Video Games - Sequels of Dread and Anticipation

[Werthead]

13 minutes ago, Slurktan said:

If you like Bethesda games then Skyrim is likely the best of them, even now almost 9 years after release. Plus it has some really fun mods if you get it on PC, I can't recommend enough the one that turns all the dragons into Macho Man Randy Savage.  Hearing the "Ooooooooh yeah" softly when one starts coming near is delightful.

After going back and forth on it, I think I'd now say that Fallout 4 is the better game. It's even less of an RPG than Skyrim (which was already pretty stripped back) but it has a much stronger UI, much better combat and the settlement-building stuff makes for a much stronger secondary focus than the civil war stuff in Skyrim (which was so vaguely implemented they might as well not have bothered).

Skyrim is fantasy and does have (increasingly irritating) dragons though, so that might float some boats better. And certainly Skyrim is still a solid game.

[Kalbear]

Surprising no one, Anthem is toast

https://blog.bioware.com/2021/02/24/anthem-update/

[Poobah]

Ya'll keep misspelling Morrowind when talking about the best Bethesda game.

Also thanks in part to IlyaP and in part to Contrapoints I've reinstalled Morrowind after some bother over how to actually get the game onto my computer which is entirely lacking in a cd or dvd drive. I went looking for a mod I made oh so long ago and finding that most of the old mod sites had died did manage to find a copy on an old hard drive I had gathering dust in a drawer. While looking for it on google I turned up a few threads also looking for it which was fun to know that at least a few people used and enjoyed it, so I put it up on nexus.

The OpenMW project looks pretty exciting so I'm gonna be using it to play in much more modern resolutions and with all the other fancy engine upgrades. Now I just need to go on a modding binge and spend a week getting everything to play together nicely

[Werthead]

Morrowind was excellent in its day, but it's old, clunky and not very accessible (I mean, relatively, it's still far more accessible than, say, Daggerfall). It is a great game and I think an underestimated one in many key areas (particularly how, alongside the GTA3 sub-series, it popularised open-world gaming as we know it and how it made Western RPGs work on console), but it's definitely not a game I'd recommend to someone wanting to play a Bethesda-style open-world game in 2021, unless they were maybe an older gamer with a strong tolerance for outdated graphics and weak AF combat (mind you, if that's the case they're probably best steering clear of all Bethesda games altogether, because that's kind of their thing).

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Surprising no one, Anthem is toast

https://blog.bioware.com/2021/02/24/anthem-update/

 

BioWare have now got two chances to prove themselves otherwise they're toast, I think. Everything is riding hard on Dragon Age IV.

[Jace, Extat]

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

 

BioWare have now got two chances to prove themselves otherwise they're toast, I think. Everything is riding hard on Dragon Age IV.

At what point does incompetence end and criminality begin?

I guess I could understand someone pinning all their hopes on the next pile of dog piss they're gonna preorder, but it is unending funlariousness that they get MULTIPLE strikes after having struck out for a decade straight.

Keep on Keep'n on, Wert. You're good people, no matter what Other Jace says.

[Fez]

54 minutes ago, Karlbear said:

Surprising no one, Anthem is toast

https://blog.bioware.com/2021/02/24/anthem-update/

I'm a little surprised. They took so long I figured they'd end up making some sort of improvement, as face-saving measure if nothing else. Guess they figured they took too long though, and there'd be no getting back the playerbase no matter what they did.

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, Fez said:

I'm a little surprised. They took so long I figured they'd end up making some sort of improvement, as face-saving measure if nothing else. Guess they figured they took too long though, and there'd be no getting back the playerbase no matter what they did.

I think it's mostly what they said - they had a TON of work, game development is extra hard during the pandemic, and they had years to go or they had tons of crunch to go.

note on the above: the reason game development (instead of other types of software dev) is hard are a few reasons, but it's all having to do with bandwidth and remoting into work. Your machine at home is likely not nearly as powerful as it needs to be in order to be a gaming dev rig (those tend to cost $10-20k each). Remoting into the work machine basically fucks over any kind of being able to see actual framerates and reasonable gaming. Bandwidth also means you can't download the game locally to test like you can at work (where you have a 10 or 100gb dedicated network for just that) and getting a 57GB drop every new build means you either be doing it before you get to work or...you're not doing it. 

So actual in time development, seeing performance and behavior over the internet, game build testing - all are major issues above and beyond the general one. To the point where a lot of the studios I know of actually have more people coming into work as a rule, with a LOT of specific rules around their safety. 

[Jace, Extat]

23 minutes ago, Karlbear said:

I think it's mostly what they said - they had a TON of work, game development is extra hard during the pandemic, and they had years to go or they had tons of crunch to go.

