marelooke

You confused me, and I have lots of hours into this game. Hmm, I wonder how ma... *checks Steam* ... errr, let's talk about something else... Anyway, marking these as spoilers in case you want to discover things for yourself, since they concern specific locations/mechanics (that you may not even be aware exist at this point, depending on how much the marketing material spoiled) With regards to the Stygian stronghold: With regards to packing up and moving: That said, after playing...this many hours...I generally run with a mod that removes the level cap so weight limits aren't that much of a concern, and when I build a new base there's generally little reason to drag all that many things along.

New Star Citizen patch dropped (3.22), and the thing that excites me most is the new and upgraded ... hairstyles I did look for a screenshot with the old hair, but all I got are ones from character creation, or NPCs, because pretty much nobody, including yours truly, took off their helmets like, ever... and at least for now many people actually do. It's kinda crazy how much better all characters look by just pimping the hair... Really interested to see what the impact of the new character creation tool will be as it will add even more options (and not just for the hair ), what we got now is just a little teaser, compared to what they showcased at Citizen Con. If nothing else the ability to actually export/import your character so you don't have to re-do things every major patch will be very welcome...

Was just flying around, looting outposts for free armour/weapons, you know, as you do When I noticed someone had parked a Reclaimer on a hill outside, leading to some pretty eery atmosphere... Especially with Crusader in the night sky... Felt the urge to go running around trying to make better screenshots, but I couldn't be sure the Cutter parked outside the outpost, or the Reclaimer itself were unmanned, and I didn't feel like getting shot. So I just circled the area a bit and decided to just peace out after a while.

Haven't really been gaming much outside of a lot of The Division 2 (crashiest game I've had the honour of playing in a while), and the ongoing raiding in FF XIV (finally cleared the final savage boss and got my BIS set for the first time ever. Party!). Aside from that I've been mostly poking at Star Citizen after I sorta lost interest in Elite Dangerous since it feels like it's in maintenance mode on top of being actively new-player hostile (think I've mentioned that part before, but it's been a while ) It's one of the things I really enjoy about Star Citizen, there's an out-of-MMO component (Arena Commander) where you can practice against AI (can also play with/against players without having to deal with...MMO-things), so you don't blow all your starting money on rookie mistakes, like having no idea what the flight controls are. Don't know if I mentioned it before, but I sprang for a HOSAS (dual stick) setup and it's been a game changer, really. Recently I also added face-tracking to look around during flight, which was another game-changer. Unlike what the manufacturers of stuff like the Tobii Eye Tracker would want you to believe for this purpose all you need is a halfway decent webcam where refresh rate and ability to discern things in the dark are the most important (unless you like to play in bright rooms, I guess). Personally I got a Nexigo N660P (as it supports 60fps, which is more important for tracking than resolution) which I use with OpenTrack/AITrack and it's been pretty great. Bonus is that you now also have a halfway decent webcam for...webcam things It does measurably impact CPU usage though, which I doubt is really a problem with any modern CPU, but figured it worth mentioning.

Been a little while, IAE2953 (Intergalactic Aerospace Expo) has come and gone, so got to mess around with lots of ships during the free fly... Alien ships: Human stuff: One of my favourites, the RSI Constellation Andromeda: One of the things that's really hard to convey is the sense of scale, some of these things are just massive:

Just casually flying my Tie Interceptor Fury over Hoth Microtech, taking in the sights.

How's the later game? Enemies feel quite a bit more bullet-spongy at low levels (I started a new character), and given that there's level scaling now that's a bit of a worry. Also seems to be impossible to sneak up on cyberpsychos now? Has anyone managed? If so I guess my pure stealth build is out of the window... Fighting them sure as hell isn't an option early game when you're all in on Cool. Unless they get stuck, of course... Do get a lot more income from jobs, so that's nice, shouldn't be too hard to pay off Vic before The Heist from the looks of it. New police system seems worse, for the way I play anyway, than before, which is a merc, not a gta-thug/cyberpsycho. Seen some pretty epic shootouts and police just ignores them entirely. They're also everywherel, and here I thought the NCPD was understaffed...

