Completed The Medium, took just under 10hours, quite enjoyable for the most part. Gameplay-wise the most similar game I can think of would be SOMA, but with Resident Evil's camera/perspective (and then I'm talking about the OG)

I do wish they hadn't done the "cliffhanger" at the end though.

Game has some technical issues as well, I suffered two CTDs and it seriously stutters when switching to/from cutscenes, which kinda sucks when you need to react quickly.

If you like these types of games definitely worth playing through, though I'm not sure I'd pay the full price for it.

Poked a bit more at S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 now that 1.8.1(.1) is out and, well, feels mostly the same as before. The main difference appears to be that some mutants feel tankier again (Bloodsuckers, notably) and there's more of them in the wild (Poltergeists especially). I also have visual artifacts now, so yay for that?

Haven't found the new weapon/missions yet so no opinion on those.

Honestly, this is one of those games that the more I play it the more disappointed I get. The environments are great, but they gave up on everything else that made the original games great to get that fidelity it feels like, immersion being the main thing, but the storytelling is just bad in a lot of ways, and given that it's pretty in-your-face in this one it's kinda hard to ignore.

Just played through the SIRCAA part (again), and am now at the Noontide base

Spoiler

it's been literally hours, a day at most, since "the event", and the place has to feel deserted, but they just couldn't help themselves and slapped a mutant in there. I mean, I can get the ambush at the end, but the Bloodsucker right when you enter? That's just, ughhh 

As a side note, ambient subtitles are still broken (though slightly less than before), most of the time (by which I mean: "almost always") the first line of a dialogue doesn't get subtitled. My Ukrainian hasn't gotten any better since the last major patch so it's still really annoying.

8 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

At this point I think the worry - if one is worried - should be about AI effect shrinking/replacing jobs all over, from low-tier to upper management - not just artistic creatives.  Although with potential population replacement crisis in some countries (not enough generational babies), not having enough "replacement" workers in many areas in 40-60 years could be a serious issue in terms of companies/economy and possible restructuring of such infrastructure systems - and by then AI/robotics might help in some fashion there. Maybe it won't happen but who knows anymore. Then there will be another baby boom at some point and they'll have to make jobs again.

On the potentially bright side, 300 years from now AI could be part of what moves humanity closer to no money motivation of ST:TNG.  "You mean you don't get paid???"   Either that, or Skynet. Either or.   

Generative AI can't really replace creative jobs, because by its very nature it cannot be creative, it just regurgitates what it has learned, often in quite a mangled fashion. It can, however, be used for rapid prototyping, which as far as I can tell is also the use-case Swen is talking about.

From my perspective there's two worries about these GenAI tools:

• juniors lean on them and don't actually understand the output, thus they do not learn, or pick up entirely wrong information that they take for truth
• execs think they will be able to replace people, because that's what Gen AI companies sell, and then they'll wake up and their company is on fire. After a bunch of People lost their jobs, of course.

4 hours ago, kanisatha said:

On AI use, sorry but I am hardcore in the opposite direction from most of you. Given my strong negative views of (most) humans (nature, capability, behavior), I can't wait for highly evolved AI systems to replace humans. I especially can't wait for AI systems to replace humans as drivers given the basic inability of most humans to properly operate an automobile.

Maybe, but it will need to come from entirely different AI research, Generative AI is a dead end for that future, something even OpenAI has pretty much admitted at this point.

7 hours ago, HoonDing said:

TES VI will have AI generated NPC's,  NPC conversations and quests.

It will be total, complete, utter garbage.

Where Winds Meet has NPCs that are basically LLM bots, it sucks about as much as you'd expect it to if you've ever used the likes of ChatGPT.

They're also fairly easy to break if you're somewhat familiar with these tools (eg. by just babbling until they run out of context at which point they forget their "personality" and you can make them do pretty much anything). There's some, let's say, interesting "conversations" with NPCs out there that are often very much NSFW...

Had to be careful to avoid spoilers, had some really nice screenshots from cutscenes, but alas, major spoilers in them.

Starting the game off slowly...

The environments are gorgeous

Still does not do the location justice

GOTY

Cats, cats everywhere!

