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Old Doggy Bastard posted:Dishonored 2 is great. Won't lie, I've ignored almost all of this chick's powers outside of super jump and shadow sewer crawl, but it doesn't feel like anymore are needed. Isnt this the first game the ... Entanglement power showed up in? Where what happened to one enemy affected others? Good power.
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Sep 9, 2022 13:45
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haha yeah, that power is Domino. Domino + Far Reach with the Pull Enemies upgrade = The Juggler of Karnaca
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Sep 9, 2022 14:36
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Finished up Death of the Outsider, pretty short and sweet with two of the missions being great in terms of level design, a mostly satisfying end to the series. Started up Prey and enjoyed the opening bits... apparently I can't choke out the aliens  Having a good time though, still looks pretty good in 2022.
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Sep 12, 2022 02:40
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infraboy posted:Finished up Death of the Outsider, pretty short and sweet with two of the missions being great in terms of level design, a mostly satisfying end to the series. If you are playing in 2022 with 2022 hardware you can download this mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/prey2017/mods/22 The engine based changes are pretty good and just make the game look a little bit better.
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Sep 12, 2022 02:48
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infraboy posted:Finished up Death of the Outsider, pretty short and sweet with two of the missions being great in terms of level design, a mostly satisfying end to the series. There's a stun gun and it's great.
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Sep 12, 2022 22:23
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Having a good time, got the scanny thing and i’m using it a lot because the mimics are downright annoying as hell. Stealth seems to be a decent option getting around the bigger aliens. Enjoying the atmosphere, not really scary but it’s got some tense moments. May as well grab mooncrash since it’s on sale and seems fun, almost deathloopy
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Sep 12, 2022 23:14
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infraboy posted:Having a good time, got the scanny thing and i’m using it a lot because the mimics are downright annoying as hell. Mostly everyone who played mooncrash was confused and baffled that a lot of the cool aspects of the looping stuff weren't used or done as well in deathloop. Avoiding discussion between the two work groups was apparently a deliberate decision by the part of the Deathloop people.  So yeah if you liked deathloop and prey I think you'll love mooncrash. A tip though, not plot related: at one point you get the ability to make items that reduce the timer available in your current run. If you make them (instead of using the ones you find) you might find yourself rapidly losing all sense of challenge in the game.
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Sep 12, 2022 23:25
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Started that first Deus Ex game and it became impossible to put down. What a classic, sort of thing that makes you think about how old it is while playing it and how incredible it must have been at the time. I'm about to start Deus Ex: Human Revolution now, and then the next one. After doing those and Dishonored it should be interesting playing Prey again.
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Sep 13, 2022 06:20
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:Started that first Deus Ex game and it became impossible to put down. What a classic, sort of thing that makes you think about how old it is while playing it and how incredible it must have been at the time. I'm about to start Deus Ex: Human Revolution now, and then the next one. After doing those and Dishonored it should be interesting playing Prey again. You can't just do that and not talk about what happened in your playthrough. What augs did you take? What secrets did you find? What ending did you choose? Did you save Paul? Details!
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Sep 13, 2022 06:44
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:Started that first Deus Ex game and it became impossible to put down. What a classic, sort of thing that makes you think about how old it is while playing it and how incredible it must have been at the time. I'm about to start Deus Ex: Human Revolution now, and then the next one. After doing those and Dishonored it should be interesting playing Prey again. Conspicuous lack of an Invisible War playthrough. 
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Sep 13, 2022 13:45
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Old Doggy Bastard posted:Started that first Deus Ex game and it became impossible to put down. What a classic, sort of thing that makes you think about how old it is while playing it and how incredible it must have been at the time. I'm about to start Deus Ex: Human Revolution now, and then the next one. After doing those and Dishonored it should be interesting playing Prey again. I'm old enough to have played Deux Ex when it was new, and yeah, it really was astonishingly good.
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Sep 13, 2022 13:55
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infraboy posted:Stealth seems to be a decent option getting around the bigger aliens. While it's possible to do so, it's best to think of stealth as less of a tool to ghost levels and more as means of employing calculated ambushes to go Predator on the aliens and always fight on your own terms.
