marelooke

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.

Finished Scorn, well, aside from the branching path The game really does have a very SOMA feel, gameplay wise, and honestly, removing combat wouldn't have been that detrimental to the experience. That said, do not expect the game to be anywhere near as good as SOMA. I feel like having the choice of fighting is probably more of a commentary on how we, humans, interact with anything when given tools. That being, our default instinct is to use the hammer we've been given to hammer in every nail, screw, and bolt we see, rather than considering alternatives. Feels a bit like an inverse Divinity: Original Sin, where in the former it just drives home how non-interactive most games are by giving us options we won't even consider since we're so conditioned by "mainstream" games being so...restrictive, while Scorn in a sort of similar vein makes fun of our tendency to assume any tool we are given must be used, because that's how we are conditioned. "Surely if they give me a gun, they intend for me to shoot things?" Personally I thought Scorn was a decent game, the atmosphere was great, the environmental storytelling was pretty decent (I got the gist of what was going on, at least). The puzzles are good, not too easy, not too frustrating, at least for me (well, except one, that I knew how to solve, since it was just a harder version of an earlier one, but I just couldn't be bothered). That said, I'm not a puzzle guru, so those among us that eat puzzle games for breakfast will likely think them trivial. Level design is pretty great. Most levels are like a giant puzzle, and that is kind of a neat idea. Unfortunately the level wide puzzles are rather restrictive, so just interacting with everything will eventually get you where you need to be. There's also enough variation in enemy density between levels that dealing with enemies didn't start feeling like a chore. Combat was functional. Some more details in the spoiler box, no real story spoilers, but some combat/enemy related ones. As for a conclusion, I'm not sure if it's worth the full asking price, maybe if they hadn't cut those two entire chapters, but the game, imho, isn't deserving of the hate it's getting. If you go in with the right, or no, expectations it's a rather good, but short-ish (took me 6.9hours according to Steam, but my actual playtime is probably a bit shorter), horror game. I'd probably score it a 6/10 or so, worth picking up on a sale, if you're into these types of games.

More Scorn, I've obtained the second weapon (so to speak) and so far I've been able to avoid all combat. Not a game to finish in one sitting for sure, kinda need my breaks in-between the puzzles.

Been playing a bit of Scorn myself, though my issue is the save system. On the 2nd puzzle I took a bit of a risk and died. Had to redo the whole section. Yeah, that's not fun. The save system is bad, at least snapshot after each completed part. On the topic of combat. I've seen it claimed you don't actually have to fight anything. If I can get past the annoying save system I might see how true that is...

They could revisit V in the next game, I wouldn't mind that. Lots of people wanted a more happy ending. One thing that does annoy me about most of them is that they are basically a set up for future content, barring one (or two, depending on how you count) ending they are all fairly open ended in a way and leave CDPR the option of bringing V back. Now I wouldn't really mind that necessarily, but given that there's only going to be one DLC the thread of V's story is likely to be left where it's at. Heh, try having that one while Weren't the numbers of refunds stated during some investor call or leaked at least for Steam or something? From what I recall there weren't all that many and I would be entirely unsurprised if most of them were on last gen (where they never should've released the game, most of the really harsh criticism came from that direction)

Getting near the end of my 2nd Cyberpunk playthrough, trying to get the Autojock achievement but having some trouble finding whatever the last few cars are that I need. Maybe the messages from the fixers that are supposed to sell them are just coming really slow (I'm done with each and every Gig, just some NCPD callsigns and Sinnerman left) Also poking some at Conan Exiles, seeing whether their claims of being able to finish the battlepass easily within the timeframe are true. For sure the whole thing is a bloody nuisance though. It's an annoying list of chores and every day you get a few "boosters" that "multiply" the XP individual chores give you by 10x. Meaning that without those boosts it'd be one hell of a slow boring slog. Additionally it also means that if you want to optimize you only want to use the boosts on the high xp chores. Btw, I haven't bought the battle pass, just to make that clear. I'm just going through the free track.

I thought that was a given? I was just r/patientgamer-ing for that one Unfortunately I know just enough German to make some of it out... (also Scooter, that was a name I hadn't heard in ... decades) Skyrim, a terribly optimized game built on a terribly optimized engine performs terribly on terribly underpowered hardware. Wow, I'm sure nobody saw that coming

I'm particular to the Quadra Type-66 personally, the Avenger for city driving and the Javelina for the Badlands, though I do enjoy the Shion as well. That is, unless I need to be somewhere fast, then I just use a motorcycle since you can pretty much ignore traffic with them. Usually a Brennan Apollo with a mod so I can pick the skin, which is almost always this one:

You can rather easily accidentally kill people with blunt weapons, not sure if that goes for fists too. Haven't seen it with non-lethal pistols (well, except that one time I shot someone and they fell in water, and promptly drowned. Oops.) Moreover, and this is something I think is outright idiotic: unconscious bodies you drop in containers etc count as "dead" as far as "no killing" objectives are concerned. So you can't really hide knocked out bodies on those missions if you want to get the bonus... As for stealth not mattering, there's gigs that have, potentially, rather different outcomes if you do them non-lethally, and just shooting everyone can lock you out of peaceful resolution, and at least once, out of additional rewards, on some gigs entirely. Many gigs are also related in some way or other, so actions in one can have consequences in another. Generally I go by what I know, the objective, and my moral compass, and a bit based on my backstory. (eg. my corpo V was a lot more indiscriminate with killing off of gang members, while my city kid mostly left Valentinos alive where possible) Scavs are getting shot though, unless explicitly told not to, every time, all the time. They tweaked something about the settings in the last patch, I think they increased visual fidelity on certain default settings, so that might be why.