Videogames: "No E3 for you!" edition.

[Mark Antony]

1 hour ago, sifth said:

Yea,the first TLoU game has the better ending, IMO.

  Hide contents

Maybe it's mostly because I find myself agreeing with Joel's actions in that game, where part II pretty much goes out of it's way to demonize him for it. While the first games ending is certainly not a happy one, I always viewed it as a very interesting one. With the second one however, I don't know it just made me feel depressed and miserable; almost like life sucks and nothing matters, was the moral of the game. In some ways the game reminds me of MGS:V, where these so called professional review sites gave the game amazing reviews, but the response from the fans was very mixed. Feels kind of strange, but I suppose these things do happen.

yeah the 2nd game tries to force it down your throat that Joel was 100% in the wrong and that he doomed humanity with his decision at the end of the first game but that’s a massive stretch imo

 

[sifth]

30 minutes ago, Mark Antony said:

 

  Hide contents

yeah the 2nd game tries to force it down your throat that Joel was 100% in the wrong and that he doomed humanity with his decision at the end of the first game but that’s a massive stretch imo

 

 

I mean the whole ending of the first LoU game, sort of reminds me of the Edric Storm plot from A Storm of Swords. Are we suppose to condemn Davos for saving a kid, because his death would have given Stannis a better chance of beating The Lannisters and The Others? I personally always viewed Joel as a hero for choosing an absolute good over a certain evil, that only had a small chance at leading to a possible greater good. 

[Macklunkey]

15 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

I finished The Last of Us 2 when I got off work this morning. Wanted to sleep and rant at a friend before I gave my thoughts. Just in case anything needed to seattle.

I give it a D-. When I first thought of writing this post before I slept, I was thinking D+ but sobriety has a way of sharpening my critiques, and it's clear to me now that the snap-grade was exceedingly generous, and not altogether unconnected to my having given the game a more generous grade while I was still in-progress. A notation clouded by optimism and idiocy.

The gameplay is fine. Great at times. Visuals are really amazing. And the overall concept of the story is one that I find quite compelling. It's the execution that collapses face-first through the floor. Truly abysmal. The best thing that can be said for the plot of this game is that it has so many ingredients for a good story already present and spinning around that I actively resented it for force-feeding me the final product.

Five or six times, I SHIT YOU NOT, FIVE OR SIX TIMES!!! I said to myself "that was just not good at all... c'mon, guys. There's still a lot of stuff I'm interested in, though, I'm sure it'll start to come together in the next scene." I felt like a chump by the time I realized I was in the end game. Seriously disappointing. If Cyberpunk is like this I'll destroy the moon.

 

Spoilery review:

  Hide contents

What a mess! The game starts off solidly, simply. Splitting time between Abby and Ellie was not a bad decision, Halo 2 introduced an 'enemy' protagonist to share screen time to great aplomb. In fact, I found the decision encouraging. Especially when Abby beat Joel to death with a club. If you didn't know Joel was gonna bite it in this game, you either never devoted a solitary thought to what might happen after the first one or you're a fucking lack wit. People citing this event as "too graphic" are whiny bitches who recognize that they're unfulfilled by a story but, because they can't articulate problems regarding plot and pacing, latch onto a single identifiable upsetting element. Even if the element in question was intended to be upsetting.

I have to address this further, regarding tone. Because tone is a problem in this installment. Joel getting beat to death is petty brutal. If you were made uncomfortable by the scene, that's probably to your credit. Seeing a man get his head staved in with a five-iron shouldn't leave you in a chipper mood. That being said, I thought the scene was actually very good at taking us right up to that line separating graphic material from torture porn. So here comes the problem...

You open the game with a Joel's brutal (not unjustified) murder by a newly introduced player character. We then re-assume Ellie's POV to see her absolutely bent on revenge, following this dark path. However she has a bizarre series of supporting characters orbiting around her whose purposes are to... I actually don't know. I'm not really sure what the purpose of Ellie's friends were, besides the one who was introduced in the beginning specifically so that he could show up- out of motherfucking nowhere- and be murdered to give the proceedings a sense of gravity. Tommy flip-flops between conservatism and revenge then ends up practically frothing at the goddamn mouth by the end without me learning a single thing about the man that I didn't know from game one. Dina is an anchor around Ellie's neck, holding her back from revenge and also pushing her away from other humans in Jackson who could help her find a sense of purpose to replace the void left by Joel's excising from her life. None of these characters contribute to either Ellie's growth from despair or her descent into it. They could have not been present and while her actions may have been altered, her motivations would not have been. This is not a sign of good characters, and yes we're still on tone. Because these characters contribute nothing to Ellie's emotional state, they mostly just act like Walking Dead characters. Kinda depressed, but sarcastically funny and full of ironic observations about the old world. THIS DOESN'T WORK in game 2. I'm familiar with this setting now, you need to take a step beyond leftover comics and museums/aquariums. Maybe that football stadium at the heart of a massive civilization in the ruins of Seattle could have been explored further. I'm much more interested in the basis for Isaac's authority than seeing Ellie play Carl with some dinosaurs.

