marelooke

Given that it's been a little bit over three years now, I think it's appropriate to bring this up again in this thread... RIP Kirill.

It's System Shock 3 in all but name, and it certainly matches (and surpasses) SS games in many aspects. Can't really get much better than that. Couldn't stand combat on my first playthrough either, I'm loving it now tho. Turned out I was just doing things wrong. Remember, killing everything is not the goal of the game, especially in areas you've already explored - and avoiding opponents is actually really easy. And for every situation where you point a gun at a baddie and shoot said baddie, there's an alternate solution which is way faster and easier. The direct combat is difficult (and annoying) to make sure you understand that direct combat is a waste of time and resources, for the most part. Also I seem to remember hearing killing things results in more hostility from the enemies. Iow, the more pacifist you play the easier it is to stay that way (ofcourse, that's hearsay, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true in subtle ways, tbh, like enemy detection ranges). There also aren't really any respawns, not in the sense other games have them. (Some) areas do get repopulated after a while though (which kinda makes sense) but never by truly hard enemies and always after some time has passed (so running back and forth through an area doesn't get you fighting the same mooks over and over, whereas returning to an area after hours might result in new enemies having wandered in) And if you exploit the weaknesses of the enemies you can kill everything quiet handily. I killed every single Typhon I encountered in my first playthrough (except you-know-who), though I'll admit that some were "a bit" more of a pain than others. Just DO itTM The game really is great.

Very fair point. And although many here like Prey I seem to remember that it didn't sell quite well enough, at least initially so whether we'd get any DLC was up in the air for a very long time (well, until pretty recently, in fact)

It should be an option if you click the "Select Mode" button in the bottom right. I think you only need a Segment to be able to use Archwing in the Plains of Eidolon (and then you still need to build the Gear items to be able to call it down). I'm starting to see why you were the first person that came to my mind when I saw that game in my suggestions on Steam...

Btw, there's a "Gift of the Lotus" alert up now, you really want to do the Orokin Reactor (or was it a Catalyst?) one at least as you can normally only get these with Platinum (40p for one I think). It's a Mobile Defense mission on Venus, should be fairly doable to solo and if not that going public shouldn't be much of an issue either. These alerts tend to run for 24h after a Devstream fwiw and pretty much always give either an Orokin Catalyst (aka "blue potato") or an Orokin Reactor (aka "gold potato") which double the mod capacity of either a weapon or a Warframe/Sentinel/Kavat/Kubrow, respectively. On another note: I tried that Valkyr specter a few more times, with a Latron Wraith I could indeed blap it before it went into Hysteria (or did much of anything, really), with my Excalibur loadout I managed to shoot it to an inch of its life and then just blinded it until it became vulnerable again so I could finish it off. Powers didn't do much to it when in Hysteria though, so I guess its either murdering it before it goes into Hysteria, making sure it can't, like with your Hydroid tactic, or surviving until Hysteria runs out.

I'm MR24 at the moment. I've been playing since not too long into open beta (started on 14 December 2013, only reason I know that is because it came up in a forum argument very recently ). Not that MR means that much anymore, if you throw enough money at it you can pretty much buy your way to high Mastery Ranks pretty quickly. One of the downsides of the trade system combined with the Void changes. I'm not exactly an expert in all parts Warframe though, after the Void changes and the introduction of Riven mods I've not really kept up with the changes as much and I mostly stick to the game modes I enjoy most, those being mobile endless modes like Survival and Excavation. That said feel free to shoot any questions you might have my way and I'll try to answer as best I can as I've at least dabbled in most things that require a coordinated group (aka: I know zilch about the now removed Trials or fighting Eidolon). As an aside I'm not sure if you play mostly solo or not (I played solo for a quite some time when I started out) but public games give quite a bit more affinity due to affinity being shared among the team as long as people stay in affinity range of each other (there's an icon that tells you in affinity range of how many other players you are)

