marelooke

Well, Conan Exiles expansion announced...aaaaand the game's getting a battlepass. No more details known, but given Funcom/Tencent's other products expectations are low. The lead designer immediately being apologetic after announcing it also says a lot, I'd say. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Well, completed my "Mystery" in Surviving Mars (the "AI" one, which was more of a nuisance than a threat, even though it was "medium" difficulty), so I'm sorta "done" with the playthrough as far as I can tell (at least, without mods that start new mysteries once the previous completes). Colony is running mostly smoothly, aside from my rabbits breeding a bit too much, leading to food issues, so I had to sort that out. I noticed Shuttles would "steal" food from food storage just to move it around...and around...and around, leading to enough food available, but not enough in stock where it needed to be (yes, I have minimum stock levels set). Disabling shuttle access to food stocks seems to have sorted that. I ended up getting rid of the research outpost to try and fix the "suicide walk", it made it better, but since I have outposts in that area for mining I still get the occasional asphyxiating Geologist that decides shuttles are for weaklings and just hikes across the map. Given I my population is now self-sustaining I don't particularly care anymore since it's not very common and the hit to prospective colonist applicants doesn't matter anymore. As an aside, I got my colony down to 0 Renegades. Once you figure out how that works it is kind of a cakewalk. Going to try and get a few more achievements (like build 5 Wonders, and "get filthy rich"), maybe try and get to the point where all my colonists are Martianborn, and then call it done for this playthrough, I think.

Giving Surviving Mars another go with a couple of mods that sort out some of the braindamaged colonist AI issues. While my current map is more conducive to having a single central base I did have to make outposts for various resources. The one giving me grief, specifically, is my research outpost. It's pretty far away from my main base, but my scientists apparently aren't the brightest as they regularly decide to walk across the map to my main base, and suffocate while doing so... There's shuttles available in both directions (shuttle hub in the remote area shouldn't have been necessary, and unsurprisingly adding it didn't solve anything, nor did designating a hub for only personnel transport) Noticed some of them actually "live" in my main base instead of the outpost (though there's plenty of room in the Research dome) so I dunno what to do about it at this point. Seems to be a known issue and there doesn't really seem to be a solution...

Glad I'm not the only one who struggles with Leliana's accent, at least.

Nah, the domes are connected with tunnels, unless they lost their legs they were perfectly able to move. I've since replicated the same again multiple times later when things started really going to hell. I destroyed their workplace, homes and pretty much everything in the dome. Quarantined it, turned it off, and the ones that hadn't yet died still wouldn't move (didn't try what would happen if I destroyed the dome they were in, something to keep in mind for the future). Since I cleared everything I ended up moving them manually since I could easily select them this time around (though can't move renegades, so he just chocked to death like the dumbass he was) As for the priority thing, seems the only way to fix the AI is using mods as the "default" AI is dumb as bricks when it comes to job preferences. Eg. if you don't specify "specialists only" (or the inverse) on buildings you'll have Geologists doing the dishes in the bar and untrained mooks mining, from the same dome. Otoh, if you do specify specialists only you often get understaffed buildings. Setting preferences on domes similarly has the risk of you ending up with *only* that specialisation in that dome resulting in trouble with utility building staffing. Per my understanding the only fix is either dealing with it, and just letting them do whatever, micromanaging the hell of out of things, or mods (which is what I'll try next). There really should be more fine grained control of target populations here, imho. When it comes to resource management, I kept things at default priority unless I needed them sorted asap. Though in general it doesn't really seem to matter much, and gets much, much, worse when Shuttles get involved. Eg. if you have an Electronics Store at low or medium it will still gobble up all your electronics if you're low, even if you set repairing the Drone Hub to max priority (and yes, there were active drones in range to actually do the repair), only solution is to actively turn it off. Not sure how you'd get away with only a single colony on a map with massive elevation differences though. Guess you could flatten the entire thing, in theory, but doubt that's practically workable. The only other thing I can think of is to make each colony entirely self-sufficient, but that sort of defeats the purpose... I'll look for some of the mods that are claimed to be essential to fix some of the AI issues and give it another go, see if that makes things more workable.

Was that last DLC also not made by a different studio, or team or something along those lines? I might come back to it if I can get the DLC on a sale as I didn't hate the game, per-se, it just felt incomplete to a degree that I didn't think was quite passable for a release. Hence why I didn't want to give it passing marks (which would be a 5/10 here) If I get my hands on the complete thing I might revisit that score. Thanks for the tip! I've wishlisted it on both Steam and Gog.

