Slick wrote on Oct 13, 2020, 21:50:
Who is paying to play a SP RPG in an unfinished state? You only get one crack at it.

I think for a lot of people who do EA (me not being one of them, for the record), part of the fun comes from being "part of" the development process. I.e. discussing things on the forums at a point in time when the devs are very likely to at least read some of it, without necessarily answering... Or just being involved with the community in general. Probably not too dissimilar from being part of a modding community as a non-modder, where most of the releases are janky-ass unplayable messes But it's fun to check out updates, follow project progress etc and discuss with other people on the forums..

Looks exactly like Odyssey and Origins in all the key ways. Could almost be a Viking reskin. Might pick up on a 75% type sale eventually but I'm completely burnt out on Ubigames and have been for years now. For the people who still enjoy the formula though, it looks like it should be great.

eRe4s3r wrote on Jun 8, 2020, 15:12:
I am not proud of it, but I also did them all.. like really all, I did my once-100% run .. exactly once (and discovered there are quests you can silently fail.. not amused). But I had a mod to make carrying all the stuff possible without going back anywhere, don't think I would have done it otherwise. So I can see why the devs would want to change that

Honestly, being able to install a mod and delete carrying caps has to be THE best part playing on PC.

For anyone in the market for a twin stick shooter, I can't recommend Nex Machina enough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29JfyVQroTY
Underrated&forgotten gem with a kickass chip tune soundtrack, awesome graphics and gameplay if you like twin stick/bullet hell type games. Eminently playable across all skill ranges too. Main negative is it's pretty short if you don't have any interest in scoring/achievement and just want to run through the campaign once or twice.

Bought the EA version immediately upon finishing Subnautica, but I'm waiting to play until it's done

Slick wrote on Apr 30, 2020, 01:56:
Anyone else just absolutely fed up with theses so-called "open world" games?

It's like the first time anyone discovers something that works, everyone has to overuse it till they run it into the ground. Happens to basically everything, but jesus I'm so sick and tired of having to find the game within the game.

Me too. You just know you're in for 60 plus hours of big beautifully crafted (and I'm sure very expensive) worlds, but almost universally shallow gameplay mechanics, plot and story line stretched way too thin, and the overwhelmning feeling of "I've played this game before".

Looks pretty good. Considering testing it out since XCOM Chimera has been pissing me off with a certain bug that keeps eating my squad members' items between missions. While you CAN fix it with console commands (or reloading) it's getting oh so tedious at this point...

Delay huh? First time for everything.

Amazing soundtrack. Nothing like music to evoke nostalgia

Think I'll give it another listen on Spotify rather than play the game again though. Really enjoyed it back in the day but not a fan of the AC series anymore. I've pretty much overdosed on the type of open-world game that it is in general.

Recommend watching the latest Noclip podcast - Designing DOOM Eternal with Hugo Martin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBHIalb01ew

Along with the positive previews it's looking like a day 1 purchase.

Bill Borre wrote on Dec 10, 2019, 18:47:
Predators are mammals?

Ground breakingly generic!

Straight for the chainmail bikini trope.

Glad it's doing well for them and I hope they get to make another where they get to apply what they've learned.

Enjoying it so far, close to the end but haven't quite finished it yet.. Weak 8/10 for me at the moment. I enjoy both Metroidvania and the From games but I have to say CJ is pretty spot on. The story and characters are weak. The game starts strong but starts dropping off the closer you get to the end. Backtracking for treasure and upgrades is one of the main things in these games but:

1. 90% of chests just have cosmetics. These should have just been story unlocks or something.
2. The game is screaming for fast travel. Going back for that chest you missed is too much of a chore when you not only have to walk all the way out there, you also have to walk back to your ship when you're done. And not every passage you see on the map is traversable in both directions because.. leveldesign...

Aside from that, there's some jank but I haven't had a crash in 20+ hours. Combat feels a bit wonky and not crisp at all. I hear the parry window is tied to frame rate which would explain some of my frustrations in tougher encounters. Star Wars atmosphere on point and some of the environments are amazing (kinda wish it was a CRPG with these production values... oh well).

