What are you Playing Now? - Video games are bad for you? That's what they said about rock-n-roll

[Wormerine]

17 hours ago, Hurlshort said:

I decided it was time to set aside my Battle Brothers play through and get ready for Avowed. So I re-upped my Gamepass account for $11.99. Then I splurged on the $25 pre-order so I can play it in a few days. It was still a lot cheaper that the $70-90 on Steam.

But now that I have the Gamepass, I'm thinking I might give Indy a try. I downloaded the massive game overnight, so we'll see if I have any time to play it before Avowed drops.

Oh, I didn't know that you get discount on pre-order if you have Gamepass. Still, I am happy to wait those couple extra days. I don't think I will struggle avoiding spoilers. I will save those $25 to get the game later, on a proper platform once it gets discounted later down the line (assuming of course, that I want to play it ever again... finger's crossed).

 

12 hours ago, Serrano said:

I noticed that there are Critical Role portraits and voicepacks, I wonder if the popularity of shows like that and LA by Night had anything to do with Obsidian going so heavily for that pen & paper vibe with all the skill checks and little details like everyone reacting to you being a godlike.
(...)

I've made it to Neketaka and I'm overwhelmed and intimidated by the size of the city, let alone the rest of the game. I have a list of all the companions and sidekicks and where to recruit them, so I'm just ticking those off initially, so far they all seem like an interesting bunch. Did Obsidian say why they reduced the party size to 5? I'd guess it's because it's easier to balance the roleplaying side of things but for combat it's a bit like losing a limb.

You might have noticed that Critical Role joined Mercer in the sequel - companions are mostly voiced by CR cast, and they got some other major roles (Eothas, narrator, Imps). It was definitely a marketing thing as well, though it didn't seem to help them much considering how much Deadfire underperformed initially.

Eh, Obsidian has always drawn heavily from P&P, and both PoEs used story adventure sequences to expand scenarios that the game could support. Personally, I still think the ones from White March are the most interesting ones, but Deadfire is good.

Neketaka is massive - it is a Hub you will be visiting and revisiting throughout the game, so my advice is to not spend too much time there are any given time. Do a major quest or two if you feel like it, gather quests and bounties and sail out. You can explore districts and all that they have to offer at your leisure, no need to try to complete it all in one go.

While initially jarring I think party of 5 is a good choice. You still have a lot of flexibility in how you build your party, and I didn't feel loosing the 6th member impacted negatively my enjoyment of the game. As someone who micromanages my parties, 5 was a very good sweet spot where everyone is actively working on accomplishing something.

[Malcador]

Almost done Kotor 2 again. Maybe I should cheat to get influence up with some characters I barely used, like...well everyone except Kreia and Atton in my playthroughs, really.   Probably should have gone LS this run, I think Kreia sounds less disappointed in you if you do, if I recall.

 

 

[Lexx]

Ok, so I've played some more Deadfire and finished the first island. Have to say that the TB combat does really feel so much better. Seems like it's the first time I'll actually try to place my dudes in a tactical manner.

[majestic]

16 minutes ago, Malcador said:

Almost done Kotor 2 again. Maybe I should cheat to get influence up with some characters I barely used, like...well everyone except Kreia and Atton in my playthroughs, really.   Probably should have gone LS this run, I think Kreia sounds less disappointed in you if you do, if I recall.

 

 

She at least doesn't give you a five minute verbal lashing about how much of a failure you are if you are light side. 's a pretty cool moment though. "You have failed me. Completely and utterly.", "To have the Jedi Masters brought low by such a failure, there is no victory in that. You have not heard a thing I have taught, and for all I have said, you have never learned to listen." and "Stay here and die, apprentice, among the wreckage of all that remains of the Jedi. It is a fitting grave until the Sith come to end you. To end everything."

[Hurlshort]

Ok, the Indiana Jones game is pretty dang good. Is this the rebirth of adventure games? I know there is some action, but really the best part is the puzzles and exploring.

It might be time to re-launch Dr. Brain.

[HoonDing]

It's likely restored content, but Kreia taking down each of your snowflake party members with one flick of a finger is prolly the greatest moment in all of Star Wars.

