11 hours ago, BruceVC said:

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

I think I've romanced everyone but not to the point of sealing the deal.  I think I chose Jack my first time around.  or was it tali... I forget.  I know it wasn't Miranda.  This time...  haven't really decided yet

Completed Pentiment. I suppose, the setting is atmospheric and alien enough, the writing is readable and consistent, the controls are rebindable, the visuals are stylish, and the game is fortunately VA-free. On the other hand, the game lacks many simple quality-of-life features, the pacing is odd, the "puzzles" and mini-games are insultingly dumb. In terms of story, during the second act the main character apparently was supposed to be depressed. Considering that the thing was more roleplayable and controllable in the first act, it was quite frustrating. Despite the game not being advertised as an RPG, the choice of the background and skills had led me to believe that there would be more RP. The last act was linear and I had to endure the main villain's monologue for 5 minutes, instead of breaking his skull with a rock (the MC was physically capable of doing so) at the moment the attack on a key NPC was admitted. While I liked the general theme, the setting and the sheer number of samey NPC made it harder to be invested. Also, PoE1 did it better and allowed just to kill Thaos without talking to the corpse-to-become. Finally, the player (not me, though, due to the lack of knowledge of the setting) could deduce who the murderer was in the middle of the first act, but was unable to pursue the lead.
So, if one likes the setting and can tolerate the shortcomings, Pentiment might be enjoyable.

Dear Obsidianites,

I started a Fortress for the first time in years. A Fortress of the Dwarven kind.

Send help. With ale.

Sincerely,

Tale

PS: Why did I lay out the entire fortress on day 1 before I even remembered how to set up doors right?

19 hours ago, Theonlygarby said:

I think I've romanced everyone but not to the point of sealing the deal. 

Even Jacob ?

19 hours ago, Theonlygarby said:

I think I've romanced everyone but not to the point of sealing the deal.  I think I chose Jack my first time around.  or was it tali... I forget.  I know it wasn't Miranda.  This time...  haven't really decided yet

BioWare really dropped the ball by not including a Dr. Chakwas romance option.

From what I've seen, one would need to have a 4080 to play Portal with RTX/max settings and be at or above 50fps. At 1080, resolution, native. 

...oh sure, with some tweaking and use of DLSS at Balanced or Performance, one could run it at 1080 (maybe even 1440) at 30-45fps with some lower rtx gpu's, but it's still funny. I still wonder how much RTX/ray tracing in particular are going to catch on/stick. I think it's going to be a long while before it feels - if it ever does - worth the performance cost to most, which may cause dev's to stop caring about putting it in. Who knows.

Edit: I do think RT has some interesting potential uses for scene lighting and shadowing, based on Metro, but whether it becomes mainstream enough to feel "worth it" in video games ... I'm doubtful.

Edited December 8, 20223 yr by LadyCrimson

The few times I have turned it on I could never tell the difference. I could tell that I had gone down to HD and accepting lows in the 40-50 fps range though. 

I played the 3 purely raytraced games, which are Minecraft, Quake 2, and Portal. The biggest differences from rasterized games is that the lighting is pretty much the real deal, and you can have an infinity number of lights, and they all realistically alter the scene. No doubt it is the future of gaming, tech just needs to evolve so it's not so expensive to process

On 12/8/2022 at 6:33 AM, Malcador said:

Even Jacob ?

Well no.. just the ladies

8 hours ago, Bokishi said:

I played the 3 purely raytraced games, which are Minecraft, Quake 2, and Portal. The biggest differences from rasterized games is that the lighting is pretty much the real deal, and you can have an infinity number of lights, and they all realistically alter the scene. No doubt it is the future of gaming, tech just needs to evolve so it's not so expensive to process

From what I understand it benefits developers too. Sure, they're great at cheating to make certain that everything looks realistic, but with ray tracing they can just set global illumination or one or two lights and be done

Yeah we just need more open standards and not have graphics features locked to one gpu vendor

3 hours ago, Bokishi said:

Yeah we just need more open standards and not have graphics features locked to one gpu vendor

Let's hope that Intel and AMD use open source ray tracing and outcompetes RTX 🤘

Playing some Elden Ring again rigth now. I remembered an interesting observation ... back in thy olden days, I was a heavy shield user. My whole playstyle was about holding up a 100% defense shield, striking only after the enemy did his thing. Then Bloodborne came around, and since there are no shields, I had to completely change my playstyle. Now in Elden Ring ... I still don't use shields. In fact, I completely forget about them in most fights. Bloodborne taught me a more aggressive attack stance, and I can't shake that off anymore.

Using a shield can make a lot of sense if either...

A. You're just not that great at reacting quickly or consistently getting your timing windows down. It's okay to not be great at soulslike games and the skills they require - do your best with the tools the game gives you.
B. You're facing an enemy whose moveset you either don't know, can't seem to understand, or which has some kind of unusual advantage that makes it difficult to avoid without a shield.

If you've played PVP, you should know that B comes into play when you're fighting another player whose weapon you don't really have great familiarity with, particularly if said weapon has quick strikes that are difficult to react in time to (I know, for example in DS1, my most favored weapon the Great/Lifehunt Scythe had the sprinting light attack that was very difficult to effectively counter without a shield because when another player is sprinting straight into you, it can be difficult to read if or when exactly they're going to attack and the scythe's sprinting light attack goes off unusually quickly for a heavy weapon - was always my favorite for scoring quick and cheap hits with virtually no chance of reprisal, particularly because even if it's blocked, the Great/Lifehunt Scythe still builds up bleed out).

