marelooke

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.

Gave PoE1 another go, Undead Raedric quickly reminded me why I quit in the first place. I sure hope combat is way better in Deadfire.

As a Warframe "bittervet" (as they like to call it in the EVE community) it's always nice to hear the experiences of a new player, kinda helps keeping things in perspective. If I may ask, how was getting into the game? The new player experience has been notoriously bad for a very long time and it's something that still gets brought up fairly often. (I also assume you found the Warframe Wikia, if not, check it out, many interactions between systems are not, or badly documented in the game itself) On that note I've also been playing Warframe quite a bit again lately, trying to complete my collection and especially acquiring some of the primes that will be "vaulted" next. I'm also finding I quite like Khora, there's something quite fun about running around with 2 huge Kavats (space kittehs!) mauling enemies ...

Stealth? I do stealth, by obliterating the entire tileset! Can't be detected by dead enemies!

If there would be confirmation of old school obstacle courses or level spanning puzzles I'd be so ready to pre-order despite my normal stance on pre-orders (or games that cost 60 Euro, for that matter)...

Not sure what one has outstanding with the other. There is a reason why gambling is regulated pretty much everywhere whereas violence in media isn't: there's ample evidence about the harmfulness of the former and none for the latter (quite the contrary, as far as I'm aware).

Didn't watch the video, but here's some more info based on the original article. It should be noted that they currently only looked at 4 games, the three mentioned above and Star Wars: Battlefront 2. The delicious irony is that Battlefront 2 was the only one not to violate the gambling laws... (note that this was most likely because they looked at the state of the lootboxes after EA made changes due to customer outrage...) Another possibly important tidbit from the original article (in Dutch) is that this research was done on explicit request of the Minister of Justice, Koen Geens. Fines can go up to 800.000 Euro with prison sentences of up to 5 years. Both of which can be doubled when minors are involved. Also from the original article are the "rules" (probably heavily simplified for the sake of the article) the gambling commission uses to determine whether something is gambling (tried to translate as literally as I'm able): there has to be a game element there have to be certain stakes that lead to gains or loss there needs to be a factor of chance There is no mention of there needing to be an in-game advantage to qualify (eg. cosmetic lootboxes are not necessarily in the clear), but I wouldn't draw any conclusions about that just based on the article.

Felt like doing a new playthrough of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. I used to run it with Olmod but that wasn't updated to support the final patch (and it will just crash) so I stated looking into alternatives. I wanted something that fixes some issues, maybe updates the weapon models/graphics and possibly adds some removed stuff back in (like silencers for the AKs) but leaves the gameplay intact. It seemd the Stalker Starter Pack was my ticket, but after starting the game on Master difficulty I immediately noticed the Bandits you meet in the first mission didn't have any shotguns... I am *very* sure they did in vanilla so I'm wondering whether it's the mod messing with enemy loadouts or just random. Guess I need to start over and if that doesn't work try it without the mod. There's nothing in there that claims it interferes with enamy loadouts but it's pretty common for mod authors (or Enhanced Edition authors...) to get carried away... EDIT: typos

EVE is awesome, but indeed, doing *anything* worthwhile requires setting aside an inordinate amount of time. Hell, just keeping up with the pace the game changes at is a challenge itself!

