Fenixp

Well there was that one time an RPG rocket ricocheted off a windshield of an approaching vehicle and blew up a nearby gas station, that is besides the point tho. But you actually struck a nail on the head there - there were a lot of stories generated by a ton of tiny details that other players may have never experienced, that only I did end up having in MY particular firefight (blah blah.) You and everybody else gets attacked by a honey badger and a crocodile in FC3. Breaking weapons, cars that won't last 40 000 crashes etc. are all elements which do end up reducing predictability and removing power from the player, yes. There are literally two unpredictable events I ever encountered in FC3 and 4 (I have yet to play 5, but I already left 4 halfway through as it's just... More of 3.) - animals and enemy patrols. Majority of war stories I've ever seen concern these two. Apparently FC5 will add randomly crashing planes to the mix but that's still not all that much. Unexpected events do happen in the games of course, but they're much more of an exception than a rule. Far Cry 3+ are trying their damnest to give as much control as possible to the player - marking enemies (and animals with the right drugs), making majority of outposts clearable without even considering weaponry you'll bring along ('cause... Bow). Weapons not jamming/falling apart and vehicles lasting insane amounts of punishment only add to that. I won't argue about crappy outpost respawns and random vehicles on the roads of FC2, because they're both crappy mechanics. They ultimately add to the whole 'misery simulator' feel of the game, but the game would be significantly better than it is without them. Still, when I approach an area with a lot of dry grass, I leave my rocket launcher behind and grab an RPG in Far Cry 2, because I don't want to risk a random fire burning my arse off. I don't expect my X-ray vision to spot all enemies in the big mission areas as I would in FC3+, and can't even fully lean on exploring the locations previously, because enemies happen to wear clothes that make them difficult to make out in the environment (Shockingly). These mechanical interactions are what allows the game to generate situations that even developers never expected, and it is in turn what makes FC2 much more replayable than FC3+ to me. However, through giving player a lot more control, FC3+ games became a much smoother and more streamlined experience - and I most certainly do not expect majority of players to enjoy broken, janky messes that I do.

Far Cry 2 is a bit of a misery simulator - whether it's by design or technical limitations, the game ended up becoming this relentless game of constant adaptation and attempts to survive. I also believe it's one of the most ambitious AAA products Ubisoft has ever released. Its systems are universally designed to take power away from player - every plan will inevitably go wrong, your weapon will break, your malaria will send you into spasms at the worst possible times, you'll get ran over by a car while trying to snipe an objective from a street, you'll get shot in the back by a soldier who you thought dead and is lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood, you'll explode yourself by accidentally standing next to an ammo cache while it catches wildfire. It's a surprisingly complex games, with a ton of unexpected details (A rocket from RPG will not explode until its engines fire. So shooting a rocket straight under ones legs will just drop it to the ground, where it'll ignite and fly in a random direction. The rocket propelled grenades themselves will eventually run out of fuel and just stumble down to the ground. And when you fire a proper rocket launcher, it'll actually exhaust from the back side of the weapon, potentially setting dry grass on fire.) It's an extremely ballsy game, in an African setting of young kids fighting other young kids, actively trying to make player feel bad about what he's doing. Far Cry 2 is ambitious, filled with unique ideas and innovative design. It's also unfinished and broken, sadly. It's the very antithesis of Far Cry 3+, which are very much sterilized in order to become more predictable and controllable for the player, giving player all the power. I'll take a proper systems-driven approach over sterile, entirely predictable gameplay any time - in spite of Far Cry 3 being excellent, turning down on reactivity ended up harming the gameplay and throwing the game into a 'generic shooter' category. Edit: Added things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L2Gve7oh_4 The finish just kills me every time. Yea, we do need more of that.

a) Add the executable as a non-Steam game to Steam, it'll slap Steam's overlay onto the game and you can take screens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IGWCgot5ko b) If you own a newer NVidia card, you can use GeForce Experience software to take screenshots c) Or just use FRAPS

The Darkness for free in Humble Store, if you want to play a slightly above average shooter thingy.