Ellie is full of rage and feelings of impotence. Her companions should react to that more than not at all. And saying "how far are we willing to go" once apiece in separate cutscenes are not what I'm looking for. Dina, particularly, should always be dancing around this issue. Why? Because she's a passive airhead who contributes nothing to the story besides having a plot device squirted up her pussy. Any time Ellie's mood turns dark Dina softly acknowledges her pain and consents to the continuation of the story despite clearly not being a "I'm on a rampage, Lana!" kinda gal. This creates moments where our two main characters for the first part of the game are utterly detached from the motivations for their fucking mission because Ellie only wants to murder people and Dina isn't violent by nature or driven by revenge. She's just following along behind Ellie. I thought Dina was going to ditch Ellie, up till the "I'm pregnant" reveal, which made me want to vomit. Didn't take a fucking second for me to know how that whole "Martha!?! WHERE DID YOU HEAR THAT NAME!?!" shtick was gonna go down.

So we spend the first half or so of the game with Ellie's revenge quest before switching over to Abby again. This is one of those five or six moments I mentioned earlier, where I could not fathom a way to fuck up the story laid out by Ellie's segment. Lack of imagination on my part. Abby seems like a pretty serious person. Not a lot of nonsense involved with her character. After half a game of hunting her down and killing her friends one by one (or close enough) we get to play as Abby, who is taking part in a massive war. Not only that, but she's on what seems like a pretty short list of Captains in -let me say again- a CIVILIZATION that doesn't seem made up of thugs and murderers but rather a secure civilian population and a dedicated soldiery. Abby throws all of that away to go see her former boyfriend, abandoning an in-progress operation to fight her way across town to a location that a pregnant woman (who I'm pretty sure was fucking shot the cutscene previous) just walked to off screen alone. Remember that Abby was very nearly murdered on this trip. Which brings us to the death of the game, certainly the franchise for me. Those kids. Just awful.

Abby, a no-nonsense chick who committed a calculated act of murder five minutes after I met her and seems distant from even her closest friends, adopts two enemy combatants. I get that they saved her, but this is just terrible writing. They shouldn't have cut her down, she should not have protected them. It makes zero sense for Abby, who has been a soldier for the WLF's for YEARS to shift her loyalties on a dime like this. The game has not presented any character traits that would suggest faithlessness or ruinous empathy from Abby, she has never expressed regret at having to kill enemies, and quite frankly the kids are annoying as shit. Their antics ruin any potential for a halfway decent second half of the game. Repeatedly.

I could say so much about the idiocy of Abby going into that hospital basement for a Scar that I am struggling to put letters together. Everything about the event was shocking in its badness. From Mel (quite pregnant) fast traveling to the aquarium and being happy to help enemies just for Abby, who she admits to hating a single scene later, to the insistence that Abby risk her life just to avoid the possibility of an infection after amputation. Seriously??? She didn't go down the street to Walgreens, she went across the fucking city and into an unfathomable hellhole that MULTIPLE CHARACTERS said was a deathtrap just to get some prepackaged equipment for a chop-and-drop.

Step 1) Boil the saw.

Step 2) Wash the incision site.

Step 3) Hope for the best.

I just saved 25% of the game's runtime to reallocate towards something interesting.

Abby kept muttering to herself "this is crazy" or "why am I doing this?" in that basement. I AGREE!!! FUCKING LEAVE! I've never spoken to myself as much during a videogame as that basement. The events leading up to it were irritating because I could feel precious game hours slipping away, but the basement was a bridge too fucking far. I wasn't having fun fighting that amorphous blob boss, I was thinking about how it could have impacted a more relevant story.

