marelooke

Ummm... Hi?

Since it's almost impossible to post any FF XIV Endwalker screenshots without massive spoilers here's one from Shadowbringers: Il Mheg And one from Endwalker's credits Always a nice touch when they thank the players for playing.

They're mostly running around and talking to people. There was surprisingly little combat involved in Endwalker (if we ignore the mandatory dungeons). The side quests (which became entirely optional in Endwalker, due to the main quest giving you enough XP to get to level cap) at least tend to deepen out the lore, though they are usually more typical MMO-fare (go there, kill/fetch that) Older expansions, and especially ARR, were worse in that respect, but I wouldn't really have any qualms playing the game just for the story (and as a matter of fact, a not insignificant part of the playerbase does just that) If they handn't just shut down registration of new trial accounts I'd recommend just giving it a go, base game and first expansion are free nowadays. Maybe something to keep in mind once the server congestion situation blows over.

Finished the FF XIV Endwalker Main Story Quest. As far as MMORPGs go FF XIV easily has some of the best story and world building. The combination of setting things up many expansion in advance as well as how they manage to just make things that were more than likely not planned entirely deliberate is pretty awesome. As an example they reused the "Answers" song (this one, used when the Calamity struck on FF XIV 1.0 to reboot the game into 2.0, aka A Realm Reborn) three times over the course of the last decade, and three times expanded upon its meaning. It's pretty hard to believe that was the intent when they rebooted the game, but they sure manage to make it look extremely intentional. Pacing was bit off this expansion, some things that should have gotten more attention, didn't, others dragged on way too long. But the 5th map and associated trial (the second one) absolutely delivered and were definitely the high point for me, though the ending was satisfying as well. Aside from that, just getting into the game is a chore on a technical level. Square Enix, despite which FF XIV became a good MMO, has refused to invest in servers for a long time (the European data center was already close to capacity before the WoW exodus, or the silicon shortage, basically during a "low" player activity period there were still queues), so now that we have both (alongside New World refugees), along with a new, highly anticipated, expansion release servers are just way over capacity with multi-hour long queues just to get in. They even stopped selling the game, or allowing trial accounts in. So yeah it's bad... The good part is that the game is actually stable and once you get in you can actually play without really having to worry about crashing out.

Queueing to get into Final Fantasy XIV early access. If game runs fine once I get in I'll probably put up with the queues, if it just crashes/disconnects all the time I"ll probably just go back to playing something else. Forza Horizon, most likely.

Getting that a lot on the forum lately, even when agreeing to the social media cookies. Something's clearly broken somewhere... Let's try that again: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hixww37DKuY

Kinda same, been poking at Forza Horizon 5. It's fun, and it's more inline with Horizon 3 than 4 (which I didn't like and barley played). This about sums it up, honestly: This content cannot be displayed until agreeing to our use of Social Media cookies. Learn more. Manage cookies I wish someone would create a proper TDU sequel ... (no TDU2 does not exist, and never has)

Been playing a bunch of Timberborn. It's a city builder about beavers and your greatest enemy is drought. Every x in-game time a draught happens and you have the rest of the time to prepare for it, basically. Aside from the obvious solution (building vats to store water) you're also leading, you know, beavers, so building dams, redirecting flow, creating artificial lakes, are all tools you can use to store water (or just keep your crops hydrated) Wouldn't say the game is hard, at least so far, on normal, but you can get caught unawares pretty easily, especially when your beavers start "getting it on" and your population explodes. The draughts do get longer though, not sure if they keep getting longer, and longer, until things become unwinnable or whether there's a cap to them. Note the game is early access, but it runs great, haven't had any crashes or seen any obvious bugs, so mostly hoping for the devs to add additional stuff to do. Maybe add some more (optional) challenges. Stuff like that.

This thread appears to be lacking a certain something... Oh! I know! Can't believe I'm still playing building stuff in this game. Tried a few others, but always end up coming back to this one for my building fix...