It pretty much tanked DOOM's modding scene in spite of the game providing you with decent modding tools from the getgo, so I'd hope Bethesda would have learned. ... Or, y'know, not.Honestly, I hope this happens here as well. The only reason why their games keep staying alive that long is because of mods on the pc. If they are gone, Bethsoft should finally be able to feel the impact. I am sure the consoles will make up for it on their bottom line. Though, I agree that this decision will have ramifications on the PC front. IMHO, Enderal is an example of why I own Skyrim. That is why modding is great. Also, if they keep trying to elicit control over modders there is the long shot of a small company building a game engine and game with mods in mind to take advantage of the vacuum. Which would force Bethesda to up their game and give us a solid TES/FO competitor. Bethesda's mods have been their major strength on pc. As I cant say it is their game design, combat, or story telling. I do think this is a mistake. It's a mistake they have been aiming at for a long while. So, I'm not surprised. I'm not so sure consoles will make up for it. They back-pedalled pretty darn fast last time they tried this idea. I think they're hoping they can get away with it since it's a multiplayer game (so they hope arguments like "balance" and "won't anyone think of the children?" will hold) and not a "true" Fallout 5 and that this way they can hopefully ease their consumers into the idea for TES VI/Fallout 5. Given that it's the same engine I'm not so sure the modding community will go along with it and if the modders don't fall for it then they had better release something pretty darn polished compared to the worse and worse quality they've been pushing out (because modders will fix it for free, right? Maybe not this time, Beth...) Given that I'm probably not the only one thinking that that is what Bethesda is thinking (Greed is a pretty predictable demon) I wouldn't be surprised if some other companies are seriously considering whether they can release something very moddable in the timeframe given (~2 years) in an attempt to steal bethesda's lunch, breakfast and dinner. It's not like the technical quality needs to be that great, I mean, they're competing with Bugthesda and given a good enough modding platform the modders *will* fix it... As for my personal opinion: if there's anything I wasn't waiting for it's a multiplayer Fallout game.

Well damn, that sounded like fun so I went back there with basically whatever I had equipped: Gara, Hek, Lato and Dual Kamas. Guess they buffed these Specters as I remember basically one shotting all of them from across the room when they released the junction system so I was kind of expecting to do the same (DE doesn't go back to old systems all that often and if they do it's usually a full rework...). 4 shots of the Hek from the other side of the room took off (only) half her health, then she went into Hysteria which was a weeee little bit of a problem as Gara doesn't really have much in the way of offensive abilities (you can use her 1 to explode her 4 but that didn't seem to harm the Specter). So I kind of just trapped her with mirrors (which unfortunately seemed to break her AI as after that she sort of just stood there) until Hysteria ran out. Then one close up shot of the Hek sorted that out. I daresay I was pleasantly surprised (and slightly scared once she went into Hysteria which makes her pretty much invulnerable...). Time to go run through all of those Junctions again. Maybe with just an Excalibur, Braton Mk1, Lato and Skana (= the original starter weaponry, though I might grab a regular Braton over the Mk1, or just primed versions of it all as the differences with regular gear isn't that big and I at least have those properly modded)... I wonder if a long range precision rifle would have made a difference (thinking Latron series here). I mean, the Hek has pretty insane range, but it's still a shotgun... Hmm... I love these war stories, they reignite some of the passion from when I was levelling and give me some goals to aim for (that aren't just ranking up the next weapon or frame...)

Nonsense, of course you bring the crossbow. How else would you squeak your opponents into all those carefully staged environmental hazards just for something to go horribly wrong and kill you instead!? By throwing objects?

I didn't see the mod related stuff or the leak mentioned around here (nor in the E3 thread) just speculation based on other rumours. Figured at least the mod related stuff would be interesting to mention...

They actually react to all movement, so just throwing a random piece of junk in their general direction will set them off. While it works a lot better in microgravity, it'll save your butt (and ammo) on the station as well. Exactly, I probably should have mentioned that. But given that the crossbow is only really useful in very very few situations using it for Cystoids is a very viable tactic (then again, just throwing junk allows you to just not bring the crossbow along, freeing up inventory space).

Oh yea, that was a pain. On the other hand, it was that room where I found that when you use the power to eliminate PSI abilities from Technopaths, their turrets do indeed all drop. I also found that when you shoot said Technopaths with a GLOO gun while they're defenseless, they're going to freeze and fall down to their deaths. That was a fun discovery. I mainly found out they have a longer range on their powers than the player does. I also found out that having the Gloo you stand on being shot out from under you is...not good By human I mean "human neuromonds only" not "no neuromods" ("No Needles"), just so that is clear I can't really remember having much problems with resource management, exploiting the weaknesses of the enemies helps a load with resource conservation though. And some of them just aren't worth fighting (especially early on) if you can just skip them (like the Weaver in the GUTS). I also don't think I ever bothered killing the big guy in my human only playthrough, just not worth the ammo (only drops alien material anyway, which you don't really need anyway), hiding for 3 minutes each time does get annoying though. Resource conservation tip: the foam crossbow is great against Cystoids, certainly never waste bullets on them, use the Gloo gun if you don't have the crossbow (or don't have it on you). Also: stun gun, upgrade asap. That said, I finished my alien only playthrough and I actually got a better ending than last time... That leaves five achievements to be had ("No Needles", "Awkward Ride Home" and "I and It" being the major ones, then there's "Escape Velocity" and "Mimic Massacre" left as well). Awkward Ride home seems really interesting (and evil) to pull off, though given my inability to be that kind of cruel, even in a videogame, I'm not quite sure I should even attempt it (I also think it implies "I and It")...

