LadyCrimson

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.

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 have no clue on gameplay, which is arguably the most important thing, but in terms of art aesthetics, I would much prefer romping around in KCD2 then Avowed, from what I've seen. I mean, I like fantasy, and sci-fi, but lately there is too much over-garrish color palettes and over-bright color tones/lighting conditions in some games. It hurts my eyes. Not saying everything has to look like a dank dungeon or be dark and stormy all the time, but eh. And before anyone says anything - yes, No Man's Sky does this too. But at least in NMS I don't have to stare at the crayola colored space station NPC's for more than 2 seconds, and if I don't like the aesthetics of some planet, and I can just leave and find another one. Also, re: fantasy/sci-fi rpg/games, I also long for non-humanoid companions to be regular thing. I feel like we're still getting the simple Star Trek method of stick some funky prosthetics/tattoos on the face of a humanoid figure type of thing. At this point I would rather have an actual space hamster (who wears a tiny space helmet!) who sits on my shoulder during gameplay and is, say, a psychic-mage who chitters to me inside my head and demands cheese. Or a party companion (not a deco pet) made of geometric triangles and circles, or is a walking pillar. Anything.

Heh, that's adorable. Reminds me of that one (single) time it snowed in California/Bay Area (at basically sea level, not hills/mts) when I was ... uh ... 8? A houseguest of my parents made three very tiny snowmen and stuck them in front of the planter boxes on the back deck. So i woke up and saw those. I've been waiting for it briefly snow around here like that one more time, in my lifetime. Hey, it could happen.

I was able to log in and load posts etc just fine today, so that's a good sign re: forum performance capabilities. Although the game hasn't wide released yet. The reviewers and those who paid for early access, I think. = In other news, while generally speaking I keep to a decent food regimen, day to day, and have kept my weight low and level etc, excess sugar snacks is still a constant "addiction" I fight against all the time - and sometimes lose. 1st couple years I did really well. (edit: still off/don't need insulin tho) The past couple years I've done "all right." Death by Costco's Kirkland macadamia-nut, chocolate/caramel clusters has more appeal all the time.

More reason to wait for next generation (any gpu brand). Or never play any new games, forever. I don't think all of this re: gpu/performance value/cost/AI-upscaling reliance stuff (not just nvidia related) is going to get any better any time soon. Oh well. I'm just an ossified old fart, what do I know.

Only if you want there to be. Note I never story-finished the game but I did explore/move around the last big "open" section so I did get pretty far. It's more of a stealth game in many cases and you can avoid or sneak-deal with enemies most of the time (not always but often). Or if you really want to, you can charge in or do something non-stealthy and attract a lot of enemies for chaos. It's up to you. Generally speaking trying to take on lots of enemies at once is often not a great idea, partly because of certain mechanics but also just spatial jank sometimes. There's some "boss" fights of course.

And that's why I never like to be the one to stand in line to get first-day new gen cards. There are apparently always enough willing to be "beta testers" that I don't need to be one. Wait a year works for me. If only that worked for the prices these days, too. Ha.

NMS - My cute new hermit crab pet is apparently the victim of a bug/glitch. After initially taming it, it takes up a pet slot but there is no info/stats for it in the list and it is not summonable. Seems to be a known thing - hopefully they fix it. It was so cute, I want it back. I have now seen tons of "purple" systems, several water worlds (still don't care about exploring their depths much), lots of gas giants, tried building my own Fighter ship (very limited feature, nothing interesting) etc. Which was fun, but now I'm back to have nothing to do besides admire vistas and maybe hunt for the perfect Sentinel ship (can't craft those). There's two restrictions to gameplay that keep ppl like me from playing a lot longer, per return. The base-part building restriction per save and player-terrain changes limit (there's a limit to number of terrain edits then it starts erasing older changes for newer ones). I know the premise is to keep moving/discovering new systems forever, but eventually all the planets/biomes are the same, so motivation to planet hop 100000000 times forever dwindles. I think these restrictions are because NMS has Steam cloud saves, which is a hard save-size limit. 7 Days doesn't have/allow cloud saves for this reason. eg, Steam cloud saves for sandbox+building+mega exploring/mega-data etc. games sucks.

Re: save systems - That potion-saving is a weird "manual" save option, too. It's kind of interesting as a restriction, although I'm sure eventually one could buy/find enough to manage or something. Although, just to say, someone's already make an unlimited saving mod for KCD2 - of course, it's user-risk to 100% trust it. Or I bet there's trainers to give yourself 1000 save-potions already, or 10 every play session, whatever you want haha. My issue with rpg's is if you can't have a lot of separated save slots. I like having a whole set of saves at certain junctions in games, so I can go back and try different things or solutions re: non-repeatable fun stuff, without having to replay an entire game again. Or in case one hits a game-breaking bug that a save from 4 hours ago might be needed. Certain types of games having 1 manual and one autosave is fine but giant rpgs, no thanks, I need 10 minimum. 20 preferable. Edit: not saying KCD 2 is like that, I have no idea. Just saying I don't like it when games do the 1-manual/1auto save thing is all.

^ I don't know about gamers vs. non-gamers, or whether I'd even be one or the other - I suspect I'm in the middle somewhere, and mostly I'm just task/order/efficiency-obsessive - but my issue with story or "realistic" RPG (vs. fast arpg's/looters) is if I realize a NPC is trying to give me a quest, I will run far away. Hence I never get anywhere in them in the long run so what's the point. It's not just combat - although that is a large factor re: whether I might even idly/briefly check something out at all - nor does it matter to me how well anything is written, I simply do not care to listen to/quest for NPC's, go away. There is generally little within most stat/gear based RPG loops - even sandboxy ones - that give me motivation anymore, outside of simple exploration/saw all the map perhaps. I wish I could still get into them but it's not where my brain travels. Death Stranding wasn't an RPG, but its gameplay loop was so different from the norm that I've experienced (well, most of it), and in some weird way it was so meditative, that I put up with a lot of stuff I wouldn't normally - like the few weird combat sequences and those mega-cutscenes, blargh - here and there. Outside of explore/build sandboxes, I need more oddball and different like that, stuff that doesn't feel like the same thing with a different skin, yet again. Man I hope DS2 doesn't suck.

It was ten years ago, I found the film rather ponderous/not very "entertaining" and I never rewatched it, so pfft. That walking wall apparently did nothing my brain found interesting enough to spare permanent brain cell storage room for. I knew this guy way back when - before YouTube/streaming and even video rentals weren't for months after - he could see a movie in theater once and repeat whole scenes almost verbatim (long multi-dialogues) weeks/months later. One of those types. It was always amazing.

^ I do remember the water/time dilation planet (somewhat) but I still don't remember it/robot specifically. I remember the farm start, the daughters "ghost", scattered planet moments, Matt Damon, the wtf weird ending, Matthew's chr. going off to try to find the other main chr in the final. I think on-ship/flying interactions/exposition or whatever I wouldn't recall at all, without cheating via looking stuff up on YT. Not much of that film stuck in my brain, I guess. Maybe I fell asleep in parts.

I don't even remember Interstellar having a robot, probably zoned it out.

What is that? Is that the feed/tame icon when I hover? Can I tame it? *CHASE CHASE/SMASH BUTTON 50x* (it kept not working/it would move away super fast and I swim slow) Yessssss! Success, another adorable creature for me! ... which I will put away and never look at again. It's so unique/different vs. everything else so far tho, cuteness overload.