marelooke

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...

Wasn't even that bad compared to games that keep getting passes, like anything and everything Bethesda Game Studios puts out. Imho the main issue was that they released it on previous gen consoles, once that became clear the meme-train just left station and kept on choo-choo-ing. For radiation, a combination of the correct artifacts combined with good gear is how I remember dealing with that. The last few areas were really rough I recall, with enemies with rocket launchers and snipers galore. Comparatively the NPP wasn't that bad, heh. All in all SoC (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in general, really) was pretty (euro)yank. For one, it was kinda unfinished, most annoying example was that your gear would wear out, but there was no way to repair it...meaning you'd have to save up the best gear for the hardest locations, and often lug around multiple sets of things so you could toss the broken ones (only to find out the AI is actually smart enough to recognize that your almost-broken armour was better than their stuff so they started wearing it, making your life more difficult ) The second issue was the difficulty slider. The game actually gets easier on harder difficulties as it increases damage to both the player as well as the enemy pretty much equally, so clearing out locations stealthily becomes a lot more viable all of a sudden as you can now one-hit enemies much earlier in the game (but conversely, if you get caught out, yer toast)... And then there was the little issue that you only get access to the real fun toys once past the point of no return. But that's, iirc, an issue all three games suffer to an extent. Aaaand, now I want to start another SoC playthrough, with a repair mod Last time I tried I used an addon that should have fixed some of the major issues (like repair), but retaining the original game's balance, while upgrading the graphics, but it also stealthily nerfed early parts of the game (which I explicitly did not want, eg. the first group of bandits didn't have shotguns any more, making that mission so much easier than it used to be it wasn't even fun)

Really excited, and really anxious about this one at the same time...

Screenshot Citizen One from the FPS event earlier this year (Siege of Orison) Pretty sunrises and sunsets Hoth Microtech looking pretty. The ship in the above screenshots (the "Constellation Andromeda") was supposed to be the largest player ownable ship at the time of the Kickstarter, things got a bit out of hand. For example, this is my character standing next to the front landing gear of an Origin 890 Jump space-yacht, which is classed as a capital-size ship... Below is the one other capital ship available in game right now, the Reclaimer. I do hope the buildings around it maybe give some perspective as to the size. This one I actually got to fly as on the PTU (test server) they tend to hand out ships to try new game loops, since salvaging is new, and this is a capital-size salvaging ship everyone got one to derp around with. I decided to just fly it to a planetary outpost and land it on the largest landing pad available (which only the landing gear fits on. Barely. It overhangs the pad by almost the size of the pad on both ends...). Then I found out there are actually only a few places in the system this thing can actually officially land and be stored/serviced. Welp. This ship looks small in space, and then you put it down like this. Star Citizen does manage to drive home that sense of scale. Talking about landing, perfect touchdown with the Connie. And dang, there's a queue to get in again... (this is actually a bug as these NPCs were body-blocking me from getting in)

As may have been clear from the screenshot thread. I've been poking at Star Citizen again after my rather, hmm, negative attempt late last year, and have been enjoying it this time around, mostly anyway. Just to get this out of the way: no the game is not anywhere near stable yet. If losing all your stuff because the server crashed, you fell through the floor, or a gurney murdered you, or...anyway, if any of that is a major problem then don't bother. Just to recap, a few years ago I bought the cheapest game package available (45EUR before taxes) because I found the game intriguing from a technological perspective as what they're trying to achieve is pretty impressive, scope-wise. Since then I've been checking in every now and again to see where things are at. This has generally been a yearly-ish thing but early this year there was a major FPS event going on so I figured that, despite my very negative experience a few months prior (when literally nothing worked for me), I'd give the gametech demo another go. It was a cluster****. But it was a very promising one. There actually is a game there now. There's not a whole lot of it, and much of it is broken (figuring out which mission types will actually work most of the time is part of the challenge...) but what is there is looking promising, and despite the issues (broken AI, server crashes, and griefers in what was supposed to be a PvE event) I mostly had a good time with the event. Additionally the next major patch (3.18, currently on Public Test Universe, supposed to go live "any time now") will finally introduce proper persistence support, meaning that if the game crashes you might not have lost everything as instead of getting dumped back to your respawn point, losing everything you had on you (or in your ship), you should be able to log back in where you left off with everything still there (assuming you are lucky and log back in to the server you just crashed out of, making sure that is the case is the next item on the todo, but hey, that seems pretty trivial compared to the persistence implementation) To me this is a major leap towards turning this tech demo into an actual game that maybe non-masochists could get some enjoyment out of, and I'm really curious to see whether the content development pace will pick up now that this core tech is implemented. Would I recommend the game to anyone? Ehhhh, probably not, at least not as a "game" as such. For anyone curious I'd probably recommend seeing how 3.18 shakes out once it goes live before deciding whether it's worth the price of entry. Or to try it at the "free fly event" in May ("Invictus Launch Week"), though my personal experience with events (based on last year...) is that is when the game is at its worst, but maybe this time will be different. Heh. I would recommend anyone masochistic enough to join to use a referral code though, the extra starting cash is kinda nice.

Got a request to update my shipping address for the System Shock remake by Nightdive Studios, so I guess that'll be coming out soonish.

It's very clear that after Dead Space 1 there's a different director. It becomes a lot more action-y and a lot less horror, imho. I've always said that the only really scary part of DS2 to me was when Note that this doesn't mean I consider DS2 and 3 bad games, necessarily, but as horror they don't get anywhere near the level of the original. Anyway, glad to hear the remake is good, once the price drops to something remotely reasonable (full price for a remake is not remotely reasonable in my book) I'll likely pick it up.

Been playing another game quite a bit recently, much to my surprise after my experience with it not that many months ago... Totally not a dinky bar... Cloud city! Somewhere else... Hoth? Game's still a mess, but I've actually been able to get things done, and well, it sure is pretty More eyecandy (and that's enough spamming for the day )