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

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

39 minutes ago, majestic said:

Looks like I'll be going out to eat on Saturday or Sunday and have a steak tartare in honor of this thread.

How naughty.

10 minutes ago, bugarup said:

What if I like my steak medium rare, does it make me the world's most laughable centrist?

Laughable centrist would be doing a reverse sear so you get no crust and medium well. Medium rare is good taste.

Edited June 6, 2023 by PK htiw klaw eriF

[Zoraptor]

Laughable Centrist for steak cooking is probably using a microwave to cook it: pretty much guaranteed to unite everyone else in hatred.

I think the thing that really annoys me about Kai Leng is that his problems are completely avoidable. Most of the other complaints are clunkiness, and problems due to ME2 not progressing the plot of the series except in its last dlc. Ultimately the traffic light choice is little different from the ending of Deus Ex (albeit that's often seen as the weakest part of Deus Ex too, but meh, ending things well is hard). Bioware can and did write decent antagonists, and some very good ones too even in ME. There is literally nothing good or redeemable about Kai Leng though, he's a terrible idea with terrible writing and terrible plot with equally terrible plot holes/ railroading. And definitely new sense terrible --> awful, worse than merely bad, not the old sense where it meant impressive but frightening. All made worse by the fact his creators seemed to think he was the most awesomest of things in the known universe.

I'm sorry to say it, but Kai Leng is the Star Trek Discovery Season 3 of characters and I'm not even sure which one I'm insulting worse with the comparison. But still slightly better than WoT S1.

Edited June 7, 2023 by Zoraptor

[Gorth]

3 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

Laughable Centrist for steak cooking is probably using a microwave to cook it: pretty much guaranteed to unite everyone else in hatred.

I wonder what the judgement is on the French... one the most shocking experiences I had when working there, was the boiled steak. It was a perfectly good piece of meat and they boiled it (I returned to Berlin again after 3 weeks, at least I was familiar with Schnitzel)

[Zoraptor]

Boiled steak? Sacré bleu. Not to be confused with steak bleu, I guess.

So much for the 'les biftecks' slang and Asterix books having the gall (ohoho) to criticise the Brits for boiling stuff. Actually, Asterix in Britain has not aged well with the stereotypes considering the French are now far more likely to quit at 5pm and meal times/ breaks/ weekends whatever the circumstances than the Brits.

Edited June 7, 2023 by Zoraptor

[Wormerine]

8 hours ago, Gorth said:

I wonder what the judgement is on the French... one the most shocking experiences I had when working there, was the boiled steak.

You mean sous vide? Apparently it is great, as you can't overcook the meat. It just takes crap ton of time.

[Keyrock]

The best way to eat steaks is sloppy steaks. That is, if you're a piece of $#!+.

I bet Kai Leng ate sloppy steaks.

Edited June 7, 2023 by Keyrock

[Hawke64]

Finished Self-Checkout Unlimited. It was a quite surreal 2-hour-long walking simulator, despite the first scene implying horror.

Edited June 8, 2023 by Hawke64

[Wormerine]

Playing Lies of P demo. It's pretty chunky - I am over two hours in, and it is still going. It's pretty good. Not FromSoftware level of great, but good. Combat animation aren't quite as smooth as I would like, and they have a lot of snap attacks (long windups, and very short swings) making attack memorisation necessary. It is very cut&dry with it's animation recovery - I sometimes feel like it prevents me from blocking after an attack for longer than neccessary.

Probably the main criticism so far would be enviroment. It's a nice looking game, but at least opening few sections have been very samey. If you would show me a screenshot it is likely I wouldn't be able to tell where it was taken. Game as also been fairly linear - the levels loop around "bonfires" but there isn't many nooks one could explore.

Still, quite impressed so far. I killed a man and took his donkey hat.

[majestic]

D4 has a hilarious bug when trying to co-op nightmare dungeons. Players in the same party do not get into the same instances, and one ends up losing the sigil, or if by any luck you end up in the same instance after leaving and going back in, it does not work properly and the glyph experience cannot be assigned. Great, like the one and only thing that justifies the always-on multiplayer mode of the game does not work properly. I was pretty pleased with the server performance so far, not counting the recent lagging and outages, but this is ridiculous.

[melkathi]

Fae Tactics.

Finally managed to beat the Stone Gardens without killing any of the gorgon sisters. Didn't get the loot out of the chest, but getting the good ending for the fight has been the hardest thing so far in the game, so not going to try this again just for some loot.