The game sure has got the vibe down

I'm sure she's angry for a reason

Think I wandered into a Tomb Raider game

Eeeeep

Yeah...so I do happen to be colourblind 

Looks like I'm slightly more powerful than a single goose, go me!

11 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

Yeah, I get it's a main aspect of the game, ofc (not a peaceful game, lol), I just meant there seemed to be at least one early (?) quest/thing where you could do it that I saw, and sometimes that means there's more like that - like the kinds of constant run/avoid speed runners might take advantage of. But I have no clue, maybe they were using some glitch to their advantage, or it was still a tutorial area with different rules or something.  It does look (story, npc) cutscene heavy but Chinese games I've tried before, it probably won't bother me much (vs. US games). I was planning on using original language/subtitles (even if text translations aren't always awesome), the Eng dialogue/dub/whatever sounds horrid.

Combat mechanics probably are a bit more than I want - I find constant parrying/dodge timing annoying/difficult AND tedious/boring vs. exciting/gratifying - but I'll probably try it at some point. If it was offline I'd just mod it but - plus re: waiting, I'm curious if they'll actually mellow out the supposed multi-multi menu nightmares a bit. they've supposedly said they're "looking at that" re: complaints.

Apparently the problem isn't just the translation, some of the lore supposedly is obtuse to the Chinese players as well per this Reddit post of a Chinese player.

The English voice acting has mostly been fine, at least with a female MC, I don't dare try Chinese since some of the text assumes Chinese, and things do get cut off occasionally, especially when it comes to on-screen tips. Though there's some weird issues sometimes like where the subtitle runs behind one step with the spoken dialogue, or the lines are assigned to the wrong person, which is hopefully less of an issue in Chinese.

I've yesterday finished the final boss we have access to for now, which seems to wrap up the Kaifeng storyline and I did have some trouble, though I managed it in one try in the end. I guess one tip for combat is to use the Healing Fan as an offhand, as well as to look into the weapon combinations in general, I found this video helpful to explain how I picked wrong initially  

 

17 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

^ Ok I finally found one of those 15+ hr videos re: the story questing  (vs long reviews/should you buys/guide to, et al).  To me it looks like most grunt combat you could mostly brute force if you felt like it, or avoid entirely (example: keep running and click on quest things fast enough to trigger cutscenes before enemies can engage), but bosses seem pretty "souls like." Lot of optional bosses one doesn't have to do, of course, too, but story bosses same mechanics. There is a story-mode difficulty and an "on screen parry prompt" option, but doesn't sound like it tones things down a lot if you're wanting to mostly story/explore.  Although they could change this later.

So think I'll wait a few months and see what they do/change with the US/international version of this game. Another one of those "wish it was/had an offline/SP version" because that aspect looks great (I'd even pay vs. free to have one).  But then they couldn't deluge you with "buy this costume" menus. Or that yacht for super whales.

Been playing this game quite a bit recently on the default/recommended difficulty but with the parry prompts enabled (which means I can pretty much forget doing anything MP related). I never made it past the first boss of Dark Souls (not my cuppa tea), but I did greatly enjoy Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, to try and give some kind of indication of where I fall. I've basically completed the major content of the first region (Qinghe), and just started on Kaifeng (second region).

Combat is rather hard to avoid, region completion relies, among other things, on finding boxes, which means you have to clear out hostile camps (chests are often locked until enemies are dead). Movement abilities tend to get disabled when you aggro enemies, so just running past usually isn't much of an option, and when it is it's generally obnoxious enough that you'd probably just want to beat them up anyway to get it over with.

The main story bosses, at least so far, have been mostly fine for me, difficulty wise, but each major region also has a region story, and the final boss of Qinghe (first region) was pretty darn brutal and took me a couple of tries.

Technically they (and the rest of the region story) are optional, but most of the storylines do appear to tie into the overarching narrative so I'd consider them very worthwhile to do. This is also why I'd recommend taking one's time exploring and at least completing the major plot lines in the region, and not just beelining the main story.

There's also optional bosses, those can be skipped entirely, though I've accidentally triggered a few due to not being aware they were there, or them being in a place that makes them really hard to avoid. That said, once beaten they do not respawn in the open world.

