marelooke

So this is why most players call them "drivatards"... (in case it's not entirely clear, that's a bunch of cars taking up the entire width of the road...)

The Phoenix Point kickstarter reminded me that I hadn't completed XCOM 2 yet. Two missions later I get one of those annoying DLC "ruler" aliens in a "Very Difficult" mission and get squaddies killed. Alt+F4. Yeah, now I remember why I stopped playing that (it' s the 3rd and final one, so yeah, I know they can be beaten, they're just not fun, at all).

Yeah, not sure how I feel about mounts, though looks like they're tied into certain zones. We'll see how it turns out I guess, thankfully no flying mounts yet... On the subject of GW2: new Living World episode released yesterday While the incessant crying for mounts on the forums ticked me off, I don't mind them actually being implemented. The core maps and the expansion maps especially were not designed for mounts, but the Elonan screenshots look like the maps will be huge and relatively flat, so using mounts there makes sense. Sure if the maps are designed for it it'll work. I'm just worried there'll be crying to retrofit them in the old maps, which would be disastrous imho (and ArenaNet doesn't really seem to have the funds to redesign all of them, Cataclysm style...).

Yeah, not sure how I feel about mounts, though looks like they're tied into certain zones. We'll see how it turns out I guess, thankfully no flying mounts yet... On the subject of GW2: new Living World episode released yesterday

Hmm, why does this remind me of Dragon's Dogma...?

Out of curiosity, what's wrong with Assetto Corsa? I had been eyeing it a bit lately... Shame Horizon 2 is console only, hear it's still better than 3 (which is starting to get kinda old, bigger map and more road tracks would've been nice) As to the op there is super Superhot, which I think falls into this category. As does Consortium, I think.

Totally did not!

It's a terrible game, but the combat is addictive. I still have no clue what the story is even about considering dialogue & voice over are so cheesy I am forced to click through all of it quickly. Fwiw, I've played a little bit of the DOS2 beta/alpha and dialogues seemed much much better.

Not strictly game news I guess, but just got an update of Gog Galaxy today. Holy batman, great feature list... If they keep this up they'll be wiping the floor with the Steam client soon. Seems I can't link directly to the version 1.2 patchnotes due to excessive use of JavaScript but you can find them on the Galaxy site: https://www.gog.com/galaxy (slightly realted: is it just me that fears the Steam codebase is a mess given at how glacial a pace it evolves even now that they have some actual competition?) Oh, and I had to read through pages upon pages of talking about Stalker 2 to catch up to this point. STOP TWISTING THE KNIFE, IT HURTS! The pain. *cries in a corner* Sorry, emotional breakdown mode disengaged. But seriously if I *had* to pick a top 3 of favourite games *ever* Stalker: SoC would be in it (CoP is better mechanically, but the atmosphere of the world and especially the labs in SoC wipes the floor with CoP imho). Oh yeah, two others I'd pick, just off the top of my head would probably be Dungeon Keeper 1 and BG2:SoA

The glow on Sylvari characters is kinda nice, maybe I should figure out how to make a gif... Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure! Quietly docked airship outside of Orr A bossfight, and it's not a dragon! Baby dragon! Squeeeeee!

Pretty awesome that companies outsource **** overseas to reduce costs, but if the end user tries circumventing regional pricing, that's a big no-no. That's globalization for ya. Except that outsourcing seldom never reduces costs in practice.

Never played the first ME or any for tha matter, I'm going to be startinf ME2 on pc (soon). It's the only one I have of the series, atm. Perfect choice, I'd say overall it's the best of the 3 since it has aged well and the story is not tied to the first game that much, but playing the first game and transfering your saves to second game can be its own reward. ME 3 can feel a bit disappointing especially if you play the games in order but it isn't bad by any means. Playing ME2 first will ruin the revelations from ME1 though. Which were kind of part of the appeal. I wouldn't recommend playing them out of order, personally.

