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Videogames: "No E3 for you!" edition.


Red Tiger

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9 hours ago, Rhom said:

I tried to install Phantasy Star Online 2 today.

What. A. Cluster@&$%.

You have to get it from the Windows store.  So I download it this morning and then it goes to update.  Pretty standard MMO stuff.  Then as it updates it times out and I can’t get it to launch.  Still figure standard MMO stuff.

I go to look at the official Twitter to see if there’s an announcement on server outages. They recommend to people with my problem to update Windows and turn on XBox services.  I do that.

Still doesn’t work.  Then I start seeing messages on forums about being unable to uninstall or recover disk space when you do.

Yup. Just checked.  I have only a few KB of space on my main drive. There is a brand new folder on my C drive (told the installer to put it on E drive where I run my games from) that takes up over 59GB of space!  WindowsModifiableApps created today.  And when I try to delete or uninstall, says I don’t have permission to access it and the only user with access is “Trusted Installer.”

Its basically like Windows Store has put a big fat Malware on my computer.  :tantrum: 

1. Have you tried uninstalling Microsoft Store first before trying to delete it?

2. Maybe try booting into safe mode and seeing if you can delete it then.

3. Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

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1 hour ago, Durckad said:

1. Have you tried uninstalling Microsoft Store first before trying to delete it?

2. Maybe try booting into safe mode and seeing if you can delete it then.

3. Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

Did try the third option... will give the first two a go.

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On 5/26/2020 at 1:06 PM, briantw said:

Yeah, the thing that turned me off of the series until Odyssey pulled me back in was the piss poor controls.  I felt like being stealthy was borderline impossible because you couldn't properly control your character.

I decided to try Syndicate, after only playing Odyssey and Origins, and the controls were so awful that I stopped. I’m sure I could’ve gotten used to them but meh.

I’ve started to play Dragon’s Dogma on ps4. This usually isn’t my type of game but I wanted to switch things up. It’s pretty overwhelming. There’s so many things to figure out, a million items and all these crazy stats for your character and pawns. I’m reading about all the inclinations now, and what they do. 

I started out as a mage but quickly switched to an assassin. It didn’t feel right not being able to hit things effectively in battle. Also relieved I read about the eternal ferrystone being a thing. Was really dreading having to collect ferrystones just to fast-travel. 

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1 hour ago, Rhom said:

Did try the third option... will give the first two a go.

Try uninstalling the app itself from powershell as well - I'm not sure what the app name would be so you might need to list them all first and find the right one. You'll need to run powershell as administrator as well to do the below.

(Get-AppxPackage).Name
Get-AppxPackage <name> | Remove-AppxPackage

The first will list all installed packages, the second will uninstall it. The second command is the same way you'd uninstall the Windows Store to try deleting the folders after removing the store, you'll just need to plug the appropriate name for the store in rather than the game name.

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I wound up calling up my IT guy and having him swing by.  Took four hours to get all the tentacles of this thing out of my hard drive.  I couldn’t even send a work email this morning because I didn’t have enough drive space to run the thing. I’m not looking forward to his bill...

Hell, I once got a Malware that froze my computer and told me the FBI would come arrest me for child pornography unless I went to WalMart and purchased a prepaid card to pay a “fine” and get access to my computer.  That thing caused less problems than this shit MS pulled.

The game has run for 8 years in Japan.  How hard can it possibly be to put a launcher to it and have at it?!!?

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I'm glad this finally got sorted, but please use a separate computer for business stuff with only the stuff for the business installed on it. You really don't want to be unable to do payroll, for example, as you said.

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Major WH40K sale on, so I picked up Sanctum Reach for a song. It's the closest we have to an "actual 40K simulator," and looking forwards to giving it a go.

Otherwise about 50 hours into the Fallout 4 replay. Enjoying it a lot more by holding back the main storyline as long as possible and doing side-missions. I've also dabbled in settlement building a lot more than I did previously. I must admit that the settlement building and how you designate scrap items you need to collect etc are all handled better in Fallout 76, and I am missing the stronger graphics of the latter (FO4's ability to generate impressive-looking vistas is really poor, even for a 2015 game).