The lore/story is pretty interesting, but unfortunately most of the cultural nuance is lost in translation, leading to some pretty major gaps in understanding of the story for anyone not intimately familiar with Chinese culture/(folk)lore that I had to resort to Reddit to explain to me (thankfully there are Chinese players that really care and post comprehensive breakdowns of major storylines/events)

9 hours ago, kanisatha said:

I started playing BG3 about a week ago. I'm using a lot of mods, though all of them from among those available through the built-in mod manager. The most important mod being the one that gets me a 6-character party.

As I had expected, the game is okay but not amazing the way everyone likes to gush over it. It's definitely not worthy of all those 98, 99, 100 review scores it was given, calling into question the credibility of those reviewers. Among the things that I dislike are a horrible inventory system and hotbar system, poory designed UIs across the board, moving and organizing the party as a group being a huge pain in the ass, most containers in the environment being empty (and not getting clearly marked as such even after you check them), and all NPCs can be interracted with even though many dont have anything meaningful to say. Your own dialog options during conversations are often many and yet the range of different options is very limited, meaning many of the options are merely minor variations on saying the same thing.

Combat is also, as expected, rather tedious, but I can live with it from having a party of six and using low difficulty settings. But it is rather ridiculous the extent to which characters miss their attacks. I've gone through multiple rounds of combat where every single one of my six characters missed on their attack. But I'll grant this is a huge flaw of DnD and not the game per se (and why I love PoE mechanics so very much more).

Where the game does shine is in beautiful environments, and very nice character animations and cutscenes. The story is also good so far.

More to come.

There's some setting that fudges the dice and is intended to help avoid chains of bad rolls, in practice it seems to make rolls worse (or at least more "average"), turning it off seemed to at least improve things for me. May be in my head, may not be, there's been evidence collected to indicate the former, but since Larian doesn't disclose how the setting atually works and kept updating it there's no telling how accurate that evidence still is.

Anyway, may want to try turning it off (it's on by default) and see if that improves things for you, it did for me.

 

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.

2 hours ago, Hawke64 said:

I have the game and here is a screenshot of the only gameplay I have experienced:

The Paradox launcher mildly annoys me, but the firewall is handling it and the issue above is more significant. I suspect it is the usual UE5 thing (kindly, may Lumen and Nanites be gone), so I will try with Steam Deck later (not entirely sure how to install GOG games on it, but will try). 

I'd be more upset about it if I did not purchase it 5 years ago for a fraction of the current price. As is, I am just disappointed. 

---

Found the pre-rendered videos:

 

 

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

On 10/2/2025 at 12:53 AM, LadyCrimson said:

*reads about some Xbox price hike, both physical goods and now GamePass, stuff*

Even considering tariff's re: hardware, I wonder if Xbox/MS has decided if you can't afford them, you won't make them any money anyway.
I don't think it's only the price of the Gamepass hike alone - companies really need to realize there is such a thing as subscription/constant fees exhaustion. I mean, from fridges/dishwashers to cars to game/entertainment services. Enough already. Just gimmie a product, not a "service", already.

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.

On 9/25/2025 at 1:06 AM, Theonlygarby said:

I kinda get it from a creative standpoint.  It would be like making a movie and then having people want an option to remove parts they don't like.  Not a perfect example but i could see people wanting their creation to be experienced as intended.

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).

On 8/19/2025 at 7:36 PM, Theonlygarby said:

Well for one I'm not a dune fan so I think some of it is lost on me.  However I did have fun with it at first so I don't think thats the main reason.

 

I think it just has the same problems every survival building type game has, which is seemingly endless incremental upgrades, repetitive exploration and no real end goal aside from getting those little upgrades.

 

I could see having more fun if I had gaming friends I could play with.  I did have some fun with it, and it's probably something I will return to.  It just felt like it was going nowhere.

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...)