And then she dies! Setting aside being fine after having your arm removed, she survives exactly long enough to kill the only interesting actor left in Abby's life before I learn a single goddamn thing about him. WHAT!?! WHY!?! WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA!?!!!???!!!!??? You can't start a narrow personally-driven revenge quest story that intersects with a war, pivot to the POV of someone WHO SHOULD FIGHT THE WAR then remove both warring parties from the narrative without any impact on the plot. This isn't how stories work! Things are supposed to matter, if not in context to me and my life at least they should be relevant to the people I care about in the story. This is called emotional investment. Herodotus didn't just tell a story about an army led by a dude who fought another army and then some people had their own conflict quite separately.

I could go on, there's a lot more I could go on about. The end stage is fun, and the writing is almost better but that may just be because they didn't have time to really fuck it up. The ending wasn't bad. I know people are probably saying that, and I have to disagree. I think they found the right ending more or less. It's how they got there that leaves it tasting of ash. Ellie is spared by Abby twice before returning the favor kind of outta nowhere after going on another revenge quest... I can't even. I thought, when it was clear that the Rattlers were slavers and whatnot, I thought that Abby and/or Lev would be in a cell. Maybe with some other slaves. And having obviously been mistreated and deprived, Ellie would take pity on her enemy and come to some realization that she didn't want to follow through on the killing. Either after a fight (like what happened essentially) or maybe through being forced to work together. I didn't think they would both have survived soft-core crucifixion for several days, Ellie would release and escort them away, and then they'd just fight until Ellie decided she didn't want to no more. That... was not good.

To wrap up, I'll say again that I like the ideas they had for a story rather a lot. But this is irredeemable. It needed massive rewrites, to combine Dina and Discount Glenn into a new character named Dina, and to avoid trying to make Abby a saint. That's the only explanation for her actions. She had to look like a good guy so you'd forgive her for Joel and want Ellie to spare her. So either have her straight up heading Unicef or let her be a soldier with hidden depths that emerge over the course of your time with her. You need to pick one. She can't be the hardest core WLF Scar Killer Badass and also have a heart bigger than Andre the Giant. Not without much better writers behind the keyboards.

D-

Game play is engaging and fun. Story is an albatross.

 

 

 

Thanks this. My thoughts exactly but articulated so much better than I could have done it.

[Macklunkey]

The storytelling and the writing on the TLOU 1 is so much better. The central relationship is what makes the game work well. People really bought into the relationship between Joel and Ellie. 

The storyline structure of the second one is all over the place.

[Ramsay B.]

I’m 12 hours into TLoU2 and pretty much agree with the majority here. Gameplay is great but the story is meh. Still having fun though.

[Werthead]

Big preview stream of Cyberpunk 2077 in two hours. A whole bunch of outlets have also been playing a big, bespoke preview build for the last couple of weeks and the embargo on those lifts immediately afterwards, so we'll get our first sense of how the game works on a large scale.

[Werthead]

The CP77 preview is outstanding. It's clear the game is utterly gigantic, has a ridiculous amount of content and looks fantastic. It's also hugely reactive. The first half-dozen hours or so of the game are completely different depending on which one of the three backgrounds you choose.

The preview playthroughs seem to be confirming the game is extremely impressive, but they only had a limited time to do things like combat, stealth or hacking, so they want to see more of those mechanics. What was odd was that the build they had was controller-only, so the PC critics had to play with controllers when they really wanted to see how it played with mouse and keyboard, but that's not a huge problem at the moment.

[Fez]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

The CP77 preview is outstanding. It's clear the game is utterly gigantic, has a ridiculous amount of content and looks fantastic. It's also hugely reactive. The first half-dozen hours or so of the game are completely different depending on which one of the three backgrounds you choose.

The preview playthroughs seem to be confirming the game is extremely impressive, but they only had a limited time to do things like combat, stealth or hacking, so they want to see more of those mechanics. What was odd was that the build they had was controller-only, so the PC critics had to play with controllers when they really wanted to see how it played with mouse and keyboard, but that's not a huge problem at the moment.

The new trailer looked great, as has most of the footage from that Night City thing. But I'm not sold on that "braindance" detective thing, and a little leary that they spent so much time on it in their first big public event in a while. It looks too similar to mechanics I've seen in other games that have always been clunky and uninteresting.

[Werthead]

5 minutes ago, Fez said:

The new trailer looked great, as has most of the footage from that Night City thing. But I'm not sold on that "braindance" detective thing, and a little leary that they spent so much time on it in their first big public event in a while. It looks too similar to mechanics I've seen in other games that have always been clunky and uninteresting.

It looked like they were trying to show it off as a dynamic feature. It's similar to the detective mode from the Arkham games, but in those games it was very curated and basically an interactive cutscene, whilst here it looks like it's going to be a tool you can use much more widely, in side missions and so on, as well as the main quest. That's genuinely quite impressive.

