Video Games: Dawn of Waaaaagh!

[Caligula_K3]

On 3/26/2017 at 0:48 AM, Simon Steele said:

Lol, when did Dragon Age Inquisition warrant a game of the year edition?

Honestly though, I started it over after having tried it last spring and not cared for it much (I was playing Witcher 3 at the time--DA:I had no chance to be honest), and this isn't so bad of a game. I wonder what it takes to get Game of the Year editions though, because I'm pretty sure this made no one's game of the year.

But the hate it gets and a lot of what I hear Andromeda getting (which makes me second-guess my cancellation) is the enormous, blandness of the collecting quests. But I'll be honest, while DA:I may not be a narrative masterpiece, nor boast compelling characters, it certainly scratches that itch I have in RPGs for collecting and crafting. Games like this shouldn't go away.

DA:I got plenty of Game of the Year nominations and awards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Age:_Inquisition#Accolades

I know that it pales in comparison to the Witcher 3, but I do think DA:I is an excellent game. Many of the side quests are bland, so I ignored them, and still had over 60 hours of very enjoyable content through the main quest, companion quests, zone quests, exploring some of the zones, and dragon fights. It's definitely a game that benefits from the player not trying to 100% everything (I'm very happy that I'm not a completionist).

As for ME:A, I've only gotten to play about 4-5 hours since it came out. I just got to the Tempest. It hasn't really grabbed me yet, but that's pretty par for the course for the first 5 hours of a Bioware game. I'm looking forward to putting more time into it later in the week; I've heard about all the flaws, but I'm hoping that like Dragon Age 2, there's still enough heart in the game to make up for its weaknesses.

[Fez]

I basically ignore the mission menus entirely. I choose quests from the map, and ignore everything that starts with the word 'Task' unless its on my way to something else. Of course, the map is terrible too; but at least its one less thing to look at doing it this way.

The inventory and crafting menus are horrible to navigate too, but having tricked out gear with augments makes combat on the higher difficulty levels so much easier.

From what I've heard, Frostbite games are nearly impossible to mod; so I wouldn't expect much help from that.

26 minutes ago, KiDisaster said:

Even more annoying is the notification icon sometimes bugs and gets stuck even though I've cleared all of the actual new items in the list. 

Funny thing is, that's almost certainly not a bug (though with this game, who knows). A lot of the Codex entries update over time and usually don't get a notification when they do, but still cause the menu notification to appear on the main folders. So to make it go away, you have to cycle through every entry in the codex.

This isn't nearly as bad though as the fact that sometimes crew members have new things to say from conversation options that are greyed out because you already picked them. The whole point of greying out options is to let you know that you've exhausted the topic, so I don't know how Bioware screwed this up but they did. It doesn't happen often, but there are times that it does. The worst offender is Lexi, she'll regularly have new things to say about crew members when ask her again but her assessments of them. 

[KiDisaster]

10 minutes ago, Fez said:

This isn't nearly as bad though as the fact that sometimes crew members have new things to say from conversation options that are greyed out because you already picked them. The whole point of greying out options is to let you know that you've exhausted the topic, so I don't know how Bioware screwed this up but they did. It doesn't happen often, but there are times that it does. The worst offender is Lexi, she'll regularly have new things to say about crew members when ask her again but her assessments of them. 

You've got to be kidding me. I'm gonna have to go through everyone's full menu again. 

I sort of noticed this with PeeBee. One of the options just says "flirting" but it's been different things at different times which seems really lazy on the part of the devs. It's never grayed out though which is the only reason I've tried it more than once. She's the only character where that's the case too. Everyone else's flirt options read like normal dialogue choices. 

[Ferrum Aeternum]

17 minutes ago, Fez said:

This isn't nearly as bad though as the fact that sometimes crew members have new things to say from conversation options that are greyed out because you already picked them. The whole point of greying out options is to let you know that you've exhausted the topic, so I don't know how Bioware screwed this up but they did. It doesn't happen often, but there are times that it does. The worst offender is Lexi, she'll regularly have new things to say about crew members when ask her again but her assessments of them. 

Whaaaat? I too had no idea.    Jeez does that ever need fixing. 

[Fez]

27 minutes ago, KiDisaster said:

You've got to be kidding me. I'm gonna have to go through everyone's full menu again. 

I sort of noticed this with PeeBee. One of the options just says "flirting" but it's been different things at different times which seems really lazy on the part of the devs. It's never grayed out though which is the only reason I've tried it more than once. She's the only character where that's the case too. Everyone else's flirt options read like normal dialogue choices. 

26 minutes ago, Ferrum Aeternum said:

Whaaaat? I too had no idea.    Jeez does that ever need fixing. 

 

Whoops; sorry to be the bearer of bad news. On the plus side, like I said, its not super common I think. And you don't need to pick every option again; I've only encountered it in some of the conversation options that are pretty clearly not backstory info dumps. So I got it from Lexi when asking her about crew assessments, and from Kallo and Gil when asking them about their fighting, and I think Liam said something different when I asked him again about morale. Also, every time after the first that you need Addison's assistant to get someone out of Cryo, the option is grey.

