marelooke

Find my what? On a more serious note, I actually did decide to go to the Institute a little while ago and the main quest made me lose interest in playing for a bunch of days. It's so so bad So I'm back to ignoring it exists so I can enjoy exploring the Wasteland.

Hi! Awww, cute! Can we keep him! (how I managed to walk up to a Deathclaw in power armor without waking it up I'll never understand. I grabbed the loot from the box and went on my merry way leaving the cutie to murder more raiders) "Pop!" She might have had a few "accidents" with explosives...

Making the list was hard, ordering them was even harder and kinda falls apart after the first few I feel: Dungeon Keeper 1 (1997) Baldur's Gate 2 (2000) S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007) Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines (2004) Dragon's Dogma Dark Arison (2016) Warzone 2100 (1999) Jade Empire (2005) Dead Space (2008) Far Cry (2004) F.E.A.R. (2005) Unreal Tournament (1999) Metro 2033 (2010) Mass Effect 1 (2007) Prey (2017) KotOR2 (2004) KotOR1 (2003) Half Life 2 (2004) TES V: Skyrim (2001) Divinity 2: The Dragon Knight Saga (2009) Neverwinter Nights 2 (2006) The Witcher (2007) Test Drive Unlimited (2007) Dragon Age: Origins (2009) Mass Effect 2 (2010) Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast (2002) Honorable mentions (no particular order): Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (2009) Mordheim: City of the Damned (2015) SOMA (2015) Endless Legend (2014) Legend of Grimrock (2012) Fallout: New Vegas (2010) Hunted: The Demon's Forge (2011) Resident Evil Revelations (2012) Saints Row: The Third (2011) World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (2007)/Wrath of the Lich King (2008) Guild Wars 2 (2012) Warframe (2013)

He spoils the start of Prey and arguably one of the (few) big jumpscares as well. Anyway, most of those are console games (or console ports of varying quality) so not really relevant to me. And yeah, did manage to watch most of the video (skimmed through some of the console game due to not relevant to me) despite the...enthusiasm of the host.

Finished the initial Season 12 journey in Diablo 3 with my Necromancer. Can't help but feel that the Necromancer is kind of weak. I tried a few different builds but didn't really find anything that really worked for me. My Monk at this point felt just waaay more powerful In good news I finally managed to open a portal to Greed's realm, the bad news was that it was from killing a Menagerie Imp and that I accidentally clicked the portal before I had a chance to loot anything. So I guess I might have lost out on a mini ... (unless they just don't drop loot when they open a portal)

The government didn't really have anything to do with Hayes, did it? It was basically an attempt to reform Hollywood's image. In a way, the MPAA, the ESRB, and the CCA are all the same. Just attempts to make the industries look like they're being responsible so the common populace aren't throwing fits about it. Because the government's ability to censor media is actually not very strong in the US. Heck, all of these self-regulation bodies are entirely optional! You just can't sell in Wal-Mart. So optional in fact that the CCA is defunct now. And it has simply been replaced by "Adults" labels similar to what the music industry does. Censorship is hard for the government to get away with in the US. But there is a long precedent for legislation targetting gambling. I can't speak to whether the government should or not. I really haven't made up my mind there. In an ideal world, our education system would be where gambling is fought, not limitation on the gambling itself. But they're not showing any signs of a willingness to do that. The problem with making people responsible for their gambling is that the gambling industry just abuses human psychology so perfectly reasonable people tend to fall for it (people like to think it can never happen to them, like depressive disorders). I imagine that better education would help some, but believing it will eliminate the problem or relegate it to the "unwashed masses" seems naive. As far as I'm concerned the main reason more people don't get gambling addicted in the "real world" is because most people don't really get exposed to it since the majority of it is relegated to casinos (which most of the population doesn't ever visit) and the stuff outside casinos can be described as the "mobile games" of "real world" gambling. Companies like EA lower the barrier of entry by bringing the gambling to the masses, abuse psychology to make people participate as much as possible and target children to boot. "Irresponsible" is the best I could say about this, but "evil" seems more like it.