[Malcador]

2 hours ago, majestic said:

She at least doesn't give you a five minute verbal lashing about how much of a failure you are if you are light side. 's a pretty cool moment though. "You have failed me. Completely and utterly.", "To have the Jedi Masters brought low by such a failure, there is no victory in that. You have not heard a thing I have taught, and for all I have said, you have never learned to listen." and "Stay here and die, apprentice, among the wreckage of all that remains of the Jedi. It is a fitting grave until the Sith come to end you. To end everything."

Yeah, hearing that line now after graduating and 2 decades of working life certainly hits a bit different than it did the first time.    I didn't kill Vrook (who didn't mind me selling out the Administrator for 2k...) and Zez-Kai, and tried to be less blaming toward them.  But killed Kavar due to no choice, real shame I couldn't be real dark side and just kill Vaklu as well.

Maybe I'll reload a post-Peragus save and go LS from there, Hanharr sucks anyway.

[Tale]

Spider-Man 2 finally hit PC and it was worth the wait. Not as good as 1 and better than miles. Insomniac are doing a bang up job of transitioning comic book stuff to a cinematic medium. Better than Marvel is at the moment, anyway.

[LadyCrimson]

NMS - My cute new hermit crab pet is apparently the victim of a bug/glitch. After initially taming it, it takes up a pet slot but there is no info/stats for it in the list and it is not summonable.  Seems to be a known thing - hopefully they fix it. It was so cute, I want it back.

I have now seen tons of "purple" systems, several water worlds (still don't care about exploring their depths much), lots of gas giants, tried building my own Fighter ship (very limited feature, nothing interesting) etc. Which was fun, but now I'm back to have nothing to do besides admire vistas and maybe hunt for the perfect Sentinel ship (can't craft those).

There's two restrictions to gameplay that keep ppl like me from playing a lot longer, per return. The base-part building restriction per save and player-terrain changes limit  (there's a limit to number of terrain edits then it starts erasing older changes for newer ones). I know the premise is to keep moving/discovering new systems forever, but eventually all the planets/biomes are the same, so motivation to planet hop 100000000 times forever dwindles.

I think these restrictions are because NMS has Steam cloud saves, which is a hard save-size limit.  7 Days doesn't have/allow cloud saves for this reason. eg, Steam cloud saves for sandbox+building+mega exploring/mega-data etc. games sucks.

[Malcador]

Droid factory in KOTOR 2 should have been left out of that restoration mod, good grief what a tedious experience  

[Wormerine]

13 hours ago, Malcador said:

Droid factory in KOTOR 2 should have been left out of that restoration mod, good grief what a tedious experience  

Still not as bad as the "restored planet".

[kanisatha]

On 2/11/2025 at 11:36 AM, Hurlshort said:

Ok, the Indiana Jones game is pretty dang good. Is this the rebirth of adventure games? I know there is some action, but really the best part is the puzzles and exploring.

The reason I passed on this game as well was, again, the first-person combat. But is there a lot of combat in the game? Because if it is much more a puzzles and exploration game, then I should and would reconsider passing on it.

[Hurlshort]

2 hours ago, kanisatha said:

The reason I passed on this game as well was, again, the first-person combat. But is there a lot of combat in the game? Because if it is much more a puzzles and exploration game, then I should and would reconsider passing on it.

I haven't played a ton, but there is a super easy combat mode that you can set separate of the puzzles. So you can set the puzzles to regular or hard, but breeze through the stealth and combat stuff. So it might be worth a try.

[LadyCrimson]

3 hours ago, kanisatha said:

The reason I passed on this game as well was, again, the first-person combat. But is there a lot of combat in the game?

Only if you want there to be. Note I never story-finished the game but I did explore/move around the last big "open" section so I did get pretty far.
It's more of a stealth game in many cases and you can avoid or sneak-deal with enemies most of the time (not always but often). Or if you really want to, you can charge in or do something non-stealthy and attract a lot of enemies for chaos. It's up to you. Generally speaking trying to take on lots of enemies at once is often not a great idea, partly because of certain mechanics but also just spatial jank sometimes.