 

Or it was a scam and you're a bunch of rubes for actually thinking there was something else coming down the line. I mean their first expansion was a fucking blue filter over the map.

They didn't even give the fictional project a real title. Anthem NEXT sounds like a transcript from the shareholder's meeting.

Presenter: And then here on this chart we have the breakdown for Anthem.

Chairperson: NEXT

[Whiskeyjack]

20 hours ago, Week said:

Unusually, I finished two different games in the last two days.

I finished Last of Us 2 -- which I've been progressing in for awhile. Frankly, in the midst of quarantine, I needed a break from the bleakness. It was a great game. I think I prefer the gameplay of the first but the story of the second.

Last night, I finished FFVII Remake which I mostly played during breaks of LoU2. I really enjoyed it -- the gameplay was fun and liked the new, broadened story. Really cool. Excited for the next chapter (and hoping I don't need a PS5 for it...)

Next, I'm thinking of trying one of the Souls games, Bloodbourne, or Ghost of Tsushima. I think I tried one of the Souls games and the lack of story just didn't grab me -- I need at least a bit of a story. Thoughts? Recommendations? I also haven't played RDR2 (or 1) ... or Skyrim ... or any AC games.

My recommendation is definitely God of War. 

[Fez]

29 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

Or it was a scam and you're a bunch of rubes for actually thinking there was something else coming down the line.

Anthem is so far the only Bioware game I never bought (besides MDK2; I even played Shattered Steel way back when). This rube avoided that scam.

[horangi]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

After going back and forth on it, I think I'd now say that Fallout 4 is the better game. It's even less of an RPG than Skyrim (which was already pretty stripped back) but it has a much stronger UI, much better combat and the settlement-building stuff makes for a much stronger secondary focus than the civil war stuff in Skyrim (which was so vaguely implemented they might as well not have bothered).

Skyrim is fantasy and does have (increasingly irritating) dragons though, so that might float some boats better. And certainly Skyrim is still a solid game.

I found Skyrim to be more immersive, not just in that its beautiful by 2010 standards, but also the sense that it feels like a living world that exists outside of your character, albeit a crowded one.  This really shows up when you use the mod that allows you to start from different backgrounds from different locations.  I liked some of the subtle things like when you clear a fort, the local authority will take it over and post guards.  I hope Bethesda expands more on this with the next ES.  For example, if you clear out a mine, the province starts using it, bringing in iron to the cities, greater patrols along trade routes, and a general feeling of taming the wild.   Fallout 4 does some of this, but as much as I enjoyed building out my main base, its a bit odd to have to actually physically build every damn outpost yourself.  However, the combat in Skyrim is a bit lackluster and becomes more repetitive.

Where I've found Fallout IV to really shine is with Survival mode and self-imposed ironman/hardcore play throughs.  I've gotten to the point in my gaming that I cant play open world games any other way- reloading after dying just feels like cheating.  Not only do you quickly value getting the ability to not trip mines (learning the hard way), it really makes you feel connected to your weapons and value making good decisions instead of charging on in.   Hmm I'm outta rounds for the laser, time to bring the old pipe gun along for the next mission.  Deathclaw up ahead- umm not even going to consider taking that thing on until going back for power armor- and even then, theres no shame in running.  Of course it means I rarely ever complete a game (I think I was like level 35 when I first got to Diamond city).  The clearing out of settlements and then decking out the spawned caravans is pretty satisfying, but, still the immersion is a bit iffy. (how the hell did these settlements survive for hundreds of years when surrounded by baddies- right after the War, sure- living off scraps, but now?!)

[Jace, Extat]

27 minutes ago, Fez said:

Anthem is so far the only Bioware game I never bought (besides MDK2; I even played Shattered Steel way back when). This rube avoided that scam.

Then how did they trick you into believing they were working on it? You have no sunk cost to tether your rationality to the underwater boulder that is BioWare's credibility.

[Fez]

25 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

Then how did they trick you into believing they were working on it? You have no sunk cost to tether your rationality to the underwater boulder that is BioWare's credibility.

Not BioWare's credibility; EA's. They aren't the terrible company they were a few years back, and are supposedly one of the only AAA publishers to take tangible action to prevent crunch. But they've had very few hit games outside of their sports franchises for a while now (basically just Apex Legends and the money train of The Sims 4). It's downright amazing how little they've done with the Star Wars license.

I figured it was important to them for Anthem to turn it around; if only as a PR move to show that their studios were still capable of doing more than annual money grabs.

[Week]

4 hours ago, Slurktan said:

There is a story to the Souls games you just learn about it obliquely through item descriptions and such.  Bloodborne has a bit of that but also has more actual straight forward storytelling as well.  IMO it is easily the best of Fromsofts games but that also comes with the caveat that I love gothic horror and Lovecraft horror.  You are on a PS4 right... so doesn't make much difference but unfortunately it has not aged well on the PS5 because of the locked ceiling of 30FPS.  I hope to god they do a remake like Demon's Souls for it.

