Edit: Will delete when I am able to.
Gamers what games are you playing? :)
Roo_Stercogburn
#457
WoW: Shadowlands
Terrible. Easily the worst expansion I’ve played in all the years the MMO has been running and this from someone who hates Pandaland. Less than 2 weeks after launch I log in, look at the tedium Blizz are charging for as a premium service and just log out.
Every expansion Bliz do some kind of nerf to players and you have to work for stuff again. Usually its some relatively minor stuff and its balanced by some engaging new things. This time round they’ve taken it too far and removed a lot of fun and quality-of-life features from the game just to give the illusion of doing something new but what they’ve given is aimless gear-grinding almost from the get-go. Its like they let the Diablo clowns design it. The logic of their new setting is tenuous, the gameplay tedious and the feeling you’re actualy achieving something other than gear is gone. There’s no hook and almost from the start its a crazy bad grind. Most of the quests feel like the shitty dailies you’re gonna be grinding at cap level without much effort been made into making the stories engaging.
Massive amount of badly written exposition in the first few areas that’s dull and you have to wade through it to move on. I like story stuff but this is some proper dull uninspired writing. Its pretty clear there was a story-goal and the words in between are just to get you there.
Also the worst by far launch in the history of WoW for me. I play on one of the servers that were absolutely fucked at launch and unplayable for quite some days. Then when they stablised it the queues were up to 2.5 hours long to get in. That’s a shit service in anyone’s book. The irony is that the stuff I was doing elsewhere while queing turned out to be more interesting than what I did after I got in to game.
Oh nearly forgot. Everything is gated. Every. Fucking. Thing. There’s always been some, but now its particularly severe if you’re someone who gets into a game for a while and likes to rince the shit out of it until you feel its time to move on.
Gate and grind boys, gate and grind.
Auto-meh-geddon
#459
I’m on the final quarter of Demon’s Soul, I forgot how frustrating is the Valley Of Defilement…
nose
#462
It certainly is! - but nothing game breaking.
I mean, some dodgy animations, weird open world normal shit.
It’s about as buggy as FoNV.
I’d implore anyone who wants to play it, to play it now. It’s in a very much a playable state.
White_Noise
#464
I’m waiting until I can get an RTX 3080 to play it on my PC. Not that I would be completely unable to run it, but last time I upgraded was to be able to play the Witcher 3 like four years ago, and that was worth the experience, so I want to give Cyberpunk the same treatment.
I have all the other parts sitting in my bedroom (well, new CPU arrives Tuesday). So it really is just the GPU shortage holding me up right now. I mean, I COULD pay scalper prices if I wanted to, but I don’t want it that badly. I’d rather keep that money for games and importing city pop CDs from Japan.
White_Noise
#468
Ironically, buying Fo3 or FoNV on the platform that CDPR owns, GOG, just works. And mods just make them better. Even more ironically? My preferred platform to play Fallout 3 on remains the PS3, even though it’s a hot glitchy mess, it’s the mess that helped me fall in love with the Bethesda way.
If you have a PC for making music, and it’s from the past 5 - 8 years, I don’t think you’d have too much trouble getting the older fallouts to run. Your only bottleneck might be if you don’t have a graphics processor of some sort and you are stuck with integrated graphics. But even then, within the past 3-4 years I’d say you’re probably good for games that old. I could be wrong, but I think if you did the research you might be pleasantly surprised at the gaming power that just lurks inside pretty much every computer these days.
For example, check out this guy’s youtube channel, he does nothing but show how to run games below minimum settings on older PCs because he’s from Spain and apparently new computers are super duper expensive over there. And most of the time he makes it work, one way or another.
Roo_Stercogburn
#470
Snagged Battlestar Galactica Deadlock in Steam sale. For a tenner its prolly worth it, had my eye on it for a long time.
Been pointed at this by a friend and it looks interesting: https://intheblack.gg/
itsthebadluck
#471
Doom Eternal. A lot of the game comes off really silly to me, but it’s as fun as it is ridiculous.
White_Noise
#474
Been a while since I checked up here. Been working through some good stuff lately. I got Ghost of Tsushima back in December and played it all the way through twice. Really, really well done game - hands down game of the year for me.
It all comes down to how this game handles ludonarrative dissonance. That’s a big college word that describes when what you make your game character do in a game doesn’t match what the story says they should be doing. This can be made worse if a developer doesn’t think about what they’re doing when they write the story and design the game. My classic example is the Uncharted series. The protagonist, Nathan Drake, is a likeable smartass who always seems to be in over his head, but is good natured at heart. Never in a cutscene do you see him kill anyone in cold blood. BUT, once the cutscene stops and you are in control, you can, among other things, stealth-kill, blow up, punch-off-cliffs, and do other heinous things to the enemies in the game. And further, the level design sometimes encourages these tactics as the optimal solution. But it doesn’t match Nathan Drake’s character. And I found myself thinking about that as I played. It wasn’t game ruining, I still had a fun romp around the world, but it did gnaw at the back of my mind.
Ghost of Tsushima pulled a fantastic switcheroo on me where I thought it was going to have this problem, but it didn’t. And not only that, it used my expectation that the game was going to have this problem to better tell it’s story. Spoiler alert because I want to tell you how.
