Video Games- Game of the Year

[IlyaP]

Given that I'm currently benched temporarily on account of a bruised knee, I figured I'd load up an unfinished game - Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Good grief I'd forgotten how ridiculously large this game is. It still feels like a single-player version of World of Warcraft - which is by no means a bad thing, but at 20 hours in, I've already forgotten what the main quest and storylines even are, as I find myself fighting zombie pirates right out of Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl and mucking around with crafting in the house I bought in a town that looks like Rivendell with a spider infestation. Still, fun game if you can't do anything else and want to wander through a massive and colourful high fantasy world.

[Denvek]

On 1/16/2021 at 3:42 PM, Denvek said:

The little Easter Eggs in Valhalla are both very varied, and never egregious. Today I've had both "exit pursued by a bear" and "the cake is a lie".

And now FENTON! FENTON! JESUS CHRIST!

[Werthead]

The little Easter Eggs in Valhalla are both very varied, and never egregious. Today I've had both "exit pursued by a bear" and "the cake is a lie".

I think one of Biden's next executive orders shall be banning Portal references from all future video games going forward unless they are made by Valve and actually set in the same universe. It was funny when Skyrim did it, it was quite funny when Dishonored and Saints Row III did it (especially because it was subtle, and not parodying either GLaDOS or the Space Core) but it does feel with 2020 games doing that it's shooting a horse that's been dead out in the yard for months.

[Werthead]

Pressed on with the GTA3 replay, using a couple of work-arounds and fixes to eliminate the worst bugs and it plays pretty great, apart from the shooting which is terrible (and was terrible in 2001, to be fair). Fortunately most games give you a bit of leeway in how to handle them in terms of you generally being able to eliminate targets by other means (running them over or using grenades). I also collected enough secret packages to spawn things like body armour and weapons at my HQs to remove most of the risk. Still, some of the missions are really horrible with no mid-mission saving and no autosaving at all. Fortunately the city is so small that going back to my three apartments to save after each mission isn't a major problem. I remember Vice City minimising that by giving you loads more property and places to buy, all with their own save points.

One of the odd things I'd nearly forgotten is that there's bugger all to do on the mainland. There's only one story mission set there (the last) and only one set of phone missions. Otherwise Shoreside Vale is pretty pointless in the game. You can easily 100% the game in well under 25 hours, which is way shorter than I remember.

Oh, and a hysterical point: I turned off the frame limiter (which limits you to 30 fps) and heard the unfathomable sound - for this game - of the graphics card fan powering up. It turns up they really do mean "unlimited frames" because the game pushed my graphics card to the limit, which given its primitiveness meant I was pushing over 4000 fps! Amusing. I do note there are a couple of 60fps mods, but since I'm at the end of the game I'll use those for Vice City and San Andreas instead.

 

[A True Kaniggit]

54 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Pressed on with the GTA3 replay,

Palpatine voice. “Goood, Gooooooood”

 

My Morrowind replay is going well. As someone mentioned upthread, it is very grindy. But Obi-Chan Kenobi shall soldier on. 

[IlyaP]

1 minute ago, A True Kaniggit said:

My Morrowind replay is going well. As someone mention upthread, it is very grindy. But Obi-Chan Kenobi shall soldier on. 

*sighs*

This is next on my To Catch Up On list after I finish Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. (I've been catching up on all the games I wanted to play while in university but had no time or money or even computing power to do so. I've finished Oblivion, and Morrowind and NWN and Ultimate Doom remain.)

[A True Kaniggit]

8 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

*sighs*

This is next on my To Catch Up On list after I finish Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. (I've been catching up on all the games I wanted to play while in university but had no time or money or even computing power to do so. I've finished Oblivion, and Morrowind and NWN and Ultimate Doom remain.)

If you would like some advice for early game, let me know. 
 

I can’t believe how much I’ve forgotten. I used to know everything about Morrowind. 

[IlyaP]

1 minute ago, A True Kaniggit said:

If you would like some advice for early game, let me know. 
 

I can’t believe how much I’ve forgotten. I used to know everything about Morrowind. 

Well, I've gotten the game set up (in advance) with MW, to make it work for contemporary gaming rigs, which my partner recommended as she's a Morrowind afficionado. 

But that's about all I've done, beyond trying out a few minutes, landing at...Seyda Nid (I think is the opening town?), and just getting GFX/audio settings configured. 