- Attacking sleeping bandits in KC: D felt like a good idea, until they teleported all their gear on their bodies the moment they got from bedrolls. ... Right. - Finally finished the Paris mission in Hitman. Dropping the entire ceiling on a hall full of people including the target was messy, but extremely satisfying. Dropping a chandelier on the secondary target in sight of a bunch of people was just pure fun. Incidentally, dear god, the amount of simulation that game runs in a single level is insane.

That's what I enjoyed about Pillars the most I think. My biggest disappointment with BG2 was that I wasn't particularly fond of what later became the Bioware formula - its ditching of semi-open world for locations ties to quests and stories. Pillars just does what BG1 did, and in my opinion it does it quite a bit better. Not much of an achievement considering BG1's age, enough to make PoE my GOTY of 2015 tho. Don't forget that Might influence all damage and healing your character causes - it'll affect damage of directly damaging spells, healing strength of directly healing spells, but also damage caused by ranged weapons. Intellect 'only' makes abilities with time of effect last longer - making them more powerful in the process, yes. And some of the most powerful abilities Cipher has are duration-based, so it's still a tradeoff. Nonetheless, good thing to keep in mind.

Neither contained dynamic music (as in, music which would change dynamically based on stage of a fight and actions of the player - SupCom may have contained separate 'calm' and 'battle' tracks, I don't think it did tho.)

It's a soundtrack, designed to complement a game, not to be listened to on its own. And it works damn well for that purpose. Regardless, there's quite a few tracks that work stand-alone too. It's not really pure metal, so... Eh.

Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider (the new games) if you want something thats good fun and Dark Souls 1 and 3 if you want something more difficult. You can also consider taking a look at Darksiders.

Don't worry, not having any taste is not an offense punishable by death. It should be tho.

Ha, beat the young Hans in both archery and swordfighting. Couple more notes: - The game is bloody gorgeous - I really enjoy the combat system, it actually makes quite a lot of sense, albeit it may get somewhat clunky - The writing is still terrible, quest design can be neat tho - I really wish developers respected my time. 10 minutes long cutscene without means to pause it is just a no-no. Thankfully save on exit was added and seems to work rather nicely.

Everything is going to be ok sits on many of my playlists. Well, it's Mick Gordon.

Yo! My profile pic, god damn it.

If Obsidian couldn't afford another month's salaries, it'd already be pretty financially strained

Well, aside from that, Mad Max also managed to do one thing extremely right - while the map was icon-o-static, the core gameplay was rock solid, and it constantly built on those foundations, and care went to everything from common loot locations (even the filler ones often served by adding to the game's flavor) all the way to main missions. And while icons on the map were always the same, developers routinely tried to vary gameplay of outpusts/loot locations/boss locations up - by using several factions which behaved somewhat differently, by new layouts and little environmental puzzles... While liberating another outpost in Far Cry 4 felt the same as liberating all the ones that came before it, unlocking a new location in Mad Max often felt like playing a new level in a very solid brawler. You can make even icon-a-thons interesting if you put enough thought into designing them and varying them up - altho, then there were bits which were repetitive, like hunting sniper nests or taking down the 'boss' vehicles. (the vehicular combat and physics were utterly stellar tho, so yes, moving about was just fun in itself.) I always felt like there's generally two types of open-world (or open-ended in general) games - ones that rely on developers to provide content (Ubisoft model), while others rely on systematic mechanics to do so (Bethesda's model, games like STALKER being the best example - it's games that create a world with a complex set of rules that then lead to an array of emergent stories developing as opposed to trying to create all of the player's fun for the player.)

Well... I don't feel like my time is being wasted when the game is repetitive, but also manages to be constantly entertaining - like Mad Max for instance. Or Dying Light for that matter.

It works by decrypting the executables on the fly, so a) It would make no sense to even make any read/write operations to a drive - the last thing you want is to write new data to disk that can be plainly read. The decrypted data is quite likely to be stored in memory, a claim that Denuvo's statement would support, and there's no data to contradict this. b) If there's any performance impact, it's on loading times, not the game itself - for the very same reason. And considering games using Denuvo tend to be modern titles ran on machines with beefy CPUs, well... Visible improvement is rather unlikely.

While I enjoyed the combat, the game felt like it's trying hard to waste my time in every conceivable way.

