Video Games - Sequels of Dread and Anticipation

[briantw]

Valheim has now sold five million copies, which means it has made a hundred million.  In a month 

That's absolutely bonkers for a game that no one had even heard of in January of this year.

[aceluby]

2 hours ago, briantw said:

I'd say Ghost of Tsushima is more Assassin's Creed Odyssey than Red Dead.  Minus the nonsense future bullshit, of course, and with better combat and just generally more polished gameplay.  But you could have slapped the AssCreed name on it and no one would have blinked.  

Hmmm.... might need to pick up Odyssey.  I played the first one when it first came out, but couldn't get into the 2nd one and never picked up another AC game again

[Jace, Extat]

15 minutes ago, aceluby said:

Hmmm.... might need to pick up Odyssey.  I played the first one when it first came out, but couldn't get into the 2nd one and never picked up another AC game again

Graphics have gotten better with the generations, gameplay even a bit more dynamic. But now every game has to have a continent to explore and be 1000 hours long. 

Just a heads up. I totally digged that AC: Odyssey game. But at like 20 hours in I realized the main story had barely begun and I was already bored.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

3 hours ago, aceluby said:

Sword fighting instead of guns, but overall pretty similar.  Open world, travel via horseback, mission based, better fast travel than RDR2, lots of sidequests and places to explore, with a straightforward skill progression tree as well.  I'm a little over 1/3rd of the way through and really like it.

May check it out in time then. I still need to be The Last of Us, which was one of the four games I got when I bought my PS4. Have yet to get anything for it since then. RDR2 just should of had 854 chapters....

[briantw]

1 hour ago, aceluby said:

Hmmm.... might need to pick up Odyssey.  I played the first one when it first came out, but couldn't get into the 2nd one and never picked up another AC game again

I loved Odyssey.  Didn't finish it, but probably put fifty hours into it before I got burnt out.  I'm too much of a completionist for the size those games have become.  There's too much side shit to do and I want to fucking do it all.  Odyssey is by far the best controlling Assassin's Creed too.  I was very disappointed when Valhalla went straight back to the janky ass movement the series has always been known for.  It wasn't perfect in Odyssey, but I found myself getting stuck on something I very much didn't intend to climb far less than in any other game in the series.

If you do get Odyssey, play as the female character.  The voice work is so much better than the male character (the opposite seems true of Valhalla).

[Werthead]

Pressing on with Age of Empires 2 and wrapped up the Saladin, Hun and El Cid campaigns. Now almost done with the Aztec campaign.

Very impressed by the quality of this remaster (considering the AoE1 remaster was crap). Also still marvelling at the achievement title "Vladislav, Baby Don't Hurt Me", for completing the Romanian campaign (haven't got to that one yet).

ETA: Completed the Aztecs. Building a massive wall right around Tenochtitlan is one of the coolest things I've done in an RTS game (though somewhat unnecessary, given the variably aggressive AI going on holiday for this one). That wraps up the original campaigns from the base game and The Conquerors, so onto the first of the newer expansions, The Forgotten. Might even do the Romanians next, that achievement is calling me.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

22 hours ago, aceluby said:

Sword fighting instead of guns, but overall pretty similar.  Open world, travel via horseback, mission based, better fast travel than RDR2, lots of sidequests and places to explore, with a straightforward skill progression tree as well.  I'm a little over 1/3rd of the way through and really like it.

Is the sword fighting overly complex? 

I decided to take today and tomorrow off, who cares at this point, and BestBuy does next day deliveries on games. 

[Slurktan]

21 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

May check it out in time then. I still need to be The Last of Us, which was one of the four games I got when I bought my PS4. Have yet to get anything for it since then. RDR2 just should of had 854 chapters....

It doesn't appear like it will happen but who knows. I wish to god they had remade Red Dead 1 in the RDR2 engine so you could just play the whole fucking story,  But hey they got to get that online drip.

[Werthead]

7 minutes ago, Slurktan said:

It doesn't appear like it will happen but who knows. I wish to god they had remade Red Dead 1 in the RDR2 engine so you could just play the whole fucking story,  But hey they got to get that online drip.

I'm pretty certain that was the original plan. They've often said that porting RDR1 with the same source code is almost impossible because of how badly it was designed, so the only way of updating the first game is to rebuild it from scratch. The fact that the entire map from RDR1 is inside the RDR2 map (even Mexico, although that is normally inaccessible across the river, but you can glitch across the river and all the landforms are there from the first game, though not the towns), even though there's sweet FA to do on most of it, I think is a good sign of that. For whatever reason they've never pulled the trigger on it (unless they've been working on it behind the scenes).

Being able to do a RDR1 and 2 remaster for next-gen at the same time would be pretty cool, especially if they could arrange it so you go from the end of RDR2's story into the start of RDR1's.

[briantw]

3 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Is the sword fighting overly complex? 

I decided to take today and tomorrow off, who cares at this point, and BestBuy does next day deliveries on games. 

Been a while since I played it, but I didn't find it to be super complex.  It's a more arcade style of combat like the Arkham games, and like those games you have a wide variety of gadgets and the option to go stealthy should you so desire.

