Video Games: 'Does Not Open From This Side' Edition

[briantw]

1 hour ago, Cz-99 said:

I couldn't find any real complaints that I had with Witcher 3, aside from bugs that caused me to reload. The ending could've been better, but considering the rest of the game/story was superb - I don't care too much. However, I do think the 'worst' ending you can get is the most emotional and well-done, but I could never get myself to do it. I think my lack of gripes with the game is due to it being so immersive, so unless something actually broke the game and said immersion (like a bug) it was hard(er) to notice anything big. All of the option stuff was optional, whereas in Inquisition you had to do at least some of the supposed optional stuff to progress. This particular thing was pretty important when it came to replayability. In Witcher 3's NG+ I opted to skip the contracts and treasure hunts and managed to move along smoothly - focusing instead on 'fixing' my major story choices. I didn't have the same luck with Inquisition; it's possible to minimize the grinding but as far as I know it's impossible to remove it entirely. Best part of TW3: Avallac'h.

Yeah, the only issue I had with Witcher 3 was that it crashed a lot for me, which meant I had to concentrate on saving very frequently, which kind of kills immersion at times.  It was still easily the best AAA game that came out last year, and the competition wasn't particularly close.  It's the only single-player game I've put over 100 hours in to in years, which says a lot about how much I enjoyed it.  To be fair, it was barely over 100 hours (Steam currently has me at 101), but I also haven't played the first expansion yet, so that will add another 10-15 hours, and the second expansion will add probably double that.

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On a different note, I beat Banner Saga today.  Really enjoyed it once I realized that permadeath wasn't a thing in every battle.  I kind of wish the game had done a better job explaining that, though.  Definitely going to pick up the second game.  I thought the ending was a bit abrupt.  You finish off the last fight and then the game just kind of ends a minute later.  I get that it's the first part of a trilogy, but some additional dialogue would have been nice.

[Jasta11]

It's weird, because TW3 ran flawlessly on my rig (especially for its jaw-droppingly beautiful graphics) and never crashed... until patch 1.10, which suddenly caused it to crash every few hours and dip in framerate in heavily forested areas. I stopped my second playthrough partly because of that, and partly because there really isn't much difference in the narrative all things considered no matter what you do, unlike TW2. I did buy and complete Hearts of Stone which is a great DLC, more than worth the price.

In other news, still enjoying Battlefleet Gothic a lot. High-level combat is a bit of a mess, with 5-6 ships to manage, all with various abilities that often need precise targeting, thankfully the active pause helps a ton. The AI is good at managing Ork and Chaos fleets, but painfully inadequate with the fragile Eldar. It tries to exhange potshots with your ships, but Eldar crafts are woefully squishy and get destroyed by Imperial broadsides, especially if you can trap them in Statis and follow up with an ever-so-satisfying ramming action.

I also like that you can customize your ships with names and Favours, which change their paintjob and give various bonuses. I name my ships after famous real-life ones, and thus the enemies of the Emprah fall under the blows of fine vessels such as the Warspite and Eisenhower. They also announced an extensive free DLC program for the game, including custom ship color schemes, challenge battles against the AI and eventually Space Marine and Tau fleets. I feel like I'm going to get my money's worth of this game and more.

[briantw]

7 minutes ago, Jasta11 said:

It's weird, because TW3 ran flawlessly on my rig (especially for its jaw-droppingly beautiful graphics) and never crashed... until patch 1.10, which suddenly caused it to crash every few hours and dip in framerate in heavily forested areas. I stopped my second playthrough partly because of that, and partly because there really isn't much difference in the narrative all things considered no matter what you do, unlike TW2. I did buy and complete Hearts of Stone which is a great DLC, more than worth the price.

Yeah I bought Hearts of Stone but haven't gotten around to playing it yet.  I might just wait until Blood and Wine releases and play them back-to-back at this point.  I have so many other Steam games to play and I've been making an effort to actually try to beat some of them the past few weeks.  

I never really had any performance issues with Witcher 3.  Just the crashing. 

[KiDisaster]

Overwatch is, as expected, a ton of fun. My brother and I played it for about four hours last night. Surprisingly the servers were holding up well, which never happens with a new Blizzard release. Although the beta opens up on Thursday so I imagine it'll be worse then. Only opened last night for pre-orders or if you got an invite code from somewhere. 

Right away I learned I cannot play McCree, Hanzo or Widowmaker because I don't have the accuracy. Always been terrible at sniping in games and that's what they all do pretty much. Junkrat, Reinhart, Winston, Mercy & Bastion are where it's at right now  

[GallowKnight]

Dawn of War III Officially Announced.

[Werthead]

Hooray. Hopefully it'll be better than DoW2. The trailer hints at Titans (or at least knights) which is definitely an interesting way to take things.

Also, Dishonored 2 has a release date: 11 November.

[Jon AS]

Yeah, the Knights have me kind of excited for no particularly good reason.

[Rhom]

Free PS4 game for the month of May is Tropico 5.  I've never played a Tropico game, but this feels like the perfect sort of thing for my newfound remote play capabilities.   

[Jasta11]

I hope this is bigger in scale than Dawn of War 2, but it seems my wish has been fulfilled. Big armies stomping at the beat of giant walkers sounds right up my alley.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

So I guess there has been this Dark Souls 3 discussion about poor invaders getting ganked when they show up and find a host and three phantoms waiting for them. Well, I found this video. It's short and pretty great, I like just the eerie 40 or so seconds before the fight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HETZT5nDE5Y

[briantw]

I see what you guys meant about Banner Saga 2.  That was so much better than the original.  I liked the first game, but the second basically improves upon it in every way.