There may be others, there probably are based on this precedent, but I do not want to go through all the conversations again to find them.

[Werthead]

StarCraft Remastered and Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition have both been announced (well, SCR has just been announced and PTEE will be tomorrow). So that's (arguably) the greatest RTS of all time and (much more certainly) the greatest RPG of all time both getting new licks of paint for the summer.

Sweet.

[Werthead]

Thimbleweed Park comes out on Friday. It's made by Monkey Island/Maniac Mansion creator Ron Gilbert and it uses the SCUMM Engine of those games, and is deliberately retro, apart from a few lighting and effect things that would have blown up a Pentium I. The game will be released at $19.99, thus fulfilling an important promise made by The Secret of Monkey Island 26 years ago.

[The Anti-Targ]

14 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

 Scott Ryder (Tom Taylorson doing a Nolan North impression) 

I knew it! First time I heard Tom's Scott Ryder voice I was convinced it was Nolan North.

[A True Kaniggit]

I finally was able to start ME:A and one thing really bothered me. The crew bathroom on the Tempest sucks! Is there no one around to clean it? So many stains! One toilet and two showerheads spaced 3-4 feet from each other

[AndrewJ]

I can't quite recall the Normandy ever even having a bathroom. So I guess the Tempest is a step up from crew members just taking a dump on the floor, wherever they please.

(Or maybe I'm just not recalling correctly)

 

[KiDisaster]

The Normandy had two bathrooms. Men's and women's. You could only go into the one that corresponded to your Shepard's sex though, EDI would tell you off if you tried to go into the other one.  

[DunderMifflin]

You could flush on the Normandy

[DJDonegal]

The Normandy had three bathrooms. There was one in the Captain's Quarters as well.

[briantw]

4 hours ago, DJDonegal said:

The Normandy had three bathrooms. There was one in the Captain's Quarters as well.

Can't expect the captain to shit with the commoners. 

[Melphis Amekia]

On 27/03/2017 at 9:13 PM, Werthead said:

StarCraft Remastered and Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition have both been announced (well, SCR has just been announced and PTEE will be tomorrow). So that's (arguably) the greatest RTS of all time and (much more certainly) the greatest RPG of all time both getting new licks of paint for the summer.

Sweet.

Not only that, but SC1/BW is getting a patch this week which will make it work properly on new systems, fix some bugs(like dragoon animations and making replays to actually work properly) and added remaping hotkeys(which the Korean pros of the scene agreed to) AND make it free for everyone to play. The Remaster is coming out in summer and is going to cost some unknown sum of money, though my guess probably not more than 20$, and it's only this visual upgrade that is going to cost. Even better, you don't even need to get it to play against people who do get it.

[The Anti-Targ]

20 hours ago, KiDisaster said:

The Normandy had two bathrooms. Men's and women's. You could only go into the one that corresponded to your Shepard's sex though, EDI would tell you off if you tried to go into the other one.  

I think a recent patch might have changed that. In my most recent playthrough of ME2, just a few month's back, my femshep was able to go into both bathrooms on the crew deck. It's possible that Cerberus instituted a gender neutral bathroom policy at some point, which depending on your perspective either makes them worse, or slightly less bad than what they were before.

Though I will note for the record that the Normandy bathrooms are speciesist as it would seem that these bathrooms are not suitable for either Elcor or Hanar use. And also seem to not facilitate use by species that use enviro suits (Quarian and Volus). But that would be pretty consistent with Cerberus' humanity first ideology. If you can't do it the human way then sucks for you.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

Man, it sounds like Bioware really stepped on their dicks with Andromeda. Look at this patch list they're admitting to. As with most patch lists, this is ignoring huge issues that can't be fixed too. They even sent out a conciliatory tweet--which is not like them at all. I think things must not be looking good. It's too bad--they took EXTRA time with this game to make it good, and this is what happened? I feel like I'm beating a dead horse, but I'm dumbfounded. Mass Effect was so good.  

[The Anti-Targ]

Geez there seem to be a lot more bugs than what's in that list.

[briantw]

Finished the original Darksiders.  Solid game.  A bit too heavy on the combat.  I'd have preferred 2/3 Legend of Zelda and 1/3 God of War rather than the other way around, especially since the combat is a little slow and clunky.  And some of the combat sequences just feel like they go on forever.  The Warmastered Edition ran pretty much perfectly, though, which was nice.  Only bug I got is the screen would get displaced when I restarted the game (I play in a borderless window), but that was an easy fix just toggling the display option back and forth real quick.  

On to Darksiders 2 now.

[MerenthaClone]

5 hours ago, Simon Steele said:

Man, it sounds like Bioware really stepped on their dicks with Andromeda. Look at this patch list they're admitting to. As with most patch lists, this is ignoring huge issues that can't be fixed too. They even sent out a conciliatory tweet--which is not like them at all. I think things must not be looking good. It's too bad--they took EXTRA time with this game to make it good, and this is what happened? I feel like I'm beating a dead horse, but I'm dumbfounded. Mass Effect was so good.  

Basically nobody who worked on ME1 or ME2 is still at the company.