[Picture of Your Games the 14th]

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...

[Cyberpunk 2077 continuing discussion]

Patch 1.31 out, 51GiB through Gog for me

[What are you Playing Now? Games = Life]

10 hours ago, Amentep said:

Sorry about that.  I thought no one was in the thread or I would have waited.  Must not have refreshed the currently viewing piece on your profile when I started (or you started writing after I started closing the thread.

ObTopic: Soul Nomad and the World Eaters.  I've restarted after sort of getting the feel for the systems; unlike Phantom Brave (the other game on this retro collection), I never played this one when it came out.  So far its interesting and system wise fairly different from a number of other NIS games.

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* )

[What are you Playing Now? Games = Life]

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!

[What are you Playing Now: Living the Game Life]

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".

[What are you Playing Now: Living the Game Life]

On 7/5/2021 at 10:12 PM, Theonlygarby said:

I'm playing legendary edition as well...  I forgot how much the paragon renegade choices annoy me.  it's extremely annoying having to be always good or always bad.  If you mix and match you just get crappy outcomes.  I'm fine with the tedium... I'm half enjoying the mako in ME1 for some reason

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.

On 7/6/2021 at 11:48 PM, mkreku said:

I bought Horizon Zero Dawn in the Steam summer sale and started it up yesterday. I am shocked by how good it's been so far. It's gorgeous, runs great on my machine, has a compelling story and it's surprisingly well-written with (some) characters that I actually care about. Also, it just opened up the world for me and that did not make it less awesome!

Unless something happens after the lengthy intro, I am going to enjoy this game immensely.

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.

 

On 7/14/2021 at 4:43 AM, Gorth said:

Mostly playing Guild Wars 2 these days... the release of the legendary armory resulted in a mass reshuffling of gear and the revisit of living world season 3 started tonight too. I'm sort of up to speed with that.

 

Short explanation: Legendary armory is a new feature where your legendary gear gets stored and instead of deciding which alt gets what legendary gear, they can now *all* use the same gear, as they all have access to a an "instance" or copy of the gear. I.e. if you have a legendary sword, all your toons can now use that one sword and each one select their owns stats and appearance independent of each other. Legendary prices are expected to become... legendary

The revisit part is Arenanet throwing carrots at people while waiting for the next major expansion (the third expansion), which got delayed from end of 2021 to somewhere 2022 (officially blaming covid for slowing down the process). They created a new set of achievements, which is basically replaying all the existing "Living World" story content, grind your butt off, do impossible jumping puzzles and do triple backwards flips with your left hand tied to your right foot... or something. Anyway, the reward for doing it all is a legendary item (amulet iirc) once all of it is done. And people are on a stampede throughout the story, crowding my personal space on the current map(s) a lot

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.

[What are you Playing Now: Living the Game Life]

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.

[rANDom vIdeo gaMe nEws]

On 6/13/2021 at 5:21 PM, Agiel said:

 

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.

[What are you Playing Now: Living the Game Life]

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.

[Baldur's Gate 3 - the 2nd thread]

15 hours ago, BruceVC said:

In what way is it depressing considering how little we really know about the game and its final release ?

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.

[What Are you Playing Now: Living the Good Life]

3 hours ago, sorophx said:

finally got to playing Nier:Automata, and while I know a lot of people love that game, I just don't see why.

maybe it's because I'm playing on PC with M+KB,

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.

[What Are you Playing Now: Living the Good Life]

On 4/16/2021 at 2:12 PM, Hurlsnot said:

I cleared some sort of goblin dungeon on the Isle of Siptah in Conan Exiles. It was scary.

I'm enjoying the Isle a ton. It's fun just to have a whole new area to explore, but I also feel like funcom has come along way with the engine and their world building, and it resulted in a pretty focused expansion with great effects.

I am building my fortress on a large rock outcropping in the middle of the maelstrom. 

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

[Cyberpunk 2077 continuing discussion]

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.

[What Are you Playing Now: Living the Good Life]

On 4/10/2021 at 10:50 AM, BruceVC said:

I loved the Dead Space series, that first one was the scariest game I have ever played...the way the aliens make noises and try to creep up on you created an amazing psychological gaming  experience 

I also use to enjoy hunting for ammo and resources and the unfolding narrative cant be ignored because its so interesting

 I dont remember ever having enough ammo 

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

Spoiler

you revisit the Ishimura.

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...

[What Are you Playing Now: Living the Good Life]

17 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

"Don't update games until I launch them."  - <---used so downloads don't auto-start when I go "Online."

But then ... I like how Steam disables the "PLAY" button within their gui (even if you go back into Offline mode), because they don't want you to play until you update.