There's some "boss" fights of course.

Edited Thursday at 10:12 PM by LadyCrimson

[Hurlshort]

Avowed - It's fantastic. It looks great. The intro area is really well done. I just reached the first city.  

[MrBrown]

5 hours into Avowed. Seems good.

More linear than Skyrim, but still a bit open-worldy. Maybe Witcher 3 is a good comparison?

Feels like the PC has too much special stuff thrown at them. You're the king's envoy, but also some kind of special godlike. Just either one could have made an interesting story.

Only bug I've ran into so far is people's hair having that problem of springing down from default position when a new camera angle is loaded.

Edited yesterday at 06:46 AM by MrBrown

[BruceVC]

2 hours ago, MrBrown said:

5 hours into Avowed. Seems good.

More linear than Skyrim, but still a bit open-worldy. Maybe Witcher 3 is a good comparison?

Feels like the PC has too much special stuff thrown at them. Your the king's envoy, but also some kind of special godlike. Just either one could have made an interesting story.

Only bug I've ran into so far is people's hair having that problem of springing down from default position when a new camera angle is loaded.

Please provide a detailed review of this game as you progress similar to how you review other games

I really want this game to succeed and we  can assess sales numbers later because we wont know that now 

[Malcador]

Finished Kotor 2, got to see Atton die because I can't build good characters I guess.

[Humanoid]

So I haven't been following the development of Avowed at all. Is using stealth to ghost encounters actually a thing (like say, Dishonored) or is it just a mechanism to front-load damage when starting a fight (like say, WoW)?

[marelooke]

I promised a more comprehensive review once I completed my playthrough of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, and since I recently finished the game for the first time, siding with the Ward, here we go. Of note, it took me 191hours and when the credits rolled the game was on patch 1.1.4 (1.2 came out very recently)

To get this out of the way early: I still would not recommend this game to anyone who has not already played the previous entries, and even to those who have I'd wait for some major patches. At the rate patches are coming this game may be in somewhat of a finished state by the end of the year (well, I started writing this before 1.2 dropped, so some of these may end up finally being fixed...).

The first, and biggest issue is that the game is still a buggy mess. Early parts are mostly fine, but once past SIRCAA things started falling apart rapidly. For one there were regular CTDs, for another there's issues with NPC literally blocking your ability to enter areas. I quite literally had to rely on a  mod enabling the Unreal Engine console so I could noclip into the safe area in Pripyat because NPCs body-blocked me out for 90% of my time spent in Pripyat (from my arrival until the very final missions start).

Being a packrat I also managed to break my Stash: items started overlapping, sections appeared empty but weren't, etc. Looks like some sort of overflow issue. Thankfully it didn't actually seem to corrupt the contents, but it made using the thing a right pain.

Then there's the gameplay issues.

For starters, equipment maintenance and upgrading is prohibitively expensive. This expense has a rather negative impact on gameplay; for one you end up dragging everything you can back to a vendor, which gets old rather fast, for another getting into a fight is less of a "Oh no, I may die!" type of deal and more of a "Oh no, this may bankrupt me." One of the results is that I stuck to "known good" items rather than experimenting, and that I stuck to lower tier items rather than upgrading to the best gear available to me. Throughout the entire game I used four sets of armour, including the starting one, and the majority of the time I used the standard Ward armour. Only once I hit the "point of no return" I started using an Exoskeleton as upgrading/repairing them is just so ridiculously expensive.

Exacerbating this is the whole enemy spawning situation. Unlike in earlier games most enemies don't exist in the world and wander around (there's some now, since the first major patch 1.1), the vast majority gets spawned onto you by the game if it thinks you haven't been fighting enough recently. Additionally there are spawn triggers in the world that will (re)spawn enemies once you get too far from them (or too close to them), which in a lot of cases means you get to fight the same enemies multiple times while you're exploring an area. This is extremely aggravating when it concerns tougher/more annoying enemies, like Poltergeists ("I'm three floors up/down but still trying to murder you by throwing furniture at you"), Psuedogiants (aka "Bullet Sponge Prime"), or Burers ("Hope you like getting shot with your own gun") especially when you're trying to figure out some puzzle.

