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I got one refunded with like 10 hours on it because it didn't close properly and just idled in the background all day, maybe go that route with the claim 
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Aug 8, 2023 20:13
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Yeah I regret not just lying. I guess there's a nonzero chance I'd want to try it again but gently caress redownloading all of that lmao
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Aug 8, 2023 20:22
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At least it's not like CEX where it works on car rules, AKA the game loses 90% of it's value once you take it out of the shop
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Aug 8, 2023 20:25
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Perestroika posted:Yeah, it's not like BG3 is the only game at that (or a similar) scale. Some years back I got myself an additional 500 GB SSD for games, and that fills up startlingly quick. 100+ GB games, while not common, do pop up more and more. And even relatively smaller ones still often easily clock in at 50+. It's not a big deal if you're only really just playing one game at a time, but if you're keeping a few installed simultaneously (e.g. for multiplayer purposes) that adds up in a hurry. Microsoft Flight Simulator comes in at around 300GB if you add in all the free scenery updates.
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Aug 8, 2023 20:31
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No game should be over 100gbs.
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Aug 8, 2023 20:36
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Hel posted:You are very right, but I will point out that most players didn't finish the game, either because most players just don't do that, the warrens, increase in combat gameplay or any of the game stopping bugs. So if you only played Santa Monica, Downtown and maybe bits of Hollywood, the mythology is pretty attractive. Those parts have both the highest highs but also mostly brought down by jank rather than actively bad design. But yeah any effort to improve it for release would have had to start with cutting even more stuff. And people love to blame outside factors especially when it's a beloved dev vs big bad activision. I get what you mean, like my earlier post said I never got this far in the game before and I too had imagined a much better game waiting just around the corner. But on the other hand, a lot of my complaints and issues extend further and further back into the earlier parts of the game. Ironically, despite being smaller and less developed, I've almost kind of liked Chinatown as a hub more because it hasn't wasted my time and overextended itself. (Which I guess I forgot to mention - I have to assume the hub areas are built in the most time wasting, maze-y way they are so the game could maintain a functional framerate on PCs of the time, but goddamn am I so, so tired of pacing all the way from one rear end end of Downtown to talk to the Anarchs and then going all the way to the other rear end end to get to my apartment and check my email.) Anyway, I really don't like the way Bloodlines executes on its RPG mechanics. Skill increases follow an escalating amount of XP cost. Think 4-6-10-16. Quests for 3/4ths for the game give a trickle of 1-3 XP for various objectives (not every objective, just, y'know, sometimes if they felt like it you get +1 now followed by +3 for fully finishing the quest), only finally being raised to 3-6 towards the endgame. This leads to a bottleneck and a lot of needless anxiety as it forces you to really examine if blowing a whopping 12 points on a major increase from rank 3 to 4 is worth it in the immediate vs. spending 4 and 8 points on separate lesser skills. In general, I've never been a fan of the "here's a pile of XP, you figure it out" approach to leveling up in RPGs. Bonus complaint, there's a special item 80% of the way through the game in a main story location that tacks on a free point of XP every time you earn 3 or more in a lump sum. If you wait to do the immediately available sidequests you can apply that bonus to them, if you did them first, gently caress you, less XP. I don't think it's a lot of XP because the number of side quests at that point drops way down and I don't remember the amount of XP they provide baseline, so it's maybe only 5~ extra points but still c'mon. The worse news is if you miss that item entirely and go through the entire endgame run, then you're probably missing 10-15~ XP in total which is a lot more significant. Combat skills are fundamentally boring. Guns might have it marginally better because I'm assuming a better ranged stat improves the Deus Ex-style reticle bloom and the actual guns themselves are more varied than melee weapons, but otherwise everything is a broadly linear progression with no depth to optimizing your character. If you shoot things you want to put 10 points into the two skills that improve that stat. Same with melee, same with unarmed. Defense stats are lopsided because of how vampires work, basically. You can get physical impact resistance aplenty (which covers bullets somewhat oddly), you get a meager amount of stabby protection from armor and otherwise need to rely on a catch-all dodge stat to automatically roll to avoid hits, and then there's aggravated damage which you can't really get any protection in because it's the nasty anti-vampire stuff like fire. I mainly bring them up because I've never really heard any consistent statement on their worth as stats to spend points on. I've felt reasonably tanky with some points in both defensive stats, but the dodge one carries the most obvious issue of being unable to know how much it's actually helping or potential issues of with streaks of bad luck. I happen to be playing a combat class, so I'll mention it now, but my active abilities are similarly boring. This isn't the case for other classes, which do get increasingly divergent effects at different ranks of abilities, but for example for me level 1 Potence adds +1 Aggravated damage to my melee attacks, cool. Level 5 adds...