Been playing Surviving Mars. It's...incomplete? Like it should still be in early access. The potential is there, but it needs work. There's just so many things missing from the base game (some of which are then "fixed" with DLC. Yes, it's a Paradox game, why do you ask?) There's also just general frustrating jankiness with the AI, and resource management is iffy as hell too. For example of the first issue, missing features: there's no way to transport water over longer distances (once piping becomes impractical). So you can have a colony that is borderline drowning because it's on top of a bunch of water sources, and another one where your colonists are permanently dehydrating because you have to vaporize water from the atmosphere, which is far less efficient, and there is no way to get the surplus from the one colony to the other... Instead of doing something about this in the base game they added trains (that can transport liquids) in a DLC... The AI is just...let me just give an example: so your colonists live in domes (because no breathable atmosphere). However, I had a dome complete building around the same time more colonists arrived, so they immediately moved into that dome, of course (even though there was plenty of space elsewhere), a dome that had no air, no water, and no living spaces(!). To make things worse, there was no way to get them to move out of that dome: I put it in quarantine, disabled all "allowed" types of colonists for the dome (after which they are supposed to move to an allowed dome with room, of which there were plenty), turned off the dome entirely (which makes it so it also isn't serviced, so no more power either at that point). The ones I could find on the map I was able to mostly manually reassign, but the rest just died from dehydration... Resource management similarly seems iffy as hell once you have multiple colonies. It's possible to set priorities on various tasks, however the AI often outright ignores these instead choosing to do something else, like using resources to sell to your colonists in a store inside a dome instead of fixing the air filtration system that you put on highest priority... Furthermore that priority is shared between what your drones (workers) and your colonists prioritize. So if you want to have a factory fixed asap and you increase the priority on it suddenly all colonists eligible for working in that factory drop everything they were doing and switch to working there, potentially leaving other jobs unmanned... Frankly, the entire game seems like it should be enjoyable enough, but after a few days of this it seems I am mostly fighting the game itself, rather than the challenges I'm supposed to be dealing with. I'd give it a 4/10: base game needs work, DLC are not an acceptable way to "patch" a game. Might be time to go back to another, similar game, that appears way better designed: Timberborn.

The full story for Cyberpunk 2077's expansion was apparently leaked. Haven't looked at it myself (and I won't), and won't link it for obvious reasons, but apparently it's set in Pacifica, which is...meh, I guess? Certainly if it turns out there really will be only the one expansion. After setting up all the endings (well, except for *that* one, well, and *that* one too, duh ) as semi-cliffhangers, so they can basically continue from them it would seem the story of V is going to get dropped on the floor after all. Big bummer. Furthermore it would appear there is some serious unhappiness about how things are going at CDPR given that this got leaked. The ship, it it taking on water...

Yep, it does, but it allows me to just use DDG on my home page but still use Google when DDG fails me...

Assuming nothing got lost in translation this is kinda sad news: That said, apparently plurals are easy to trip over for Eastern Europeans, so fingers crossed. If they really only release the one (they promised at least two), then, combined with dropping the Red Engine engine for an off the shelf one, it would seem the money types finally took over. If that's the case I wouldn't be surprised if CDPR starts bleeding talent. Fingers crossed, but not feeling particularly hopeful with the news that's been coming out of that direction lately.

In all fairness, Google's searches have turned into hot garbage recently as well. All these algorithms certainly seem more of a hindrance than a help... I generally just use both (defaulting to DDG), depending on how hot the garbage served by either search engine is... As an aside, for those that might not be aware, you can search Google from DDG by prefixing the search with !g, same for bing with !b, making it quite a bit more convenient to repeat your search in another search engine. Anyway, on the subject of the thread. After my Subnautica Below Zero stint I've been mostly playing Conan Exiles (Isle of Siptah, and yep, still going ), and slowly picking away at my second Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough. Such a shame it appears CDPR is giving up on CP2077 already, and on their engine too. Seems the beancounters finally took over. Oh well, it was a good run while it lasted...

It's a cult classic, so there's money to be made off of nostalgia, mostly nostalgia from a generation that never experienced the original. See Baldur's Gate 3.

