12 hours ago, Humanoid said:

The Nomad start is the outlier in terms of not knowing Jackie before the events of the game I think?

In corpo you have relationship with Jackie, yeah, but I thought it was a professional one. I did feel a more personal relationship always develops in the montage in-between the intro and act1. 

4 hours ago, Hawke64 said:

Played for 2 hours and requested a refund. It is a hack and slash action game. You get attribute points from clearing combat zones. There are character customisation and AI-controlled companions, but no dialogue choices, non-combat skills, or tactical combat (can't give commands to the companions or pause). One save slot per character.

Glad I dropped it from my wishlist.

I had my first death in Hogwarts Legacy. I jumped off a cliff with the intention of getting on my broom mid-fall, for style points, and flying off. My less than dexterous fingers fumbled on the controller and SPLAT. Still no combat deaths, though. Despite lacking challenge, combat is always fun. The possibilities for entertaining combos continues to expand as I learn new spells. I'm currently doing the broom upgrade quests to get maximum broom. The broom races are a good time, I hope they add more tracks in the future.

As an aside, these are the mods I'm currently running:

Someone needs to make a mod changing the balloons you can pop in the game while flying into Chinese spy balloons.

 

Edited February 18, 20232 yr by Keyrock

It is finished. I am actually dangerously close to platinuing the game. I miss All arnaments and all talismans achievements, so I might see how much I am missing, and if I can hunt the remaining ones in my current save. More annoyingly I didn't get the achievement for beating Morgott.... I might leave it, if I feel like doing another playthrough (he culminates what I would consider the good content of Elden Ring, so going that far one day might be a possibility) or I might see if I can hunt down a pre-Margott save somewhere for a quick completion.

Great game, but darn, the final areas and bosses really sour the experience. If the game would end upon reaching the Erdtree, and got some extra polish instead, I think it would be better off.

Hogwart's - I like how they incorporate many spells into the quest problem solving. It at least keeps me from forgetting some of them even exist.

Stealth-killing is still my favorite thing in the game. Again, it's not the best thing to try in some situations and some enemies it won't outright kill but I put stealth-dmg. enchants on half my gear and it's a bit OP (at least on Normal) but I find it more fun that direct combat.

I am a little annoyed how many times you go to pick up coins and it's 1 or 3 gold, not even 25. Like why even bother.

@Keyrockhttps://www.nexusmods.com/hogwartslegacy/mods/398?tab=description

..haven't tried this one either, but there it is. 😄
Since the VA is nothing head-turning for me, I just turned dialogue volume way down (since I use subtitles anyway) and I've gotten almost used to it by now, lol. I mean, honestly, I'd need a mod for almost every throwaway line in the game at this point. Even the main character. And the clothing shopkeeper. And ...

Completed Lamentum. It is a horror adventure game with combat.
The main character arrives at an old mansion with his wife in hopes of saving her. Then something goes wrong, and the amnesiac protagonist spends the rest of the game looking for her in the mansion overrun by the undead. The more-talkative inhabitants of the mansion can provide assistance or hinder his search. Unfortunately, it is not possible to knife the suspicious but not outright hostile NPC.
On the other hand, there are several weapons to dispose of the visible monsters, though combat in general is somehow clunky - there is delay between pressing the dodge button and the MC dodging and the weapons found later in the game, while more powerful, are also slower. The lack of rebindable controls does not help. The boss battles are unavoidable and reasonably challenging.
But the bosses are not the only obstacle. Most of the puzzles are logical and there is enough information to solve them, thus gaining access to other parts of the mansion. The maps have to be found and are reasonably helpful - they show the current objective, discovered save points (the game uses manual saving at checkpoints), opened paths, and the current location.
What they do not show is whether everything has been collected, and there are no maps for some of the areas, which is related to the several flaws of the game - the inventory space is limited and there are missable items that affect the endings. While it is possible to achieve a reasonably satisfying one, the "best" ending requires collecting several missable barely visible items, some of which in the temporary accessible areas without maps. Some of the less important items are hidden behind the environment as well.
The graphics, sound, and GUI are good.
Overall, recommended despite the above-mentioned issues.