Just got to the point where you are forced into in Starfield, I'm sure they give you absolutely no choice in the matter because of some story reason that the writers couldn't be bothered find a more creative way to deal with. Keeping my "called it" cared handy. Ugh

Goodbye Port Olisar o7 Crusader, as seen from Port Olisar in 2018: More or less the same spot in 2023 at night: You'd come up to the pad after going up the stairs from this walkway: To be greeted by this view: Getting to your ship (an Aurora MR, aka "small starter ship") with Crusader in the "background": Nowadays you can actually fly down to the planet, to Cloud City Orison: Which looks especially amazing at night:

I think that's why most MMOs stopped actually messing with the world state and generally use areas frozen in time. It was pretty bad for new, and old, player retention alike. (see WoW: Cataclysm and GW2 with their early living world seasons)

I got wind that Port Olisar, Star Citizen's oldest space station and the original starting location before there were any planets or moons to land on, is getting removed with the next major update (3.20), so I dusted of my HOSAS to visit the OG one last time. Spawning at PO in the "Habs", walking through the station to the airlock, hearing the sound deaden when the airlock cycles, stepping outside and walking to the open landing pad the ship sits on, with the absolutely massive gas giant that is Crusader looming overhead is a core gaming memory for me. Port Olisar so far is the only place in a game that managed to inspire that sense of awe by actually driving home the ridiculous scale of the universe. The station needed an overhaul, but it is a shame that the features that made it memorable, the spacewalk and open pads, are being lost in the process. o7 Port Olisar, you will be missed.

My opinion of Starfield is going downhill the more I play it. I've gone from "Eh, a 7/10, maybe?", to "No more than a 6/10", so far. The UX is just atrocious, and clearly built around a very limited set of buttons ("press and hold" to exit the map, really?) to make it controller friendly, but they couldn't even be consistent in which button does what across UI elements (Tab? Hahaha, no, this time it is Escape). Needing a mod to disable the obnoxious "toggle to sprint" is mind boggling and, in my mind anyway, a clear indication the UX really was built around controllers. In summary Bethesda clearly learned nothing from the terrible UX of Skyrim and/or Fallout 4, and even managed to make it worse, somehow... Which brings us to lock picking which is now also much more annoying. Thankfully someone already modded it out. But can we, please, stop these obnoxious mini-games and just go back to skill checks, like in New Vegas? Especially for things you have to do every five steps? In a similar vein, outposts seem worse than the Fallout 4 implementation (outside buildings, like solar panels, don't snap to a grid, so things look like they are just haphazardly thrown around. But even inside decoration is an exercise in futility as the "rotate" granularity is abysmal, so aligning anything to a wall is borderline impossible). Additionally finding a good, resource rich, landing zone on a planet is just a dice roll since the granularity of the map isn't good enough to actually land where you intended, so you think you're landing on the intersection of 3, or 4, desirable resources but after touchdown one of them is nowhere to be found. I mean that spot may exist somewhere on that "the size of Fallout 4's map"-map that you can only traverse on foot. Which they clearly did to try to hide the inability of their engine to stream in entire planets by making it unreasonable to traverse the entire thing (well, until modders mod in vehicles or other faster ways of getting around, anyway). Especially since they're mostly empty and things are 700/1400m apart, so trudging on foot through vast tracts of nothingness to get to randomly generated events (to be fair, some of them are pretty good). Maybe if reviewers would start picking on the lazy choices Bethesda made instead of praising them to the moon for doing nothing new they'd actually try to make a better game next time. But for some reason Bethesda consistently releasing mediocrity is praiseworthy. Or am I simply unreasonable in expecting that if they make the same game every 10 years or so, it would at least have improved over its predecessor in some tangible way? Especially when they somehow think it's worth charging substantially more for it? As usual, underneath the technical/UX disaster is a decent enough game, but well, we are, once again, going to need the modders to do what Bethesda couldn't be bothered to, which is to actually make it enjoyable to play. At least by then the price should've come down, hopefully...

Yeah, got similar vibes. Feels like a mix of Fallout 4 and No Man's Sky. Game's "fine" so far, which means it's better than Fallout 4, which I couldn't stand until I started modding it. So far it certainly doesn't feel like it's worth the insane asking price, as far as I'm concerned.

Patch 1.63 released. Lots of fixes, the one that stands out to me is this one: Chippin' In - It is now possible to examine all of the clues on Ebunike before becoming detected. That one really bothered me as you were missing out on some significant lore on Adam Smasher due to this bug.