Sooo, Fallout 76, apparently there's been some leaks from a reliable source (predicted title last year already). Knowing that MxR's videos aren't exactly everyone's cup of tea, I'll summarize: it's still going to be an RPG, no battle royale, Rust like or anything emphasis on building and improvised weapons rather than customizing weapons (whatever that means) voiced protagonist is back (tbh, I ended up not minding the female voice actress much, she did an ace job, too bad about the ****ty script and dialogue system, but no word on the latter one so far) groundwork for FO5 which is already in the works apparently no modding outside of the creation club If that last one is true then Bethesda is really trying to sink its own ship. Full video:

Just leaving this here: FO4 might have been quite the evolution, but polished? Hell no. I mean sure if you compare to F:NV but then pretty much everything looks polished (especially if you take into account the launch state), but I'd argue FO3 was easily more polished from a purely technical PoV than FO4 (and I'd toss in Skyrim too as being way more polished than FO4).

Oh I've just finished the alien powers run (I'm now on human-only, genicidal run to wrap the game up completely. Maybe.) Anyway, I've picked the hardest difficulty (in which the game forces you to experiment a bit more and dig deeper into its mechanics so it just generally ended up feeling easier than normal, funnily enough, by not letting you get away with stuff that doesn't work) and it did feel easier than when I was trying to avoid most alien powers on my first run - you can instantaneously take control of both organic and mechanical enemies (yes, temporarily, but it's enough to either just bugger off or weaken everyone sufficiently), as well as shut them down (the power that simply lets you turn off alien psychic powers is just massively overpowered, turning both the mind-cotrolly aliens and machine-controlly aliens into utter jokes). And, just to make you even more powerful, you have a shield that makes you immune to damage. Sure, you can't hack and repair, but vast majority of content has alternate routes leading towards it. Inventory space is limited, that's true enough - but the PSI hypo thingies are rather cheap to craft, to the point where I didn't really have to limit myself in using said powers towards the end of the game. Yes, usually it's not a problem, though I've run out on a few occasions, mostly due to long stretches without crafting stations (I was out of PSI hypos after the entire Power Plant segment as the only functioning crafting station in that region is in the Cargo Bay, gotta say getting out was...interesting). Currently I'm out of organic material to craft with (I think, the leftmost stuff in the crafting station). But I've taken care of you-know-who and have about 20 hypos left so I'm pretty confident I'm good until the end of the game. I must say that the Machine Mind power did indeed turn all the robots into a minor nuisance (especially given how cheap of a power it is), though given their damage output even getting clipped hurt pretty bad. The alien power shutdown power is indeed pretty darn powerful. For regular Typhon the stun gun is pretty much equivalent, but for some of the harder ones (Telepaths and Weavers) the power is indeed a seriously huge advantage. Finding all the altnernate routes was serious fun, though they were often more time consuming or dangerous than the "normal" route (I mean, climbing out of the reactor room with the Gloo gun was definitely slower/harder/deadlier than just repairing the elevator... ) I'd need to do a no-powers and kill-everything run to wrap everything up (and a few combat achievements, apparently haven't managed to kill a bunch of mimics fast enough yet, among a few others) but I'm not really sure I'm up for that. Don't forget the time slowing psi power that's also exclusively in the human skill tree. One point is all you need to turn yourself into an unstoppable death god on demand. I think I used that once, for the achievement...