I've been told this game has a *vicious* learning curve (compared to Daggerfall - which I still play because it's awesome in Unity - though, how bad could it be?)

[A True Kaniggit]

4 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

But that's about all I've done, beyond trying out a few minutes, landing at...Seyda Nid (I think is the opening town?), 

Close enough. 

[IlyaP]

16 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Close enough. 

I probably will take you up on that some time next week, as I am fairly close to finishing Amalur, but don't tend to game during the week. And I'd like to wrap up my gaming bucket list so that I can move onto my reading bucket list of books I didn't get around to reading while in university. 

[Werthead]

 

27 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

I've been told this game has a *vicious* learning curve (compared to Daggerfall - which I still play because it's awesome in Unity - though, how bad could it be?)

It's vicious in the sense that the game's main storyline will naturally lead you through two or three quests and then the fourth will kill you instantly without any forewarning that you should go off and side-level for a bit before coming back. It's also not easy to work out if any given side-quest is suitable for you either. Also, frequent manual saving (this is another game harkening from before the "autosave every 5 seconds and every time anything vaguely important happens" era) is recommended. Oh, and the game does the "here's some actual verbal directions on where to go" thing, no magic marking of your minimap on where to go.

It's brutal. Like, GTA3 (which is a year older than Morrowind) has some off-putting, pre-modern elements that you have to re-adapt to, but Morrowind is even more punishing (although at least you can save everywhere).

[Clueless Northman]

1 hour ago, IlyaP said:

This is next on my To Catch Up On list after I finish Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. (I've been catching up on all the games I wanted to play while in university but had no time or money or even computing power to do so. I've finished Oblivion, and Morrowind and NWN and Ultimate Doom remain.)

Funnily, Neverwinter Nights is my oldest acquired-yet-unplayed game. I mean, the one I've had on my shelf for more than 15 years yet still haven't played yet. To an extent because Baldur's Gate seemed more important to play first, and then I had tons of games coming up. Still, I grabbed the complete edition in GOG for free a few years ago, just in case my CD/DVD install wouldn't work when I want to play it. Oldest released games I intend to play but haven't yet (bought way more recently than NWN) would be Fallout and System Shock and I, too, plan to play one of these in the next few weeks. Thankfully, they seem reasonably short. More than NWN definitely.

About Morrowind, you have to check how difficult, that is how high-level, mobs are in the area you're supposed to do the quest. If you're crushed by the first random mob off the street, then forget about it and come back later. Basically, Morrowind is that kind of game in which, when the main quest sends you to some new area, it's better to actually do all the local side-quests before moving on with the main quest, otherwise you just won't have the level, and possibly equipment, to succeed. There isn't much to do in Seyda Neen, but when you'll come to the first sizable town, then explore it and try to do the quests that seem the easiest ones before adventuring much farther. The first time the main quest sends you to grab some loot and bring it back might already be too hard for your level, and if that one isn't, the next one surely will.

[Poobah]

1 hour ago, IlyaP said:

I've been told this game has a *vicious* learning curve (compared to Daggerfall - which I still play because it's awesome in Unity - though, how bad could it be?)

Sort of. Once you get up to a relatively modest level and have some reasonable equiptment the world really opens up and becomes your oyster. On the other hand...

At low levels you're quite weak with very little in the way of hp or skills, you have no gear, and especially with a non-optimised build you're gonna be doing a lot of swinging into enemies and not actually doing damage most of the time because it's an RPG system where it basically rolls a die modified by your attributes, skills, and fatigue level to determine if you hit, rather than the skyrim style. Nothing is really level-scaled with the majority if the spawns being static so the game doesn't really tell you "you can't go there/do that" except by there being some kinda (at the time) terrifying danger in the way which may summarily kill you if you're not prepared and as Wert mentions above the lack of the way modern games autosave for you any time you do anything you can get in trouble if you forget to make saves for yourself.

The guy you're sent to meet will kinda tell you to fuck off and do some sidequests if you're very low level but yeah I would second the comment that you should really focus on doing a broad range of sidequests, exploration and general improvement if your abilities rather than trying to zoom on down the main quest because that's a recipe for running headlong into some very deadly situations. I'd advise hanging out around Seyda Neen for a bit, exploring, and chatting the locals up; they have a few quests and issues that you can probably manage to resolve though you definitely wanna be careful even then at the lowest levels, and there's a few things you can find too.