Thankfully, most of the time you can bypass this (Offline at least so it can't autostart updating on launch) by launching a game directly from the .exe in the install folder.  FU Steam. And before anyone wonders - no I don't really care that these games want updates. Except Xuan-Yuan, they changed a lot of things I don't want to deal with yet. Mostly I'm just too lazy to want to temp-backup game installs first, and then download, most of the time, especially games that seem to "update" every two days.   I know there's a way to download/downgrade to older game versions (manifests?) but it's way too much bother.

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>

[What Are you Playing Now: Living the Good Life]

14 hours ago, Malcador said:

Times like this I feel I could have made it as a game developer.

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.

[Cyberpunk 2077 continuing discussion]

13 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

Some on Steam are saying the LoD/pop-in is even worse than before, especially when driving. Anyone here notice such?  If there's one thing I hate - particularly in supposed  "graphic wowzer" games - is texture and other pop-in.

Oh well ... I probably won't be able to dedicate to playing games like this for some months anyway (my hands, I mean). I may try to replay this game in 2022, see if they make enough changes where I'll find the gameplay/mechanics a little more interesting for my tastes. Won't expect miracles.

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.

[What Are you Playing Now: Living the Good Life]

Put some more time into Warframe now that you can hire crew for your Railjack. It's better now, at least as you don't have to babysit the bloody thing quite as much anymore.

While doing that I made it to Mastery Rank 29. Go me!

[Cyberpunk 2077 continuing discussion]

Noticed you appear to no longer get xp for killing an enemy that was knocked out. Shame

Driving is still "meh", mostly because traffic doesn't appear to have gotten any fixes, so they still swerve randomly, or just stop in the middle of intersections for no reason at all.

Supposedly you can now craft multiples of items, but couldn't for the life of me figure out how...

[Cyberpunk 2077 continuing discussion]

On 3/19/2021 at 8:22 PM, Malcador said:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1091500/announcements/detail/3042717759905569253

"According to our survey over 30% of all Night Citizens experienced an irresistible urge to burst forward for no reason and the majority of affected people admitted that it put them in danger of falling from a high place. Manufacturer claims that the glitch is caused by a lack of perfect synchronisation between the user's brain patterns and the neuroprocessor."

 Hah.

 

 

Blaming bugs on the user, glad to see nothing is changing in the next 56 years

But yes, glad that one got addressed, somewhat, at least. Having a separate, dedicated, button would be better, of course...

[Cyberpunk 2077 continuing discussion]

19 hours ago, Humanoid said:

Got to the point of no return, 42 hours in. Not going to finish just yet, but fairly happy with that. Biggest complaint so far is the one forced (I think) boss fight I had to endure, pretty awful when I have exactly zero combat perks, ugh.

I'm kinda curious what level you are, and what exactly your build is that you have no combat perks.

Also I assume you were referring to the fight with

Spoiler

Oda?

In which case, yup, can't avoid that one.

[Picture of Your Games the 14th]

43 minutes ago, melkathi said:

Installing Mordheim now

You uninstalled Mordheim...

[Picture of Your Games the 14th]

On 3/7/2021 at 10:39 PM, Keyrock said:

Valheim is slowly taking over Obs Forums. Everything is proceeding according to plan.

Gotta defend that throne...

 

[Cyberpunk 2077 continuing discussion]

10 hours ago, Hurlshot said:

I just don't understand how anyone complains about the game being too short. I put in about 50 hours and I don't think I was that close to the end. I stalled out, but I am pretty comfortable with the idea I will return to it. It is an enjoyable game. I think people just have crazy expectations.

Took me 150hours to "complete" the game. That is: one playthrough, all the (marked) side quests (minus the boxing ones, those can go diaf. Not counting the cars either) and went through all 4 main endings (Sun, Star, Devil, and Temperance).

10 hours ago, Oner said:

The actual complaint is that the main story is short. For some this means the 12-ish hours it takes to rush through it is a tiny part of the game, for others it means the story running leaps into the finale straight over a potential act 3 that the story is (or would) neatly flow into.

It's definitely short-ish if one ignores all the side content (some of which could borderline be considered main quest, though), but I don't think I'd necessarily want it to be longer just for the sake of it, if that would result in something like Witcher 3, which I thought felt seriously dragged out at points to the point that I ended up forgetting what my actual goal was.

I'd prefer more substantial side quest chains instead then, giving us the chance to become more familiar with certain NPCs without forcing it through the main quest, for example (like doing more substantial jobs with Rogue, or some deeper involvement with some of the fixers than merely doing their gigs).

Maybe once/if we get to continue past the ending...

[Cyberpunk 2077 continuing discussion]

7 hours ago, Humanoid said:

I thought that 1/3 at the end there meant that the new release date was the 1st of March. I suck at Twitter.

