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

[Jerri's Kid]

Politics as a mode sucks, it's absurdly easy to game.

I had a feeling this would happen. I've played their other games (This War of Mine and Frostpunk 1) and the morality/politics in them always feel half baked even though they're used as selling points for the games. I mainly like these for the atmosphere and general mechanics, but if Frostpunk 2 fails in this area then I'm not interested in getting it.

 

[Need for Sped]

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.

After seeing how underwhelming the story mode was, I thought "Well, at least having the sandbox mode will make up for it...", nah, it's underwhelming as well. You choose one objective out of three, which are absolutely uninspired (Have a Food, Fuel and Materials colony with at least 10,000 each, have 50,000 people in your city, or have a shitton of resources stockpiled, that's it). There's no new mechanics (Like raiding the vaults to fill the archives, building the generator or the Christmas event) like in FP1.

As an aside, despite how much they jerked off the faction system, I find quite boring, especially since they felt compelled to make one faction for almost every potential alignment combination, resulting in either retarded factions like the Bohemians (Ice age hippies) or samey-feeling factions like the Overseers and the Technocrats. Trust and Tension are basically Hope and Discontent with extra steps.

Unless there's some really inspired moders who carry this game like it happened to Skyrim, I don't think it will have nowhere near the adoration FP1 had.

 

[Trogspawn]

Unless there's some really inspired moders who carry this game like it happened to Skyrim, I don't think it will have nowhere near the adoration FP1 had.

I find this to be super unlikely. Unless they overhauled how easy it is to mod it will prolly be in a simillar state to the first one with only a handful of mods.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

I find this to be super unlikely. Unless they overhauled how easy it is to mod it will prolly be in a simillar state to the first one with only a handful of mods.

It's specifically made in unreal to make it easier to mod

 

[Blackstar]

 

[Sigmund Freud]

Spoiler: A couple thoughts

FP1 us one of my favorite games, which is why I was excited for thr sequel. I had tempered my expectations, but I still ended up disappointed.

First of all, the game was made much simpler: districts are practically prebuilt, the sick are treated automatically, all the building materials are now a singular resource, the generator automatically shifts the output whenever the temperature changes, among other things. The only things you have control over is how much workforce you can put in a district and the abilities each building has. You can't optimize your building placement, work shift or control the temperature of a building in order to save fuel. You can only reduce the workforce to decrease the material and heat requirements, which also reduces the output.

Also, Automatons were one of the coolest things in the first game, both gameplay and visual-wise. They were extremely expensive to manufacture and demanded a lot of research, but paid off immensely since they work 24/7 without getting sick. They also had unique animations for each workplace you placed them in. In FP2, however, they're just an extra number in your workforce count and don't really do anything particularly interesting (unless you side with the stalwarts, which gives your city a boost in efficiency but can occasionally kill people). You can see one or two walking around the city if you zoom in, but that's it.

The biggest annoyance when it comes to city building is population and housing. By the end of the game, 1/3 of the entire my buildable area was covered by a mass of dozens and dozens of housing districts, because population growth will keep dumping people into your city, fucking up your economy which the limited resource deposits cannot sustain. The housing to space ratio is just that horrible, and you can barely upgrade how much people you can put in them. The best you can do to control overpopulation is sign radical laws so people start dying.

The politics system, the main selling point of the game, is half-baked at best. You get 4 factions per playthrough, 2 of them depending on your choices during the prologue. You gain or lose reputation with each decision you take, but the game just decides which faction will be the "main one" after asking you to choose between adaptation and progress. You can pass whatever law you want because manipulating votes is ridiculously easy. Just keep promising to suggest laws, since the faction will be appeased even if the vote fails. Even the rule laws, which require more votes to pass, can be cheesed that way.

And, of course, the big event, the finale. I knew the storm from the first game would be a hard act to follow, but even then I ended up disappointed. Even if you keep everyone happy, one of the factions will get so butthurt over Winterhome they start a city-wide riot which escalates into a full blown civil war. Said civil war consists of 1-6 districts slowly gaining disrepair and people dying (a small notification on the right corner of your screen) with a faint red glow around the city. You solve it by either seeking reconciliation or telling the angry faction to fuck off (gently or angrily). The final minutes of the campaign then consist of you staring at the screen as you wait for laws to pass or the faction's new home to be built.

