I figured I'd make an /e/ equivalent of that great, big /beat/ thread.
Recently I have been slogging away on XCOM: Enemy Within with the Long War mod. Humanity is doomed as I'm simply incapable of holding back the torrent of battleships the aliens keep hurling at me.
I've picked it up myself, and looking at the other games I've picked out as this summer's steam sale haul, there's something of a theme.
I've been meaning to get WRATH for absolutely yonks. It was one of the very early ones to come along when they started doing all these boomer shooter revival cash ins, but it stands out for using the actual OG Quake engine, and not just low-poly assets in modern Unity or Unreal.
I played the demo and thought it's a bit much. I feel like some of these retro shooters go far more over-the-top than they need to, and besides I am usually more into the dark and moody aesthetic than the neon look (even though I love cyberpunk in general, the genre and the game.)
In that regard Echo Point Nova was a bit of a punt, because it has a couple of things that might not be my cup of tea, but I haven't seen another game have such a near unanimously positive reception like that since Helldivers.
>>26892 >>26893 Well, I played for 50 minutes. While the atmosphere is very interesting both visually and audibly, the variety of concept designs seem to mesh poorly and the writing doesn't inspire.
Within the tutorial section you meet servitor like floating skull mechanations and a torture chamber encased creature that tells you how agony sharpens their reason while profusely bleeding chunks of bodily matter. Then there's a whole host of mystical mushrooms, etheral flying dragons and a pirate woman who flies off on a wooden ship. It's .. unusual.
I'm not particularly enthused to play again but I'll give it another go in the week. I'm hoping I can detatch myself of expectations and simply play the game as it is.
There's also this weird toggleable 'shaking pixels' option that joggles elements around - I can remember something like this from my earlier years but this recreation is way too much.
>There's also this weird toggleable 'shaking pixels' option that joggles elements around - I can remember something like this from my earlier years but this recreation is way too much.
It's seemingly part of the current nostalgia wave. When I was a late teen to early 20s-lad, retro 16bit pixel games were all the rage, because that was the nostalgia thing. The kind of games I am only just barely old enough to remember playing (I think the very first videogame I ever played was Lion King on Windows 95), but can't really had a claim to have been part of that generation. Likewise the kids these days remember PS1 era graphics the same way, so a lot of these retro games nowadays exaggerate the style. It's how they remember it, not how it actually was.
Can't really fault them for it I suppose, but it's going to get weird in another 5-10 years when it's the PS2/Dreamcast era's turn.
It's as multiplayer as you want, you can solo it, play it with mates, or random it and usually be welcome. You are one of four classes, all of which are useful if you know how to play them.
Scout: take out far enemies, mine the things out of reach
Digger: Commit war crimes and make a path to the Morkite
Gunner: Pew Pew, and make this passable
Engineer: Make platforms, place turrets
You choose your own archetype, and then choose if you want to solo, friends only. or drop into an open game.
Even playing solo is fun, drinking a Leaf Lover and trying a few of the stronger brews. It's as solo or friendly as you want it to be. And all bullshit is in game earned, once bought no nothing.
To reignite the Donkey Kong conversation, I played three hours of Bananza yesterday, and will play more today.
It's Mario Odyssey 2. Pretty much identical in structure, only the levels are a bit more complex, and the gimmick is voxel terrain deformation instead of object and NPC possession. It's really good and fun. It just seems like they started work on an Odyssey 2 where you travel to the Earth's core instead of across its countries, and just rebadged it with Donkey Kong. If you like Mario Odyssey you'll probably like this. Doesn't feel very Donkey Kong though. Still very very fun. I think they tried to make this monkey look seductive but she looks like the cartoon version of Egon Spengler.
I'm trying to refund FutaDomWorld. I wanted an erotic femdom based game, but all the femdom games on Steam look garbage. FutaDomWorld has futa femdom, and the reviews say it's genuinely well written so I tried it.
The central premise is that futas started appearing on Earth, swallowing their cum too much binds you to that specific futa, and once bound you and all your assets are their property. So you have to find a suitable futa to bind yourself to, by levelling up stats, and not getting raped into being bound to a
ne'er-do-well futa. If your mental stat goes below 0 it ends I think. Being raped reduces your mental stats more than consensual sex.
I think it would be better if it was the same premise but without futas. Like being bound to a vagina having woman from her bodily fluids. The huge cocks really prevent me from immersing myself in the world.
It's been in early access for over 10 years, and they seem to be constantly adding to it. So I imagine it gets really deep in terms of narratives about being mindcontrolled by futa semen.
