What Are you Playing Now: Living the Good Life

[LadyCrimson]

5 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

the only way you could "more detailed" sprites is by completely remaking them. How do you want the game to look, exactly?

I don't want more detail, I want it to not look fuzzy like an overblown sized photograph when at higher resolutions or screen size but not become super tiny on the screen either.

 

Edit: like the Stronghold HD  or Casear HD mod versions do.

Edited April 30, 2021 by LadyCrimson

[LadyCrimson]

Thinking about it, it's mostly that the FoV becomes so ginormous.  I guess 800x600 is fine, but anything higher is silly. 

The HD/widescreen for the above mentioned games did increase the FoV a little as well, to the sides ofc, but nowhere near as extreme and things didn't become extra tiny for a single bump up in resolution or widescreen aspect.  Although I'm sure if at 4k it might still do so.  Those games also had higher resolution to begin with, ofc, too.

Maybe I'll try playing D1 with the 1920x1080 anyway.  Maybe it'll be amusing.

[Bartimaeus]

I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, but you're kind of confusing me: Diablo 1 (and Diablo 2) are 2D sprite-based games, not 3D model-based models. 2D graphics like sprites and textures, which have a finite amount of pixels to them, can't magically gain more detail from increasing the resolution - increasing the resolution just allows for greater magnification of the details that were already there. The detail that is already there is all there is - it's a 1998 game. So when you say this...

31 minutes ago, LadyCrimson said:

I want it to not look fuzzy like an overblown sized photograph

...you're literally asking for exactly what you just said you didn't ask for:

31 minutes ago, LadyCrimson said:

I don't want more detail

Either that, or you're asking for a remake of the graphics altogether. Either way, I'm not understanding what you're getting after, .

I preferred using 1024x768, because I don't like getting smashed by stuff off-screen and that just about covers enemies' maximum range, but 800x600 would be a good compromise too.

Edited April 30, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[LadyCrimson]

^  Sorry, by more details I meant I don't care if chrs faces are featureless blobs or whether I can tell if there are wrinkles in their armor. 

I guess I mean better upscaling, aliasing, smoothing,  or whatever one calls such.  I know there are limits (especially re: larger and larger screen sizes etc) but I still think it could be a little better and thus one wouldn't have to use larger "resolution" to start with or at most the 800x600.

Like the mod does do a little something, you can see a difference in smoothing (or something) at the same original size (640x480) vs. the GoG version.  A little more would be nice. I tried all 3 scaling quality settings, anisotropic seems the most effective.  I also tried nvidia's sharpening setting out of curiosity but I'm not sure it affects this game at all, couldn't tell any difference, good or bad, heh.

 

41 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

I don't like getting smashed by stuff off-screen

To me that's part of the ... challenge? surprise? ... of the game.  I like that I can be attacked by something I don't see first and I have to move closer to aim/attack it. 

Edited April 30, 2021 by LadyCrimson

[Mamoulian War]

Still playing the Fairy Fencer F for Playstation 3. On my way to platinum trophy, I have hit a very big roadblock, achievement to get 100 million gold I have already 22.5 million, but the speed of getting the money is approximately 2.5 million in an hour, and I am still missing 77.5 million, you can imagine, how much fun it is I will go back to Druidstone: Secret fo the Menhir Forest from GOG today, and while playing some other games, I will be going back to it, once in a while. Hopefully I'll get that trophy before the end of the year

[Malcador]

 

Woo.  Even got that result when simulating the last 2 months.  Tempted to leave Brno now, got 3 titles and 1 cup with them.  But, suppose I will stay with them and do the dynasty route - I can't wait for my 17 year old wonderkids to betray me and go to a bigger club ASAP

[Hawke64]

Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Beneath the Stolen Lands. I successfully created a party and cleared 15 floors, discovering 1 piece of lore and gathering a small pile of loot. There was supposed to be a main/non-random boss on the 15th floor of the standalone version of the dungeon, but he apparently did not spawn. I'm going to try the shorter version from one of my old saves.
One of the merchants, the Honest Guy, strongly reminds me of Patches from Dark Souls.

Tried Tales of Berseria. Well, mistakes were made - camera speed seems way off, which is most inconvenient for a 3rd-person action-adventure. The combo system is quite interesting (possible to bind specific chains of attacks to keys before battle).  The presentation of the story is not anyhow appealing.

[Mamoulian War]

IIRC, it is possible to change camera speed in newer Tales of games.

[BruceVC]

Morrowind, I am about 20 hours into the game and its been a great and rewarding experience. I do enjoy the Bethesda RPG Sandbox design. The world is huge and full of things to do from the dozens of books to read around lore to the myriad of quests and the sequence of when you need to do them. Yes this is true sandbox and with the assistance of Mods Bethesda are the undisputed masters of this type of RPG 

At the moment I am just trying to survive in the game world financially and enjoying finding places based on the " directions " of NPCs...." go east past Fort Moonmoth and take the trail to Gnaar Mok " ....its always rewarding not having a  blinking cursor on the map making it easy for you 

[Malcador]

Not pleased with Lost Horizon 2, timed sequences and arcade segments.  Also Fenton's voice actor sounds like he's on ketamine channeling Kevin McKidd. 

