Frostpunk 2 - It needed more time in the oven. story is bugged beyond belief.

[Smashed & Slamed]

So do you finally get trialed at Geneva for the war crime of making soup?

 

[Terra Pax]

They slipped in a bit of wokeshit into this game. The Steward is a chick supposedly.

You can steralise criminals, ghettoise political dissidents, enforce mandatory marriage and women not being allowed to work for the sake of child birth and I think every single character you see is white. So I don't know where you got that idea. It's frankly the least of the games problems if the voiceless, ungendered in any VO lines, Steward is possibly a woman.

 

[Scale Smerch]

Beat story mode on normal this weekend. IMO it's not bad and thematic-wise moves in the right direction (I'm a sucker for strategic-level games), but is held back hard by UI and performance. Best examples are laws, exploration, and research: FP1 did a very good job notifying you when you could pass measures or had idle research/exploration teams, but FP2 doesn't tell you at all. Didn't look at the right part of the screen? Well that's a few game weeks down the drain. I also dislike how you can set a measure to vote on, forget about it, and the popup of imminent vote makes it appear like you've granted a faction the right to choose an agenda when you didn't. Very confusing at times and given the amount of UI feedback months ago is the one surprising thing that wasn't improved from the demo.

Perfomance-wise is also hair pulling. I haven't been soft locked like some, but the crackling audio issue always seems to hit once you're 25-30k population and late game autosaves freeze for long enough to almost have you think the game crashed. Supposedly fixes are in beta but still aggravating.

As for the story itself there is some replay value since there's three points of divergence. Faith vs. Order gives a different set of priorities for initial city building (you can leverage coal & oil both at the expense of fuel heating efficiency, have unlimited resource outposts vs. unlimited resource home deposits) and then Winterhome has two options. The endgame then again offers three paths, albeit only two offer any challenge.

Personally I like it enough to give it a few additional playthroughs and at least one utopia run for completeness (after bugs are fixed), however the longevity will be determined by what the DLCs offer and the robustness of the modding tools. If FP2 allows for extensive modding there's quite a bit you can do with it, especially in terms of introducing hard choices and forcing the requirement of radical ideas/laws.

 

[ATandTism]

Gave it a shot so far, but the UI issues are getting annoying. I mouse over one thing and the description for that is now overriding every other description. It is also now sayin 'there is no where to save' in big red letters, but, it just saves regardless on top of the saves only loading up 30 seconds after starting up the game.

Silly of me to grab the day 1 version in current year +8 and not waiting a week for the inevitable slew of patches for shit that should have already been fixed.

 

[Need for Sped]

I just finished the story and I am fucking flabbergasted: Is that fucking it? This has to be the most limped dick ending I've seen since Mankind Divided, for fuck's sake.

Spoiler: Spoilers for the Story Mode

So basically you do one mission where you switch from coal to oil and set up a settlement (With the option of declaring at the end whether you intend to "embrace" or "destroy" the Frost (i.e turn to naturalism or technology as the main pillar of survival.
Then you have another mission when you expand the city, improve the generator and survive a whiteout.
Then another mission where you decided whether to resettle Winterhome (Naturalism) or to destroy to get a hoard of steam cores to further improve your generator (Technology)
Then another mission where the tensions between the Naturalist faction and the Technology faction explode and the city ends up as a battleground where you have to either pick a side or try to broker peace between them. You do either...and that's it.

The ending is an absolute wet fart with next to no impact compared to surviving the storm in A New Home

Now I fucking understand why you had all those finite resources that had no way of lasting in the actual long term: The game was never intended to be run for long (I finished around the 600 something week, and took my sweet ass time with every objective). And the best/worst part is that this is all there's to it. Besides the story mode, there's only the "Utopia" mode, which is just a regular sandbox. This is even more sad than the original release of FP1, at least it had three separate campaigns.

Jesus Fuck I'm pissed for buying this. Give me all the top hats in the world, I deserve them.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

It's crazy how bad the UI is, like wouldn't that be the easiest thing to make?

The Steward is a chick supposedly.

You sure? I guess it makes sense with the intro and IIRC they did explain that gender roles sort of faded when the population was so low because "everyone was needed" I thought it was just a generic caretaker with the captain.

I remember hearing about the first game it started out strong but by the end you meta game it to being not as interesting, sounds like the same in the second

It's actually worse because the "strong" part of the game doesn't really exist. It's near impossible to kill everyone the same way you could by accident just by not giving everyone a home before 10 minutes in. It's a sequel that tries to continue the boring meta of the late game

one of them is decreases exploration time slightly more.

The lack of concrete numbers really angers me. I feel one of the first mods will be to show you the explicit numbers the same way one of Fallout 4's first mods was just showing the dialogue you actually say.