Running some benchmark on loop for an hour or so would be a decent way to figure out whether it was a fluke or actual cause for concern. 3DMark or Heaven would work as both have a "loop" mode. As to what I've been playing, I started, and finished Subnautica: Below Zero (took me 1d7h40min, according to my save file, though I did leave the game running at times) My expectations were kind of low since there was a lot of negativity around the game. Personally I considered it more of a standalone expansion than a full game, and as a standalone expansion it was definitely decent. I mean, it's more Subnautica, which is good. Game world definitely feels smaller, which was a common criticism, but conversely it's also much, much more confusing. Early on I died quite a few times due to running out of, ironically, water, because I got lost somewhere in a cave system (and everywhere has cave systems). However, there's now these new plants that give you oxygen, and they're everywhere, so dying by running out of oxygen is actually pretty hard, which, eeeehhhh, I dunno, seems a bit counterintuitive and makes a lot of places a lot less claustrophobic and scary than they would have otherwise been. Smaller size and the tight cave interiors also means that of the larger vehicles from Subnautica only the Prawn made it into the game. Unlike many I never cared too much for Cyclops (the big sub), I did however miss the Seamoth. The Seatruck really isn't a good substitute for the Seamoth since without modules it has no storage. Furthermore each module you add makes the thing slower, and, obviously, longer, and thus harder to get around the tighter cave interiors. Combined with quite a few of the modules being really situational, I ended up only using three on the regular: the storage module, the one with the crafting station, and the docking one (so I could lug a Prawn suit around), and given how often I used the Prawn (basically only on land, or to mine) I could have done without that last one most of the time as well. Which brings us to the land component, Below Zero features quite a bit of surface exploration, and it is kinda "meh". Don't get me wrong, instead of air, you gotta watch temperature (Below Zero is the outside temperature, in Celsius), and the atmosphere is great. You also get access to the Snowfox, some sort of hoverbike you're supposed to get around in. Unfortunately it's just not very usable, for starters it has no storage, you also get knocked off of it by certain enemies, all the damn time (oftentimes you get knocked off immediately after getting back on, multiple times in a row. RRRAAAGGGEEE). Using the Prawn was a much less obnoxious way of getting around, sadly. So we need to talk about the enemies. They were...disappointing. Most of them are way more aggressive than they were in the original, unfortunately they're also way, way less dangerous. It really doesn't take long before most enemies are just an annoyance rather than a threat (yes, *those* too). This is especially true on land (see earlier Snowfox comment) Unlike Subnautica, Below Zero has a narrated story and a voice protagonist. In fact, there's two storylines that are not directly related, though they do intersect. The first one is the reason you're there in the first place: finding out what happened to your sister. This one fell really, really flat in my opinion. Supposedly they changed writers somewhere during development and I have no trouble believing it with how this storyline went. Started of pretty strong but totally dropped the ball past a certain point. The other storyline seemed a bit more fleshed out. I feel I should also comment on the voiced protagonist. I generally prefer the silent type, however for plot reasons, that wouldn't really have worked here. Aside from the character you play reacting entirely differently from what I would have envisioned (really, strong reactions to something should be a player choice, not something forced onto them, it is jarring) it kinda worked better than I expected. I didn't hate it. I'd give the game a 6/10, it's decent, but the story, land exploration, and lack of sense of danger (plentiful oxygen, most predators being more of a nuisance than a threat) make it so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who didn't like the first game. Tl;dr it's more Subnautica, If you liked Subnautica, can get past the story, and don't hate voiced protagonists with the fury of a thousand suns, I'd recommend it, certainly when you can get it on sale. For those who didn't enjoy Subnautica, well, doubt this entry will change your opinion.

Ah, would recommend completing at some point that one it's pretty good The racing ones, well, ymmv, but if you got to the final race you might as well see it through to its conclusion (imho)

Dunno, maybe I should give Mooncrash another chance, but when I tried it the gameplay loop didn't hook me and there seemed to be very little story there to keep me going.

I just want Prey 2. Instead they turned that "meh" DLC concept for Prey into an entire game (that would be Deathloop, for the heathens among you that haven't played Prey)

Curious which ones you skipped, there's a few late game ones on timers that I'd recommend completing regardless. Certainly seems like the middle act is missing some content because I had to resort to random gigs to get the time to pass at the end of my first playthrough (maybe gets fleshed out with expansions?). There's also an option to simply progress time, no need to spam sleep if you just want to trigger those quests. Curious which ending you actually got, there's two people argue about which one has the better outcome, though given your mention of Judy I think I can make an educated guess For what it's worth you can do all the endings on a single save (assuming you meet the prerequisites). If nothing else they seriously nailed the atmosphere, I regularly boot up the game just to wander Night City. Reminds me of Bloodlines a bit (if they would have created the whole city in that game, I'd probably have gone wandering there too)

When people in the FF XIV community wax poetic about how awesome Square is I like to remind them that FF XIV is good despite Square Enix, not because of it... If they couldn't manage to make enough money off of Tomb Raider... I mean, I really don't think anything needs to be added to that.