[Hawke64]

Finished Dreams of an Exile. It is a functional and minimalistic action-adventure with platforming. Due to a bug, I was able to achieve only the bad ending and not quite inclined to replay the second half of the game.
Review:

Spoiler

Dream of an Exile is an action-adventure/platformer. The protagonist’s village was covered by mysterious red fog and her father’s notes imply that the salvation is outside the barrier (unsuccessfully) protecting the village.

The locations available are divided into regions with collectibles and power-ups to find. The latter consist of various tools that allow to explore and collect more. The issues are that only one tool can be equipped simultaneously and it is necessary to switch between them one-by-one, as opposed to auto-applying them in relevant circumstances (e.g. the hammer can be used only on the small rocks, the axe only on trees, etc.) or having individual hot-keys. The other problem is the lack of a map. While there are only four areas and four dungeons, seeing all of the map helps with planning the route to the objective. Speaking of, most of the objectives are spherical coloured keys to open the corresponding doors. There are also chests, containing the above-mentioned tools. Both are clearly understandable and visible, and there is an on-screen counter of the orbs to collect in each area and dungeon. Also, this aspect of the gameplay provides a reasonable challenge - some of the orb keys must be carried without taking damage, while others return to the initial position if their timer runs out. Though, some of it comes from the controls - the protagonist moves strictly by squares. Additionally, taking actions (such as jumping) or using the tools (such as cutting down trees) consumes the only stat, Energy, which recharges by itself over time, meaning that it is possible to deplete in an inopportune moment (e.g. standing on a disappearing platform) and might be necessary to wait to perform an action even in a safe environment (e.g. breaking boulders).

On the other hand, the controls are rebindable, saving is almost unrestricted (can't save during dialogues or combat), the penalty for dying is low - the MC respawns at the area's entrance.

The single combat encounter takes place in real time, without a pause.

The graphics and music are adequate - most of the visuals are pixel art, with the short cut-scenes and dialogues featuring drawn images. The writing is present - nothing exceptionally good, but neither is it horrible, just enough to explain the story.

In terms of bugs, the most significant ones experienced during the playthrough were a quest-critical NPC not appearing and getting repeatedly "hit" and pushed back when jumping. The latter was fixed by several reloadings, the former required replaying.

Overall, it is a decent concept realised via a very restrictive engine.

Started Tacoma. It seems to be a walking simulator. Unironically, the character models are very impressive - the NPCs have different heights and weights, which is rather rare. Usually, there are at most 2-3 models of the same height in sci-fi games (thinking of Mass Effect in particular).

[Bartimaeus]

talking serial killer werewolves into no longer being serial killers (but still werewolves), always a classic

dialogue skills that you can level up in games tend to be pretty funny like this: they usually let you reach more "correct" outcomes for characters and quests, but those outcomes are very often neither fitting or satisfying

stupid frodo, he should've just invested more points into persuasion and then he could've just asked sauron to be nicer and we'd have avoided all that nasty ring business, and surely what a better story it would've made

[MrBrown]

10 hours ago, majestic said:

D4 has a hilarious bug when trying to co-op nightmare dungeons. Players in the same party do not get into the same instances, and one ends up losing the sigil, or if by any luck you end up in the same instance after leaving and going back in, it does not work properly and the glyph experience cannot be assigned. Great, like the one and only thing that justifies the always-on multiplayer mode of the game does not work properly. I was pretty pleased with the server performance so far, not counting the recent lagging and outages, but this is ridiculous.

Seems like that might be fixed https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d4/t/hotfix-8-june-11-2023-102/44793

[Malcador]

Finished the main story of D4 Friday, had to laugh as my game crashed when

Inarius dies

. Ending was good, leaves threads open for expansions.

