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

[Keyrock]

@melkathiWhen you wrote that Showgunners is like The Running Man, I'm assuming you meant the movie rather than the book that said movie is very very very very very very very very very very loosely based on (I cannot stress enough how little the movie has in common with the book).

Edited June 3, 2023 by Keyrock

[melkathi]

Indeed.

I will have to read the book now. I read The Warriors which the respective movie is very very different to, even while keeping a lot of the pacing and theoretically a lot of the scenes.

[Gorth]

I'm through most of Mass Effect 2 by now. I just completed the IFF retrieval mission and got my last party member (rather than selling him to Cerberus). For some weird reason, I love the conversation where Sheppard tries his best to get a name out of the Geth

I can't remember if Legion has a loyalty mission, but otherwise down to two. Need to do Jack's on Pragia and Sayeed's on some planet I can't remember the name of from top of my head.

I like the story and most of the characters. Combat is IMHO by far the weakest of the three games (not counting Andromeda as I haven't played it yet)

 

Edit: I made a mistake that I've done the last 3 times I played the original version of this game... my poor fish

[LadyCrimson]

Above Snakes: well I reached around 400 world tiles (out of a possible 2200+ square grid or so) and fps has dropped down to 45. Although there's this odd combo where some of the optimization patches they've done have lowered gpu utilization by a ton (started at 99%, now it's at 50%...) and fps at the same time, beyond what world size building is doing. Regardless, like many such games, it's gonna get hardware/AI/fps limited before anything else.

I might reach 800-1000 world tiles before fps drops to 20 or something, haha. I've decided however that there aren't enough variety of tiles to make a map of 2000+ squares not so repetitive as to get dull to even design it...I could make 2/3 of the map "ocean" but.....

...so maybe instead I shall use my 3rd save slot to try to see how minimal/tiny I can design it.
...I have been staying up way too late all week.   >.>

[MrBrown]

Literally unplayable.

 

[Wormerine]

Can you pay for a convenience of having more active sidequests?

Edited June 4, 2023 by Wormerine

[melkathi]

You can pay for a loot box that has a 0.67% chance of dropping an active quest increase. Chances doubled if you get a premium subscription!

[Keyrock]

20 minutes ago, melkathi said:

You can pay for a loot box that has a 0.67% chance of dropping an active quest increase. Chances doubled if you get a premium subscription!

If you buy the annual battle bass for the low price of $24.99 your chances triple to 2%. Not only that but you also get a bonus 200 Blizzard Bucks that you can spend on cosmetics! (note: the cheapest premium cosmetic costs 205 Blizzard Bucks)*

* I may or may not have made all of that up

[melkathi]

Sounds legit.

[Malcador]

14 hours ago, MrBrown said:

Literally unplayable.

 

People have the same complaints in WoW. Never understood why people let them build up so much, you can come back and collect them for a good portion of them.

Should go find some reviews of D4 from the D2 zealots, now that I think of it.

[Lexx]

If they have so many side quests that it fills a whole list and more, I can't shake off the feeling that it's all just generic and copy&paste with slightly different text.

[MrBrown]

1 hour ago, Lexx said:

If they have so many side quests that it fills a whole list and more, I can't shake off the feeling that it's all just generic and copy&paste with slightly different text.

They're surprisingly varied and well written. There's over a 100 of them though, so I might just have not gotten to the boring ones yet.

Mechanically it's still Diablo though, go there and kill stuff, maybe with a few gimmicks.

[bugarup]

Bioshock 2: moar Bioshock. Devs stuck with "Don't fix it if ain't broken" formula for this one, so it's just the same Bioshock with a bit updated weapons (for good or worse; I miss my wrench which did not require ammo), a new type of rather annoying baddie, entitled collectivist egomaniac instead of entitled capitalist egomaniac and your shifty helper ain't a traitor this time. No levels that would stand out though, like Sandor Cohen's kitsch galore in B1. And way too long ending slog.

Done with that, started Infinite. Nice of you to warn me upfront about your disgusting save system, game, but it doesn't help against being mildly annoyed all the time.  Setting is very pretty and colorful, but that Americana thing feels, like, seen 500 times before and its overexposed themes of racism, greed and religious nuttery doesn't help any. Shooting part is fun and cool, enemies are less braindead than crazy undersea junkies and with a few exceptions less bulletspongey, but because of that stupid save system I play it safe (i.e. with a sniper rifle from behind the cover). Vigors so far are same old plasmids with some repaint, melee attacks are ridiculously brutal and gross, our protagonist is once again a dad figure, only now he apparently is a bit of a piece of sh†t, talks quite a lot, does funny things like moodily strum a guitar in the cellar of the bar whose owners he murdered minutes ago, and his daughter figure tags along with us all the time. Now, Liz I really like, and not just because her part time job is cheat mode. Liz is cool. 

