What are you Playing Now? - Games don't make you violent, lag does

[Wormerine]

47 minutes ago, uuuhhii said:

memorize third boss first phase routine are almost impossible

only beat that boss before w w light attack was patched

can not even get more than a few hit now

I still didn’t manage to do this one without death, but I managed to get her down without touching her health, which is a good start. I think I had such troubles with 3rd and 5th as I didn’t deflect much. Deflect doesn’t discriminate between high and low, so that actually made it easier, rather than dodging. For some reason I thought you can deflect bladed attacks, which I don’t think this is the case, or health loss is minimal. The trouble is elimination posture buildup without getting hit.

All bosses spared. Taking a bit of a break from SIFU (have been binging it hard) and went back to Wasteland3. I am nearing the ending, so will wrap it out and pass my final judgement. 

 

[Humanoid]

I think I rage quit ME3 when the second dream sequence started. I will never return to that series. In retrospect my opinion of the game has worsened even more, not helped by the defenders who claim "only the ending is bad". No, the beginning is just as bad, as is the middle, and everything else.

The Mass Effect series parallels the the Rambo movies quite neatly, come to think of it. The high concept vanishes pretty much immediately after the first title. That's being too kind to ME3 though. It doesn't just lose the original point, it twists back on itself and delivers the exact opposite message it originally attempted to convey.

_____

As for the others, I don't recall much of KoTOR, no strong feelings about it either way. I suspect that's because it's wedged awkwardly between my fondness (at the time) for BG2 and my general dislike of Star Wars. Never played JE.

Edited April 4, 2023 by Humanoid

[Malcador]

1 hour ago, Humanoid said:

I think I rage quit ME3 when the second dream sequence started

Come on, those parts were great comedy - the kid combusting while Shepard gives a blank face.

 

[the_dog_days]

2 hours ago, Humanoid said:

I think I rage quit ME3 when the second dream sequence started. I will never return to that series. In retrospect my opinion of the game has worsened even more, not helped by the defenders who claim "only the ending is bad". No, the beginning is just as bad, as is the middle, and everything else.

The Mass Effect series parallels the the Rambo movies quite neatly, come to think of it. The high concept vanishes pretty much immediately after the first title. That's being too kind to ME3 though. It doesn't just lose the original point, it twists back on itself and delivers the exact opposite message it originally attempted to convey.

_____

As for the others, I don't recall much of KoTOR, no strong feelings about it either way. I suspect that's because it's wedged awkwardly between my fondness (at the time) for BG2 and my general dislike of Star Wars. Never played JE.

ME3 upon release is the only time I ever called in sick to play a game. An hour in and I was wondering if I should pretend to be magically cured and just go to work.

[Lexx]

I had no strong opinion about ME3, except for the ending. Other than that I quite enjoyed it. Truth told, I don't remember much, but at least I don't remember hating it.

[Wormerine]

Which reminds me: [sorry if I posted it already before. I can't keep a track.]

 

[LadyCrimson]

I'm in the middle of sorta watching a Diablo retrospective video (all three games). Near the beginning they mention trudging in the dark in D1, beating monsters, and suddenly that ring-drop sounds and your excitement ratchets up like crazy.

...sooooooo true. I remember hearing that sound and sometimes pixel hunting with the mouse for 10 minutes trying to find it. "I know it dropped, I heard it, dangit!" Sure it was likely going to be junk but they were rare enough and maybe it'd be a Zodiac ring and...

I miss that. I don't think I've had that same kind of item-drop sensation from a sound cue, in a game, for a long time. These days half the time it's more about visual or icon/text color cues then sounds. And they're not rare. >.> Well, in games I play anyway.

[Gorth]

Continued from previous thread:

 

[BruceVC]

I was 45 hours into IWD2 and about it go into the Underdark when the game crashed on that loading screen

I then spent about 5 hours troubleshooting it by removing mods and reinstalling mods and the game  and it just made things worse. None of my save games would load. It was very frustrating and I was about to quit the game but then someone on Codex mentioned that you must loads mods in the same original  order because IWD2 is a buggy game. I decided to try one more time to fix the issues and I did the following

• I uninstalled the game completely from GOG
• I then deleted any folders or files that were left over that were mostly mod related
• I reinstalled the game
• I then used my normal windows download folder to guess which mods I would have installed first

And it worked, I could load save games and go into the Underdark 

[Malcador]

WoW's trading post is a neat idea, just allows for a little grind to get cosmetics. The "grind" is stuff you probably do anyway, WQ's, PVP.  Blew through the objectives in about 1 day's playing as well, so that was that. Tried to PVP again, got flamed heavily for suggesting someone say what to do rather than insult everyone for not knowing what to do, heh.

