Video Games- At least 2023 looks like a banger

[sifth]

I loved God of War Ragnarok. The ending had me in tears.

[Werthead]

The GOAT is back!

It seems to have bought a surprisingly well-realised open-world city with impressive radiant AI as well, which I don't think anyone was expecting.

Also, the opening is excellent.

 

[Werthead]

Rogue Trader gameplay reveal. Although by "gameplay" they really just mean "combat."

It looks a bit thin at the moment, with no real exploration of the actual RPG mechanics. Given these are the same people who made the two Pathfinder games which have crazy amounts of stuff going on, I'm hoping they've got a lot more going on under the hood than it first appears.

 

[polishgenius]

I'm normally pretty oblivious to graphical issues and hitched but, er, yeah, waiting for the patch.

[polishgenius]

So I did jump in on Pokemon (on the basis that at some point I'm gonna buy it anyway and being a Pokemon game it's never gonna come down in price, so I might as well get it now since I can and if I wanna wait, whatever). While the graphical issues are obviously notable, rather embarrassing for gamefreak and Nintendo, and will put some people off, it's nowhere near as bad as that clip - come across nothing that bad- and they're not really impacting my enjoyment at all. 

 

I mean, I bought the Switch port of No Man's Sky at the same time and while I've not tried it yet, by all accounts it runs much better than this, which is really funny, but it's not interfering with the gameplay or anything. 

[IlyaP]

Managed to do pretty much everything that was available in Mass Effect: Andromeda, utimately hitting the rare 100 hour mark for a videogame (it's rare for a game to engage me for such lengths). So I've decided to stretch myself across two different games that require two completely different modes of thinking: Pentiment and Homeworld Remastered. I'm only a few minutes into the game, but Pentiment is thus far a wonderfully designed game that uses fonts in a brilliant and original way. 

And then there's Homeworld Remastered. This is the first time I've ever willingly played through a tutorial, as this game has - by my standards - an insane amount of mechics and controls that need to be learned to actively enjoy what looks to be a brilliant, if complex, game. Plus, y'know, @Werthead seems to love this game dearly, which makes me extremely curious, since he's a gent with excellent taste.

[RumHam]

Ugh another steam sale. Must resist. I guess I should get Skyrim though I've never owned it on PC and will need it for Skyblivion. 

[IlyaP]

54 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Ugh another steam sale. Must resist. I guess I should get Skyrim though I've never owned it on PC and will need it for Skyblivion. 

Skyrim is a delightful experience. It's also dangerously addictive if you enjoy open-world RPGs. 

[RumHam]

53 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Skyrim is a delightful experience. It's also dangerously addictive if you enjoy open-world RPGs. 

Oh I did play it on xbox 360 when it came out and then years later on the switch. Just not on PC. 

[IlyaP]

1 hour ago, RumHam said:

Oh I did play it on xbox 360 when it came out and then years later on the switch. Just not on PC. 

With the SkyUI mod, it's perfection. 

[IlyaP]

Yeah, Homeworld is not for Ilya. Fleet and resource management is simply not very interesting to me. The hope had been that as a space-RTS, it would feel different. Unfortunately, not so much. It's clearly a brilliantly designed game, with astonishing art and sound design and mechanics, but it simply is not my kind of game. 

So in the meantime, it's time to explore Solasta: Crown of the Magister - which so far is proving to be extremely fun, especially in the writing department, as it's full of delightful quips and snark, which delights me to no end - and Pentinment.

[briantw]

The new God of War is, unsurprisingly, really good, although it feels much more on rails than the previous game.

[Werthead]

Started a StarCraft series replay.

StarCraft itself is still a very fine game, like ultra-fast speed chess, but it's disappointing that the remaster didn't fix all of the things people were complaining about in 1998, let alone 2017. Not being able to zoom out further, not being able to auto-assign units to mineral patches or geysers or bunkers and only being able to select 12 units max are all things people moaned about when the game came out, let along twenty years later (and we'll pass over the fact that the OG game turns 25 years old in May; whimper).

