jump straight into the game because learning from experience is more fun and fulfilling to me rather than using the tutorial. You can't play the game if you're blind but I don't think that video games are really on the agenda for blind people in general. People who struggle with hand movements might struggle with the mouse but most things are easy to click. Text is legible and the UI has a scaling slider to make it as big as you want. There were not any typing errors that I could see. The game is stable and does not crash often, but mods can be an issue sometimes because they are fanmade so quality cannot be verified. The base game though is very stable. There aren't any dead ends since the game can be saved and loaded at any times and no stalemate truly lasts forever. My rating for the game is Five stars because it is a quality game with infinite replayability. Also I sold my sould to be good at the game and cannot say otherwise.
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The process for creating this game was surprisingly long to me. I started with just the forest area where I created floors and a wall. Then I made a particle system to simulate rain which took a days worth of work. After that, I took seamless images of the ground and turned them into complex lit textures to apply to the forest floor. I also created a flashlight and put it under the camera so it follows it. Next, I created the side areas and put in the trees. After that I created my maze, textured it using the same technique of seamless textures and then I needed to think of what I wanted to come next. I decided to return to the first forest thing, but change things up by going surreal. I got rid of the walls and had floating impossible trees to make it interesting. Finally I made a cave using a very crumpled and distorted tunnel made from a cube. At the very end I put a small room where I placed my 3d object. My 3d object is the Untextured Dodecahedron on a Pedestal which I made very quickly in 3DS Max.
In my time on the internet, I've heard a lot about Unity. I myself never had any personal biases against it. I didn't think it was as powerful as something like Unreal Engine 4, but I never thought it was bad. Quite a few games that I like, notably Cities: Skylines, was made in Unity. Despite that, I've heard many people online say that they do not like the Unity engine. It's not because of the actual engine itself though, but rather the games that come out of it. So, the question is, is the problem Unity, or the people that use it?
My belief is that it's the users. What Unity offers you is a powerful engine that's not insanely hard to use for absolutely free. It's a no brainer to pick up if you're interested in game design. Because of this though, there tends to be no shortage of bad games made by people. I think it's unfair to blame the Unity Engine for the amount of bad games that comes out of it's free software. The nature of the internet is that if you offer a free service to people, anyone and everyone who encounters it will use it. What's there to lose? Below: This shows some of the tokens in the game, including the cards and die that are used for determining random chance aspects of the game. Below: Shows a portion of the game. As you can see, it shows players moving in different directions as they attempt to explore the cave as quickly as possible. Below: Shows the exit of the cave and two players who won.
Flow is the state achieved when you get in "the zone." Time passes quickly, day turns to night, and you fail to notice your eyes are as dry as the Sahara until you close them and it stings. Your mouth is sour and your head slightly hurts around the sides. All of these feelings come when you spend hours upon hours playing because you were stuck in a state of flow. Flow is important for the design of video games, since it's the end goal for most games to have their players be invested in the game so much that they fail to notice anything else. For this example, I chose the classic game Half-Life. It's super easy to enter a state where all you do is run, think, shoot and live. Half-Life has a simple gameplay loop, but it's highly dynamic and adaptable. You explore, find supplies, defeat enemies, solve a puzzle, and then move on to the next location to do it again. What makes this fun is how satisfying it is to solve the puzzle, how curious you are to open the boxes and doors, and how exciting it is when a horde of zombies or soldiers come your way and you know the only way you're getting out alive is based on your own skill at shooting and dodging. Half-Life was carefully designed to give the player this feeling, There are moments of peace and quiet every so often to give the player a moment of calm so they can take the time to appreciate the environment. Some may think this breaks the state of flow because it removes the player from the action, but I'd argue the opposite is true. It makes the player feel excited for the next time action comes, and also curious as to what's around them. The player becomes lost in exploration and progression as they tensely wait for the next time to fight. The way the weapons feel also helps. They're all super satisfying to use. The areas I included are important because it shows how the gameplay is staggered, not to break, but to strengthen the gameplay. However, the last part of the game on Xen does break this, and commonly skipped by fans.
Oh boy, it's currently 12:34 AM and I'm writing my blog post. I realized though before making this, that I always seemed to get hit with inspiration at night. Why was that exactly? Why was it that when I'm lying in bed, I feel the urge to write or draw? What is it about lying down that psychologically inclines us to get up and start doing something creative? I really didn't have a clear answer. I decided to dig into this and see why this was the case. After doing some digging on the internet, the prevailing theory has to do with how our brains react to sleep and nighttime as a whole. During the night, your body has much less to focus on. This decreses the amount of energy your body spends on analytical thinking and other life processes. The effective result of this is that spare energy is able to be dedicated to things like creativity. You also have much less distractions and obligations at night. While throughout the day, assuming you don't have a job in a creative field, you probably don't have a ton of free time to give to creative tasks. At night however, this burdon is lifted from your shoulders and you can take the time to be creative. In summary, it's not my fault I stay up late doing things. It's my brain's... which technically is me.