Started Record of Lodoss War-Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth-. The game looks gorgeous, the movement is fluid and the controls are rebindable, though the mouse is not supported. As I understand, the story is a prequel or a sequel of an anime series.

6 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

@Keyrockhttps://www.nexusmods.com/hogwartslegacy/mods/398?tab=description

..haven't tried this one either, but there it is. 😄
Since the VA is nothing head-turning for me, I just turned dialogue volume way down (since I use subtitles anyway) and I've gotten almost used to it by now, lol. I mean, honestly, I'd need a mod for almost every throwaway line in the game at this point. Even the main character. And the clothing shopkeeper. And ...

I installed the Silence Deek mod, it does exactly what it says. I also installed better broom control. The devs made the utterly bizarre design decision to split the directional controls between the two thumbsticks on a gamepad, left stick controls left and right and right stick controls up and down.  This mod puts all directional controls on the left thumbstick, where they should have been all along. The one downside of the mod is that up and down on the left thumbstick used to be forward and back and that's now replaced by down and up (it's inverted by default because the modder is likely a flight/space sim player like me) so there's no way to slowly fly forward or backward, pressing the right trigger to fly fast makes you go forward, though, like it always did, and who wants to fly slowly?

Edited February 19, 20232 yr by Keyrock

Hadn't checked back for a while since most of my posts got eaten. So I had a bit of catching up to do.

I wrote this reply about Death Stranding weeks ago, so I'm gonna (update &) use it, dangit!

On 1/16/2023 at 7:43 AM, LadyCrimson said:

^ I always used a controller, which felt fine/worked well. I don't imagine I would have liked using a keyboard.

I managed to play through NieR: Automata with a controller, but can't say it was enjoyable. I'm really not much of a controller player, it would seem. Still, I hated it less than Remember Me, which I gave up on due to my fingers hurting.

On 1/16/2023 at 7:43 AM, LadyCrimson said:

There's one minor boss fight (the one just before you have to travel to another map section thru snow) in the game that after struggling to even escape it a couple times I realized I could avoid completely by just ... running over some rocks in the opposite direction then the game makes you think you have to go because it'll despawn after a certain distance. So I did, and again when replaying. Technically I have not defeated that thing, lol.

Repair Sprays are completely unnecessary to protect cargo from Timefall itself - so long as you don't fall down a mountain or get swept away by those ghosties, haha. Even with fully repaired cargo containers, a major fall etc. could damage the cargo pretty extensively, even to the point of mission fail, sometimes. I stopped carrying them at all about halfway through the game. Timefall did reduce most gear over time but I was a packrat as usual and always had a certain number of things. I mostly used the blood grenades the entire time so I had piles and piles of blood bags and not much else.

Problem at that stage is that you're forced into that final fight with

Spoiler

the whale

which I don't think you can skip (I tried) without being able to stock up, pretty much at all after you fight

Spoiler

Higgs

so being knocked over is rather likely to damage cargo since you've just spent 10-15min slogging through Timefall (potentially more, depending on how lucky you are with structures from other players spawning, I imagine). If I'd had Container Repair Spray I would have been a lot more aggressive, however having to play it safe made it feel like a bit of a slog.

For most of the game repair spray is more of a nice to have rather than a requirement. It would have been more useful if it actually repaired ladders, weapons, and the likes.

On 1/16/2023 at 7:43 AM, LadyCrimson said:

Interesting re: roads or structures disappearing, never had that happen on the console, all the online structures stayed forever - unless I manually deleted them myself - as long as I repaired them a little occasionally. Sounds like a bug.

As to the structures disappearing, seems to be a known thing that happens. Game apparently evaluates your "links" at game load and may decide to change them if you haven't interacted with a player much, leading to structures going "poof". I guess I got unlucky and that road was the only thing of his that spawned into my world that I actually used. Any structures you do interact with (eg. repair, or upgrade) will stay forever though (unless it gets destroyed, of course). So if I had repaired it the day before instead of waiting for them to go <50% it should have been fine. Annoying lesson to learn, to be sure. Wish roads would be excluded from that mechanic.

