marelooke

Actually enjoying EverQuest 2 quite a bit again. I'm one of those people that always logs off in his character's house so when I loaded the game I was immediately greeted by lots of curio of past exploits, stuff like this sets this game squarely above pretty much every other MMO out there. Of course, not everbody cares about such things, but me, I do, a lot (I also always kept my Tier-gear sets in WoW, for example, even long before you could use them as appearance gear) It's a bit hard to get around without a guild (at least when you're used to having a guild at your disposal) and the same goes for crafting, but figuring out stuff and running into the familiar is good fun, for now at least. EQ2 has quite a few problems though (a terrible graphics engine, extreme top-heavyness, lack of participation of players outside of their guilds and the fact that SOE made the stupid decision to "borrow" some of WoW's worst ideas instead of focusing on what sets their game apart of the competition, which imho is: the ability to really discover things that most people have forgotten about or that just aren't obvious as there's no big ass quest marker to point you the way). There's also talk about cross-server dungeons, which, imho, is a terrible idea (I attribute much of WoW's decline to the cross-realm group finder and the resulting death of realm-communities, combined with a focus on making everything easily accessible to everyone, because, yeah, you can't have hard dungeons if you plop a bunch of random people together in a group, that would only lead to frustration*...) * Blizzard actually tried this with Mists of Pandaria (iirc), the resulting backlash was...well, lots of people quit then. Because the general way groups went was: group enters heroic dungeon, group wipes once, tank says "FU BUNCH OF NOOBS!" and drops group, group falls apart, everybody gets to join the group finder for 2 hours again (not making this number up, it really was that bad for DPS) to find a new group, except for the tank, who is locked out from grouping for 20min (as "punishment" for dropping group), but instantly has a new group after those 20minutes... Net result is that heroics were nerfed into the ground, so the only way to find challenge in the game is to raid (actually raid, not raid finder, which is snoreworthily easy), which takes a lot of time and commitment...

Mommy, is that an angel? Yeah, so I've been away from this game for a while... After all this time I'd still consider this the best (non-sandbox) MMO I've played. EDIT: btw, I'm on Splitpaw-EU and I'm sure you can figure out my character name from the screenshots Any EQ2 players feel free to poke me if I'm on (might need to pok regularly tho, I think my chat settings are still a bit off)

Finally made it to chapter 2 in The Witcher 2 (only took me 4 years...), the definitely improved combat (and general movement) compared to release though I still prefer Witcher 1's combat. Inbetween I've also been working on my backlog of games I backed on Kickstarter but didn't get around to really spend time with, first up was Unrest. It is RPG-ish game set bleak India-inspired universe and it's all about choice en consequence of your (= the player's) actions. It's actually one of the first games with C&C where I really wonder what would happen if I'd handle certain situations differently and since it's a very short game (assuming you only play through once, my first playthrough was ~2hours, but I might have rushed things a bit to see how things would turn out...) For those who don't know you play through different "chapters" with various characters (sometimes on opposing sides of the central divide), the actions of each of them influence the fate of the nation, though what's best for the nation isn't necessarily best for that specific character... There is no combat to speak of, pretty much everything happens through dialogue. I'd say it's definitely worth picking up in a sale if you like a good interactive story with C&C though the ending exposition could have been better (eg. the fates of the different characters you get to play are mostly not touched on, which makes sense given who some of them are, but not everybody will like this) I somehow also manged to get a craving for EQ2 (which I quit playing around 2011-ish, I think), seems it's now run as some F2P thing. Going to be interesting if any of the new stuff is actually any good or the whole game has devolved into the usual F2P nickel-and-diming... Guess I'll find out once the download finishes

Not bad for EA, and a good move for those who enjoy the DA:I multiplayer aspect. But that move also makes me believe that it´s not a very successful aspect of the game. I tried it, and it came across as a useless tacked on mode, one i certainly don´t enjoy or need. Wouldn't surprise me. Personally I didn't even try it, just like I ignored it in ME3, my stance on it is that they could have used the money wasted on those multiplayer modes to give the single player campaign some much needed extra love in both games. Because, seriously, who bought ME3 or DA:I for the multiplayer? Nobody *I* know for sure... (though my sister did enjoy ME3 MP, pretty sure she'd have gladly traded it for a better SP experience)

Duel-wielding rogue the first time, mage the second. I hated the first, enjoyed the second. Combat, IMO, doesn't favor duel-wielding rogues. Whereas if you specialize as a Knight-Enchanter, you can take on dragons all by yourself. I was doing it the other way around (Knight-Enchanter Mage first, dual wield rogue second). I did find playing a mage more enjoyable in DA:I than in DA2 at least, whereas in the second game I just quit the mage and rerolled a dual wield rogue to get through the game I stuck with the mage in DA:I. I mostly started the new playthrough to see if I'd notice any differences with my new graphics card on the Nvidia recommended settings, not sure if I'd want to go through the entire game a second time. Either way I upgraded from a GTX460 to a GTX970 btw, didn't notice that much difference so far, game does seem to run smoother (no more occasional stuttering so far) and loading times seem shorter (but I reserve judgement on that until I try to load Hinterlands for the first time) other than that it looks mostly the same, I think I'll try and up some more settings beyond what Nvidia recommends.