I found my 20 hours of Donkey Kong Bananza a more compelling gameplay experience, but my 18 minutes of FutaDomWorld really opened my eyes to just what a futa based game can be.
The thing I can't get into about anything futa/herm/genderbendy in general is that it's trying to have the best of both worlds, it's trying to have its cake and eat it, it's trying to run on both tracks; but ultimately that squanders the vast majority of appeal most kinks had in the first place.
A huge number of fetishes have some kind of basis in the gender dynamic between male and female, and you spoil that if you want to have a character that's both male and female. That dynamic can no longer be there. A futa character in any sexual fetish dynamic is just a sexual Mary Sue with all the strengths and none of the weaknesses of both genders. There's no tension, there's no foil.
I've stopped accepting invitations to typefuck from purple names.
>>26906 In FutaDomWorld the futas are like IRL men, and the men are like IRL women. Men are passed around like toys, or treated as trophies. There are misandrist attitudes where a futa says something like "hey babe fancy a seat on my cock" to the male player character, like how IRL misogynist men would say that to a woman. There's also an element of chivalry in the FutaDomWorld - some futas will come to the defence of a weak man.
Maybe I'll cancel the refund, it could actually be a brilliant piece of fisherperson art.
Though again, if it was a game set in a matriarchy of actual women, and had similar themes, it would be better as there'd be less anal rape involved.
I would recommend Lies of P. It is like Bloodborne, but instead of it being werewolves and cosmic horrors, it's mechanical puppets and plague mutants and also you're Pinocchio. It has all the mechanics one would expect from a FromSoft game, an almost shameless apeing of their games, but is done so well I find it better than Bloodborne.
One key thing is it added difficulty options recently. So at the start there's Original, Easy, and Easier. I'm playing on Easy, and the game still sometimes frustrates and challenges.
This guy is like a cross between Dark Souls' Stray Demon, and Dark Souls 3's Saint of the Deep Devouring. Incredibly unoriginal, but presented in such a cool and fun way that you can forgive that.
It is still the most positive co-op game without a clique to play with, no matter what Haz.2 or more and you get some call outs based on classs, But it's all in good fun.
1k sscout, shout for light while I get Nitra and you can throw youir own flare.
>>26921 Look at these dudes. I cant take Dwarf people seriously, but I love dwarf concepts and themes. What're they like, engineering, geologist metalheads? I bet they don't travel to the 'con in their gear.
The Light Brigade is a VR game that I was eyeing up a year or so back, when I first got my headset, but ended up getting sucked into my 3 month long odyssey of Skyrim VR instead; but it's one I really should have tried earlier on.
It's got a very interesting aesthetic, where it's sort of like if you mashed PS1 Medal of Honour with a bit of a christianity themed Dark Souls flavour. You know, you're somehow in some kind of WW2 heavily christian themed purgatory or something and bla bla bla souls souls souls you know the drill; but it feels very sombre and atmospheric. And for some reason I really love stylised low-fi graphics in VR. It somehow always feels much more authentic than any game which strives for realism. The game is hard, but just the right kind of hard- You feel like you are up against steep odds but like a real soldier would, desperately covering and blind firing and chucking grenades around corners. The weapons are realistic, and that's part of the difficulty, but it's not your boring selection of typical modern military. It's those nerdy ones like the Gewehr 43 or M3 or C96 Type-14 you only know because you spent so much time watching WW2 documentaries. You have to know your clipper strips from your magazines, but it's all in service of the immersion, not just gun nut boner polishing.
The problem with VR is that it's hard to find games that really satisfy once you've played the really big hitters like Alyx and Skyrim and... Alyx, and Skyrim. It's one of those things where you look through the titles available, and a lot of the good ones have their potential spoiled, because they all follow some daft market trend that's just inexplicable but they all follow because it's what the dumbfuck 12 year olds on Quest store are buying. So you'll end up with a handful of simple but well executed games, and play those over and over. For me, that's Compound, Pistol Whip, Iron Rebellion, Alyx, Skyrim, and now I am pretty sure, this will be one of them.
(Until You Fall gets an honourable mention because it's really very good at what it does, but it relies far, far too much on that roguelike "you WILL die a lot" thing, and it's ultimately very short- You will just take forever to get the lucky run where you finish.)
(I played about an hour of Wrath: Aeon of Ruin and that's nice. Good solid game by the looks. I'll need to wait for my mood to come around to it though.)