The "good ending" happens if you reconcile people and convince them to stop acting like fucking niggers. The "bad endings" consist of you building an ethnostate for the displeased faction (which will either be decent or a shithole depending on how much resources you invested into it), simply exiling said faction or giving yourself full authority by becoming the captain and telling everyone to stop being whiny bitches.

Just like the first game, you get an epilogue showcasing all the good and bad things you did over the campaign, but instead of a timelapse of your city you just get to watch a line slowly moving through ice. Oh, and the game shows you a picture of a sad little girl if you get anything but the reconciliation ending. Do you feel bad yet?

Two major bugs severely pissed me off during the main story: sometimes the game would refuse to build something even though I had the required workforce and/or heat stamps. I was also unable to use the peacekeeping option during the riot, with the game telling me I didn't have enough space for the prisoners DESPITE the fact more than enough prisons to incarcerate everyone in that city.

The endless mode is nothing to write home about, even though it's not actually endless unless you beat it once. What's really missing is the different scenarios that Frostpunk 1 came with, which are far more interesting than the sandbox mode. I sincerely hope the upcoming DLCs add new campaigns on pair with The Last Autumn, or something to make the endless mode less boring.

TL;DR: Doesn't hold a candle to FP1, DLCs will make or break this game.

 

[Scale Smerch]

It's specifically made in unreal to make it easier to mod

Easy to mod but terrible for accessibility. You have to get the modding tools through EGS, and mods themselves through mod.io (which isn't linked anywhere within the game itself). Steam Workshop support will be needed to drive any game longevity from mods.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

Two major bugs severely pissed me off during the main story: sometimes the game would refuse to build something even though I had the required workforce and/or heat stamps. I was also unable to use the peacekeeping option during the riot, with the game telling me I didn't have enough space for the prisoners DESPITE the fact more than enough prisons to incarcerate everyone in that city.

It's insane how often that happens, and at least those don't soft lock you. Every day there's a new thread about getting locked in chapters because events don't trigger like the big storm or finding the oil area from the prologue

 

[Oilspill Battery]

For a sequel that went from directing individual citizens to controling an entire empire its ironic that the sequel feels way way way WAAAAAYYYYYYYY more micromanagy than the original what with constantly building new resource extractors because they last like 5 minutes each and spamming new houses every 3 minutes.

The deposits are retardably limited and and your population breeds like fucking rabbits, it feels like I'm playing the refugees scenario all over again. Its impossible to stabilize the economy because everytime you manage to get ontop of it the game will dump 3000 more citizens and you have to keep building houses and food until the food districts get depleted and... you get the point.

"Bruh its supposed to be haaaarrd, that's the point."

Fuck off. The first game had an incredible tempo of tension of trying to stabilize the economy, followed by a relaxing break after you stabilize it giving you some time to chill, admire your work, and plan ahead, followed by the big story moment happening disrupting your economy and you trying to stabilize it again.

Frostpunk 2 is nonstop tension with no breaks. You can't build unlimited resource deposits anymore unless you either side with the progs at which point you can't make outposts or side with the ferals at which point you HAVE to rely on outposts because your city becomes useless.

So basically if you side with the progs there's 0 point in exploring the frostland anymore because it disables unlimited deposits in the frostland and if you side with the ice people your city is completely useless because it no longer has ANY deposits it can make use of.

Even excluding the UI issues (In the first game I never missed laws or research, in this one I literally go weeks without noticing I can pass a new one, playing on low resolution also makes it impossible to negotiate laws because the button is below the screen lmao), the game is balanced like shit. Resource distribution and population in particular make it a huge pain in the ass, but some things I don't think can be fixed. The elegance of an organically growing city is gone. Now it feels like you're just randomly painting the ground to catch deposits, city planning be damned.

Super fucking ironic that the second game literally has a shoehorned districts mechanic with proxinity bonuses and malluses resulting in discombobulated patchwork cities while the original game organically managed to accomplish district organization with steam hubs.

The post game replay in fp1 looks great specifically because of how realistic and organic it is, there's no point in having one here.

The biggest annoyance when it comes to city building is population and housing. By the end of the game, 1/3 of the entire my buildable area was covered by a mass of dozens and dozens of housing districts, because population growth will keep dumping people into your city, fucking up your economy which the limited resource deposits cannot sustain. The housing to space ratio is just that horrible, and you can barely upgrade how much people you can put in them. The best you can do to control overpopulation is sign radical laws so people start dying.

