marelooke

Went back to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 now that about a year has passed and we're on the 1.6.1 patch to see how far the game has come and...well, they've added Night Vision Devices, and the Mosin, and it does run more stable, but other than that very little seems to have changed about the things I disliked. In fact, one of my main complaints, enemy spawning, seems to have regressed since I last played, even at release with enemies obnoxiously spawning around you it'd take some effort to actually catch them "popping in", but on 1.6.1 I've literally had enemies pop into existence right in front of me on enough occasions that it's become rather bothersome. There's also generally too many, it's literally impossible to get from A to B without the game spawning a bunch of enemies around you, if you're lucky they'll be too busy fighting each-other (which, I suppose, is an improvement over release where they'd all go for you). To test whether it was the game or I was just imagining things it I decided to make the trek from Quiet to Azimuth Station (after the mission that takes place there) multiple times in a row, this is a short distance that has you cross a tiny strip of empty bog, of the 8 times in a row I made the corssing (4 in each direction) I didn't run into anything only once, every other time there was something going on in this tiny strip of land. That's ridiculous, especially since there's no realistic way for anything to get there. Missions still have the same issues they've always had with exposition but they've somehow managed to break in-world subtitles (which is a bit of an issue, seeing as I can't stand the English VO, but I also don't speak Ukrainian...) so I have to rely on memory for much of the context. Haven't had any main missions outright break though, which is nice. Worst I had was an early side missions for the Ward in the Chemical Plant that I had to reload 6 or 7 times to get to function correctly. So yeah...there's supposed to be an engine update in the next patch (1.7), honestly not sure what good it'll do unless it somehow also fixes the spawn issues.

Not sure why but I'm getting Shadow Warrior vibes from this.

Expected them to boil the frog longer before doing this, with some luck this teaches a lot of people a thing or two about how these subscription services do business. Then again, if they haven't figured it out by now they may just be beyond help anyway.

You can already pick a specific crisis to happen, so I doubt that's much of a concern, I just want the inverse option: the ability to exclude certain crises without turning off the entire DLC they are in. Cetana is also very different from every other crisis. Most crises shake up the galaxy with their rampages, as generally by the time they spawn borders are kinda entrenched, and the crisis forces the galaxy to take action, shaking up borders and the political landscape. As far as I can tell that's their whole point. Cetana is just "there", and unless you, as the player, do a bunch of stuff, and set up very specific fleet compositions to deal with her insane difficulty (compared to every other crisis out there) there's really nothing happening until she presses her "I win"-button. The AI won't lift a finger, not even when she declares war on the entire galaxy (not that, given her power levels, they'd be much help anyway), and until she does it's pretty much business as usual. She may be fun once, or for some challenge run, but by and large I'd call her boring, as there's a whole lot of nothing, then a single massive fleet battle that you hopefully win, and...that's kinda it... If you beat her the game is basically over as there's probably not a whole lot left to do until the victory year as I'd be rather surprised that anyone able to beat Cetana would be having any issues beating up the rest of the galaxy after, if need be. Honestly, design-wise she really feels more like an elaborate event-chain than an endgame crisis. Maybe in a game with multiple crises having her mixed in, I can see that being more engaging, but on default settings with only the single major crisis? I'd rather not have it be her.

