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Video Games: Mystery Box Character Creation


Jace, Extat

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I'm excited to be able to play Horizon; my laptop should be able to handle it at lower settings. Let's hope this is the beginning of more old Sony games being ported to PC. I'd love to play The Last of Us, finally.

As for Pikmin 3... probably not the best PR for Nintendo to charge 60 bucks for it (apparently it was selling for $20 on the Wii U) when they don't have any other new games coming out. I do think they must have some new game that will come out in November or for the holidays, or else they would have saved Paper Mario until the end of the year. I can't say I'm too excited personally, but the Pikmin games have never been my thing.

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Bethesda confirm no news on Starfield until 2021.

Makes sense, since post-E3 there's no real venue to announce it. My suspicion is they do a big reveal at E3 with a September-October 2021 release window, moving themselves well clear of Cyberpunk 2077.

That does put the release gap between Bethesda mainline CRPGs at 6 years, which is unprecedented in their history (previously the record was 4 years, between Skyrim and Fallout 4 and between Morrowind and Oblivion). It raises the question of when The Elder Scrolls VI (with the likely title Redfall) can be expected: 2027, sixteen years after Skyrim, seems unfeasibly distant.

2 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

I'm excited to be able to play Horizon; my laptop should be able to handle it at lower settings. Let's hope this is the beginning of more old Sony games being ported to PC. I'd love to play The Last of Us, finally.

Bloodborne's PC port has been rumoured for a while. Last of Us is a lot more tenuous, although you can play it on PC via PlayStation Now (unfortunately only the PS3 version, so it does look a bit ropey by modern standards).

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47 minutes ago, Caligula_K3 said:

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about Bloodborne. I'd love to play that too.

A 2021 release date for Starfield would be very nice. I can't believe it's already been almost ten years since Skyrim. I liked Fallout 4, but it really just didn't scratch the Bethesda RPG itch.

I've been replaying it recently and I like it a lot more than Skyrim. FO4's big problem is the urgency of the main quest is incompatible with the big open world stuff, and I missed a lot of the side-stuff in my first playthrough because I felt it was more role-playing-appropriate to get through the storyline ASAP.

On this replay I ignored that and put a lot more energy into the settlements, not going mad with them but just setting up settlement beacons, providing infrastructure and defences and linking them all together with (heavily-armed) caravans, which has had the unexpected side-effect of putting Minutemen and caravans pretty much within spitting distance of almost every spot on the map. I'm wandering around seeing places getting cleaned out without my intervention because the map is almost completely criss-crossed by caravans going everywhere. It adds a completely different dynamic where you can take control of the open world aspect of the game, something no Bethesda game has done before (New Vegas did it in the main storyline, but that had no discernible in-game-world impact), certainly not Skyrim. The only big problem I've encountered is the travel time between Far Harbor and Boston; when you get a warning a settlement is under attack in the other area, it's already too late to intervene.

I also picked up a lot of side-quests I hadn't done before, and some of the DLCs that weren't out during my original playthrough. All in all, a much better game than I remember in terms of gameplay and things to do, even if the traditional complaints (the main story is still bobbins, quest design is either fetch quests or kill everybody missions) are still valid.

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2 hours ago, sifth said:

I beat Darksouls 3 with my friends Sunday night. It was pretty fun. We beat the first DLC on Monday and are planning to start the second one next week.

I never played the 2nd DLC.  I should go back and do a new build for that

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9 hours ago, Werthead said:

I've been replaying it recently and I like it a lot more than Skyrim. FO4's big problem is the urgency of the main quest is incompatible with the big open world stuff, and I missed a lot of the side-stuff in my first playthrough because I felt it was more role-playing-appropriate to get through the storyline ASAP.

On this replay I ignored that and put a lot more energy into the settlements, not going mad with them but just setting up settlement beacons, providing infrastructure and defences and linking them all together with (heavily-armed) caravans, which has had the unexpected side-effect of putting Minutemen and caravans pretty much within spitting distance of almost every spot on the map. I'm wandering around seeing places getting cleaned out without my intervention because the map is almost completely criss-crossed by caravans going everywhere. It adds a completely different dynamic where you can take control of the open world aspect of the game, something no Bethesda game has done before (New Vegas did it in the main storyline, but that had no discernible in-game-world impact), certainly not Skyrim. The only big problem I've encountered is the travel time between Far Harbor and Boston; when you get a warning a settlement is under attack in the other area, it's already too late to intervene.

