Video Games - Legendary Edition

[Jace, Extat]

So what's the deets on this reMasstered Effect? Y'all ain't crowing about how purty it looks.

[Rhom]

45 minutes ago, Babblebauble said:

So what's the deets on this reMasstered Effect? Y'all ain't crowing about how purty it looks.

Honestly?  Its been so long since I played it... and I'm used to playing games like Horizon and Ghost of Tsushima... so its hard to realize just how much better it really is.

Ive not played it in about 5 years or thereabouts, so its all feeling new yet familiar to me.

[Jace, Extat]

Just now, Rhom said:

Honestly?  Its been so long since I played it... and I'm used to playing games like Horizon and Ghost of Tsushima... so its hard to realize just how much better it really is.

Ive not played it in about 5 years or thereabouts, so its all feeling new yet familiar to me.

My universal translator interpreted the following from your statement:

"It's barely different at all, 'cause by 2007 graphics were as good as they needed to be so the update isn't adding any detail or depiction I haven't seen before."

And my bullshit meter agrees.

But I am only a girl and know little of videogames. Or their remasterings.

[Rhom]

3 hours ago, Babblebauble said:

My universal translator interpreted the following from your statement:

"It's barely different at all, 'cause by 2007 graphics were as good as they needed to be so the update isn't adding any detail or depiction I haven't seen before."

And my bullshit meter agrees.

But I am only a girl and know little of videogames. Or their remasterings.

That’s about right.  There’s some good quality of life features added to ME1 that make it a bit more user friendly; but yes, I’m the same guy raving on the last page about how excited I am to play a PSP JRPG from 2011... so checking with me on graphics obviously isn’t the best idea.  

[Jon AS]

3 hours ago, Rhom said:

There’s some good quality of life features added to ME1 that make it a bit more user friendly

But as far as I can tell there's no change to combat, class skills and skill trees in general, right?

[IlyaP]

On 5/19/2021 at 8:13 AM, Poobah said:

I'd argue that the overall sense that ME2 was a sidequest of little relevance is more a problem with ME3 rather than ME2 itself - the level of character building and general investment you get into all the characters and the sorta found family vibe they build is great and the shame is that ME3 wasted so much of it in favour of another reset.

This accurately and nicely addresses something that inherently bugged me about the second game - it's ultimately a side-quest. An intersesting one, to be sure, but a side-quest nonetheless when compared to the primary story established in the first game. 

And to make that pivot after I'd so heavily bought into the initial game's story is...frustrating.

[IlyaP]

6 hours ago, Babblebauble said:

But I am only a girl and know little of videogames. Or their remasterings.

What's a videogame?

[Luzifer's right hand]

I guess I will pick this version of Mass Effect up when it goes on sale.

I own like half a dozen versions of Skyrim I can own multiple versions of that game. :p

[Rhom]

4 hours ago, Jon AS said:

But as far as I can tell there's no change to combat, class skills and skill trees in general, right?

They tell me combat is better... but again, been so long since I played I don’t know how for sure.

They did change the leveling by giving you an option to go 1-30 instead of 1-60.  You still get same number of skill points.

[Derfel Cadarn]

Got ps5 today

But just under 700gb hd space??

With the likes of Mass Effect remaster and FF7Remake weighing in at newr enough 100gb, this seems a major oversight by Sony. I’ve very good broadband (71gbs) but not everyone had, and even with good broadband, I’ve little enougj gaming time as it os without having to reinstall games and download patches whenever Inwant to llay something not on the hd

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Got ps5 today

But just under 700gb hd space??

With the likes of Mass Effect remaster and FF7Remake weighing in at newr enough 100gb, this seems a major oversight by Sony. I’ve very good broadband (71gbs) but not everyone had, and even with good broadband, I’ve little enougj gaming time as it os without having to reinstall games and download patches whenever Inwant to llay something not on the hd

SSDs are still much more expensive than magnetic equivalents, especially the custom-tech ones the new consoles are using. Having a 2TB drive in the PS5 - which is what you ideally really need as a minimum - would push the cost of the console up by at least $100, so I can see why they kept the size down.

