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Video Games- At least 2023 looks like a banger


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18 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

To go from having a major plotline about a teacher preying on and sexually assaulting students to having the protagonist's homeroom teacher come over in a maid costume is just really fucking bizarre

I highly recommend going ahead and finishing Kawakami's confidant all the way up to rank 10.

Despite your misgivings regarding the whole inappropriateness of it, the max rank perk she gives provides a massive benefit to your character and is extremely useful in helping you to finish all your activities before the deadline is up.

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19 hours ago, Gorn said:

Also, both the Witcher 3 and CP2077 get compared with the same types of games. For Witcher, those would be Skyrim and Dragon Age Inquisition, and Witcher blows them both out of water. For CP2077, it is the Grand Theft Auto series (Saints Row too, but mostly GTA), and it... doesn't.

The Witcher blows Dragon Age (any of them) out of the water, but Skyrim is a very different kind of game that's doing a very different kind of approach, so they're not as directly comparable. The Witcher 3 has a far superior story and cast of characters, but Skyrim is an infinitely better open-world experience.

Comparing Cyberpunk 2077 - a roleplaying game with immersive sim and action elements - to Grand Theft Auto V - an open-world action game - is a bit odd in the first place. Sure, they both allow you to jump in cars and fire off guns, but they're completely different genres. It's a bit like comparing XCOM to Doom because both allow you to direct manly men in armour to kill aliens with ludicrous amounts of bullets.

Even there, GTAV has inarguably better polish, launched in a much better state and was more immediately accessible as a game, but CP77 doesn't just blow it out of the water in terms of having a better (and actually branching and reactive) story, more interesting characters, a functioning stealth system and better combat, it absolutely atomises it. GTAV is much more tolerant of you deciding to fuck around with it and the game responds to you trying to break it much more readily, but I'm not sure that's as much of a selling point as some people think.

11 hours ago, Rhom said:

There are still people who hate on Andromeda for being buggy at launch.

There are still people who hate on Fallout: New Vegas having a buggy launch and that was twelve years ago.

5 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Isn't there a 3rd person mod for the game? I coulda sworn there was...

There is, but it's fairly janky. It is surprisingly functional though, to the point where I'm pretty convinced that CDPR could introduce a proper third person mode without it being as much work as everyone seems to think, and it would probably immediately sell another couple million copies.

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29 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The Witcher blows Dragon Age (any of them) out of the water, but Skyrim is a very different kind of game that's doing a very different kind of approach, so they're not as directly comparable. The Witcher 3 has a far superior story and cast of characters, but Skyrim is an infinitely better open-world experience.

Comparing Cyberpunk 2077 - a roleplaying game with immersive sim and action elements - to Grand Theft Auto V - an open-world action game - is a bit odd in the first place. Sure, they both allow you to jump in cars and fire off guns, but they're completely different genres. It's a bit like comparing XCOM to Doom because both allow you to direct manly men in armour to kill aliens with ludicrous amounts of bullets.

Even there, GTAV has inarguably better polish, launched in a much better state and was more immediately accessible as a game, but CP77 doesn't just blow it out of the water in terms of having a better (and actually branching and reactive) story, more interesting characters, a functioning stealth system and better combat, it absolutely atomises it. GTAV is much more tolerant of you deciding to fuck around with it and the game responds to you trying to break it much more readily, but I'm not sure that's as much of a selling point as some people think.

I'm not sure if I would say that Skyrim is "infinitely better" than Witcher 3 as an open-world experience, but I guess that YMMV applies on that - Skyrim is better in some things, Witcher is better in others (no level scaling, for example, or Novigrad as a vastly better city).

When it comes to Cyberpunk 2077, it wasn't even promoted as an RPG. Until very recently, "RPG" was completely dropped from its official description, it was sold as an "action adventure game". That makes GTA a natural point of comparison. And CP2077 failed in some basic mechanics of open-world urban action adventure games that GTA developers (and even lesser games like Watch Dogs) mastered a long time ago, and that players learned to expect from this type of game - things like non-idiotic pedestrian and driver AI, or police response to crimes committed by player. I'm also not fond of its bullet sponge enemies, so I disagree with "better combat" as well.

Finally, RPG to me requires a third-person mode of playing, and I was very disappointed when CD Project Red officially dropped it during development (I know there is a mod for that, it's not the same). To me, a game with guns played exclusively in first person is a FPS, I don't care how many RPG elements it has.