Fucking preach, these fuckers breed like goddamn rabbits. And houses are awful. Building a new house district takes 6 hexes and gives you 20 houses. Expanding takes 9 hexes and only gives you 25. Like, what??? Why???

Expanding vs Building new districts is balanced horribly because its never made clear which one is more beneficial. Expanding shouldn't never be worse than building new.

And the worst part? The game literally punishes you for trying to plan ahead, because even empty houses consume pops and heat, so if you don't have the population to fill them, planning ahead just costs you workers and heat.

In the first game losing a single citizen made me want to restart, in this one I'm praying the fuckers will die off already so I can stabilize my economy and stop covering half the map in houses.

The time scale has been increased where we deal in weeks instead of days but the game moves so fast you don't have a moment of peace.

 

[EmpGulcasa]

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

Lol, are you retarded?

 

[grump]

Lol, are you retarded?

girlboss/old man replaced by girlboss is definitely a thing they've been trying to make into a trend in media over time. Like I said, the frostpunk example is a minor thing and people have gotten used to the smaller modern audience tropes and I never said this specific example was the end of the world. If it doesn't bother you good for you. No need to freak out over others have eyes and a brain noticing obvious trends of which this is a probable if very tiny part of.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

Building a new house district takes 6 hexes and gives you 20 houses. Expanding takes 9 hexes and only gives you 25

have you checked the building techs? you get 10 on a simple upgrade slot for an industry. if you're worried about space (which you shouldn't be) then its a great way of saving some.

And the worst part? The game literally punishes you for trying to plan ahead, because even empty houses consume pops and heat, so if you don't have the population to fill them, planning ahead just costs you workers and heat.

you can just turn off unused houses and they won't spend heat or workers. i know its silly but having an entire force dedicated to building housing units then shutting them off to build another one might work.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

have you checked the building techs? you get 10 on a simple upgrade slot for an industry.

You mean there's a housing building that gives you +10 housing per upgraded district?

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

You mean there's a housing building that gives you +10 housing per upgraded district?

sort of its in the housing upgrades in the bottom of the first page of research, its a building you can put on industry or extraction districts that counts as either 10 or 20 housing. there might be better upgrades later in the path, but in terms of space its one district slot on industry for 10 vs wasting 9 hex for 25.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

sort of its in the housing upgrades in the bottom of the first page of research, its a building you can put on industry or extraction districts that counts as either 10 or 20 housing. there might be better upgrades later in the path, but in terms of space its one district slot on industry for 10 vs wasting 9 hex for 25.

Oh I get it, so you can use industry buildings as extra housing, yeah makes sense, too bad that population demand pretty nuch nessesitates that you milk each building for resources :/

 

[EmpGulcasa]

girlboss/old man replaced by girlboss is definitely a thing they've been trying to make into a trend in media over time. Like I said, the frostpunk example is a minor thing and people have gotten used to the smaller modern audience tropes and I never said this specific example was the end of the world. If it doesn't bother you good for you. No need to freak out over others have eyes and a brain noticing obvious trends of which this is a probable if very tiny part of.

A voiceless woman replacing a voiceless man who essentially died of old age you never even saw is not wokeshit, even a minor example. When people treat shit like this as woke we get closer to that retarded spreadsheet made by leftists trying to paint normies as evil bigots being real and it dilutes the meaning of the word.

 

[Sigmund Freud]

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

Did they really?
The only time the steward is depicted is when you fuck up and get exiled, and even then you can't tell what they look like because he or she is under thick clothing. The woman pushing the captain around could be anyone, or no one at all. It's hard to tell if the cutscene even actually happened or if it's purely symbolical due to how surreal it is.
At worst the steward is left ambiguous so the player can project themselves into the role.

girlboss/old man replaced by girlboss is definitely a thing they've been trying to make into a trend in media over time. Like I said, the frostpunk example is a minor thing and people have gotten used to the smaller modern audience tropes and I never said this specific example was the end of the world. If it doesn't bother you good for you. No need to freak out over others have eyes and a brain noticing obvious trends of which this is a probable if very tiny part of.