Edited December 10, 20223 yr by Bartimaeus

Finishing up GoW:R. Down to the last optional boss, which seems not to be the hardest one, then again I haven't beat it yet so I'll withhold my judgment until I do. The previous bosses leading up to him went by fairly easily, probably because I was max level and should have done them during the story (although the last boss is for sure locked until after the main story so I figured I'll also do the rest of them after).

The hardest boss I think is

Spoiler

Odin's new Valkyrie queen. I would say that she is not as hard to beat as Sigrun, but that is probably because I now have more experience playing the game (and using a controller) and there were no cheep tricks this time around that you had to pray didn't come when you were low health.

Either way the game would be much easier on PC as a lot of the difficulty is enemies moving out of your line of sight and dropping the camera lock on them. Sometimes the camera lock would also making things difficult to dodge.

Edited December 10, 20223 yr by Sarex

really want some nice narrative focused game like suzerain and novinews

how good are roadwarden many been talk about

I finally finished Callisto Protocol. I'd give the game 3.5 stars out of 5. I enjoyed playing it overall and want to see if the franchise improves for sequels, but there's a good chance I'll never play it again if it does not.

I say it's a good game, but a good part of that is just how starved I am for space horror that's not put together entirely with assets from the Unity asset store. The combat system works, but not so well you can play 10+ hours (Steam says I have 15) dodging side to side without begruding it quite a bit. For a sequel to excel, they'll need to not make this the center of the gameplay.

And maybe don't use the same encounter as a mini-boss 4 times. When I say "the combat system works" I'm not counting any boss fights. It didn't work for a single one.

Im about 45 hours into Days Gone and its still a very entertaining experience  and provides a  good opportunity to  explore  a post-apocalyptic world 

I love using the bike to travel to places, I dont use fast travel. I appreciate the emotional and human side to the main protagonist, Deacon, as he laments and misses his wife

The camps you help also make sense and the human factions you fight against are brutal and regressed into barbarism so  you dont mind killing them

Its not a difficult game and there are plenty of resources around, like petrol and scrap, that you constantly need for crafting 

But its a worthy  game in the zombie killing genre 🥂

 

 

Has anyone here played Encased or Atom RPG? How long are these games, and which one would you recommend more, and why? 😛 

Got all the achievements for GoW:R. That last boss took a while, but once I went back to the defense build it took me just a few tries (around 10). Was still missing a hilt, but that was easy to find. I think I stand by what I said previously that it's not the hardest fight, but it's pretty close. Also spent some time finding some optional dialogue I saw referenced on the internet (well worth it if you are invested in the story and characters). Will probably come back to it once more of those are discovered. Don't know about new game plus, maybe at some point down the line.

 

edit: new game plus has not been added yet as of now, but it probably will soon.

Edited December 12, 20223 yr by Sarex

Some thoughts on High On Life. It's a first person shooter. The gimmick is talking weapons, primarily your gun, but you get a talking knife too. Once the talking weapon gimmick is no longer novel, you're left with a fairly plain shooter. It's not bad, by any means, and it's very colorful and kinda goofy, but, well, it's a shooter. You can lasso things to swing across gaps and also to hang from rails, sort of like in BInfinite, but beyond that it's a regular ol' shooter. 

Been playing Bound By Flame recently. It isn't very good because of how it tries to be every mainstream RPG and doesn't succeed at borrowing any of the mechanics which made said games great in the first place. It's fun in small doses, but keep going for long enough and the cracks begin to show.

One thing they got right was the tactical menu, which the devs (Spiders) brought back for Greedfall, which I thought was underrated.

23 hours ago, Keyrock said:

Some thoughts on High On Life. It's a first person shooter. The gimmick is talking weapons, primarily your gun, but you get a talking knife too. Once the talking weapon gimmick is no longer novel, you're left with a fairly plain shooter. It's not bad, by any means, and it's very colorful and kinda goofy, but, well, it's a shooter. You can lasso things to swing across gaps and also to hang from rails, sort of like in BInfinite, but beyond that it's a regular ol' shooter. 

As a big fan of Roiland stuff, I was really hoping I'd latch onto it. It hasn't happened yet. There's occasionally a really funny bit, but it mostly feels like throwaway gags that weren't good enough to air on Rick and Morty.

I had some chilling time with running around in FFXV and finishing the quests, which I did not finished before the endo of the game, and in the meanwhie, I had finally enough time to put on youtube my fight with Cor in FFXV: Episode Gladiolus 😛

 

Goal number 27 achieved

After a few days of chilling in the main game, I have started and finished the storyline of Final Fantasy XV – Episode Ignis DLC on my PS4. This DLC was so far the weakest from the three character DLCs. It took me 4 hours, but I wished few times, that it would end sooner. The combat mechanics felt lackluster, and for the counterattacking, you need even better reflexes, than for Gladiolus. Which sucks for an old guy with slow reflexes. I am not looking forward to the DLC challenges at all.