The Belgian government published a study already, which has a lot of facts about how it is already legitimate health concern for minors. I linked a partial translation I did of a Belgian newspaper article covering it in the random video game news thread, assuming that's the study you are talking about (I'm not aware of any others, at any rate) Actually it was requested (and as such likely at least partially funded) by the National Lottery, who, if anything, would reasonably have a vested interest to not have this information come out.

Well, given that I'm also playing FO4 currently... I'd say the companions are a little less two dimensional for a change. So there's progress in that respect. Serana was already a step in the right direction and they've improved some more in that respect. (just have to get this off my chest though, and this is probably me, but I can't stand Curie's over-the-top accent. Phew, feeling better now) The story and faction choices seem rather ridiculous and being forced to make choices that appear to be all be bad isn't exactly thrilling (to me), I then rather have FO3's basically "no choice"-choice so I can at least ignore what passes for the main story without ending up being locked out of a bunch of stuff later. That said, as usual some of the side quests and environmental story telling is pretty good. (some of it is also cringe-worthily bad, also as per usual). As far as the story not being worse than FO3, not so sure, I think it's up for debate but I'd say they're close cousinst. Difficulty is just the typical TES game thing, starts off relatively challenging and then falls off rather steeply later. There's still enemies that can make short work of me, but they're not exactly common (thinking higher tier Deathclaws and Behemoths probably) That and having a Vertibird crash on my head, of course. Stealth does appear to be gutted and if you take companions along it's almost impossible to murder anything without getting detected since as soon as enemies go into "cautious" state they appear to go Rambo on them. Then again, with the improved scopes you can often pop their heads off from halfway across the map to similar effect, at least in outside areas... My main gripes are basically that the game is a technical trainwreck (loading times are just bad, especially in the city areas, had a few crashes and a slew of bugged quests that I had to fix through the console) and Bethesda's hostile stance towards the modding community. Also have to admit I'm not particularly fond of having my character speak, hope that was a first and never again thing for a TES game. (not that the voice actress is bad, just that most of the time my character doesn't say anything, so when there's suddenly dialogue it's...jarring and pulls me right out out of the image I had formed of my character). As for getting building stuff to line up. There's concrete foundations that you can build to even out terrain, that helped a bunch. (think that might be part of some DLC though I'm not sure which one). Pulling electricity everywhere is a pain though, or lining up lights or stuff like that. At least if it's not supposed to look like a dump.

Prey, if only because it's the one game that I played that gripped me enough that I actually finished, figuratively speaking. D:OS2 and Nier seem rather promising, but Nier gets disqualified for being a sloppy PC port and Divinity I need to actually finish first. No basing review scores on only a partial playthrough here! (unless a game is so bad that I don't make it to the end of course, which isn't the case for D:OS2 unless quality takes a very steep nosedive later on)

CurieSkynet speaks:

I grabbed Nier: Automata and Hellblade. Nier is going to be a pain, gave up on mouse+keyboard and struggling with a controller (I'm just not used to controller gaming, why did I do this to myself?), swallowed my pride and just put the game on easy for now. So far haven't been hurting my hands though (unlike with Remember Me). Camera could stand to be a bit smarter and a bit less manual work though, imho. Also plodding along in F4. Still don't understand most of the Settlement systems, experimentation doesn't seem to get me much further either. Guess I'll look for some tutorials or something because there's sod all information available in-game. So far I've also been mostly ignoring the main quests (joined the Minutemen and Railroad so far). On the fence about getting Death of the Outsider, mostly because I haven't even started Dishonored 2 yet... (actually, I still need to complete that Ghost playthrough of Dishonored 1...though practically speaking I'm done as the only mission I didn't Ghost first time through was the first one if I'm not mistaken. But mah achievement...)

