Videogames: All Valves on Deck

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

Just now, House Balstroko said:

I’m glad the GTA VI trailer finally arrived, though I found it to be slightly disappointing in terms of content given the fact that it’s been a decade since the last main entry came out. Otherwise, I think it looks very promising. 
 

 

Apparently rumour has it the leaks were caused by an internal rockstar employees kid taking pics of his dads workstation lol and posting it on social media…

[IlyaP]

18 minutes ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Yeah I don’t know why people prefer doing mini games like fishing and sim stuff than playing the actual narrative…I mean mini games are a nice icing on the cake but it’s not the cake for me.

Assassin's Creed has conditioned people?

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

26 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Assassin's Creed has conditioned people?

I’ve only played AC2 and brotherhood and both of those games had a pretty strong narrative….Yeah there were some treasure quests but it wasn’t the focus.i think sandboxes like GTA, far cry, saints row,just cause etc are more responsible. But then again,  I haven’t played any newer AC games so I can’t say. 

[Rhom]

ITT people who never played JRPGs

[Darryk]

Still looking forward to Dragon Age: Dreadwolf even though I'm concerned by the amount of people who have left Bioware.

[Caligula_K3]

Mini-games, sidequests, emergent gameplay, etc... Can make a world feel lived in. This is ultimately why I love the two new Zelda games so much. The main quests are fun and very well designed, but the fun in a really good open world/sandbox game is creating your own fun. The last GTA game I seriously played was GTA San Andreas, but I can say that I definitely spent 90% of my time in that game just messing around.

Hell, even if the main story sucks mini-games and side quests can make a game worth playing. I'm never going to finish Yakuza 0 because I can't get into the plot and the style of storytelling, but I had a great time for 15 hours disco-dancing, karaokeing, and teaching fake-punks how to be badass by telling them to talk about adopting puppies.

GTA games just aren't for me; as I've gotten older, the world has gotten darker, and as the graphics have become more realistic, I'm more and more uncomfortable playing games that are essentially mass murder simulators. Rockstar are incredible at designing games, though, and I'm sure this will be a great one.

(And count me in among those impressed by the graphics. But then again, I've been mainly playing Switch games for the past five years. On the other hand, as graphics get more photo-realistic, the uncanny valley effect does increase for me. I do also, again, have trouble with photo-realistic graphics in a game like GTA).

As for Dreadwolf... I'm disappointed that we're only going to be hearing about it in the summer! I can't believe it's going to be more than a ten year gap between Inquisition and this. Fingers crossed EA is aiming for a short marketing cycle and that it'll be out by next Fall.

 

[Toth]

I'm disappointed the GTA VI trailer showed no drone crashing at a construction site.

[Darryk]

Anyone got tips for combat in Pillars of Eternity 2? I'm struggling a lot more than I did in the first game.

[Mexal]

I started to play Diablo IV again and the changes they made for season 2 have really helped the game. Still hate the managing of inventories but the introduction of the Blood Harvest, end game bosses, monster density and significantly faster leveling has made it a blast. Will I stick with it? Who knows, but been a fun week of playing.

[Ran]

Stellaris Nexus, Paradox's distillation of the grand strategy 4X game into a more digestible form where campaigns run maybe an hour long, is available for a free playtest for a few days before releasing to early access on the 12th.

Been a long time since I last played a 4X (Master of Orion 2?!), but am giving it a shot.

ETA: Pretty sure GTA VI won't get a PC release for at least a year and maybe two after the console release. PC is mentioned nowhere in the press material, so it's console-only to begin with. Also, have heard that the PC ports of Rockstar's games have not been the best.

 

Edited December 5, 2023 by Ran

[IlyaP]

4 hours ago, Darryk said:

Anyone got tips for combat in Pillars of Eternity 2? I'm struggling a lot more than I did in the first game.

What in particular is proving difficult? 

[Poobah]

Spent all day working on my new PC build. The Torrent Compact is a real bitch to cable manage and I had to resort to buying some individually sleeved cables to help.