[Fez]

I stayed up late last night to finally finish off Final Fantasy IX on Steam. I'm sure its at least part nostalgia, but the game absolutely holds up, imo. I think I may actually like it even more than I did when it first came out, since I think I appreciate some of the writing more now.

Its not perfect, mind. The combat does stay on the easy side, except for a couple boss battles that are out-of-the-blue difficult (though most have some sort of obscure, super easy trick that negates that). Also, it is frustrating that for a game so character-focused for the first two-thirds of the game, in the last third they start talking less and less until most of them don't really say anything anymore. And there stops being those optional cutscenes showing other characters. Fortunately, this abruptly reverses itself in the final few hours, when all of sudden everyone has things to say again, even Quina.

ETA: I also think its by far the most satisfying ending of any of the Final Fantasy's that I've beaten (VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XIII, and Tactics).

The regular crashes-to-desktop never did get resolved, which was annoying.

I really want to play The Banner Saga II, but my budget in general has been blown to hell this month, so I don't know if I can justify buying any video games right now. Might need to wait.

[Corvinus85]

Looks like Total War: Warhammer will have mod support after all. http://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Total_War_WARHAMMER_Modding_Details

[Rhom]

I tried out Overwatch last night.  Enough to confirm that I'm still terrible at FPS games.    Stuck with the AI opponent training mode.

Tried out a tank, but just really felt like I didn't know what I was doing.  DPS was more self-explanatory, but I'm just not quick enough to really be effective at that I think.  Finally, I played a few games as the support characters.  When I played as Mercy and we got through a defense game without anyone dying, I felt like I did pretty good. 

 

[Werthead]

42 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

Looks like Total War: Warhammer will have mod support after all. http://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Total_War_WARHAMMER_Modding_Details

It's very, very light though. And they're not putting back in full campaign map customisation, which is what people have been clamouring for for a decade now. It's utterly preposterous that for total conversions, people still need to go back and install Medieval II.

[Channel4s-JonSnow]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

It's very, very light though. And they're not putting back in full campaign map customisation, which is what people have been clamouring for for a decade now. It's utterly preposterous that for total conversions, people still need to go back and install Medieval II.

Its disappointing, I've had to mod every single version of TW so far to make it work properly. However I guess it might be some legal reasons with Games Workshop. Not sure why.

[Werthead]

Quote

Its disappointing, I've had to mod every single version of TW so far to make it work properly. However I guess it might be some legal reasons with Games Workshop. Not sure why.

I think it's more to do with legal action. I gather that various companies (including Games Workshop but also New Line and maybe even HBO) weren't happy with how open the previous Total War engine was, allowing people to make far better Lord of the Rings, Warhammer and A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones strategy games than most of the official ones that people paid money for. I doubt EA were happy with people saying that the completely free Third Age: Total War was a vastly superior strategy game to their own Battle for Middle-earth games, for example.

That's pretty much the only possible explanation for why the Warscape games (which is the engine used for all the Total War games from Empire right through to Warhammer) explicitly log out campaign map customisation, when it would be trivially easy to allow it. Without that, all of the other mods are just tinkering with faction stats and moderately adjusting units. Given the limitations, it's amazing that things like DarthMod are even possible.

[Werthead]

So the new Call of Duty game will be set in space and on other planets, and the new Battlefield is set in an alternate-history WWI.

It remains to be seen if either are any good, but it's surprising and welcome to see the two biggest generic manshooters both branch out and try to be more experimental.

Bundling the remaster of Call of Duty 4 only with the new game is a mistake though. It's led to such an insane backlash that I wouldn't be surprised if Activision change their minds about that sharpish.

[RumHam]

6 minutes ago, Werthead said:

So the new Call of Duty game will be set in space and on other planets, and the new Battlefield is set in an alternate-history WWI.

It remains to be seen if either are any good, but it's surprising and welcome to see the two biggest generic manshooters both branch out and try to be more experimental.

Bundling the remaster of Call of Duty 4 only with the new game is a mistake though. It's led to such an insane backlash that I wouldn't be surprised if Activision change their minds about that sharpish.

I was quite confused when I heard the new Battlefield would be called "Battlefield 1" Hope it's good. 

I think a lot of the Call of Duty 4 remaster backlash is because it only comes with the fancy expensive version of the game. 

[briantw]

4 hours ago, Rhom said:

I tried out Overwatch last night.  Enough to confirm that I'm still terrible at FPS games.    Stuck with the AI opponent training mode.

Tried out a tank, but just really felt like I didn't know what I was doing.  DPS was more self-explanatory, but I'm just not quick enough to really be effective at that I think.  Finally, I played a few games as the support characters.  When I played as Mercy and we got through a defense game without anyone dying, I felt like I did pretty good. 

The main thing I don't like about Overwatch is how Q is just a win button.  Press it and get free kills.  It's annoying.

It's pretty obvious the game is influenced as much by MOBAs as by FPS games, as well, which is the other thing I don't really like about it.  One thing I love about games like Team Fortress 2 is that a really good player can jump in and just annihilate an enemy team, and that's really not the case in Overwatch unless you use your win button.  But using the win button requires zero actual skill, so that doesn't really count.

It's a fun enough game, but at the same time I'll probably only play it if a bunch of my friends do.  I can't see myself hopping on alone and joining games like I do with TF2.