Still, the story is pretty good and all the better for being so lean. StarCraft II has a better UI and some much better-designed individual missions, but the sprawling unit choice (too many units that replicate each other's functionality), unbelievable padding and recycled story elements are all a bit disappointing.

[Poobah]

I've been quite ill the past week and a bit so I've had a lot of extra free time on my hands to play the new, much meme'd upon Pokemon Scarlet & Violet game and honestly... it's a really good game. I should note that I haven't quite finished it yet, having just started on the endgame story path so I haven't seen what lies in the postgame or how the game ends yet, but I'd say I've still seen a pretty large chunk.

The graphics, and especially performance are atrocious, truly dire, there's almost nothing positive to be said here (the Pokemon models themselves are ok, and there are some nice animations for Pokemon hanging out in the overworld and in cutscenes), but I think I have an easier time than most overlooking shitty graphics and when the framerate decides to stay playable long enough for me to appreciate it there's a very good game underneath.

There are three major story paths on offer throughout the game for you to bounce between and all three are fun and well written with interesting and sympathetic characters - the gym challenge aka Victory Road is the most bare bones in terms of plot being as it's a pretty straightforward mainstay of the Pokemon series but they do a good job with your best friend/rival, and having various people drop in to track your progress, encourage you, and so fourth, the Gym challenges and fights are also pretty fun and have good music. If I have one criticism of how the story paths are handled it's that in giving the player a huge amount of freedom in which order they want to approach objectives and where they want to go in the world (positive) it becomes quite easy to get sidetracked or lost, or miss things, or end up doing things "out of order" which can lead to a bumpy experience and a janky difficulty curve. In this I think the main thing they need to improve is the world map, if it had an option to overlay the zone borders and expected levels of pokemon and trainers that'd be an enormous help without being too in your face or curtailing the player's freedom.

The game also does a very good job of getting you invested in/bonded with the box legendary who serves as your mount, I was kinda prepared to hate it but I actually really like Koraidon now. I still haven't actually had the chance to use it in battle yet actually and I much prefer this approach with legendaries where you spend a good chunk of time with them and have them as a part of the story, rather than them just being a big ol' powerful statblock that randomly appears right after you get handed a master ball and tends to force its way in to your team with its sheer strength. Koraidon really managed to worm its way into my heart with its ongoing presence and a few cute animations. It also handles quite nicely as a mount, and the climbing up steep surfaces in particular is a huge improvement over Legends: Arceus.

The world feels pretty large with a fair amount to explore and do - the world map itself isn't great as alluded to earlier, it could use showing cave entrances/exits for starters to aid in navigation not to mention the zone borders as I mentioned earlier, so it can be more difficult to figure out how to navigate than it should be. There are large numbers of pokemon all over the place, and often they spawn in groups that'll flit and fly around, do various animations, or suggest some life to the world with, for instance a group of one type gathered around or chasing one of a different species, or following a more evolved version of their own species. The distance at which they spawn in and despawn is pretty terrible though. While I'm on the Pokemon I'm pretty happy with the majority of the new species, there are some really great new designs that I'm sure will become classics, though personally I think the starters final forms are a bit of a mixed bag.

There's a decent amount of QoL over older generations such as having access to your boxes at all times through your phone and being able to have pokemon re-learn moves whenever you want (I think this was also in Legends: Arceus) and I like what they did with TMs with making them single use but craftable with materials dropped by pokemon you defeat. Stuff like being able to have your pokemon out walking around and also being able to tell them to go auto battle is great, especially with outbreaks. I was surprised by how developed the "school" segment of the game is with a variety of classes you can take and little subquests you can go through to develop a friendship with / learn about / help your various teachers as you progress through them, and the teachers themselves are all fairly well developed characters themselves.

I was also pleased with how wide a variety of gender presentation there is in this game with a fair number of gender nonconforming characters, a variety of body types and gender presentation, clothing styles, etc. from the characters you meet in the game, none of which is pointed out or made a big deal out of, and there's a pretty good range of options to customise your own character's face and hair too (sadly and this is a definite downgrade from previous games, you're stuck in your school uniform as far as clothing goes and can only customise your accessories).