 

[Gorth]

Finished my game of Mass Effect 2. I deliberately went with a less than perfect ending (I don't think I've ever killed any team/crew members before) to satisfy my curiosity. No maxing out of Jack or Zaeed resulted in a dead engineer Daniels (I did like the innuendo and fun dialogue between Daniels and Donnelly throughout the game) and as well as Presley and the biggest loss of all... Chambers. By extension, all my fish died soon after

I guess nobody really cared about Zaeed, as he survived despite not getting his way (I saved the refinery workers, no loyalty there), whereas Jack did bite the bullet before the end. I suspect the former is because he was a DLC addon IIRC, so no consequences either way?

It will probably be a while before I play ME2 again. I chose Miranda as the romance option btw, that's how Jack ended up failing the loyalty test, as I didn't have enough light/dark side power to persuade her (having already done Miranda's mission, I could have sided with Jack to maximize both team members loyalty, but that would ruin the experiment). I managed to squeeze both Legion and Tali into the team without them killing each other. Not that they didn't try to  at first. Lots of characters I never really bothered with though. It's possible I did in the first half dozen runs back when the game is new. Generally stuck with Miranda, Mordin, Grunt and Kazumi for most missions that didn't require specific team members.

Now off to play ME3.

 

 

[Malcador]

Flurry poison rogue seems fun in D4, although if I let my weapons be out of date just a little I'm a bit screwed.  Just addicted to that Flurry aspect and the other one where i leave stun grenades when evading.  Still good fun. Sure wish they'd give us a mount earlier, Act 3 at least for me is a colossal pain traversing that forsaken desert.

Edited June 5, 2023 by Malcador

[melkathi]

Flurry was fun in Kotor.

[Wormerine]

7 hours ago, bugarup said:

Bioshock 2: moar Bioshock. Devs stuck with "Don't fix it if ain't broken" formula for this one,

 

No levels that would stand out though,

No complaint about baby sitting little sister?

Did you play Minerva's Den DLC? I remember liking it better than the base game.

[InsaneCommander]

Little Witch Nobeta: 3D castle exploration with anime girls. A simple but fun game.  Don't look at the Steam labels or you'll be disappointed (this can't be considered an RPG or Soulslike). Some bosses are annoying but nothing that can't be handled with a well timed dodge. I must have missed a tutorial in the early game, because I didn't know that you could run. This made some battles a little more difficult and I got stuck for a while in an area that required a longer jump.

I'll make a random prediction now: the cat is the real villain of the story.

[MrBrown]

Finished the Diablo4 campaign yesterday.

It was ok. People seem to really like the tone better, I've never been able to tell the difference. Act 1, 4 and 5 (out of 5) had some neat moments, but otherwise I felt it was monotonous "let's run after the baddie" stuff. Felt the drama between characters was mostly too forced, couldn't care about a lot of them. Inarius was good, but should have been more prelevant I feel, Lilith was too prelevant but was ok otherwise. The rest were a bore, outside of a spoilery one.

Gameplay... I'm not sure what to feel. I've been playing Barbarian, and the enemies in the game run around a LOT, so you need lots of movement skills as a melee character. And it still feels sluggish. I'd have a try some different characters and builds to give an honest opinion.

[bugarup]

4 hours ago, Wormerine said:

No complaint about baby sitting little sister?

Did you play Minerva's Den DLC? I remember liking it better than the base game.

Nah, game gives 3 guns with trap ammo, when else use them than when babysitting? Those were fun parts, well, most of the time because the game tended to crash a lot when there were lots of effects firing off. Didn't play Minerva's Den, thought it was one of those arena DLCs where you do nothing but fight waves while on timer. In Infinite news, two gun limit sucks and Liz is asking for trouble being so frivolous about parallel realities.

[Wormerine]

12 minutes ago, bugarup said:

Didn't play Minerva's Den, thought it was one of those arena DLCs where you do nothing but fight waves while on timer.

Nah, it’s couple hours (3-4?) long stand alone campaign. 

[MrBrown]

Oh, I forgot to say this about D4: I have below min specs, and D4 keeps telling me to upgrade my ****, but I had absolutely no trouble running it. 

Some textures are a bit bland, that's all.

(One crash, and that seems to have been a server issue)

[Keyrock]

11 hours ago, Gorth said:

Now off to play ME3.

Kai Leng is waiting for you.

[Gfted1]

2 hours ago, MrBrown said:

Oh, I forgot to say this about D4: I have below min specs, and D4 keeps telling me to upgrade my ****, but I had absolutely no trouble running it. 

Some textures are a bit bland, that's all.

(One crash, and that seems to have been a server issue)

Dont you dare give me hope. I dont have a gaming PC anymore and I was wondering if my work laptop could handle D4. For minimum settings I think I have the CPU (i5-8250U) and RAM (16GB) covered, but I think the on board video card wont cut it (UHD Graphics 620). What do you think?

[uuuhhii]

5 hours ago, Keyrock said:

Kai Leng is waiting for you.

that was the worst part of me3