The Borderlands Complete Collection is the free game offer on Epic Store. I've still not got round to Borderlands 1 despite buying it when it first came out, so I probably won't bother with this one.

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50 minutes ago, Ran said:

That's crazy. August 12th, mark your calendars.

Are those any good though? I barely ever registered that these Total War side games are a thing and I must admit I have been extremely disappointed by how Total War plays ever since they started with this Motion Capture style-over-tactics nonsense.

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48 minutes ago, Toth said:

Are those any good though? I barely ever registered that these Total War side games are a thing and I must admit I have been extremely disappointed by how Total War plays ever since they started with this Motion Capture style-over-tactics nonsense.

The previous Saga TW was Thrones of Britannia, basically a reduced TW: Attila with some modified mechanics, and it was overall a bust. The game just wasn't exciting enough. But CA have done very well with Warhammer and Three Kingdoms. Troy is pretty much building on these, again with some modified mechanics. I will that the latest trailer didn't give me any excitement, and will wait for more reveals. 

I don't think the game-play has changed much, for better or worse, when it comes to making tactical decisions in battles. The UI has become friendlier in the last few games. The MoCap style was detrimental in Rome 2 and Attila to unit/character collision that were so awesome to behold in the older titles, but again, they've optimized and changed things in that area, too.

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11 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

The previous Saga TW was Thrones of Britannia, basically a reduced TW: Attila with some modified mechanics, and it was overall a bust. The game just wasn't exciting enough. But CA have done very well with Warhammer and Three Kingdoms. Troy is pretty much building on these, again with some modified mechanics. I will that the latest trailer didn't give me any excitement, and will wait for more reveals. 

Yeah, the trailer was pretty meh and given how bad CAs track record is with their history I'm betting it will be more or less an adaption of the Brad Pitt movie. But oh well, for free I will certainly give it a try.

11 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

I don't think the game-play has changed much, for better or worse, when it comes to making tactical decisions in battles. The UI has become friendlier in the last few games. The MoCap style was detrimental in Rome 2 and Attila to unit/character collision that were so awesome to behold in the older titles, but again, they've optimized and changed things in that area, too.

Mmh... I feel like they have all been bad, given those titles I tried out since then. The pathfinding in Empire was horrenduous and screwed up your strategies all the time, causing me to avoid close combat in Napoleon entirely (which made it a decent game). Shogun I never really tried (I installed it once, but it ran so horribly on that PC I immediately abandoned it). I tried Attila, never managed to finish a single campaign and ended up autocalculating almost every battle because they were too boring. The original Rome had in my opinion the best combat where your formations actually mattered and battles didn't devolve into a mindless Hollywood action scene due to every soldier going off to do their own thing. Looking at pictures from Warhammer and Three Kingdoms, I don't see that they've actually done anything about that, it looks more like they doubled down on it.

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2 hours ago, Toth said:

Mmh... I feel like they have all been bad, given those titles I tried out since then. The pathfinding in Empire was horrenduous and screwed up your strategies all the time, causing me to avoid close combat in Napoleon entirely (which made it a decent game). Shogun I never really tried (I installed it once, but it ran so horribly on that PC I immediately abandoned it). I tried Attila, never managed to finish a single campaign and ended up autocalculating almost every battle because they were too boring. The original Rome had in my opinion the best combat where your formations actually mattered and battles didn't devolve into a mindless Hollywood action scene due to every soldier going off to do their own thing. Looking at pictures from Warhammer and Three Kingdoms, I don't see that they've actually done anything about that, it looks more like they doubled down on it.

Actually formations, flanking attacks etc. matter still, and a lot. Sure, Warhammer doesn't have formations, but then again it has magic and flying creatures. Unit pathfinding is still a challenge, which is why they unfortunately simplified siege battles rather than attempt to fix the problem. I think that has to do with the game engine they've been using for a long time.

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1 minute ago, Corvinus85 said:

Actually formations, flanking attacks etc. matter still, and a lot. Sure, Warhammer doesn't have formations, but then again it has magic and flying creatures. Unit pathfinding is still a challenge, which is why they unfortunately simplified siege battles rather than attempt to fix the problem. I think that has to do with the game engine they've been using for a long time.

