Category: General

Upcoming turn-based RPGs and Tactical games from RPGWatch list 2024.

This year’s list has plenty games. Although one has to bear in mind that RPGWatch database often contains only guesses about release dates. Where I could, I tried to find more information, but often I had to fall back on this unreliable source.

As a reminder, this list mentions games that interest me personally, which mostly mean western, isometric and turn-based. Because of this, let’s do away with two most-awaited big releases: Dragon Age: Dreadwolf and Avowed. Both hold little interest to me. Well, maybe I’ll check out Dragon Age for old times sake…

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Upcoming turn-based RPGs and Tactical games from RPGWatch list 2023.

The coming year looks interesting in terms of RPGs, but almost all releases that really look promising were already mentioned in my last year’s post, they just didn’t came out in 2022. The new additions to RPGWatch’s upcoming releases list are less impressive, especially among “real” RPGs (tactical games are maybe more interesting).

Let’s begin with the obvious: b>Baldur’s Gate 3 and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader are THE top dogs in this year’s “RPG of the Year” battle, and everyone already knows about both, so there is no point mentioning them further or speculating on the true release dates. With that in mind, let’s move on to less shiny releases. As always, I only write about games which I might find interesting – which mostly means isometric turn-based RPGs and tactics, or at least something with promising mechanics or non-standard setting.

0. Note

Release dates are from RPGWatch, and can be unaccurate.

1. RPG.

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The story behind The Bug: undying Cairn Wights

Original post at Pathfinder CRPG – Wrath of the Righteous page in Facebook.

Creating computer games is a tricky business, and all good tricks include a lot of smoke, mirrors and hidden trapdoors. Sometimes, though, the smoke gets sucked into the trapdoor and the assistant’s twin walks head-first into the mirror because she can’t see anything. In the case of computer games, this usually leads to bug reports. This series of posts offers a behind the scenes look at some of the notable bugs in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.

Pathfinder tabletop system is incredibly complex. It includes a huge number of interacting rules and content based on said rules, which sometimes overrides them and creates special cases. Because of that, even a simple question like “how much damage can that character do” requires complex calculations. Of course, we make these calculations whenever the character attacks someone, but that’s not the only time when we need minimum and maximum damage values.

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Turn-based mode in Pathfinder: Kingmaker

So, both me and Razgriz were pretty silent for a long while. Sorry about that, changes in our lives, etc. etc. I, for one, joined the illustrious Owlcat Games studio to work on Pathfinder: Kingmaker and future CRPGs. Here’s an article I wrote about my experience on adding turn-based mode to Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which is what I, along with my colleagues, were working for quite a while:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/owlcatgames/pathfinder-kingmaker/posts/2930560

Open Horizon progress report

New build for windows will be automatically compiled on every commit, so it’s now possible to get the most fresh build rather then waiting for the next release. I will also be notified if I break linux build.

latest_win32 status:

Open Horizon is now multithreaded and I see good performance improvement on my macbook air.

Various graphical improvements: shadows, heat effect, sun shafts, better missile trails, fixed landscape seams and tree imposters, etc.

XBox controller should work fine now, but since I can’t get it working correctly in wireless mode, I will try some other input library in the future.

I don’t have much time to work on this project but will continue occasionally improving it.

Effectively storing arrays in Solidity.

I’ve been doing some work with Ethereum blockchain recently, and the idea I worked on requires that we write a relatively large array of integer values in smart contract’s storage. Now, most tutorials warn you not to store a lot of data on blockchain, because it’s very costly. But how much is “a lot”, and at which point the price becomes too high for practical purposes? I needed to find that out, since we really needed this data on-chain.

For a quick approximation, let’s have a look at a wide-spread type of contract, ERC20 token. At the very least, it stores a mapping of addresses to token holders’ balances. The address is a 20-byte value, and the balance is usually 32 bytes, so we have at least 52 bytes per token holder, which in reality translate to 64 bytes, since the storage in EVM is parceled in 32-byte blocks. A somewhat popular token can easily have 10000 or more holders, so our estimate that it stores about 625Kb of information. That’s quite a lot, actually – more than enough for our purposes, since by our estimates, we only needed to store maybe tens of kilobytes!

Naive approach

So, let’s go ahead and pass that data to EVM and write it down to the storage:
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RPGs and Tactics 2018. Part III: spiritual successors galore, a tale about a stolen sun, and more

The criteria for inclusion of a game in my list is specified in Part I. Continued from Part II.

2018 seems to be a year of spiritual successors. Not exactly sequels – for copyright reasons – but games that draw directly and unashamedly on a single source, rather than the whole corpus of “old-school RPGs”, as was often the case in the previous years. Whether any of those “successors” prove to be of any worth remains to be seen.

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