I have such a terrible login experience every time I head over there to claim my freebies. It may be better in the actual client, I don't know, but it doesn't instill a lot of confidence when it comes to the possibility of making actual purchases on their entire platform. I mean, I don't use this thing more than once per month but I pretty much always have some sort of issue logging in when I do.

Right now, I'm just getting a spinner "Verifying". So yeah.. Guess I'll try later.

Usually, it's their terrible 2FA causing the hold up. They've lazily NOT opted to support any of the default authenticators out there and instead send you a code by email. An email that I have yet to see arrive in timely fashion. Request your login code today, sign in tomorrow!

Honestly, most going on about how D2 offered more choice than D3 either don't remember D2 very well, or never played past normal difficulty. Sure, your skill selections were permanent but there were only 1-2 builds per class that actually worked on Hell difficulty anyway, and every single end-game player was using the same ones. The common denominator for pretty much all of them was saving your skill points until you could pump every point into the top level skill of choice. Failing to do so and spreading your stuff around, testing different shit etc. would have you hit the damage wall hard, and be completely unable to kill a thing past nightmare/hell. I'm willing to bet 95% of everyone who plays Diablo or PoE "non-casually" is just copying someone else's build anyway.

As for choices, there's just no way of knowing how well something works without testing in these games. The information you get in-game is always incomplete because you can't know how the damage calculation actually works. Where's the fun in selecting a skill that turns out to be pure garbage and then being stuck with it, or rerolling?

Challenge-wise, you can pretty much make any of these games as "hard" as you want with the difficulty selectors. The problem is nobody has found a way to make ARPGs particularly challenging while remaining fun to play, so it's mostly about choosing a setting that gives you the best balance of kill speed and drop rate bonuses in the end.... Difficulty = How damage spongy do you want your enemies to be, vs. how often you want to get one-shot? For hardcore players (in the one-life-per-char sense) that balance obviously tips more towards safety but it's the same trade-off none the less. Diablo 3 *tried* to change this with its infernal difficulty, and failed miserably. They removed massive life leech and replaced on-demand full heals (potions) with health orbs to combat the incoming one-shot damage issue. It still wasn't fun, the bullet sponge monsters and one-shot meta was still very much there, and the only classes really able to progress were the ranged ones, and only by kiting all day and all night. Turns out that running, taking a shot, running, taking a shot, running, taking a shot ... isn't good gameplay.

I enjoyed the first game with expansions. The second game not so much. The first had the advantage of being the first serious new entry of its kind in a very, very long time, I guess.

Can't really put my finger on any specific thing that made me not like the sequel. With either game, I never really cared much about the story and never found the drive to explore or discover stuff about the world. Page upon page of text and I didn't really give a crap about any of it. Care about party members? Not really. Give a damn about factions? Nope. The ship? Bleh.

Replayed PS:T a few months back, and what a difference. Story, setting and writing that just instantly grabs you, from the second you wake up in the mortuary. Almost every location manages to be memorable. I can hardly remember a single location from PoE2. Just an endless assortment of islands.

Also never been a fan of RtwP. Hated it in Baldur's Gate too. Turn based is so, so much better when done properly.

Wasn't the main [stated, at least] reason they pulled out back in the day the inability to sell DLC directly, rather than going via Steam and give Valve a cut? Did something change in that regard lately?

Beamer wrote on Sep 16, 2019, 10:40:
Peteham made it sound terrible. You made it sound hysterical.

I'm right, of course

Seriously though, I guess YMMV, as always.

Personally, I don't enjoy it at all and would much rather shoot, chainsaw and stab things than bob around and be an ammo donkey and buffbot for my friends. Other than that, you get to zap things for... some... effect.. But it's a close proximity auto-aim/just-hold-LMB thing that requires zero aim or skill and isn't even remotely fun to use. At no point do you feel like you're contributing as much to the combat action as the real players. Scripted set pieces where the droid has to push a button to lower a bridge etc. doesn't really count. And it has that added bit of suck because you know your friends are having a lot more fun than you are.

On the ability tree side, you can equip two abilities at once, allowing you to do stuff like stimming your friends, pulse to highlight enemies and so on. These skills are on a cooldown of approx 60 seconds.

There may be more interesting unlocks later on, but for at least the first two chapters, which is what I've seen of the game so far, it's seriously bland.

