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'm going to figure out this French chimera of a game if it kills me, but just as an example of what I'm dealing with; same "DNA Profile", different stats, no explaination. Wat.
The game does a dozen different things that wouldn't be too confusing on their own, but put together are so disorientating. For instance, there are 20+ tutorial videos, which is a bit rubbish, but whatever, but then trying to watch them with the intense, ambient drone rock that makes up the soundtrack is a bit too much. Then everyone talks to you like a N64 character for good measure.
>>22742 Brilliant game but it's basically what happens when you trap a bunch of French veteran modders in a room with too much speed. They based the game off a tabletop RPG system that doesn't exist.
It's absolutely fucking mental and the game struggles to tell you anything. You can hack into everything: enemies, yourself, co-op partners. You can go insane and start halucinating enemies and it'll stop you using your weapons. You can teleport inside enemies and make them explode. You can have 64 players on a mission.
The story is insane, the translation is so bad I thought a dialog option with a random npc was a joke but it ended up adding in optional levels and changing the endgame drastically.
Going off my crap memory one of genes is simply better than the others so you just use it for all three slots; can't remember if it's because one of the stats it is weak on is pointless or if you have a reasonable chance of a roll that'll give you really high stats.
>>22762 I'm a bit more on the fence if I'm honest.
I don't especially care about the setting. I really enjoyed the Souls games' weird, very foreign take on Western fantasy tropes (and Bloodborne's Victorian occult/celestial horror stuff), with this I feel like I'm lacking a bunch of cultural context or something as it isn't getting into my head in the same way. I just don't find the world as compelling.
I also really liked the deliberate pace of the action in earlier games. After Bloodborne and DS3, the writing was on the wall about which direction they were taking the design, but this is a pretty substantial break and accelerates the trend towards the classic 3D brawler, fast-paced and aggressive. I never really got on with those games.
These grumbles aside I'm still tearing into it, so it must be doing something right.
>>22762 >>22763 I'm not enjoying it. Out of all the Souls series and Bloodborne, it's my least favourite. When I play it all I can think of is that I'd rather be playing Dark Souls II.
>>22764 It certainly plays different from your average souls game and certainly isn't everyone's cup of tea. The world does feel a bit more open after a few bosses and doesn't feel so linear like DS2 and DS3 ended up being.
I'm enjoying the setting too, I've always been one for the Sengoku period and Japanese folklore so it's nice fighting Onis under Shinto gates, etc
Game certainly doesn't hold your hand like other soulsborne games either. I do think there is some artifical difficulty involved and you'll end up dying a few times to figure out a boss or area.
>>22765 Have you tried Nioh? It's very much like a Souls game, and it's set in the Sengoku period, featuring real historical figures as NPCs/bosses. It's probably the best Souls rip off, and I enjoyed it more than I'm enjoying Sekiro.
Wasting time on UT2004 again.
The CTF goes all over the place. After about 2 hours of it I can't really say if I still consider it inferior to UT99's CTF. It's just different somehow and actually not in a bad way.
Bombing Run is very tense on some maps. BR_Serenity has that hot middle where each team occasionally pushes into the enemy territory then the attack subsides under the dense fire from the defenders. Contrast this with the skyscrapers map - 30:0 easily.
1v1 DM pisses me off at times.
UT2004 is my favourite nostalgia game. I was 13/14 or so at the time it was out, but I remember playing a lot of Invasion mode on a server full of Scottish lads who took the piss out of me because my voice was breaking.
I really miss "server culture" like you used to get on old school shooters. You simply don't get that these days when everything is out of the player's hands, peer-to-peer and such like.
>>22765 >I do think there is some artifical difficulty involved and you'll end up dying a few times to figure out a boss or area.
Yeah, exactly.
Like most people, I had a standard approach in the Souls games, for bosses and new enemies: circle and analyse. Take a few hits, observe the pattern, shield up if you've got one - learn.
Try to do that in Sekiro and you'll get slapped down in seconds. You've got so little health that usually any enemy will kill you in a couple of hits, and several bosses I've encountered can knock you out in one. Sometimes you have to spend a minute or two stealth-murdering other enemies beforehand; having to do that all again, multiple times, does start to feel tedious. Even when the idol is right next to the boss (which, to From's credit, is mercifully regularly), it's dispiriting that I get so little time to learn before being wiped out. The combat is so fast and specific in its demands that it feels like trial and error.
This may just mean that I'm shit at the game, I don't know. Generally I don't mind difficult games, but there's a point where a game starts to feel like it's being awkward just for the sake of it, and Sekiro has strayed in there at times. Still can't stop playing it, though, so it's doing something right I guess.
