What are you Playing Now? It's not how you play the game, it's how you place the blame

[Keyrock]

33 minutes ago, Tale said:

So I finally decided to start up Valheim. Kind of grindy too. But I like building stuff and exploring.

Valheim is one of two survival games that I didn't hate, the other being Conan Exiles. I should jump back into it at some point. It is grindy, but that's the nature of survival games. You're going to be swinging a pickaxe a lot, that's what you do in that genre.

[Tale]

Callisto Protocol gets better the further I get into it. People who said it feels like an advertisement for a better game might be on to something.

All that stuff I complained about earlier in the game? I feel like I passed the part of the game where they fixed it. The majority of the "prison" part of the game is walking down drab hallways and disgusting vents. Nothing about what you're looking at feels like a real place. It's all just generic hallways broken up by scripted fights of various difficulties.

But then I'd say around the hab dome area of the game that changes. Fights are still scripted, but the areas start having more identity. They're a bit more open, the paths more sensible.  And when they weren't, I was catching little markings pointing me where to go next. There's a whole sequence in a concrete facility where it looks like someone went ahead of you and marked all the collapsed tunnels.

And the combat... this is right around the part of the game where the tentacles come into play. They're presented as this step up in difficulty, the enemies are mutating. But what it really is, is an opportunity to end the fights early. Swing a few times, then the tentacles appear and you can kill them off by shooting them. It really improves fight pacing.

Then we're on to playing a bit more with your own style. The number of environmental objects in the game has taken a sharp upturn. Explosive cannisters, wallspikes. So you can run through four or five guys by shooting a couple cannisters, beating one in the had a couple times, then double tapping them. It's made all of it more interesting.

Maybe they thought they'd teach me all these tools over time, get me used to more tedious combat, then let me feel like a badass when I could exploit all the ways to manage it better. But what it really feels like is they were learning as they developed the game. The early level design feeling a lot less competent leaves me with this impression.

[BruceVC]

Im 20 hours into   Days Gone and Im thoroughly enjoying it, its achieved my scratch nicely around playing a " zombie killing game "

I like the scavenging and resource mechanics and Im having fun avoiding and killing zombie hordes. I enjoy using the bike to travel to places and I have avoided fast travel because its a beautiful game world

The narrative is interesting and I am keen to see how my relationship with the camps change 

Edited December 5, 2022 by BruceVC

[Chilloutman]

Well if someone wanna try Darktide and not with randos I am happy to step in as semi-rando

[Malcador]

Dragonflight is fun, spending time zooming around on the dragon and harvesting resources more than anything.  Looks better than the low point that was Shadowlands, at least.  Community is still full of morons, tried to heal a dungeon and the tank was running around far ahead of his support and just causing wipes.   Maybe is just a demon hunter thing. 

In FM, using my tried and tested tactic of harvesting the Balkans for players out of contract to get Bielefeld ready for glory.

[Theonlygarby]

Back to mass effect remastered or whatever it's called.  On mass effect 2... as much as I like the story and setting, the combat is so tedious,  makes it really unenjoyable to play.  Go down hallway kill enemies, go down hallway kill enemies.  The only time I die is when I get impatient and try to move down the hallway too quickly. 

 

The husks are the worst.  Super easy to kill but just waves and waves... so... boring... I think maybe I just don't like video games

Edited December 5, 2022 by Theonlygarby

[majestic]

Crank up the difficulty a little, and enjoy the Husks with a massive armor boost.

[Theonlygarby]

4 hours ago, majestic said:

Crank up the difficulty a little, and enjoy the Husks with a massive armor boost.

Sounds like hell

[uuuhhii]

high difficulty on me2 are awful

3 are pretty good at any level with all the explosion combo

[Sven_]

I wish (what a kickass 1990s box art -- just 155 bucks on ebay though).


 

Edited December 6, 2022 by Sven_

[Gfted1]

Still in the plastic!

[Gorgon]

So, Calisto protocol. Is it awsesome, meh.. how bad are the microtransactions. 

[Gorgon]

The Dead Space franchise was the first AAA game ever to place a microtransaction vending machine at the center of upgrading and gear making and so on.

[Gorgon]

4.8 user score average on Metacritic. That's brutal. 74 Metacritic score

[Humanoid]

Hey, for them a 4.8 is better than a 5.1 because plenty of people like myself won't know if it's scored out of 5 or out of 10.

Huh, I've just argued myself into believing that a score out of 100 is a better system than scoring out of 10. Until a game comes along and gets 9/100 of course.

Edited December 6, 2022 by Humanoid

[Gorgon]

Having watched a few gameplay vids the main culprit seems to be a broken dodge mechanic, other than that it's very similar to Dead Space 1. 

[Chilloutman]

Dorf fortress is out today so I guess I am spending my night with it. Already can say that UI is still god awful xD

[Mamoulian War]

Nr. 25

In the middle of the night, I have finished the storyline of Final Fantasy XV – Episode Prompto DLC on my PS4. It is a very mixed bag for me. This one has also some sidequests, but most of them are pretty much unbalanced, and they have all some kind of exploit, where the enemy gets stuck, and completely stops attacking. What is the use of lvl 99 encounter, if it either oneshots you, or you need to use exploit to defeat it? At least final bossfight was enjoyable. That being said, IMHO Prompto's shooting mechanics in FFXV lacks fun factor compared to melee mechanics of Noctis or Gladiolus.