Now to start the exhaustive grind, working my way through side quests now.  Current quest involves the dudes in the trailer way back when, can't believe I didn't match the voice.   Did some nightmare dungeons with my friend's OP sorc. those were fun enough, but can't quite say why I prefer D3's GRs instead.  Just due to familiarity, I guess

[LadyCrimson]

7 Days to Die: the never ending version series, Alpha 21, first build release

Install went fine. Map generator went fine, at least for 6k and 8k maps. 10k maps on my rig took 12 minutes because it likes to hang at this one generation point (it's not just me) for ages. Probably an optimization oversight/bug re: not ultrauberCPU +128RAM rigs. Lucky for me I rarely want to play anything but 6k maps anyway. Hopped into a random map new game. Nice new surface paint or redesigns to POI's. The road system, towns/POI/trader placement, and chr. spawn-in placement - no more always spawning right next to a trader/city - is much improved. Water physics much better, I like. Not being able to scoop dirty water from a pond or lake, I think I don't like. Not because it's really hard to get water/drinks (it's not). It just feels weird, in a survival game, to be unable to get water .... from bodies of water if such bodies of water exist in the game. I can go with it, but it feels overly gamey.  I personally like the magazines for some skills/abilities vs. everything being skill tree/skill point based. That all said, after a bit I thought, "not in the mood"...and turned it off. There was nothing that made me really want to dig in/test deep. Maybe next weekend.

Edited June 13, 2023 by LadyCrimson

[Keyrock]

I started playing Mask of the Rose (courtesy of @majestic), it's a visual novel set in the Fallen London universe. Early going but so far I'm really enjoying the writing, which doesn't come as a surprise, given that writing is Failbetter Games' strong point. This makes them well suited to making a VN since writing is of utmost importance to that type of game... Well, and the quality of the art depicting individual distinctly lacking clothing in certain types of visual novels, or so I've been told.

[melkathi]

Fae Tactics has one of the cutest protagonists.

NPC: "I don't know why you are here, but you better leave."

Peony: - long explanation of why you are there -

NPC: "Why are you just telling me all this?"

Peony: "Well, you said you didn't know why I was here, so I am telling you."

[Hawke64]

Finished Tacoma. Nice, but linear. End-game spoilers:

Spoiler

I guess, it was good to see a happy ending and that both pro and against corporate characters were AIs as well as humans. On the other hand, the 2 NPCs wanting to pursue careers in arts did not age well at all and at no point in the story there was any choice. Also, it was somehow interesting to see a gay character who at the same time was unreasonably cruel with the background (the citizenship) explaining it reasonably well, while there were enough NPCs (2) who were gay and decent.

I guess, the question of AI and automation application remains relevant. As is, in order to train a good (reliable and usable) AI model, you would need a skilled specialist for each area (from data management to communicating the insights to the stakeholders), a lot of clean training data, and processing power, while low-skill contractors are cheaper short-term and provide a comparable output. On the other hand, higher-skilled employees might provide results of higher quality but slower and they also require adequate compensation. And people in general might like to have income sources and react negatively when those are threatened.

 

Edited June 14, 2023 by Hawke64

[xzar_monty]

Playing Obsidian's Pentiment, which has a forum here that nobody writes on. Well, there are aspects of the game that I really enjoy (like the setting and the premise, for instance), but there's not a whole lot you can do, actually: it looks like a short story with a few places where you can have some influence on what happens. None of the mini-games, like fitting pottery shards together, are interesting.

I'm in the third act, which looks like it's going to be the last one, and while the game's ok, it's not that memorable. A bit of a pity, really. I would have liked to like this a lot more.

[Wormerine]

48 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

Playing Obsidian's Pentiment, which has a forum here that nobody writes on. Well, there are aspects of the game that I really enjoy (like the setting and the premise, for instance), but there's not a whole lot you can do, actually: it looks like a short story with a few places where you can have some influence on what happens. None of the mini-games, like fitting pottery shards together, are interesting.

I'm in the third act, which looks like it's going to be the last one, and while the game's ok, it's not that memorable. A bit of a pity, really. I would have liked to like this a lot more.

I thought it was a great narrative adventure, but it is just a narrative adventure. Not something a dedicated gamer will find particularly exciting to interact with.

[xzar_monty]

1 minute ago, Wormerine said:

I thought it was a great narrative adventure, but it is just a narrative adventure. Not something a dedicated gamer will find particularly exciting to interact with.

Or even a more casual (but admittedly picky) gamer like me. But yeah, you're right. There just isn't enough to do, you simply follow along.

As for it being great, I'll reserve my judgement until it's over.

[Hawke64]

8 hours ago, Wormerine said:

I thought it was a great narrative adventure, but it is just a narrative adventure. Not something a dedicated gamer will find particularly exciting to interact with.