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Sep 13, 2022 14:12
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Pookah posted:I'm old enough to have played Deux Ex when it was new, and yeah, it really was astonishingly good. I also think that DX is the only game I've played that does the whole "there are multiple endings, but you can choose any one you want once you get to the end" bit well: - While you aren't locked into any one ending, your actions throughout the rest of the game affect who contacts you during the final level, and what they say to you - Selecting an ending involves crawling all over the final level completing a bunch of objectives, rather than just pushing a button - In the course of doing so you're guaranteed to see all the bits needed for the other endings, prompting you to think about what you're doing and consider if you want to change your mind KillHour posted:You can't just do that and not talk about what happened in your playthrough. What augs did you take? What secrets did you find? What ending did you choose? Did you save Paul? Details!
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Sep 13, 2022 15:12
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ToxicFrog posted:The most important question is whether they saved black helicopter. A bomb!?
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Sep 13, 2022 15:20
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I think Returnal is going to be the game that finally gets me to upgrade to PS extra. $30 to upgrade for the year? 70 for a single game that's included in that 30? It's kind of a no brainer
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Sep 13, 2022 15:51
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ToxicFrog posted:Same and same. I played the Liberty Island demo before I got the whole game and it blew me away. While I don't otherwise disagree, I still think it's a stretch to claim that choosing your ending in DX1 is that much more involved than pushing a button. But pretty much anything is leaps and bounds ahead of HR, I suppose.
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Sep 13, 2022 16:11
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John Murdoch posted:While I don't otherwise disagree, I still think it's a stretch to claim that choosing your ending in DX1 is that much more involved than pushing a button. But pretty much anything is leaps and bounds ahead of HR, I suppose. It's well known that the last few levels of DX were rushed. The amazing thing is that instead of other games going "We should expand on this and make player-choice endings more involved and integrated" they went "People want to pick from three buttons. Let's literally give them three buttons."
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Sep 13, 2022 16:33
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The DX (lead?) dev went on record saying that they didn't want players locked out of endings due to things they did hours ago. While other titles have since embraced that limitation, it works well for DX in its own way of being open-ended and crawling through levels to see everything and then have a philosophical chat with someone about it at the end. I appreciate it for what it was, and it also let us talk to our friends about which one they 'chose' and why. DX back in the day was mind-blowing and I'm glad we're still talking about its influences and legacies two decades later. Oh, and I still want my Mooncrash full-sized game, you bastards!
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Sep 13, 2022 16:44
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Serephina posted:The DX (lead?) dev went on record saying that they didn't want players locked out of endings due to things they did hours ago. While other titles have since embraced that limitation, it works well for DX in its own way of being open-ended and crawling through levels to see everything and then have a philosophical chat with someone about it at the end. Oh yeah, it is literally a Deus Ex Machina that you come out of nowhere and decide the fate of the world at the very end. But I mean that the level itself was pretty rushed and linear instead of being the typical big open playground. Still, for a game from the early 00's, they did an amazing job at making it feel like your decisions had real meaning, even if they mostly didn't.
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Sep 13, 2022 16:55
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hazardousmouse posted:I think Returnal is going to be the game that finally gets me to upgrade to PS extra. $30 to upgrade for the year? 70 for a single game that's included in that 30? It's kind of a no brainer If you want Returnal, that’s fine, but it’s nothing like Prey or Deus Ex. It’s a watered down roguelike third person shooter.