Whoops, didn't notice this thread before pasting in the "random video games news" one, so there's a bit more going on here as one of Belgium's universtities also published a study about the prevalence of gambling (and its promotion) in our society and the effects on children. Anyway, post is here. And there you listed everything wrong with the current business attitude. Their job is to create the best product they can while ensuring the company's future, making investors happy should be a result of that, but most certainly not the focus. Shovelling out drivel as bad as they can get away with and abusing human psychology to get away with it due to unbridled greed most certainly isn't "their job" (though it is the interpretation they like to give it). There's a reason "greed" is a serious sin in most religions, yet here we are revering it. /rant

Even if they aren't technically "gambling" they are incredibly anti-consumer. Like, I get that free-economies need to encourage wealthy people to be more frivolous, but I don't think that's what is going on here. There are some whales sure, it's mostly preying on the short-sighteness of young people who waste away their parents money, all while ruining the aspects of a game that make it worth while playing on it's own merits. A study requested by the National Lottery was released by the University of Leuven (also in Belgium) where the effects of the amount of gambling (and gambling promotion, by advertisements, television, etc.) children (10+) are exposed to was researched. The conclusion is pretty damning. Article (in Dutch) They state that the result of a questionnaire filled in by 645 children is such that they consider many of them are at serious risk of "developing problematic gambling related behaviour at a later age". They also talked to the parents and most of those have no idea what's going on (shocker, I'm sure) Big part of the article talks about casino games (which 1/3 of the kids 10-12 had already played in some form, either with family or online) and the gambling by the national lottery. I'll focus on the gaming related stuff though. One of the things apologists of the lootbox system always bring up is that in many cases these only contain appearance related items. This is explicitly addressed by the study: "Gambling elements are nowadays common in video games where they can help players progress faster or give them special visual appearance." I would not be surprised if Minister of Justice Geens already had access to the study or its results before it was published. He's as far as I can tell not the type of guy to make broad statements just to score which doesn't mean he 100% understood what is going on here, he doesn't strike me as much of a gamer.

Huh? In what way? I remember playing Crysis until at least the chopper section after the obligatory aliens showed up. At least I don't specifically remember having issues, which doesn't mean there weren't any, but I didn't get scarred by them at least (unlike by the ones in Arkham Asylum). One colourblind person isn't the other of course. Didn't realize the Menagerist goblin's were that rare. Got one quite early on in my new Season playthrough, lucky me. Never made it to Pony land so far tho :/ Picked up Fallout 4 again because I'm a masochist (and because I hoped they'd have fixed some of its issues by now. Yeah, I know...). Managed to get loading times to a level that doesn't make me want to instantly Alt+F4 anymore (disabling cloud save helped, for some reason. Beats me why this was no issue with any other Gamebryo game ever before...). They're still obnoxious and entirely unacceptable, but it's manageable. So far the most common causes of death are BoS vertibirds crashing on/near me (BoS is like everywhere crashing vertibirds and stealing my kills. Those things must be *cheap*) and random enemies with a Fat Man (whoever thought adding those things to the loot tables was a good idea deserves to be forced to drink decaf until Fallout 5 releases). The former I'm just going to suck up, the latter I'm going to fix with a mod, being killed by random nukes isn't fun, engaging or challenging. Whatever they did to the engine wasn't good. 3rd person animations are better and that's about the only improvement I can think of, really (and not sure if holstering weapons was something I was willing to give up for that, tbh). My extensively modded (vanilla) Skyrim runs way more stable and faster, and with well shorter loading times, and I run with a *lot* of heavy texture mods in that game.

Arkham Asylum has the sad honor of being the first and only game I gave up on due to my colourblindness. The scanner thing (or hack tool or whatever it was) was entirely unusable for me (on a keyboard, apparently a controller works better due to force feedback). Well, first 2 chapters of the Season cleared in Diablo 3, onwards and upwards. Not sure if the Necromancer is so my jive, seems to be lacking in the direct damage department so far.

