Videogames 2023 pt. II: Can We patreon This Man an Alienware Already?

[Raja]

13 hours ago, Werthead said:

I'm hoping the big difference is this being a RPG. The BioShock games were badly-served by them being FPS games when they felt like they were crying out to be full RPGs.

I kinda disagree. We really do not need another RPG. Bioshock's combat is a bit janky, but I love that it was a 'different' kind of FPS game and I think the FPS aspect of it, especially in infinite

[Ran]

Starfield looks impressive enough that it might well be my first Bethesda game.

Not a fan of mining or base building, but I'm guessing there'll be multiple routes to getting resources/money to improve gear and ships.

[Toth]

Speaking of Bethesda jank... Amusingly, after watching a scathing review about Fallout 76... I ended up buying it in a sale for 7 bucks because it still looked oddly fun in terms of exploration and gunplay.

... and I must say... that's pretty much the only thing it has going for it. What a confusing Frankenstein's Monster of a game this is. You start, after starting it three more times because it was stuck in a tiny window and refused to save the setting changes I did until it suddenly did, you get a cutscene about Vault 76 being the "best and brightest" (which never comes up again) and how it's supposed to open 25 years into the apocalypse and kicking everyone out. Except you, apparently. Because you overslept? The vault is a mess of confetti and party stuff. But... it is also mentioned that you were staying behind... for at least a year... for some reason. And in this time you never bothered to tidy up the party stuff? Or weren't pestered by the robots telling you to get out already? It's such a weird state where the game tries to justify a time skip for the Wastelanders questline after the initial main quest of finding your overseer who slipped out of the vault a day prior and discover the world... without you ever doing the latter... It's such a bizarre example of the game barely bothering with a coherent explanation for what I feel sounds like an unnecessarily complicated set-up of openly competing storylines.

Then on top of that I decided to follow the Wastelanders storyline at first because it was the closest near the vault and in typical Bethesda fashion there was yank when I entered a bar where the barkeeper had her hands raised as a raider kept her at gunpoint and after he was dispatched, she remained with her hands raised throughout the entire next dialogue because the animation didn't fire before she talked to me.

Also when I wanted to get into the game again at a later point, it kept freezing on the boot-up. I looked up and you have to erase its folder in the AppData directory and suddenly it worked again. How... can they miss such a stupid bug?!?

But otherwise... well, it does indeed feel very much like a Fallout 4 mod, what with the large amount of carried over assets. And while I occasionally run into other player homes, multiplayer seems mostly unnecessary.

[Werthead]

Nivalis looks amazing. Their previous game using the same city, Cloudpunk, was outstanding, but they've really levelled up the visuals here and the detail.

 

6 hours ago, Poobah said:

I know there's a lot of hype for Starfield but I'm honestly left kinda cold. Yeah it looks fantastic but it gives me the feel of a tech demo not an actual game and needing several thousand pounds worth of hardware that I don't have to play a new game ceased to be a selling point for me about a decade ago. All the talk about procedural generation and how many planets there are makes me feel like it's extremely wide but very shallow - No Man's Sky before the redemption arc, but in ultra "make your PC cry" 8K or whatever - and it's a bethesda game so throw in all that jank too.

We know exactly what the game is going to be because we've seen it five times before (six if you count New Vegas).

It is going to be "Bethesda in Space." Fallout 4 with zero-gee combat sections. And that's fine. The gravy is that the visual update actually looks significant (this is easily their best-looking-on-release game since Oblivion, every other game between has looked about 2-4 years behind the curve) and they've actually gone back and reinserted some actual RPG systems (Fallout 4 stripped a lot of them out). Also, pulling the fully voiced protagonist has given them a lot more freedom with the writing than they had in FO4.

It's No Man's Sky but you can completely ignore the main selling point of NMS (doing shit on barren planets and getting resources) and just focus on a standard BGS RPG experience, and still likely get 100+ hours out of it.