Edited December 6, 2022 by Mamoulian War

[Mamoulian War]

Goal Nr. 26 finished

Last two PS4 trophies in Final Fantasy XV – Episode Prompto DLC have been acquired. The two DLC challenges were much easier than in Episode Gladiolus, but they needed a little bit of practice as well. Especially the snowmobile Time Trials. After an hour and 20 minutes, with little bit of luck, I've completed all three of them with three stars rating. The last time trial, with exactly the minimum time limit required to pass it . The Intensive Training challenge against Aranea was pretty relaxing fight, so after 30 minutes of attempts, I was able to defeat her as well.

[majestic]

19 hours ago, Theonlygarby said:

Sounds like hell

It makes the Horizon Husk rush really fun to deal with. Bonus points if you do not have any strong fire area of effect skills to deal with all that armor.

My experience with Mass Effect shares something in common with my Dark Souls and Sekiro experiences. Not entirely realizing how the game is supposed to be played and making it harder than it would be otherwise, and this is partiall at least the post that the forum ate when @Gorth locked the other thread.

In Dark Souls 1, I began playing as Pyromancer, because consesus was that playing a caster makes the game easy - or easier - and for a first time around the block that seemed reasonable. A quick peek at how stats work before playing led me to pyromancy over regular magic. That was a good choice, all in all, because I did not realize until I was done with the game that you could just buy multiple copies of the same spell to extend casting. Why would I buy a spell I already have?

I basically had a 45 DEX glass cannon with a dexterity scaling weapon and the durability of a wet 'forced' into a hybrid casting/melee playstyle. This led to the hilarious situation of bosses giving me trouble that other players consider a pushover: I spent like an hour trying to defeat the Gaping Dragon. On the bright side, none of the other bosses gave me any pause afterwards*. Ornstein & Smough died on my first attempt. Kalameet and Artorias took a couple of tries, Manus like two.

Sekiro on the other hand I initially just ran around until I stumbled upon Lady Butterfly. Fightingher with no upgrades took me a while, but beyond that? I saw a lot of posts and people complaining about the final boss being too difficult. I don't get it. I spent three hours fighting Lady Butterfly and a whole lot of time figuring out how to do the Mikiri-Counter because dodging straight into an attack went against three decades of conditioning, but like ten minutes fighting Kensei Ashina Isshin. Lady Butterfly is the single hardest boss in this game, period.

Now what does that have to do with Mass Effect? Oh, right. I think my experience finishing the three games on Insanity would have been less stressful if I had realized that the player was supposed to just import a character they already finished the game with.

*A bit of a lie. The jump to The Bed of Chaos killed me more often than I would care to admit, but that's not really a boss, is it? I mean, it is the hardest part of the fight, but still...

[Hawke64]

Pentiment. I am in the middle of the third and, as I understand, the last act. The time limit was removed - all objectives could be accomplished without pressure. But the objectives were different as well - instead of hunting down the potential murderer, the MC was gathering information on the history of the town. The "puzzles" and "exploration" became more ridiculous, such as finding X pieces of a plate in 2 empty rooms and a corridor, then rotating them to form an image.
So far I have the impression that just using Ren'Py, the engine for visual novels specifically, would have solved most of the gameplay issues. Puzzles and travelling are already boring and could have been removed without losing anything, the saving system and dialogue log are lacking and would have been improved.

[BruceVC]

On 12/5/2022 at 10:52 PM, Theonlygarby said:

Back to mass effect remastered or whatever it's called.  On mass effect 2... as much as I like the story and setting, the combat is so tedious,  makes it really unenjoyable to play.  Go down hallway kill enemies, go down hallway kill enemies.  The only time I die is when I get impatient and try to move down the hallway too quickly. 

 

The husks are the worst.  Super easy to kill but just waves and waves... so... boring... I think maybe I just don't like video games

And who you Romancing? Miranda right .....we love those curves  ( and her personality, I forgot to mention her  personality )

Edited December 7, 2022 by BruceVC

[Malcador]

Healing WoW dungeons is always fun, people rush too much.  Second dungeon is essentially the zone, so you can fly around in it. Yes, a PUG flying around uncoordinated sounds great.  Tank thinks he's a Space Marine and deep strikes into a group that's surrounded by patrols, we wipe.  Repeat process about twice before a DPS quits and tells us we're all retards and homosexuals.

 

[majestic]

33 minutes ago, Malcador said:

Healing WoW dungeons is always fun, people rush too much.  Second dungeon is essentially the zone, so you can fly around in it. Yes, a PUG flying around uncoordinated sounds great.  Tank thinks he's a Space Marine and deep strikes into a group that's surrounded by patrols, we wipe.  Repeat process about twice before a DPS quits and tells us we're all retards and homosexuals.

Blizzard learned nothing from the fiasco that was The Oculus, and decided to make it even worse?

As Karl Marx once said: history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. More and more I get the feeling he was right.

[Malcador]

No, you don't fly around as in vehicles, you get to use your dragon (the gimmick or feature of this expansion) to fly around to each boss.  Problem is that morons think they can fly over the trash mobs, forgetting movement will pull them.  

Although, I suspect Blizzard might not "learn" out of a sense of sadism.