What are you Playing Now? Who needs a life anyway?...

[majestic]

39 minutes ago, Lexx said:

Did I say that? I never played any of the ME games with gamepad. I wanted to at some point (so I can play them from the couch on my big ass tv), but if I remember right, the PC port flat out didn't have gamepad support, so it wasn't working.

Ah, perhaps I misunderstood then, I seem to recall a conversation that hinted at you playing shooters with a gamepad because you can do so from your couch. It was about Mass Effect 2 at the time, but perhaps not limited to ME2. Anyway, point still stands, albeit slightly changed. Playing shooters with a gamepad is an excercise in frustration.

[Lexx]

Nah, shooters and tactical / strategy games are the only ones I'm still playing with M&K. But if a game was primarily made with gamepad in mind, then I usually take that.

[Hurlshort]

Elex II has some really engaging quest threads to pull on. Rather than just having stationary NPC's stand there and hand out assignments, they have a bunch that will travel with you and have full conversations during the missions. These aren't just the recruitable NPC's, either. I'm impressed by the depth of it all.

[Lexx]

Wasn't stuff like this always in their games?

Kinda want to replay Gothic 1 again. Still the best one they made, imo.

[BruceVC]

8 minutes ago, Hurlsnot said:

Elex II has some really engaging quest threads to pull on. Rather than just having stationary NPC's stand there and hand out assignments, they have a bunch that will travel with you and have full conversations during the missions. These aren't just the recruitable NPC's, either. I'm impressed by the depth of it all.

Have you never played any PB games before? Thats standard design for their games generally  

[Chilloutman]

taking a break from CK3 for a while and I got discount for Spellforce 3 on GoG so now I started that. I really like the graphics and gameplay reminds me a lot of good old Warcraft 3. Looks like I will spend some time with it. Also I started one of the campaigns and I can't shakea feeling that my mine character is dude who voiced Adam Jensen in Deus-ex

[BruceVC]

I have decided to give Vampire : Coteries of NY another chance after watching that Swansong marketing video

Now that I know its a narrative RPG, when I first played it I was expecting a normal RPG,  I am enjoying it so far so I will see how things progress 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

How accurate is this?

[Sarex]

1 hour ago, KP wants Blue Velvet said:

How accurate is this?

Very. But that was always the case.

 

On the other hand in Elden Ring you can farm side content and breeze through all the main bosses with any build.

[Lexx]

I finally dominated Starscourge Radahn, my currently No1 worst bossfight in all of Elden Ring. Cheesed him, because I couldn't be arsed anymore. Punched some levels into Arcane, equipped my arcane-boosting ring, and then used the Dragon Breath whatever spell. Summon the party members, let them melee the boss, use dragon breath to give him rot, then run away and wait for phase 2. Dodge the stupid meteor, try to get close to him without getting hit, use dragon breath again, then run away as far as possible and wait. Even with this it took me 4 attempts, because his stupid attacks are such insta-killing bullcrap.

Edited March 14, 2022 by Lexx

[Oner]

Yeah I disliked him too and even after beating him with archery I didn't feel accomplished or proud.
The meteor attack though made me laugh so hard I had tears in my eyes and I didn't even mind that it killed me. 

[Wormerine]

 

[213374U]

On 3/14/2022 at 5:26 PM, Chilloutman said:

taking a break from CK3 for a while and I got discount for Spellforce 3 on GoG so now I started that. I really like the graphics and gameplay reminds me a lot of good old Warcraft 3. Looks like I will spend some time with it. Also I started one of the campaigns and I can't shakea feeling that my mine character is dude who voiced Adam Jensen in Deus-ex

Yeah, general Gerard of Rivera was a bit unsettling. Fantastic game, they released a patch late last year that remade the base game to have it work with the improved engine from the latest expansion. Great time to get into it.