And you picked the least epic boss to show off? In my defense, the last screenshot is the Mouth of Mordremoth. That one's pretty epic in my book! Buuuut, suggestions welcome (Tequatl is in an earlier instalment of the screenshot thread)

Tbh, I got it free as a gift from a friend on Steam last year but your point still stands as I have bought other games based on appealing graphics/art styles. How do they go backwards? I don't understand how devs cause their games/franchises to devolve! Why try to change what the fans love so much??? Kinda weird nobody brought up that they were forced to change engines. As far as I can tell facial animations and the latter have been relatively bad on all BioWare's Frostbite (I think?) games. Forcing all your developers to use a single engine might seem like a nice cost saving for management, but it clearly doesn't work properly. Not to say that it couldn't be made to work, but clearly nobody considered it worth freeing up the budget for it. It also, likely, means that BioWare has much less control over the engine and can't fix issues they see on their own terms without having to jump through a bunch of corporate hoops to get things approved so the engine team can work on it,... I thought that most of the ME3 plot arc wrapups felt rushed and often shallow (the Asari one was especially bad, so much so that I only remember the obnoxious Kay Leng "fight") and were thrown at you in way too rapid succession. Tuchanka was clearly a high-point (and the best part of ME3, by far, imho). And while I can't say I "hated" the Quarian/Geth thing too much it felt too way predictable and after all the hubub about that sun in ME2 I'm pretty sure they scrapped their initial idea and went for something more vanilla. (come on: zealots attack machines, machines get desperate and call upon bad powers to save them. Things predictably go haywire and you get to fix it. Does it get any more cliché than that?). Given the buildup in the previous games it was a minor disappointment. The Turian arc was decent, though nothing particularly special, I'd hoped for some family solving problems with Garrus as him having issues with his father is often hinted at in the previous games (isn't solving personal issues the thing Shepard does best? I mean, ME2 was a fix-personal-issues simulator), but alas. Basically ME3 should have been split into multiple games imho (and ME2 scrapped if they really didn't want to go over their 3 game "limit", since most companions from 2 only make cameo's in 3 anyway and Cerberus was already set-up as villain in ME1, so there...)

*sings* In the circle of life. It's the wheel of fortune... So, plant dragons. Did we already agree those are boss? Sexy locations galore I like the combination of painted backgrounds with in-game models, like this: Meet the twins Epic bossfights? Check! Ever wanted to buzz around a dragon's head like a little insect? Well, that's one I can scrap from the bucket list...

This is what always frustrates me with MMOs or even ARPGs that there's always a OP way to do a class or race and all I want to do is play games and have fun. I don't have the time nor want to spend the time to be the king of the leaderboards, I just want to enjoy myself. Heh, most of the people hung up on this aren't "top" players anyway, they're just aping what they hear elsewhere without understanding (and understanding that for the content most people care about it doesn't matter one bit). Personally been mostly playing Guild Wars 2, though I've also started in Guild Wars 1. There's a load of references from 2 to 1 so yeah, couldn't help myself It's really surprising how different the games are from each other though, I'd have expected the class system of GW2 to be an evolution of GW1's but it's a total overhaul: the games have absolutely nothing in common (combat)mechanics wise. Still the GW1 intro was fun, hiking through pre-Searing Ascalon and getting to see the "other" side of the conflict (in GW2 you mostly get to hear the Charr, aka the GW1 "bad guys", side). Actually needing corpses for a Necromancer was also kinda nice (until you get to fight elementals and undead. Ugh )

Just save some for the drought that will undoubtedly come (or the disappointment when a bunch of them turn out to suck) Yeah, my interest in ME: Andromeda started at around 0 due to ME3 (and no, not because of the ending) and DA:I (I like my MMOs with other people in it) but it's dipping into the negatives now... Will be interesting to see what people (= you folks) have to say about it after release...might be more entertaining than the game itself to boot

F2P is misleading though since unless you don't want to craft you basically *need* a subscription for the crafting bag, otherwise your inventory will *always* be full. There' s so many crafting mats that *not* having it is just not an option imho and unlike in many other MMOs crafting is actually viable so ignoring it would be kinda suboptimal... And when I last played at least there was nothing short of a subscription that could get you access to this thing. Speaking of MMOs, still playing Guild Wars 2, stalled on the second big dragon battle (Mordremoth) due to the just plain frustrating mechanics (boss specific gimmick that is a 1 hit KO mechanic which makes you restart the whole, long, bossfight over from the start each time you get hit). Guess the devs played too much Dark Souls (and I don't consider that a good thing, at all). So I just went alt hopping, got my Guardian to lvl80, nearly done with the main "Personal Story" on that one (which is killing big dragon no1: Zhaitan). The nice thing is that due to the mastery system my older Thief still benefits when I'm playing a max-level alt since mastery experience is account wide so I don't feel "guilty" about letting my altaholic side loose

Yeah, I had Ghost on every mission after the prologue. I recently started over trying to remedy that but the playthrough kinda fizzled after taking out the first "boss" as I know I can do the rest of the game (since I did it before...)