6 hours ago, Raja said:

I kinda disagree. We really do not need another RPG. Bioshock's combat is a bit janky, but I love that it was a 'different' kind of FPS game and I think the FPS aspect of it, especially in infinite

And we needed more semi-mediocre FPS games?

The three BioShock games were supposed to be successors to System Shock, but were neither immersive sims nor RPGs, which felt like it was missing the point. It also meant spending vast resources constructing amazing-looking locales with Rapture and Columbia and then creating ultra-linear 10-14 hour experiences rooted in absolutely murdering everything in sight with the games holding your hand every step of the way. The plasmids gave you a slightly more sophisticated arsenal but that was really about it. The short lengths of the game and the FPS murder focus meant that the thematic elements were really undersold, whilst in an RPG they could be explored much more in-depth.

5 hours ago, Ran said:

Starfield looks impressive enough that it might well be my first Bethesda game.

Not a fan of mining or base building, but I'm guessing there'll be multiple routes to getting resources/money to improve gear and ships.

Yup, the settlement building was fairly optional in Fallout 4 and if you did decide to engage with it, it was up to you to what degree. You could actually construct a settlement, hire some people to work it and recruit patrolling soldiers or merchants in about 10 minutes flat and then never think about it again.

My main issue with it is that it hinted at a really interesting fresh idea for open-world games, being able to change the world itself by adding merchants, trade routes, soldiers on patrol etc, and it did develop that somewhat but then stopped on fully delivering the consequences of that. They only integrated base-building in the last nine months of development, so they did not focus on it as much as they could have done, and the UI for it was very janky. Starfield has completely changed the deal on that with the overhead system, plus it's a core mechanic from the very start of development. I do think it will be less important overall, though, since your settlements in the game will probably just be lost in the vastness of the setting, rather than sprawling over a map which is already pretty busy (and if you mod out the settlement building limitations in FO4, complete and total mayhem can result as you build your base through enemy settlements and so on).

5 hours ago, Toth said:

Speaking of Bethesda jank... Amusingly, after watching a scathing review about Fallout 76... I ended up buying it in a sale for 7 bucks because it still looked oddly fun in terms of exploration and gunplay.

Yeah, FO76 is a very confused game. It's annoying because it's possibly the best map Bethesda have ever created and the biggest to date in their modern era (obviously that's about to be obliterated completely by Starfield), but they then wasted it on a multiplayer game which also doesn't do a great job of integrating multiplayer features.

76 has too much multiplayer jank to work as a single player game (especially the cripplingly awful ways of getting more ammo for guns) but is too much in thrall to the singe player games to work as a proper multiplayer title. For all the shit it got, Elder Scrolls Online had the right idea in just doing its own thing completely divorced from the SP games.

Edited June 12, 2023 by Werthead

[Raja]

4 minutes ago, Werthead said:

 

 which felt like it was missing the point.

Not to me. The thematic elements & story was the whole point of the game, they were not undersold - they were front and center, which is why Bioshock did so well.

As for mediocre FPS game, I'd take those over the mountain of RPG games we have at the moment.

[Toth]

18 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Yeah, FO76 is a very confused game. It's annoying because it's possibly the best map Bethesda have ever created and the biggest to date in their modern era (obviously that's about to be obliterated completely by Starfield), but they then wasted it on a multiplayer game which also doesn't do a great job of integrating multiplayer features.

76 has too much multiplayer jank to work as a single player game (especially the cripplingly awful ways of getting more ammo for guns) but is too much in thrall to the singe player games to work as a proper multiplayer title. For all the shit it got, Elder Scrolls Online had the right idea in just doing its own thing completely divorced from the SP games.