Summary of the expansion + general game updates coming with it shamelessly stolen from Reddit: Trailer's already linked in the general news thread, but figured it may warrant some more discussion and this seems like the more appropriate place. My only real worry is that they'll give in to the Cyber GTA crowd a bit too much, which would be especially bad news for the next game. While the map being kinda dead once you're done with the story was a bit of a shame I'm not sure gamey sounding random activities will make it better. But we'll see how they manage to spin it, probably should have a bit of faith in CDPR on this one. Similar thoughts about the police system: if you play as a merc, and not a (GTA-style) thug you wouldn't exactly interact with it very often, at least imho so I can't say I particularly care about it being overhauled. Looks like it'll be a busy end of year with Starfield supposedly also releasing.

Timberborn I've played, and completed (minus DLC) Terminator Resistance. Decent little shooter, makes you actually fear the Terminators, even though they're dumb as bricks. It's not a game with a massive budget so don't expect too much depth. Most annoying things were a few pretty obvious spelling mistakes and a single CTD (on a bossfight...). Worth it on a sale, solid 6/10, maybe a 7/10 if you're really into Terminator. Started playing Airborne Kingdom after that. City builder where your city floats. Difficulty seems to ramp up slowly (so far) as you basically scavenge resources from the ground below, but you're burning through them increasingly quickly as your population grows, which may lead to some interesting logistical challenges down the line.

Been a while since I played it, but it was really fun then, at least. Rather relaxing game.

I have. The teleporters do have their drawbacks, which I've spoiler tagged in case you want to find out for yourself: I'd say that the locations the Map Room connects to generally are still useful, especially since some you can't build close to (like the Archives), but having only Map Room that can be reached with a teleport is probably sufficient. They also just allow for much freer base location choice since being near an Obelisk doesn't really matter at all anymore. Especially nice for those among us that don't really use mounts... Obviously, they're absolutely fantastic on Siptah because no map room there at all, and rare materials are anything but on Siptah

Made it!

Been swapping between Conan Exiles, and Elite Dangerous (since Star Citizen 3.18 is still a disaster area). In Elite I made the dumb decision to fly to Colonia, the furthest out inhabited system, as a rookie. It was a learning experience, to be sure, made a lot of bank too, but really dreading flying back to the Bubble... The universe is big, it turns out. Who'd a' thunk? I've also started flying with HOSAS. Just soooo much more enjoyable, and I got used to movement surprisingly quickly. Star Citizen uses the 6DoF a lot more actively though, so it will be interesting to see how I manage there. Also, manual landings in SC... In Conan Exiles I've picked up a character I created a long time ago but didn't do much with[*]. Decided to build in the Savannah as starting location and started building a main base on the volcano (near the hidden exit), linking both with a portal. Bit of a shame that even though you can build up pretty darn high you literally have no view due to all the clouds Also the size of the map room is getting really annoying (only took, errr, all these years for me to get annoyed by it? ), creates some annoying constraints if you're trying to build in weird spaces. I wonder if there's any mods that just shrink it down a bit. The in-game store is also starting to really annoy me. Funcom always claimed DLC were locked down for modders so the assets don't get stolen (which is why there's no mods to improve/extend Siptah, for example), but now they're selling extension building pieces to the already very expensive DLC at absurd prices on their in-game store At least they finally fixed most of the snap points on the DLC building pieces. Really, I love Conan Exiles, but I'm not touching that new Dune survival game from Funcom due to how absolutely disgusting their treatment of CE has been. Anyway, goal-wise I've been going through the new Journey steps. It seems they completely dropped guiding players through the storyline of the Exiled Lands, which is a real shame. The new system is just a bunch of tutorials and doesn't really guide people towards any of the story stuff at all, omitting some of the really important parts for the plot entirely (eg. some story-related dungeons aren't in any of the steps). Really hope they revise these, uncovering the story was one of the main things I liked about CE compared to most of these types of games (like Ark, for example), but some of the steps are really...obtuse so the guidance of the Journal was helpful at quite a few points. [*] I created a little tool to be able to switch between chars on the same save db, or create a new char even. There's tools that do the same out there as well, but the ones I found weren't updated in ages, or not FLOSS. Regardless it can quite easily be done manually if you know some SQL.

