marelooke

Star Citizen But even that will be a few years after Half Life (2 Episode) 3, of course. We all know that's coming soon now that Valve is back to making games. Totally... Really... I think I might be stuck in the "setting myself up for disappointment" mood. Time to ask for a raise to keep the ball rolling

Those seem like unrealistic hopes. If that is what we are doing here, I would like to throw in my hopeful vote that Bethesda is re-launching Blades of Steel. Professionally settings ourselves up for disappointment, I see. Ok, I'll join: it also won't be padded with DLC that they outsource to their community through their paid-DLC programme.

Hmm, odd. Wonder how you were playing as I didn't really get bored of the game. There's also only a few areas that have actual respawns, though the station "changes" over time, so places that were clear can get repopulated due to advancing the story. Personally I played a full on human-only character stealthily killing anything hostile and I must admit that it was more fun than my pure alien playthrough (that got kinda stalled halfway-ish...). I imagine that mixing both results in an overpowered character rather quickly, taking much (all?) of the tactics out of the combat though. But yes, the Nightmare gets annoying after a while, especially since it's so big that it gets stuck everywhere so tends to hardly be a threat, just a nuisance (I hid it out each time, not worth the ammo to fight the thing if not doing the alien mod stuff). But if I'm not mistaken you get a mission that will allow you to get rid of it quickly (assuming you don't want to kill it every time) if you at least have enough alien material in you to trigger the turrets.

Looks like we might be getting Prey DLC after all: https://twitter.com/PreyGame/status/969702812912320514

True. That line really made me think twice about the game itself. I think overall Fallout 4 is a very fun game even if it's not necessarily a good RPG. Sure, there aren't many choices to be made but I like how they dared to experiment with the idea of Vaults and their purpose. It's fun to see the outcome of the experiments the government planned before the war since some of them have gone absolutely sideways with results that no one ever expected. Vault 118 was a good example of that. It's a fun game, once modded, and some of the side quests/stories are pretty good (liked the entire Nick Valentine story), but it's hard to call it a "good" game, there's just too much wrong with it (starting with a terribly bad main quest. The premise of being frozen had potential, most of it squandered) for it to deserve that rating and without mods I most likely wouldn't still be playing at all. If anything I get the feeling that Bethesda is relying more and more on modders to make their games even playable. Skyrim, for one, I found perfectly playable without any mods (and that's how I finished it first time through). My attempt at trying to play Fallout 4 without mods just made me shelve the game. We'll see when the next game comes out whether this is a trend ...

That was a fun quest. I also liked where DiMA questions your humanity because you can't remember anything from before the start of the game. Existential philosophical question with a sauce of self-awareness.

Still mucking about in Fallout 4. Kind of impressive how much time I've sunk into this game given how it manages to do pretty much everything it does badly (but praise where praise is due: the shooting mechanics are much improved compared to previous instalments). Except for allowing modders to pick up most of the slack, I guess... I'm pretty sure that I've spent at least half my game time tinkering with settlements. Hell, currently my main reason to venture outside of a settlement is when I run out of one resource or another (aluminium has been a favourite lately, but I've actually managed to run through my entire stock of steel as well...). It's kind of funny how addictive the settlement system is even though it's actually pretty broken and almost entirely carried by mods (like the rest of the game I suppose, though the story doesn't qualify as "fixable", unfortunately) On the note of settlements, I found a mod that just queues up all those annoying attacks so I can deal with them when it suits me. Pretty huge QOL improvement, that...

I totally didn't read "obesely gigantic hammer", nope. I also didn't almost fall off my chair laughing when I realized that I did not read that... Got bit bored with Far Harbor so I went back to the one thing that is challenging and at some point will kill you in Fallout 4. The true endgame. There were no scrub dares to go. I am, of course, talking about building settlements! I might also have fallen about 5 or so stories down while building my vault. Buildings can defy gravity in this game, but it appears living pixels can't. Ouch.