They do? The thing that irked me a lot is that flanking only works in TW as long as it all happens simultaneously because slightly stronger units slice through slightly weaker ones so ridiculously fast that you have never enough time to bring your cavalry around the enemy before the battle is over. At least that was my experience when I played Attila. It got obviously even worse with an infantry heavy army, so the strategy of the day was to just throw all your units at the enemy at once to overwhelm him. Then again, I am probably just too used playing heavily modded versions of Rome 1 like Europa Barbarorum where battle lines and switching out tired troops is utterly necessary to get through a battle with minimal losses.

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15 hours ago, Toth said:

Are those any good though? I barely ever registered that these Total War side games are a thing and I must admit I have been extremely disappointed by how Total War plays ever since they started with this Motion Capture style-over-tactics nonsense.

No. The last really good, all-around classic Total War was Medieval IIEmpire, once they fixed the bugs, became reasonably decent and that carried through Napoleon and Shogun II (which has the best campaign AI of the entire series).

Rome II was a disaster which, after seven years of constant patching, several DLCs and a complete ground-up rebuild, they've just about gotten to "passable". Attila was sort of okay but then I found the Warhammers to be almost unplayable. No proper sieges, no naval combat, utterly appalling enemy AI and an increasing focus on cartoon superheroes with cool abilities and animations over battle tactics. That carried through to Three Kingdoms, although to be fair that does seem better (especially the historical mode, which switches off the superman stupidity). Thrones of Britannia was also dogshit (cheesing the AI so it doesn't suffer from attrition and can still field full stacks of units when they control exactly one village was old in 2004, let alone in 2019). Aside from the shiny graphics, there's no reason whatsoever to play Thrones when you can play the original Viking Invasion for Medieval I or the British map in Kingdoms for Medieval II.

The main problem I've had with all of the Warscape games (starting with Empire) is the speed of the battles, which ranges from just about okay to outright absurd. Units engage and seconds later they're all dead or are retreating. Pinning enemy units with infantry and hitting them with cavalry is almost impossible. I think a modding team did some calculations and worked out that battles in Rome II run twice as fast as they did in the original Rome engine. A lot of the modern mods (which are limited) are built around stopping this by adjusting unit stats to something reasonable and removing the "glass cannon" tendency in the base units. The mechanic where you can only assemble an army with a general, so you can have a map like Rome II which is utterly vast but you only have four armies to defend the entire Empire and can't raise a new army until you do certain things to unlock a new general, is also complete horseshit. That tension you get from the earlier games of spotting an enemy army landing on your coast whilst your main armies are hundreds of miles away and you have to scratch-assemble an army of local garrisons and move troops from one exposed city to another is completely gone.

The philosophy and focus of modern Total Wars has moved away from what I really enjoyed about the series in favour of chasing empty spectacle, flashy graphics and superficialities, and in doing so they've removed the ability for modders to create full total conversion mods (I suspect because they got embarrassed about being shamed by amateurs doing better things with their engine), which is kind of essential when you're constantly releasing buggy products. It's a huge shame, and I doubt they're going to recover any time in the future.

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15 minutes ago, Werthead said:

No. The last really good, all-around classic Total War was Medieval IIEmpire, once they fixed the bugs, became reasonably decent and that carried through Napoleon and Shogun II (which has the best campaign AI of the entire series).

Medieval II was fine (once you got adjusted to the camera hovering like 10m above the ground after playing Rome), though for my taste I found the unit variety lacking and cavalry far too strong. But that's minor issues compared with games where the battles are simply no fun...

And yeah... I'm still surprised I managed to finish a Napoleon campaign, but really only by avoiding close combat and sieges at all costs and instead cheesing through every battle with huge amounts of artillery and the terribly broken light infantry. I still remember vividly cavalry failing to kill a single enemy because they couldn'tget into their starting position for their attack animation, or that unit of infantry that formed a line across the entire map while trying to man the walls of a fortress. The pathfinding was this atrocious.

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