[the_dog_days]

With my Axis Football save gone I will have to begin my plans for league domination anew. 

[Mamoulian War]

I have started today Tales of Legendia. The pace is not fast, but not slow as well. After a hour, I got few cutscenes and skits, and I am still in first city, but it does not feel like a slog. Random encounters are not too frequent, so I hope it stays this way in the foreseeable future. 

In the meanwhile, I am up to 30 million Gold at Fairy Fencer F. 70 more to go for Platinum 

Also tomorrow, I’ll be organizing final multiclass race for second season of Racing Academy in Assetto Corsa, and on Thursday, I’ll finish my first season as a sim racing commentator in two local Czech and Slovak Racing Leagues for Trained Monkey Modding group 

And I will finally have a little bit more time until september, when next racing season will start 

[Keyrock]

I finished GreedFall, it took just over 50 hours. Very good RPG, easily Spiders' best effort to date. I'm sure most people here have already played the game, so I won't go into details. Suffice to say that if you've played any previous Spiders' titles then it's like that, just more open, more polished. It makes me excited to see what they develop in the future.

I also finished Death Come True, it's an interactive movie where you wake up in a hotel room with amnesia, there's an unconscious and bound woman in the bathroom, and a news report on the television claims you are a wanted serial killer. The premise is simple enough at first, it's a choose your own adventure and when you die you wake up at the beginning retaining the knowledge from before and can make different choices, but then it makes a hard left turn and gets weird... then it gets really weird. It's from a new studio made up of devs that used to work at Spike Chunsoft, makers of the twisted and demented Zero Escape and Danganronpa games, so it's no surprise that the game gets really weird. It's a short game, you can finish it in a single session. I haven't gotten every one of the deaths yet, but I did get the true ending and I got one particularly twisted death that amuses me to no end. It's likely no one else here will ever play the game, I may be the only weirdo here that plays stuff like this, but on the off chance that you do play it, don't read or watch anything about it beforehand. Go in completely blind.

[Keyrock]

While I'm waiting for Ace Combat 7 to download I'm going to play Zero Time Dilemma, which is the most recent Zero Escape game. It's part choose your own adventure, part escape the room, and all demented. Basically, imagine if the Saw movies were interactive... and interesting... and didn't suck.

[BruceVC]

14 hours ago, Keyrock said:

I finished GreedFall, it took just over 50 hours. Very good RPG, easily Spiders' best effort to date. I'm sure most people here have already played the game, so I won't go into details. Suffice to say that if you've played any previous Spiders' titles then it's like that, just more open, more polished. It makes me excited to see what they develop in the future.

 

I have been reviewing Greedfall for ages and I have often considered buying it, please go into detail. I would like any comparison to other games and as much detail you are prepared to share, for example what specifically did you enjoy about it and also what didnt you  enjoy about it ?

[sorophx]

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, but combat feels unfair most of the time. encounters are very poorly designed, and because the controls are so bad on PC by default, I keep dying so often it really feels like an exercise in frustration.

I finally dropped the game after a boss fight where I had to play a bullet-hell portion, and the game switched controls as part of the "challenge", that was the last straw since you can't do diagonal movement on KB...

I'm sure there's a good game under it all, I just don't have it in me to sift through all the crap to get to it. 

I have to say, visually it's really appealing, combat itself feels nice when it actually works, and some of the locations are very well designed (love the factory area). I've heard there are mods that fix controls on PC, maybe I'll try those out before giving up completely, but there's no way I'm ever playing Nier:Replicant, where all of these problems are magnified. 

[ComradeYellow]

5 hours ago, BruceVC said:

I have been reviewing Greedfall for ages and I have often considered buying it, please go into detail. I would like any comparison to other games and as much detail you are prepared to share, for example what specifically did you enjoy about it and also what didnt you  enjoy about it ?

It's a Eurojank version of Dragon Age, but with more of a Renaissance type setting (ships, feather hats, colonialism, etc.)

So that means it's better than Dragon Age, and if you thought Dragon Age was pretty good you'd probably really like Greedfall.

A simple analysis but I hope it helps. 

Edited May 5, 2021 by ComradeYellow

[Sarex]

Tried out Homeworld Remastered, specifically HM2. Started up a game against a CPU to see if I still remember how to play it. It all came back to me pretty quick and the first Battlecruiser was out in a couple of minutes, at which point I discovered the reduced unit caps and no level 2 or 3 research. Upon further research I discover that they balanced HW2 to be inline with HW1... Whyyyyyyy... Also there seem to be a lot less maps then before, or maybe I'm misremembering.

While they have modernized the game with the basic quality of life changes, they ****ed it up with the balancing especially considering that they abandoned the game completely. There are some community patches out there in a form of a mod, but as far as Gearbox is concerned they will not touch the remaster anymore. I don't understand why they didn't just remaster the game and leave the gameplay as is, especially if they had no plans to support it in the long run. Maybe they expected more sales or a larger active community. Whatever the case may be I don't like the end product.

This does not bode well for Homeworld 3...

