Videogames: Perfect homies for the great indoors.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

6 minutes ago, kuenjato said:

Like what Wert said -- also, it's a narrative-driven game, and the narrative would suffer IMO with "more" content. It feels perfectly paced at around 15 hours, with the tension generated across its run-time peaking right where it needs to. I'm playing Odyssey right now, and while I love the environment and most of the systems, the Ubi-grind/bloat is making the story seem thinner than it really is. Just with extra exploring and side-quests, I'm at 55 hours and only 44% done with the main narrative. After completing behemoths like this or Witcher 3, it's nice to engage with a shorter game.

And I'm sure that's true. But like I said before, I'm just getting back into the swing of things gaming wise.

For a point of reference, Diablo 2 is my all time fav. 

[Ramsay B.]

On 4/7/2020 at 12:54 AM, Inkdaub said:

  Reveal hidden contents

I wasn't torn at all.  Joel did the right thing.  If they mean Ellie harm...kill them.  If that means the world burns then the world burns.  I never wavered for a second.  I'm not sure if that's unusual or not. 

Best voice acting I've ever seen(heard...).  I want to play again every time someone mentions the game.

Spoiler

Your reaction is probably totally normal. I just started overthinking things for some silly reason. My hesitation is even more ridiculous seeing that I just killed every Firefly soldier in my way to get there. 

It took me like 15-18 hours to beat TLoU on normal difficulty. I was kinda disappointed it was that short(given the situation we’re in),but thought it ended in a perfect spot.

[The Winged Shadow]

On 4/7/2020 at 7:12 PM, Toth said:

You seriously want to farm 5 billion credits for a fleet carrier that disappears the moment you walk away from the game? I must say, I have absolutely zero interest in that update. Also last time I played I was still several thousand lightyears away from the bubble trying reach the next next sector before turning inwards towards the center of the galaxy. Would be a bother to abandon my exploration trip only for some farming.

Haha I need a ship to park all my other ships in! And all my engineered modules too. 10m upkeep (assuming it stays that way when it goes live) ins't a big deal. A 2-3 hour mining session will easily provide more than enough upkeep to last me a year. Not like there is anything better to do with credits in the game (when you already own all the ships you want). I hope they change their mind on the upkeep, because it feels like they are forcing you to log in every now and then (one of the many examples in elite where trying to be realistic has resulted in shit gameplay). But I have a feeling that the credit sink is the whole point of this. I think the upkeep is designed to be a credit sink for the rich players who exploited bugs to get rich (billionaires).

Sounds like you are the long range explorer type, so you're right that this update doesn't hold a lot for your playstyle

 

 

[Werthead]

20 hours ago, kuenjato said:

Like what Wert said -- also, it's a narrative-driven game, and the narrative would suffer IMO with "more" content. It feels perfectly paced at around 15 hours, with the tension generated across its run-time peaking right where it needs to. I'm playing Odyssey right now, and while I love the environment and most of the systems, the Ubi-grind/bloat is making the story seem thinner than it really is. Just with extra exploring and side-quests, I'm at 55 hours and only 44% done with the main narrative. After completing behemoths like this or Witcher 3, it's nice to engage with a shorter game.

Yup. Probably a better example is Alien: Isolation, which would have been an absolutely amazing 10-13 hour game, but they dragged it out to around 25 hours because the publisher thought that was the minimum people would tolerate. The result is a game that lots of people praised but it's also been universally criticised for being "too long" and that actually dissipated the tension.

Quote

 

For a point of reference, Diablo 2 is my all time fav. 

 

Diablo 2 was only about 20 hours, IIRC, although the expansion added another 10 hours or so onto it. Granted, Diablo 2 was way more focused on grinding, respeccing and replaying as different classes, with tons more side-content so you could get a lot more out of it in total.

[Rhom]

@A True Kaniggit

Quote

It's only a foolish purchase if the statue doesn't fulfill its purpose.

Was its purpose to make me jealous as hell?

Because damn it you succeeded at that.

Even I was at a loss as to what to do with this thing... it’s huge!!!!

 

[Impmk2]

Just finished Doom: Eternal.

Decent game, but imo doesn't have a patch on Doom 2016. It lost a lot of the irreverent humor and threw in a story line which no one asked for and took itself far too seriously. I don't play a Doom game because I care about some poorly written and confusing alien history. I play a Doom game to blow some shit up and tear some demons apart. 2016 got this and riffed on it, Eternal missed the mark.

OTOH the gameplay was as always great.

[RumHam]

I'm a sucker for asymmetrical multiplayer horror games, but I'm really enjoying the Resident Evil one that comes with the new remake. 