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Sep 13, 2022 17:55
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Serephina posted:The DX (lead?) dev went on record saying that they didn't want players locked out of endings due to things they did hours ago. While other titles have since embraced that limitation, it works well for DX in its own way of being open-ended and crawling through levels to see everything and then have a philosophical chat with someone about it at the end. I feel like the solution would be better telegraphing the endings and making sure the players have what they need to make the decision before the end. Take the endings of Deus Ex, you could easily have the player choose the ending before the final mission and then tweak the final mission accordingly. The final level doesn't have anything in it that couldn't just be moved a bit before. Have everyone make their spiels about what you should do and then the one you pick to side with gets you to the base and helps you through it and the ending fires when you finish the level. Instantly better. A lot of the problem with "locking in" endings is that players can do it without knowing what the ending is. So you get things like "do I side with X?" where players are trying to see what doing that gets them. They don't know if they want the X ending because they don't know what the X ending is but they have to choose the X ending before that knowledge and thus feel locked in. They get new information that may make them want to change, but they can't. If the question is "do I want to plunge us into a technological dark age?" then that's something the player can answer much earlier and thus not feel like they're locked in. Just gotta make sure the player has what they need to make the decision at the point of decision. Phigs fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Sep 13, 2022 |
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Sep 13, 2022 20:59
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Bogart posted:If you want Returnal, that’s fine, but it’s nothing like Prey or Deus Ex. It’s a watered down roguelike third person shooter. Ok? I've beat prey and Deus ex. And in general I hate roguelikes so watered down is probably better for me
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Sep 13, 2022 21:54
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Phigs posted:I feel like the solution would be better telegraphing the endings and making sure the players have what they need to make the decision before the end. Take the endings of Deus Ex, you could easily have the player choose the ending before the final mission and then tweak the final mission accordingly. The final level doesn't have anything in it that couldn't just be moved a bit before. Have everyone make their spiels about what you should do and then the one you pick to side with gets you to the base and helps you through it and the ending fires when you finish the level. Instantly better. Given that this is Deus Ex, they would have needed to not lock you out of doing the "wrong" ending because you're still in the same physical location and it would have felt cheap if you couldn't betray whoever. Picking from a dropdown menu on what you want your final level to be and then it's linear to the end is strictly worse.
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Sep 13, 2022 21:59
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hazardousmouse posted:Ok? I've beat prey and Deus ex. And in general I hate roguelikes so watered down is probably better for me I’m just letting you know that the game you are posting about has little to do with the thread you are posting in.
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Sep 13, 2022 22:04
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John Murdoch posted:While I don't otherwise disagree, I still think it's a stretch to claim that choosing your ending in DX1 is that much more involved than pushing a button. But pretty much anything is leaps and bounds ahead of HR, I suppose. TL;DR: there's a bunch of competing philosophies of how to do "a game has multiple endings", but in the philosophy DX1 subscribes to I think it's one of the best of its type. So, I think there's a tension between "the ending should be the culmination of every choice made since the start of the game and if you want a different ending you need to replay the game" and "the player should not be committed to an ending until the cutscene actually plays and at any point prior to that they can change course" -- and I don't think either of those is inherently a better way. In the latter case, the laziest and least satisfying way to do is it to do what DXHR did and ask the player right at the end "which ending cutscene do you want to see  ". DX1 makes choosing an ending a multi-step process that, critically, takes you all over the level and forces you to consider the alternatives -- the reactors you need for the New Dark Ages ending are right near the entrance, but in order to actually gain access to them you need to explore much deeper into the base, for example. But at any point in the process before you push the button you can change your mind and run off and do something else, and I think if you're going to do the latter sort of ending selection, that's the way to do it.You could, I think, think of Dark Souls 3 as taking a similar approach but spread across a much longer part of the game rather than being confined to the final level -- there's four different endings and most of them require you to do a bunch of setup to lead up to them, but you can at any point abandon that setup and choose a different ending than the one you were working towards right up until the end. I don't quite consider it the same because there are a bunch of ways to cut yourself off from endings without realizing you've done so by talking to NPCs at the wrong time, or the wrong number of times, or picking up the wrong items, or whatever; you can in principle choose any ending right up until the end but it's easy to lock yourself into a specific subset of endings without realizing you've done so. Then you have stuff like Geneforge that kind of combines both approaches -- there are dramatic differences in the ending depending on whether or not you use the titular Geneforge, who else uses it (if anyone), and whether it is destroyed, all decisions made very close to the end of the game; but there are a also a lot of variations on those endings depending on your interactions with the various factions throughout the game as a whole. I think this is probably my preferred approach¹, but it's also a lot more complicated to implement. ¹ for longer games like GF and DX1; for shorter games, like Alpha Protocol, I do quite like "the ending depends on your whole playthrough" designs.
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Sep 13, 2022 22:55
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It's nothing to do with the approach - I 100% agree with what you're saying, the wiggle room and time to think are good qualities. Maybe I'm being too pedantic but people have a tendency to paint DX1's ending as being vastly more clever than HR's and...it's not though? Mechanically speaking, it's still more or less a push button ending, there's just some busywork involved rather than the game literally putting three buttons in front of you. It's not compelling gameplay either way, is what I'm saying.