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13 hours ago, karaddin said:

As for Gorn comparing it to GTA and Saints Row - treating them as it's peers is indicative of it's marketing and word of mouth failure. I've seen that complaint so many times and yeah, if you're judging it on those merits it's not looking good but that's not what it's trying to be. I'm comparing it to TW3 because it's in a similar bucket, just one has fantasy furniture and the other Cyberpunk furniture. And to a large part that's a huge fail of their marketing team, they hurt the game on multiple fronts - features that ultimately didn't make it into the game, people expecting GTA rather than a character driven narrative RPG, superficial edgy marketing that hides the emotional heart of the game etc.

But they're not really in a same bucket. Game mechanics of a first-person game with guns are vastly different from those of a third-person game with swords. Game mechanics of a game with cars are vastly different from those of a game with horses. Creating your own character is completely different from playing a pre-defined character who has nine books and two games of backstory behind him. Being good at one thing doesn't mean you are good at another.

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1 hour ago, Gorn said:

I'm not sure if I would say that Skyrim is "infinitely better" than Witcher 3 as an open-world experience, but I guess that YMMV applies on that - Skyrim is better in some things, Witcher is better in others (no level scaling, for example, or Novigrad as a vastly better city).

Sure, Novigrad and Beauclair are the best medieval fantasy cities ever depicted in a game, but there's not much to do in them outside of the quests and some light shopping.

Skyrim you can treat as a single-player MMORPG, if you want to be a blacksmith or an armourer or a fisherman, you can. You can't do anything like that in The Witcher 3. There are no real optional, repeatable open-world elements at all, apart from the monster and treasure hunts, and even those are finite.

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When it comes to Cyberpunk 2077, it wasn't even promoted as an RPG. Until very recently, "RPG" was completely dropped from its official description, it was sold as an "action adventure game". That makes GTA a natural point of comparison. And CP2077 failed in some basic mechanics of open-world urban action adventure games that GTA developers (and even lesser games like Watch Dogs) mastered a long time ago, and that players learned to expect from this type of game - things like non-idiotic pedestrian and driver AI, or police response to crimes committed by player. I'm also not fond of its bullet sponge enemies, so I disagree with "better combat" as well.

Cyberpunk 2077 was announced as a roleplaying game in 2012, based on a tabletop roleplaying franchise that had been around since 1988 (the Cyberpunk ttrpg franchise is one of the most famous and storied of them all, after D&D). It was always meant to be an RPG and it's a far better RPG than The Witcher 3 in that regard (you can create your own character and tailor their abilities and skill trees and origins far more than TW3), although TW3 is still an RPG as well.

Plenty of RPGs have bullet or sword-sponge enemies. In fact all of them do, and GTA certainly has tougher enemies and bullet-spongey elements (although it's a little fairer with headshots, but CP77 is set in a world where people can replace their skulls with titanium, so that actually makes sense).

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Finally, RPG to me requires a third-person mode of playing, and I was very disappointed when CD Project Red officially dropped it during development (I know there is a mod for that, it's not the same). To me, a game with guns played exclusively in first person is a FPS, I don't care how many RPG elements it has.

That's an arbitrarily limited perspective. So all of the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games are not RPGs (they do have optional 3rd person modes, but they didn't work very well until Fallout 4)? Deus Ex and its sequels and prequels are not RPGs? The Might & Magic games are not RPGs? Legend of Grimrock is not an RPG? First-person RPGs have been around since the early 1980s.

RPGs can be first-person, third-person, text-based, viewed from isometric overhead, or 2D sprite-based, with a party or one person, with a named character or a wholly character-created one. They're really not that limited.

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54 minutes ago, Gorn said:

But they're not really in a same bucket. Game mechanics of a first-person game with guns are vastly different from those of a third-person game with swords. Game mechanics of a game with cars are vastly different from those of a game with horses. Creating your own character is completely different from playing a pre-defined character who has nine books and two games of backstory behind him. Being good at one thing doesn't mean you are good at another.

I think I'm defining the type of game by what you're doing, you're putting a lot of weight into how you do it. Riding a bike in Cyberpunk 2077 plays almost exactly the same as riding Roach in TW3, down to being able to jump off while you're still moving but stopping. A bunch of the builds are entirely built around melee weapons or hacking that is functionally the same as playing a mage except probably more powerful.