Still playing Sim Settlements 4 as far as singleplayer games are concerned. Decided to grab Vault 88, figuring out how to use those building pieces is turning out to be a pain. So far I haven't gotten any settlement to 100 happiness. Sanctuary is now hovering around 91% though (seems to go up/down by 1% for no discernible reason) and I have quite a few others that are in the mid to high 80s. Couple of things I noticed: * need maximum charisma to be able to fill your settlement to capacity (or get Settlers from elsewhere, like some of those traders that you can get to join) * non-humanoid inhabitants are capped on happiness, so getting rid of them is beneficial (eg. workshop droids, Ada, Strong,...) for the happiness score * companion interaction with settlements appears rather wonky. I somehow have 21 settlers (while the cap is 20, and the 21sth came from the beacon) in Sanctuary, so I think one of my companions is counting as a Settler but not counting against the cap. Companions seem to also have an effect on happiness, even when they're just hanging around (though they appear not to count as unemployed). Not sure if I can be bothered to figure out what exactly is going on here, nor do I really want to remove all companions from Sanctuary at this point, so I'm building up another settlement purely with Settlers. * if you have 4 unemployed Settlers no new ones will join, Provisioners appear to be counted as unemployed settlers(!). I imagine with associated drain on their happiness because of being unemployed... So one of the things I did was instead of having my trade routes start at Sanctuary and fan out, which lead to having 4 Provisioners in Sanctuary (and no new Settlers arriving...) I swapped everything around so Sanctuary has no Provisioners at all and every other settlement has a maximum of 1 provisioner going to the next settlement until all trade routes eventually converge in sanctuary. Setting that all up was a bit annoying (and time consuming!) since obviously most of my resources are centralized in Sanctuary. Average happiness in my settlements sky-rocketed though. Thinking of actually going back to Fallout 4 for a bit now and finishing up Far Harbor and maybe Nuka World too...might get some new building blocks for Sim Settlements 4 out of those, who knows!

Come here Stalker, let's have a chat... Moo! Shouldn't have gotten on my lawn...

Found an interesting article about how the happiness stuff works in Fallout 4. I seem to remember someone here running into that wall as well, so I'll be doing some experimentation and then posting my findings. Goal is to bring at least a few settlements to 100 happiness.

Since you are taking care of the ending, I'll take the rest of the game's "story". I'll just try to make it "better" instead of fixing it, since the latter would require scrapping the entire storyline starting with ME2 (which ultimately was a mostly pointless filler game that ended up leaving the last game with lack of time to properly expand on everything it should/could have). actually visit Palaven and learn more about the Turian. Pretty sure most people would have liked to see more of the Turian homeworld than just a moon... I'd flesh out the Asari plot mission more and probably the Asari in general, show some more of their planet, go a bit deeper into their belief system and the "shocking revelation" that their goddess was a Prothean and what that would mean for their culture. I'd get rid of Javik. I'm not sure why they needed to drag in a Prothean to begin with. To expand on their culture? Could have deepened out Liara a bit more there (instead of turning her into that information broker, role better suited to Miranda, or TIM if you really need to have one). To provide more background on the Asari/Prothean thing? Then why is he a DLC character? To satisfy curiosity as to what they looked like? What about Quarians then? That'd at least have made sense since the Quarian-Geth war was recent (any old Asari would know what a Quarian looks like, as mentioned by Liara's mom in ME2). Some mysteries are better left and I think the Prothean one was one of those. fix the mess that was the entire Quarian-Geth thing. Clearly more was planned there instead of the two-dimensional pile of clichés we got, what with all the hubbub about the Horizon sun in ME2. Maybe the original idea was that they'd just wipe (out) the Geth somehow and they back-pedalled on that (especially after introducing Legion) but I think I'd find that preferable over the current sutuation. get rid of the TIM indoctrination plot, keep them as xenophobes helping Shepard from a purely human POV by providing information (see information broker point above), but never entirely trustworthy (since they don't give a damn about those filthy aliens) so you'd always have to be careful with the information you get from them. Could lead to some interesting situations I'd imagine. show some more of Tuchanka, while this mission was pretty great those ruins really got me intrigued about Krogan culture before they turned their planet into a wasteland get rid of the EDI body thing, seriously Honestly the EDI/Geth stuff feels like they just hopped onto the "What is life?"-question bandwagon. Sorry folks, but SOMA, among others, did it way better.