The writing is nothing to write home about anyway :-P At any rate, of course it'd add work and would be difficult to implement so that it doesn't stand in the way of gameplay - just as was difficult to implement any facet of the game to be quasi-realistic, yet Warhorse spent time doing so. I mean, it's cool that we have a game with no dragons or magic in it, but the biggest difference between Skyrim and medieval Europe wasn't necessarily the setting, concurrent culture is just as important - and Warhorse omitted this, for the most part. And yes, I do understand the romanticized writing is much easier to swallow for modern audience, which should in turn translate to more sales - and KC is, after all, a game that has to sell. Nonetheless, the game isn't even really trying. Did you know that gatherings in churches and chapels not only served for religious purposes, but also to relay information and relevant news about the land? See, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. And yes, the contemporary morality and approach to problems would be more difficult to relate to - which, to me, would actually be an extremely interesting part of the experience. I mean, it was Warhorse who promised a very realistic medieval RPG, not me. Look, when it comes to gameplay and mechanics, all bets are off. Inaccurate information is something I'd like to see to add flavor, not to mislead palyer. Morrowind tried that and it was a horrible idea. Perhaps, I'll see later on. It's all kinda combined with my last point of Henry being at the centre of everything - sure, I can see a lord being nice and kind to Henry. I can't see every noble man and woman he's met up to the point I've played to all universally being nice to him and serving most of his needs without a word. Eh, I still think it's probably just a question of budget. After all, children are not just downscaled models of adults. Nonetheless, it feels jarring, especially considering medieval peasant families being rather ... Large with big rates of infancy/early childhoods deaths.

Well because most historical Youtubers would be mainly bothered by factual inaccuracies. There's a problem with re-creating historical societies - we don't actually know all that much about them as life of peasants was hardly ever really recorded. Still, I'd have liked if Warhorse tried at least. - Outside of rare instances of writing specifically acknowledging the fact that access to information wasn't quite as easy as it is nowadays, which do exist in the game, everybody seems to be rather knowledgeable about the world near and far. It's be nice if you were given different accounts on this information based on location, information being colored differently with each retelling, but ... Nah. They've all read the stuff on a wiki using their smartphone. - "We all know our place, we all act like we should." When I mentioned LARP, what I'm talking about is actors assuming rather one-dimensional characteristics assigned to them - the writing is imposing 21st century view of what medieval Europe should have been without at least trying to give characters an array of quirks which would make them ... Y'know, human. - Overbearing nationalism. I mean, the game takes place 17 years before a massive civil war swooped the country. - Complete absence of children? - Everybody treating Henry like he's the Godsend also doesn't gel with me particularly well.

Right, played like 90 minutes of the game's opening. One one hand, the factual bits are really nice - contemporary names, buildings, tools etc., yeah, I'm enjoying that a ton. It's similar with weapons and craftsmanship and all actors seem to have a routine which makes sense within confines of the world. There's also a lot of little touches and details which are clearly included to make the world feel more realistic, but they're more along the lines of "duh, arrows don't make a loud swooshing sound when they fly" than anything particularly meaningful - still, it's nice that they're there. Nonetheless, it's rather apparent that Warhorse spent exactly 0 effort on researching actual medieval societies, their habits and culture which was rather different from that of 21st century and instead focused on combat and weapons, which is arguably the least alien part of it, and consequently the least interesting to explore for me. I don't feel like I'm being transported about 600 years into the past - instead, I feel like I'm a part of a really expensive historical LARP in which actors try to pretend medieval Europe was, like, a really cool place to live, except for those who drew the short straw and now have to begrudgingly play the villains. Still, what is being presented to us here is a rather gorgeous and well-developed world, if you're willing to accept the fact that Warhorse's claims of realism were rather exaggerated and only extend to general setting and mechanics, but don't particularly affect the story. I think I'm going to enjoy it.

Don't judge Henry's approach to personal heating.

No, it's not. It doesn't promote real-time combat. It promotes real-time combat with plentiful pausing. Thus real-time with pause. You've managed a straw-man in the second sentence of your response, that's impressive :-P No, I'm saying that if you don't like engagement, you can build your parties to largely circumvent it. I happen to like it so I make full use of it.