Patch 1.31 out, 51GiB through Gog for me

Probably because I had to AFK a bit due to a phonecall. Not sure how long you're marked as active once you start writing a post, but I guess the answer was that I was gone too long Going to chalk it up to just an unfortunate series of events. Bit of a bummer it doesn't at least let you save it somehow, but oh well, merely slightly annoying not exactly the end of the world (On a forum that supports BBCode I'd write the post in a text editor first though... *cough* )

Aaand it seems I lost a rather long reply because locking a thread just makes the forum software eat it. Anyway. RE: Horizon Zero Dawn. I thought the "main" plot point being predictable was intentional (anyone on this forum would figure it out within 30min of starting the game, I'm sure), where the game eventually ends up going was not something I was able to predict until at least a few major story missions in. I don't mind the walking simulator missions quite as much, though some were overlong exposition dumps and should probably have been spread out over more missions. Certainly prefer it over that very long one where they shoehorned some enemies in that shouldn't have been able to be there at all (that was kinda jarring). To me HZD's world feels more akin to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. rather than a "modern" open world game, and I think I personally prefer that approach over the "crammed with stuff"-design we tend to get nowadays. As to what I'm playing, still mostly, Final Fantasy XIV trying to get all jobs to max level before the expansion hits. I've also been back to building in Conan Exiles, it seems the server software has become a bit more stable, not sure if that's related to the big patches recently or the improvements brought by the Debian upgrade and potentially a newer Wine version but I had a server running for over a week without it going Out of Memory. (bets on how long it'll take before I have to eat those words are open ) Still haven't made it back to my Siptah-game, keep getting distracted by...ooooooh, good building spot!

Finished Horizon: Zero Dawn Great game overall, would highly recommend. So most criticism I have should be considered of the more nitpicky sort. If you haven't played this I'd recommend picking it up (unless this genre is just not up your alley, of course) The lore is pretty great and hits close enough to home to be a tad disconcerting. Can't go into any more detail without at least minor spoilers, but the settings is right up my alley for sure! The environmental storytelling is rather on point. There's quite a few collectibles and a few of them are actually really worth collecting for the lore bits, especially the "Vistas" are top-notch (the Banuk statues are OK, the rest is..."ehh"). I appreciate how they made it fairly hard to miss any of the major lore collectibles (journals etc) unless you really don't pay attention, and as far as I can tell you could go back to most places should you miss anything anyway. My initial impression was a bit unfavourable due to how mine and Aloy's early goals didn't appear to quite align. The game solved that issue beautifully though. There were, unfortunately, a few places with "forced dumb" where you're forced to just stand around and watch things happen "because story", or where your character makes certain decisions you almost know will backfire. Most of these instances I feel could have been handled a lot more elegantly than they were. A few main quests are (or contain) large exposition dumps which I feel could have been handled a bit more peace-meal. Gameplay-wise the game works rather well on mouse+keyboard. Combat works fine, with a few minor niggles, like animation locks sometimes meaning you get hit because it potentially locks you into a long animation which enemies then "cancel" with a faster attack while you can't do anything about it even when you see it coming. There's also at least one enemy type in the Frozen Wilds DLC that's horrendously obnoxious to fight except with one very specific weapon whose ammo eats resources like there's no tomorrow. Your growth in power is rather well done and closer to how S.T.A.L.K.E.R. works than most other MMOs, level ups mean relatively little, with skills mostly opening up additional options (except for melee attacks) and the power increases mostly come from a combination of better gear and a better understanding of your environment. One minor niggle is that whoever gets the killing blow, gets the XP, meaning friendly NPCs often steal your XP. Can be a tad frustrating when you're fighting something very tough and some guards pass by and manage to get the killing blow. The one thing I absolutely hope they'll fix in the next instalment though is the inventory. There's so many machine and upgrade parts and you really don't know what's useful and what's not that inventory management is just an utter nightmare where you'll keep stuff you end up never needing, while tossing things that you then later (quite literally) have to go hunt for. The same goes for some resources that I didn't use until I needed boatloads of them (see "specific weapon" from before) As mentioned earlier I didn't like the Hunting Grounds. After the disappointment that was the "stealth" one I mostly ignored them. The DLC had a quest that was hunting ground related where you were set up with a limited arsenal (only specific weapon and limited amount of ammunition) to accomplish a task, but without a timer which I felt would have worked a lot better for most of the Hunting Ground trials. So I really hope they go that route if they want to retain the concept for the next game. From a technical POV...well, my Gog copy CTD'd twice on its own, and screenshots are very liable to crash the game as well (seen that on Gog with other games, so not sure if Gog issue or game issue, regardless, my usual screenshot-happiness suffered greatly). I had one instance of textures simply not loading, forcing a reload, and a few cases of them loading slowly. There's also the "optimizing textures" bit that's bugged, it's supposed to help the game load faster but it ran on every game launch for me. I tried some of the troubleshooting tips but none seemed to work, so game loading times were agonizingly slow. The UI is acceptable. It's a fairly direct console port and the most annoying part of it is the inability to "slot" more than four weapons at once, which is purely a controller-imposed limitation as you can swap out weapons in combat without drawbacks, so would be nice to see that resolved in the future. Overall would rate it an 8/10 "Very good".