I also picked up a lot of side-quests I hadn't done before, and some of the DLCs that weren't out during my original playthrough. All in all, a much better game than I remember in terms of gameplay and things to do, even if the traditional complaints (the main story is still bobbins, quest design is either fetch quests or kill everybody missions) are still valid.

4 is still my least-favorite Fallout game, below even Fallout Tactics (haven't played 76 or Brotherhood of Steel). There are two key things I hated about it.

The first is the half-baked settlement-building feature, where they just basically unloaded a bunch of development tools on players and called it a day without making any effort to make it user-friendly to a player who does it from the perspective of their character. I've spent fruitless hours trying to build something at least semi-nice looking, before giving up on that part of the game entirely. The walls don't even snap together at the edges! Not to mention that every new building you make instantly looks like a decades-old half-ruin.

The second and bigger one is my exploration constantly being interrupted by alerts of my settlements being attacked. I see that you liked it, so I guess it's a YMMV situation, but to me it just felt like a pointless game of whack-a-mole with the raiders.

There are some details I liked about the story, such as Brotherhood of Steel finally being depicted as a full fascist society, but not enough to make me replay it.

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3 hours ago, Gorn said:

The first is the half-baked settlement-building feature, where they just basically unloaded a bunch of development tools on players and called it a day without making any effort to make it user-friendly to a player who does it from the perspective of their character. I've spent fruitless hours trying to build something at least semi-nice looking, before giving up on that part of the game entirely. The walls don't even snap together at the edges! Not to mention that every new building you make instantly looks like a decades-old half-ruin.

The second and bigger one is my exploration constantly being interrupted by alerts of my settlements being attacked. I see that you liked it, so I guess it's a YMMV situation, but to me it just felt like a pointless game of whack-a-mole with the raiders.

I don't know when you played it, but the settlement building is definitely improved over that. Things do snap together at the edges (even if they do sometimes get confused) and the higher-quality material you use, the less stuff looks destroyed. If you build things out of concrete or use Vault-Tec designs (from the Vault DLC) you can make stuff that looks brand new, but it's much more costly in terms of resources. It also kind of makes sense, since the stuff you're recycling is stuff that's already old and battered. The building system is still more cumbersome than it should be - on PC it's particularly frustrating using this console-centric system when you could have something much nicer and easier to use - but it's better than it was in 2015.

They did revamp the settlement attack mechanic in one of the later patches. Garvey no longer comes running up to you to scream about a settlement needing help (he'll only mention it if you talk to him) every 5 seconds and the game reduces the chances of a settlement being attacked, or needing your help if it is, based on the defence rating. I made Sanctuary into a semi-impregnable stronghold defended by a wall of laser turrets, heavy machineguns and guard posts manned by guys in power armour and it was basically never attacked again.

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My copy of THE WORLD OF CYBERPUNK 2077 turned up a couple of days ago and it is very impressive. The maps and guide to Night City make it clear how absolutely massive the place is and the sheer amount of stuff they've created with regard to weapons, vehicles, clothes, cyberware, augment etc is mind-boggling.

If they've genuinely got all this stuff into the game in a coherent manner, it's going to be amazing.

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On 8/6/2020 at 8:43 AM, Werthead said:

Bloodborne's PC port has been rumoured for a while. Last of Us is a lot more tenuous, although you can play it on PC via PlayStation Now (unfortunately only the PS3 version, so it does look a bit ropey by modern standards).

I wonder if Sony is factoring in the polarising response to TLOU 2 when thinking about a PC release for TLOU. Horizon 2 should be a pretty early release on PS5, and there will no doubt be a PS5 version of TLOU2 in the first year of PS5. So the idea is not to release the 1st games on PC just out of kindness to PC gamers, but to try to get PC gamers to buy a PS5 for the sequel, relying on the pretty well known lack of patience among a lot of gamers.

With all the shit being stirred around TLOU2, some legit differences of opinion or gripes about certain decisions, a lot just trolling because gays and trans and buff lady contaminated mah game!!! Sony might decide that perhaps TLOU2 won't be a big draw for people who might play TLOU on a PC release.

Also, loads of people have already watched TLOU as a movie on Youtube. What is it's real sales potential on PC given many PC gamers will already be completely spoiled for so many people. It is a good and fun game to play, but really it's brilliance hangs on the story and characters. So the experience will be highly diminished if you already know all about that.