After that I went around repairing/upgrading ziplines too, because, boy would it be annoying to suddenly have parts of my zipline network missing...

Anyway, been slowly picking away at maxing out reputation with all locations. Game keeps feeding lore seemingly at random (going to assume after a certain amount of likes).

There's still a few buildings I've never really had a use for though, like the ramps, the chiral bridge, and the package-gun, bridges and ziplines seem to cover their use-cases just as well without their drawbacks.

 

 

 

Edited February 19, 20232 yr by marelooke

In the vast majority of games where stealth is an option I try to ghost the game as much as possible, but in Hogwarts Legacy I like to go in guns wand blazing. Freezing an enemy then hitting them with diffindo does so much damage. I'm sad I haven't gotten any unforgivable curses yet.

Edited February 19, 20232 yr by Keyrock

If only I knew how to hex edit I could possibly unlock the Ansel camera in Hogwart's by finding the right "offset". Maybe. But since I don't, there's 0 chance, haha. I keep googling and there's pages saying it's potentially so easy but I look at their instructions and yeah...nope. lol

Dangit I want an unlocker.

14 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

If only I knew how to hex edit I could possibly unlock the Ansel camera in Hogwart's by finding the right "offset". Maybe. But since I don't, there's 0 chance, haha. I keep googling and there's pages saying it's potentially so easy but I look at their instructions and yeah...nope. lol

Dangit I want an unlocker.

Mind posting a link to the instructions? Curious to see how complicated they are, and googling "hogwarts legacy ansel camera hex edit" didn't turn anything up besides a random 4chan page I'm not going to look through. I've done some hex editing in my time, so if there are instructions already laid out, it shouldn't be too difficult...in theory.

Edited February 20, 20232 yr by Bartimaeus

4 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Mind posting a link to the instructions? Curious to see how complicated they are, and googling "hogwarts legacy ansel camera hex edit" didn't turn anything up besides a random 4chan page I'm not going to look through. I've done some hex editing in my time, so if there are instructions already laid out, it shouldn't be too difficult...in theory.

There isn't anything specifically for Hogwart's. There are mentions re: FFXV and Hitman 2 and 3 and some others, where I was thinking one could take that info and spend a lot of time looking for the right offset or calls or whatever terms, in Hogwart's exe (they would be different I'm sure).

This one is theoretical removing of restrictions for anything by disabling checks and creating a sort of toggle? This would require an nvidia/github account (I think) to access  Ansel SDK tho, which I have never tried to get yet.
https://gist.github.com/FransBouma/a322a80ed9f51114371ca32c4db4808e

For games like FFXV/hitman etc, they tell you what offset to change in that particular game's .exe. I don't know if you could figure that out "alone" or if it's a code you'd find via the method above. Or if any of this would even work currently/new games.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1325152608

Other non-Ansel/hex'ing of Hogwarts: 

--why oh why didn't they put in a disable all HUD toggle so one doesn't have to constantly uncheck 10 (whatever) things, then recheck them again??
--if you want to rescue caged beasts, stand as far to the side of the lock/door as much as you can before unlocking it, or the beast pathing may bug/glitch and it won't exit the cage, meaning you can't then rescue it via capturing it. If it doesn't exit its cage you can try to move far around to see if you can trigger it.

7 minutes ago, LadyCrimson said:

Other non-Ansel/hex'ing of Hogwarts: 

--why oh why didn't they put in a disable all HUD toggle so one doesn't have to constantly uncheck 10 (whatever) things, then recheck them again??

https://www.nexusmods.com/hogwartslegacy/mods/137

53 minutes ago, LadyCrimson said:

For games like FFXV/hitman etc, they tell you what offset to change in that particular game's .exe. I don't know if you could figure that out "alone" or if it's a code you'd find via the method above. Or if any of this would even work currently/new games.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1325152608

Doing it purely by offset will be different for every game, possibly even for different patches of the same game - if anything is added somewhere in the the file before you get to the ansel offset, the offset you're looking for would change. How much that actually happens in practice will depend on the game in question. The alternative method I don't know as much about, but it's almost definitely still specific to the FF15 .exe (especially if one makes assumptions based on the poster saying "until significant changes are made to the .exe").