Indeed. What I found the most striking at the beginning which doesn't even come up much in most reviews is not just that the plot is nonsense and the quests Skyrim typically "go there, kill something and come back" types of tasks, but just how incredibly confused and directionless everything is. Inside the vault you didn't even get a quest or a dialogue or anything. You wake up all alone, everywhere are robots telling you to leave and guarding stands offering you starting equipment and then out you go. You can read all the terminals to get a bit of a sense of what was going on with the vault, but everything I found was mostly about the "kicking everyone out after 25 years" part, while the part about you having to search for the overseer doesn't come up anywhere. It seems like a random idea popping up in your character's head and getting added to your log the second you leave the vault. Logically your task would be to rebuild and construct a village with your fellow vault dwellers, but there is nobody whatsoever around and so you just shrug and mindlessly follow quest markers that you barely know why you should bother with.

[Werthead]

Star Wars Outlaws looks fun. The transition from ground stealth/combat to jumping in your spaceship and then dogfighting before jumping out was all very cool.

It's not challenging Starfield's scope, but it looks solid.

[Week]

17 hours ago, Raja said:

Not to me. The thematic elements & story was the whole point of the game, they were not undersold - they were front and center, which is why Bioshock did so well.

As for mediocre FPS game, I'd take those over the mountain of RPG games we have at the moment.

1000000%

I'm probably due for a replay (and actually first time for BS2).

[IlyaP]

18 hours ago, Werthead said:

The three BioShock games were supposed to be successors to System Shock, but were neither immersive sims nor RPGs, which felt like it was missing the point. It also meant spending vast resources constructing amazing-looking locales with Rapture and Columbia and then creating ultra-linear 10-14 hour experiences rooted in absolutely murdering everything in sight with the games holding your hand every step of the way. The plasmids gave you a slightly more sophisticated arsenal but that was really about it. The short lengths of the game and the FPS murder focus meant that the thematic elements were really undersold, whilst in an RPG they could be explored much more in-depth.

This is how I felt about pretty much every single Bioshock game, like they had the framework of 0451 games but not the deep mechanics that made them so much fun.

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, IlyaP said:

This is how I felt about pretty much every single Bioshock game, like they had the framework of 0451 games but not the deep mechanics that made them so much fun.

100%. Watching BioShock get mentioned in the same breath as Deus Ex, Thief and System Shock is very strange, as it's not even in the same genre (whether that's immersive sim, CRPG or both).

I liked BioShock for the setting and the interesting ways that plasmids changed up combat (and its mockery of Ayn Rand), but it was much more of a successor to Half-Life and that school of gaming, and a reasonable one at that.

[RumHam]

Yeah there were two reasons I bounced off Bioshock after a few hours. One was I thought you couldn't aim down the sights, which someone later told me you could I guess the controls were just not what I was expecting. The other reason was I for some reason assumed it would be like Fallout 3 and it was just a shooter. 

[grozeng]

On 6/8/2023 at 3:55 PM, Werthead said:

Oooh, Baldur's Gate III has a new antagonist voiced by Jason Isaacs. The new bad guy commands an army of automatons, and it sounds like the story may hinge on if your PC chooses to ally with them or oppose them. Also the game has a locked release date of 31 August.

 

Baldur's Gate III?  I don't really pay attention to games, so had no idea this was coming out.  If my computer plays Dragon Age Inquisition (is probably 3-5 years old), will I be able to play it?

[polishgenius]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

100%. Watching BioShock get mentioned in the same breath as Deus Ex, Thief and System Shock is very strange, as it's not even in the same genre (whether that's immersive sim, CRPG or both).

I liked BioShock for the setting and the interesting ways that plasmids changed up combat (and its mockery of Ayn Rand), but it was much more of a successor to Half-Life and that school of gaming, and a reasonable one at that.

 

To be fair like, while they may have gone for different ideas gameplaywise, BioShock was a deliberate 'thematic sequel' to the System Shock games made by a lot of the same team. Comparisons there were outright invited, even in the name.

Edited June 13, 2023 by polishgenius

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, grozeng said:

Baldur's Gate III?  I don't really pay attention to games, so had no idea this was coming out.  If my computer plays Dragon Age Inquisition (is probably 3-5 years old), will I be able to play it?