Parked my last Stellaris game after I basically won (Galactic Emperor, smacked the Contingency, and enough fleet power to walk over anyone who even looked at me funny). Almost thought I managed to make the Unbidden spawn, but seems Ultima Vergilis just is being ominous when you already beat the crisis, shame. Started a new game and since I usually turtle I figured I'd force myself into early combat by going at is as a Driven Exterminator Gestalt Consciousness. Only to spawn between two Fallen Empires and another Driven Exterminator. Great. Also ended up running into some major Trade deficit issues because I'm not familiar with how to play machines, so ended up mostly turtling anyway while I figured out/fixed my economy. At that point one of the Fallen Empires decides to awaken, and since I can't handle them in a fair fight I build up fortress systems and fleets like mad and shelve any plans for wanton galactic murder sprees. Aaaand then Cetana decides to spawn, obliterating the FE(s), taking some of my (fortified) systems with her and then just basically ruining the rest of the game (as far as I'm concerned). All the research options for the crisis end up outside my borders, so unless I want to fight a whole load of wars to get to them I have no access to them. So I have content myself with nabbing her transports, trying to get somewhere with the situation that way. Unfortunately she somehow goes hostile before she declares war somehow, despite me having "good" rep (bug?) and just "removes" some of my biggest fleets (not even combat, just dialogue and *poof* fleet gone...). Once she finally does declare war I try beelining her with everything I have left but just get smacked like a fly. She, herself, has 1.5m fleet power, and the rest of the crap in the system she hides in counts for another million or so, even before losing a bunch of ships to bs I managed only like half that. AI doesn't even try to deal with her, like at all, unlike every other crisis where at least they can act as a distraction. Might as well be alone in the galaxy for this one, and can't rely on Fallen Empires to do, well ... anything as she just outright murders them with a 100% guarantee when she spawns. This is also where I learned you can't disable a specific crisis, you can pick a specific one, but you can't say "give me any random one, except for that one", which is annoying as from what I've seen I don't think I want her in most of my games (but I don't necessarily want to disable the whole DLC) as she seems ridiculously over-tuned compared to every other crisis (and I just generally dislike things being on timers like this).

It's why Conan Exiles is still my favourite "survival" game. There's an actual story, though Funcom, probably in preparation of Dune's launch, kinda pushed it aside for some "modern" checklist bollocks, but it's still all there. What I enjoy is that you have to go out and *find* the story and slowly puzzle together what happened. And the game has a goal that you can complete, if you so choose: getting out of the situation you find yourself in after the intro. I'd imagine the gameplay is similar to Dune, at least my impression of Dune is that it's just Conan Exiles in the Dune universe without the option to host your own server (but I haven't played it, just to be clear) Personally I haven't really stopped bouncing around half-finished games. Went back to the original DOOM reboot and apparently I'd left that off at the last boss, so I killed that and freed up some disk space. I also made a little bit of progress in Mass Effect: Andromeda, but the game just hasn't been able to hold my attention after first contact. I'll probably finish it, eventually. Mostly I've been having a lot of fun in Stellaris, tried getting through a game with Knights of the Toxic God a few times (using the predefined species) and got absolutely stomped in the early game multiple times, so I increased galaxy size with less of us in it to give me some more breathing room at the start. Also added another 300years to the "game end" condition as my last game where I wasn't sniffed out early ended when stuff started getting real. After beating the endgame crisis the awakened fallen empire decided to go after me for war mongering (I mean, I was sitting on massive fleets and I just cleansed the universe of two crisis, which I guess makes me the bad guy) and everyone else decided to close borders, blocking some of my fleets from getting out of the Contingency system, so they were stuck until I could buy a Gate to teleport out (I expected this, so I came prepared). They had a bunch of fleets with 2 to 3 times my fleet's power but decided to attack me in a heavily fortified system (3 maxed out Citadels set up to deal with them specifically). Lost like half of the ships I was able to actually field but managed to murderify both of their strongest fleets (somewhere around 4million fleet power together). Little while later that Gate got finished, freeing up two fleets in prime fighting condition, and now I'm just happily stomping down Awakened Empire systems. Hope I can take them down entirely before the war ends, if not I may just declare them a galactic crisis and have everyone beat down on them (I have so much political influence due to my fleets that anything I want done in the Galactic Community, goes, it's hilarious, maybe I should run for Emperor next...)

(no, I don't actually think using that long term is a good idea, but it's neat )

Missing out on UT3 is not that big of a loss, I'd argue. Though I see they added achievements at some point, so maybe I'll play through the campaign again eventually. I bought that game on DVD unless I'm very mistaken, though I think it was one of those "have disc, need Steam anyway"-releases that were so popular at the time. But there may be some new-old-stock out there still if you really, really want to complete the collection...