Realized I was gifted Everspace 2 last year...so guess will play that.

[Hurlshort]

Conan Exiles - My new base and thralls are coming along well. The sorcerer stuff is exciting. You aren't throwing fireballs or anything crazy like that, but you can do some pretty interesting things with it. It also adds a good deal of lore and story to the game. 

I'm excited to get the teleporter stuff up and running, so I can start a new base is a better spot. Right now I'm near all the early game stuff, which is good, but I am almost ready to move on.

[Keyrock]

After a break where I played no vidya games whatsoever, part of that was a weekend trip to see my parents in southern Florida, I'm back to AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative. One thing I'm quite happy to report is that they keep adding new twists to somniums (the main gameplay element of the series, an Inception-like dream world puzzle). The first game already had a decent variety of how things worked, but now they've added in new elements like reversed and/or inverted controls to increase the stress level. Somniums have a time limit, but they also have a function where time (almost completely) stops when you don't move, giving you ample time to think things through. Once you start moving again time flows normally, and, outside of the first 1 or 2 tutorial-esque somniums, the time you have to work with leaves little room for mistakes. Adding in borked controls and/or shifted perspective further heightens the tension of trying to complete the somnium in time. Of course, you can lower the difficulty and give yourself more time to work with. I'm not going to do that because puzzles are my jam, so I want them difficult. 

Edited April 5, 2023 by Keyrock

[uuuhhii]

dredge are pretty addictive

still 10 fish didn't catch

hand hurt a lot from all the qte and holding r x

[Hawke64]

Immortal: Unchained. Reached the Cauldrons. I have a very general idea that I need to progress through the area and face Iska, the Queen of the Dead, but I have no clue why there were breakable tubes leading to the central pillar of the room. The room itself consisted of circular bridges connected to each other with giant statues of the undead near the ceiling. Behind one of the locked outer doors was an Obelisk (bonfire) and a portal to another area. The undead with grenade launchers on the other side reminded me to finish the current area first. I was able to upgrade my sniper rifle and unlock a passive ability that restored an ammo (1) if the enemy was killed by the shot. The green teleporting ninjas, who appeared every 10 metres, were problematic without appropriate weapons (high physical and acid resistance), which I did not have - most of my arsenal caused physical damage only. As a workaround, reloading through the main menu was returning them to the initial positions or despawning (because they did not exist on the map until triggered). Looking forward to the main boss.

[Mamoulian War]

After some small breaks now and there and casually playing Assetto Corsa Competizione on Low Fuel Motorsport portal, I am still playing some Tales of Arise. I think I am already in the final dungeon, but for the first time, I have encountered a small need to do some grinding, wither for money or for XP. As some of the enemies there are little bit to tough for my party. So I am flying between Rena, Dahna, Lenegis and Daeq Fazol, trying to get some more quest finished, visiting training grounds and fishing with Kisara

And I am again at my typical bad habit, that as soon as I suspect, the game is closing to the finish, I am avoiding to play it, as I do not want it to end Silly me

Anyway, we have Easter holiday soon, so I hope I can move the game little bit further on Friday, and then I'll see what should I play next

[Theonlygarby]

I finally forced myself to beat ME2 and onto ME3.  I'll be honest the whole series doesn't really hold up imo.  Even 2 which is the best one, I found myself skipping dialog because it seemed unnecessary and tedious.  

just hold the joystick up to paragon option or down to renegade depending on your playthrough.  no point in mixing responses unless you want a bad ending.

The combat is the same thing over and over.  fight flow of enemies empty room go to next room, empty room go to next room.  find thing, move to next location.

I really doubt I'll finish 3 this time around.

[Wormerine]

Finished Wasteland3, and it’s two DLCs. That’s a weird one. I feel I should like it more than I did. 

The set up is pretty great - easily understandable overarching objective, missions with a few possible outcomes and a lot of factions to befriend or piss off for variety of outcomes. Choices are regularly acknowledged, and the game has this rare feeling of making actual choices. 
Combat is fine. Not bad for an RPG, but nothing too interesting as a game system. 

