Leaderboard

Re: color/lighting - of course it's all very subjective. And I don't mean just Avowed. Dragon Age Veilguard, Outer Worlds, even some aspects of Baldur's Gate 3, a lot of farm/other sims. something just bothers my eyes. It's not as bad in wide view isometric, and ofc I'm sure all of them have places it's more mellow. It's not only palette but lighting on top they do for "bold and colorful" emphasis or something - everything is so god rays bright/glare-y, or glossy/shiny. and in day scenes I get literal eyestrain if I stare at it too long. I mean Torchlight didn't bother me back when. I guess the more "realistic/hi-def" they try to make chrs and environments, the less I like such (imo) OTP colors. But I'll give any game extra credits if you can make chrs. like these. When I saw WAB's video, I burst out laughing when he showed his chr. Fantastic.

I promised a more comprehensive review once I completed my playthrough of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, and since I recently finished the game for the first time, siding with the Ward, here we go. Of note, it took me 191hours and when the credits rolled the game was on patch 1.1.4 (1.2 came out very recently) To get this out of the way early: I still would not recommend this game to anyone who has not already played the previous entries, and even to those who have I'd wait for some major patches. At the rate patches are coming this game may be in somewhat of a finished state by the end of the year (well, I started writing this before 1.2 dropped, so some of these may end up finally being fixed...). The first, and biggest issue is that the game is still a buggy mess. Early parts are mostly fine, but once past SIRCAA things started falling apart rapidly. For one there were regular CTDs, for another there's issues with NPC literally blocking your ability to enter areas. I quite literally had to rely on a mod enabling the Unreal Engine console so I could noclip into the safe area in Pripyat because NPCs body-blocked me out for 90% of my time spent in Pripyat (from my arrival until the very final missions start). Being a packrat I also managed to break my Stash: items started overlapping, sections appeared empty but weren't, etc. Looks like some sort of overflow issue. Thankfully it didn't actually seem to corrupt the contents, but it made using the thing a right pain. Then there's the gameplay issues. For starters, equipment maintenance and upgrading is prohibitively expensive. This expense has a rather negative impact on gameplay; for one you end up dragging everything you can back to a vendor, which gets old rather fast, for another getting into a fight is less of a "Oh no, I may die!" type of deal and more of a "Oh no, this may bankrupt me." One of the results is that I stuck to "known good" items rather than experimenting, and that I stuck to lower tier items rather than upgrading to the best gear available to me. Throughout the entire game I used four sets of armour, including the starting one, and the majority of the time I used the standard Ward armour. Only once I hit the "point of no return" I started using an Exoskeleton as upgrading/repairing them is just so ridiculously expensive. Exacerbating this is the whole enemy spawning situation. Unlike in earlier games most enemies don't exist in the world and wander around (there's some now, since the first major patch 1.1), the vast majority gets spawned onto you by the game if it thinks you haven't been fighting enough recently. Additionally there are spawn triggers in the world that will (re)spawn enemies once you get too far from them (or too close to them), which in a lot of cases means you get to fight the same enemies multiple times while you're exploring an area. This is extremely aggravating when it concerns tougher/more annoying enemies, like Poltergeists ("I'm three floors up/down but still trying to murder you by throwing furniture at you"), Psuedogiants (aka "Bullet Sponge Prime"), or Burers ("Hope you like getting shot with your own gun") especially when you're trying to figure out some puzzle. Not to mention that getting attacked at times or places when reasonably speaking you couldn't be is rather immersion breaking (eg. when going back outside right after an emission) Then there's weapon balance, or what passes for it. The tl;dr is that choice of weapon quickly boils down to how common the ammo is, how much "penetration" it has, and how expensive it is to repair, aka cost per kill quickly becomes the defining characteristic given the repair costs. There's more here, like