I generally have 2-3 games installed at all times which are my multiplayer stand-bys and then the main SP game-in-progress, sometimes two if one is really long and I've taken a break from it. That is often too much for my 500 GB SSD and I have to go delete something. And these are generally older games from a few years ago, not modern behemoths taking up 100+ GB individually.

[Kalbear]

The real problem with the size is that the ps5 still has no expansion plan. Xsx has a specific port for a 2tb ssd that you can buy right away, but ps5 has nothing so far. 

[RumHam]

I seem to recall on the xbox one you could just attach an external drive with a USB if you needed to, is that no longer an option?

[Fez]

55 minutes ago, RumHam said:

I seem to recall on the xbox one you could just attach an external drive with a USB if you needed to, is that no longer an option?

I think for both new systems you can use an external USB drives as cold storage for games, but you can't run games off of them. You need to transfer the games to the internal drives to actually run them (or those special external drives that Xbox has).

[Fez]

Victoria 3 announced today by Paradox, no word yet on when it'll release. I am excited, although that is tempered by Paradox's recent track record. CK3 has been great so far. But the latest EU4 DLC was trash, Imperator: Rome was pretty bad, and Stellaris has been bad for a while too (IMO). No idea what opinion on the recent HoI4 DLC has been.

So it kinda all depends on exactly which developers at Paradox are actually working on it.

[Kalbear]

24 minutes ago, Fez said:

I think for both new systems you can use an external USB drives as cold storage for games, but you can't run games off of them. You need to transfer the games to the internal drives to actually run them (or those special external drives that Xbox has).

That's correct. The new systems assume games are on the ultrafast drives and games are designed with that in mind, so playing them on old school drives would really just not work at all. 

Xbox Series has a proprietary slot that allows you to install drives that fit that niche. Sony does not allow that right now. Both allow having a 'cold' storage option where you can keep copies of your games, but you can't play them from that drive.

[Werthead]

16 hours ago, Kalebear said:

Xbox Series has a proprietary slot that allows you to install drives that fit that niche. Sony does not allow that right now. Both allow having a 'cold' storage option where you can keep copies of your games, but you can't play them from that drive.

This does seem pointless as opposed to just deleting the game and keeping the saves on the drive (or even keeping the saves in the cloud).

[Fez]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

This does seem pointless as opposed to just deleting the game and keeping the saves on the drive (or even keeping the saves in the cloud).

Says someone who clearly has good internet. There's lot of people at least in the US still where it will take hours and hours to download a game, and also there's usually bandwidth limits where they'll get charged more if they download too much in a month. It makes a world of sense for people in those kinds of situations (and we're talking tens of millions at minimum) to keep their old games stored locally somewhere.

[karaddin]

@Liffguard I really like your flipping of the order like that, you could definitely get something that worked for me with that approach.

As others have said ME1 has the better core story, ME2 has the better characters. Another thing that's jumped out at me is that the dialogue writing in ME1 is definitely weaker than the other 2. I've actually settled on 3 being my favorite. The combat is easily the best of the 3 (and improved further in Andromeda), it does waste many of the ME2 characters unfortunately but they wrote themselves into a corner by letting you get them all killed in 2. It continues the stronger character focus of ME2 but you're not on the side quest anymore - the sense of urgency and stakes is very much there. The macguffin is a bit weak but aside from that the main story is quite strong - the tasks you're sent on actually make sense for getting civilizations to work together, and the high points hit the hardest of all 3 games for me, even if the very end drops the ball. But I also enjoyed Andromeda and am still angry they dropped it instead of doing the work to recover it.

23 hours ago, Werthead said:

SSDs are still much more expensive than magnetic equivalents, especially the custom-tech ones the new consoles are using. Having a 2TB drive in the PS5 - which is what you ideally really need as a minimum - would push the cost of the console up by at least $100, so I can see why they kept the size down.

And that's before you take into account that the chia cryptocurrency might be able to do to SSDs and HDDs what Bitcoin did to graphics cards. 

[IlyaP]

10 hours ago, karaddin said:

But I also enjoyed Andromeda and am still angry they dropped it instead of doing the work to recover it.

I picked this up on Steam, but haven't installed it yet. Do I need to play ME2 an ME3 to properly understand and enjoy this game? Or is it enough that I've played ME1?