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Sep 13, 2022 23:32
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A lot of things in games are more-or-less-[something reductive] though. The entire medium is basically a series of illusions to hold everything together. For me, making me actually go through the level to activate my choice made it feel like I had more agency and that it was more of an expression of myself and my character. I know sitting back it's really not mechanically that different, but it had an entirely different feel to me.
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Sep 14, 2022 01:13
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The big difference is that as you inch towards one of the endings, you get dialogue from the characters reacting to your choices and trying to convince you. It also introduces your options one at a time instead of just laying them out like a menu. The characterization there is great and it's nothing at all like HR's ending except in the most superficial sense.
KillHour fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Sep 14, 2022 |
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Sep 14, 2022 01:23
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KillHour posted:The big difference is that as you inch towards one of the endings, you get dialogue from the characters reacting to your choices and trying to convince you. It also introduces your options one at a time instead of just laying them out like a menu. The characterization there is great and it's nothing at all like HR's ending except in the most superficial sense. iirc, isn't there something similar in HR? On Panchaea you (can) talk to Sarif, Darrow, Eliza, (and I think somebody else but I can't remember his name), as you progress through the level and each of them ask you to do something different like Tong, Icarus, and Everett do in DX1. That said, I do remember there being more effort to getting between the DX1 endings instead of literally buttons in one room.
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Sep 14, 2022 01:36
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Eason the Fifth posted:iirc, isn't there something similar in HR? On Panchaea you (can) talk to Sarif, Darrow, Eliza, (and I think somebody else but I can't remember his name), as you progress through the level and each of them ask you to do something different like Tong, Icarus, and Everett do in DX1. That said, I do remember there being more effort to getting between the DX1 endings instead of literally buttons in one room. Yeah but iirc as you progress down one path or another you get the other folks calling you back to basically try to sway you back to their side.
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Sep 14, 2022 01:41
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Ravenfood posted:Yeah but iirc as you progress down one path or another you get the other folks calling you back to basically try to sway you back to their side.
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Sep 14, 2022 02:05
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John Murdoch posted:It's nothing to do with the approach - I 100% agree with what you're saying, the wiggle room and time to think are good qualities. Maybe I'm being too pedantic but people have a tendency to paint DX1's ending as being vastly more clever than HR's and...it's not though? Mechanically speaking, it's still more or less a push button ending, there's just some busywork involved rather than the game literally putting three buttons in front of you. It's not compelling gameplay either way, is what I'm saying. I mean, they're "more or less the same" in that they both come from the design philosophy that the player should not be committed to any particular ending until the moment the game actually ends, but apart from that they are really quite different. And if your argument is that the philosophy is categorically bad, or that all games using it are fundamentally equivalent in their treatment of endings, we're going to have to just disagree on fundamentals, I think. You could argue that they should have taken a more Dark-Soulsian approach of having requirements for most of the endings above and beyond "make it to the final level", but since the design of DX1 does not merely discourage but prohibits backtracking, that puts you in a situation where you reach area 51 and the game goes "sorry, you can only get the bad ending because you didn't pick up the isolinear chipset in Vandenberg AFB four levels ago", which is some Sierra-rear end bullshit; and if you go "ok, so make the game fully backtrackable so the player isn't actually locked in until they enter the inner bunker or something" you are now talking about a very different (and much more expensive and complicated) game.
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Sep 14, 2022 02:23
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Tbh, I think we're just totally talking past each other. I'm saying that Deus Ex disguises the arbitrary nature of its ending but you're still ultimately pushing buttons to pick between A/B/C. That the buttons were in different rooms and called something different worked out, but the upsides feel like a happy accident more than anything. Like, at least in IW picking your ending involves going off and murdering the faction(s) you don't like. Basically, KillHour posted:It's well known that the last few levels of DX were rushed. The amazing thing is that instead of other games going "We should expand on this and make player-choice endings more involved and integrated" they went "People want to pick from three buttons. Let's literally give them three buttons."