I like when consoles offer good exclusives, those exclusives are what seem to push the industry to create more quality games. Without Sony/Microsoft's in-house studios or published projects, the rest of developers and publishers would probably get lazy and not push themselves in storytelling and art in general. And if there are no exclusives than there would probably be no point for consoles anymore either, I don't want pc to be the only platform because that would be horrible for gaming in alm things. We need competition, it's good for the industry and has always been it's saving grace. Nah, most people buy consoles because they want to game from their couch, whether there's exclusives or not isn't going to change any of that until there's actually functional ways to game on your PC from your couch, and we're not there by a long shot last I checked. Exclusives just mean competition between the consoles, the vast majority of people that weren't planning on buying a console won't suddenly buy a console because of one exclusive... There's really barely competition between the PC and consoles, which is why MS has been doing the cross platform thing lately, there's no way in hell they'd allow their formerly console exclusive titles on PC if they thought it'd cost them money. However in doing so they might just steal customers from Sony, because what are you going to do? Get FM7 on the PC you already have or buy a Playstation to play Gran Tourismo? Moreover MS and Sony are, as far as I'm aware just as lazy/toxic as the rest of the big publishers (FM7 anyone?). If we want real progress then it's the indie studios that we need to look at, or just "crazy people" (in this age of greed) that only want to make good games rather than earn lots of money, like this Swen dude you might've heard of --------------------------------------------------------------- Anyway, on topic: new season started in Diablo 3 and chugging along with my Necromancer. Not sure how far I'll get but I at least want to get the Season rewards done. I kind of stalled in Observer, the game so far has been missing a "hook" to really make me want to figure out what's going on. Maybe I need to push a bit further, but this isn't a problem I had with Soma or Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

No thanks, I hope exclusives finally die their well deserved death. If the only reason people buy your console is because you withold stuff from them..well maybe the console isn't that great after all...

That looks pretty badass Why do they call it an "open world game" instead of just stating it's a MMO up front (we'll see how much RPG there is when it releases...). After the GW2 mount debacle I'm not sure I even want to bother with another MMO again, not until some regulation is put in place to weed out the most abusive monetization practices at least.

What annoyed me about the survey was how they lumped expansions and DLC together. NWN 1 & 2 didn't have any DLC, they had expansions. Gives a bit of a wrong image of "people who bought Obsidian DLC" imho. (not that I imagine it would make a huge difference, but still) I think it's because now a days there is no "difference" really, it's a word now that covers all of it. It's like why are PC/weapon skins considered a dlc but so is like OWB or DM which have new areas/weapons/stories/etc? Size is the biggest difference as far as I'm concerned, a good example would be Dragon Age: Origins, it had a bunch of DLC that added minor new areas/weapons (eg. Return to Ostagar) and a full expansion "Awakening". (now arguably a bunch of the DA:O DLC where pathetically small for their price tag) If they're selling me an "expansion" my expectations are going to be rather different than when you sell me a DLC, both regarding the scope as well as the associated price tag. And while Old World Blues, Dead Money and the other story DLC for F:NV were bigger than the norm I don't think they're big enough to qualify as expansions either.

What annoyed me about the survey was how they lumped expansions and DLC together. NWN 1 & 2 didn't have any DLC, they had expansions. Gives a bit of a wrong image of "people who bought Obsidian DLC" imho. (not that I imagine it would make a huge difference, but still)

Picked up the Necromancer in Diablo 3, seems like it could be good fun but shelving it now until the next Season starts in 2 days. Installing Observer right now and I've been eyeballing Hellblade, it wasn't on sale in the recent Stam sales but I'm rather tempted to get it full price due to all the good things I keep hearing about the game.

Pretty sure those who cared enough opened the article and got as far as: "China-based publisher Perfect World", and then went: "Well that explains everything"... I mean, we're talking about the Chinese EA here. Heh, or even the one company that I might consider worse than EA. Them having a stake in Digital Extremes (Warframe) worries me to no end.

Grabbed "The Park" in the Steam sales, pretty neat short story. Knowing something about the setting (The Secret World) makes the entire thing even more interesting... I should go check out that location in the MMO at some point.

There, I told him! (He does actually come back in the second game as a ghost, heh. Don't mess with my PC!)

Still salty that they never patched the PC version, which made it unplayable as far as I'm concerned (map and the overlay had different resolutions, making the map useless for all intents an purposes, only "solution" is to lower the game's resolution). I hear the Gog version was fixed, don't intend to re-buy a game because the devs/publisher were too lazy to fix my box copy though.