Though on that note I should mention that the game doesn't have a real ui-based "quest log" as such. There's a journal which I think notes active quests but I mostly remember a mass of entries and a hard time sorting through them, and since there's no magical arrow on the map telling you where to go you'll wanna pay attention to what the npcs say and the directions they give (you'll often get directions like "so you wanna head on out of town to the west then take the first left at the crossroads and after that look for a big tree on a hill" or something like that) as well as any other advice and comments that they might offer to help or hint towards other options and paths - the game has TONS of written dialogue and because it isn't voice acted there isn't much of that recycling you see where everyone says the same thing on the same topic or has nothing to say but some generic bark, and a lot of it is some combination of helpful, useful, or at the very least interesting world/character building.

Edit: Ya'll are making me really wanna spend the next few weeks installing, tinkering with, and modding out Morrowind to function and look ok on my pc, and have all my favourite quests, companions, houses etc. in it.

[IlyaP]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Oh, and the game does the "here's some actual verbal directions on where to go" thing, no magic marking of your minimap on where to go.

I actually kind of like this. Sure it slows down the gameplay a bit, but it also makes exploration a bit more interesting. I can see the merit in this decision. It doesn't hold the hands of players. 

[IlyaP]

1 hour ago, Clueless Northman said:

Oldest released games I intend to play but haven't yet (bought way more recently than NWN) would be Fallout and System Shock and I, too, plan to play one of these in the next few weeks. Thankfully, they seem reasonably short. More than NWN definitely.

How long to beat suggests System Shock 1 takes about 13-15 hours to beat. Though I wonder if it shouldn't be an hour or two longer, to account for the swearing and cursing that comes with becoming accustomed to its bastard of a UI.  

[Martell Spy]

Love Morrowind. I am pretty sure I never beat it, despite playing enormous amounts of it. Got kind of far a couple times. I mostly end up playing Bosmer archer thieves and grinding at the thief skills. Loads of fun robbing a city blind or having the entire city try to kill you after you are caught. One thing Morrowind had was that great levitation spell. Really handy when in the mountains and stuff. Sadly I think they way toned it down in later games.

One combo I want to try out still is a high-jumping Khajit thief. I could definitely play that game for years, much like Skyrim's crafting system did to me, but times a hundred. Cyberpunk has that element to it, but yeah it does not approach ES3.

 

[IlyaP]

2 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

I could definitely play that game for years, much like Skyrim's crafting system did to me, but times a hundred. Cyberpunk has that element to it, but yeah it does not approach ES3.

The interest gamers have to engage in crafting within a game has forever perplexed me. I did a bit of crafting in Skyrim, but purely to have more space to carry stuff. Beyond some quality of life improvements, why it transfixes some gamers I just do not know. 

[IlyaP]

 Found some further mod recommendations here, which I've used to make some further graphical performance tweaks to Morrowind. 

So now, it looks like this!

 

[Gorn]

6 hours ago, Poobah said:

Though on that note I should mention that the game doesn't have a real ui-based "quest log" as such. There's a journal which I think notes active quests but I mostly remember a mass of entries and a hard time sorting through them, and since there's no magical arrow on the map telling you where to go you'll wanna pay attention to what the npcs say and the directions they give (you'll often get directions like "so you wanna head on out of town to the west then take the first left at the crossroads and after that look for a big tree on a hill" or something like that) as well as any other advice and comments that they might offer to help or hint towards other options and paths - the game has TONS of written dialogue and because it isn't voice acted there isn't much of that recycling you see where everyone says the same thing on the same topic or has nothing to say but some generic bark, and a lot of it is some combination of helpful, useful, or at the very least interesting world/character building.

Yeah, one thing I remember about Morrowind is that you really had to take it one quest at a time, and if possible complete every quest in a single sitting, because other you'd get lost. Modern RPGs condition players to "collect" all the quest in town areas, and then follow the quest markers one at a time and check off the tasks in the quest log. You can't do that in Morrowind.

[IlyaP]

47 minutes ago, Gorn said:

Modern RPGs condition players to "collect" all the quest in town areas, and then follow the quest markers one at a time and check off the tasks in the quest log.

I've tried finding some mods for this, but given how the journal features a rather particular and intentional design, it's hard to find an optimal solution without building some new feature atop all the pre-existing ones - which is a big ask of any modder.