Edited May 5, 2021 by Sarex

[Malcador]

HW3's being worked on by BBI and they are led by ex-Relic fok so might not be too bad.   Deserts of Kharak was enjoyable to me, others will vary, but that's what we have to go on.

In FM18, ever so slowly making Brno pure Serbian - 5 of 11 starters are Serb

[Sarex]

31 minutes ago, Malcador said:

In FM18, ever so slowly making Brno pure Serbian - 5 of 11 starters are Serb

If you win anything, I'm calling that game unrealistic...

[marelooke]

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.

[Keyrock]

8 hours ago, BruceVC said:

I have been reviewing Greedfall for ages and I have often considered buying it, please go into detail. I would like any comparison to other games and as much detail you are prepared to share, for example what specifically did you enjoy about it and also what didnt you  enjoy about it ?

The Spiders' games have long been Eurojank budget RPGs. They've always had the heart and the ambition, but never either the prowess or the budget to get there completely. GreedFall feels like the closest they've ever come to realizing what they wanted to create to its full potential. There's still some jank, but this is the least jank Spiders game and the closest to AAA production value they've ever come (still not quite there, mind you).

This is the best that combat has ever felt in a Spiders' game. It's still pretty much the same combat system they've used in all their games, but it just kinda works better. It flows better, the feedback feels better, and you have a lot of tools at your disposal. I didn't go much into the magic skill trees until the very end when I had already gotten everything I wanted for my build and I just had a couple extra points to spend, but I can tell you that firearms feel great. I think it's a combination of good sound design and good feedback , both the recoil of firing a blunderbuss and the knockback on the victim. Guns just feel appropriately loud and punchy. Melee is pretty good too, dodging and parrying both work well. You have a normal attack, a secondary attack, and a special attack, which you need to build up your fury to use. These attacks change depending on your weapon type. For example, with a 1 handed sword your secondary attack is a kick, which is quick, hard to parry, does little damage, but it's great for breaking guard and unbalancing the opponent. With a 2 handed heavy weapon (hammer, axe, etc.) your secondary attack it a big overhead smash. It's slow, but it does lots of armor damage and can generate a small shockwave that does some AoE damage.

I can't comment on m&kb controls, but the game felt great with a controller. I thought the default controller scheme worked really well. It lets you bind a whole bunch of actions to the limited buttons you have to work with on a gamepad via a modifier button (I could have done that anyway with my Steam Controller, but didn't feel the need to since the in-game controls were plenty good enough) and the way it's set up it works really well. I'm not the most dexterous guy in the world, but even with my fat, clumsy fingers I almost never wound up doing actions I didn't mean to do. I had no problem attacking, parrying, firing guns, setting traps, throwing bombs, and casting heals in the middle of an intense battle. Everything worked properly and consistently.

If I had a criticism it's that there's too much black & white in the story. They do try a little bit in giving multiple points of view, but it's abundantly clear who's really in the right and who's really in the wrong in most cases. There is a very clear good path and a very clear evil path most of the time. I wish they muddied things a bit more. Also, while they've done a better job of disguising invisible walls than ever before, Spiders does still have them in there and I really hate invisible walls, especially when it's like a couple branches half a foot off the ground. You're telling me my character can't easily step over that?

[Katphood]

17 hours ago, Keyrock said:

While I'm waiting for Ace Combat 7 to download I'm going to play Zero Time Dilemma, which is the most recent Zero Escape game. It's part choose your own adventure, part escape the room, and all demented. Basically, imagine if the Saw movies were interactive... and interesting... and didn't suck.

I played that on the PS Vita and I was enjoying it until I hit one of the games many puzzles...

 

Gave up.

 

On topic: playing a little bit of Cyberpunk 2077 whenever I can. It's ok. I like the story progression and the characters.

[Theonlygarby]

5 hours ago, Katphood said:

On topic: playing a little bit of Cyberpunk 2077 whenever I can. It's ok. I like the story progression and the characters.

I absolutely can't get into cyberpunk sadly. I'm sure the story is good.  I just really loath when games give you 100 missions on the map instantly...  it feels like a ubisoft game, and I have never finished a ubisoft game.

It's almost to the point where you can't explore because you are bound to run into a quest.  One of those quests makes you drive someone to a hospital.   While driving, a bunch of school kids cross the road...  the game forces you to stop and then I pretty much gave up on the game.  not that I wanted to run them over(I did want to) but it just made me feel like the game was limiting my role playing (as a child murderer)

 

0/10

[Wormerine]

11 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, but combat feels unfair most of the time. encounters are very poorly designed, and because the controls are so bad on PC by default, I keep dying so often it really feels like an exercise in frustration.

Yeah, controller is a must. Even so, I still don't see why the people love the game so much.  

Finished Fallen Order. Mediocare action/adventure, great Star Wars game. 

After having a blast with Titanfall2, after putting it off for years, I jumped into Doom 2016. Not terribly impressed so far. Combat is getting better as weapons and enemytypes count increase, but so far it's been rather dull. "Atmosphere" just isn't my cup of tea, I guess - I can tell, because I don't care for the soundtrack, which is aparently amazing.