On September 12th, I celebrated the two year anniversary of my job as a freelance voice actor. And oh boy, what an uneventful two years it has been for me. Sure, I was fairly active. Soon I'll be reaching the 100 auditions point, but despite that it's been rather quiet. One problem that I've noticed in the industry is the lack of apparent proactiveness from a lot of my directors and staff that I work with. I get the constant feeling that I'm the only person working on the project, and I'm only doing voice lines. In another situation, I had to put the entire video together myself on the behalf of the director just so something would get put out. This is the problem I have noticed in the field of freelance and unprofessional work. There just isn't any structure or motivation to finish things. This lack of motivation for small groups though is something I've noticed outside of voice acting however. In groups of people I work with that make games, I don't see much getting done. Friends of mine who are very talented artists aren't getting anything done. It seems as though people who work independently just get less done than those who are part of a structure. Why this is has been on my mind for a while. Was it because there was nobody but themselves to get them to do it? Was it an effect from the stress and drain of quarantine? I don't frankly have a clear cut answer.
Around the start of quarantine, I reviewed a game called Pathologic. I feel now that quarantine is wrapping up that it's a good time to revisit the game and give a new outlook. At it's core, Pathologic is a game about self interests. When playing through the game as the various characters, you can see their interactions with you and other characters in different lenses. In your first playthough, you'll likely pick The Bachelor of Medicine. Daniil Dankovsky comes from a large city and is an outsider just like you. He tries to help people sincerely but struggles to break through the various cultural hurdles the city throws. As an example, a bull is impaled on a spike by accident. You want it burned as it's clearly a health code violation, but if you're playing as The Haruspex, who is an insider, you needed to collect it's blood to make a medicine. It shows how in both playthought you compete against yourself because no one person knows all or what's the best. Maybe the medicine was key, or maybe it was useless. It's impossible to know. As the disease spreads, there is a lack of alarm until authority is put into control. For days people walk about with very little worry as the Sand Plague spreads fast and kills even faster. When the military arrives to put down the disease, all hell breaks loose. I can only see this transition from unorganized peace to organized chaos as hauntingly prophetic...
A new product on Steam is the lowest reviewed of all time. I'm a huge fan of Paradox Interactive's games. With hundreds of hours placed in their games, I've found them to be well worth their price... that is if you like to install mods because the games by themselves are incomplete. Paradox for a while know has been critiqued for it's aggressive DLC policy. Often times they'll release games and then make DLC after DLC for said games. There's nothing inherently wrong with DLC, but when you're charging people full price for a game and then asking them to pay 2 or 3x that price for the full game, people take notice. And notice they did when Europa Universalis got a new DLC. It cost the price of a full game, about $20, and yet, it was entirely broken. Broken graphics, broken code and broken mechanics. This has called into question the validity of DLC as requirements for full games. A lot of people's grief has been directed at Paradox because of their priority of DLC over actual game content. They have been cited as using a strategy of releasing games early and unfinished but playable before then adding the content people expected in the first place at a price. This can be seen especially with the game Imperator which was slammed with bad reviews for being uncomplete and people knowing what was coming next. The pressure mounted so firecly that Paradox ended up updating the game for free. But what about Europa? The DLC currently sits at 8% Positive with over 4,000 reviews. It costs $20 which is half the price of the base game and recent reviews for Europa itself have fallen to Mixed. It's unclear currently what Paradox's strategy is for EU4, but it likely won't make such a blunder again. Hopefully.
Everybody knows Team Fortress 2. If not by name but at least by image. It's characters and design is a massive part of internet pop culture. It's gameplay is renouned for it's greatness. With that said, I might have a TF2 problem. According to Steam, I just crossed my 660th hour played which is a lot. So why is the game so loved? Why is it the top 10 most played games per day on all of Steam despite being from 2007? First we should discuss marketing. On YouTube is a series of videos called "Meet the Team." These are classics that really got a ton of people interested in this world. It gave people a perspective on these amazing mercenaries. TF2 also has amazing gameplay which is probably what's given it it's most success. The weapons all feel great to use and are carefully designed to coencide with distinct character movements. Another thing is customization. You can create any kind of loadout you want for the nine different characters. With different primaries, secondaries and melees to choose from, there are many distinct ways to create your own playstyle. Couple that with the over 1600 cosmetic items for your characters, there's so many ways to play how you want. The art style is a distinct cartoon style look that is blended with the 1960s spy aesthetic. The music is also classic and was performed by a real orchestra. Being a game created by the masterminds at Valve, it's very stable with a clean and functional UI, but updates are lacking. The last major update was in 2017 and it's felt like an eternity for me. Despite this, the community continues strong with nearly 150,000 players online at one time in November 2020. Quite impressive for a game of it's age! Oh and the best part? It's free. 100%. No ads, no premium subscribtions. Nothing. It's totally free for anyone to play. I've put my own money into it purely on my own volition and it's a great system. A discussion on the economics of TF2 is for another day though.
5 Stars - An amazing classic with infinite replayability and is 100% free. |
AuthorI am an artist as anyone else is an artist (if that makes sense). My style is abstract and I also draw cartoons. I am also a voice actor for a web-series. Archives
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