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Humanoid

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Everything posted by Humanoid

  1. Humanoid
    Skyrim's was easily ignored though. What's that Balgruuf? Go see the dragon attack? Yeah no thanks, I'm going to go do my own thing for the next 100 hours. Fallout 4's overly personal story just doesn't work with the style of game Bethesda makes. And the mistake can be traced to the very first step: the decision to have the player character be a pre-war survivor. It's superficially an interesting idea to explore, but in no way does Bethesda have the chops to pull it off successfully. I haven't played it for a couple weeks at least now, and have no urge at all to give it another shot. Skyrim remains the only Bethesda game I can say I genuinely had fun playing. Comparing Fallout 3 to Fallout 4 is trickier. Fallout 3 was flimsy but I think its central conceit bothered me less (I think they reserved the worst of their writing for the DLC). On the other hand, Fallout 4 has colours other than green and grey. In the end, I played them for about the same amount of time, 10-15 hours, before giving up.
  2. Humanoid
    I have to admit I've never finished it either, or indeed ever gotten more than a third of the way through. Frankly what I'd look for is just an extract of all the game's text repurposed into a text adventure, the rest of the game seems rather extraneous. Or, more seriously, just a mod to literally remove all enemies from the maps. With a corresponding increase to conversational XP I guess, but I can't even remember if having higher levels does anything for speech checks or whether such a game could just be played as a level one TNO.
  3. Humanoid
    To be honest, "old school" is largely the opposite of what I want in an RPG. The likes of Fallout and Ultima before it were notable because of how they departed from the old school orthodoxy of their time: the status quo being represented by the likes of Wizardry, Might and Magic, the Gold Box games, and innumerable other series that I had no interest in, both then and now. Though it is interesting how crafting in general is making a comeback in a big, big way, with all sorts of game genres rushing in to embrace it. Personally I can't stand crafting systems in general, I have no patience for it and its cousin that it's never seen without, Inventory Management.
  4. Humanoid
    When the blurb says "focuses on exploration and combat", does it mean to say that the game is pretty much a pure dungeon crawler? Comparable maybe to say, ToEE or IWD? Legend of Grimrock?
  5. Humanoid
    Well shot-down UFOs aren't actually a problem, there's no penalty as such for leaving them alone besides not getting the loot from it. But landed UFOs if left alone will increase the research and/or resource level of the aliens.
  6. Humanoid
    So I'm playing XCOM Long War again for the first time in about a year. It's up to the final pre-release build now, and it's pretty much feature complete. I've just about run into the problem that I've had with any flavour of XCOM ever since its release though: I absolutely hate the large UFO missions. The ones that spawn early are in a way a blessing because I can skip them without guilt, but now it's late May and I've got one I know I *should* handle, but I'm seriously tempted to just leave it alone because this type of mission is just a tedious multi-hour slog with a heavily back-loaded outcome (i.e. the 4-6 Outsiders at the end). With that in mind, I massively look forward to XCOM 2's reduced emphasis on this kind of mission, since "alien" facilities will largely be architecturally the same as human ones and should have a lot more variation than the endless identical UFOs the aliens send now.
  7. Humanoid
    Well this is just unfair. Yes, that's every single alien pod on this escort mission. If only my rocketeer could hit the broad side of an observatory...
  8. Humanoid
    No, but it says a lot about the fragmented nature of the industry such that every studio seems to end up having to reinvent the wheel every time they do a new title. CDPR seem to be particularly good at wheel invention, but I doubt that tech will filter through much, if at all, to other companies. Is it because some companies hold on very tightly to their trade secrets? Or is it that others are stuck in their ways and are too reluctant to look outside and learn from what others are doing? Of course, on the other extreme you have the case of mega-publishers gobbling up all the small fry and forcing them onto one engine and one design philosophy, but hopefully there's a happier, more collaborative medium between the two extremes.
  9. Humanoid
    I picked up a multipack Red Heat/Raw Deal/Total Recall on Blu-ray for $10 or so. Not sure why because it was a few years ago and I haven't watched the discs yet. Aside (since it came up in the FO4 thread), it seems there are way more movies I recognise set in Chicago than in Boston. Still couldn't name a single landmark there though, I'd have them at similar status in a "name a random US city" contest.
  10. Humanoid
    It's a good single player game, but it's a great co-op game, so if you can line-up a friend to play with it's an essential purchase. I haven't played the EE so I can't comment on the revamped balancing, but the original release had a sort of inverse difficulty where most of the challenging fights will be in the first chapter. After that, XP gain snowballing usually means you can stay ahead of the curve. I played the game in "Lone Wolf" mode though, i.e. each player controlling a single character instead of two, which probably made things harder because we frequently were both stunned or frozen or whatever. It also means I don't know how playing with the companion NPCs works out.