As far as I remember about how the "alignment" system worked this wasn't as much of a problem in ME1, but the way it was designed in ME2/3 meant you basically had to pick a "side" and stick with it. Even a single deviation could throw things off massively. It was a horribly broken mechanic. Still playing HZD myself, must be getting close to the end of the main quest. I'd rate it a solid 7 or 8/10 so far. But I'll try and just do a more detailed write-up once I complete it. I'll say I absolutely loathe the Hunting Grounds side content though. The fact that you basically have to do all of them to get anything out of it made me just not bother once I came across the timed stealth section one. I noped the hell out right there and then. Despite GW2 being one of my favourite MMOs of the past decade I'm fairly confident I'm done with it, or, more accurately, I'm done supporting ArenaNet in any way, shape, or form. The last expansion (and the next one) are just fan service, pulling on hyped up content from the previous game to try and lure people in (isn't it just weird how you can hype up people with stuff they never experienced themselves? See also Baldur's Gate 3). Besides I thought Path of Fire was pretty terrible, and I'm rather unimpressed they absolutely 100% dropped some major unfinished business from HoT (the whole Pale Tree debacle...) But much more importantly than whatever passes for a story is that ArenaNet has proven to have a broken moral compass, especially when it comes to lootboxes (aka gambling) in their game, for which they promised a solution years ago and they have done exactly squat past making the content inaccessible in a few countries (a list that hasn't been updated since to boot, meaning they're actively violating gambling laws in multiple countries at the moment), which was supposed to be a temporary measure pending a more structural solution. There's a few more egregious problems, like everything "desirable" basically boiling down to a massive gold grind, which can be conveniently shortened by just buying said gold with real world money. It's a bummer, because aside from FF XIV I can't think of any other actually good MMO out there right now but each time I've tried to get into it and catch up with the Living World stuff I just meh'd out.

Picked up Horizon Zero Dawn on Gog. Enjoying it so far, though the transition from the "tutorial" part of the game to the "main" game was slightly jarring. Hope we get to do some archaeology at least, figuring out what happened to "those that came before" is usually high on my list of things I try to dig into.

Hmm, the combat section early on looks very action-y. In the previous games playing like that would likely have gotten you killed in very short order. I do hope that was just for the trailer and the actual game preserves the deadliness of the earlier games' combat.

Hasn't really been anything that caught my eye lately so I've mostly been building in Conan Exiles (still gotta get back to Siptah) and playing Final Fantasy XIV. Outriders was a bust and appears to be getting the Anthem treatment, which is a tad disappointing as there was some potential there.

We know it's Divinity: Original Sin 3 in all but name and setting. That's enough for many people to be disappointed. Many of the friends and acquaintances I have that enjoyed the Baldur's Gate series did not enjoy the D:OS-games all that much. Regardless of whether the game is any good as it is, anyone expecting something even remotely resembling the Baldur's Gate series is going to majorly disappointed, because this ain't it. I'm still baffled by the need to abuse the name of a long completed series and then make a game nothing like it. A game that, from the looks of it, could very well have stood on its own based on Larian's merit, the pedigree of the setting, and the quality of the product that's out there (so far). I really can't help but see this as an ego-trip in that they were allowed to make Baldur's Gate 3. That or a severe case of company-level imposter syndrome, I suppose. To people not having played BG1&2 it doesn't matter. And those that did either don't care, or are mightily annoyed. The entire thing reminds me of Prey, that drama was completely unnecessary and marred the reputation of what was otherwise a great game in the eyes of many and it still gets brought almost every single time Prey is mentioned.

Don't. Really. As someone who is terrible with controllers, and really only uses them for race games (and one, failed, attempt at "Remember Me", which I quit because the controls actually started to hurt my hands) my enjoyment of the game went up immensely when using a controller (from negative to somewhere positive, at least). Now I still wouldn't play on some high difficulty, but it certainly was bearable and with some practice I got somewhat decent at it. They really should advertise this game as controller only. Imho the game is simply unplayable with M+KB. I'm not convinced any mods will be able to fix keyboard controls as you need to be able control both your character as well as the Pod at the same time, and I just really don't see that working out with m+kb. (but that's just like, my opinion, of course...) Also do get the unofficial patch, if you haven't already, regardless of your choice of input method, it fixes quite a few issues that the porters never bothered with.