59 minutes ago, LadyCrimson said:

This one is theoretical removing of restrictions for anything by disabling checks and creating a sort of toggle? This would require an nvidia/github account (I think) to access  Ansel SDK tho, which I have never tried to get yet.
https://gist.github.com/FransBouma/a322a80ed9f51114371ca32c4db4808e

This one I would actually need the game in order to test (and I don't have it). Also not sure if Denuvo would make it more difficult or not. Eh, looks like you're probably gonna have to wait for someone who's a little more hands-on to figure this one out, .

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

Also not sure if Denuvo would make it more difficult or not.

FFXV has Denuvo/they've never removed it.
The unlocker someone made for it was an .exe that I assume injected/altered the game exe with that stuff. When FFXV patched, Ansel lockout would reset, but I'd just run that unlocker script again on the new game .exe and it would work again, lol. 

But yeah, I'm sure it's different per game and I don't know if newer version of Ansel would even allow for the same method of tweak or not. Never know they could've blocked it somehow.

1 hour ago, Bartimaeus said:

https://www.nexusmods.com/hogwartslegacy/mods/137

Oh, also, that requires Reshade, which I don't and don't want to install/use. More than half of the "mods" on Nexus seem to require it. >.>  Edit: there's no special reason I don't want to use it outside of just not wanting more programs install clutter and generally having no use for it to begin with etc. - although if it unlocked Ansel I might. Might. Haha.

Edited February 20, 20232 yr by LadyCrimson

For what it's worth, Reshade is used in mods for most games, so you will encounter needing it again in the future, most likely.

1 hour ago, Keyrock said:

For what it's worth, Reshade is used in mods for most games, so you will encounter needing it again in the future, most likely.

Oh I know. Most of the costume mods on Nexus for ffxv were reshade ones for some reason, but in that case I knew it was possible without it so I only used stand alone mods so to speak. I'm not sure what the dependence on reshade for things outside of lighting/color is, it's become so dominant lately, but eh, I'd just rather not. Needing tools to create mods is a given, but I'd rather the resulting mod not be dependent on the user having it installed as well.

It's funny because I do like moddability and will use a few mods here and there, but it's rare I use very many. I generally like as vanilla as possible. More often I'll just mod myself if it's simple enough, because most ppl don't create ones that fit my likes/desires. Or in some cases I deconstruct a mod and tweak it to suit.

Edited February 20, 20232 yr by LadyCrimson

Great, ran into the Take the Biscuit quest bug which I didn't know about before hand. The spot it's in has this giant (empty if you don't have quest) cage and while exploring I cleared the baddies and unlocked the lock, wondering if it did anything. When I got around to taking/doing the quest, the baddies respawn but the lock on the cage does not. Cannot open and rescue. It was probably hours and hours and oodles of stuff after my original visit of that spot, so not going to reload some ancient save.

I think you could solve with a sql editor plus a user-created save editor or something but too much fiddly bother. Those creatures will just remain forever in their cage unless the dev's retroactively fix it.

Edited February 21, 20232 yr by LadyCrimson

I finished Dead Space remake. Twice actually, so I could get the secret ending. It was a lot of fun and remains one of my favorite horror games. They did some smart additions. And I say this having been half afraid they'd screw everything up. When my only real complaint is the sound seems a lot more subdued than the original. Not enough constant clanging, banging, and screaming. Loses some of that industrial feel.

So on to Dead Space 2.