>>26922 It's neither of those, it's what you make of it. Four classes, Scout has a grappling hook and provides light, decent single target damaga but no crowd control. Engineer can built turrets, good for point control, but also makes platforms for usually the scout to mine minerals. Driller can obviously tunnel through the environment but also has very good crowd control. Gunner has a lot of fire power but can also place ziplines that anyone can zip up or down on, also a shield which is vital for revives.
In short, scout makes light and takes out unique (usually ranged) enemies and can reach places others can't. Engineer does good single target damage, is vital for access to minerals via platforms, and builts turrets providing passive damage. Driller has great aoe damage, and the game is based around mining so their ability to drill through terrain is vital. Gunner guns and unlike scout provides mobility to other players. Along with massive damage output.
Ok, that was not short. In terms of FPS it has the friendliest community. If you're tired of sweaty lobbies and "banter" not in good spirit, this one is nice. Players tend to help players, everyone chips in. At haz4 or haz5 (or lethal) it's not an easy game, but around haz2 tor haz3 it's a lovely time to relax with some fps while listenting to a podcast. Choose your class, do your duty, bob's your uncle.
The quest types vary between single player friendly (eggs and arquarqs, Bosco (a bot you get in single player) can get them), but since it's all coop it can be fun to play them all.
Scout is probably the easiest class to pick up, Driller is it's equal. Engineer has specific uses, Gunner has the hardest time getting into place but the damage they put out makes up for it.
>>26947 >announce release date of massively anticipated game
>don't allow pre-orders
>massively anticipated game releases and is able to be purchased
>server crashes for (at this point 1hr43)
Masterstroke from Team Cherry.
>>26948 This lack of preorders leading to a server crash does make me think there has been an active attempt to build up an unrealistically high level of hype. There is literally no reason for them to not open preorders when the release date was finalised.
I wasn't a huge fan of Hollow Knight, but might buy Silksong because the movement looks more fun. My main beef with the games is the hideous art style.
>>26947 I was hoping that the release on Silksong would lead to steep discounts everywhere but I can't tell - Alien Isolation is going cheap anyway.
Yes, I had to stop because I'm now tempted to buy my first idler 'Spirit City: Lofi Sessions' to see if I can genuinely gamify productivity. The concept seems to be borrowing from that lofi study girl youtube channel but you can build out additional tools to help you study like task lists, study timers, ambient noise and you earn achievements as you go. This'll teach me for browsing the steam catalogue.
>>26949 >There is literally no reason for them to not open preorders when the release date was finalised.
Before today I think everyone joked that preorders for digital games made no sense at all and it's often abused to ship out terrible games before the reviews hit. You would think Steam would be able to handle a surge of orders - presumably they have a lot of experiance at managing hyped releases.
I, for one, will be buying Silksong once Gaben lets me. I'd had Hollow Knight on my PC for ages and never thought to play it until the pandemic hit but the game got me through a long period of being under lockdown with mountains of work to do just because there's something about the level design that makes it great for picking up and playing a quick adventure. A doctor mate had a similar attachment to RDR2 for the same reason.
>>26948 More than 500k concurrent despite the teething difficulties is pretty respectable, according to Steam Charts it's currently 3rd, after Counter Strike and DotA. There's certainly been a good amount of hype via silkposting, but I wouldn't call it "incredibly" artificial. If the drop continues and doesn't recover, then I'd agree that at least some people got swept up in the excitement with no idea what the game entails.
>>26952 I eventually got it on GOG and 7h30m of play time later it's exactly what I expected and I couldn't be happier.
All that would tell us is that the hype did its job, it wouldn't indicate anything about how organic it was. I have no doubt a lot of people were looking forward to it, I just get a feeling that they put practically the same budget into astroturfing gaming sub-rudgwicks as they did into making the game itself.
I also predict it will be wildly popular for a while, but won't be hailed as a masterpiece. Within a month the hipsters will have found which bits they are going to deem forever to be its critical flaws that let it down compared to the first game. Exactly like how all the Soulsbourne fanboy video essayists suddenly decided hard bosses are a bad thing as soon as they noticed Elden Ring was the most popular thing since sliced cocaine.
>>26950 I didn't want to create a waifu but the target audience seems to be young girls and programmers so my design of a stern dude that it's also working has gone wrong. Fortunately I'm still JUST in the refund window and I'm on the fence on getting it refunded.
It's an interesting concept though. I don't really need lofi playlists, ambient sounds or a built-in browser for youtube nor do I need 'cute' characters but the basic of an idler that provides a UI to a task list with timers and 'habits' (regular tasks on a given day) seems like a step up from using Google Calendar and a sticky note. It also has a journal feature with suggested questions and free-writing if you want to build out introspection.