>>22769 I kind of disagree, the boss runs in DS3 are down right pleasant unlike Sekiro. It does distill that try-fail-try-again loop very effectively, though. Like a rythm game, it wants you to "git gud" and learn the bosses, you cannot just grind out the soulsXP and outlevel the bosses to whittle them down. This really deepens the distinction between normal mobs and bosses, though. Sure, if you dive in head first into a group of mobs without a plan, you'll get slaughtered classic From style, but the difference between "one poiseposture break and done" moogs and 2+ stab (mini) bosses is feels much greater than previous games.
I share the concern about the theme. I like the sort of Lone Wolf and Cub/Kenshin/"period drama" style setting, but it lacks the extraordinarily fantastical setting of the DS games. It's good, but not extraordinary in the same way.
>>22770 I think I agree with most of that. It's the same loop, yeah, but this one is definitely accelerated by the significantly lower health. At least, I am dying way faster and more often on bosses. I'm now stuck at Genichiro Ashina, and he's a great example of what we're talking about - the only way to beat him seems to be to attack constantly and just rote learn when to dodge or roll away. The previous games made me feel like I was being taught, here I feel like I'm being told. That's alright, but it's not as fun.
Apparently, you can go away and grind to acquire a particular unblockable sword skill, which makes the fight substantially easier, but I'm many levels away from that, so I'll be doing it the hard way I guess.
>>22771 I was sad to learn that mini-bosses can't fall of cliffs and even when I physically push them off with my flame cannon, their deaths don't count.
At least in dark souls they let you cheese some stuff like this. (Tauros demon, dragonrider, the old swordman at firelink, etc)
>>22768 Today I've suddenly found out that there is a bloody camera on the translocator module. I can't tell if I've never known that or simply forgotten.
Made obtaining the Redeemer on BR_BridgeOfFate way easier, also saved my arse from blindly running into a big fight a few times. This particular map is tonnes of fun too although lots of easy frags when the fight is hot on the middle bridge - just make the projectiles rain and call it a day.
I posted a while ago about some of the older Total War games updating to include all their DLC. It was mostly unit packs so I wasn't too bothered, but I decided to check out Napoleon's Penisular campaign and it's realy good fun. I thought it'd be the regular capaign only on a different map, but because it's the same amount of provinces with fewer resources, you actually end up conquering differently. Agents feel more important because of the pro or anti-French sentiment you have to manage, and it's far harder, at least so far, to reach the tipping point that occurs in the main campaign where you become on unstoppable wrecking ball, mostly because there's always something slipping past your big armies to raid something. As the British you can also recruit local Portugese and Spanish forces, which I like to see because it really diversifies what your army can do, and what it looks like (that sounds minor but endless rows of redcoats and the same two cavalry units can get very boring, very fast). And I haven't encountered any perfectly flat areas of the map yet, which is a major bugbear of mine about the main campaign, as all of Southern Italy and the British isles are perfectly flat for some reason.
The main problem is that the campaign AI still sucks, and the Portugese and Spanish allies themselves don't do much of anything, and will sometimes actively impede you by sitting on a brige and forcing you to go around the entire river. I've also seen a couple of French doomstacks just wander by my armies like pillaging a farmstead was more important.
Thank you for reading my review of a eight year old DLC, please give it a like and check out my Patreon linked down below.
Napoleon is my favourite Total War of the lot, I reckon, and I say that even as a lifelong Warhammer nut. I'm not sure if that's because it was actually good, or if it was just the last one before the series itself went to shit, but I have a massive soft spot for it.
It suffers from some similar problems to Shogun 2 where the factions feel too similar (ooh, these foot regiments have an accuracy stat of 85 rather than 80, good grief. How unique) but ironically I think it was a type of warfare and an era that suited the engine and the turn based strategic overview best. I enjoyed how it was more manoeuvre based than just charging your rock/paper/scissors blobs of guys at each other.
I did hate some of the quirks, like how the AI would sometimes just sneak something like a single unit of foot on its own past your armies and you'd end up with this annoying little army just walking around teabagging all your farms and universities at the furthest corner of the map. But at least it didn't quite so blatantly cheat to appear challenging, like it has to in the recent ones.
"Baba Is You". It's a neat little puzzle game. In a Sokoban style playing field, there are items and a few kinds of "rule" blocks. These consist of nouns, verbs and attributes and can be arranged to change how the game behaves. The aim of the game is to get the noun that is "YOU" to be on the field that is "WIN".