Speaking of skill tree unlocks, to actually get them you need to be actively looking for components (basically collectibles). Not sure if the total component pickups exceeds what you need to max the skill tree before the end, but based on the initial supply I'm guessing you have to actually find them all - something nobody's going to do on a first (and for most; only) playthrough.

Kinda hoping the bot blows up and you get to play three gears for the remaining chapters or something but I'm fairly certain the bot is there to stay for the reasons stated when Gears 4 didn't have more than two player co-op (more actual players requiring too many cover spots and so on).

This comment was edited on Sep 16, 2019, 12:36.

Word of warning to potential Gears 5 co-op players: It says 3 player campaign co-op on the box, but the last guy actually has to play the bot, as we found out... The bot is essentially a glorified spectator, so it's more like 2.5 player co-op. People following the series probably knew this already but to us it was a bit disappointing.

Not a huge deal for the price of entry if using the gamepass, and you can take turns on robot-duty between chapters or whatever, but, yeah, if you're three people someone's going to have less fun than the others.

Slick wrote on Sep 6, 2019, 14:58:
Abzu is supposed to be good, I got it for my Hexbox One and haven't gotten around to playing it yet. I miss really engrossing well crafted AAA single-player games. Cyberpunk can't get here soon enough, cause I just keep going back to playing multiplayer shooters...

If memory serves, it's only a couple of hours long. It's basically underwater Journey, so not everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoyed it a lot. Perfect game for a rainy Sunday morning.

I just didn't enjoy either Odyssey or Origins that much. The worlds they've built are amazing, , especially Origins. Something about Egypt and pyramids that greek huts or temples can't match. But the gameplay just becomes complete drudgery after 4-5 hours. At this point you'll have seen every quest variety the games have to offer but you're not even 10% through yet. If I see another fort-of-kill-two-captains-loot-two-chests-burn-2-supplies-find-the-nations-chest in this life time, I may just implode.

Storywise, I hardly remember a thing. There's just too much game spread far too thin. Odyssey is actually worse than Origins in this regard. I'd guess twice or more the size? With the same cut & pasted content essentially. Can't barely remember a single NPC or story beat in Odyssey. A couple in Origins.

Forts.

Forts.

Bandit camp.

Leader house.

Forts.

(For the uninitiated: they're all different size forts)

Bounty hunters, aka that terrible nemesis imitation (to be fair, I didn't enjoy it in SoM either): Thankfully they just let you pay off the whole thing for a pittance from the map screen anywhere. It's ridiculous how every bounty hunter in Greece automatically knows where you are and you will literally finish slitting the throat of the first guy when the horns sound again, announcing the approach of the next guy. And the next. And so on. I once lost an entire fort clear worth of progress because the buggers just kept on coming and you can't really take that many hits on hard.

On that note: Incoming poison is ludicrous (on hard at least). A single hit from Sir Bulletsponge will kill you unless you have the heal/status clear skill ready.

Second note: You can't save in forts. Some of them are huge. A workaround is to exit the "hostile" area which allows you to save and not have to re-clear/assassinate every last henchman all over again if you or the controls mess up and you get spotted.

Oh yeah. It wouldn't be Assassin's Creed if the controls didn't regularly betray you. The addition of a descend button has certainly helped but whenever the game expects speed or accuracy, you may just find yourself glued to the wall you were trying to get behind while arrows slam into your back..

Odyssey also has that completely Oblivion-esque leveling system where getting a level ironically means you lose power, once you no longer have more core combat skills to gain at least (the "end-game" stat modifier points don't amount to much). You level up, your enemies immediately scale to your level (unless you disable scaling for a truly snooze-worthy gameplay experience), but your gear stays the same. Meaning you have to upgrade all your stuff every 5 levels or so to keep up. Again, it's just a tedious task to perform. And it actually becomes quite expensive. Unlike most RPGs where you're swimming in cash by the end, you will not max your ship and character in Odyssey short of spending 200+ hours. Not that you need it, but, you know..

Will give them credit for the DLCs though. Feels like a proper expansion and is actually more focused than the main game (though fear not, there's still forts!).


Uhm. So yeah. Dear diary, nobody's ever going to read that but I feel so much better now