Given that they were married to the Torrent's signature 180mm fans when it came to "compactifying" it seems like the only place Fractal could reduce width was from behind the motherboard, which was an absolutely pants-on-head insane move in my opinion - nobody will notice the visible width reduction once it's built, it's only a couple of centimetres but holy shit do those couple of centimetres matter when it comes to getting all the cables nicely tidied away and the side panel to stay on flush. I'm sure I'm going to be happy with it and it's excellent thermal performance when all is said and done but I'd have been a lot happier today if it were even a centimetre wider in the back. This was also my first time using any kinda RGB (it was the same price as the non-RGB one so I thought why not get extra features and if I don't like em I can turn them off right?) and getting all the fiddly little ARGB bits daisy chained and then plugged in right while not creating a horrible cabling mess was not fun. Tomorrow I'll be setting it up and hoping everything works, wish me luck.

[Darryk]

12 hours ago, IlyaP said:

What in particular is proving difficult? 

Cant really work out which spells are good a lot of the time. Like I try fireball but it seems to hardly do any damage.

Also I seem to have issues penetrating enemies with my weapons

[IlyaP]

27 minutes ago, Darryk said:

Cant really work out which spells are good a lot of the time. Like I try fireball but it seems to hardly do any damage.

Also I seem to have issues penetrating enemies with my weapons

The priest spells in PoE1/2 are insanely powerful - especially pillar of holy fire, which is a terrific area of effect spell. With wizards, fan of flames, ray of fire, fireball, chain lightning, and Concelhaut's crushing doom are all useful spells to be able to cast. 

It's useful to have a wizard doing AoE spells, priests doing a combination of AoE spells like pillar of holy fire and searing seal, whilst also casting endurance restoration spells, while your ranger uses arrows and or guns to do long-distance damage. Meanwhile, having a cipher to reduce the resistance of foes is a plus as well, by casting things like soul ignition, pain link, or puppet master. 

Make sure also that you're using the best quality swords, so you want to equip characters with exceptional quality swords, with good chance to hit percentages. For example, my main, Locke, is currently using Tarn's Respite as his sabre of choice, which is proving quite successful: https://pillarsofeternity.fandom.com/wiki/Tarn's_Respite

Remember also that rings can add bonuses to actions, and increase the chances of successful attacks.

[Werthead]

On 12/5/2023 at 1:30 AM, IlyaP said:

And now with non-urban environments, which make it automatically more appealing, as it's nice to for once, have a break from miles of monotone grey and brown rectangles and depressing urban strip malls.

San Andreas and GTAV both had enormous non-urban environments, dwarfing the urban areas in both games considerably.

On 12/5/2023 at 2:17 AM, Kalbear said:

I...wouldn't hold your breath. It is still going to be at its core a sandbox game, with no real RPG elements (like character upgrades or skills or things like that). That is the GTA brand. There's a story that goes through it and GTA 5 is pretty good for it, but it still is mostly about interesting and fun missions while doing whatever the hell you feel like in a crazy big world, all the while making real inappropriate teenage jokes. RDR is far more 'serious' of a story. 

San Andreas had RPG-like skills and stats, but GTAIV immediately rolled back on them. V IIRC did bring back some kind of those elements but it was very lightweight.

GTAVI might well go back to the RPG-like direction, but I would not put money on it.

On 12/5/2023 at 7:49 PM, Ran said:

ETA: Pretty sure GTA VI won't get a PC release for at least a year and maybe two after the console release. PC is mentioned nowhere in the press material, so it's console-only to begin with. Also, have heard that the PC ports of Rockstar's games have not been the best.

GTAV's port was excellent, RDR2 was pretty good after very brief initial problems. GTAIV and III both messes but that was a long, long time ago. Vice City and San Andreas were also both excellent ports.

