Videogames 2023: Dreams of the Sandbox Kings

[briantw]

9 hours ago, Toth said:

Grrr... god, why am I sucking so badly at this being social thing? I've been hurting quite a bit these days about whether I should drop out of the Dead by Daylight group Discord and cut all contact with them to put my mind at ease about my own childishness. Which... seems to be a thing I always do when my experiments in making social experiments fail.

To illustrate: A while ago, when I was still playing with them, they managed to make another member of that forum where we met join. He had already a bit more experience playing DbD and I found it interesting how his observations about our group dynamic matched my own. He expressed utter befuddlement at how everyone dropped everything the moment somebody was hooked and when he somehow managed to convince the others to let him do a rescue, they kept screaming at him to immediately go for the rescue now! now! now! Even though he was waiting for the Killer to go away first, which... should be the obvious thing to do. Of course after I was rescued the killer dropped out of chase to go after me again and he then expressed his bafflement at how quickly I always go down, so he also confirmed that it's seriously not normal how much I suck at this game. From what I gather from their current post-game discussions and trading of memes, he seems increasingly upset at their continued inability to do generators, their only objective, the second someone gets hooked. Almost all recent matches have also been total losses, apparently.

In the meantime they also managed to convince another total newbie in the forum to try the game and he... also keeps complaining about having an utterly miserable time in a way very reminiscent to me. So basically at its core the group still has four people who somehow have fun with the game and keep talking about it in the Discord, while I'm at the sidelines very backhandedly trying to talk about different games, which is what fuels my misery. They have fun, I don't. I refuse to play with them anymore because I don't want to get upset again about our horrible teamwork, but at the same time feel awful and selfish for secretly wishing they would give other more cooperative games a try. The thing is, I did play Vermintide with another Discord group two weeks ago and had... a lot of fun, actually. Something I never felt with Dead by Daylight, which was always only anxiety-riddled frustration to me. Unfortunately that core of the game group says Vermintide games are too long (and one argued that I would probably feel terrible there as well if things go wrong, even though again, I... never felt that at ease with DbD despite playing Vermintide with total strangers). But yes, yes, I know. It's selfish of me to want them to try something different when they have fun with what they have, even though I don't have fun with it... so that's why I'm feeling anxious every time I watch them converse, every time I watch the group call go on because they are playing through another evening, while I'm sitting here watching them like a stubborn snotty child refusing to play with the other kids.

Life's too short to keep playing games you're not having fun with.  If it sucks, just put it down and find a game that doesn't.  There's no shortage. 

[polishgenius]

10 hours ago, Toth said:

I've been hurting quite a bit these days about whether I should drop out of the Dead by Daylight group Discord and cut all contact with them to put my mind at ease about my own childishness. Which... seems to be a thing I always do when my experiments in making social experiments fail.

 

Being socially awkward and that is hard, but trust, by the sounds of it it's not you being the childish one here, it's them. 

Any way you can get the others on the forum also unenamoured of the way these core lot are going about it into a group playing games youse lot actually enjoy?

[IlyaP]

Trying to get into Fallout 4, but ye gods, it's like the writers didn't consider or care about how humans behave. I walk into the middle of Concord, and no one bats an eye at my vault clothing, abject confusion, or lack of knowledge about modern events?!

What? 

[Luzifer's right hand]

1 hour ago, IlyaP said:

Trying to get into Fallout 4, but ye gods, it's like the writers didn't consider or care about how humans behave. I walk into the middle of Concord, and no one bats an eye at my vault clothing, abject confusion, or lack of knowledge about modern events?!

What? 

Playing Skyrim with guns and you expect reactivity? Bethesda does not make that kind of game.

[Darryk]

2 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Trying to get into Fallout 4, but ye gods, it's like the writers didn't consider or care about how humans behave. I walk into the middle of Concord, and no one bats an eye at my vault clothing, abject confusion, or lack of knowledge about modern events?!

What? 

Like in Skyrim how the guards would keep taking the piss out of you even if you'd become head of the Mage's Guild and killed every dragon in the game.