weapon balance being rather out of wack (one of the best guns in the game isn't a modern AR, those mostly suck, comparatively, but a variant of the AK...). What each weapon state, or upgrade does, is also very hard to measure and very badly explained. Personally I never liked the upgrade system that got introduced in Clear Sky and Stalker 2 hasn't changed my opinion on it, rather the contrary. The world also doesn't make a whole lot of sense, enemies barely carry ammunition, yet never run out, but there's so much common loot spread around the world that it's absolutely ridiculous. Additionally each time you go into a situation that seems like it'd be a tough one you get thrown so much stuff at you that preparing for anything is just a waste of time. The endgame missions are a prime example: in SoC you'd prepare by picking your favourite loadout, making sure you bring enough ammunition or healing items etc. etc. In Stalker 2 the endgame areas are full of stocker armouries and they toss a couple of some of the best armours in the game at you to boot. Stashes are often intricate puzzles with more often than not extremely disappointing contents for how difficult they were to access. There's also the issue that some of them are literally impossible to get unless you picked a specific side for certain parts of the story. Mutants are overused, quickly eroding any sense of fear they may have instilled otherwise. Meeting your first Bloodsucker in SoC was a memorable experience. Alas, not quite the case in this entry. The anomalies overall were great, I liked how they made them more interactive by having the bolt disable certain ones for a limited amount of time. I will say I strongly dislike the (new) "bog poppers" anomaly though (aka "the flashbang"...) Story wise the game is good, that is, the overarching story, though it pretty much explains everything so I'm not quite sure how they're going to continue this franchise because there doesn't seem a whole lot of mystery left. But the storytelling, I'm very much not as much of a fan. For one you're forced into joining a faction, there's no option to go at it alone at all. To make matters worse, neither option is particularly appealing and while I initially ended up with Spark as I tried to play "independent" I quickly flipped my allegiance to the Ward once I met and realized it'd be a binary choice between Ward and Spark. You're also forced into various dumb decisions, I mentioned being forced to kill friendly faction soldiers after having talked to a returning character that the PC doesn't know at al before. The game goes out of its way to not give you any other options, and even if you finagle it so you don't actually kill anyone, it still assumes you did. To me it seems as if this mission was written for Spark and just lazily recycled for the Ward because they ran out of time. Another peeve of mine is the use of cinematics, which, while well done, absolutely take away your sense of agency, often forcing situations that I guess they couldn't figure out how to create in a more organic. In the same vein the game likes to cut off your way back by locking doors behind you during story missions, which feels kinda cheap and/or immersion breaking. Another thing I personally wish they'd never bring back are the bossfights, they feel extremely out of place for the type of game Stalker used to be, and I can't say I enjoyed any of them as they're almost all bullet spongey gimmick fights. Hell, sometimes you literally drop into an "arena" that's so obviously an arena that you might get some Borderlands flashbacks. All in all my conclusion is still that this is a game that tries to look and feel like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and initially succeeds, until you get further in and all the cracks start becoming apparent. It's a decent open world game, and may even become a good one once it's less of a buggy mess, but as a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel it's a frustrating experience as it's so easy to see how great this could have been. As it stands it's not clear to me whether the game is even fixable as some of the limitations may just be due to the engine choice (eg. night vision is apparently hard(er) to do with RT, and well, fancy graphics were more important, apparently. Similarly draw distance may be a console or UE5 limitation). Once they start making structural fixes to the game (spawning, night vision, etc.) I may revisit it, but as it stands one playthrough was quite enough. Earlier I gave this game a 6/10 and I stand by that.