[Chilloutman]

yeah but UI could use some love. Or its really hard for me to get into it

[melkathi]

It's good to play it now with a consistent UI across the game and expansions. Before it was really confusing to finish Spellforce 3 and have to relearn to play Soul Harvest.

Good game though. Really enjoyed it.

Did you play the previous games and care about the story?

[Chilloutman]

don't care about the story much - I have played once 1 or 2, I can't remember

[melkathi]

It's a prequel, so it doesn't require you to know anything. It is a nice bonus for people who do, to realize the "significance" lore wise.

[Wormerine]

Finished Guardians. A short pitch is, that if you liked Gunn's two Guardians movies, and have gamepass, I think you will like this one. For what it is, it's well written and has a good understanding of popcorn film writing, with simple lessons to learn, predictable but not uncompelling thematically tied arcs, some great set-ups and payoffs and personal stakes in the story. Overall it's all fine, with some high comedy peaks, and some awkward lows. Gameplay wise it is half Telltale game (mostly dialogues with choices that pretend to have consequences) and half weird jRPG thingy, with some puzzles on the side, that even with hints turned off are hardly puzzles. Honestly, nothing gameplay wise is even remotly good, but never stops the narrative from flowing. It has a bit of Arkham games feel to it (although even with weaker gameplay) - it's not precicely a compelling game on it's own, but adapts very well a characters that you most likely are already attatched to. 

The choices quite blantandly don't matter, but every once you will pick what game wants you to pick and have satisfying "this happened because you did this!" moment. Of course, I didn't replay to see how much of it it's true, but I have good reasons to believe that it is all smoke and mirrors. Oh there are also instant death QTEs and conversations for a good measure. 

Edited March 17, 2022 by Wormerine

[Theonlygarby]

I feel like I already posted this but can't find it.

Playing hearts of iron 4 "old world blues" mod... way more fun than the base game.  Plus without the weird feeling of being fascist, Communist  or boring... like the base game

 

The modders obviously put a ton of work into it... find it crazy it's not more popular within the steam workshop

Edited March 18, 2022 by Theonlygarby

[the_dog_days]

Since I already owned it and it just full released, I gave Black Geyser a whirl. Big problem right up front at character creation: you can't see your character model when picking out what your character looks like. There aren't many customization options (this usually doesn't bother me) but I had to tab back and forth between two different pages, scroll down to the bottom of the character description page to see what each hairdo is labeled as to know what my guy would be wearing. I think they did this because the character models still look bad outside of the environment of the game world. Probably didn't want players buying the game, downloading it, opening it up, getting to character creation and seeing the models, uninstalling, and refunding the game.

[the_dog_days]

Right, sooo, I uh deleted my Elex 2 save and started a new game. Again. I had 40 hours in that save. I had around 20 in the last one. A bug, which was patched halfway through my last save, lead me to believe that I was in a good place with a faction only to find out later that I really wasn't. That faction happened to be the one that I wanted to join. Honestly, if the UI had originally correctly told me the factions reaction I would've just rolled with it (I like having unexpected consequences for my actions in rpgs) but the bug just makes me feel cheated so I started over.

[Keyrock]

I started Elex 2 on xXxBOxXx. What can I say? It's a Piranha Bytes game. If you've played a Gothic game (except 4, we don't talk about Gothic 4), a Risen game, or Elex then you know what you are in for.

Visually, it's not much of an upgrade over the first game. There are moments the game looks truly next-gen, for example the bloom effect when walking through a doorway from a darker area into a brightly lit area looks fantastic. For the most part, however, this looks like an early XBone/PS4 game, and that's being generous.

If there have been any gameplay improvements made, I've yet to experience them. This plays exactly like the first game, same jank-ass combat PB have had for years. Seriously, Piranha Bytes, I love y'all but you need to completely overhaul your combat. The jetpack is still awesome, though, and has a lot more upgrade options, which is great.