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Sep 14, 2022 03:41
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John Murdoch posted:Tbh, I think we're just totally talking past each other. I'm saying that Deus Ex disguises the arbitrary nature of its ending but you're still ultimately pushing buttons to pick between A/B/C. That the buttons were in different rooms and called something different worked out, but the upsides feel like a happy accident more than anything. Like, at least in IW picking your ending involves going off and murdering the faction(s) you don't like. We're not talking past each other. The ending of Deus Ex isn't just pushing buttons any more than any video game is just pushing buttons. There are unique challenges that have to be overcome for each of the endings, and as you get closer to completing those challenges, the game engages you to try to change your mind (and the main villain goes from taunting you to begging you as you get closer to your goal). Would it have made you happier if there was a level transition between the ending rooms? Your reductionist argument could apply to anything - what is the point of Liberty Island when they could just have you push a button to decide whether to save Gunther and whether to shoot the terrorist leader? I'm not saying Deus Ex didn't put enough effort in. I'm saying newer games should expand on the premise even more. Edit: Deus Ex always presents your options upfront and center. At least the important ones. The game's thesis is that the player needs to make conscious decisions and weigh the potential outcomes of their actions. It's littered with A/B choices and the weight behind them is more moral than practical. Not giving you the option to do an ending because of some flag you set halfway through the game would undercut that. and then the thesis of Invisible War is that in the end, those choices are all insignificant and don't matter KillHour fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Sep 14, 2022 |
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Sep 14, 2022 04:28
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That was a response to ToxicFrog.  But regardless to put it another way, I found the ending objectives in Deus Ex about as phony and artificial as HR's buttons. It's been a hot minute, but I mostly remember wandering around a by-then depopulated map pressing buttons and pulling switches, just separated by space. That it gives time for characters to talk at you is useful, but otherwise I recall the process being incredibly mundane and not innately compelling. If the game still managed to maintain your immersion, then I feel like that's entirely down to the writing doing the heavy lifting. Otherwise it's only better than three buttons on a console by degrees. And to whit, the reason why HR fumbles it as badly as it does is because for lack of any other way (because HR's conclusion was also hideously rushed; I doubt it was conscious decision) the writing has to hastily and clumsily justify the three buttons and of course it turns out the endings themselves don't really hold up to scrutiny either. If DX had locked me in a room with three buttons, while otherwise maintaining the same quality of philosophical debate, I don't think it would have radically changed my opinion of the endgame for the worse. And naturally, the inverse, if HR had the chops to build to that moment and/or present the choice in a less flatly artificial way (I've said before they could've had Adam debating with the three "cores" of the big machine forex) then it could've sold me on the push buttons. And hence why IW's ending, while not as heady as it wishes it was, stands out to me a smidge more because you conclude the sneaky-shooty game by doing some more sneaky-shooty stuff one last time. Several last times, actually, Omar forever.  Rather than generic busywork making space for the dialogue OR a character near-literally asking you to pick an ending.
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Sep 14, 2022 16:18
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John Murdoch posted:Several last times, actually, Omar forever. As a preferred customer, a discount will be applied to all of your future purchases.
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Sep 15, 2022 01:00
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We clown on IW a lot for some very valid reasons but it did have some pretty great moments. Omar especially. And the coffeeshop war analoging to the wto/order. or the talk with JC.
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Sep 15, 2022 01:15
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John Murdoch posted:That was a response to ToxicFrog. I suspect that "wandering around a depopulated map pressing buttons and pulling switches" is not the typical experience of that level, because it implies you explored the whole map and killed/disabled every enemy in it before actually starting to cross out objectives for whatever your desired ending was. On the other hand, that sounds exactly like my argument for why "Sabotage at Soulforge" is an absolutely garbage final level and both "The Maw of Chaos" and "Betrayal" are better finales, so perhaps we have more in common than I think.
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Sep 15, 2022 03:22
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Maw of Chaos was linear garbage Soulforge wasn’t great, but at least it wasn’t just proceeding down a tunnel until you get to the end
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Sep 15, 2022 05:59
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Beat my first playthrough in about 19 hours... I think I skipped most of the side quests because I didn't want to deal with backtracking and dealing with respawning Typhons because I really couldn't be bothered. Saved the doctor and the paraplegic lady though. I'm sure I missed about a million things. The whole ending was a lie aaaaa. I can see why people thought this was their favorite game.
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Sep 15, 2022 07:19
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