I've always liked Borderlands on a fundamental level, it understands that what you want from a looter shooter is a looter shooter. So in that respect, I like Borderlands 4, it's a good game- Particularly now that they've taken it properly open world, with a lot of evident influence from Far Cry, Elden Ring, Breath of the Wild style games. Exploration actually feels fun and organic, which takes some skill on the part of the developers. There a lot of fun little dungeons and challenges to discover. It just feels weird that it took them so long to make this shift.
The performance is the big elephant in the room here, though. I am on a 5800X3D with a 6800XT, and at "high" across all settings, 2560x1080 res, I get about 45-50FPS. I either have to turn frame generation or upscaling on to get above 75FPS (my monitor's refresh rate is 75hz). Turning down to medium alleviates it somewhat, but the game does noticeably look worse at low and medium settings.
It's UE5, which shouldn't be a problem on its own. There are some UE5 games that run very well, such as Remnant 2. But even the ones that run quite poorly, such as Oblivion Remastered and Stalker 2, in general look absolutely blow your bollocks off incredible, so you feel like the performance is justified with those games, you get the sense it really is pushing your hardware. If that were the case here, you could excuse it; but this game looks mediocre at best. In fact in places, it looks really fucking bad.
The art direction used to be Borderland'ses visual strength, but it feels like it was an obstruction here. It has fancy lighting and super accurate shadows but the textures are a mess. Distant terrain is just flat colours like it hasn't loaded in properly. It's far too cluttered, and actually hard to parse what the clashing mess of colour is at times.
Don't know what's going on in the story nor do I give a fuck, so sorry, nothing to say about that. I'm playing as the goth chick because she reminds me of all my exes, and like them, she's not particularly likeable personality wise. I did laugh at a few incidental voice lines, though, so they have straightened out the terrible meme humour a bit, thankfully.
>>26955 I've decided to keep it and I'm getting a fair amount of use from the journal. Which is surprising as all it does is provide some prompts to answer in the heading but then afterwards I run it through an LLM to call me out on my shit and to discuss with myself how I'm feeling.
I'll let you all know if I start wearing programmer socks.
You can try to defend UE5 but the performance cost, to me, is an absolute joke and you can't opt out of it. It's a fat tumour on modern gaming. It actively worsens the everyday experience and holds you hostage until you shell out £500 on a GPU. I don't want to do that for a couple of games.
Thing is it's not the engine itself, the engine is perfectly capable of running smoothly when utilised by developers who care enough to optimise. They just don't bother, because they can just slap DLSS and FSR and frame gen and all that bollocks on, and call it a day.
There's nothing new about poorly-optimised games with terrible performance on average machines - I remember when "Does it run Crysis?" was a serious enquiry, not a meme. Loads of UE5 games run really well on low-end systems. If you're conspiratorially-minded, you might want to look into the funding that GPU manufacturers provide to game studios.
Crysis wasn't poorly optimised, it was legitimately leagues ahead of the competition. I remember it too, I tried the demo on my Athlon 64 PC, which I believe had a 256mb GeForce 7600GT. It ran, but only just barely. I was working my first proper job around that time and saved up, ended up building a new PC with a 9800GTS and the then-new Phenom quad core. That machine was laughably out of date within a couple of years too, and struggled with Skyrim.
We have gained on one hand, that PCs now last considerably longer. This current PC is pushing for 5 years old now, and I'm complaining that it only just barely runs this year's most demanding games at 75+ FPS. Back in those days, that was absolutely preposterous. Just try running Doom 3, in 2004, on a PC you built in 1999 with a TNT2 in it.
But I digress. We are still in the graphical era of Crysis. That game still holds up. It's the first game of what I would consider modern gaming. Our PCs are 1000% more powerful, but our graphics are only about 50% better than they were then, if that.
>If you're conspiratorially-minded, you might want to look into the funding that GPU manufacturers provide to game studios.
I am very conspiratorially minded, but I don't think that's likely, Nvidia practically sees its gaming customers as a side-hustle at this point. The majority of their income is AI and rendering workloads, so bribing game developers is barely worth their time. What I think is going on is simply that the higher ups in these companies don't want to waste a dollar more/second longer than they have to on polishing a game, so as soon as they see a working build that gets over 60FPS with DLSS and all that shite turned on, they say "that's it, ship it, we have shareholders to think about".