One interesting clarification they've made is that the game will have a somewhat shorter main quest than The Witcher 3 (which was ~80 hours) but a ton more side-quests, and the main quest will also have three more or less completely different playthroughs depending on the class (they seemed to be trying to shoot down the idea it's like Dragon Age: Origins, where the opening is different but the rest of the game is identical).

[felice]

54 minutes ago, Werthead said:

the main quest will also have three more or less completely different playthroughs depending on the class

So it's effectively three different games and you choose which one to play at a the start? A pity; I'd have preferred major variations based on choices during the game.

[Werthead]

41 minutes ago, felice said:

So it's effectively three different games and you choose which one to play at a the start? A pity; I'd have preferred major variations based on choices during the game.

It's both. Each one of the three major playthroughs also allows for you to change the story, affiliate with different factions and characters etc all within that story thread, but your home base, starting equipment and characters you have access to for jobs etc all shift based on the three.

I suppose it's more like the starting choices of Dragon Age: Origins bolted onto the story and faction choices of New Vegas (except the three choices are equal in length and content).

[Proudfeet]

On 6/22/2020 at 12:16 AM, Toth said:

Umineko Golden Fantasia!

I don't think I'd be able to sit through it now unfortunately. 

I ended up getting Soul Calibur and have completed the story mode of the characters. The way they narrate and converse is painfully slow, and coupled with their rubbish level translation, I ended up skipping all of the story after my patience ran out. Once bitten twice shy as they say. I haven't been to a cinema since the first Hobbit movie. I don't think I can do a translated visual novel for awhile.

[Rhom]

Found the feature that has @Jace, Basilissa sold on the game.

[Toth]

6 hours ago, Proudfeet said:

I don't think I'd be able to sit through it now unfortunately. 

I ended up getting Soul Calibur and have completed the story mode of the characters. The way they narrate and converse is painfully slow, and coupled with their rubbish level translation, I ended up skipping all of the story after my patience ran out. Once bitten twice shy as they say. I haven't been to a cinema since the first Hobbit movie. I don't think I can do a translated visual novel for awhile.

Ah, no, I wasn't talking about the actual Umineko VN, since you were talking about fighting games I was jokingly recommending the Golden Fantasia fighting game spin-off:

Though without having read Umineko in either VN or Manga format, I'm pretty sure it makes little sense to play this.

[Proudfeet]

32 minutes ago, Toth said:

Ah, no, I wasn't talking about the actual Umineko VN, since you were talking about fighting games I was jokingly recommending the Golden Fantasia fighting game spin-off:

Though without having read Umineko in either VN or Manga format, I'm pretty sure it makes little sense to play this.

Oh. I didn't realise there was one. 

The story isn't that important in fighting games though. I mean, you have to be really dedicated to know all the adaptations in Marvel v Capcom or Super Smash Bros. I don't have much experience in fighting games but the story doesn't seem to progress much for Soul Calibur. Its basically the same story from when I played the PS2 version a decade ago. Wonder if its the same for other games.

Anyway, I don't think I've ever thought poorly of a fighting game. It might have more to do with it being competitive rather than the game itself though. 

[Toth]

1 hour ago, Proudfeet said:

Oh. I didn't realise there was one. 

The story isn't that important in fighting games though. I mean, you have to be really dedicated to know all the adaptations in Marvel v Capcom or Super Smash Bros. I don't have much experience in fighting games but the story doesn't seem to progress much for Soul Calibur. Its basically the same story from when I played the PS2 version a decade ago. Wonder if its the same for other games.

Anyway, I don't think I've ever thought poorly of a fighting game. It might have more to do with it being competitive rather than the game itself though. 

Oh, I'm not the least bit concerned that the story of Golden Fantasia is bare bones. I only watched a couple of clips on Youtube and it's your usual excuse plot to see the characters from the novel beat each other up. Though it's chock full with references to the main story and... honestly readers who already love the characters are pretty much the only possible target group for this game.

[Durckad]

4 hours ago, Rhom said:

Found the feature that has @Jace, Basilissa sold on the game.

Only 5? That's pretty bare bones.

Maybe the game was delayed so they could add a 6th.