  11. Humanoid
    Licence Arcanum and Interstate '76 from Activision as a package deal, then create a mashup of them. :D
  12. Humanoid
    It occurs to me as a non-American that the setting of Fallout 4 isn't exactly familiar, and that may contribute to the difficulty of getting into the game. Things I know about Boston: It's somewhere in the top right corner of the US, and has a harbour that may or may not taste somewhat tea-like. I couldn't name a single landmark, be able to recognise the general architecture, or know anything about the weather (though I'd guess it gets pretty snowy). This is in sharp contrast to Vegas and DC (sort of, I know it has, uh, the White House, and that obelisk) in the immediately preceding Fallout games, and would be the case with cities like New York, Miami, New Orleans and San Francisco for example. If I wanted to see what Boston was like from a movie portrayal, I wouldn't even know what to watch, whereas say Philadelphia, a city I'd consider equally unremarkable, I can at least get a feel for by watching Rocky.
  13. Humanoid
    On some less-good news, the "Project Phoenix" JRPG Kickstarter has descended into farce with the latest project update published today. TL;DR timeline: - Initial estimate (September 2013) of about 15 months for completion. - In March, claim a target date in June for Alpha and December for Beta. - In November, admit they have no programmer yet. - In December, claim they have a programmer joining in February, who will take approximately 30 months to complete the project, which would be followed up by 6 months of testing. So a 2H 2018 release. It's pretty spectacular how it went from a planned 15 months end-to-end project cycle to 30 months just for one step of the process. Makes the likes of Tim Schafer and Chris Roberts look like Flash Gordon.
  14. Humanoid
    I already dislike how the display of how much damage you did/took is delayed, so yeah.
  15. Humanoid
    Beaglerush (probably the most famous XCOM player around) has put up some XCOM 2 gameplay up as well, so it's a coordinated release of all this material today I guess.
  16. Humanoid
    I mean I don't think there's any collision detection with the rain? So if you're in a gazebo or under an awning, say, the game still considers you to be out in the open. You can script NPCs to move to certain locations during a weather event, but I don't think you can correctly do things like taking radiation damage from the rain.
  17. Humanoid
    I don't think the engine can simulate sheltering from rain and that kind of thing? Otherwise it'd be awesome with a Frostfall type mod where you have to scramble to take shelter from dangerous environmental effects - or even just from the cold at night. (Someone should mod in proper seasons)
  18. Humanoid
    It may become mandatory eventually, but I got bored and quit the game before even building a single settlement, and I get the impression that I could have gone on a lot longer without doing it if I had the desire to. I suppose that counts as both a bit of praise and a bit of damnation, but the point I guess is that for the ones who like to just explore places without being nailed down by the settlement minigame, I believe the game is fully playable that way.
  19. Humanoid
    ^ Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed had a bunch of PC-exclusive characters, such as a General from Company of Heroes, a Shogun from Shogun 2: Total War, and Football Manager, from Football Manager 2012. Who says Sega doesn't have a rich and engaging stable of characters?
  20. Humanoid
    And it could all be addressed by some relatively minor changes to dialogue. Sure, you can have the desperate and slightly irrational option of "my baby's out there, I need to find him now", but you can just as easily have a weary, resigned protagonist who knows that odds are their baby may well have died of old age by now. Both would be valid approaches and the player could go either way. Y'know, roleplaying.
  21. Humanoid
    Had a PE teacher back in secondary school called Mr Dans. Has the same sort of build, square jaw, and massive chin (bigger, actually) of this Danse character that it's a bit disconcerting. Mind you my memory would be playing at least a few tricks on me since this was all of 15-20 years ago.
  22. Humanoid
    Oh I have quite a few copies of the game, on multiple platforms. I've just never played it.
  23. Humanoid
    Ah, the GECK, a tool so powerful that the game's own scripters needed to implement a moving tram as an NPC wearing a tram-shaped hat.
  24. Humanoid
    It's the same reason any remotely quest-relevant NPC is invulnerable, the same reason you can't refuse quests, the same reason having to do a bit of arbitrary settlement management is mandatory, and why stats and perks don't matter. Because hey we made this awesome stuff, come look at this awesome stuff, you totally won't want to miss this awesome stuff. Locking out the player from anything makes the game look smaller and if there's one think they like to trumpet and gain fawning praise over is the apparent massive, expansive scale of their games. They know who butters their bread and losing that perception would be bad business. In that sense it's a completely rational decision, and sales figures vindicate their decision.
  25. Humanoid
    Does it actually look like it's going to make it though? I don't think we've seen a goal this high in some time, or indeed ever, so it's hard to say whether the trickle amounts over the next 5 weeks before the final day rush will be enough. Personally if it was the standard $15 KS tier I honestly would have no real issue backing it. But knowing absolutely nothing about Psychonauts, the price of entry is just not the level where I'd be happy to make a "donation" (something I do for a lot of KS games which I back with no real intention of playing the final product).
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