What are you Playing Now? - Right Now at the moment edition

[majestic]

8 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

Did you try to defeat the Asylum Demon with a broken sword hilt, out of curiosity?

Yeah, don't do that, your fists do the same amount of damage, attack faster and cost less stamina...

Spoiler

 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

10 hours ago, melkathi said:

We should do something about that.

 

I tried playing Dark Souls for like 30 minutes before giving up.

You know what game I didn't give up on? Fire Emblem Engage, but I should have because it's the worst game in the series. So I didn't play it in a while and instead started playing the remakes of Baten Kaitos or whatever the **** you call it and have given up on the prequel game because it is much worse than the original. So I started playing the original because I find both jrpgs and deck builder games to be nostalgic and this does both. It's a much more innovative game than pretty much anything in the genre and really taps into the weirdess jrpgs are able to hit pretty well.

I also played KoF XV and for some reason it's nice to see Yamazaki scream while presumably beating people half to death. Hope he gets put in the new FF game next year.

[melkathi]

I have started work on my backlog.

Thus I played through Robothorium. A rogue like with a robot rebellion fighting for robot rights.

The writing was done by someone who's English isn't the best. It could have done with at least a community proof reading.

It was interesting to see the robot I found the least interesting gameplay wise initially turn into my favourite in the end.

 

I'd need to do another three runs to get all achievements, but I don't see myself doing that.

It did get me to want to play though, unlike Fallout 4.

 

More enjoyable than Fallout 4 - better love story than Twilight.

[Sven_]

After months off, progressed some further into  The Outer Worlds.

Monarch is awful. I hope I'm right with this, as the entire planet feels as if it was outsourced to a B-tier MMO developer. The entire surface is basically just asset recycling, copypaste enemy mobs, random loot and crates all over. That's when I stopped.

Picked this up again with the intention of just following the main quest. So I did. And even that consisted of the most straight forward fedex jobs in the milky way. At the end of the main questline, you're given the opportunity to respond to an NPC with something along the lines of: "Lemme guess! You wanna make me fetch another three keys for ya, don't ya?" That joke, unfortunatley, is on Obsidian. This is the most mediocre thing I've ever played from this studio.

Hopefully the game's going to pick up again. Because prior it was at least decent. Nothing to WhatsApp home about, but decent. Still puzzled how you can make an entire planet of low-quality filler, given that there's but a couple of planets either way -- and the game isn't even aiming to be a (space) epic to begin with. Resource allocation went smoother in both smaller scale Pillars games for sure (and Pentiment either way).

Edited October 5 by Sven_

[Hawke64]

13 hours ago, HoonDing said:

I still consider DS2 = Dungeon Siege 2

Dead Space 2.

---

Finished Lunacid. The experience was enjoyable, with the combat being generally somewhat better than in The Outer Worlds. I still skipped the combat-only gauntlet due to one of the foes being non-hostile and very agile rats.

I guess, I would have liked the exploration more if there were built-in quick saves and at least some pointers to the next checkpoint.

---

Regarding The Outer Worlds, while I quite like the game, the combat encounter design is not its strong part. I guess, if the locations were smaller, with more thoughtfully placed opponents and items, it would have been better. So, like Dark Souls, but sci-fi and with more story.

[Mamoulian War]

Goal nr. 9/2024 finished

October 5, 15:30 – I have decided to relax a little bit with Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate on my PS4 again, and started the Aftermath story added to the game as a DLC. It started immediately after the events of the original story and brought back to life few old characters. It was 2 hours shorter than the original story and this time, you are also playing as members of the evil entourage. At the grand finale I have picked Liu Kang’s ending.

[Wormerine]

Finished Alan Wake 2 - by finished I mean my first playthrough. I thought ending scene was cut rather abruptly, and I hear one needs to complete New Game+ Called "Final Draft" to get the true ending. But considering how I enjoyed the game, and how much there is to digest I am looking forward to doing 2nd playthrough at some point.

Brilliant sequel. I liked the idea of Alan Wake1 more than the actual game, and AW2 is a game I wished AW1 was. On top of that lovely ties to wider Remedy-verse, with direct links to Control, but also all of the other Remedy output. For a long time fan it is a treat - and more importantly it never felt to me like fan-service - I don't think I can name one reference that felt to be done just for reference sake.

I was less impressed by AW2 first DLC pack - Night Springs. I mean, they are mostly non-sensical non-canon silly short stories, but they just did nothing for me. Non surprising as each story is very brief, and reuses pre-existing locations, but I just expected them to be a bit more weird and interesting. First two that is. I thought the 3rd one was pretty great and it is also one which might have actual story implications for Remedy-verse - though due to nature of the DLC pack it is difficult to parse what exactly we can take at face value. Time will tell I suppose.