My problem with FO4 is the horrible performance. I'm not going to buy an SSD just because Bethesda can't optimize their game to have even somewhat acceptable loading times. It just made me give up on the game. On that note, does the "enhanced" Skyrim suffer the same issues, having been ported(?) to the FO4 engine?

TToN, but aren't we all at this point? About the intro:

There hasn't been much variation in my gaming lately (this and Forza Horizon 3, basically) Little kid telling her golem it's gonna be ok, I almost teared up. Aww. (but seriously, that bit was well done, in general quest design in GW2 is rather...meh. Though the overall lore is pretty cool) Mom and Caithe Some pretty neat area design So what's better than plant-people? Plant-dragons of course! Obligatory undead dragon (that's gonna get a beating)

Well guessed! (and here I was trying to be myserious by not including anything with UI/NPCs on it) It's Rata Sum and the Pale Tree, respectively. I guess Rata Sum is rather recognizable to anyone who's ever played the game. Personally I like the Sylvari most of all the races. Plant people, yay! So here's a screenshot of my Thief

RE predates Tomb Raider by a few months, not quite enough time to steal major systems I'd think (RE is from March 1996, Tomb Raider was released in October of that year) So how does RE7 stack up against the Revelations games? I was never into the "modern" RE games, but I quite liked Revelations and your description seems quite appropriate (though afaik there were never multiple endings in the Revelations games). I played it at launch and liked it. Now that the gold edition is out I might give it another try. The visuals looked neat and the world looks vibrant and alive. I just hate those 20 GB patch updates. I oddly enough couldn' t really get into it, too much filler inbetween the story content I guess. The mechanics somehow also didn't click for me. Since we're on the topic of MMOs, I've dusted off my Guild Wars 2 thief after what appears to have been two years (juding by how long some things are already on the Auction House, kinda funny to see they just stay there if not sold). Some things I noticed: Lion's Arch has changed *again*, seems every time I quite & come back something happens to that poor city, they better hope I don' t take another long break anytime soon, because my breaks murder NPCs by the thousands apparently But more importantly, the fixed my major gripe with the game: the last step in the personal story was a dungeon and I didn' t have anyone to do it with. Now it scales and can be done solo. Though it was still a major PITA, Thieves being squishy as hell combined with ArenaNet's love of spamming movement impairing effects all over (explosions, knockbacks, stuns, you name it) and especially the tendency to chain them (Think you just got up from that knockback? Hers' s a stun, and here, another knockback, and here a stun. Oh, you died. How sad.) I think what I like about the game is, despite how cliche some factions are is how alive the world is and how much stuff there is to do. It' s something I always like about EverQuest 2, just find something obscure (less of that in GW2 though, in EQ2 there were literally quests 98% of the community had forgotten about) to do and chasing that goal all over the world is just fun. And if you get tired of that you can just tag along with a group massacring (or getting massacred by) world bosses, running world evens or w/e. Or you can just go around mining ore, whatever. The inclusion of "Mastery" seems like a step in the good direction, away from the typical leveling threadmill, though I don't have that much experience with it yet (just unlocked it yesterday). I reminds me a bit of EverQuest 2's AA (Alternate Advancement) system, which was just genius and something I'd love to see more often. Basically there are two types of XP in EQ2: "normal" leveling XP, that will gain you levels (duh), which unlocks new abilities etc. and then there is AA XP which will gain you AA points (basically skill points). And there was a slider to specify how much XP should go each way (once you hit max level any new XP is converted to AA XP). The idea here is that this gave you a few options, you could either go mental and level lika a rocket (100% of XP going to levelling), but end up being useless as hell at max level because you'd have almost no talent points to spend or level slow as hell but be a walking powerhouse. Sane try to find a balance between these extremes, of course. There's other reasons why leveling slower was often preferable (eg. while you could lock your level to be lower than your actual level you always got less XP, relatively than when you'd do something at the appropriate level iirc)