I can only hope that some patches come along soon to address the performance issues and in future Gamefreak and The Pokemon Company figure something out to get them the development time and expertise they need to wring a decent looking and well performing game out of the limited hardware of the Switch (or whatever console Nintendo come up with next).

[polishgenius]

7 hours ago, Poobah said:

/snip

Yeah, this has been pretty much my experience. The graphics and performance are laughable, but I'm pretty easy-going about these things so they've not really impacted my enjoyment. I totally get why for some people they would, but it's fine for me.


Past that, it's just really fun and a pretty well-done open world, that does a good job of drawing/guiding you on while allowing you a lot of freedom to explore where you want if you want to.
There are still some odd decisions- not level-scaling the gyms was a bizarre one given the ease of over-levelling and that you're more or less invited to do them out of order- and you could in places ask for more places and moments that feel really epic - you know, the way the Noble Pokemon did in TLA or some dungeon-like areas to fill out the world itself- but the feeling of freedom is great and there's so many Pokemon, including a lot of new ones I like. And even without the insta-catch mechanic and direct involvement of being targetable personally, which did add impetus to the moment-to-moment gameplay of TLA, being able to see them before you fight them (or don't) makes such a difference. 

 

It's a really fun game that just needed more time. Despite the performance, it's a huge relief after Sword and Shield.

[karaddin]

On 10/29/2022 at 9:25 AM, Werthead said:

RPS have hosted a reader-voted Top 100 PC Games list and it's fairly solid, although a bit too heavy on having multiple games from the same series. Having Half-Life 1 and 2 is understandable, just, as they're both so hugely influential, but having three Civilizations and two modern Fallouts and the last three Elder Scrolls feels a bit OTT. But then again, that's the nature of this kind of list.

RPS did their own list a few days earlier but it was a bit weird, very heavy on recent flavour-of-the-month indies people will probably struggle to remember in six months, let alone six years, and very light on the strategy genre.

Late reply here, the Civs really should have all just counted together as a single entry - they're essentially iterations on the same game. You can rank them internally, but in comparison to other games you should just be substituting your personal favourite version for where they rank.

I find it quite ridiculous that the same group could vote Witcher 3 as the best game ever but not place Cyberpunk 2077 on the top 100 at all, you can really see the legacy of the bad launch hanging over it even after Edgerunners and the other aspects of its redemption. I'm not saying everyone should love Cyberpunk 2077, but a group that values Witcher 3 so highly should at least still appreciate it as they share a lot of the same CDPR DNA.

[Slurktan]

6 hours ago, karaddin said:

I find it quite ridiculous that the same group could vote Witcher 3 as the best game ever but not place Cyberpunk 2077 on the top 100 at all, you can really see the legacy of the bad launch hanging over it even after Edgerunners and the other aspects of its redemption. I'm not saying everyone should love Cyberpunk 2077, but a group that values Witcher 3 so highly should at least still appreciate it as they share a lot of the same CDPR DNA.

Why?  I love Fromsoftware games but I would not rate Sekiro in my top 100 games despite Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring being there even though it has the same Fromsoftware DNA.

[Werthead]

6 minutes ago, Slurktan said:

Why?  I love Fromsoftware games but I would not rate Sekiro in my top 100 games despite Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring being there even though it has the same Fromsoftware DNA.

Because CP77 does quite a few things a lot better than The Witcher 3 (particularly the character focus, the main narrative, stealth and combat). I think most people agree that Sekiro is a fine game that doesn't beat any of the other From games in any particular field.

[karaddin]

Yeah what Wert said - I'm sure some people are going to be heavily influenced by love of the IP, but so much of what I see TW3 praised for are things that CP2077 does at least as well and a lot of it is better.

[briantw]

4 hours ago, karaddin said:

Yeah what Wert said - I'm sure some people are going to be heavily influenced by love of the IP, but so much of what I see TW3 praised for are things that CP2077 does at least as well and a lot of it is better.

I’m guessing many people tried it at launch, saw what a dumpster fire it was, and never went back.