[BruceVC]

I played Kenshi for 100 hours but then I decided to stop. The reason for this is I am not really into building cities and simulation games

And a huge part of  the point  and design of Kenshi is building a  city and all the mechanics around this 

I really enjoyed what I played, I explored large parts of the game and completed several bounties and I raised my melee skills to 55-65 for most of my party

But end  of the day if you not going to build a city then the exploring becomes monotonous and so does the scavenging for items because the ruins are all more or less the same . I ended up with 500K Cats but nothing to really spend it on because I had already bought or found  most of the best equipment 

Its not fair for me to give this game the very popular  and globally influential " BruceVC game score " because if you not going to embrace and participate in the core design of the game then you cant objectively rate the game. It would  be like playing a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game and saying " I dont play games where you have to explore " 

In summary, great game for what its designed to be but end of the day its not for me. But I dont regret playing it at all 

[LadyCrimson]

5 hours ago, BruceVC said:

I ended up with 500K Cats

Holy Moly, that's a lot of cats, do you have to build a city to house all of them?

5 hours ago, BruceVC said:

but nothing to really spend it on

....oh, it's a currency.

[majestic]

Quest designer: "How long should the Spiritborn class quest be in Diablo IV?"

Design Lead: "Yes."

For crying out loud, seriously, stop wasting my time game. What the hell.

[Malcador]

Got Rogue Trader, helps to be familiar with the PnP game from 2010 or so.

5 hours ago, majestic said:

Quest designer: "How long should the Spiritborn class quest be in Diablo IV?"

Design Lead: "Yes."

For crying out loud, seriously, stop wasting my time game. What the hell.

My preload was a waste of time, have to download a 37 GB "patch". 

[uuuhhii]

50 minutes ago, Malcador said:

Got Rogue Trader, helps to be familiar with the PnP game from 2010 or so.

My preload was a waste of time, have to download a 37 GB "patch". 

 

remember fallout 76 have 60 gb patch

is it still the record keeper

[melkathi]

Which is game industry speak for "you have to reinstall the game"

[majestic]

Well, to be fair, a full installation* of Diablo IV is like 150GB, so it's more like a quarter reinstall.

 

 

*A third of that is the optional Diablo IV high res texture pack.

[uuuhhii]

11 minutes ago, majestic said:

Well, to be fair, a full installation* of Diablo IV is like 150GB, so it's more like a quarter reinstall.

 

 

*A third of that is the optional Diablo IV high res texture pack.

 

why is diablo 4 150g

even cyberpunk 2077 are not 100 g

how does game get so bloated

[majestic]

2 hours ago, uuuhhii said:

how does game get so bloated

High definition textures, something Cyberpunk 2077 or more recently, Black Myth: Wukong, for all their visual glory, do not really have.

Edited October 8 by majestic

[melkathi]

And compression.

Or lack thereof.

Worried that Bokishi will run it at ultrahypersuperextraultraultra HD and a resolution of 192.000 x 108.000, some devs don't compress at all, to ensure best quality no naked eye would be able to identify.

[LadyCrimson]

One doesn't "need" seriously high res. and low compression textures to have a game look really good on a 4k screen.

But while I may not be anywhere near at Bokishi's "level", I do find it annoying when a game claims to have some high texture dlc only to find they only gave it to, oh, say, road textures and vehicles, and all the rocks and walls and creatures still look like blurry blobs if you get anywhere close to them.
To me an overall, very noticable texture quality inconsistency is far worse than simply not doing "hi-res" textures at all.

[bugarup]

On 10/7/2024 at 9:14 AM, BruceVC said:

I played Kenshi for 100 hours

...

In summary, great game for what its designed to be but end of the day its not for me.

[majestic]

Huh, Diablo IV needed stability improvements? You don't say. In the past few days the game servers have crashed several times for me, especially while loading into new zones (i.e. getting endless loading screens without timeouts). Well, maybe that got better, it is pretty tiresome to lose your seething opal buffs because the servers keep dropping games.

[Hurlshort]

Rogue Waters - This is a turn based pirate game. It plays like Darkest Dungeon on a strategic level, and then the combat is a puzzle turn based combat. It's alright. I don't really dig the story or the characters, but I like the combat. It wasn't quite what I was expecting, as the missions don't really make me feel like I'm sailing the open seas, but I don't regret the purchase.

I was hoping to play Tavern Keeper this month, but it has been delayed until next year. 

[BruceVC]

I played two PC Fighting Fantasy books,  House of Hell and Forest of Doom

Very nostalgic and worthwhile  experience and reminded me of the incredible time when I was kid and we didnt have a PC so books and Tabletop games was how we played fantasy games 

I bought 3 more to play later

I decided  to play Two Worlds 2, its fun. It has some unusual designs and mechanics but its a cheesy and entertaining   RPG, its not complex  but its fun 

 

 

 

[melkathi]

I bought Two Worlds 2 when it came out. Never really played it. Something bothered me in the initial feel.