Screenshot is a (badly stitched together, mea culpa) tutorial level. The "Baba is you" near the bottom left means that Baba, the white rabbit character, is currently you, the player. The other existing chain "Wall is stop" means walls stop things (including the player). Use the rabbit to punt any of the words from "Wall is stop" out of alignment and the rule no longer applies, i.e. "wall" is no longer "stop". From there, you can assemble "Flag is win" and hop onto the flag for a simple solution. If you're feeling a bit more whimsical, though, you could arrange it as "Wall is you" and "Baba is win" and then move the wall onto the rabbit. Or declare that "Wall is flag" to turn every wall tile into a flag, then declare "Flag is win" and take your pick. I hope you get the idea.
The only contraint is that something must always be "you". You don't lose immediately if nothing is you, but you can take no further action unless something else re-assembles an "X is you". It's quick to reset the maps and you can rewind as many steps as you want at any time, even after "death".
>>22771 After 60 hours or so played it's hard to argue I don't enjoy the game, but your sentiment of
> The previous games made me feel like I was being taught, here I feel like I'm being told. That's alright, but it's not as fun.
hits the nail on its head. I've reached the final boss of the Immortal Severance ending and I think I might drop it here. I enjoyed the non-boss content of the game right to the end but for the most part the bosses were challenging not (just) because they are difficult but because fighting them quickly became tedious. The boss I'm on right now for example has a phase one which, after a few tries, is just a tedious chore and delayed attacks after telegraphing, quite reminiscent of DS3's Nameless King.
A minor correction here from my earlier comment, by the way: "proper" boss runs are universally short, mini-boss runs on the other hand range from fine to dreadful. They often involve clearing the arena before it's safe to engage and, of course, if you fail then it's time to do it again, stupid!1Juzou the Drunkard and Seven Ashina Spears are particularly egregious examples, in my opinion.
> a particular unblockable sword skill
Ichimonji? It's not unblockable, but does guranteed posture damage and interrupts enemy attacks if it connects in time; it's rather useful. Mikiri counter is also extremely useful if you're not a parry god but can reliably read incoming thrust "perilous attacks".
Started playing Trails Of Cold Steel. It's supposed to be about 60-80 hours long, which is a big investment, but so far it seems fairly interesting. Came with a decent sized full colour manual, which is a rarity in this day and age. Brought back memories of going into town with my mum as a kid, buying a new game, and reading the manual on the way home. It's a shame most big publishers have done away with manuals.
Continuing to spend my time on UT2004. I've discovered Onslaught maps that feature the bloody Leviathan.
It's tough. Lots of armour - 5,000 hp, compare to 800 hp of the Goliath, the in-game tank variant, which is a formidable opponent itself. Still, not that tough if used incorrectly or left without ground/aerial support. The main plasma cannon delivers devastating damage at the cost of making the vehicle stationary and precluding the driver from using homing rockets. That makes it rather vulnerable to air and artillery attacks.
It's lots of fun to drive it on the ONS-Severance. All it takes to win is to get to the enemy base with enough hitpoints to deploy the main cannon and waste the core in just two shots. That 'just' will be a tense time period as the cannon charges slowly; the road towards the core even more so, it's the whole fleet of tanks, helos and other battle machinery against you plus the small arms fire. You're golden if you managed to grab a Redeemer en route and hopped off just before the tank explodes from incessant fire. Very annoying for the opposing side even if you didn't blow the core right then.
Sage because I feel like that HL2/cake lad from the XKCD comic strip.
>>22813 >also extremely useful if you're not a parry god but can reliably read incoming thrust "perilous attacks".
I didn't have any problem with Mikiri counter (you get that five minutes into the game so not really a spoiler IMO) but I found it too hard to learn the different kanji in time to correctly parry to aerial/swipe/whatever. Not been back to the game since that last post, though I'm not ruling it out and do tend to go back to games that got the better of me. I'll be playing the PC version next time, though, the PS4 Pro version was a disappointment.
Sega have finally got around to a proper port of Virtua Racing. It's on the Switch and runs at 1080p/60. It feels spot on and is a massive nostalgia kick for those of us old enough to remember it in the arcades back in the day. It's not perfect though, as the image shows the colour balance is a bit weird, but it's hardly a deal breaker. It's only on the Japanese store right now but will probably be released over here at some point.
>>22837 There is no difference in the kanji, it's always "危" for all three. The lead-up animation is supposed to give away what kind of attack is incoming, but that was one of the annoyances for me: sometimes the game does a shit job at telegraphing what an attack is.
Some are easy to spot, but the Snakeye's mini bosses for example do what I thought was a grab attack. Turns out it's a very delayed... something that can be parried (I only know this from watching speed runs). It's that ambiguity that feels a little off, again less like learning and more being told.