I had some issues with blurryness, turning off Chromatic Abberration on top of the already disabled Film Grain (who keeps that on anyway? ) made the game look a million times better.

Errr, I had to look up what Last Light's story was about again... So yeah, Exodus' story is easily much better, a lot more "grounded" too, I'd say. The only thing you might miss out on with skipping Last Light is some of the relationships Artyom builds. Then again, aside from Anna and Miller I didn't particularly remember most of them (other than "name sounds familiar") and it didn't really hamper my enjoyment at all. I've now also finished the first DLC "The Two Colonels", which was a pretty interesting in itself giving some other people's perspectives on events during the main game.

Figure enough time has passed, so we're due some more FF XIV screenshots. Fair warning, there may be major spoilers in these, so anyone's not finished the MSQ yet or intends to actually play the game might want to heed the spoiler tags. I'll add whether I consider them light or heavy spoilers where appropriate and I've been careful to pick things that generally need more context, but still, beware! Me and the homies setting out on a new adventure. Potluck dinner with the homies Revisiting old friends (Heavensward spoiler) Second Endwalker Trial major spoilers. I'll say though, this trial made me bother with hard content again after a very negative experience during Shadowbringers. I just *had* to complete this on Extreme mode. 6.0 finale spoilers (no story stuff, but the area itself could be considered spoiler)

After finally getting a new GPU I've finished Metro Exodus (minus the DLC, for now). Kinda ambivalent about it. The storyline is nice, they do a pretty good job of actually setting up an existing relationship for the player you can't help but care about, with character with their own hopes and dreams. Quite unlike that other company with the post apocalyptic games that tries to make you care about certain characters... (*cough* Bethesda *cough*). However gameplay-wise... I don't know. For me the best sections where those that played more like previous Metro games, the more linear, more purposefully built pieces rather than the open world stuff, like the start of the game, Yamantau, the Taiga, and the finale. Especially the respawning enemies kinda took me out of the immersion, certainly when it comes to what are supposed to be the more "scary" enemies (like Demons). In that it sort of reminds me of Dead Space 2, that game was "fine", but really didn't evoke the same claustrophobic fear of the original, until I set foot aboard the docked Ishimura and all that claustrophobic fear came rushing right back. The use of collectibles (diaries in this case, some of which are really easily missable) for environmental storytelling also isn't a trend I particularly enjoy, especially given how the save system works: there's only a few rolling saves that constantly get overwritten, with autosaves and quicksaves using the same slot, so if you purposefully save at a certain point the game will just overwrite that save in short order. This means that if you miss something in an area you cannot return to your only option is to replay the entire level. Still, I'd consider it a good game as I finished it in a few sittings, which is unusual for me nowadays. I'd probably give it a 7/10, maybe an 8, if I'm feeling generous.

Game just pulled in a 5.6GiB update on Gog. So far no patch notes so not sure what's in there.

Since Lost Ark is unavailable in my region due to gambling laws I started another Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough. Boy, must I have gotten lucky with my first playthrough because I've had to redo missions so many times because of bugs I'm seriously considering just giving up at this point. Not to mention quite a few graphical glitches. I barely had any issues prior to 1.5, but now the game is just a mess. Couple of examples, helping the monk: Jotaro gig: Had a few annoying glitches as well. Like people stuck in the floor and Jackie's motorcycle randomly being in the middle of the street (without Jackie). Also got hit (literally) by the "stuff spawns behind your back" "feature". Look around before crossing street, you know, as one does... Get driven over by car that spawned behind me. Ugh. The mission bugs might be ones I just managed to dodge before, since I went full stealth last playthrough.

Eh, so far nothing of value is being lost. Which, really, isn't surprising given the types of games that tend to include these "mechanics". Still, would be nice to stomp this predatory behaviour out. Last I heard quite a few countries were looking into updating their legislation to deal with predatory practices in games, not the least of which being France and the UK.