Video Games- At least 2023 looks like a banger

[briantw]

4 hours ago, Fez said:

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.

I've only played one match plus all the tutorial stuff, so not really enough for me to get much of a sense for how the level grinding is going to be.

[Werthead]

Two Point Campus was discounted nicely on Steam so picked it up. I didn't want to pay full price for a reskin of Two Point Hospital (fantastic though that game was, and its after-launch support was outstanding), but at half price it was a no-brainer.

Won't play it for a bit though as I'm doing a full replay of the StarCraft franchise (just wrapping up the Enslavers bonus campaign for StarCraft Remastered, then into Brood War, so still a while to go).

[psynetik123]

New Amnesia game announced.

Spoiler

They finally added guns!

 

[IlyaP]

Are any of the expansions for Crystal Dynamics' Marvel's Avengers any good? Was thinking of giving it another go, having found it to be a tedious exercise in battling endless waves of uninteresting robotic foes. Yet somehow the game is still going strong? 

[RumHam]

Elden Ring really is an amazing game. I'm doing all this shit I've done three times already not even that long ago and still having a blast.

Someone even showed me the hidden path in Stormveil just before the boss. Where you go up by the where the jars are and jump to that ledge.  I never would have found that.

[Werthead]

So I picked up Midnight Suns and played through it a bit. It seems solid, but it's hamstrung by serious technical issues. Only running a 2060 (at 1080p), so wasn't expecting anything special from it (bearing in mind this game only looks moderately better than XCOM2 did on release), but even running it at Medium the game stutters like a lunatic on both gameplay and cutscenes, and moving the camera seems to be 50/50 between it going where you want it to go and lurching randomly across the map. The problems seem extremely widespread based on Steam and other forum reviews as well, to the point that Firaxis have had to promise an update quickly to address it. Inevitably, it seems Denuvo (sigh) is possibly to blame.

Once the problems subside - they are worst at the start of a level/transition/cutscene and then seems to snap back to normalcy a minute or so later - there's a reasonable game here.It is different to XCOM with a little bit of a similar DNA, in that positioning is important and using environmental factors (like the explosive barrels someone has generously strewn across New York and the enemy will never use) is critical, but cover is something you simply never have to worry about and you're much more worried about the balance between building up points to unleash cool abilities and constantly thinning out enemy ranks (since reinforcements constantly arrive during battle).

There's a pretty robust battle system here but it's odd that the between-mission gumpf takes as long, if not considerably longer, than the battles, and the game is borderline obnoxious with its cosmetics system (no, I'm not spending real money on cosmetics for a single-player game, get a grip), but the technical issues really need to be addressed pronto. They're only really bearable because this is a turn-based game. If this was a real-time game it would be an unmitigated disaster worse than the launch state of Cyberpunk 2077.

[RumHam]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

it seems Denuvo (sigh) is possibly to blame.

These companies must do all their testing and then slap this shit on. You'd think at least one person there would have run the game after and noticed.

Apparently Denuvo works on the Switch now, which should be an interesting disaster considering how under powered the Switch is by modern standards and now long it takes to get patches though Nintendo's certification process.

[Werthead]

Ah, disabling the 2K launcher removes a lot of the stuttering. Not all of it, but it's massively improved over the performance with the launcher in the background.  That's made the game a lot more fun.

Weirdly both Midnight Suns and Callisto Protocol seem to have a similar problem with not compiling shaders during the game load process (which usually happens fast and is unnoticeable), resulting in the game constantly having to reload its entire shader package on the fly, which is really weird. Midnight Suns is nowhere near as bad for this, but Callisto Protocol seems functionally unplayable on PC at the moment.

[Ran]

I've seen people play Callisto Protocol with no real problems, but the suggestion I saw was to use DX11 and possibly to limit framerate to 60 fps. Seemed to work for the streamers I watched.

[briantw]

8 minutes ago, Ran said:

I've seen people play Callisto Protocol with no real problems, but the suggestion I saw was to use DX11 and possibly to limit framerate to 60 fps. Seemed to work for the streamers I watched.

I turned off V-Sync and Motion Blur (saw that suggestion in a Steam review) and that seemed to mostly fix it for me.  It'll still occasionally drop some frames when I move to a new area but otherwise the game runs great.  Looks amazing too.

I'm waiting a bit to play more, though, because I assume many of the technical issues will be addressed in the next week or so, and I've got Deathloop, Ragnarok, Darktide, and Hades in my queue already and am stupidly trying to play all of them at once.

[Caligula_K3]

On 12/1/2022 at 11:00 AM, Fez said:

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.

 

 

I hear you. The writing can be quite weak and the game's pacing does it no favours- the central story of stopping whoever else is using the metaverse is sloooowly dripfed across tens of hours. And the game too often interrupts its gameplay loop of "social-simulator/turn based dungeon crawler" to give you days upon days of scripted events and repetitive dialogue. I just went through an especially painful stretch going from the end of August to the end of September: in like, 30 game days, only 7-8 actually gave you free time to do activities, even at night. It was not fun, especially since most days the dialogue was just the same "wow, the Phantom Thieves sure are getting popular!" over and over. If I didn't find many of the characters charming, and if I hadn't decided to mash A through every text conversation, I think I'd be done too.