I also absolutely love RDR2, only briefly wet my toes recently in Ghosts (I'm a little played out on open world games), AC Valhalla is fun but don't try and beat it all at once as it is simply too long, the story becomes a slog but its repetitiveness lessens if you like go to take a month break to beat/play something else and then come back to it.  Same thing for Odyssey.  Maybe try Fallen Order, its a souls style game with more direct plot plus lightsabers, also has one of my favourite endings in a while. 

If you like Bethesda games then Skyrim is likely the best of them, even now almost 9 years after release. Plus it has some really fun mods if you get it on PC, I can't recommend enough the one that turns all the dragons into Macho Man Randy Savage.  Hearing the "Ooooooooh yeah" softly when one starts coming near is delightful.

Thanks Slurk -- that was my general perception of the Souls games. Probably would have been among my favorite in highschool (also would have been amazed at the graphics -- in between the days spent playing Perfect Dark :p).

Bloodbourne sounds more up my alley as a more straight-forward story with gothic/lovecraftian horror. Sign me up.

Fallen Order -- good recommendation -- I definitely have a soft spot for Star Wars games from KotOR 1&2, Jedi Knight, and Jedi Outcast .. until some of the more recent stumbles (in my mind -- Battlefront, etc,)

2 hours ago, Whiskeyjack said:

My recommendation is definitely God of War. 

Always had an interest in GoW -- will be definitely this or FO. Well, probably both -- and will just decide which first.

ETA - GoW and Bloodbourne are downloading ... GoW was on sale. Self-control is not one of my strengths during the panini.

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

At what point does incompetence end and criminality begin?

I guess I could understand someone pinning all their hopes on the next pile of dog piss they're gonna preorder, but it is unending funlariousness that they get MULTIPLE strikes after having struck out for a decade straight.

Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition sold shitloads despite mixed a critical reception, Mass Effect 3 sold reasonably well (even if it remains surprisingly a low-selling series given its profile) and I think even Andromeda scraped a profit. So it's not like they're titanically bombing on every single level. Even The Old Republic is in profit. From EA's financial POV, BioWare's not giving them anything like the return they were perhaps hoping for, but they're not costing them money either.

3 hours ago, Karlbear said:

note on the above: the reason game development (instead of other types of software dev) is hard are a few reasons, but it's all having to do with bandwidth and remoting into work. Your machine at home is likely not nearly as powerful as it needs to be in order to be a gaming dev rig (those tend to cost $10-20k each). Remoting into the work machine basically fucks over any kind of being able to see actual framerates and reasonable gaming. Bandwidth also means you can't download the game locally to test like you can at work (where you have a 10 or 100gb dedicated network for just that) and getting a 57GB drop every new build means you either be doing it before you get to work or...you're not doing it. 

So actual in time development, seeing performance and behavior over the internet, game build testing - all are major issues above and beyond the general one. To the point where a lot of the studios I know of actually have more people coming into work as a rule, with a LOT of specific rules around their safety. 

I think CDPR said they actually set dev PCs up at staff's homes where possible, and through most of the pandemic they had 100% or almost of the workforce working from home, even the hardcore coding and graphics teams. I only assume they had to sign some serious contracts about what would happen if they got damaged.

I'm not sure how feasible that really is (though Poland's business internet infrastructure seems to be pretty good), but interesting if they really did that.

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But they've had very few hit games outside of their sports franchises for a while now (basically just Apex Legends and the money train of The Sims 4). It's downright amazing how little they've done with the Star Wars license.

That's a bit harsh. They've done fuck all with Star Wars in terms of volume of games released, but those games have made serious bank. Their four Star Wars games have sold something like 50 million copies between them, which is very impressive. Battlefield is a strong franchise. They're also publishing a few more low-budget and middle-tier games than they used to (C&C Remastered did much better than they expected, apparently).

The sports and racing games are what's keeping the bank happy, and the acquisition of Codemasters will help them with that, but it's not like everything else they've done is a bust.

[Jace, Extat]

So you measure a game's quality based on the copies it sells and whether the publisher made profit. Congratulations, Wert, you're no longer a real gamer. You're a suit. You have achieved minor villain status. Someone on this board will win the big game tournament at the end of the movie and remind you what real video games are and why gamers play them. At that point the camera will linger on you as you disgustedly throw away your tie and make plans to join a radical Super Mario Cult based out of Santa Barbara, reestablishing why you ever picked up a controller in the first place. Excellent spin off opportunity if we can get the studio on board.