I have stuff I want to say here. This is my second "real" playthrough of Dead Space 2, not counting my abandoned first run at release. A couple minor nitpicks I had in remake were the over the top new cutscenes. A ship explodes, throwing Isaac clear, then a second explosion throws him to safety on the gangway. A necromorph transforms right on top of him making sure you see it up close. Dead Space 2 literally starts with that latter scene as the opening. And in my first two hours of the game, Isaac had been blown up three times. And in my several hours since they did not stop at three. Anytime the developers got bored of an area, explosions throw you elsewhere. Except that one time where you got sucked out of an window, then blown up back through a different window in the same building. Why? WHY?

A lot of people complained that Dead Space 3 turned the franchise into a big dumb action game and I'm reminded that it did not start with three. Enemies come at you in waves so large, the game engine has to despawn bodies from the first wave to to have enough memory to send the last. Three maybe just turned the dumb up a notch. Sure, two features you Supermanning through a collapsing city only to make a superhero landing when you arrive, but at least it doesn't have three's piece-de-resistance of... Supermanning around to use your super kinesis to wrestle a moon. Or whatever that is. I guess I'll resfresh my memory when I get there.

9 hours ago, Tale said:

I finished Dead Space remake. Twice actually, so I could get the secret ending. It was a lot of fun and remains one of my favorite horror games. They did some smart additions. And I say this having been half afraid they'd screw everything up. When my only real complaint is the sound seems a lot more subdued than the original. Not enough constant clanging, banging, and screaming. Loses some of that industrial feel.

So on to Dead Space 2.

I have stuff I want to say here. This is my second "real" playthrough of Dead Space 2, not counting my abandoned first run at release. A couple minor nitpicks I had in remake were the over the top new cutscenes. A ship explodes, throwing Isaac clear, then a second explosion throws him to safety on the gangway. A necromorph transforms right on top of him making sure you see it up close. Dead Space 2 literally starts with that latter scene as the opening. And in my first two hours of the game, Isaac had been blown up three times. And in my several hours since they did not stop at three. Anytime the developers got bored of an area, explosions throw you elsewhere. Except that one time where you got sucked out of an window, then blown up back through a different window in the same building. Why? WHY?

A lot of people complained that Dead Space 3 turned the franchise into a big dumb action game and I'm reminded that it did not start with three. Enemies come at you in waves so large, the game engine has to despawn bodies from the first wave to to have enough memory to send the last. Three maybe just turned the dumb up a notch. Sure, two features you Supermanning through a collapsing city only to make a superhero landing when you arrive, but at least it doesn't have three's piece-de-resistance of... Supermanning around to use your super kinesis to wrestle a moon. Or whatever that is. I guess I'll resfresh my memory when I get there.

It's very clear that after Dead Space 1 there's a different director. It becomes a lot more action-y and a lot less horror, imho. I've always said that the only really scary part of DS2 to me was when

Spoiler

you get back on the Ishimura, and arguably that's because the impact the first game had, rather than anything the second game did.

Note that this doesn't mean I consider DS2 and 3 bad games, necessarily, but as horror they don't get anywhere near the level of the original.

Anyway, glad to hear the remake is good, once the price drops to something remotely reasonable (full price for a remake is not remotely reasonable in my book) I'll likely pick it up.

'I think I'll move to the next main quest..."
"Oh wait, 18 side quests = reward, must get that"
"I think I'm ready to move to main ..."
"Oh wait, I should just get the next tier of Ancient Magic challenges I just need a few more."
"I think I'm ready to move to..."
"Oh wait, I've missed a lot of (room of requirement) Collectable chests in those areas, gotta get those" (you can see that info when you hover over some map icons)
"I think I'm..."
"Oh, this many combat feats gets me this, must run endlessly around triggering combats so I can do that"

...yeah, for me, one of those games.

Edited February 21, 20232 yr by LadyCrimson

deleted and reinstall elden ring

can finally restore great rune without game crashing

More Tales of Arise. I have restored order in Elde Menancia and two more members joined my team. The mood of the game changed completely after entering the region, but will probably go back into the old ways in the next one. I have to say, I am happy, that I have avoided all of the spoilers last two years, the game surprised me few times, with unexpected plot twists 😀 I am enjoying the game and the story much more than Final Fantasy XV.