[Corvinus85]

Thought about posting this in the politics thread, but it applies worldwide. 

 Victoria 3 proves communism is the best economic system. ("on paper")

https://www.pcgamer.com/victoria-3-communism-op/

Quote

In the month since the release of Paradox Interactive's latest grand strategy game, Victoria 3(opens in new tab), some players have struggled with one persistent issue: The communists are right. As entrenched conservative interests in their 19th-century nations prevent modernizing reforms—you know, like abolishing slavery—players start to rail against landowners, exploitative capitalists, and the Petit Bourgeoisie in rants that could have come from Marxists a century ago or today.

"I hate landowners," wrote(opens in new tab) one player just after release. "I hate these inbred, backass backwards, slave owning, tax stealing, progress blocking, head in the sand, law hating, stupid hat wearing, anachronistic assholes, I hate Landowners." 

...

Players are also finding that a properly implemented communist economy can lead them to become not just a dominant world power, but one in which the average standard of living for the lower and middle classes is as high, or higher, than that of the upper strata in other nations.

...

"One other thing to keep in mind is that while Victoria 3 is an ambitious simulation, it is not a complete simulation. There are currently no distinct mechanics modeling corruption or cronyism, foreign economic influence beyond trade, or direct interference in another nation's politics, all of which could help make 19th century communism seem a bit less appealing than it does in the current meta.

 

[Fez]

23 hours ago, Werthead said:

Ah, disabling the 2K launcher removes a lot of the stuttering. Not all of it, but it's massively improved over the performance with the launcher in the background.  That's made the game a lot more fun.

Weirdly both Midnight Suns and Callisto Protocol seem to have a similar problem with not compiling shaders during the game load process (which usually happens fast and is unnoticeable), resulting in the game constantly having to reload its entire shader package on the fly, which is really weird. Midnight Suns is nowhere near as bad for this, but Callisto Protocol seems functionally unplayable on PC at the moment.

Is there a straightforward guide to disabling the launcher? I've been playing a bit of Midnight Suns and I've really liked what I've seen so far, except for the technical mess.

Darktide has the shader issue too. It's like every big dev has forgotten how to use their game engines properly.

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, Fez said:

Is there a straightforward guide to disabling the launcher? I've been playing a bit of Midnight Suns and I've really liked what I've seen so far, except for the technical mess.

Yes. Locate the actual game .exe, then type it into the Steam Launch Options (right-click the game, then Properties, and the text box at the bottom of the General tab. Put the path in speech marks and add %command% after the line.

For mine it looks like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Marvel's Midnight Suns\MidnightSuns\Binaries\Win64\MidnightSuns-Win64-Shipping.exe" %command%

It may vary if you've installed Steam elsewhere. This then stops the Take Two launcher from engaging. The default Steam path actually goes to the 2K launch which then launches the game, so this simply bypasses it.

[Fez]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Yes.

Wow, thanks! Loading times are still pretty bad, but I'm shocked at how much that improved the game performance.

[Rhom]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

Yes. Locate the actual game .exe, then type it into the Steam Launch Options (right-click the game, then Properties, and the text box at the bottom of the General tab. Put the path in speech marks and add %command% after the line.

For mine it looks like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Marvel's Midnight Suns\MidnightSuns\Binaries\Win64\MidnightSuns-Win64-Shipping.exe" %command%

It may vary if you've installed Steam elsewhere. This then stops the Take Two launcher from engaging. The default Steam path actually goes to the 2K launch which then launches the game, so this simply bypasses it.

Does that work for other games that use a third party launchers in Steam?  Like the EA launcher?

[Heartofice]

I had to disable the 2k launcher for Civ 6, had it switched off for a year because it was so buggy it prevented me launching the game. It's amazing that there are still issues with it. I played Xcom last night and it crashed, i suspect because of the 2K launcher. 

[Werthead]

8 hours ago, Rhom said:

Does that work for other games that use a third party launchers in Steam?  Like the EA launcher?

No. Origins and UPlay host the game and integrate much more into the game system so you can't get around them. You can just launch from them and ignore Steam instead. 2K is just an extra launcher so they can spam you with adds for DLC and things, but it doesn't actually impact the ability to launch the game.

[Werthead]

The Witcher 3's update - released for free next week - looks very impressive.

 

[Werthead]

Pleasingly, and unexpectedly, MechWarrior 5 is getting a third expansion in January. Rise of Rasalhague tells an important story from BattleTech/MechWarrior lore, the rise of the Free Rasalhague Republic from the ashes of the Fourth Succession War (when the Lyran Commonwealth seized a whole ton of planets from the Draconis Combine and then had to let them go in the resulting peace deal). It's also critical as the prelude to the Clan Invasion, which is the one thing every fan wants to see happen in a game (a bunch of earlier games were set after the war was over, or after the invasion had started, but not during the whole thing).

The game devs have also confirmed that a fourth expansion is on the drawing board and they've even been talking about a sequel. Apparently MechWarrior 5's early sales were only meh, but the Steam release and then the console release have both done much better business than expected, and the early so-so critical reception has been immensely improved by the expansions.