Too bad I didn’t much care for the game. I think my issue comes with how shallow the world building is. I don’t think a variety of choices and outcomes matters, if I don’t have any strong feelings about the world and people who inhabit. Factions of Wasteland3 feel like concepts that has never been fully developed. Gangs have their particular quirks - some dress in hallowe’en monster masks, some as clowns, some to ritual sacrifices… I never felt there was an interesting characterisation behind them. And with every encounter in the game having some off-beat weird thing going on, nothing stand out as particularly interesting.

I think that’s why I liked Steeltown DLC the best out of the whole package - characters motivations made sense, and setting was fairly relatable.

DLC2 was pretty bad - ambitious, but bad. It mostly seems to try to squeeze a bit more juice out of combat, but the end result were lengthy, tedious gimmicky fights, that seemed to push the limits of what the game is technically capable of handling. 

[Sargallath Abraxium]

...after a few years break from gamin', decided ta build a new rig and 'ave been playin' 'round wit' Divinity 2 Modding...takes me back ta the ol' days o' the DLTCEP an' makin' customs fer the Infinity Engine games...miss the moddin' community that was 'round back then...

 

 

...WHO LUVS YA, BABY!!...

[Gorgon]

After a very rocky start the last of us 1 is now running 60 fps on 4k ultra settings. Iooks absolutely gorgeous. I fired up Cyberpunk just to see what it looked like on ultra, and.. it's pretty meh. I mean sure there's boatloads of textures and view distance, I could even run it with ray tracing, but it still just looks good, not great. 

Bought new ram and stuck it in the other dual channel, meaning no xmp profile. Cheapest fix I could do quickly.  I can't get framerates over 120 in any game consistently regardless of settings, because I now have both a ram speed and CPU bottleneck, but I an acceptable tradeoff that you will be making regardless. If I bought all new board ram and processor, it wouldn't necessarily impact 4k ultra that much. I can get to 95 % GPU utilization, which doesn't  really warrant an immediate upgrade on a 4k display. I'm actually underclocking several game profiles to make the card less power hungry.  

When I do upgrade, I'm definitely getting faster ram. the difference between the Radeon metrics saying 9 gbs of ram speed and 17 was like night and day. It couldn't stream assets fast enough and was stumbling on having to swap a lot with the SSD. 

[Hawke64]

Immortal: Unchained. Defeated Iska. The boss got pushed into the wall after teleporting, 1/4 into the battle, while I was standing right next to her and shooting. Not the most glorious victory, but satisfying, nonetheless. The path from the boss room to the fast travel point, without unlocking another one from a save point, was interesting - the previously-cleared ambushes triggered when I approached from the other side. The sniper rifle and quitting to the main menu solved it.

[majestic]

Hellpoint, which I got on GOG in a giveaway two years ago. The DLC was on the spring sale for 2.99 €, so I bought that and off I went. Hellpoint is Dark Souls in SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE. Well, on a space station. With less interesting and easier boss fights, but better exploration* - although that is subjective. Dark Souls (talking about the first one here) has better combat and equipment variety, and equipment that changes gameplay more than Hellpoint's, which while having similar items to regular action RPG staples like rings or amulets are not particularily interesting, most of them are flat bonuses.

That pretty accurately describes everything about the game. I actually liked the game, warts and all, better than the clearly more polished and balanced Dark Souls, primarily because uncovering what the hell is going on was more fun in Hellpoint than in Dark Souls, but let me put a caveat here, I am someone who was disappointed by Dark Souls "story" (you're the chosen one, either go do what the dark snake or the light snake tells you, mmmkay, this is supposed to be incredible? Riiiiiiiight...) after hearing so many people rave about the depth and, uhm, subtle storytelling. Sci-fi worldbuiling is also infinitely more interesting to me than fantasy worldbuilding unless there's something interesting going on.

It does have some fun concepts like a part in the DLC where you can set your game to change enemies whenever you kill one. Basically the setting causes all enemies in the game to move to the next NG+ level whenever one dies, making for an incredibly rewarding difficulty ramp that will have even the mookiest mooks one shot you pretty quickly. I survived long enough to realize that at some point the scaling just peters off. The less fun side-effect of this setting is that you'll just break the game really quickly, gathering millions of souls axions in short order.