The only one freaking out here is you, pulling mental gymnastics to find "obvious trends" where there is none. If the steward truly was a "girlboss", then she'd be an infallible mary sue and the captain would be an incompetent shithead, which is not the case.
And even if it was, do you think they'd only add a girlboss protagonist? The usual suspects lack any subtlety and wouldn't stop at just one thing. New London would be filled with niggers, pajeets and muslims despite the fact you never saw any in the first game, siding with the Stalwarts (literally hecking nazis) or Faithkeepers (yucky conservative christians) even slightly would give you the worst endings, and shit like arranged marriage or dedicated motherhood would be treated on pair with LITERAL GENOCIDE.
The only woke thing in frostpunk is victorian women having the same roles as men, and even then you can fix that with a single law which the game won't raise too much of a fuss about. If 11bit was compromised by woke faggots, it would've been much, much worse.

I hate this shit as much as you do, but you're really grasping at straws here.

 

[grump]

Did they really?
The only time the steward is depicted is when you fuck up and get exiled, and even then you can't tell what they look like because he or she is under thick clothing. The woman pushing the captain around could be anyone, or no one at all. It's hard to tell if the cutscene even actually happened or if it's purely symbolical due to how surreal it is.
At worst the steward is left ambiguous so the player can project themselves into the role.

Thats what I thought too but the company said or basically indicated that the caretaker was the steward in discussions about it. Is this a big deal? Am I saying the makers are rabid sjws? No, not in and of itself in isolation. Just a tiny datapoint when you put it together with tons of bigger things across the industry.

Also the game shows gender equal workers whereas in previous years they probably would have just made the workers men. Again not a big deal by itself at all just a tiny point among many indicative of a larger trend of how the culture is shifting to make everything more gender neutral in media.

The only one freaking out here is you, pulling mental gymnastics to find "obvious trends" where there is none. If the steward truly was a "girlboss", then she'd be an infallible mary sue and the captain would be an incompetent shithead, which is not the case.

Show me where in the thread I am freaking out about this. You guys are getting way more emotional. All this over an offhand comment I made.

A voiceless woman replacing a voiceless man who essentially died of old age you never even saw is not wokeshit, even a minor example. When people treat shit like this as woke we get closer to that retarded spreadsheet made by leftists trying to paint normies as evil bigots being real and it dilutes the meaning of the word.

Pretty much 90% of the pop culture war stuff talked about on youtube and here is absolutely trivial by itself in isolation. A character turns gay or black whoopteedoo. The common defense that works on less intelligent people is to mock critics for overreacting to such a trivial thing and that the little things shouldn't be noticed or commented on at all. Of course what people are really talking about when they are going on about how woke media is getting are the bigger trends not just the specific examples but those examples help illustrate things whether big or very small.

 

[geckogoy]

"Its not woke" comes off a bit like the one fish asking "how's the water?" and the other saying "what the hell is water"

When people treat shit like this as woke we get closer to that retarded spreadsheet made by leftists trying to paint normies as evil bigots being real and it dilutes the meaning of the word.

The only one freaking out here is you, pulling mental gymnastics to find "obvious trends" where there is none. The usual suspects lack any subtlety and wouldn't stop at just one thing.

I don't understand, do you think there is some 5d chess move here? Like you can engage in incrementalism in the opposite direction as long as you dont seem 'crazy'?

The answer here is the video game 'industry' was demolished a long time ago because nobody on our side ever (successfully) sought out positions of power to do anything about it. Its over, there is no trick to make everything better, either play whats out there or dont but don't try to tell me any of it is somehow not compromised just because it acts like stage 3 cancer instead of stage 4.

 

[EmpGulcasa]

"Its not woke" comes off a bit like the one fish asking "how's the water?" and the other saying "what the hell is water"



I don't understand, do you think there is some 5d chess move here? Like you can engage in incrementalism in the opposite direction as long as you dont seem 'crazy'?

The answer here is the video game 'industry' was demolished a long time ago because nobody on our side ever (successfully) sought out positions of power to do anything about it. Its over, there is no trick to make everything better, either play whats out there or dont but don't try to tell me any of it is somehow not compromised just because it acts like stage 3 cancer instead of stage 4.

But it's not woke? I dunno why you're so buttmad. There's no shortage of games that don't contain wokeshit, and even excluding every game that even a smoothbrain would consider woke (say for daring to contain a woman in it) there are more video games to play than you could ever get to in your lifetime. Calm down.