But to what degree can they modify it? Clearly not deep enough to fix any of the major issues, which would make sense, as messing with the internals would mean they'd make their upgrade path even harder, not to mention that at that point the might as well have rolled their own. They appear to have licensed the engine based on marketing speak. Given the humongous budget for the game I can't help but feel they'd have been better off rolling their own. I'm not going to argue that the technical feat of making anything worthwhile out of what appears to be an utter disaster is anything short of amazing. The realization just makes me even sadder about what could have been if they hadn't stuck to using an engine that clearly wasn't up to the task, something which I'd imagine should have become rather obvious early on but wasn't acted upon for whatever reason. Either way, over 3 months after the release (I'd have to dig to find out the exact timespan, I think it was actually closer to 6months) most endgame content was still utterly broken. Some hard mode dungeons only worked half of the time and the same was true for raids. I'm a rather patient person (also: Star Wars \o/), the rest of my guild wasn't quite as patient so by the time the game was playable I had a nice solo guild and I quit shortly after (tried it again later, but the magic had gone). I imagine the same story was true for many that played the game on release.

It'll probably be around for a while yet as it appears to be one of the bigger MMOs around still. That said the engine is a pretty big stone around the neck of that game, something that become depressingly obvious shortly after release with how slow and difficult hotfixing glaring issues turned out to be. Unless they decide to buy the engine so they can actually improve it I see the game starting to look and feel increasingly more dated especially when compared to (older) MMOs that have their own engines and actually invest in them (like WoW and Guild Wars 2)

I'm just hiking around sifting through buildings and building stuff in my settlements doing my best to ignore the main quest. At some point I'll run out of places to visit I imagine, but I'm not quite there yet.

Run by a crew of robots...

Without context this might as well be about Bethesda... Given how Horizon 3 had loads of issues at launch, many of which were never fixed I don't find that inspiring confidence. The assumption that it will go through the Microsoft Store if it makes it to PC is also not a real good sales argument as the Microsoft Store is a piece veritable trainwreck.

Home sweet home Fistbump? Oh no a zombie! (didn't realize how much Trashcan Carla resembles one until I took this shot) ...and I was just forgetting about the main quest idiocy.

Playing whack-a-mole with Windows 10 issues. Booting was starting to take ages so I did a reinstall. Then it installed updates and deleted its own master boot record. Then the start menu broke. After I fixed the start menu it upgraded again and messed up the CLR and PowerShell (and all the tools that you're always told to use to "fix" things) Running an in-place upgrade now. This is easily the worst Windows version I've experienced so far. Everything breaks and since MS decided to "integrate" everything you can't even reinstall them. Only real solution is reinstalling Windows or that in-place upgrade, apparently. What a mess. Let's see what this is going to have broken once it completes. EDIT: didn't break anything. The installer broke, so I'm stuck. Only option left being a clean install, which I just did. Tempted to wipe Windows 10 and reinstall 7 at this point.

I'll have you know Test Drive Unlimited was on my list! It's not a sim, but it's still a race game (most sims are either console exclusive, don't play well without a wheel or have other issues and thus didn't make the cut) I loved that game, could've made the list, but I haven't played it in a few years unlike Richard Burns Rally. TDU2 was a real letdown though, no wheel support to speak of. TDU servers were shut down, unfortunately and converting a save to offline requires messing with hex editors and the like.. Also lost my TDU2 account and support is dead for that game (not that it matters too much, there was more wrong than good with the game, starting with the handling) Man, how I wish someone would make a game with that scope again, with some semi-realistic handling at least. Not the pure arcade stuff we got in stuff like "The Crew", but more like Forza Horizon, but with a big map for a change.

I thought they switched to something from Amazon a while ago, wasn't that what all the drama with CryTek was all about?