[Arakasi]

I did get Wrath of the Righteous for my steam deck and have been enjoying it. Changed a couple settings to prolong battery life. Text reading has been fine.

[Werthead]

5 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Trying to get into Fallout 4, but ye gods, it's like the writers didn't consider or care about how humans behave. I walk into the middle of Concord, and no one bats an eye at my vault clothing, abject confusion, or lack of knowledge about modern events?!

What? 

That's pretty par for the course in Fallout. Everyone is - or should be - wearing crazily mistmatched clothing from all over the place and the lack of a continent-spanning news network means nobody is really up to speed on what's going on.

They probably also think the cryo-freeze story is not true, and people are wandering out of some hitherto unknown vault to suddenly save the day from some huge threat pretty regularly by this point.

Still, I do miss the days of Anachronox when you could have an entire planet shrunk to the size of a beachball as a party member, and if you had it in your party you got extremely visible confusion from every single person you spoke to. "Never mind your surprisingly combat-filled quest to find 3 toilet rolls and a plunger for the janitor, what the hell is THAT floating behind you?"

[Toth]

20 hours ago, briantw said:

Life's too short to keep playing games you're not having fun with.  If it sucks, just put it down and find a game that doesn't.  There's no shortage. 

Yeah, that's what I have been doing. I guess I'm just frustrated about my tendency to turn down a possible social interaction.

20 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Being socially awkward and that is hard, but trust, by the sounds of it it's not you being the childish one here, it's them. 

Nah, they are totally nice people. They also from the beginning when I was so frustrated with the game told me I didn't need to force myself, it was my own decision to go on for months on end despite having no fun with it whatsoever. They just couldn't understand why I was putting myself under so much pressure and they found that it's just easier not caring about it that we lost, like, 95% of our matches. Though at the same time they seemed confused when I counted and showed them how badly we fared, because apparently whenever I wasn't playing with them, they did MUCH better. Which in turn just... made me more miserable about being caught so easily by the killers all the time, while they successfully duck away at the beginning. It also wasn't helping when the one who invited me told me to go ask for coaching at a DbD Discord and the people there acted like total dicks both time I asked questions about strategy.

4 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Trying to get into Fallout 4, but ye gods, it's like the writers didn't consider or care about how humans behave. I walk into the middle of Concord, and no one bats an eye at my vault clothing, abject confusion, or lack of knowledge about modern events?!

What? 

Yeah, the beginning is... strange. I was also baffled that you are railroaded into meeting Preston, but the sole reaction of the character to being offered bottlecaps as currency happens in a purely optional side quest at a farm in the south that you'd never conceivably visit before going to Concord. So in the end... it's a fun loot-shooter/dungeon crawler and kept me going on until I cleared the entire map, but it... really shouldn't be played much for the roleplaying aspect.

Though it's actually fitting, given how I'm myself now also in an all things Elder Scrolls crawl. Starting with my Skyrim-Rerun I somehow quickly thought it would be fun to see all of Tamriel... kind of increased by me seeing The Elder Scrolls Online on a sale for 3.40€. I at first prevented myself from going for it and instead installed Arena instead.

What can I say? I just finished the third Main Quest stage, getting the second piece of Jagar Tharn's staff in the Labyrinthion dungeon in Skyrim. It had its annoyances at the beginning, but I'm level 11 and settled fairly well in my adventuring. At first I was baffled at the dearth of side quest (all of them are randomly generated delivery quests with the exception of the search for what are about to become daedric artifacts, which boils down to clearing two dungeons) and the somewhat awkward combat (in the artifact dungeons enemies have a tendency to randomly spawn into your back as you traverse it). But as a pure dungeon crawler... it IS still surprisingly fun, if a bit repetitive. Combat is also tough as hell, what with the last dungeons in Skyrim having been filled with frost magic using packs of wolves and gigantic golems that can only be hurt by high level weapons. Luckily I'm starting to accumulate a nice array of mithril swords... which I need because the dungeons are so stupidly large, I tend to break at least one in each of them.