>>22897 it's scenes like this that make me think about the stuff I had on the Master System, and how going up to the Megadrive was like real life on screen. It's insane how far things have come really.
People are buying this new Cyberpunk 2077 thing on pre-release like nobody's business. It looks good. And it's fifty quid. Fifty smackers. For ones and zeros that you can't even use yet.
Whyyyyy do people do this?
There is no reason not to wait two or three years:
- It will be on sale for about £10 or less
- You'll know whether it's actually worth buying
- All the bugs will be fixed
- People will have modded it to death
- You may have an upgraded PC which can run the thing smoother and prettier
- If there is a sequel they will bundle it for free
I know this was also an xkcd comic but fuck that nerd.
There's definitely not really any reason to pre order, but there's plenty of reason to want to pay full whack for it and have it on release day - I don't want to wait three years extra to play a game I'm excited for, once the endings been spoiled and all the cool set pieces are on fifteen million YouTube videos.
>>22900 Not being able to wait is your own impulse control problem I suppose. Having it spoiled for you shouldn't be too difficult, people don't tend to unexpectedly plonk major cutscenes in the middle of unrelated videos. And fifty quid seems a lot of money but maybe that's to do with my own income.
>>22901 > people don't tend to unexpectedly plonk major cutscenes in the middle of unrelated videos
Sometimes they do just that in the middle of related videos though.
I'm into games, so watch and consume a fair bit of gaming media. There's no way I'm avoiding someone dropping a "remember the end of Cyberpunk?!" Type spoiler TWO YEARS after release. I also don't think not wanting to wait two years to save forty quid to play a game is in any way impulsive.
I understand fifty quid is quite a lot of money, but even at minimum wage it's only really about seven hours work. When I was on that sort of money I'd usually only buy one or two games a year at full price, Skyrim I bought day one, GTA 5, big stuff I was excited for.
Now that I make a bit more money I'm willing to do it for a few more titles, but I think even if I was on the dole I'd be trying to get Cyberpunk on release. It's very much my jam.
People are just morons. Two years is a bit much, if you have the money for it, but I can't for the life of me fathom why people wouldn't wait at least a few weeks until the hype has died down.
Look at Fallout 76. It was a shit game, but the majority of the backlash was because people pre-ordered it without knowing what the hell they were going to be in for. If they'd only have waited and read a couple of reviews first, they'd have saved themselves all the trouble. I didn't even need that much- I knew it was going to be shit as soon as I found out it was online, and I think deep down so did most of those people too. They just hoped it would miraculously be the new Fallout game they wanted in their heads, and then cried about it on the internet.
Really, if publishers had any sense, they'd stop encouraging pre-orders so heavily themselves. If Bethesda never took pre-orders, they might have made a bit less money, but they might well have saved their company's reputation by avoiding the worst of the backlash.
I happen to think Cyberpunk 2077 looks pretty great, but I'm old enough by now to remember every disappointing overhyped game of the last decade, and I know it's from a developer I haven't really liked in the past. A lot of people might think The Witcher 3 was the hottest shit since sliced gold, but I played 3 hours and absolutely nothing about it held my interest. Cyberpunk looks like it might be more up my street if it's more focussed on character customisation and player character role-playing; but there's every possibility it will suffer from all the same janky controls, clunky animations and shallow environments that put me off The Witcher.
>>22905 >Really, if publishers had any sense, they'd stop encouraging pre-orders so heavily themselves. If Bethesda never took pre-orders, they might have made a bit less money, but they might well have saved their company's reputation by avoiding the worst of the backlash.
You're making the mistake of thinking that goodwill is as bankable as actual cash. Especially these days when the games industry seems to think it's entitled to all the money in the world.
>>22907 >This kind of short term only mentality is the problem with most Western business, mind you, not just games.
Cashflow is the be all and end all of every publicly owned company and the vast majority of privately owned companies.
If a company reaches the end of a financial year and makes the statement "Well we've made a loss this year, but we think we have a lot of potential next year", heads roll whether deserved or not.
It's not even that. Growth is the obsession. You can be making profits in the billions, but if it's even a fraction of a percent less billions of profit than the year before, it's not enough.
>>22909 All based on percentages and sod sustainable, which is barmy and expecting sustained growth beyond overall growth is banking on a boom to never wear off. At this point, it's a gamblers bet to pull out before it goes kaput.