I'll have you know Test Drive Unlimited was on my list! It's not a sim, but it's still a race game (most sims are either console exclusive, don't play well without a wheel or have other issues and thus didn't make the cut) As far as games that I'm disappointed didn't make it. RTS fans really should check out Warzone 2100, it's free (the devs open sourced it when they went under) and still in development by the community (also, it runs on Linux). It was one of the first 3D RTS games back in the day (beaten only by some terrible game nobody remembers). Just a little warning that the "new" AI can really brutalize you, if you want to start off easier you might want to stick to classic until you get a grip on mechanics. Couple of things to note: the campaign videos are a separate download (originally due to copyright, nowadays the reason is simply download size I think). You probably want those if you intend to play through the campaign. (edit: installer can now download those for you, so that's nice) The game's relatively slow paced (which I personally like) and had some innovative mechanics (for the time at least) like "commander units" that controlled those under their command and true LoS (LoS affected by elevation etc.)

There's actually one surprise to me in the entire list ( double checked, so unless I'm going even more insane and/or Firefox' search function is broken...). No mention of Jade Empire, did we all just manage to forget about it, or ... ?

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. actually... I haven't played it myself but was all the same surprised by the high placing in the list, and slightly curious even though I've never been a huge fan of survival horror games (which I understand the game is? I could be wrong). You didn't ask me, but I ain't letting that stop me I never considered the Stalker games to be survival horror, really (unless you'd also consider the Metro 2033 games such, I guess). But rather greatly flawed open world shooters (well, very large maps at least) in a very interesting setting and with really great atmosphere. There's definitely some survival elements (eg. you need to eat, bleeding requires bandages, weapons can jam if not well maintained, etc) but it never got near Metro 2033 levels of "AAAAAA I'm out of air filters" levels (which I only ever had in the 2nd Metro game, but that's neither here nor there ). That said, the mutants created some really really tense situations so I get where the "horror" idea comes from, especially when dealing with specific areas, but really most of the time you're dealing with humans of some faction. I also kind of liked the story, though the pacing near the end in the first game was really off (you're slowly acquiring better weapons until suddenly they throw the entire arsenal at you and send you on the final mission...) I'd also argue the first game really *needs* some form of mods to make it enjoyable at the very least a mod that allows armor/weapon repair since they kinda forgot about that in the base game. Not that it's not completable in the original state (I completed it like that, after all) but having to drag a spare armour or gun around (or having to throw it away at some point) instead of being able to repair it at some faction camp is kinda...meh.

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree as far as DA:O is concerned. While the game certainly had its flaws I think the direction they took with the engine was the best they could have taken to take the RTwP classic systems "to the masses" (so to speak). That the game was a buggy mess (the expansion, Awakening, is the only game I never finished due to an actually game breaking bug) with utterly broken combat balance (some spells were beyond overpowered until pretty late in the patching cycle and certain enemies didn't scale properly) and that the story itself was rather dull (albeit fairly well told) makes it only more disappointing that they gave up on that direction (something I blame entirely on their acquisition by EA) and went full on action with DA2/DA:I The storytelling in DA:I is considerably worse (though the overall story is arguably more interesting), the combat mechanics are just dull (though balance is better, I guess. I have no idea how one could find DA:O's combat worse than DA:I's though, especially when repetitiveness is brought up) and the tactical camera is utterly useless. The maps are good looking but most of it appears to be used to place collectibles. I also feel the characters in DA:I actually look worse than those in DA:O (especially the elves), but "de gustibus et coloribus...". Light armor otoh, yeah, let's just not mention DA:O light armor. I'd also argue the companions in DA:O were much better fleshed out and more memorable than those in DA:I. I mean, I can still name a bunch for DA:O (Wynne, Sten, Alistair, Leliana,...), from DA:I? I mean, I remember the "types" we had (the guy with the horns, the "Grey Warden", the beyond annoying city elf,...), but most felt more like caricatures than actual characters... DA:I could really have done with a lot more focus. Personally I'd have just made people play an Elf (given how everything centers about their lore) and fleshed that out, instead of making my Dalish apprentice to a loremaster seem just as ignorant about their lore as a random human... But hey, gotta have that checkbox for race choice, I guess...