I was saying it as soon as I saw DLSS and frame generation come out, for about five minutes I thought oh that's cool, so older hardware can play stuff for longer. But then the penny dropped that oh wait, this will just mean system requirements go up and they expect us to rely on these features as the new normal. And I was right.
Nvidia and AMD definitely bribe game studios, that's not in any doubt - whether a title performs better on Geforce or Radeon is mainly a question of which company provided "technical assistance". The conspiratorial part is whether that financial and technical support induces studios to target current-gen hardware at the expense of gamers on older machines. The GPU manufacturers do at least have entire departments dedicated to helping and encouraging game and engine developers to implement new features like DLSS, FSR or raytracing.
Yeah, that's my point, I just assumed that's what we were both talking about.
They pay to have the games run a bit better on their brand via driver level optimisations, they pay to have their logo on the splash screen, but I see it as unlikely they are bribing studios to induce a kind of planned obsolescence in order to push people to buy newer GPUs. A game studio would need a pretty massive bribe to risk alienating the huge chunk of gamers on older hardware, so the studio's financial incentive is still to target the "average" midrange machine, and I don't think they'd take that money over the potential lost sales on launch.
That's just my general logic with conspiracies like this anyway, if it makes sense as a business strategy, albeit underhanded one, I am quite often willing to believe it. For instance I do believe the one about how file sizes keep getting bigger in order to make you more likely to keep their game installed and playing it, over other competitors. But in this instance it doesn't seem like there's enough incentive to bother, when devs are already willing to do it for them out of laziness/saving money.
Just finished Castle Dimitrescu in my first playthrough of Resident Evil Village since 2021. It's been so long since I last played that I do still get jumpscared occasionally.
It's a real shame Lady Dimitrescu's final form is a horrible dragon. If I were Capcom, I'd have her mutate into a 20ft tall version of herself, with bigger veinier tits and a more exaggerated hourglass figure. And in getting that big all her clothes rip and you can see her bush. But I'm not Capcom.
Still, it's a 10/10 game, and it saddens me that RE Requiem looks to be very serious and more focused on actual genuine horror. The giant woman in Requiem isn't even remotely fuckable.
>>26954 It's a single player game, of course it'll drop. Will it be as acclaimed as HK? Who knows, it's roots as DLC certainly show and the audience may have shrunk. It's telling that Team Cherry said HK made enough they didn't have to rush Skong, I don't much care for the arena gates Double Moss Mother but the bosses and optional bosses are first class. Alternate route design as well, First Judge is optional if you beat Phantom, Fleas, unlkike grubs, let you skip a boss.
It's only downside is that it's roots as DLC show. The game doesn't ease you in, it skill gates you early and the currency, which is uneeded when not available, feels like another gate while the currency that matters feels useless until a little bit later. You have to go in with the mindset that it'll be parkour, boss mechanics, and marking or noting down places that look interesting. Places you can't quite reach because you haven't gained the grapple, double jump, dash, whatever are well telegraphed. And many of the grapple points are arena/boss rooms.
It's not for everyone. It's perfectly fine to watch lore videos and experience it that way. There are mods to make it slightly less punishing by removing double/triple damage or removing boss runs. If that's what's stopping you, use them. No one even knows how you "beat" the game, no one cares except meme trolls.
Playing this game you can feel the love and care (to a fault) that was put into the world, the characters, and the story telling with both simple emotional movements and quite skillful overarching story hints. If it's not obvious: I like this game. I never beat The Radiance or P5, those reached the "I know how to, I just can't" level of precision. Silksong isn't there yet, I'll keep bashing my head against the optional bosses.
I have dropped the goth lass and started playing as this chap, because I found out that for only £8.99 he can have a cool long coat too. He is much more likeable, but that would count for nothing if I had to make do with his rubbish default outfit.
It might seem trivial, but these are the kinds of thing that really matter in a game, if I am being truly honest. This has bumped my review score from a 6 verging on 7/10, to a comfortable 8/10.
I think he took a massive publicity hit when he pulled some kind of backstabbing stunt to get Vinny (of Vinesauce fame) cancelled for sexually having sex at a girl.
>>26971 I had to look up whatever that was and the first thing I learnt was that it happened in 2021, so I don't think that has anything to do with his current non-hiatus.
Also I posted a link to a blog that explains things ten minutes before your post.
>>26973 I'm so happy everytime I find out a new Banban stream is out. But then it's such a strange thing too, because it's not something anyone else I know, or will ever know, will have watched, and I can't exactly tell people to watch four to eight hour long VODs of a man playing a video game he doesn't even like. It's just something that happens every few months, like an extraterrestrial visitation.