That said, I've been playing the game in earnest, finally. Only just past the big FUBAR and into the open world content proper for the first time. No technical issues really. Playing a pure stealth character more or less and not sure how I feel about it. Part of it is because I'm already stealth-inclined generally, but the other was that I ended up deciding that the gamepad was better for the game generally but at the same time it necessitated making shooting not the major focus of gameplay.

Both the stealth mechanics and level design in that context aren't quite as good as games dedicated to the mechanics, but that's understandable given that it's trying to be many things at the same time. Takedowns are clumsier than they need to be, requiring two commands instead of one striking me as particularly silly (grab first then decide on lethal vs non-lethal). I've long thought that Dishonored, even the first one, already solved the most elegant way to takedown and grab but for some reason it hasn't been shamelessly copied, with both Mankind Divided and now this regressing to jankier implementations.

That said, I'm letting myself be immersed, walking around at a moderate pace, following the walk lights, etc. I find myself reluctant to drive because of a lack of parking spots means I can't elegantly leave the car anywhere. Even when I'm in a place with parking spots, I find the game doesn't actually let me use them, which is irritating. Seriously, there's like an invisible wall in front of the parking spot itself. Whyyyyyy?

That's for quests, where they want to force you to walk up to the quest area. I have noticed those barriers tend to not always go away once you finish the quest, even though in some instances they are not there before the quest (eg. the Pyramid Song location)

Stealth didn't bother me too much, aside from Cool feeling a bit useless. Hacking seems a lot more useful to get around without being seen than most Cool perks and I've gone through the game with only 3 points in Cool (think I only grabbed the skill that makes you go faster in stealth)

As for the controller, I just use m+kb and grab a controller for driving. Also, as mentioned prior, the traffic AI is garbage (they like to swerve for no reason at all, for example) and car handling is "meh" with a controller (and outright bad with m+kb). Simplest "solution" is to just use a motorcycle, you should be getting one of the best ones in the game for free right about where you are in the game now.

3 hours ago, Spider said:

This kinda sums the game up in a nutshell for me. Everything in it is worse than in games dedicated to the specific thing, but compensates by having all the things. Problem with that approach is you risk dissapointing everyone. The GTA crowd feels the world is stale and vehicle handling is crap, the rpg crowd complains about lack of depth in the rpg systems and in meaningful choices. Both of which are valid complaints.

For me personally it worked well, I found the game to be greater than the sum of it's parts. I loved the first playthrough I did, but replayability suffers a bit. The story beats are largely the same, and while it's mechanically different, the melee slasher I'm playing now is less fun than the hacker/sniper I went with first. Then again, I tend to favor the former playstyle, so wasn't completely unexpected.

I feel the problem there is how people define "meaningful choice". I think most people want "big impact" choices, not necessarily meaningful ones (maybe just arguing semantics, but still) Because while you end up in the same place (and I've complained about that place before, so I'll spare everyone a re-run ) and walk more or less the same road there's still significant differences.

If you miss certain quests for example, or if let certain characters die, or how your relationship is which certain characters. It all impacts the flow and feel of the quests and how the endings "feel" (or which ones you have access to at all).

For example,

Spoiler

the Arasaka ending is very much a downer, but it is really depressing when Takemura is dead. Try romancing Judy for some extra punches in the gut in this ending.

But yes, you do end up in the exact same place in the end, but that is by design, the endings (there's only three outcomes, really, despite there being at least 5 endings with a lot of variations on each) are a very obvious setup for future content so I do hope they "fix" themselves once that content gets released.

So I would argue that the choices are meaningful, just that they don't have a big impact on the gameplay and replayability, as the road you walk is still mostly the same. And that's a very valid complaint indeed, multiple playthroughs are basically the same unless you take conscious effort to make them different (purposefully make different decisions to see what happens, purposefully use a different build). That said, my first character was a Corpo and, after the initial disappointment about the extremely short "origin story", I was pleasantly surprised about how much it actually affects the game.

I did try going melee on my second playthrough, didn't work too well for me (also tried NG+ style, by "cheating" my way to 50 on Very Hard, with appropriate attribute points, game put out the hurts, at least initially)

And another complaint I can get behind is that there's very little to do once you're "done", there's the police star things, but those are so easy by the time you complete the game it's like swatting flies, they're also not marked on the map, so finding them requires just randomly driving around and getting lucky...

Exploration is still enjoyable, there's quite a bit of environmental storytelling going on and I even found an unmarked quest that gave me a nice edgy motorcycle. But yeah, collecting more stuff...why exactly? Guess this is where the "not a living city" complaints come from, in which case I can kinda see where they're coming from.