Yeah, playing a character that you get to design rather than a pre-existing one is a point of difference and I acknowledged that earlier but it doesn't turn it into GTA. It's more like Mass Effect in that regard, except Cyberpunk 2077 has more skill variation, a functioning crafting system that is useful without being painful and a large level of capacity to actually role play. I saw plenty of people arguing that because it lacked "video game RPG element x then it's not a RPG" when it's got a ton of free play role playing - ie not on rails at all, you're fleshing out your version of V through the way you live V's life. 

The 3rd person thing is entirely your preference, not a definition of the genre. Top down view isn't third person either but it's far more associated with RPG for me than 3rd person is. I was unhappy with 1st person initially, but it's actually working with it sufficiently to justify it with the immersion it adds. I think a big part of the facial and eye animations working so well would go out the window in 3rd person.

But I agree that a bunch of people ended up with the impression it wasn't an RPG, and that's explicitly a fuck up on the part of the marketing for the game. But that marketing failure doesn't make the game not an RPG, nor whatever genre GTA is. The whole idea of wanting involved police chases etc is just weird to me, you're a legitimate mercenary who sub contracts for the police, actually landing on their wanted list from slaughtering them wholesale is going to end V's life. You do a couple of jobs for one of the mayoral candidates and they're not hush hush, you're openly visiting their home. That game mechanic is so out of kilter with the story it goes beyond ludonarrative dissonance.

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Just finished Pentiment. Stunningly beautiful game. It took me a while to get into it and adjust to its pace, but I'm so glad I did. A couple of moments will definitely stay with me. (Big spoilers!) 

Spoiler

1. After the first time jump, Andreas standing by the grave of Brother Piero. He'd promised to come back and visit him, this man who (in my playthrough) he'd sacrificed the life of a probably innocent character to save, and now he's messed up and it's too late. 

2. Magdalene exploring the ruins of the abbey (which, as Andreas, we used to know well), to the backing of a haunting song which I'm about to go and track down.

Also, I now know a little about the German Peasants' War, which I'd never heard about previously. History coverage in the media in Britain is often depressingly limited. Even In Our Time hasn't covered it. 

The game seems to have taken its research seriously. As I type, the reference list is still scrolling past in the credits. 

I was glad that there were Jewish characters and that 

Spoiler

nothing horrible happened to them; they did well and thrived away from mad Tassing. I'd kept on expecting a lynch mob to go for them. At the same time, I wonder how true this portrayal was to the historical record. There was surprisingly little anti-Semitism. 

 

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7 hours ago, Ran said:

Yeah, a lot of early RPG's were first person games. Dungeon MasterMight and MagicWizardry, The Bard's Tale... 

A lot of them were first-person games with guns. It was a common twist in the Might and Magic series for your characters to get either modern weapons (machine guns etc) or laser rifles towards the end of the game. Captive was a brilliant Dungeon Master clone but you controlled robots instead of adventurers and had to rampage around bases blasting everything that moves (even moreso in its full-3D sequel, Liberation). 

7 hours ago, karaddin said:

I think I'm defining the type of game by what you're doing, you're putting a lot of weight into how you do it. Riding a bike in Cyberpunk 2077 plays almost exactly the same as riding Roach in TW3, down to being able to jump off while you're still moving but stopping. A bunch of the builds are entirely built around melee weapons or hacking that is functionally the same as playing a mage except probably more powerful.

Not to mention you summon your car in the same way you summon Roach, except they spent a lot more time programming it so your car wouldn't inexplicably materialise on a nearby rooftop.

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Ooh, Midnight Suns is getting rave reviews. Tempted to pick this one up.

Yeah, it looks pretty damn cool.  

I've got a couple of other games to finish before I dive into another 50+ hour game, though.  Ragnarok is at the top of my list, and I just finished building a new PC and picked up Deathloop, which I've wanted to play since it released but lacked the hardware for, on sale for twenty bucks during the Thanksgiving Steam sale.

I also just bought Darktide earlier today, although I haven't played it yet.  Several of my friends either already picked it up or plan to, and we all played Vermintide 2 together, so I'm anticipating another fun Left 4 Dead style experience. 

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15 hours ago, psynetik123 said:

I highly recommend going ahead and finishing Kawakami's confidant all the way up to rank 10.

Despite your misgivings regarding the whole inappropriateness of it, the max rank perk she gives provides a massive benefit to your character and is extremely useful in helping you to finish all your activities before the deadline is up.

