marelooke

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.

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...