Unfortunately I then... did get weak and also bought Elder Scrolls Online, even though I was doubtful it wouldn't just be a generic MMO with TES as a setting. And... well, I'm for one positively surprised, that it does share the "get better with stuff as you use it" system of the main series, with myself feeling encouraged to try a variation of weapons for fun. Somehow ended up a Stealth Archer again because it's the best way to not get hit by enemies and avoid armor degradation, given how stingy quest givers are with money (so far), how expensive it is to keep your equipment in shape and how the game at least so far encourages you to take apart acquired loot for smithing XP. Also the game... it... triggered my OCD quite badly by having the tutorial dungeon filled with 26.537 urns with small loot in them... urns that, as I noticed far too late, refill the moment you exit a room and enter it again. Ugh... Well, I guess those 60 lockpicks will come in handy. XD

Other than that... I must say, I acknowledge the effort they went with a fully voiced MMO, but unfortunately it fails at being SWTOR with its heavily instanced and scripted cutscenes and myriad of dialogue choices. At its core, TESO is really inheriting the worst aspects of Skyrim in how all your quests boil down to "Hey you, I want you to go interact with three McGuffins hidden around me and then come back to me for a reward." and that ad nauseam. That combined with the result of there being no instances that boss enemies somehow greet you while standing up the knees in dead clones of themselves, left behind from other players who whacked them just before you came in. What seems interesting however is that TESO inherits Skyrims alchemy system and an even more beefed up smithing system (even with different skills for making clothes, furniture, light, medium and heavy armor). The only downside is that your inventory is completely DROWNING in shit, making it my actual main quest at the moment to grind for inventory expansions.

[Heartofice]

4 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Trying to get into Fallout 4, but ye gods, it's like the writers didn't consider or care about how humans behave. I walk into the middle of Concord, and no one bats an eye at my vault clothing, abject confusion, or lack of knowledge about modern events?!

What? 

Fallout barely functions as an RPG. Dialogue options are a joke, there are basically zero choices in quests, you are forced into playing this boilerplate character. However there is a lot of other stuff to enjoy in the game. I personally like to just turn survival mode on and turn it into a post apocalyptic survival game. It's quite good at that.

[RumHam]

I replayed Fallout 4 right before Elden Ring came out and it was my first time going melee in a Fallout game. I dumped I think all my starting points into strength cause fuck the carry limit. Tons of fun. I wish they hadn't made a lot of the changes from New Vegas but rushing from enemy to enemy chopping off their limbs was very satisfying. 

[Derfel Cadarn]

I played Elder Scrolls Online on PC in 2013 or so (releaee). Never stuck with it much.

Got it on PS4 years ago, made a character but never sid anything with it.

Got a copy the other week with all the xpacs, upgraded to ps5 version, and made a dark elf necro. Had some crown points from when I oroginally had the ps4 version so made my char a vampire.…. Not knowing they reversed how it works from when Inhad a vamp nightblsde on PC.

Originally if you didnt drink blood from a humanoid npc, you would gonthrough the various vamp stages. So I ambushed a few brigands.  Only to find myself now vampire stage 4 with no health regen!

Takea 4 hours of play time to go down a stage, so got another 3 hours untilI’m stage 3. Weird change; the origibal idea was that younhad to drink blood to keep the thirst at bay and look human.

Also playing Ass Creed Odyssey. 25+ hours in and liking it. After, I’ll play Origns and then Valhalla.

[IlyaP]

7 hours ago, Werthead said:

Still, I do miss the days of Anachronox when you could have an entire planet shrunk to the size of a beachball as a party member, and if you had it in your party you got extremely visible confusion from every single person you spoke to. "Never mind your surprisingly combat-filled quest to find 3 toilet rolls and a plunger for the janitor, what the hell is THAT floating behind you?"

Gods but I love Anachronox. One of my top 10 favorite games. "JAKE KNOWS!"

[Jace, Extat]

8 hours ago, Toth said:

Yeah, that's what I have been doing. I guess I'm just frustrated about my tendency to turn down a possible social interaction.