[Werthead]

Gritting my teeth through Valkyria Chronicles 4.

The gameplay is still good, but they've somehow put a ton more obnoxious, difficult-to-skip cutscenes before and after every single mission (and you have to manually hit enter every five seconds to move onto the next part of the cut scene), they've made the game ridiculously longer so it outstays its welcome (VC1 was a solid 35 hours, VC4 has taken me 53 hours to get to the final mission) and the final mission is completely dependent on luck, as the enemy goes first and they have magical super-units that can one-shot your entire army (I'm also calling bullshit on the enemy who can one-shot your tanks with a crossbow). The only way to survive the final mission is to constantly reload and hope for a round where they don't get too many hits in.

Also, the game is quite ridiculously sexist to a truly bizarre degree. The first game wasn't at all (some iffy uniforms aside, but nothing too egregious by anime standards) so why this game leans into it so hard is quite strange.

[Fez]

4 hours ago, Werthead said:

Gritting my teeth through Valkyria Chronicles 4.

The gameplay is still good, but they've somehow put a ton more obnoxious, difficult-to-skip cutscenes before and after every single mission (and you have to manually hit enter every five seconds to move onto the next part of the cut scene), they've made the game ridiculously longer so it outstays its welcome (VC1 was a solid 35 hours, VC4 has taken me 53 hours to get to the final mission) and the final mission is completely dependent on luck, as the enemy goes first and they have magical super-units that can one-shot your entire army (I'm also calling bullshit on the enemy who can one-shot your tanks with a crossbow). The only way to survive the final mission is to constantly reload and hope for a round where they don't get too many hits in.

Also, the game is quite ridiculously sexist to a truly bizarre degree. The first game wasn't at all (some iffy uniforms aside, but nothing too egregious by anime standards) so why this game leans into it so hard is quite strange.

Both VCI and VC4 I ended up quitting at about the 30 hour mark. The gameplay, and the narratives, just don't hold up well enough to support how long the games are.

[Toth]

Mmh... I only played the first one and I did have a feeling that it was already (comparably subtly) pushing its female characters into downtrodden stereotypes when they talked about what they wanted to do after the war, also how the female McGuffin people mostly ended hope helpless in the cutscenes even when they are decent fighters within the gameplay.

Though granted, my biggest gripe was the impossible steering of the tank that ate all my movement points without moving an inch that caused me to give up on the game once I reached a mission where I couldn't just park it at the starting point and go my way. I don't know whether this was a PC porting issue, but it was insanely frustrating.

Meanwhile I played a lot more No Man's Sky yesterday, 4 hours according to my clock. Phew. I just found the 'Nexus', though I am extremely confused where this comes from. I have a feeling they intended the story to have this very crypic show don't tell set-up where you have a blank protagonist with no memories drifting through space with occasional moments of somewhat lovecrofian weirdness going on. But the missions so far have been revolving entirely around survival and setting up a base, so suddenly being dropped into this massive space station and being told that this inexplicably was your intended destination the whole time feels very disconnected to me. It's like there are two story philosophies actively working against each other.

Then again, I guess people don't play it for the story anyway. Before closing yesterday I decided that the next step on my journey should be to properly set up camp. I bought myself a Hauler because I can't store shit in my inventory, but I was even more relieved when I got blueprints for storage boxes at a base. Even as I was tinkering with my base I kept running into the problem of lacking very specific materials. I know I could just buy them at the market, but I'd like to do it the old-fashioned way by setting up a network of extremely simple sheds with attached transporters that goes across planets with all possible resources, all connected with my main base where I build up a storage with all resources of the game. I guess that endeavour would also result in me finding enough of the common buried technology stuff and nanites to get everything needed for a proper mining base to make the big money.

[Gorn]

I tried Watch Dogs 1, which I picked up for free on one of Ubisoft giveaways. My general opinion of the game is meh. It felt like an inferior clone of GTA IV (not even V) with a hacking gimmick, and I never connected with the main character or the story. When I lost an hour of gameplay due to an autosave messup, I used it as an excuse to quit playing.

Going back to my comfort gaming - Paradox grand strategies. Hearts of Iron IV, here I come.

[Fez]

Continuing to have a whale of a time in Bannerlord, despite having very little clue of what I'm doing. The overall campaign clearly needs a lot of work (it is in early access after all), but damn are the battles satisfying.

