marelooke

Just made it past "Nest of Vipers" In Kingdom Come Deliverance, and holy hell, is this one of the worst quests I've experienced in a long while. If your quests secondary objectives don't work at a basic level, maybe don't put it in. Older game, but spoiler alert anyway: Dunno what's still coming, but if someone were to ask me what is that quest that makes you reconsider replaying the game in the future, well this one sure qualifies.

Soulframe (pre-alpha: Prelude 9) Lots of animal saving

I shall join this club. After originally backing it I finally started a play through. Hah, this is the last part i completed, I've been doing every single side quest I could find so far, slowly getting Henry from being totally useless to being less totally useless. I might even venture outside of Rattay soon I mean, given the game it makes sense, though the DLC made me appreciate her a whole lot more. The Theresa part of A Woman's Lot was absolutely great and I'm confident has something to do with people liking her so much. Oh yeah, and someone posted a (I presume) edited picture with her hair loose... https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Falikwyhz24l61.jpg Just completed the Theresa part of the DLC yesterday and it was fantastic. Think it really set the tone better than the same part done as Henry, because you get to experience more of the Skalitz part, and Theresa just starts of as a much more ... engaging(?) character than Herny (imho). Of course being more competent at the game's systems helped (still can't hit much of anything with a bow though). There were some minor niggles, like the nightly herb picking being more about fighting the terrain and the dog AI than the actual quest, as well as what happened to Tinker, which felt like more of a gameplay thing than something that really made sense. Still came away really liking Theresa a whole lot more than I did before.

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.

Eh, I've seen a few that are far more neutral and they're like "Meh", here's one: Game seems to have turned out kind of how I expected. Will probably play it, but for 70EUR it's definitely on the "wait for a discount"-list.

Doesn't seem to be loading for me... There's an event going on so I grabbed some patience and bugspray and finally headed to Pyro... Undocking with the jump gate in the background... On approach... Here we gooooooo... You can see some of the inside of the jump tunnel, those "pillars" you actually have to navigate around. Aaaand we made it! Some atmosphere shots from inside the Pyro system: First encounter with space cows

Forcing myself through the story in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, they clearly ran out of time and just half-assed the latter half once you start making "ending choices". Instead of having multiple missions depending on earlier choices there's only the single one that makes absolutely no sense for 50% of the choices you may have made before. Things got so on my nerves I actually put the game down for a few weeks. I'm talking about "Dangerous Liaisons": The lore is intriguing, but the storytelling is abysmal. I'd have taken less cinematics (that have lots of issues on their own) and better storytelling over what we got. If you're going to give players choice, better make it makes sense or it's just going to feel even worse than getting no choice at all (much more to say there, but will reserve that for when I get to the end) No patches since the last one, so AI and spawning issues are still the same as they were after the first big patch.

Not sure anyone would really want to claim that one at this point...

It will probably be a few more generations before hardware path tracing is at the level we need for it to be usable everywhere without tanking performance and/or quality at any resolution higher than Full HD. Just fingers crossed my RX 6800 XT can last me that long (and more fingers crossed Intel will be able to provide some higher end competition by the time this card starts falling off) On the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 front I can say the big 1.1 patch definitely improved the Zone's feeling. Enemies no longer pop up behind you fully aware of your location and they do seem to wander around on their own. That being said, the game still clearly spawns NPCs based on triggers (I had to kill the same pack of Blind Dogs three times while exploring a location...) or, at least to my feeling, "activity" (if you are jogging around too long, per the game's estimation, without a fight the game will spawn you a fight) Apparently the major showstopper I ran into was fixed, but it's hard to say as I managed to get past it before the patch dropped. I did run into major performance issues during the boss fight though, fps dropping to the single digits each time I targeted the boss. Feels like I'm nearing the end of the playthrough, so far it's clocking in at 100 hours, which puts me at about 1death/hour (though I'd say about 70% of those are probably attributable to the game being in a "state"...) At this point I'd say I'd score it like a 6/10. It's decently playable at this point, and you probably won't want to uninstall within the Steam refund window if you're not a hardcore S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fan (but assuming this type of game is your jam, of course...)

AAA went up 20EUR in only a few years as well, first trying to convince us that the console prices that were 10EUR above normal PC pricing of 50EUR were "standard" for PC as well, and then tacking on another 10EUR for inflation...

It also has an image quality impact per the folks at Hardware Unboxed:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl patch 1.1 is out with an enormous amount of fixes, but, most importantly for me (aside from the bugfixes) major improvements to the spawning system

Eh, they're not exactly releasing them often enough for how broken the game is. The longer I've been playing the more major bugs I've been encountering, from quick items not working (animation plays, nothing happens), to outright crashes to desktop, my 2nd weapon magically getting swapped out by something I didn't even have in my inventory, and now a progression stopper bug that's been there since release. So guess I'm setting the game aside, because I'm not exactly left with any other choice. On top of that as time went on general design issues are just becoming more and more apparent, from weapon balance (such as it is) to just mission, world, and progression design. The game may look like a duck, but whether it quacks like one...

That was apparently a requirement from their publisher, they were afraid the game would feel too empty if not enough was happening so they dialled the number of enemies way up. Kinda ironic that they're doing the same, in a worse way, in HoC, though it seems like after the first patches it's less obnoxious now, but I haven't gone back to any of the egregiously obvious areas to verify. It may just be that Garbage is less affected. Ran into my first major bug, you're tasked with "finding" one of two items in Garbage, but when I return with only the one they just take it and act like I didn't complete the mission, so I gotta do both, and hope it works I guess, if not I guess I'll just kill everyone. I'll find out in the evening what it's going to be.

Well, I've completed my part of the Save Stanton event, and the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo has come and (mostly) gone, so I've got more to share from my favourite screenshot generator (alas, I forgot to turn off the debug overlay way too often, ruined some really nice shots )