I checked her perk list and it does seem really useful. But it's really not worth the amount of embarassment I feel for whoever wrote this teacher/maid/master masturbatory fantasy.

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3 hours ago, Ramsay B. said:

Probably. I’m just console scum though.

Hey hey hey! There's nothing wrong with playing on a console! You play a game where you feel most comfortable! You may be a lot of things, but scum ain't one of them! 

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Deathloop is fantastic.  It reminds me of the early 2000's shooter series No One Lives Forever mingled with the game mechanics of Dishonored, the dystopian insanity of BioShock, plus a dash of Groundhog Day.  You've got one day to kill an entire island's worth of psychopaths and every time you die or make it to the end of the day without killing everyone (you really only need to kill eight specific people), you start all over from the beginning.  I'm only a few hours in, but I just unlocked the ability to maintain items from loop to loop, which is more or less where the actual game begins.

I played a bit of Darktide tonight as well and it was pretty fun.  My buddy and I got stuck with a couple of dipshits on my first mission (he's level nine, so I was mostly just following his lead) but we made it work.  The gunplay and melee are very satisfying, which is to be expected from the studio that made the Vermintide games.  The character creation system is fun as well.  I'm not sure how much any of it matters, but I went with a Zealot and picked a variety of insane backstory options and ended up with a character that looks like Kratos from God of War, which was fitting since the starting melee weapon for the class is an axe.  I was also gifted with a very Kratos-like voice option, which apparently is heard by everyone in my party during missions.

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Has anyone played Warcraft III Reforged? I felt like playing it for the nostalgia but I don't think Blizzard did a good job with this one. I want my Warcraft III classic back.

The Diablo 2 Remastered just upgraded the graphics and didn't change much else, much better that way.

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On 11/29/2022 at 11:22 AM, Caligula_K3 said:

I'm like... 45 hours into Persona 5 Royal, just beat the fourth palace, and I have a feeling I'm not even halfway done. This game is a lot of fun and has a great cast of characters; the combo of life-simulator and really snappy turn-based combat is great. Some of the anime weirdness, though, really gets in the way of the game's themes. To go from having a major plotline about a teacher preying on and sexually assaulting students to having the protagonist's homeroom teacher come over in a maid costume is just really fucking bizarre. I'm just ignoring that character's quest line, because it's just too weird and uncomfortable... and there are other moments like that too.

But still, really fun game. I just don't know if I'm going to be able to last the full 100+ hours though. It's a lot.

I'm about 40 hours into P5R but haven't played in about 10 days and I'm not sure I'll be getting back to it. I had a lot of fun at first but the combat doesn't feel deep enough to last another 60+ hours, and I'm not enjoying the rest of the game enough to last through it. The characters aren't drawing me in the way P4G's did, most of the confidants aren't much fun, the writing feels very weak in a lot of places (although there are some great bits too), and I'm not interested in the central story (in fact, I'm not even sure what it is). Still, the game simply oozes style and I'm glad I saw it for a while.

 

10 hours ago, briantw said:

I played a bit of Darktide tonight as well and it was pretty fun.  My buddy and I got stuck with a couple of dipshits on my first mission (he's level nine, so I was mostly just following his lead) but we made it work.  The gunplay and melee are very satisfying, which is to be expected from the studio that made the Vermintide games.  The character creation system is fun as well.  I'm not sure how much any of it matters, but I went with a Zealot and picked a variety of insane backstory options and ended up with a character that looks like Kratos from God of War, which was fitting since the starting melee weapon for the class is an axe.  I was also gifted with a very Kratos-like voice option, which apparently is heard by everyone in my party during missions.

The core gameplay does feel great and I think they really nailed the 40k atmosphere. I am worried about the amount of grind needed for new weapons though, and the fact that there's only 4 classes and most of the perks look pretty lame makes me concerned that it'll get stale much faster than Vermintide 2. Also, the character creation is fun, but with there being 12 different personalities (and 21 separate voice options) there seems to be much less character banter than VT2 had with its 5 characters. There's still a bit, but most of the dialog appears to be undirected combat barks and quips. Which is a shame. And there doesn't appear to be a story after the prologue, just a setting. I've seen rumors that the story will unfold over seasons. But considering Fatshark's trouble sticking to deadlines, that idea concerns me; if it's even true at all.

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