[Toth]

I'm honestly a bit concerned how addictive NMS is. Yesterday night I played a bit more it was a constant stream of "Just need one more buried technology to buy that neat thing I saw the shop", "Approaching one more planet can't harm, I still need some phosphorus", "I need just one more copper deposit to make these upgrades I got the blueprints for", "Hey look, there is a hidden grave up there, I wonder what I get", "There is a cave with lots of underground relics right next to it, have to check that out", "What is this, platinum stalagmites?", "Oh, and there is another outpost!", "And around it are even more buried technologies and drop pods", "Hey why is my inventory full again, better call my ship and store some shit away", "Oh no, my ship inventory is also full as well, gotta put some of the rubbish into my refiner", "While I wait for my refiner it can't hurt to look around some more... oh look, a buried technology!"

I haven't even started to build my mining base. XD

The only thing I am still not sure of is the navigation. One of the main quests wants me to travel to two different anomalies, but I can't seem to find them on the galaxy map and in fact I am not entirely sure which of the main quests (if at all) is being follewed if I follow that dotted line.

[red snow]

Wasted an hour playing darts on final fantasy. Got some materia for it but it reminds me if the fun can be had with mini games.

Combat system is taking a bit of getting used to but it does feel more involved

[Rhom]

2 hours ago, red snow said:

Wasted an hour playing darts on final fantasy. Got some materia for it but it reminds me if the fun can be had with mini games.

Combat system is taking a bit of getting used to but it does feel more involved

I hate that darts game!  There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme nor reason to the aiming!!!! What Materia do you get and do you have to take top place?

I mostly like the combat, but it seems too fast paced and hectic to honestly make for reasonable blocking and dodging.

You know the little thing that I like the most that seems completely random and inconsequential?  I love that I’m using two magic Materia and a support Materia and my sword very visibly has two green dots and a yellow dot as I walk around.  Same with Tifas glove.

[Werthead]

On 4/11/2020 at 12:49 PM, Gorn said:

I tried Watch Dogs 1, which I picked up for free on one of Ubisoft giveaways. My general opinion of the game is meh. It felt like an inferior clone of GTA IV (not even V) with a hacking gimmick, and I never connected with the main character or the story. When I lost an hour of gameplay due to an autosave messup, I used it as an excuse to quit playing.

Going back to my comfort gaming - Paradox grand strategies. Hearts of Iron IV, here I come.

Watch_Dogs is kind of okay but not great. It has a lot of promise in the hacking and some of the story elements (like the main character's relationship with his family), not to mention how well it depicts Chicago. The biggest problem is that it allowed you play it exactly the same as GTA, so a lot of the hacking nuance got lost in favour of blowing stuff up and machine gunning enemies to death, which was often easier and faster.

I have Watch_Dogs 2 on my list, which is supposed to be far better because you can legitimately do non-lethal playthroughs and it gives you a lot more hacking powers and a drone to do stuff with. You still can murdergun your way through the title but it's no longer the default approach.

[Mexal]

42 minutes ago, Rhom said:

I mostly like the combat, but it seems too fast paced and hectic to honestly make for reasonable blocking and dodging.

My issue with the combat is that it's so cray and hectic that it's very hard to pay attention to blocking, dodging, fighting and the rest of your parties ATB bars to make sure that you can actually use their skills since if you don't change to them or address their skills, they'll just sit there and do nothing. Wish there was a way to set their plan ahead of time. Much easier to pay attention to everyone in a turn based way than real time combat.

[Red Tiger]

1 hour ago, Mexal said:

My issue with the combat is that it's so cray and hectic that it's very hard to pay attention to blocking, dodging, fighting and the rest of your parties ATB bars to make sure that you can actually use their skills since if you don't change to them or address their skills, they'll just sit there and do nothing. Wish there was a way to set their plan ahead of time. Much easier to pay attention to everyone in a turn based way than real time combat.

The camera doesn't help.

[Mexal]

47 minutes ago, Red Tiger said:

The camera doesn't help.

No it doesn’t. That’s definitely another thing.

That being said, still thoroughly enjoy the game and outside of every girl macking on Cloud (who’s an emo asshole atm), think it’s a cool story. I’m just going to be sad that it’s only part 1 and won’t know how the story ends for awhile since I never played the original.

[Werthead]

33 minutes ago, Mexal said:

No it doesn’t. That’s definitely another thing.

That being said, still thoroughly enjoy the game and outside of every girl macking on Cloud (who’s an emo asshole atm), think it’s a cool story. I’m just going to be sad that it’s only part 1 and won’t know how the story ends for awhile since I never played the original.

Spoiler

 

Given how FF7R ends, I don't think you'll know how the original ends either from playing the remake.

 

At this juncture I'm just recommending that people who've been intrigued by FF7 but never got round to playing the original just play the original. In fact, it'd be interesting to see the reaction of someone who'd played FF7R and then played the original.