Been putting some hours into Soulmask recently. It has very similar vibes to Conan Exiles, a game I sunk a fair few hours into (and that I still occasionally play, but more as a building game ), so I'll mostly be comparing against that. At a high level they are very similar, end up in some weird place due to weird reasons and have to build/craft your way out of things, you bonk natives on the head to add them to your tribe, etc. From where I stand there's two major differences: The first one being that your main character is weaker than everyone else (stats are hard-capped below those of other NPCs), and you are, in fact, not expected to use it most of the time. This is where the titular "soulmask" comes in, you can use it to "Control" other tribesmen that you recruit, taking over their skills, inventory, gear, etc. The one downside tribesmen have is that they can die permanently (at least initially), while your PC will just respawn. The second one is that Tribe management is much more involved than in Conan. Tribesmen are much more active, and in fact much more along the lines of what I wished Conan Exiles had when I started playing it: you can assign them various tasks and they'll go out and do them. If you assign them to logging they'll go out to the area you assigned them to chop wood, grabbing an axe from storage if they don't have one, for crafting they'll run around collecting materials from chests to then craft the things you queued up. The downside of this situation is that you have to rely on AI pathing, so being creative with base placement/interior may not be the best of ideas. I had the great idea to build up on a cliff, with the result that my tribesmen often get stuck at the base of said cliff instead of pathing around. There's still some limitations I wish there weren't, for example they won't repair their gear when it breaks, instead they'll toss it and grab new stuff from chests if they can, otherwise they'll just start idling. Overall having a good time and probably worth checking out if you enjoy(ed) Conan Exiles.

Well, there's a fun bug where occasionally a VLRT (Very Low Risk Target) space-combat mission sends you to go kill someone on foot at a Hathor location, which is rather a big PvP event. Managed to take out my target (space ship vs guy with an AR on a rooftop kinda went the way you'd expect it to go...), but I also managed to get caught on a pole and crash Dying in a crash is kinda rare nowadays, so I ended up stranded in a not-so-friendly location with hostile NPC and shoot-first-ask-questions-never players. I had noticed there were vehicles parked. Some seemed to be part of the location so they weren't locked, so I grabbed an MTC and started driving around trying to find a ship that could get me off-moon. Unfortunately all the "non-player" ships turned out to be Furies, and those don't have a Quantum Drive, so they can't really get me much of anywhere. I also got second thoughts about grabbing the MTC over the Fury as the driving physics aren't great, to put it mildly. Eventually I found an abandoned (if not, sorry) Reliant (Tana, I think). I picked it's door lock by shooting it with a LMG (as you do) and flew back to Lorville on Hurston as that was the closest major city. I tried to find the city gates so I could park outside and walk in, as I wasn't quite sure how security would react to me flying a stolen ship (I'm not really in the habit of stealing ships...), but I couldn't find them despite flying the whole circumference of Lorville, so I ended up trying my luck at the spaceport after all. And lo-and-behold, after hailing them and asking for a hangar I was just granted landing rights, no questions asked. Seems a bit broken, but I'm taking it... Landed the girl, but alas, you can't keep stolen ships so when I called up another ship she went "poof". (fun fact, the Reliant-series "transforms" into a vertical configuration in flight, very reminiscent of certain recent Star Wars ships, like this: This shouldn't be too surprising as the person who created the concepts for many of these early ships, David Hobbins, ended up doing concepts for Star Wars as well)

Been bouncing around a bit, there were some events in Warframe, so went through those and hit Legendary Rank 4 now. Haven't really played much KC:D after the horrible broken "spy on the camp" situation, but I did finally kick off the Theresa romance. Been playing some Stellaris, ran into some interesting situations, like when the Crisis spawned right next to a Fallen Empire and got absolutely crushed (600k strength fleets, wowzie). Didn't manage to win that game as I wasn't able to reach the Fallen Empire's score in time. Sad times. Kinda starting to "get" some of the 4.0 changes so I might try and play one of the Crisis paths for my next game, probably the tech rush one as "wide turtle tech rush" is my default playstyle anyway... Went through my gamelog to see what unfinished business I still had and turns out I stopped playing DOOM 2016 on the last boss, so cleared that so I can finally cross that one off the list (and free up some disk space).

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.