I checked Amazon and the PC version is up for 50€ on pre-order. Big AAA game tend to be 60€ on Steam.. is that where you're getting that price from? Yeah, Steam is kinda rubbing F4 in my face all the damn time, hadn't really checked other retailers yet (shame on me, I know)...

those were the days... of spending an entire week to download a 300 MB torrent. don't miss them one bit Why, I remember when Peter was seen as a visionary, rather than someone who sees visions I almost spilled my tea just now. Bittorrent is a product of this millennium though

Finished Revelations 2, got the "good" ending. Might go through again to get the other one. Also did some raid mode stuff, but that seems to just be run-and-gun so, meh (though that time I ran out of ammo was kinda fun). Went back to an ancient Skyrim playthrough, still have 2 achievements I'm missing (one of which due to a bug...), going to try to get those. The first minigame was upgrading the gazillion mods though

What system are you playing on? I never noticed an issue with movement in the PS4 version. The only slight "herky-jerky" moments I noticed were when in tight spaces (like a scaffold) and you accidentally shift him from walking to running, or running to walking. He sort of does this stutter-step. Yeah, hardware's gonna be the problem, shame, seemed to perform pretty well at first sight, but looks like I'll need to upgrade ~20fps isn't really playable. Bah

Is there any way to make Geralt move a bit more fluently? Right now it feels like he's skidding all over the place. From the little bit I've played so far this isn't much of an issue in combat, but out of combat movement feels terribly unresponsive (and I thought TW2 was bad, this is much much worse)

Neither of these warrant a day one purchase as far as I'm concerned based on the things we've seen so far. So the only date I care about is the date they go on sale for a reasonable price.

Source: https://twitter.com/ChrisAvellone/status/615752320324755456

Spoiler: (No really!) Phew, I was almost afraid I missed out on something, but yeah, I can see how that could give a Fallout vibe (I gave mine to Jaheira btw, bit of a shame you only get to play with it for relatively short amount of time) I'm kinda putting of the RE: Revelations 2 bossfight and have gone back to an old Skyrim playthrough (I also played some PoE and DoS). I seem to have a really hard time sticking with one game and finishing it lately...

BG series has the most insane Fallout easter egg... but you must start it in BG1 to complete it in BG2/Throne of Bhaal. I wonder if the BG:EE team has done any updates to that; or did they even know about it? Are you referring to the "Pantaloons Enigma" (and if so, what makes it a Fallout easter egg?) or is there something else that crosses the entire saga?

From Beamdog? Yeah, I don't see who else will realistically do it? They seem to have the IP around the Forgotten Realms from a development perspective so it should be feasible? Yeah, but can they make combat as fun with whatever the latest version of D&D is? I seriously doubt they'll be allowed to use 2nd edition for a new game, and then there's the risk that they'll start fiddling with things *they* consider to have been "bad" in BG2 (on top of whatever changes were made to the ruleset already) and we'll end up with another PoE... (looks like a duck, squawks like a duck, but swims like something else entirely) I wish they'd just leave BG be, the studio that made it is gone, the talent that made it is scattered to the wind and the saga was complete. If they want to make a BG-style game set in the Forgotten Realms, I'm all for it, there's a definite lack of *good* RtwP games that have been coming out. (there's SitS, which I really should get around to, dunno of any others really) Give them a chance to prove they can do it. But don't abuse our dreams by piggybacking on BG, they'll more than likely just be crushed once more anyway (not to mention that the backlash should they fail to deliver would be beyond epic...).

Squeeeee!! Though... also kinda scares me... EDIT: Colin coming aboard is also way cool, of course

Which is why they do their best to try and kill the second hand market any way they can get away with, these tricks don't affect PC gamers much since you either buy new at release or dirt-cheap in a Steam/Gog/wherever sale. The CPU core thing actually had a practical reason: it allowed them to sell off CPUs with botched cores (by disabling them), which apparently happened a lot in the early days (dunno about nowadays though). People with such a CPU could sometimes re-enable these cores and sometimes they worked fine, though just as often they would kill system stability. Also different models are pretty likely to have other differences besides the lowered clock speed (otherwise simply overclocking would get you a much more expensive card for free and you'd bet that information would spread like wildfire ), like slower ram or narrower buses or what-have-you. I doubt that'll be any time soon as the logistics/administration would likely be nightmarish...

As someone who never played the originals I get a bit of a M&M X: Legacy (should really finish that one...) vibe from the descriptions in that video. Not sure why he doesn't compare the viewpoint to Legend of Grimrock or M&M X which I'd assume the target audience would be familiar with (even though the gameplay of the former is decidedly different, being real time and all)

Dunno, standard price for AAA *PC* titles here has been 50euros (or the pre-euro equivalent) for as long back as I can remember (which would be dating back to the Tomb Raider/Dungeon Keeper times, which were 2000BF at launch, which is ~50euro). Console games have always been more expensive, for some unfathomable reason* But hey, if they can find enough idiots to pay that price instead of waiting for a sale and playing the like 300 other games they own in the meantime, all the more power to them... *well the reasons are quite clear, though why people put up with it is beyond me.

