marelooke

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 )

Somewhere around the time the forum went crazy I completed my second Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough. Some of the better shots from throughout that campaign that I don't think I've shared yet. Kerry quest spoilers I was tempted to skip it, but ended up doing that mission anyway, because completionism is a disease... If you know, you know... Hangin' with the homies I think taking a screenshot at this point is mandatory... And so it ends...

Hadn't checked back for a while since most of my posts got eaten. So I had a bit of catching up to do. I wrote this reply about Death Stranding weeks ago, so I'm gonna (update &) use it, dangit! I managed to play through NieR: Automata with a controller, but can't say it was enjoyable. I'm really not much of a controller player, it would seem. Still, I hated it less than Remember Me, which I gave up on due to my fingers hurting. Problem at that stage is that you're forced into that final fight with which I don't think you can skip (I tried) without being able to stock up, pretty much at all after you fight so being knocked over is rather likely to damage cargo since you've just spent 10-15min slogging through Timefall (potentially more, depending on how lucky you are with structures from other players spawning, I imagine). If I'd had Container Repair Spray I would have been a lot more aggressive, however having to play it safe made it feel like a bit of a slog. For most of the game repair spray is more of a nice to have rather than a requirement. It would have been more useful if it actually repaired ladders, weapons, and the likes. As to the structures disappearing, seems to be a known thing that happens. Game apparently evaluates your "links" at game load and may decide to change them if you haven't interacted with a player much, leading to structures going "poof". I guess I got unlucky and that road was the only thing of his that spawned into my world that I actually used. Any structures you do interact with (eg. repair, or upgrade) will stay forever though (unless it gets destroyed, of course). So if I had repaired it the day before instead of waiting for them to go <50% it should have been fine. Annoying lesson to learn, to be sure. Wish roads would be excluded from that mechanic. After that I went around repairing/upgrading ziplines too, because, boy would it be annoying to suddenly have parts of my zipline network missing... Anyway, been slowly picking away at maxing out reputation with all locations. Game keeps feeding lore seemingly at random (going to assume after a certain amount of likes). There's still a few buildings I've never really had a use for though, like the ramps, the chiral bridge, and the package-gun, bridges and ziplines seem to cover their use-cases just as well without their drawbacks.

Finished Death Stranding, kind of a weird one. Gameplay loop is fine, though I can see why it wouldn't be for everyone, but I feel the pacing and storytelling are a bit iffy. You get fed little bits of information and then suddenly you just get dumped in a bunch of pretty linear chapters that just speed you to the finale. Controls aren't great either, turning in place is often a huge ordeal without using compass mode, and there's things that use different keys that kinda feel like they shouldn't (like "F" being used for most interations, but then it's "Tab" for buildings, I see why it is that way, but it still felt annoying) Another feature that could use some work is the sharing of structures with others. I found out the hard way that structures from other players you've not contributed to directly (because there may not have been a reason to) can just outright, randomly, disappear, when you next load the game. This is pretty rage-inducing when you want to have quick play session to clear up some deliveries before heading to endgame just to find out a huge section of (expensive to build) highway just vanished, especially since I'd already had to put in the effort of actually building almost all of the highways myself (think there was only 3 sections that "appeared" from other players). Before anyone brings it up, no it hadn't detoriated, at least not on my playtime, since I'd spent a lot of time going around repairing all damaged highways the day before... And at least one of the boss fights was truly rage inducing. Once past the ending you get the chance to complete things that you didn't prior, but motivation to do so is kinda low. You do get more background information that might help explain some of the ending stuff, but yeah, lots of effort for the payoff.

Let's see if things work in Chrome again. Still 100% unusable in Firefox. Also forced me to re-verify my email address, and if you don't do that login becomes unusable until you clear your browser cache (all of it, nuking cookies/site data doesn't cut it in Chrome) EDIT: let's see if things work if I nuke all my Firefox data. EDIT2: well, seems that worked. So just clearing out site cookies and stored session data isn't enough. Whatever was done broke things to such an extent that the only way to sort it out was clearing the entire browser cache. Reallly annoying but at least things appear to be sort of working again. EDIT3: never mind, still can't post in Firefox at all, but can edit posts made previously in Firefox apparently EDIT4: getting "request blocked" on both browsers today when trying to reply

Well, quotes don't work either, but with Elon running Twitter into the ground people have been looking for alternatives, I just didn't expect this forum to try to be one More on topic: Death Stranding is messing up my sleep schedule. Got spoilered, unfortunately, but fortunately that just confirmed a hunch I'd been having for a rather long time already. Still curious how it will all pan out. Slogging through the mountains right now, got trolled by another player placing a zipline that zipped me right in the middle of a BT zone. That'll teach me trying to take shortcuts.