[Argonath Diver]

On 12/5/2023 at 1:39 PM, Mexal said:

I started to play Diablo IV again and the changes they made for season 2 have really helped the game. Still hate the managing of inventories but the introduction of the Blood Harvest, end game bosses, monster density and significantly faster leveling has made it a blast. Will I stick with it? Who knows, but been a fun week of playing.

Heh the barb I rolled for S2 is named OneWeekOfFun. He's made it longer than that, though I didn't hit 100. I got pulled through a bunch of Duriel runs from a friendly Twitch community, got some great gear, and now hilariously one-shot Varshan etc - though not Lilith. Game definitely is in a far better place than release, although I still think the itemization system needs a colossal rework. Gameplay is fun, but they need more carrots on sticks for long-term grinders like me. Hopefully they keep piling on endgame systems - the new rift dungeon is a good start I guess but not my personal cup of tea. 

Glad I re-installed while I wait for new POE season (yummm).

[Mexal]

27 minutes ago, Argonath Diver said:

Heh the barb I rolled for S2 is named OneWeekOfFun. He's made it longer than that, though I didn't hit 100. I got pulled through a bunch of Duriel runs from a friendly Twitch community, got some great gear, and now hilariously one-shot Varshan etc - though not Lilith. Game definitely is in a far better place than release, although I still think the itemization system needs a colossal rework. Gameplay is fun, but they need more carrots on sticks for long-term grinders like me. Hopefully they keep piling on endgame systems - the new rift dungeon is a good start I guess but not my personal cup of tea. 

Glad I re-installed while I wait for new POE season (yummm).

I still haven’t done a Duriel run. My rogue is at 85. I’m really enjoying this character. Itemization is a mess, I agree, but the game is definitely more interesting than it was for season 1. The changes they made were in right direction.

[IlyaP]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

San Andreas and GTAV both had enormous non-urban environments, dwarfing the urban areas in both games considerably.

I suppose, particularly in V, but the world map was so uninteresting, because most of it was inaccessible and just there for the sake of (from what I can tell) being there to make the world feel big. I've bounced off pretty much every single GTA game I've tried, so I'm not reaaaallly expecting 6 to be any different. 

[Werthead]

1 minute ago, IlyaP said:

I suppose, particularly in V, but the world map was so uninteresting, because most of it was inaccessible and just there for the sake of (from what I can tell) being there to make the world feel big. I've bounced off pretty much every single GTA game I've tried, so I'm not reaaaallly expecting 6 to be any different. 

The world map in V is fully accessible from the start (for the very first time in the series). V fully encourages off-road travel more than most games in the series; San Andreas was relaxed about you driving a family saloon through the woods or halfway up a mountain, but V stops you doing that and forces you to hike, use mountain bikes or aircraft to get to less-connected areas of the map. But almost all of it is accessible, and there is some stuff to do there (even random encounters, like bumping into hikers who, if you follow them around, will pitch camps in different places). V's map is also big but not stupendous, and quite a few other open-world games have far bigger maps.

I've liked the GTA games for trying different things in each instalment, and I particularly like it when they take bigger swings, like they did in San Andreas and GTA IV. I am hoping that VI shows some of that same inventiveness again; V was solid but a bit of a reaction against the more serious tone (your COUSIN ROMAN!!! excepted) and deeper characterisation of IV, so it was more like a cartoon in places and fell back on the series tropes rather too easily, even if some of its ideas were interesting (having three lead characters, for example).

[Arakasi]

8 hours ago, Mexal said:

I still haven’t done a Duriel run. My rogue is at 85. I’m really enjoying this character. Itemization is a mess, I agree, but the game is definitely more interesting than it was for season 1. The changes they made were in right direction.

My son and I got to 100 and have farmed most of the content. They apparently have a huge itemization overhaul that will come with season four. It is a lot of fun to play but they need more things to do.

They have also yet to find the balance between difficulty and reward. The bosses like Duriel are great rewards but a joke to beat. The new Abbotair is brutally difficult but has little rewards and is an impossible grind. They need to find better balance.