>>22907 There are more than enough names you can you can bring on board. If one of the major FPS franchises pushes out a poor game, pitch the next one as a return to form. If a brand is flagging, put a star name behind it with "$(famous-game-designer) of $(famous-game-designers-major-project) fame is running this one so you know it'll be good".
When was the last time a major studio or publisher went under because of poor sales? I think you're looking at THQ back in 2013. All the greedy ways of monetising games have put an end to that.
Are we not counting the two or three studios anually EA takes out the back and shoots? It can also be argued that those companies themselves would have survived without the interference of the execs trying to squeeze the blood out of the stone.
Frankly, EA are looking like the next big one that could tank. They've only kept going this long by sucking out the life force of new acquisitions, drinking the talent of new devs like the Emperor drinks the souls of psykers; but they have competition.
I mean you can't go saying big game companies are immortal now just because one hasn't gone under for 6 years, you daft sod. The hyper-monetisation of things like loot boxes and cosmetics etc is a bubble which will itself burst eventually.
>>22913 >I mean you can't go saying big game companies are immortal now just because one hasn't gone under for 6 years, you daft sod.
Actually, I can. To wit, I just did.
Bear in mind that one of the senior executives at one company, who within the last few days has appeared on-stage for said company at E3, has openly admitted to having not only possessed jailbait porn (it is not entirely clear that the performer is of age) but also commingled it with company confidential information. In any business where reputation was remotely worth anything, he'd have been fired on the spot.
It's common knowledge that there's a shortage of skilled talent in the industry, but companies are still somehow able to overwork and underpay the very people that make the magic happen. They frequently stiff non-salaried talent on royalties.
I don't know about you, but to me, taken together, that looks like some serious immunity to economic reality, and they don't even need to engage in Hollywood accounting to do it.
It's six years mate. The games industry itself has barely been a thing for thirty and it's already had one major crash in that time. Compare that to boom/bust patterns in other industries and come back to us.
As a couple of examples where I think my waiting policy has paid off - I'm looking forward to, but still haven't bought or played, Arkham Knight or No Man's Sky.
>It's common knowledge that there's a shortage of skilled talent in the industry, but companies are still somehow able to overwork and underpay the very people that make the magic happen.
Those two things are contradictory. The isssue is that the people who want to work in games really want to work in games, so they will do it for fuck all. You will never get the additional staff without a huge increase in everyones wages because anyone else is willing to play the market to some degree.
People complain about how much people in the financial sector get, but honestly it is because the employees have their heads in the right place when it comes to handling a company, they need to treat everything as sociopathically transactional (even if it makes you a terrible human being in all other respects) because thats what the company is doing to you.
> EA are looking like the next big one that could tank
Belguim litterallly starting an intiative to get Star Wars Battlefront 2 banned in the EU for crooked gambling. It had a horrific fall out of bad PR on reddit, and every form of non-corrupt press declairing it was lootboxed up the arse.
Despite everything sensible working against them EA sold 9 million copies of SW Battlefront 2 in 3 months, which was 90% of their projected figures.
Worse case scenario and loot boxes get banned, and no franchise will let them licence them, EA scales down to re-reasing the same sports related games every year for full price and rebuilds. They are absurdly bulletproof.
>>22899 The only time it's acceptable to pre-order is for Nintendo games. They do this bullshit planned scarcity thing where they'll only print x amount of copies and if you don't get one at launch, it'll cost you more for a new copy in 3 years time. They hold their value incredibly well, so pre-ordering and selling them on can sometimes reap benefits upwards of £10 within the first Month of release.
>>22917 >Despite everything sensible working against them EA sold 9 million copies of SW Battlefront 2 in 3 months, which was 90% of their projected figures.
I bet someone got fired over that 10% shortfall. After all, this is EA and revenues anywhere short of literally all the money just isn't good enough.
I really do wonder whether the whole "$60 isn't really enough" argument really holds water anymore. Sure, production budgets have ballooned, but so has the audience. Go back 20 years and the suggestion that individual games would be shipping 9 million units in 3 months would have been laughably optimistic. These days it's a slight underperformance.
Of course, if the lootbox mechanic is eventually banned, expect to see the "£500 Super Duper Deluxe Special Edition with pre-pre-order exclusive content" become more common.
>>22899 Also this is shockingly far ahead for pre order, it's close enough to a year to not matter.
It looks like it has excellent single player and no multiplayer, and therefore, expect to see it in CEX for under a tenner on the playstation 4 a few years and 75p a few years after that.
I don't think you and I are typical consumers though, I just started playing the uncharted games because I could get the first 3 for under a fiver. but I am honestly disconnected enough from the hype to not care about the differance between a game that came out now and 10 years ago.