And speaking of, for those who have played 1 & 2, some speculation about 3

Spoiler

For almost the whole of TLOU we think Ellie is immune. But at the end we find out Ellie is infected, but with a mutant strain that has become symbiotic with Ellie rather than parasitic. The Fireflies, and Abby's dad in particular, probably not being immunology experts (and certainly ND not being), and 20 years of progressively losing knowledge, means they still think a vaccine is necessary. But did they (characters in the game and ND outside of the game) stop to think that what makes Ellie immune is competitive inhibition. The symbiote strain is what kicks the parasitic strain out whenever Ellie gets exposed. And maybe the symbiote strain spreads the same way the parasitic strain does, through the bite. Ellie has bitten 2 people since being infected: David (dead by machete to the brain) and Abby. Abby may now also be symbiotically infected.

Imagine, Abby finds out she's "immune" like Ellie. That would mess with her head. It means Joel was right (but for the wrong reasons) to prevent Ellie from being killed by her Dad / the Fireflies. And it means her Dad would have killed Ellie unnecessarily if he had got his way. Strictly speaking Joel still didn't need to kill Abby's Dad, but I don't recall having the option of not killing him. The other OR people you could let live, but Abby's dad was threatening you with a scalpel and wasn't going to let you take her.

 

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Ha. For five years people have confidently been predicting that Rocksteady have been making a Superman game and it turns out that Superman is indeed in their new game...as the antagonist. It's actually a Suicide Squad game.

Also sounds like some trouble in the WB Games camp, with Rocksteady and WB Montreal having some beef stemming from WB Montreal making Arkham Origins over Rocksteady's objections, Rocksteady spiking Origins from being mentioned in discussions of the franchise (with some official WB marketing referring only to the "Arkham Trilogy") and Origins getting recent critical reappraisals ranking it high above Arkham Knight. It then sounds like WB Montreal started working on a Suicide Squad game and were some way into it when Rocksteady said they wanted to do a game, so the project was booted over to them and Montreal put to work on Gotham Knights, which also just got announced but only an auxiliary bit of news to Suicide Squad.

Quote

I wonder if Sony is factoring in the polarising response to TLOU 2 when thinking about a PC release for TLOU. Horizon 2 should be a pretty early release on PS5, and there will no doubt be a PS5 version of TLOU2 in the first year of PS5. So the idea is not to release the 1st games on PC just out of kindness to PC gamers, but to try to get PC gamers to buy a PS5 for the sequel, relying on the pretty well known lack of patience among a lot of gamers.

I think the problem is more making money. For the first couple of years of their lifespans, the consoles will not be in many homes (especially with a massive economic downturn), so they're going to need to rely on PC games sales to help pay for the immense costs of development and help keep things afloat until the consoles get enough of an install base to make things work better for them.

LoU2's sales also mean that Sony are likely very much not giving a flying fuck about the "controversy" over the game's story at all.

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So yesterday, just in time to completely minimize my gaming again cause of the end of my holidays, I finished my New Republic campaign. And yes, that includes blowing up a goddamn Executor. It wasn't fun, I say that honestly. After having built a very strong fleet I made a mad push liberating Imperial worlds one after another, taking even Bastion and one massive ring world that was able to build SSDs (unfortunately only for the Imperials, no shiny toys for the Republic...). Taking the last world of the Imperial Remnant was extremely weird. The Pentastar Alignment wasn't kind to it, reducing it to one lone world with the smallest possible shipyard and the Ai was stuck in that for 30 weeks or so. So when my fleet arrived, the entire system was just filled entirely with corvettes and carrier, with just two Victory class cruisers amidst that ludicrous swarm. At times I looked at some straggler ships of mine and got briefly nervous that they got themselves into a debris field and were taking damage, only to zoom down and see that that static seeming debris field was just corvettes and patrol craft in all shapes and forms they were wading through. Of course my poor fighters got absolutely hammered in that battle, but at least my capital ships barely took any scratches.