Spoiler

I actually liked the core idea of the game, which was a secret project to create a/the capital G God by creating a powerful AI system and linking (well, merging) it with the infinite quantum copies available in the multiverse, creating a system of infinite knowledge and processing power - by all means a literal deus ex machina. The game starts after the quantum merge had some - maybe unintended, maybe not - side effects, like turning many affected insane, if not killing them outright. Strange cosmic entities now prowl the station, in service of even stranger godlike beings originally summoned by the cabal running the experiment in their attempt to create God.

The player character is a 3D printed spawn of the Author, the mass AI system intended to become God, tasked with finding information about what happened to the station and bringing it back. Something is wrong with the system, or as it tells you, it is sick. Well, damaged by the quantum merger.

Not that anything you do truly matters. Everything that can happen already happens. Reject your task or embrace it, what does it matter. As the eldritch horrors you meet tell you, you are indeed in a literal hell(point). For every spawn that rejects and fights, there is one that submits. For every reality that does not spawn God, there is one that does, or as the creature known only as the Sentient (the result of the ongoing project) tells you in the game's final, true ending after you vanquish it: there is no end, and there is no victory. It will simply always be there.

*Keep in mind that exploration rewards the player with a plethora of not really interesting gear, but many, many bits and pieces of lore. If you like the Dark Souls type of exploration that rewards players with potentially gameplay changing items, this is not really a game for you, or at least it will not be the primary motivation to continue. Lore and plot related elements was mine. Just something to keep in mind.

[Hawke64]

Immortal: Unchained. Reached Cinderwood and participated in a duel of snipers. The teleporting-sniper boss and the other teleporting snipers could not leave the arena, so I just camped next to the entrance. Also, found a shortcut to the previous area. While I did not need to go there, it the interconnectivity was pleasant to see. I think, there are 3-4 main bosses and 2-3 main areas left to go.

Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG. Started the game. It is impressive that a PC with Int 1 has a lot of unique lines, while most of them are voiced.

[Gorth]

Made a bit more progress in Mass Effect (the legendary edition version). Currently exploring The Citadel (The Presidium and The Ward areas). In many ways this just feels like a better "game", because it feels less claustrophobic (not sure how to explain the feeling otherwise). More perceived freedom and openness, the only blocker being having to go see the council before other areas become accessible and then off to explore... and backtrack and retrack and backtrack again etc., as the missions and assignments keep piling up

 

[Theonlygarby]

19 hours ago, Gorth said:

Made a bit more progress in Mass Effect (the legendary edition version). Currently exploring The Citadel (The Presidium and The Ward areas). In many ways this just feels like a better "game", because it feels less claustrophobic (not sure how to explain the feeling otherwise). More perceived freedom and openness, the only blocker being having to go see the council before other areas become accessible and then off to explore... and backtrack and retrack and backtrack again etc., as the missions and assignments keep piling up

 

I gave up on mass effect.  once I found myself just skipping the dialog and holding the joystick up to paragon dialog choices, I thought to myself, the combat isn't fun, I'm not even following dialog, what am I doing here.

[Hawke64]

Immortal: Unchained. Reached and defeated the local version of the Bed of Chaos (the weak point of the tree boss was open for 1 shot, then I had to dodge or shoot vines, spikes, bugs, and a dryad). The good thing was that the floor was not falling to pieces, the bad was that the tree was regenerating (summoning the flies that were healing it non-stop), though each my shot was taking about 1/4 boss' health bar.
The two optional bosses discovered were similar (larger) to a previously met main boss and a regular foe. The first was possible to spawn (it was not present on the map before you approach the arena), then back out from the arena without starting the battle and locking yourself in, and shoot safely from the nearby cliff (it would be summoning drones otherwise). The second, Flamebelcher Hierophant, was impossible to cheese, but it kept setting the surrounding trash mobs on fire with AoE attacks and their numbers seemed limited (they stopped spawning at some point), so I was able to just keep shooting while dodging the fire and grenades. The loot rewarded included arguably the best sniper rifle in the game (the unquestionably-best sniper rifle had much higher stat requirements to equip). Another interesting piece of equipment was an ability that restored an ammo if it was used to kill a foe, which worked wonderfully with sniper rifles and, possibly, grenade launchers (which I cannot use).
Overall, I am enjoying the game, though it would not be so without quick-saving and sniper rifles.