Yes, at least the companion quality seems to be going up each game (hope I didn't jinx it now), Nick Valentine is pretty nice and he easily gets the most screen time out of all of them with the ties into Far-Harbor. If they'd just fix the main story thing and deepen out the companion backgrounds more that's all I want. Because honestly, all most (or maybe I'm the odd one out *cough*) people want from a TES game is an excuse to roam around, trying to tell a deep and engaging overarching story in an open world setting seems a bit beyond Bethesda. They should have just stopped at the cryogenically frozen part, ditched the "kidnapped child" bollocks and played the "fish out of water" element out a bit more (more references to the old world, more banter with Ghouls, maybe run into some (more) acquaintances from before the war that got Ghoulified (and are not feral..), etc. Try to keep the initial "what the hell hapened to the world" vibe from the start going. Other than that, it's mostly fixing all the broken stuff in the game. And boy, is there a lot to fix, with the loading times in certain areas (central Boston mostly) and the utterly broken settler and companion behaviour kind of being the top of my list currently (and their treatment of mods, of course, but that's not really a technical issue...). Yeah the companions are pretty decent for a Bethesda game. Right now I'm wandering around with Deacon and he's made me chuckle. I especially like the way his costume changes tend to match the environment, baseball gear for Diamond City and a lab coat around Cabot House. Loading speeds are (insanely...) tied to vsync, Load Accelerator cuts down those two minute monsters to 15 seconds, it's essential. Thanks for pointing that mod out to me, huge QoL improvement. I was in fact aware of the vsync issue (which is pretty ridiculous, really) and I tried turning it off entirely at some point, resulting in the lockpicking minigame actually becoming challenging Needless to say, I turned vsync back on given the huge amount of locks that need picking, I also didn't remember the difference in loading times being particularly noticeable, but it's very well possible I didn't test it long enough. One weird thing I encountered though is that the first time I loaded a save after setting up that mod the loading times were absolutely insane (like almost 10 minutes or so, I literally went to make coffee and very nearly alt+F4'd when I got back), after that they were actually better than before and I've not yet seen the crazy long thing come back. Fifteen seconds, however, I'm not getting... I'd say they went from "absolutely unacceptable" to merely "bad" in busy areas (eg. downtown and huge settlements like Vault 88). I imagine that an SSD could bring them down even further though. As to my actual game. I started a new character in Fallout 4 a while ago. Trying to give it a bit more of a RP spin, my character is less braindead than the one Bethesda provides and realizes that the chances her son is still alive after all this time are extremely slim and has settled for figuring out what happened and eventually getting revenge if such a thing makes sense at that point (as in: chances that the perpetrators are pushing up daisies by now is also pretty big). This kind of takes off the pressure of the main quest in my mind. I also limited my usual urge to just explore everything by saying that I will only go to places I'm sent to through (radiant) quests or that I get told about. Exploring outside areas along my route is OK too as long as doing so makes sense. I also go everywhere on foot, but to avoid making things too tedious I stipulated that it should be from a settlement (major hubs like Goodneighbor and Diamond City qualify as well, though I haven't yet used those in practice). One not so RP thing I did though was making a beeline for Vault 88 as soon as possible as I intended to make that my main settlement this time around. Clearing that place out at lvl10 was interesting, especially the Mirelurk Queen was a pain (and ammo sink), the Legendary Alpha Deathclaw was less of an issue since I could just plunk down a bunch of turrets there... I'm now lvl54 (or so) and I've yet to get really started on most major questlines. While I ran into Danse while helping the Minutement the BoS has not yet arrived in the Commonwealth. I searched out the Railroad based on a rumor in Diamond City (I half expected not to deal with them, but Bethesda really doesn't want you to miss any content). Currently I've picked up Piper and Cait (while the Combat Zone was mentioned by NPCs it didn't really make much sense for my character to seek them out, so I kinda sinned and metagamed a bit there, though I did pass it on the way to some Minutemen radiant quest and got attacked, so I'll use that as my defense...), plus the companions that are hard to miss: Codsworth, Preston and Dogmeat. I also rescued Nick but I haven't gone back to his office yet. I'm considering doing Nuka-World next and then maybe pushing forward the main quests a bit more after that. One funny result of this way of playing was that most of the power armours I found (except for the very first one) ended up being higher tier ones.

Yes, at least the companion quality seems to be going up each game (hope I didn't jinx it now), Nick Valentine is pretty nice and he easily gets the most screen time out of all of them with the ties into Far-Harbor. If they'd just fix the main story thing and deepen out the companion backgrounds more that's all I want. Because honestly, all most (or maybe I'm the odd one out *cough*) people want from a TES game is an excuse to roam around, trying to tell a deep and engaging overarching story in an open world setting seems a bit beyond Bethesda. They should have just stopped at the cryogenically frozen part, ditched the "kidnapped child" bollocks and played the "fish out of water" element out a bit more (more references to the old world, more banter with Ghouls, maybe run into some (more) acquaintances from before the war that got Ghoulified (and are not feral..), etc. Try to keep the initial "what the hell hapened to the world" vibe from the start going. Other than that, it's mostly fixing all the broken stuff in the game. And boy, is there a lot to fix, with the loading times in certain areas (central Boston mostly) and the utterly broken settler and companion behaviour kind of being the top of my list currently (and their treatment of mods, of course, but that's not really a technical issue...).

How is it? I've been eyeing it for quite a while but I still haven't even finished Grimrock 2...

While they're nothing like the originals the quality of the second (reboot) one was greatly improved over the first (reboot) one, they fixed most of the major irritations I had with the initial game (being, the stupid QTEs, the stupid story and Lara being beyond stupid), while keeping the good (like an interesting setting). So I'm cautiously excited. Maybe we'll even get some bigger puzzles again (still setting myself up for disappointment, I see)

Wait, it's been released? Guess I should have actually clicked the link in those last few backer e-mails... (seriously why do people keep doing that, just put your damn content in the e-mail instead of sending us to some website...)

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...