Should give it another go now that they've added NPC camps, because boy, was getting thralls tedious in the original beta release. Ironically though, I feel the game has mostly been regressing, rather than advancing when it comes to the base systems. All the additional crafting stations are just a nuisance (gotta fit them all *somewhere*, feels like just lazy workaround instead of properly dealing with atrocious crafting station UX, I guess), combat is as broken, if not more so, as it's ever been. But they removed much of the cheese tactics, so now you're more at the mercy of the game's shoddy hit detection and teleporting enemies. But I still play the game, though I rarely venture into combat heavy areas, or dungeons, anymore as that experience, solo anyway, is just...not good. Building stuff is where it's at

New Cyberpunk update (Patch 1.21). Was 588MB for me on Gog, mostly minor bugfixes and deals with some quest progression issues (like Cyberpsycho quests not counting towards the "meta" quest). The two things I'd like fixed aren't, those being: Ping quickhack alerts enemies Can't craft multiples of crafting materials Kinda prefer having these smaller patches, but more often, rather than wait months for a large one, but given the inefficiency of these updates on consoles I can see why that doesn't happen (this patch requires like a >20GB download on some consoles, ouch). Here's to hoping that now that the worst issues are tackled they'll start adding in some additional content as well.

For some reason the next games in the series didn't really scare me. The one part where I went "oh dear, oh dear, oh fscking dear!" was in Dead Space 2 when People keep saying the "slow" aimining in the PC port of Dead Space was a bug, but imho it worked well given the heavy suit, and it really made you feel a lot more vulnerable, so I didn't even question whether that was intended until I read about it later... Anyway, have mostly been hopping between my go-to "I dunno what I wanna play" games, Conan Exiles, Warframe, and FF XIV. I did give Outriders a go as the demo was promising. Unfortunately the final game, well, far less so. Balance, for single players, appears to go entirely out of the window the further in the campaign you get. Enemies with assault rifles have sniper accuracy from across the map, and many "elite", or "boss" enemies will basically one, or two-shot you when you go near them (great when running a melee build...) As such it often feels more like a case of luck (or not having "bad luck") when I get through an encounter alive, even on what is supposed to be "normal" difficulty. Not really the feeling I'm looking for, tbh. This game, while mostly single-player, is always online. If the connection goes out during a mission you just get kicked out and get can start over. This especially matters because there's an inventory wipe bug that happens on disconnects, and crashes, where you can irrevocably lose everything on your current character. Saves are local (and they rely on some sort of anti-cheat to keep people from tinkering with them) so the devs have no backup of your stuff. At best you get some random-rolls of items you may, or may not, have had back (imagine losing some tweaked out Diablo 3 character and getting some random rolled legendaries back. Yeah...) So yeah, stopped playing until they can sort that stuff out, bit of a deal breaker right there...

If only that option also worked for workshop content Nothing quite as annoying as having mods auto-update, breaking your game until the mod authors manage to update their stuff... Been a major pain point for Conan Exiles, each update just breaks servers for sometimes days, until the modders manage to catch up. On the subject of Conan Exiles, on top of the forced connection to Funcom's "live service" BS (note, game supposedly still works if you're offline now, but you can't force it into offline mode without disconnecting your network) they now added a dumb launcher too. You can, at least for the time being, skip this abomination by just launching the exe directly from the game folder. <rant> What's wrong with devs nowadays? Do they not want you to, you know, play the game? Why make it as slow as humanly possible to get into the game? Just get rid of all the stupid unskippable intros, launchers, splash screens (that includes you "press <key> to continue" abomination of a UX failure), health and safety warnings, and get me to the main menu on startup, for Pete's sake, it's not exactly rocket surgery... If you really must show the damn things (eg. for legal reasons) at least make them skippable, or even better, only show them the first time. No need to remind me of the epilepsy warning every. single. launch. Ugh </rant>

They make me fee like I definitely wouldn't be able to make it as a game developer... The way games are just cobbled together in general without anything resembling a development process, the total lack of any competent UX design in most games,... I swear I'd go postal within a year.

Didn't notice it being any worse so far, but well, it was already noticeable before...so take that for what you will. Game did seem to look better after the patch though, initially I chalked that up to coming back after not playing for a while, but apparently they did improve lighting on lower end hardware, so I might not be imagining it. As for a comprehensive list of changes, this Youtuber did some good coverage, covering probably all the important stuff: Things that stood out to me (not all of them were in the patch notes): resistances now work most (all?) perks and items/mods now work driving is slightly better (but traffic is still broken) almost all exploits (xp and money) are fixed Ping and Breach Protocol now alert enemies (not a fan of this one, tbqh) FPS is more stable in general crafting got a bunch of fixes (lowered crafting requirements, buying crafting components got cheaper) shops now actually sells legendaries. Not sure if the rotation of blueprints is fixed, will have to test that one.