It was somehow low on interactions, and the ones present were rather uncomfortable, from the slow exploration to the mini-games to the very low interactivity of the story. Speaking of, the first MC becomes severely unrelatable, as a major story event happens off-screen, and (end-game spoilers):

Spoiler

Then he goes to die in fire, fails, and lives 20-something years under the ruins, all of which without any input from the player, even something simple as "Press F to breath in smoke/Press A to try to escape". While the second MC at least had all character-shaping events during the game, she still could not bludgeon the antagonist with a rock instead of listening to the corpse-to-become's monologue*. Which was awfully similar to Thaos', but he was possible just to attack without talking to, and, in general, one of themes of the story was presented much better in PoE. The other one, how history reflects the events, seemed fine in Pentiment, though it did not mix well with the player's motivations (to find the attacker).

On another note, I find somehow unpleasant that it was impossible to discover the main antagonist on your own, before the story pointed at it. I was not familiar enough with the setting to do so, but other players figured it out and were understandably upset.

*MC: "Did you attack that important NPC?"; The antagonist: "Yes, but.."; MC takes a large rock and proceeds hitting the antagonist until it stops moving. Shouldn't have been that difficult to implement.

Edit. Also, the walking into the burning library episode (and the preceding depression) did not work for all backgrounds. For the Bookworm, definitely, but not for the Hedonist.

Edited June 15, 2023 by Hawke64

[BruceVC]

I have some exciting news , I am playing Daggerfall Unity  for the first time properly (I tried it 18 months ago but I didnt do proper DFU or mod research and I stopped after 8  hours or so)

This time I was motivated by the numerous discussions on Codex about  DFU and I spent about 12 hours watching DFU mod videos and reading up on mods on DF workshop forums. I am using DREAM with all the relevant presets and I have about 100 mods installed and so far, 6 hours in, Im having a great time and all my mods are working as expected. I am using Vortex mod manager and I did have to confirm files were moved into the correct locations but that wasnt for all my mods

I watched videos like this around suggested mods

And then the mod community is incredibly helpful and people go so far as to create this link with is an excel spreadsheet with different mod builds that are suggested and what may conflict with what mod (use tabs at the bottom to see the different builds suggested )

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...ToVGliR7oesLEaSlWrT23JS3I/edit#gid=1397230399
 

[Wormerine]

7 hours ago, Hawke64 said:

It was somehow low on interactions, and the ones present were rather uncomfortable, from the slow exploration to the mini-games to the very low interactivity of the story. Speaking of, the first MC becomes severely unrelatable, as a major story event happens off-screen, and (end-game spoilers):

  Reveal hidden contents

Then he goes to die in fire, fails, and lives 20-something years under the ruins, all of which without any input from the player, even something simple as "Press F to breath in smoke/Press A to try to escape". While the second MC at least had all character-shaping events during the game, she still could not bludgeon the antagonist with a rock instead of listening to the corpse-to-become's monologue*. Which was awfully similar to Thaos', but he was possible just to attack without talking to, and, in general, one of themes of the story was presented much better in PoE. The other one, how history reflects the events, seemed fine in Pentiment, though it did not mix well with the player's motivations (to find the attacker).

On another note, I find somehow unpleasant that it was impossible to discover the main antagonist on your own, before the story pointed at it. I was not familiar enough with the setting to do so, but other players figured it out and were understandably upset.

*MC: "Did you attack that important NPC?"; The antagonist: "Yes, but.."; MC takes a large rock and proceeds hitting the antagonist until it stops moving. Shouldn't have been that difficult to implement.

Edit. Also, the walking into the burning library episode (and the preceding depression) did not work for all backgrounds. For the Bookworm, definitely, but not for the Hedonist.

Honestly, the only complaint I had was backtracking - I felt I had to run regularly all over the local to make sure I am not missing conversations.

I was fine going along with what the game gave me. I was folowing Andreas story, so not being able to push in another direction (or to another suspect) didn't seem an issue to me. The mystery was thematically and historically interesting, so I was more invested in that, than the murder mystery. As an art major, I was also happy with some dots I could connect from my education, and the soundtrack had a great selection of period music.

I do have mixed fillings about the ending, but I thought it worked well overall. I really liked the decisions the game made me make - whenever they have impact when it comes to major reactivity, is less important to me, than pondering I had to do to make those choices.

[Katphood]

Started playing The Outer Worlds. Unfortunately I couldn't get the PS5 'complete edition' with all the bells and whistles so this has to do for now. Runs pretty smooth on the PS5 though, maybe I'll purchase the DLCs later on if I like the game enough?!

I am also playing some AC: Origins and Control on the side.