Death Stranding, enjoying it quite a bit so far. Enjoying the Portal and Cyberpunk 2077 references. Would write a lot more, but forum only lets me write a single paragraph, and only when using Chrome, at that (also can't react to posts )

Still can't use the forum at all in Firefox, posts don't work, reactions don't work. (EDIT: still eats everything past the first paragraph in Chrome too. So entirely unusable, unfortunately)

Can't post from Firefox at all, and forum eats every paragraph other than the first when using Chrome.

Posting on one line as forum appears to just eat everything over a single paragraph. Completed my second Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough as street kid. Tried to get the achievement to buy all vehicles, which I did, but achievement didn't unlock Considering restarting my Witcher 3 playthrough, maybe I'll even complete it this time...

Sounds like they need some optimisation too, then. I hear Carmack's free...

In case that was aimed at me: quite the stretch if you assume I "like" Steam. It's just a service. I'm still annoyed about the forced Steam on the Orange Box and the resulting death of boxed games. I also buy quite a lot on Gog because I can at least still grab the installers. That being said, the fact that Valve doesn't really make games any more means that their userbase mostly sticks around because Steam is just a good service, if it weren't Epic, or any number of other would-be competitors, would've eaten their lunch by now. Pivoting back to Microsoft: a MS monopoly would very likely also massively hurt Linux gaming, which would in turn be a bad thing for general Linux adoption. In other words a MS gaming monopoly could result in significant fallout in other areas of computing. One would hope regulators would step in before it comes to that, but I have about as much faith in regulators being competent in this area as I have in any multi-billion dollar corporation not screwing over their customers if it means they can make an extra dollar.

Once they have a big enough chunk of the market they may very well start closing off a lot of their ecosystem. Currently a lot of MS owned studios have their games on, say, Steam (cough Obsidian cough). Should they manage to manoeuvre themselves into enough of an anti-competitive advantage (eg. by owning ActiBliz) I'll bet at least new releases won't be, if they don't outright pull everything. People that claim MS has "changed" compared to "past" MS are deluded, unless they mean that MS has gotten a tad more subtle about some of the anticompetitive bs they pull (most don't mean that though)...

Well, occasionally I still play that game. One of these days I'm even going to finish Act 2 with the Sisters. The other day I was able to get a match where I managed to complete the objectives, and, in fact, smack down every single enemy as they passed all the rout checks. I think that was a first for me, and I do have quite a few hours in this game...

Well, did my yearly "let's see what's up with Star Citizen", and it kinda went like this: Followed YouTuber recommendations, tried some mission, bugged, only 2 of the 3 things i had to destroy spawned. Tried twice, same thing both times, giving up. Fly back to station, land in assigned bay, for some reason get ship impounded because blocking bay(?!). Lost another 5000 or so money getting it back. Then decided to try and loot stuff in a location that got recommended, firstchange my respawn point to nearby station, then fly over there. Server crashes when trying to enter airlock. *sigh* Right, getting late, better go to bed. Another day, let's try that again. Fly over to same place, loot stuff, backpack full, empty on ship. Disconnect. Lost everything in ship inventory. Great. Let's try that again. Fly over again, loot stuff. Don't put stuff in ship inventory because of last time. Try to fly back to station. Get arms stuck in front of face so have to fly using 3rd person camera. Game crashes on landing. Log back in. Am in New Babbage (my initial starting location) instead of the station I set my respawn point at. Lost everything. Loot. Gear. The whole shebang. Give up. Alt + F4. So yeah, "unplayable" about sums it up.

Have you heard of this little game called Factorio? Disclaimer: I will not be held responsible for any fallout (harr harr) of picking up Factorio. (which, incidentally, I've been playing. It contains temporal magic, I swear, makes hours, and even whole days disappear)

All of them are already in the art book that was in the original CE. One a more serious note, I wonder if they're going to mess with the combat. Withcer 1's was arguably more RPG-y, but everything needs Souls-like (or should we start calling that Souls-lite?) combat nowadays, so guess they might try to push the Witcher 3 combat into Witcher 1.