[Toth]

Speaking of When they Cry Visual Novels, I stumbled upon a very interesting Covid-related giveaway: "Higurashi - When they Cry"'s first chapter is given away for free on Steam and GOG until a Covid-19 vaccine is found. Obviously I can only recommend it to everyone!

https://www.gog.com/game/higurashi_when_they_cry_hou_ch1_onikakushi

https://store.steampowered.com/app/310360/Higurashi_When_They_Cry_Hou__Ch1_Onikakushi/

(*cough* if you install the PS2 sprites patch *cough*)

 

Meanwhile what have I been playing? This week not much thanks to a rather unexpectedly dense onslaught of things coming up. But last weekend I pretended to have an Egypt vacation by playing Assassin's Creed Origins. Yes, really. I bought it during the last Epic Store sale for five bucks thanks to their discount and 10 euro coupon. And yes, this means I haven't touched Unity ever since. Can't exactly say why. Given my usual typecasting, I guess Egypt is closer as a setting to my taste. Even though I am well aware of its reputation to just be ripping of The Witcher 3 and not being a 'proper' Assassin's Creed title anymore. Also yes, I played Unity as a bit of a test run to see whether my laptop can take it.

I am actually very surprised AC Origins runs on my laptop as well. And not even all that badly. I just had to deactivate anti-aliasing, but otherwise I can run it in all of its medium-to-high settings beauty. Admittedly, the sound effects desynch in the cutscenes in a very irritating manner, but otherwise it's fine. And I must admit the "You some dude who wants revenge, now here is your free to explore home village; now do whatever" approach is quite fun because it actually fits the character. Even in the hour I played Unity I wanted to strangle Arno several times for making me do stupid things that screamed bad idea just to make the plot happen, while Bayek in contrast is the resident troubleshooter going around lending everyone a hand who asks for and in return has friends wherever he goes. I... guess have a bit of a thing for genuinely heroic characters. It is extremely motivating to keep going in Origins even though it takes several hours to tell you why Bayek is hunting down these masked dudes, you just want to see Bayek interact with old friends or the neighbor's kids, you want to see him walk drunkards home and save kittens from trees. Because that's the kind of guy Bayek is and it's also amusing to watch him react to the more zany side quests.

On the mechanical side... well, I guess the climbing is simplified compared to Unity, but climbing down was still more of a hassle than I expected. I was killed only once so far and that was because I pushed "Alt" (climb up) instead of "C" (climb down), which resulted in Bayek jumping down a 30 meters high cliff. I also can't seem to get a grip on the combat system. It is fine in 1 vs 1 fights and I like to believe that the Sekhmet cult ritual fight honed my skills a bit, but the moment a second combatant appears things get hectic and I end up just frantically hack people to pieces without bothering to parry, which of course makes boss fights with several mooks a pain. My first story assassination was a ridiculous failure for that reason. I found my target inside a temple that luckily had an open roof, but not so luckily my target stayed below the roofed parts so that I couldn't do a takedown and then dared to move into another room while I was circling the roof trying to find a better angle (which I like to imagine as being accompanied by constant squeaking and creaking noises). Seeing that there was only one guard left, I made a takedown, but unfortunately at that exact same moment another guard walked up the stairs of the cellar and saw me, resulting in a messy scuffle. I had to chase my target and his bodyguards across the entire temple garden, dispatching everyone I came across one by one until I had cleared the entire temple... and then all I did was just riddle the with arrows from afar because he still had two bodyguards around and I didn't feel confident to take on three people at once.

One little detail I find amusing though: Much to my surprise takedowns by Bayek are non-lethal. The victims are just writhing on the ground in pain after you punch them out. This led me to try to clear camps only with takedowns and feel like Batman, which is awesome. Unfortunately the dialogues still assume that you killed everyone. It already happened twice that Bayek went back to his quest givers and said "I promise these guys won't trouble you anymore" and I was just sitting there thinking "How can you promise that? You just punched them!". I still have no idea why Bayek dislikes Ptolemy to the degree to smash his statues and murder his soldiers. You would think a Medjay would need a major reason to oppose his pharaoh like that...

[RumHam]

Leaked Microsoft document hints at second next-gen Xbox

Quote

Microsoft has been planning a second, cheaper and less power next-gen Xbox console. Codenamed Lockhart, it’s designed to take most of the key next-gen improvements found in the Xbox Series X and provide them at a lower price point for gaming at 1080p or 1440p.

This may be their answer to the "will people pay $700+ for a console" question. If the only major difference is resolution I'd get the cheaper one. 

[Jace, Extat]

23 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Leaked Microsoft document hints at second next-gen Xbox

This may be their answer to the "will people pay $700+ for a console" question. If the only major difference is resolution I'd get the cheaper one. 

That's great that they're actively gouging rubes before making a marketable product.