Nah, they are totally nice people. They also from the beginning when I was so frustrated with the game told me I didn't need to force myself, it was my own decision to go on for months on end despite having no fun with it whatsoever. They just couldn't understand why I was putting myself under so much pressure and they found that it's just easier not caring about it that we lost, like, 95% of our matches. Though at the same time they seemed confused when I counted and showed them how badly we fared, because apparently whenever I wasn't playing with them, they did MUCH better. Which in turn just... made me more miserable about being caught so easily by the killers all the time, while they successfully duck away at the beginning. It also wasn't helping when the one who invited me told me to go ask for coaching at a DbD Discord and the people there acted like total dicks both time I asked questions about strategy.

Yeah, the beginning is... strange. I was also baffled that you are railroaded into meeting Preston, but the sole reaction of the character to being offered bottlecaps as currency happens in a purely optional side quest at a farm in the south that you'd never conceivably visit before going to Concord. So in the end... it's a fun loot-shooter/dungeon crawler and kept me going on until I cleared the entire map, but it... really shouldn't be played much for the roleplaying aspect.

Though it's actually fitting, given how I'm myself now also in an all things Elder Scrolls crawl. Starting with my Skyrim-Rerun I somehow quickly thought it would be fun to see all of Tamriel... kind of increased by me seeing The Elder Scrolls Online on a sale for 3.40€. I at first prevented myself from going for it and instead installed Arena instead.

What can I say? I just finished the third Main Quest stage, getting the second piece of Jagar Tharn's staff in the Labyrinthion dungeon in Skyrim. It had its annoyances at the beginning, but I'm level 11 and settled fairly well in my adventuring. At first I was baffled at the dearth of side quest (all of them are randomly generated delivery quests with the exception of the search for what are about to become daedric artifacts, which boils down to clearing two dungeons) and the somewhat awkward combat (in the artifact dungeons enemies have a tendency to randomly spawn into your back as you traverse it). But as a pure dungeon crawler... it IS still surprisingly fun, if a bit repetitive. Combat is also tough as hell, what with the last dungeons in Skyrim having been filled with frost magic using packs of wolves and gigantic golems that can only be hurt by high level weapons. Luckily I'm starting to accumulate a nice array of mithril swords... which I need because the dungeons are so stupidly large, I tend to break at least one in each of them.

Unfortunately I then... did get weak and also bought Elder Scrolls Online, even though I was doubtful it wouldn't just be a generic MMO with TES as a setting. And... well, I'm for one positively surprised, that it does share the "get better with stuff as you use it" system of the main series, with myself feeling encouraged to try a variation of weapons for fun. Somehow ended up a Stealth Archer again because it's the best way to not get hit by enemies and avoid armor degradation, given how stingy quest givers are with money (so far), how expensive it is to keep your equipment in shape and how the game at least so far encourages you to take apart acquired loot for smithing XP. Also the game... it... triggered my OCD quite badly by having the tutorial dungeon filled with 26.537 urns with small loot in them... urns that, as I noticed far too late, refill the moment you exit a room and enter it again. Ugh... Well, I guess those 60 lockpicks will come in handy. XD

Other than that... I must say, I acknowledge the effort they went with a fully voiced MMO, but unfortunately it fails at being SWTOR with its heavily instanced and scripted cutscenes and myriad of dialogue choices. At its core, TESO is really inheriting the worst aspects of Skyrim in how all your quests boil down to "Hey you, I want you to go interact with three McGuffins hidden around me and then come back to me for a reward." and that ad nauseam. That combined with the result of there being no instances that boss enemies somehow greet you while standing up the knees in dead clones of themselves, left behind from other players who whacked them just before you came in. What seems interesting however is that TESO inherits Skyrims alchemy system and an even more beefed up smithing system (even with different skills for making clothes, furniture, light, medium and heavy armor). The only downside is that your inventory is completely DROWNING in shit, making it my actual main quest at the moment to grind for inventory expansions.

The times I tried to play The Elder Scrolls: O and Star Wars: The Old Republic I did not leave particularly impressed. Perhaps time has improved the efforts. I thought both were very pay-to-play ish and I didn't really have anyone to play with anyways. 