 

Maybe I'll have to try again after a full BruceVC rating has been given.

[majestic]

On 10/4/2024 at 2:45 AM, Bartimaeus said:

Wrong.

Boy, arguing on the internet is easy.

Okay, but really, I'm reading your reply here, and all I'm hearing is "you have to do what players consider to be the worst and what might objectively be the least-played content that nobody wanted to do even once multiple times...but you have to do it in more complicated and time-consuming ways". Great, fantastic, that's exactly what I want to do with my life, .

That is certainly one way to read it, if you want to troll.   

I should probably have skipped the part about it probably being the least played content. The actual dungeon is fine, it was just impossible to complete with random mouth breathers, which sadly is the usual way to play 5-man content in the game. The entire game is designed for each part of its content to be completed multiple times anyway, what with it being an MMORPG, so giving the inevitable repeats a breath of fresh air is good.

The point still stands though, the achievement system was a nice addon with an incentive to do things differently. 

On 10/4/2024 at 2:45 AM, Bartimaeus said:

If I want to play and beat Dark Souls at level 1, I can go decide to do that of my own free will, and there's nobody that has to award me some "congratulations, you are a total dip**** for doing this" award in order for me to feel rather pleased with myself for doing so. Nor for doing any other number of arbitrary goals that I might decide I want to do, because if I actually love the game and there's something like that which I actually want to do, I can just...go decide to do it. With achievements that I cannot disable tied to an always online account like Steam, there has been a non-zero number of times where I've got through the first area or tutorial or something of a game, had an achievement pop up for completing that or for something else completely minute, I go look at the achievements and see that there are seventy distinct achievements for this stupid ass game that I'm playing, I immediately think that I'm probably not even going to finish the game - much less get all the achievements! - so I close the game, I use the Steam Achievement Manager hack program to reset the achievement that just unlocked, I uninstall the game on Steam, and then I go download the game from elsewhere and play my downloaded copy instead - blissfully free of any thought for achievements or stat-tracking or time-tracking or any other unnecessary meta garbage that's not really actually part of just playing the damned bastard ass game that I'm supposed to be enjoying. No, I'm now able to just play without thinking about any of that, just like I used to be able to do when I was a kid and put a video game into an SNES or an N64 or when I loaded up a Baldur's Gate or Age of Empires save game. Just let me play my video games exactly how I want to play them, it's all I ask.

 

I have done some of that myself, like playing a full tactics modded Baldur's Gate 2 solo on insane run*. My inability to liberally use limited resources in games makes many of the games I play technically challenge runs right from the start (I had 99 human effigies in Dark Souls 2 halfway through the game and only then started to use them because they would have otherwise gone to waste). 

Well, actually, yeah, I get it. It's similar to the problem I had with Baldur's Gate 3's timed quests where I immediately looked up time sensitive quest lists before even reaching the druid grove, just to make sure I don't miss any content. I probably despise that sort of game design in the same way you dislike achievements, but the point is that I can still see how and why they're included, and that they can make for good game design. They're just not for me, and I will always hate them. 

*Lie by omission, I have only done that because it was a challenge on the forums. Without external impetus, I am so not doing any challenge runs outside of my OCD when it comes to limited resources in games. More like the opposite, I will go out of my way to break the game in every way possible.  

On 10/4/2024 at 2:45 AM, Bartimaeus said:

I never found even one weapon that I liked in Dark Souls 2, so I ended up using the Lost Sinner's Sword for most of the game. It comes with this lovely unique ability where it slowly kills you as you use it, which I thought, if I'm going to be stuck using some crappy greatsword because I can't find even ONE weapon in this entire game with a good balance between speed, damage, and move set...well, at least the fact that my own weapon is literally killing my character feels thematically appropriate.

I did not like using the rapier, but it had several advantages that were too good to pass up. Next to the ridiculous damage output it also was good to use for the NPC and PVP invasions (since Dark Souls 2 requires external shenanigans to put into offline mode, I often did not bother doing it) because it could stunlock enemies until your stamina runs out. The Dark Souls 2 PVP meta seems to revolve around doing the silly rapier dance. You whip out your ice rapier, buff it with your buff of choice depending on your character build and then try to connect just once to stunlock them until you are out of stamina. Rinse and repeat until one side is dead.