Afterwards I continued my conquering spree until my main fleet hit the inevitable roadblock I was anxious to find: The Reaper. Oddly enough, without its entourage. The Executor-class Super Star Destroyer was docked at a shipyard all alone as my Corellian Corvette blasted into the system (or at least I mused to myself that it was, given that it made no attempt to go intercept me, at least initially). I called in Ackbar (whom I was now confident enough to include in my line-ups), a couple of starcruisers, my literal army of repurposed Quasar Fire bulk freighters and of course one interdictor ship for good measure. Dropping off my first swarm of Y-Wings and X-Wings, I sent them to destroy all enemy corvettes and their shipyard which has an endless TIE deposit, unlike all their other hangars. After they bombed that into oblivion, I also tried to take on one of their two Golan defense stations. That... went super badly. Somehow all my squadrons were pulverized within just a few minutes, leaving me to wonder what got them. Certainly no corvette I missed. Maybe Acclamators and Enforcers are better against fighters than I anticipated?

Anyway, that was when the Imperials woke up and my freighters dropped a second wave. And I wondered if I had to retreat and be content with taking the shipyard for now... The SSD started lumbering towards me, but its TIEs, the Acclamators and Enforcers went in first. My X-Wings took care of the TIEs (which turned out to have been their last ones as I saw no new ones spawning to replace them) and had my starcruisers handle the Imperial cruisers while my swarm of Y-Wings now dove directly against the Executor... and from there on I could have gone away to make myself tea or eat a sandwich or whatever. The Executor became quite confused and only sporadically continued its flight, especially after I destroyed its engines. With no further entourage and away from the Golans, it had no anti-fighter defense and now followed about 30 minutes of whittling it down with scratch damage, only for my starcruisers to get in and finish the job when it got 80% of its teeth pulled already.

Am I the only one who finds it weird that in order to defeat an SSD without 'official' ship losses you essentially have to turn into Zapp Brannigan? Especially for the New Republic that's an incredibly odd position to be in... Because damn, I can't believe I ended the battle without casualities after sending waves upon waves of fighter pilots to their deaths...

Even though I can't seriously play anything for the foreseeable future, I looked at the next scenario that would come up if I progress through the game chronologically. Unlike the main Empire at War this is certainly a lot more fun here in Thrawn's Revenge due to the high number of playable factions. The next story scenario would be a conflict between the Imperial warlord Zsinj and the "Corporate Sector Authority", which... appears to play a bit like the Zann Consortium of the main game, what with being a ragtag bunch of pirates with a wide variety of highly modified civilian vehicles, leftovers of the Empire and the Rebels and a whole bunch of leftover CIS droids. In fact the pecularities of all the different factions seem quite interesting. The Pentastar Alignment for example is very ideosyncratic with both Super Star Destroyers and the advanced Secutor Star Destroyers, but also breaking out lots of museum pieces in ground combat, what with making ample use of LAATIs, AT-TEs, Venators and the like. I have a feeling those poor stormtroopers must think they are laarping the clone wars...

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I heard about the unexpected mania involving the game Fall Guys - basically a Battle Royale only with jelly bean characters designed for 7 year olds running through obstacle courses. Their servers were overwhelmed (and still are), so I watched the trailer and thought, "That looks stupid." Watched a bit of the Twitch streamers I generally tune in to all really enjoying it, and thought, "Okay, that looks stupid but I'll try it on Steam and quit after an hour for a refund."

Three hours of rotating between screaming at my opponents (or more often my own mistakes) or laughing uncontrollably, I can say that I'm goin on 40 and this silly ass game is 100% delightful. 60 players per match, I still haven't even broken the top 10 yet. It seems incredibly easy, but in practice the weird physics causes a ton of human error.

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4 hours ago, Werthead said:

Ha. For five years people have confidently been predicting that Rocksteady have been making a Superman game and it turns out that Superman is indeed in their new game...as the antagonist. It's actually a Suicide Squad game.

Also sounds like some trouble in the WB Games camp, with Rocksteady and WB Montreal having some beef stemming from WB Montreal making Arkham Origins over Rocksteady's objections, Rocksteady spiking Origins from being mentioned in discussions of the franchise (with some official WB marketing referring only to the "Arkham Trilogy") and Origins getting recent critical reappraisals ranking it high above Arkham Knight. It then sounds like WB Montreal started working on a Suicide Squad game and were some way into it when Rocksteady said they wanted to do a game, so the project was booted over to them and Montreal put to work on Gotham Knights, which also just got announced but only an auxiliary bit of news to Suicide Squad.