 

[briantw]

Valheim is, for me, the biggest time sink since Stardew Valley came out.  Half the time I'm not even trying to accomplish anything when I play it.  I'm just trying to trick out my base to make it look as awesome as possible.  I spent an hour earlier tonight building a fucking gazebo with a fire pit under it next to my longhouse.  It serves no practical purpose.  It's just that I had built a similar structure at one of my group's bases (this particular village is entirely my own craftsmanship) and really liked how it turned out, so I decided to replicate it.

I really enjoy the smoke tech in this game, and the way you need to actually build chimneys to vent smoke.  There's something very satisfying about approaching your walled village and seeing the smoke billowing from the roofs of your various buildings, and also in figuring out the most visually appealing chimney designs.  

I did figure out a way to sort of cheese resource collection.  The area around my village on our online server is basically barren of trees, as I already chopped them all down.  However, your character's inventory is maintained from server to server.  As such, I decided to create a fresh offline world using a seed I found on reddit that has an ideal layout for quickly mining certain resources.  The game also remembers where your character was when you exit, so you can viably fill your inventory with as much shit as you can carry, log out, then join your primary server and dump your resources into a chest before going back and repeating.  This strategy has allowed me to collect a whole lot of resources in a relatively short period of time, and as enemies scale to the amount of players on a server, I'm basically invulnerable with all of my upgraded armor and weapons, at least in the biomes I'm farming for resources right now.

I only use that sort of exploit to build my personal base, though.  I wanted a little spot that was entirely crafted by me, and didn't want to spend countless hours ferrying certain resources from our other camps.  You can't teleport ores in the game, which to me is a restriction that really only serves to bog down the game and make it overly grindy, and this particular location is ideal from a safety standpoint but really far away from the necessary resources.  You also need a metric fuck ton of ore in this game to fully upgrade your weapons, armor, and crafting stations.  Logging in and out of another server is a sort of bypass to that teleportation restriction in the name of expedience, and has saved me hours of travel time already while also ensuring I'm not stripping areas near our group bases of resources that some of the players who are further behind in the tech tree will need to make better gear or expand the bases themselves.

For how limited the building options in this game appear on the surface, you can make some truly incredible looking things if you put your mind to it, or follow the building tutorials of smarter players like I've been doing for my major structures.  I use the smaller structures I build as an opportunity to experiment on my own.

[IlyaP]

22 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

So you measure a game's quality based on the copies it sells and whether the publisher made profit.

Come on, that's unnecessarily harsh. 

Also, everyone's mileage with games varies - as with any art, de gustibus non est disputandum, y'know? What doesn't speak to me might work for you, and vice versa. 

I am also reminded of Kotaku writer Ash Parrish's post regarding Dragon Age: Inquisition, where she explained how that game saved her life. I'm not going to defend the game, as I didn't particularly like it - having preferred Dragon Age II the most myself - but DA:I certainly means a lot to her. And the same can probably be said of any game out there.

So please - be kind. There's no need to be mean or rude.

[IlyaP]

6 hours ago, Poobah said:

Ya'll keep misspelling Morrowind when talking about the best Bethesda game.

Also thanks in part to IlyaP and in part to Contrapoints I've reinstalled Morrowind after some bother over how to actually get the game onto my computer which is entirely lacking in a cd or dvd drive. I went looking for a mod I made oh so long ago and finding that most of the old mod sites had died did manage to find a copy on an old hard drive I had gathering dust in a drawer. While looking for it on google I turned up a few threads also looking for it which was fun to know that at least a few people used and enjoyed it, so I put it up on nexus.

The OpenMW project looks pretty exciting so I'm gonna be using it to play in much more modern resolutions and with all the other fancy engine upgrades. Now I just need to go on a modding binge and spend a week getting everything to play together nicely

OpenMW has made the game SO much nice. 

The other mods I'd recommend installing are (in no particular order):

Better Heads, Morrowind Code Patch, Run Faster, Real Signposts, Skyrim UI Overhaul, Morrowind Graphics Extender, Better Dialogue Font, Landscape Retexture, Morrowind Optimisation Patch, and Morrowind FPs Optimiser. 

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

I think CDPR said they actually set dev PCs up at staff's homes where possible, and through most of the pandemic they had 100% or almost of the workforce working from home, even the hardcore coding and graphics teams. I only assume they had to sign some serious contracts about what would happen if they got damaged.

 

I mean, so did 343 and other MS studios, but it was still a massive problem. Furthermore, that doesn't help testers at all who need to get giant builds. Unless you're sitting on an entire fiber network you're gonna have a bad time - and even then you might choke the entire intranet. 

IIRC, Microsoft considered the feasibility of stringing fiber to one high performing dev's house so that they could work safely during this.