Picked up my Prey "alien only" playthrough with the DLC hopefully dropping soon. I swear the people saying that the alien powers are overpowered must be combining them with human ones, because this is well harder than my "human only" playthrough (on that note, I'm not even considering "No needles", that's just masochism): no inventory space, no ability to hack or repair anything, no way to upgrade any weapons past "peashooter" level and alien material to craft with is scarce as well as the ability that gives you more materials is in one of the human skill trees as well... Either way, I'm well past halfway now:

I got The Sexy Brutale from a Gog sale

Honestly, if you're spending a lot of time on Fallout 4, it probably did a lot of stuff right as well. One does not preclude the other. The reason I'm spending time with it is because modders managed to salvage quite a bit of the broken mess Bethesda left them. Meaning F4 is still a good platform for modding. Fallout 4, unmodded, to me, is unplayable (I tried and I gave up until I could get all DLC in a sale). And I've enjoyed (and completed) both Fallout 3 and F:NV without mods (as well as Skyrim, for that matter). The Metacritic User Score of 55 tells me that most people do not mod their games to make them function somewhat acceptably.

So we're getting a new Fallout before a new Elder Scrolls game? Weird. Then again, Fallout 4 (even though I'm spending a lot of time with it) is a massive trainwreck, there's very little I can think of that isn't broken in some major way (shooting mechanics, and even there the AI cheats, unless dodging bullets from an undetected enemy counts as "normal" behaviour)

I daresay there's a bit of a difference between funding "a game" and trying a new concept like Star Citizen (well, the concept isn't new, but actually trying to build it clearly is). Of course the reason something like Star Citizen has never been tried is because of the massive investments needed coupled with the risk of threading new ground. Few companies have the clout to pull it off, and as usual, those that *could* won't because they'd rather produce the same game over and over again instead of risking burning themselves trying something new. As long as Chris Roberts manages to produce enough of what he's promised at a somewhat acceptable quality level he is likely to win big (and given how the game is basically playable I wouldn't say he is that far off). Then we might also see the likes of EA trying to copy the concept (and simplify it for the masses) as then it's proven to be working (and in demand), "borrowing" the lessons learned from Star Citizen while throwing much bigger budgets at it.

Never cared for EverQuest Next, at all. EverQuest 2 was a pretty great game though and could still have been if Sony hadn't just invested the minimum to keep a viable playerbase and not a cent more. It had a great setting, a huge amount of lore, lots of actual roleplaying mechanics (like multiple languages that you had to somehow learn. Having to speak to a Dragon and then the super long questchain just to learn Draconic so I could actually *talk* to that Dragon, because no way in hell an ancient evil dragon would bother to speak some lesser race language... Or hell, just gossip about a guildmate with them there knowing they don't speak Fae...) and a huuuge amount of content built up over the years. Hell it actually had literal puzzle dungeons, and also just regular dungeons with loads of puzzles in them, to top it off it had a pretty great system to keep "max level" players playing lower level content by allowing them to lower their level temporarily. In my mind there's a very good reason why we don't speak about MMORPGs anymore in the context of any of the "big ones": because they ain't. MMOActionAdventures, sure, but RPG? Nah. On that note (and in some actual news, so we stay on topic ). The company that bought Sony Online Entertainment (and as such EQ, EQ2 and the rest of the furniture), Daybreak Games is in some seriously dubious waters as the company that supposedly bought Daybreak has had its assets frozen by the US government. So depending on what's what it is possible that the SOE franchises end up either disappearing or for sale once again, in which case I hope someone willing to turn the games around is picking them up (or just let them die, which seems preferable to the treatment EQ2 was getting from Daybreak, imho). Anyway, article here.

If only they hadn't neglected EverQuest and then sold it to those...those...ugh

Didn't most of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. team end up elsewhere by now. So it's basically a game using the name but made by different people? Or am I getting that wrong? Not sure if I should be excited or scared right now, so I'll just go for both.

Phoenix Point target release date pushed back to June 2019 (source) I expect this to slide some more but if that means they can give us a quality experience like we've seen in the first backer alpha then I'm all for it.

The combat is worse because it isn't challenging at all. Combat in PoE 1 just can't hold my interest. It seems just convoluted for the sake of it. Lots effects that might or might not work and then there's that annoying "engagement" mechanic to top it all off. If they'd put some of these "hard" bosses somewhere out of the way (see: Kangaxx) instead of on story paths I'd just skip them because, unlike Kangaxx (and the Unseeing Eye and their ilk) I really don't think these encounters (or the combat mechanics) are enjoyable. I might just take it down yet another notch to Story Mode in hopes that that will allow me to mop up Raedric and the Adra Dragon without too much effort. If PoE 2's combat is similar then it being easier at least might allow me to power past it. Oh, I didn't finish it the first time around. Apparently I got stalled at undead Raedric and lost interest.