I think the problem is more making money. For the first couple of years of their lifespans, the consoles will not be in many homes (especially with a massive economic downturn), so they're going to need to rely on PC games sales to help pay for the immense costs of development and help keep things afloat until the consoles get enough of an install base to make things work better for them.

LoU2's sales also mean that Sony are likely very much not giving a flying fuck about the "controversy" over the game's story at all.

That's interesting.  Count me in as one of those that thinks Origins was a far superior game to Knight.

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20 minutes ago, Argonath Diver said:

I heard about the unexpected mania involving the game Fall Guys - basically a Battle Royale only with jelly bean characters designed for 7 year olds running through obstacle courses. Their servers were overwhelmed (and still are), so I watched the trailer and thought, "That looks stupid." Watched a bit of the Twitch streamers I generally tune in to all really enjoying it, and thought, "Okay, that looks stupid but I'll try it on Steam and quit after an hour for a refund."

I've been quite intrigued by it! Looks like silly fun.

Speaking of streaming, Dr. Disrespect announced yesterday he was coming back to stream yesterday. Launched this stream, which within an hour or so hit 330,000 simultaneous viewers (to put this in perspective, this is twice what Ninja got on his first stream on Youtube after leaving Mixer, and that was with some of his regular streaming pals joining in and boosting his numbers), and then announced he was going to actually go live today (in about an hour). The stream has stayed up (never falling below about 10k viewers and now at over 80k) and has basically been a synthwave channel with occasional "VSM Radio" spots poking fun at some of his frequent collaborators and detractors:

As I've said before, Doc is pretty unique as a streamer, with production values and theatricality that's second to none. 

I fully expect him to crack 500k today.

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Twitch is fascinating to me. I'm much older than most of the streamers. Five years ago I scoffed at the idea of watching another person play a game I could just play myself. Then I started watching guys playing games I played, only at a much higher level. That helped educate me on some fights, etc, or let me see content I couldn't reach as a casual. Later, I found guys like Dr Disrespect, who played games I don't even own.  I have watched a whole heck of a lot of PUBG the last few years, a game I never have even owned. I am so thoroughly bad at FPS games now that it's simply far, far more fun for me to watch a really good player make great plays.

I generally equate it to my watching basketball and baseball. I haven't stepped onto a court in a decade, no do I have any interest. But I still argue about and watch basketball all the time. I don't see much difference in watching competitive online gamers make plays that I could never, ever pull off. I also still play a lot of Path of Exile, but I don't have nearly the time to really dedicate to it. More importantly, similar to FPS games, I simply suck at the damn game even with several thousand hours. So there are boss fights I don't even bother to attempt on my crappy characters. I have fun my way, and then watch the big streamers do the neat content.

I'm also tuning into the Dr Disrespect channel right now. Currently above its peak yesterday of 335k. I imagine it'll hit 600k in the next hour or so. I think his character and persona are hilarious, and no one else is quite like it. I'm very glad that it sounds like it was a money issue and not off-stream misconduct.

 

And yes, do yourselves a favor and try out Fall Guys if you want to play a game that looks like absolutely nothing you'd ever have an interest in, but find really delightful after all. I certainly know that when I finally win my first game I'm going to go absolutely nuts.

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Horizon: Zero Dawn has been splendid fun so far. An open world game with crafting where neither the open world elements nor the crafting elements suck. Extremely rare.

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Horizon: Zero Dawn has been splendid fun so far. An open world game with crafting where neither the open world elements nor the crafting elements suck. Extremely rare.

One of my favorite games I played this year.

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On 7/8/2020 at 2:49 AM, Jace, Basilissa said:

He wasn't in prison or something. Keeping a lightsaber on your person isn't something I would put past a Jedi. Even an apprentice. When Luke was playing around with Anakin's in the Falcon Han barely blinked.

Yeah but at that point in Ep4, the Jedi were basically extinct and memory holed, and Han certainly knew that there were no Inquisitors on the Falcon, and I think he was there when Kenobi dismembered a guy in the cantina so not that surprising there was a lightsaber on board.  He was mostly disdainful "Where did you dig up that old fossil?".   Fallen Order is what, somewhere between 10 and 15 years before Ep 4, and there's a vastly different mindset about the Jedi that really should take longer to take hold, but was Cal really going around an Imperial facility for years hand waving at everyone who looked at his belt "This is not the marital aid you're looking for"?

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