 

[Spud]

Payday 3's a "stand-in-a-circle-to-start-a-heist" gameplay loop

The worst thing about that is not only did they steal it from GTFO but they didn't even bother to include the QOL feature of making your AI teamates stand in the other circles like GTFO does

 

[Blackstar]

Some of the faction abilities are extremely useful. The Icebloods have the ability to give a stacking +80 to food production every 150 weeks, and it doesn't seem to expire.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

Didn't realize this shit was on gamepass meaning even less reason to buy it nor replay it. its a one campaign game with 0 replayability. what the fuck were they thinking

 

[ATandTism]

Finished it up myself and I have to agree, I got a big feeling of '... That's it?' at the end. Compared to the first game where you were scrapping everything together to stop people from going nuts, and gathering goodies to survive the storm all with the fantastic 'The City Must Survive' playing in the background of the finale.

You see it getting colder and colder, sick are piling up, the generator is in full overdrive! It is going to end soon right, ...right? Then SWOOSSH the warmup sound, storm is gone, tension gone and the wonderful THE CITY HAS SURVIVED pops up along with a neat timelapse of you building the city. Fantastic.


This one just is

Spoiler: Ending of 2

So much less? There was a storm, but assuming you have functioning fingers you have enough stockpiles. But for the 'real' ending I was on good terms with everyone, no one was really radical sure we lost a few people to dig up steamcores but hey. Then the 'big finale' surprise is actually these people hate you here is a red screen. Now you just click a few things and bing bang boom, peace returns. Game over. I was playing on officer so maybe that is baby mode, but the total lack of a feeling of build up or consequences for anything sapped the 'feels'. 6/10 meh, glad I pirated it.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

"everyone was needed"

It's such a ridiculous explanation in those games, as if gender roles are some sort of privilege of a luxurious patriarchal society rather than the defacto status when resources are limited and you can't have people not fit for the job for imaginary quotas and feelings.

 

[grump]

You sure? I guess it makes sense with the intro and IIRC they did explain that gender roles sort of faded when the population was so low because "everyone was needed"

It's such a ridiculous explanation in those games, as if gender roles are some sort of privilege of a luxurious patriarchal society rather than the defacto status when resources are limited and you can't have people not fit for the job for imaginary quotas and feelings.

post apocalyptic societies becoming even more gender equal is such an absurdly stupid modern trope. Thats like claiming there will be an explosion in the number of psychiatric hospitals after the apocalypse because everybody's feeling down.

I thought it was just a generic caretaker with the captain.

The company sort of indicated it in the comment section. Not a big deal compared to all the other nonsense happening. I just get the feeling it was slipped in as sort of a girlboss thing.

 

[Blackstar]

One of the laws you can research is either putting the kids in daycare so that both parents can work or making the women stay at home to raise their kids, each providing different bonuses

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

One of the laws you can research is either putting the kids in daycare so that both parents can work or making the women stay at home to raise their kids, each providing different bonuses

Admittedly I took the "ban women from working" one just because I hated having so many "unemployed" workers just standing around. And I think the boost in population growth made up for it. But it was weird. Going from 2000 worker bees to 50 in an instant.

I'd still really love to see hard numbers too. Someone here mentioned that the tech choices are only a 100 employee difference and it got me thinking what if the laws were basically the same too?

 

[Trogspawn]

Bought it, and refunded it. It's obviously Frostpunk but it doesn't feel like Frostpunk anymore. It lacks the intimate brutality of walking the knifes edge to keep eveything from exploding that the first one had.

 

[Joe Dough 68]

Shares of video game maker 11 bit studios slump after 'Frostpunk 2' release

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

I'm bumping because so far i've not been able to finish a single fucking game. its bullshit. soft locks because somehow events don't trigger and its obnoxious and makes everything more difficult because its a perpetual loop.

 

[Kane Lives]

So did everyone immediately lose interest after how mediocre the sequel is, lol. Even DD2 had a better time sustaining interest than this.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

So did everyone immediately lose interest after how mediocre the sequel is, lol. Even DD2 had a better time sustaining interest than this.

There's only one real scenario and then sandbox mode. And even that's half-assed because most of those 6 or 8 maps are literally them using the same ones from the first game meaning if you did it in the first game you can beat it now even easier. Politics as a mode sucks, it's absurdly easy to game.

 

[Trogspawn]

There's only one real scenario and then sandbox mode. And even that's half-assed because most of those 6 or 8 maps are literally them using the same ones from the first game meaning if you did it in the first game you can beat it now even easier. Politics as a mode sucks, it's absurdly easy to game.

Does the utopia mode at least connect the maps? You would think that having multiple cities would be the natural endless mode for this game.