Another positive is how well the game runs. This is my first time playing a PB game on a console. By all accounts, when PB first released their games on consoles (Risen?) they ran like ass, but they've obviously gotten better at that. I don't have any empirical data to back this up, but it feels like it's running at a rock solid 4K/60 and I've not experienced a stutter yet in general gameplay. The map screen, on the other hand, tanks the framerate and feels quite sluggish to navigate. I wonder if it does that on PC also?

Anyway, I only just got to The Bastion and cleared out the annoying critters. I'm playing on hard difficulty and the game has been fairly easy so far, I've only died twice. I'm somewhat tempted to restart the game on ultra difficulty (can't change difficulty mid-game AFAIK), but I'll probably just stick with hard. I'm surprised by how much I like Dex. There's always a very significant chance in games (and movies) that children wind up being really bad and/or annoying, but I quite like the little tike. It's good that they made him as young as he is. There's nothing worse than game writers trying to write teens. 9 out of 10 times they try to make them either edgy or angsty and the vast majority of the time it winds up being pure, distilled, hospital strength cringe.

[the_dog_days]

1 hour ago, Keyrock said:

Visually, it's not much of an upgrade over the first game. There are moments the game looks truly next-gen, for example the bloom effect when walking through a doorway from a darker area into a brightly lit area looks fantastic. For the most part, however, this looks like an early XBone/PS4 game, and that's being generous.

I'm playing on PC and have no idea what either the first or two look like on console, but on PC Elex 2 looks vastly better than 1. At first I couldn't see it because it's still a whole generation behind in graphics but then I looked at side-by-side screen shots and was amazed at how much better Elex 2 looked (I played both games on the same rig).

Also, it's hard to love your son when he looks like someone sewed the head of an Elizabethan doll onto a Claymation extra.

[Keyrock]

I played Elex on PC at 1440p with the settings cranked so I don't have an apples to apples comparison with Elex 2 either. The lighting effects are what stood out as being much improved. Pretty good draw distance on the environment and pop-in, while definitely present, hasn't been that egregious. The character faces are still hideous, though. I'm talking Bethesda-level hideous.

Does the map screen run like ass on PC or is that just an XBOX thing? It's weird because the gameplay, which by all rights should be far more taxing on the hardware, runs buttery smooth.

Edited March 18, 2022 by Keyrock

[Zoraptor]

41 minutes ago, the_dog_days said:

I'm playing on PC and have no idea what either the first or two look like on console, but on PC Elex 2 looks vastly better than 1. At first I couldn't see it because it's still a whole generation behind in graphics but then I looked at side-by-side screen shots and was amazed at how much better Elex 2 looked (I played both games on the same rig).

Also, it's hard to love your son when he looks like someone sewed the head of an Elizabethan doll onto a Claymation extra.

Yeah, Elex 2's environmental graphics is far superior to 1's on PC. I actually replayed 1 not that long ago, and in some respects it's really really obvious how large the improvement is- Elex 1 has some very low poly objects and environments which clash with the rest, there's almost no grass and the water quality is night and day better in 2 etc. 2 has got a lot of extra engine overhead though and runs far worse (but nowhere near as badly as, say, Gothic 3 did at a similar point)

And also yes, the human models are... well, they probably should have stuck with the Elex 1 models in most cases, the E1 flashback cutscenes actively look better. They do now seem to have had the bump/ normal maps applied at least, but the mouths are still gateways to hell and the eyes still imply that an eldritch horror has taken up residence in a meat puppet. Also one or two funny dialogue bugs, like rescuing a merchant who is grateful to some dude called 'Calahan', instead of 'Calaan'.

I'm about 20 hours in and the biggest difference is still difficulty curve. Instead of being the traditional "run away from literally everything you can't kite" PB gameplay most of the starting enemies ('young' 'sick' 'old' __) are easily dispatchable with even starting gear, very unlike getting stunlocked and killed by the tutorial area biter in E1. It's actually more difficult now than in the beginning, which is a big change.

Edited March 18, 2022 by Zoraptor