On 6/9/2025 at 7:22 PM, Katphood said:

Oh, what can I say. You can't lay on a couch with a mouse and keyboard. 😅

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

On 6/8/2025 at 2:16 PM, Mamoulian War said:

They removed it from everywhere. Thankfully I bought all of the games on GOG, before they pulled this stunt. Unfortunatelly U3 was never released there, so I am missing that one in my collection   

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:
 

Spoiler

You're supposed to poison a bandit/Cuman camp's food and destroy their arrows. The idea is to do this stealthily, either by, well, stealth, or by using a disguise (which I did), but this is simply impossible as far as the bandits are concerned. For starters, they don't sleep. Ever. And to make matters rose they literally have night vision eyes in their backs. I've had bandits that were sitting with their backs to me charge at me from across the camp when I pour poison in their food. Or from beyond the pallisade (guess they can see through solid matter too) Sleeping bandits instantly wake up. The works.

The Cumans, on the other hand, do sleep, though their guards will chase you incessantly to "question" you, forcing Speech checks every single time (until they become unpassable), or turning the whole thing in some sort of Benny Hill situation.

Anyway, I ended up giving up on doing this the immersive way by just poisoning the Cuman food, then charging through the bandit camp burning their arrows and poisoning their food, to then do the same in the Cuman camp after which I jumped the palisade, ran across the bridge and jumped onto my horse and got the hell out of dodge. The obnoxious lock-on system didn't make it easy to just run away either, but after a few tries I did finally manage.

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
 

Spoiler

 

On 3/24/2025 at 11:42 AM, Wormerine said:

edit: Finally started to getting around to giving Kingdom Come: Deliverance a go. I like it so far, though the game works really hard to reinforce how much of a dufus Henry is. What I like less is how little agency I had so far. Henry seems to get into scrapes and challenges his betters and leaves me to deal with the aftermath. I hope the game will let go of the reins soon. I really enjoy the setting though.

I shall join this club. After originally backing it I finally started a play through.

On 3/26/2025 at 1:52 PM, Wormerine said:

Thanks. Yeah, I decided to leave Ginger be for a while, and spent couple days doing other work, including(@BruceVC) taking lovely Theresa for two dates (2nd one in Tavern gave me strong Mafia "walk lady home" flashback). I got better in fighting, gained some gold, bought an actual sword, collected some bandit ears (BTW. How do they now it's a bandit ear and not someone elses? Could I slaughter a random village and collect their ears? Does it always have to be same ear, so I won't double dip with two ears per single bandit? It feels like a shaky system). I think I am ready to go back to the main story.

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

On 3/26/2025 at 5:40 PM, majestic said:

So, I, like, never having played Kingdom Come: Unwoked Incline, just went and looked up Theresa, because @BruceVC has kept mentioning her for a while now. I had certain expectations going into this image search, mostly because the aforementioned poster said that Veilguard did not cater enough to the horny incel core audience of these games.

Now, to make this comparison properly, here's one of these character models from Veilguard that doesn't cater to the horny incel core audience. Probably because of her rack size, but that I do not know for sure, because said poster refused to actually tell what it was about that game that made it unappealing for horny incels.

This is Neve in her civilian attire, i.e. in non-combat locations. Take not of the lack of anime style giant boobies.

Now, before looking up Theresa, here's what I thought I would get:

That's how Neve should look, I guess, to make the incels happy?

And this is Theresa, apparently. At least according to a quick googling.

Imagine my surprise when Theresa turned out to be a plain country bumpkin, completely unremarkable. Normal, one might say. Certainly less catered to horny incels than Neve was.

This is so confusing.

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

On 3/27/2025 at 1:50 AM, Zoraptor said:

On KCD romances..

  Hide contents

..there is one romance in KCD which is mildly cringe, but Teresa certainly ain't it.

 

The map in KCD has quest markers and Henry shows up on it, same as any modernish game. It also has fast travel and the rest of the modcons.

It only doesn't show Henry's location (or have fast travel) in hardcore mode. Which is what I'm playing. No matter how much of a crusty boomer gamer you are you wouldn't have much fun playing KCD in hardcore mode first time through.

A Women's Lot overall is a great DLC, might actually be the 2nd best I've played.

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

Spoiler

Scar, who is entirely unhinged

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.

On 2/14/2025 at 1:20 PM, Lexx said:

Seems there's only two kind of reviews for Avowed: "Super awesome!!" and "worst game ever" -- will probably play it via GamePass once it is out.

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.

On 2/11/2025 at 5:50 PM, Majek said:

Right steps, wrong feeling.  :S just not enough enemies to slaughter.

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:

Spoiler

First encounter with space cows