60 euros pre-order price? They are out of their mind! Even if I were super excited about the game I wouldn't be prepared to pay that much

Halfway through chapter 3 in RE: Revelations 2. The game is pretty much more of the same as Revelations 1, but in a less interesting setting (imho, it gives me some serious Tomb Raider vibes, the newest Tomb Raider, that is), though going through the same areas twice with different characters (and seeing the effects of the others that came through first) is interesting, they spiced it up compared to the previous game by allowing actions done by the first two characters to pass through to have effects on the second two (eg. depending on what you two the others will be able to access extra goodies and/or will have an easier/harder time in the level). The boss fights so far have also been less frustrating than in Revelations 1, we'll see if it stays that way though, wouldn't be surprised if the final boss turns out to be an insane difficulty spike, like in the last game. Still not sure about the lockpicking minigame, either I'm doing it wrong or it's just a big "**** you" towards colourblind people as I really can't tell by the supposedly changing colour whether I'm near the unlock point or not. Generally I can figure it out in a few tries by measuring the distances between where it fades and then more or less picking the middle point, but this often fails when it's near the border. Most of the time it's only a minor annoyance but there was this part where there was a box in a timed section (if you're not fast enough you either die or have to skip the box) that I just couldn't get done in time, so I had to give up on that box. Thankfully I only lost out on (potentially useful) loot but game progression wasn't blocked (unlike that horrible spectrometer minigame in Arkham Asylum that actually resulted in me giving up on that game). At least I can be glad that some game designers manage to turn something that's a minor handicap irl into a major source of frustration... Thankfully both inXile and Obsidian included colourblind modes in their games, which I can only applaud, though I've personally not needed it in PoE nor in W2 (which, of course, is even better, though that by no stretch of the imagination means that other colourblind people do not need it to be able to play these game).

Everything being massively sped up didn't bother you? Hm, nothing actually came across as massively sped up compared to most games over the last decade. It was stable, and nothing jumped out as an issue.Hell, the last time I replayed SR2 was about.. hm. 2-3 years ago now thinking about it. Not everyone had problems with it, the performance of the port was all over the place. I guess that is true of all games, to some degree, with a game running like a dream on one computer and having problems on another (with similar level hardware specs), but Saints Row 2 is a very extreme example. It's been a while, but I think the game's speed was actually tied to framerate and there was no way to cap the framerate (I remember games having issues like that in the past, but that was the 80s). So, if you had a beefy rig that could run the game at 120 FPS, then everything in the game was going at hyper speed. There were graphical glitches, keybindings not working, crashes to desktop. It worked fine for some people and was COMPLETELY unplayable for others. The Gentlemen of the Row mod fixed a lot of the problems, though some required weird workarounds as some of the problems were hardcoded into the game. One issue I had with the game, though I'm not sure if this was a PC only problem, was how insanely twitchy the vehicle steering was. You could tweak an ini to lower the steering sensitivity and make the cars much more driveable. Unfortunately, tweaking the steering sensitivity did so not just for the player, but for every vehicle in the game, and the driving AI was hardcoded to the original steering sensitivity, so when you turned steering sensitivity down all the AI drivers constantly crashed into each other causing massive pileups at every intersection. This was pretty hilarious for a while, but got annoying after a while, especially since it broke driving missions, so I had to put the sensitivity back to original and just deal with how twitchy the handling was. It's too bad because it's a very good game that I never got to really enjoy because I've never been able to get it to run well on any machine I've owned. I suppose I should give it a shot on my current monster desktop rig, though running it through WINE isn't likely to help me out in getting it to work properly. From what I remember from trying to get SR2 to run somewhat properly not too long ago (after finishing SR IV, in fact) the steering sensitivity thing is related to the massive speedup, it's one of the ways that you can see you are suffering from the speedup problem according to the stuff I read back then. The rest of the game stays playable with the speed problem (although it looks weird/funny), but driving is just broken.

Everything being massively sped up didn't bother you?

She was also one of the few characters that were sufficiently fleshed out instead of gimmicky or downright silly like Sera or Iron Bull. I don't know what Bioware did with that game, I mean I still liked it enough to play for almost 150 hours but it feels as if it was developed by a team of interns with a little supervision by seniors. What made Iron Bull silly (besides his looks, or is that it?)? His motivations for joining made sense at least, or is it the romance (which I didn't see)? My favourite female character is probably Josephine, she just makes sense and though they didn't turn her into some sort of doll she doesn't look bad (not in the sense that Sera looks like Gollum...), though whether someone would consider her good looking is, of course, a matter of taste. I assumed Jaws of Hakkon was just more Hinterlands style crap, is it actually worth getting? Does it add some meaningful exposition? (which the main story is sorely lacking)

'sup folks? Self portrait Awww...