Good to hear those two franchises are spreading some joy around somewhere though

[IlyaP]

14 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Playing Skyrim with guns and you expect reactivity? Bethesda does not make that kind of game.

Can someone please deliver @Luzifer's right hand some kind of award for what I have declared to be The Finest Post of 2023. They've earned it and I wish to give unto them the highest of high fives! 

[IlyaP]

12 hours ago, Werthead said:

That's pretty par for the course in Fallout. Everyone is - or should be - wearing crazily mistmatched clothing from all over the place and the lack of a continent-spanning news network means nobody is really up to speed on what's going on.

They probably also think the cryo-freeze story is not true, and people are wandering out of some hitherto unknown vault to suddenly save the day from some huge threat pretty regularly by this point.

Still, I do miss the days of Anachronox when you could have an entire planet shrunk to the size of a beachball as a party member, and if you had it in your party you got extremely visible confusion from every single person you spoke to. "Never mind your surprisingly combat-filled quest to find 3 toilet rolls and a plunger for the janitor, what the hell is THAT floating behind you?"

@Werthead have you had much experience with the first 2 Fallout games? I've installed both, and also used the high resolution patch that is lovingly included in the Stream release, and have also installed Fallout Fixt, which I found quite helpful in resolving dumb little bugs like the intro video playing only in a corner of my monitor. But I'm finding it insanely frustrating, due to the movement speed of enemies, as well as the fact that - and please, if anyone understands this, please feel free to infodump/explain - I can't always access my inventory due to a lack of action points? To access my inventory?! 

I've long wanted to dip my foot into the Fallout series, and know F1 is where to start, but...ye gods, it really isn't the friendliest of games to play! 

[Gorn]

1 hour ago, IlyaP said:

But I'm finding it insanely frustrating, due to the movement speed of enemies, as well as the fact that - and please, if anyone understands this, please feel free to infodump/explain - I can't always access my inventory due to a lack of action points? To access my inventory?! 

It always felt perfectly natural to me. Rummaging in your backpack is an action, and it should cost action points. If you want to access something quickly, you can put it in the second quickslot, but it will still cost some action points.

I respect Fallout 1 for its surprisingly realistic outcomes of your actions, which was revolutionary for its time (and still is). Your character blabs too much about their secret vault? Bad things will happen. Sends a water caravan to its secret location? Good in the short term, not so good in the long term. Waste time exploring instead of focusing on the urgent main quest? More bad things (and it was really hardcore about this before a patch dialed it down). Get yourself captured by mutants? You get a bad ending where you're tortured with no chance of escape and a fate worse than death.

[Toth]

10 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Also playing Ass Creed Odyssey. 25+ hours in and liking it. After, I’ll play Origns and then Valhalla.

Sorry, but this abbreviation makes sound like a porn parody!

But interesting to hear about the vampire mechanics. As someone who cures himself instantly of vampirism each time I play a main series game, it... sounds like they didn't want to make it that much of a hassle by having you stay more humanlike without doing anything instead of making it constant busywork biting people.

5 hours ago, Secretary of Eumenes said:

The times I tried to play The Elder Scrolls: O and Star Wars: The Old Republic I did not leave particularly impressed. Perhaps time has improved the efforts. I thought both were very pay-to-play ish and I didn't really have anyone to play with anyways. 

I suppose it's because standard MMO gameplay of whacking things until they are dead isn't really something to be excited about. Particularly playing a Jedi or Sith in TOR felt more like I'm beating people up with a glowstick instead of, you know, cutting them up with a plasma sword. And that got somewhat stale after a while. However I found the character stories engaging enough to finish my Sith Juggernaut and Jedi Sentinel... come to think of it, both being tanky classes may also have something to do with it. I can also say playing a lightsided Sith is the funniest shit ever by virtue of most of the Jedi you are meeting being dirtbags you can tear down and drag to the dark side and with the few who aren't you often have the option to befriend them. The Sith Warrior even gets a Jedi padawan as an apprentice and teaches her in the light side!