Sorcery is kinda neat, though I can't say I use any of the sorcery spells much. The teleporter is great though for serial base builders (guilty as charged). Corrupted health traits are also pretty neat (immunity to status effects baby!). The stamina loss when corrupted is kind of a severe drawback though. Still not entirely convinced the corrupted traits are really worth giving up half your stamina for. Journey is nice. The idea is good, the implementation is... Funcom, I guess. For example: it doesn't update when you do things out of order, or when you're not on that specific journey (eg. going to Sepermeru and are in two different Journeys, even though they're in the same place and are most likely done at the same time). Might not be a big deal in general for new players, more of a nuisance for old hats, possibly. the very first journey steps only work when you do what they expect at the point they expect you to do it (eg. if it says you gotta craft a mace/club, it has to be a stone one or it won't register) Haven't done all of them yet so I don't know if there's still journeys for all the lore stones, I'd be a bit sad if there weren't though. If there are, and there'd be more direction to finding all of them, I'd be all for it though since I never managed without outside help, even after playing the game for all these years now... I noticed the intro area changed when I went to try and do the journey steps. Guess I have an excuse to add yet another character to my save... As for the crafting hammer, I like it for general building, I don't like it as much for more specific items (like decorations and crafting stations), because those often require very specific/rare components and having to lug those around is often more annoying than just churning them out at a bench and then placing them (imho). Then again, since building no longer gives xp ( ) might as well enter creative mode and not bother with all the material gathering, I suppose One thing I'm noticing, since I'm on a fairly fresh character now, is that Isle of Siptah, after the massive nerfs to it, is now significantly easier than Exiled Lands. Bit of a shame that, in my opinion. It's also getting kinda ignored in some of the new events (eg. current battlepass-related event cannot be done on Siptah). Sure, makes sense lore-wise, but still ...

I've been kicked out of my own, private, Conan Exiles server on my own, local, network, multiple times because the game couldn't reach the Funcom servers for a split second (my network connection is generally rock solid, which I know because I have a few permanent connections that don't handle interruptions well) [*] Or when Funcom messes up (twice, so far) and the authentication servers are down and I can't play on my own, local, private server, either, sometimes for days... I seem to recall it being a problem in other games as well, UT3 while playing the campaign maybe? Or maybe one of the Borderlands games? Not sure anymore. And of course, good luck trying to play any of those "always online" games while in a hotel or something. [*] This comment inspired by it happening again yesterday evening. Grmbl.

Didn't it turn out the whole leak had nothing to do with the war situation but was just an attention seeker that even tried to apply for a job at GSC after the fact? At least I saw this on the Stalker subreddit.

I recall people were unhappy large parts are underused (which I don't mind, this obsession with filling every square cm with "content" is horrible), but small is one I clearly missed. Anyway, since I can't even get into Star Citizen atm since they literally broke my character's ability to log in like a week ago with no way to do anything about it, I grabbed Elite Dangerous to get my space fix (oh, in case you were wondering how the major Star Citizen patch is going...not well ) I must say, ED is the game with the absolute worst new player experience of any game I've ever touched (and I've played some of the X games, EVE online, and, well Star Citizen). Even watching loads of videos didn't particularly clear anything up. Most are just videos about how to make massive amounts of moneyz pretending to be tutorials, and then skim over how you get the stuff you need to do so, because why would anyone watch a tutorial to get mechanics explained to them, right? There's also this obnoxious issue I already reported years ago (I tried ED once before around 2019 and ended up refunding because of this issue), that apparently it is still around (in slightly less gameplay impacting form). For some reason the game decides it knows better than you which keyboard layout you should be using. Being Belgian this means it forces an azerty layout on me, even though I didn't even have an azerty layout configured in Windows at all (which it "helpfully" rectified by adding said layout to Windows ). So yeah, can't make heads nor tails from the keybindings section, super helpful. Thankfully this is such a simple game... Somehow I did manage to get things done, since it now forces the layout at least the keys are somewhat where you'd expect them to be, but the more specialized stuff (like scanners) is a massive pain in the neck to figure out like this, even after you know what you're looking for...

I may have broken my own rule about not pre-ordering and pre-ordered S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2...