On 10/4/2024 at 2:45 AM, Bartimaeus said:

Some of my fondest memories of Dark Souls were with the PVP - both being invaded and as an invader. Especially with some of the weirder places I got invaded, like in the Abyss right before Manus in the DLC. Impossible to see more than like ten feet, big area that you normally only explore once, and where the hell do invaders even spawn in this area? Ended up being some jerk dual-wielding electric Avelyns (the unique repeating crossbow) taking burst-fire potshots at me from in the dark, ended up murdering him with my trusty Great Scythe. I loved the Great Scythe in DS1.

Arguably the best weapon in the game, and one you can Fast-Havel with due to its low weight. Not so keen on the poise damage though. Great weapon to use on bosses though.

I tend to, what was it that Tolkien used to describe his dislike for allegory, cordially dislike PVP in games were anything but skill influences outcomes too much, and in the case of Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 game, their backstab vector placement and net code are just way too janky to make for fun combat. That is before factoring in that one might just play a build that is not too good in PVP and since there are not a whole lot of players left playing the games these days you might get invaded by the same player over and over again without having a real chance to fight back against their meta build, and you end up with one very unfun experience. 

Maybe Dark Souls 3's PVP is better, but somehow I doubt it, and I am not going to find out. It is just not fun for me, and the same was or is true for PVP in plenty of hot key based MMORPGs with global cooldowns and incredibly gear dependent PVP. Really enjoyed the arcade space shooter component of SWTOR though. I might have played a couple thousand matches.  

On 10/4/2024 at 2:45 AM, Bartimaeus said:

Yeah, some people like thinking about that sort of things and trying to connect dots, basically fan theorizing. The original theory for a long time was that Solaire is the disgraced son of war, who's on his rather inexplicable quest to "find the sun", whatever that actually means. Though it never directly plays into the plot, he interestingly happens to be the one who is summonable for challenging Gwyn if you use the Chaos Servant shortcut to prevent him from going hollow.

I don't get it, Solaire is clearly undead, and if he was Gwyn's firstborn and human, he would have been dead at least twenty times over. Frampt implies that it has been at least a thousand years since Gwyn linked the first flame, and his disavowal of his first born must have happened before that. If you help him fail his quest for the sun he loses faith ("Was it all a lie?" - why yes Solaire, that is the nature of religion, it is always a lie), which is why he can be summoned against Gwyn, whom he worshipped, and you need 25 faith to join the Warriors of Sunlight without jolly cooperation, so he's part of a rather faithful group, yes?

I'd argue it is also the reason why he can (almost) solo Gwyn even on NG+. 's laughable, out of all the things in the game, the one with a rather clear intent by the designers is the one the fandom argues over being something completely else?

On 10/4/2024 at 2:45 AM, Bartimaeus said:

Like I said, I never got super into either the story, lore, or characters of Dark Souls personally...I think it's because while I find a few of the characters charming enough and I don't mind some more indirect storytelling and world-building, the connections between the world and its characters and its story all feel way too loosey goosey for me, and it doesn't end up feeling quite like a properly constructed universe/world that I can really project my brain into.

Yeah, I understand that, it is the same for me. See, for instance, when you read A Game of Thrones, it becomes pretty clear that the mystery of who Jon's actual parents are was intentionally put in the novel. The novel also contains enough clues to answer it conclusively, or at least I thought so. The fandom did not agree, and they argued back and forth, at least until the TV show proved that the original theories were correct. 

The mimic with the occult club in the secret room in Anor Londo? That's an occult club. In a mimic. A mimic that most likely just hides amongst other treasure to eat whoever tries to open it. That's what mimics do. Eh. I repeat myself. 

On 10/4/2024 at 2:45 AM, Bartimaeus said:

But I have gotten into other things before, especially when I was younger, and even though Dark Souls doesn't fit that way into my brain, I think I can at least understand how it did for a younger generation of gamers experiencing something new and different that they clearly fell in love with.

Yeah, maybe. That's what I once called a younger gamer a "stupid uninformed neophyte" over, on a different forum, after saying they loved Halo so much because it was the first multiplayer shooter*, so clearly we have found something where I am the irrational hater more so than you are. Yay?   

*Historically obviously wrong on every account, but it was arguably the first instance of a very popular shooter that you could play online over a console at a time when the availability of fast and reliable internet connections skyrocketed, and very likely a gaming generation's first foray into multiplayer shooters. So, in a sense, well, I guess it is understandable. If one squints enough and accepts that in the same way that I can "accept" that people like time sensitive quests because immersion, or like looking for NPC because they have schedules and it is a full moon in the second month now, and they are on their yearly pilgrimage because immersion or people who think Bethesda makes good games because... ok no idea why, but clearly, they exist.  

[Malcador]

Grinding along in Rogue Trader, curiosity sure taught me, checking out random stuff because am conditioned by games to check every icon when surprise! Herald of Tzeentch spawned.   Getting too old, this combat is tiring me out.