Video Games - Legendary Edition

[Caligula_K3]

12 hours ago, Comrade Jace, Leftist said:

That sounds suspiciously like my own experience. Are you one of my personas run amok again? According to the Treaty of Terrorkai you have to tell me if you are!

I'm you from the mirror universe, and I will take your place in this world!

[Inkdaub]

Origins and Odyssey are like one big...bigger...game.  I wouldn't be surprised if drunk players forget which one they are playing.  Good news is it's a great game. 

God of War has held my attention for three weeks straight.

[Caligula_K3]

Yeah, me getting burnt out on Odyssey may also be because I had played already Origins. I think Odyssey is a better game plot and character-wise, but yes, it is more of the same, but during Peloponnesian War Greece instead of Ptolemaic Egypt.

I agree with @Liffguard above - Black Flag is the best Assassin's Creed game. I replayed it last summer. Even though many of the main quest missions are pretty annoying, it's so easy to ignore them at a certain point and focus on the real meat of the game: becoming the best pirate the world has ever seen. The world is perfectly sized too. It feels big and there are plenty of different activities, but it's not so huge that it becomes exhausting.

[Derfel Cadarn]

13 minutes ago, Caligula_K3 said:

Yeah, me getting burnt out on Odyssey may also be because I had played already Origins. I think Odyssey is a better game plot and character-wise, but yes, it is more of the same, but during Peloponnesian War Greece instead of Ptolemaic Egypt.

I agree with @Liffguard above - Black Flag is the best Assassin's Creed game. I replayed it last summer. Even though many of the main quest missions are pretty annoying, it's so easy to ignore them at a certain point and focus on the real meat of the game: becoming the best pirate the world has ever seen. The world is perfectly sized too. It feels big and there are plenty of different activities, but it's not so huge that it becomes exhausting.

Arr!sassin’s Creed! 
London is big in Syndicate 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Rhom said:

I’m trying to remember, did you ever play Horizon: Zero Dawn?  Gameplay is very similar to GoT but with giant mechanical beasts.  You’d probably like it.

Nope. And TBH, I'm not wild about the gameplay of GoT. It's one of the easiest games I've played, even when you put it on hard (I never tried lethal, but I doubt it would have been that much harder outside of the duels). I just love Japanese culture and old samurai stories so it was a good fit given it was an open world game. Here's one example of the game that makes no sense though:

Spoiler

The hot springs increase your health, but you can't find several of them until after you've beaten the main story, and finding them after does exactly nothing as you have no need for them. It reminds me of some old racing game from a long time ago that really said you needed to buy a specific engine, but then never gave you enough money to get it until after you beat the mission it says you need it for. 

 

[Heartofice]

Got the Viking flavour pack for CK3. I think I’ll be happy getting almost all the DLCs for this game, even if they are just aesthetic.

So I tried out a campaign as Harald Fairhair and wanted to create a bad ass Viking dynasty, breeding the most unpleasant murderous bunch of brutes imaginable.

This required uniting  most of Norway, which was pretty easy, but the hard part was educating my children and getting stressed out from making them vengeful and wrathful. On top of that I decided to start duels ( new feature) with anyone who looked at me twice. I ended up losing 2 duels to a 63 year old! The mental break of such a humiliation caused me to die, leaving 15 year old son in charge and empire in pieces. Ugh 

[Mexal]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Nope. And TBH, I'm not wild about the gameplay of GoT. It's one of the easiest games I've played, even when you put it on hard (I never tried lethal, but I doubt it would have been that much harder outside of the duels). I just love Japanese culture and old samurai stories so it was a good fit given it was an open world game. Here's one example of the game that makes no sense though:

  Reveal hidden contents

The hot springs increase your health, but you can't find several of them until after you've beaten the main story, and finding them after does exactly nothing as you have no need for them. It reminds me of some old racing game from a long time ago that really said you needed to buy a specific engine, but then never gave you enough money to get it until after you beat the mission it says you need it for. 

 

HZD has one of the best stories of any game I've ever come across. It's incredible.

[Corvinus85]

Creative Assembly has entered the remaster game. Rome Total War Remastered coming at the end of April.

[Heartofice]

13 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Creative Assembly has entered the remaster game. Rome Total War Remastered coming at the end of April.

I’d prefer if they remastered Rome 2 by making it good.

[Corvinus85]

16 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I’d prefer if they remastered Rome 2 by making it good.

Rome 2 has been improved over the years, unless you don't like the main mechanics.

[Heartofice]

2 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Rome 2 has been improved over the years, unless you don't like the main mechanics.

I think even with the huge amount of work that has gone into it , I still am not a fan of that game. I might go back to it at some point but not if Warhammer 3 entices me.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Mexal said:

HZD has one of the best stories of any game I've ever come across. It's incredible.

It looks interesting. Would you play it over Witcher3, which seems to get a lot of love?