Summary
In Ghost, you play as a samurai who’s island is invaded by Mongolians. Violently. A traditional samurai battle is fought and lost to open the game. Your uncle, lord of the island, is taken prisoner. You are rescued by a thief, and with her help develop new tactics to turn the tide of this war, rescue your uncle, and take back the island. One problem though, these new tactics revolve around stealth, and this goes against your samurai code of honor. The first time you do a stealth kill, the game plays an entire cutscene where your uncle lectures a young you on how important it is for a samurai to look his opponent in the eye and kill them with complete control over your emotions and the situation. You get another reminder about this kind of thing the first time you do a double kill from above…
And that had me thinking that what, I was just going to proceed to ignore my samurai code without consequences the entire game and get nothing more than an occasional slap on the wrist from memories of my uncle about it? Nope. By the middle of the game, your uncle is rescued and you are taking back the mid-point of the island. An attack goes wrong and your uncle regroups his forces to amass for a samurai-style assault. You have another idea, and sneak into the enemy camp and poison them all. This outrages your uncle, who banishes you, disbands, your clan, and strips you of your samurai rank. Holy crappoli, your breaking of the code, which seems like a logical choice given the game’s design AND given the way the story has played out thus far, has had realistic consequences. The game is fantastic about this, because even if you want to play as the upstanding samurai (which is a valid playstyle 95% of the time), there are still those times where you HAVE to break the code.
So, what I thought was going to be ludonarrative dissonance was just part of the story, and it made all these things stick out even more to me.
I just got Last of Us Part 2 this week. I got pretty frustrated with it tonight, but not before looking up and realizing I’d been playing for four hours straight. So I guess I just needed a break and a good night’s rest. Anyways, playing it is kind of a weird experience because I had the story spoiled for me (it leaked pre-release). So I know what’s coming in broad strokes, and I thought I wasn’t going to like it but I would at least enjoy the gameplay. Nope, other way around, I hate 99% of the combat, but the story is super duper well executed. If you can get your mom to buy you a copy even though it’s rated M, I recommend it.
morphic
#475
Did you try Vampyr? It has its flaws but deciding what you do to the humans, knowing that you were a doctor when you were alive, is neat. I played through once, did a “no kill” run. Really tough at times but well worth it.
White_Noise
#476
Hadn’t heard of it until now. I took a look and that is an interesting setting and idea. I’ll be adding that to my steam wishlist for sure. Next gaming purchase isn’t going to be as interesting unfortunately, I need to pick up an external SSD for my Playstation. A friend told me that it’s faster than the internal drive for loads and such, and when I do eventually upgrade to PS5 I can just use the drive to play all my PS4 games on that without taking up valuable super speedy PS5 SSD.
And then I’m thinking of doing Retro-pie or MiSTER to play old games. I don’t have any Nintendo consoles pre-N64, so I’ve never had a chance to play any of the old Super Mario Bros, Metroid, etc. Need to do some more research and see what they can do, what I might want to play, etc.
And then I still have a backlog of some older stuff I picked up last fall to work through. Namely, I have the Bioshock Infinite: Return to Rapture DLC (which I’m about half done on) and I have Dishonored 2. Played Dishonored 1 and enjoyed it. But then I started 2 and IDK if the game plays different or if I just needed some time after the first one, but I wasn’t having any fun so I quit pretty early on. Want to try and give that one another chance.
RFJ
#477
@White_Noise not much to say specifically in response to your Ghosts post but I really enjoyed reading it through man. Never heard of that term, whatever it was. Fascinating though. I bounced off of Ghosts pretty early. I’m just not one for open world design like that actually. I much prefer a more closed open world, with level / area type structure, than a big map.
I played Dishonored two for all of two hours. Played the same two hours twice actually. Played it once, quit, tried again months later, quit again. Not sure what it was about it but I just wasn’t having fun either. The internet sure does love it though.
Auto-meh-geddon
#478
I got to the point where I steer clear of open world games. I just get bored super quick.
I’m playing lots of stuff on the Switch, right now Crypt of the necrodancer, with the bard so it plays like a proper dungeon crawler without the annoying rhythm gameplay
morphic
#479
mmm I didn’t know about the Return to Rapture DLC. Will have to check this. As much as I absolutely loved Bioshock 1 & 2 and I wanted to love Infinite, it left me feeling a bit “meh”. Too easy, too short. And maybe the sky setting removed the claustrophobic/atmospheric aspect. The ending was fantastic though.
I played Dishonored 1 and liked it a lot. At first it felt like a weak version of Bioshock but then it found its rhythm and charm. I’ve had the second one for a couple years, still in shrink because unfortunately, leisure time gets scarce as you get older.
Talking about backlog I’ve finally plugged back in the old PS3 at my new place and I’m playing Heavy Rain. I had started it twice but problems with the Fat PS3 killing my saves twice had somewhat killed my will to restart it again and the PS4 came along…
Back to Bioshock-type shooters, I bought Prey for, like 15 bucks, and I plan on starting that one soon. It looks really fun.
I’ve also finished Control, which I highly recommend. It’s superb; and, while crazy hard at times, you can easily turn on cheat codes that prevent you from doing the same boss fight 25 times, which is huge IMHO, especially since I’ve always hated boss fights - nothing fun about being repeatedly killed by something 10 times bigger and more powerful then you while you run like a headless chicken shooting everywhere, hoping for it to end on a positive note… literally don’t have time for that kind of self-inflicted aggravation. There are 2 DLCs that I need to go through.