Not to mention that getting attacked at times or places when reasonably speaking you couldn't be is rather immersion breaking (eg. when going back outside right after an emission)

Then there's weapon balance, or what passes for it. The tl;dr is that choice of weapon quickly boils down to how common the ammo is, how much "penetration" it has, and how expensive it is to repair, aka cost per kill quickly becomes the defining characteristic given the repair costs. There's more here, like weapon balance being rather out of wack (one of the best guns in the game isn't a modern AR, those mostly suck, comparatively, but a variant of the AK...). What each weapon state, or upgrade does, is also very hard to measure and very badly explained.
Personally I never liked the upgrade system that got introduced in Clear Sky and Stalker 2 hasn't changed my opinion on it, rather the contrary.

The world also doesn't make a whole lot of sense, enemies barely carry ammunition, yet never run out, but there's so much common loot spread around the world that it's absolutely ridiculous. Additionally each time you go into a situation that seems like it'd be a tough one you get thrown so much stuff at you that preparing for anything is just a waste of time. The endgame missions are a prime example: in SoC you'd prepare by picking your favourite loadout, making sure you bring enough ammunition or healing items etc. etc. In Stalker 2 the endgame areas are full of stocker armouries and they toss a couple of some of the best armours in the game at you to boot.

Stashes are often intricate puzzles with more often than not extremely disappointing contents for how difficult they were to access. There's also the issue that some of them are literally impossible to get unless you picked a specific side for certain parts of the story.

Mutants are overused, quickly eroding any sense of fear they may have instilled otherwise. Meeting  your first Bloodsucker in SoC was a memorable experience. Alas, not quite the case in this entry.

The anomalies overall were great, I liked how they made them more interactive by having the bolt disable certain ones for a limited amount of time. I will say I strongly dislike the (new) "bog poppers" anomaly though (aka "the flashbang"...)

Story wise the game is good, that is, the overarching story, though it pretty much explains everything so I'm not quite sure how they're going to continue this franchise because there doesn't seem a whole lot of mystery left.

But the storytelling, I'm very much not as much of a fan. For one you're forced into joining a faction, there's no option to go at it alone at all. To make matters worse, neither option is particularly appealing and while I initially ended up with Spark as I tried to play "independent" I quickly flipped my allegiance to the Ward once I met

Spoiler

Scar, who is entirely unhinged

and realized it'd be a binary choice between Ward and Spark.

You're also forced into various dumb decisions, I mentioned being forced to kill friendly faction soldiers after having talked to a returning character that the PC doesn't know at al before. The game goes out of its way to not give you any other options, and even if you finagle it so you don't actually kill anyone, it still assumes you did. To me it seems as if this mission was written for Spark and just lazily recycled for the Ward because they ran out of time.

Another peeve of mine is the use of cinematics, which, while well done, absolutely take away your sense of agency, often forcing situations that I guess they couldn't figure out how to create in a more organic. In the same vein the game likes to cut off your way back by locking doors behind you during story missions, which feels kinda cheap and/or immersion breaking.

Another thing I personally wish they'd never bring back are the bossfights, they feel extremely out of place for the type of game Stalker used to be, and I can't say I enjoyed any of them as they're almost all bullet spongey gimmick fights. Hell, sometimes you literally drop into an "arena" that's so obviously an arena that you might get some Borderlands flashbacks.

All in all my conclusion is still that this is a game that tries to look and feel like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and initially succeeds, until you get further in and all the cracks start becoming apparent. It's a decent open world game, and may even become a good one once it's less of a buggy mess, but as a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel it's a frustrating experience as it's so easy to see how great this could have been. As it stands  it's not clear to me whether the game is even fixable as some of the limitations may just be due to the engine choice (eg. night vision is apparently hard(er) to do with RT, and well, fancy graphics were more important, apparently. Similarly draw distance may be a console or UE5 limitation).

Once they start making structural fixes to the game (spawning, night vision, etc.) I may revisit it, but as it stands one playthrough was quite enough.

Earlier I gave this game a 6/10 and I stand by that.

Edited 11 minutes ago by marelooke