Hello 👋, I've spent the last days developing these Avowed Interactive Maps, with locations for Pickups, Interactable Corpses, Loot Holders/Chests, and much more. It's not finished, but I am very happy about the results so far. Expect regular updates with more filters, better tooltip descriptions, and maps for the towns and dungeons. In addition, I am working on an In-Game app, which will track your player position and sync it with the maps (Overlay/2nd Screen). You can find most regions so far, including filters for the most important filters. I like to add monsters too soon. Track your progress by settings locations as discovered (right-click or click in the tooltip). This should help you to collect all the secrets! In case that you don't want to get spoilers about the game locations, you can disable all filters and track them by your own using the Add Node and Add Drawings features! Please let me know what you think and keep in mind, that this project is very new and some locations might be wrong or missing. I appreciate your feedback!

Hello, my friend! Progression is quite simple (can't be compared with PoE 1/2), so, i presume, the are no need for this kind of topic((

This is rather amazing, DevLeon! Thanks for sharing this with the community!

I'm having the same issue. Submitted a ticket and waiting for a response. Will update if I find a resolution.

I guess No Man's Sky added a new "Abandoned" mode/difficulty for experienced players. So I tried that. It basically removes all NPC's from the game. This includes all space station or ship encounter shops, no npc given missions, etc. Animals on planets are still around, and the robot sentinel enemies. Can't call/use the special station to shortcut quests re: upgrades. No npc fleets filling the skies above planets and no player freigher to be had. I think it also means the new purple systems are impossible to get to since it requires NPC quests to get there...you can change most of the difficulty settings on the fly still if you wish, but the Abandoned part sticks to the save, no going back. This forces one to wander and be at mercy of RNG re: having that 3% chance of getting a good suit-mod out of something, Or bumbling randomly into a crashed ship that has more storage slots, that you can struggle for the resources to repair, if you want something besides the clunky starter ship. They do give you a way to research most tech from your base, eventually, but some things are missing. And it'll take one forever to find high grade upgrade modules in the wild. I remember playing sort of this way on my own - self-rules. No Anomaly station, or even "how far can you get never leaving the starting planet, ever". The zero NPC's thing is kind of interesting tho. I feel truly alone. It's great.

Kingdom come deliverance is Cryengine, and it looks great at mid-high settings at 1440p 60fps. No stuttering, no upscaling, no ray tracing, on the GOAT. the Gtx1080. 9 years old and still doing it. I think we are at a point where the graphics feature arms race is turning out to be quite detrimental to the overall experience, unless you are willing to pay an absurd amount of money you will be left wanting. They keep adding features that cancel out generational performance improvements and are themselves not as desirable as a stable framerate and frame time graph.

Since I'm currently replaying Deadfire, I'd say the Avowed color palette is pretty much exactly the same. All those outworldish elements are in that game as well- huge mushrooms, bright colors, etc. From what I can tell it's exactly the same, just in first person. The one thing I hate in videos and screenshots is that the hud feels so cluttered. There is so much crap going on, which I really hate and makes me think of MMO stuff.

What I totally dig visually for sure re Avowed: Its (box) cover art. Could almost see that as the artwork of a Converge record. Which rules. 😍 Germany's GameStar made an interesting comparison: oldschool Dungeon Crawlers (including Westwood's Lands Of Lore and Wiz7, games with an overworld..). Their chief editor was reminded of 'em. Reasons: - primary focus on exploration and discovery - similar sense of accomplishment when having finally uncovered the last "square" of a "map" - comparably "static" world (like in most oldschool games, NPCs not reacting to theft, etc.) - combat The guy means that in a positive way though. They all like the game and say the level design focused on all of this would be fantastic and unlike anything they'd seen from Obsidian. I mean, there is even vertical exploration, almost Dishonored-style, which is unusual for the type in general, isn't it. They argue too though that there would be quite a bit of filler combat. Probably not the kind of game that is gonna draw Deadfire's kind of feedback . I personally liked that -- Deadfire may be comparably tame in terms of the overall amount of combat -- FOR ITS TYPE OF GAME. But as it collects stats, by the end of the game you're gonna check and see that you were still a bloody murder hobo, having slain hundreds. 😄

We’ve released a small patch today to help repair some game files in the build. This update is purely for maintenance, and players should not notice any changes to their gameplay experience. Thank you for your support!

I'm playing avowed and the head movement are almost inexistent even maxed out and I think It could add a bit of realism so it would be great to boost head movement

I'm playing avowed and the head movement are almost inexistent even maxed out and I think It could add a bit of realism so it would be great to boost head movement, like when you hit with a sword it would be good if the head follow more the sword like the character give a real hit not just hitting like Steve in minecraft

So Trump signed a new executive order that funding will be cut for all schools that mandate the COVID vaccine. Sounds terrible, right? It's outrageous! Until you find out that no school mandates the COVID vaccine and it's all just hot air. https://www.immunize.org/official-guidance/state-policies/vaccine-requirements/covid-child-school-2024/

These stairs @marelooke But then they patched them after, so they feel right now with tons of enemies. Even if the enemies need to be hit a bit too much before dying 😄

I made my character pretty light on the shroominess. You can also choose to hide it, but for purposes of the story, people need to be able to tell you are godlike. I'm sure a few people will be turned off by it. But there's also dumb people turned off by a pronoun option, so you can't please everyone.

If Avowed sells well, will Michaelsoft let them spend some money to upgrade the forum infrastructure? Grounded already screwed us right proper, we're going to just be a pile of smoldering ruins if Avowed does well too.

Yup.