Maybe. It's already partially out in Early Access, so you should be able to test-run it right now (you can get a full refund if you stop playing within 2 hours).

[polishgenius]

I'm still Tears of the Kingdom-ing, but this just came out and I'm really looking forward to diving in once I'm done in Hyrule. 

[grozeng]

18 hours ago, Werthead said:

Maybe. It's already partially out in Early Access, so you should be able to test-run it right now (you can get a full refund if you stop playing within 2 hours).

Never did early access before.  If I sign up for that, do I get the game when it comes out?  Has anyone tried it yet?  Baldur's Gate and Dragon Age are the 2 computer games I played in the past.  I knew about the new Dragon Age coming out (whenever that may be) but had no idea about Baldur's Gate.

[Ser Not Appearing]

On 6/12/2023 at 9:10 AM, Toth said:

Speaking of Bethesda jank... Amusingly, after watching a scathing review about Fallout 76... I ended up buying it in a sale for 7 bucks because it still looked oddly fun in terms of exploration and gunplay.

... and I must say... that's pretty much the only thing it has going for it. What a confusing Frankenstein's Monster of a game this is. You start, after starting it three more times because it was stuck in a tiny window and refused to save the setting changes I did until it suddenly did, you get a cutscene about Vault 76 being the "best and brightest" (which never comes up again) and how it's supposed to open 25 years into the apocalypse and kicking everyone out. Except you, apparently. Because you overslept? The vault is a mess of confetti and party stuff. But... it is also mentioned that you were staying behind... for at least a year... for some reason. And in this time you never bothered to tidy up the party stuff? Or weren't pestered by the robots telling you to get out already? It's such a weird state where the game tries to justify a time skip for the Wastelanders questline after the initial main quest of finding your overseer who slipped out of the vault a day prior and discover the world... without you ever doing the latter... It's such a bizarre example of the game barely bothering with a coherent explanation for what I feel sounds like an unnecessarily complicated set-up of openly competing storylines.

Then on top of that I decided to follow the Wastelanders storyline at first because it was the closest near the vault and in typical Bethesda fashion there was yank when I entered a bar where the barkeeper had her hands raised as a raider kept her at gunpoint and after he was dispatched, she remained with her hands raised throughout the entire next dialogue because the animation didn't fire before she talked to me.

Also when I wanted to get into the game again at a later point, it kept freezing on the boot-up. I looked up and you have to erase its folder in the AppData directory and suddenly it worked again. How... can they miss such a stupid bug?!?

But otherwise... well, it does indeed feel very much like a Fallout 4 mod, what with the large amount of carried over assets. And while I occasionally run into other player homes, multiplayer seems mostly unnecessary.

I love Fallout 4.

Tried Fallout 76 for the first time last year and tried my hand at lock picking. Apparently I did that on someone else's stuff and without much of a warning that put a bounty on me and I was hunted down by other players. Uninstalled immediately. I've got no interest in that game mechanics, especially without strong warnings.

I'd love multiplayer in Fallout 4. This wasn't really it. Felt like dating a relative of someone you love. There are similarities but it's not at all the same.

Edited June 14, 2023 by Ser Not Appearing

[Ser Not Appearing]

Starfield looks amazing. Get honestly looks to have a lot more Fallout 4 DNA in the build systems and everything than Skyrim DNA. 

I swore to myself I wouldn't buy it since it'll be free on Game Pass but then they offered that damn watch and I told myself I'd pay around $150 for it. Then I saw the cost was $300 and ... I bought it anyway.

I'm such a sucker.

[Toth]

46 minutes ago, Ser Not Appearing said:

I love Fallout 4.

Tried Fallout 76 for the first time last year and tried my hand at lock picking. Apparently I did that on someone else's stuff and without much of a warning that put a bounty on me and I was hunted down by other players. Uninstalled immediately. I've got no interest in that game mechanics, especially without strong warnings.

I'd love multiplayer in Fallout 4. This wasn't really it. Felt like dating a relative of someone you love. There are similarities but it's not at all the same.