My favorite mechanic, though, is the ability to call out an opponent for a duel.  If you time a counter right, you get an instant kill on that enemy and potentially several more if you upgrade the ability.  Not only is it super fun and very fitting given the game's setting, but it's immensely satisfying to watch a geyser of blood erupt from an enemy as you slash them.

[aceluby]

4 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Is the sword fighting overly complex? 

I decided to take today and tomorrow off, who cares at this point, and BestBuy does next day deliveries on games. 

Not especially.  There are 4 styles that match up to different types of enemies (shields, spears, swords, big guys), but I basically only keep it on the shield setting and use the speed slash that style gives you.  Getting used to switching now, but it's not super important.  There's also a parry system, but I haven't used it that much.  More often than not I'm sneaking around like a ninja anyway.

[briantw]

1 hour ago, aceluby said:

Not especially.  There are 4 styles that match up to different types of enemies (shields, spears, swords, big guys), but I basically only keep it on the shield setting and use the speed slash that style gives you.  Getting used to switching now, but it's not super important.  There's also a parry system, but I haven't used it that much.  More often than not I'm sneaking around like a ninja anyway.

I'd always start out sneaking but then inevitably I'd want to do a showdown because it's so fucking fun.  I think you can eventually kill a string of like four or five enemies.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Well I went ahead and bought the game. @aceluby, if it sucks, you owe me $65. 

[Rhom]

4 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Well I went ahead and bought the game. @aceluby, if it sucks, you owe me $65. 

I actually just started it this morning and got about an hour in.  Beautiful game.

In the initial settings I was really tempted to play in Kurosawa Mode.  

[TrueMetis]

Playing Elite Dangerous haven't for a while and my joystick and throttle are in storage. Games a lot of fun, but it's bad enough trying to remember the controls, but having to switch back to the keyboard and mouse sucks.

[Fez]

Picked up Loop Hero. It's an interesting one, sort of a mash-up of a rogue-like, an idle game, and the board games Dominion and Carcassonne.

Each run starts with a randomly generated loop path, and nothing else except some slime enemies. Your character moves and attacks automatically, with no direct control. When enemies are killed they can drop equipment (and choosing when to be changing out equipment is one of the direct inputs the player has) or they drop land cards. These cards vary by type, and can either be played onto the path itself, adjacent to the path, or not adjacent to the path to build out the map. Each card does something when played (e.g. a forest lets you pick one wood each time you walk over it and generates a wolf enemy on a timer) which it says on the card. There are also a ton of hidden card interactions that you have to figure out. Playing these cards are another direct input. And the only other one is choosing when to end a run. If you retreat back at the starting point of the loop you get 100% of your resources, if you retreat anywhere else you get 60%, and if you die you only keep 30%.

There's also a meta-layer in between runs where you're building up a town using the resources you get, which I've only barely cracked the surface of after 4 hours. Through it, you can get permanent buffs to your character and can unlock new cards that can be played during a run; and between each run you can edit the deck of potential cards that enemies can drop.

It's an interesting game design. I thought it was neat at first, then got kinda bored after about 90 minutes, and then got way into it when I realized just how complex the card interactions can be.

There's not a huge amount of writing, and none of the characters or dialog stands out at all. But the setup for the game itself is intriguing, and there seems to be some pretty interesting lore that you get tidbits of from some land descriptions and occasionally from conversations.

[aceluby]

15 hours ago, briantw said:

I'd always start out sneaking but then inevitably I'd want to do a showdown because it's so fucking fun.  I think you can eventually kill a string of like four or five enemies.

Max is 3, and it is fun to do that, but I've found it to become increasingly difficult to get the timing right as the game moves on and you have to fight Ronin.  Still try to do it, but the appeal has definitely dropped since the early stages of the game.  Right now I'm actually having more fun just taking them on head-on than doing the showdown.

14 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Well I went ahead and bought the game. @aceluby, if it sucks, you owe me $65. 

  You'll have to let me know how you like it.  Feels like a game you'd enjoy given how much you like GTA & RDR.

9 hours ago, Rhom said:

I actually just started it this morning and got about an hour in.  Beautiful game.

In the initial settings I was really tempted to play in Kurosawa Mode.  

Beautiful is a great word to describe it.  The views at some of the locations are marvelous and I really enjoy some of the more meditative things like hot springs and writing Haiku. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, aceluby said:

 You'll have to let me know how you like it.  Feels like a game you'd enjoy given how much you like GTA & RDR.

It's 8:43 here and the game still hasn't come. Did I buy this thing from communists? 

Jokes aside, I should enjoy it assuming the mechanics aren't too weird. I just don't game enough these days to know a lot of the smaller details. For example, it tool me a few hours into GTA5 to unlearn all the riding stuff from RDR2 because they work in totally different ways.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Game arrived earlier than expected. I need to read some more, study a bit, do some yoga and either jog or go for a walk, but after that, samurai time baby!

[Week]

Playing entirely too much GoW - it's a lot of fun. I'm concerned that it's getting a bit too easy as equipment and abilities get stronger tho. May have to increase the difficulty.