[Rhom]

11 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

It looks interesting. Would you play it over Witcher3, which seems to get a lot of love?

Depends on how much time you have.  W3 can be well over 100 hours; HZD probably tops out closer to 40.

[Clueless Northman]

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Got the Viking flavour pack for CK3. I think I’ll be happy getting almost all the DLCs for this game, even if they are just aesthetic.

Assuming it turns out just as awesome as CK2 (my most-played game on Steam, though of course not my all-time most-played game), all DLCs will be quite worth it. Just frustrating that they keep releasing them by the dozen until you have the complete package a few years later, with 30-40 DLCs in your library.

[Red Tiger]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

It looks interesting. Would you play it over Witcher3, which seems to get a lot of love?

I prefer if over Witcher because it's combat is just a lot better. I also like that the world, while open, is relatively compact. You can find interesting things to do everywhere, but it's not like you're gonna be doing the same mission over and over again. The world is just like "Okay, here is 30 hours of fun, now go do something else with your life".

The Witcher has the stronger characterization and sidequests, but make no mistake, Aloy is a very good character and the revelations of what happened in the past were shown very well.

[Mexal]

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

It looks interesting. Would you play it over Witcher3, which seems to get a lot of love?

I don't know. I put HZD in a similar vein to GoT, GoW - openish worlds with a story that propels you to different parts of the story and while there are consistent things to do outside of the main storyline, it's not as huge as TW3. I really liked TW3 but I felt massively overwhelmed by how much there was to do and after ~60 hours putting into it and not feeling like I progressed too much, I took a break until The Witcher TV show pushed me back into it. At that point, I mostly focused on the main storyline which I thoroughly enjoyed. To me though, I like HZD more.

[aceluby]

3 hours ago, Mexal said:

I don't know. I put HZD in a similar vein to GoT, GoW - openish worlds with a story that propels you to different parts of the story and while there are consistent things to do outside of the main storyline, it's not as huge as TW3. I really liked TW3 but I felt massively overwhelmed by how much there was to do and after ~60 hours putting into it and not feeling like I progressed too much, I took a break until The Witcher TV show pushed me back into it. At that point, I mostly focused on the main storyline which I thoroughly enjoyed. To me though, I like HZD more.

This is my experience to the T.  I'm about 75 hours in W3 and there's too much worthless content.  Side missions with nothing valuable and little story.  I might go back to it and just try to do just the main story, but then I feel like I'm missing a lot of the game.  It's been a frustrating experience as I bought the game 5 years ago and have barely scratched the surface.

HZD, however, is one of my favorite games of all time.  I spent most of the game sneaking around, but I watched a few videos of people taking down dozens of beasts and leveraging the slow mo stuff better than I could imagine, I started leveraging that and fell in love with the depth of combat.  The story is also one of the better sci fi stories told in any medium.  Just amazing overall and think everyone should play it.

[Werthead]

6 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

It looks interesting. Would you play it over Witcher3, which seems to get a lot of love?

As others have said, Horizon Zero Dawn has by far the better combat, backstory and monsters. Witcher 3 probably has better characters and a current-day plot, but the interaction of backstory and modern-day story in Horizon Zero Dawn is quite unique and interesting.

HZD is a bit shorter - I have 63 hours to completion including the DLC versus W3's 88 - but you could shave that off a bit if you went for a less-exhaustive playthrough (I'm not sure about 30 hours though, that sounds excessively low and you'd be pretty under-levelled for the final battle). I did every side activity bar only the hunter's trials, which suck. Protip: do the Cauldron techno-dungeons. I did the first two and nearly skipped the rest because of the amount of tedious jumping around large underground lairs, but I'm glad I did the rest because they're much, much shorter and give you tons of loot and levelling opportunities (especially the one that teaches you to fight Thunderjaws in close quarters, after which fighting them in wide open spaces is never really a problem again). Also try to get Tearblast arrows as your secondary weapons ASAP.

The two games are certainly very close in quality, and I'd probably rank them as my favourite open-world action games of the last generation (maybe with Red Dead Redemption 2 just a bit behind them due to more fundamental problems in UI and the PC port being sloppy and prone to crashing), with their position as #1 and #2 prone to varying.

[Fez]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

As others have said, Horizon Zero Dawn has by far the better combat, backstory and monsters. Witcher 3 probably has better characters and a current-day plot, but the interaction of backstory and modern-day story in Horizon Zero Dawn is quite unique and interesting.

I'd agree with this. I'd also note that for as much as I enjoyed TW3, I was more compelled to finish HZD as quickly as I could; I was so drawn in by the mystery of what had happened. And the game stayed with me longer after I was done.

Personally though, as someone not great at aiming, I didn't love the HZD combat. I wasn't good at hitting the weak points consistently, so many of the big fights were long grind sessions.

[Rhom]

Funny... seeing the universal love for HZD as an alternative to W3; you’d think the universal game of the year acknowledgement would be flipped.