Yeah, the review I saw noted that the predominant way of griefing is to wait for some hapless guy to take stuff near your base and when they get flagged as stealing everyone on the map is allowed to shoot them. Very mindboggling system, but given that you are otherwise immune to PvP, after the heads up I found it easy to avoid.

However interestingly my only contact with another player so far was actually fairly nice. Yesterday a quest popped up tasking me to take over a workshop which can apparently passively generate resources (I think) and so I did, with it warning me that other players can challenge me to take it for themselves, though that didn't happen. Instead I got notified twice of attacks on that workshop, first by ghouls, then by Chinese (?) attack robots. The former got stuck somewhere trying to get into the quite spacious baseball field, so I wandered around trying to find the last of them as the quest stubbornly refused to finish. In the end another player came in, killed the stragglers, saluted to me and plopped away, I guess either logging off or fast traveling. The guy was level 250. I think he saw my blind level 7 ass aimlessly wandering around and took pity.

I suppose I will try to at least finish the main quest and explore the map. I ended up making quite a couple of screenshots. The textures may be Fallout 4 like a little grainy (though it feels a little bit sharper all in all), I found a Fallout game that for a change isn't obsessed with grey and brown and instead goes for green reclamation of nature after the disappearance of humans visually very interesting. Finding a cottage snuck deep in the woods, overlooking those woods from the top of a mountain or traversing a broken highway bridge across a canyon is quite fun. Like Werthead says, the map is really good. It helps that unlike Fallout 4, you don't walk into a point of interest every five meters into every direction. Things are spread out in a way that getting somewhere feels like a realistic task, though it's still not so spread out that it becomes tedious. Still was quite surprised to find that above mentioned bridge that looked so small on the map was a whole exploration area with several levels, all filled with ghouls. Survival aspects notwithstanding. I find it interesting that food spoils, so you are discouraged to forage huge amounts of stuff and forget about the system from there on. However the hunger and especially the thirst meters are plain ridiculous. I had to stop every 10 minutes with what I'm doing to down three whole ass bottles of Nuka Cola to not dehydrate. This feels quite excessive and makes me focus on looking whether there are perk cards to soften up that system.

1 hour ago, Ser Not Appearing said:

Starfield looks amazing. Get honestly looks to have a lot more Fallout 4 DNA in the build systems and everything than Skyrim DNA. 

I swore to myself I wouldn't buy it since it'll be free on Game Pass but then they offered that damn watch and I told myself I'd pay around $150 for it. Then I saw the cost was $300 and ... I bought it anyway.

I'm such a sucker.

Yeah, you are! Seriously, it's beyond me why in this day and age anyone would preorder a game. Yes, people don't necessarily have to be me and wait for games to come down to single-digit "Grabbeltisch" prices before considering buying them, but preorders or buying on release, spending a ton of money on a product that is quite probably still a barely playable bug riddled beta? It just makes no sense to me. And particularly Bethesda, whose track record is REALLY bad, not just in terms of bugs, but also in terms of trying to stiff people on their preorder bonus. Fallout 76 was lambasted for downright cheating people with very misguiding marketing (backpack, Nuka Cola bottle) with people ending up with goodies of significantly poorer quality than pictured.

[Werthead]

I picked up an Xbox Starfield controller from GAME (the first time I'd bought anything at all from a physical game story in many, many years) and they offered to reserve me a copy of the Collector's Edition for £10, so I said sure. Gives me a couple of months to decide if I want to splurge the full amount on it.

I have very, very rarely bought Collector's Editions for games. I did for Homeworld Remastered, but that was for a rerelease of two of my favourite video games of all time, so I know the score there. The last collector's edition I got before that I think was the one for the original StarCraft in 1998 (I still have the keyring and the T-shirt only recently finally faded into unusability, which is pretty good for 25 years!).

Oh, I did get the one for Oblivion, but that was because I'd preordered the standard edition and they'd sold out, so they gave me the collectors' edition as an apology.