Next to that the only other MMO I really played for a while is Star Trek Online, which I think has far superior combat by virtue of it being mostly a tactical space combat game that is all about managing your shields the angle you face your enemy with aside from hammering on your special power buttons. Of course the ground combat is then a hilariously simple standard MMO combat that has the potion to become an FPS.

[RumHam]

9 minutes ago, Toth said:

Sorry, but this abbreviation makes sound like a porn parody!

I would watch a pornographic movie called "The Office: ass Creed odyssey" It explains what Creed Bratton was up to before the reunion. 

My pitch is he was doing "butt stuff with the dog." meaning he hosted a podcast under the persona of "The Dog" and reviewed chairs and other butt related things.

[karaddin]

On 2/25/2023 at 7:19 AM, Werthead said:

MechWarrior 5 is the only game I've ever played which has made me feel nauseous or get motion sick. Absolutely everything else I've ever played, from flight sims to racing games to superfast FPS, has been fine. I've occasionally had games that gave me a slight headache, but usually pitching up the FOV to past 90 solves that.

I've fiddled with the game a lot, I'm using two mods that dramatically reduce the head-bobbing and weapons recoil shaking, I've whacked the FOV up to 110 and all of that helps a lot, but it doesn't eliminate the problem entirely. Genuinely baffling. I see quite a few people complaining about it. Even odder, people report suffering from it in MechWarrior 5 but not MechWarrior Online. MWO uses a different engine (CryTek versus UE5) but otherwise has a very similar UI, head bobbing etc. It's something inherent to the way MechWarrior 5 uses UE5.

Yeah we discussed this a bit after I tried it out, it was sufficiently bad for me it triggered a full blown migraine not just the usual nausea in a pretty short amount of play. I just refunded it immediately instead of trying to make it work when it was that bad. It always baffles me how arbitrary the issue is though, Half Life 2 was terrible for it but CS:Source and DoD:Source in the same engine were both perfectly fine. A more recent non shooter one - Tacoma was also really bad, almost as bad as MW5.

21 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Trying to get into Fallout 4, but ye gods, it's like the writers didn't consider or care about how humans behave. I walk into the middle of Concord, and no one bats an eye at my vault clothing, abject confusion, or lack of knowledge about modern events?!

What? 

I tried playing it recently as well and bounced off completely. I think for me part of the problem is the aesthetic of the technology just does not appeal to me at all. I looked at the TV during the opening and thought "this civilization has hovering robots but their TVs are still 14 inch fishbowl CRTs even decades in the future from 2022?" and it bothered me lol. I thought the tension leading into the nukes going off was pretty good, but wasn't feeling much at all after leaving the vault. I forget the names already, I cleared out the nearby town of raiders and got that power suit then followed some quest down to an armed area to the south/south east and didn't feel any desire to continue the next day. 

[Toth]

2 hours ago, RumHam said:

I would watch a pornographic movie called "The Office: ass Creed odyssey" It explains what Creed Bratton was up to before the reunion. 

I was thinking more along the line of the franchise itself. Heck, I imagine people in-universe certainly used the Animus to spy on their ancestors' sex life, given how it's available commercially in the later games.

24 minutes ago, karaddin said:

I tried playing it recently as well and bounced off completely. I think for me part of the problem is the aesthetic of the technology just does not appeal to me at all. I looked at the TV during the opening and thought "this civilization has hovering robots but their TVs are still 14 inch fishbowl CRTs even decades in the future from 2022?" and it bothered me lol. I thought the tension leading into the nukes going off was pretty good, but wasn't feeling much at all after leaving the vault. I forget the names already, I cleared out the nearby town of raiders and got that power suit then followed some quest down to an armed area to the south/south east and didn't feel any desire to continue the next day. 

Mmh... I don't think that's fair. You have to imagine that this is not our future, but an alternative world where society has never moved on from the 50s culturally and aesthetically. That combined with a heavy dosis of Jetsons future. Admittedly, if that's not your cup of tea, that's alright as well. I must admit, when looking at life action adaptations of the setting, I do find it exceptionally silly as well, but oddly when playing the games it didn't really strike me as that tonally out of place. However much Bethesda's take on the setting is "rubble themed amusement park".