+5. Adds to the dullness of building a character and leaves me further unsure what's worth my fairly limited and restrictive point pool at any given moment. Access skills come in the form of Lockpicking and Hacking. These are subtly infuriating. First of all, no minigames, for better or worse. You just press a button and wait a certain amount of time and you either cleared the difficulty of the pick/hack or you didn't. Hacking borders on being completely useless, except when it isn't. The grand majority of computers offer little more than inconsequential emails or maybe a tiny bit of backstory you otherwise wouldn't be privy to. The exceptions being when they randomly decided to have computers control certain locks that are therefore unpickable or when an email contains a vital clue found nowhere else. There's shockingly few computers across the game as a whole. The tutorial and early game imply that computers will generally have some kind of hint, clue, or just outright spoiler for their password to find somewhere, but this is a complete lie. Immediately past the early game, there's not a single computer, at all, that you can find a password hint for. Thereby making hacking completely mandatory to interact with computers past a certain point. Maybe if you're godlike at Wordle you might be able to guess a password or two because they tend to be thematically relevant and you can see the number of characters on a failed hack. If you don't mind doing a bit of cheating, every single computer has an assigned password (revealed when you successfully hack it) so you can always just look them up and skip wasting points in the stat entirely. Some classes get a buff skill that happens to affect the mental stat(s) that govern Hacking, which means your ability to hack a given computer can be variable, which is a bit awkward. Locks meanwhile are much more frequently seen and usually bar physical access (duh) but with the payoff being that physical access means more access to Stuff and in an RPG more stuff is more good. On the other hand, what you actually get is a complete crapshoot. Sometimes it's nothing more than a storage room with some spare ammo, money, a sellable item. Sometimes it leads to a stealth route that may or may not matter to what you're actually trying to accomplish. Sometimes it leads to a completely empty room. Sometimes it lets you skip finding a key, other times absolutely not, because doors can and will be locked by quest script instead. Also, this isn't Fallout where everyone universally agreed to use one single type of lock. Plenty of doors in the game that use electronic locks of varying kinds, which makes them unpickable. You'd think they would provide a much needed use for Hacking then, but nooope. You can only hack computers. Lockpick has the added wrinkle of being partly governed by Dexterity, which is a physical stat that gets boosted by the universal Blood Buff ability. The end result is that points past 8 are effectively wasted because Blood Buff can get you to 10 anyway. Assuming you'll even need 10 in lockpicking... In the opposite direction, heavier armor subtracts 1 from Dexterity so makes it harder to pick locks while armored up, forcing you to swap clothes in order to match a lock's level. This is in no way particularly risky, difficult, or interesting, just tedious. The real trouble comes from quest design. Far, far too often quests will outright hinge on your ability to pick a lock or hack a computer. (With an added third "do stuff without being spotted" that obviously punishes anyone who can't literally turn invisible...or doesn't want to waste points on the generic sneaking stat.) This is tabletop RPG 101. You never make something hinge on a single stat check. But it gets worse. In Fallout 3/NV/4, if you lack the 50 lockpick skill necessary to crack a safe, there's nothing preventing you from putting it aside and coming back later. In Bloodlines....well, it's all over the goddamn place. Side quests tend to die on the vine if you don't get to them before progressing the main story. Both types of quest are liable to send you to bespoke areas or whole maps which you can't return to afterwards. They seemingly compensated for this by just...not putting very many locks or computers in main quests and when they do they're extremely optional. Or they directly hand over a password or leave a key lying around. Regardless, it creates a real Catch 22 where you need to put quests on hold until you can get enough XP from quests to raise the right stats allowing you to finally complete quests and get their XP.  (Don't forget this all butts up against the whole awkwardly limited XP pool/rising skill costs thing.) A bigger problem is that in several instances the two skills are combined as one. You pick a door open only to find a computer you then have to hack into. It ruins any sense of reward for investing in lockpicking and restricts access to things to hack, making the skill even harder to get value out of. Deus Ex had largely figured this poo poo out already - multiple separate approaches leading to the same objective. Also worth throwing in that those are the only two access options, ever, period. You can't sneak past obstacles, you can't bash things open with pure strength, can't pickpocket keys/keycards/literally anything off NPCs, nothin' else.But really the biggest problem is one that applies to basically all of the major skills - lazy scaling. Nothing in the game is custom tailored, tweaked, or carefully considered. If a door, computer, enemy, whatever appears 70% of the way through the game, then you can readily assume it will be set at a difficulty of 7, with maybe a fudge factor of +/-1. As the game progresses the difficulty rises in a bland, predictable, nonsensical way. I like to call this the Wolf Problem, because it usually crops up solely in relation to RPG with iffy combat systems. Basically, how level 1 wolves of equal level are a fair fight, but level 10 wolves will atomize your character on contact. As soon as you reach level 10, those wolves are back to being a fair fight with nothing distinguishing them from level 1 wolves. Now apply that problem to every core gameplay system and take a dump on immersion and believability while you're at it. If the Illuminati have hidden their power pyramid inside the omega vault at the start of the game, well, maybe it'll cap out at level 4. If you want to get into the gas station bathroom at the end of the game, well hoo boy you better have pumped points into lockpicking motherfucker. I realize that games need to have some degree of upwards scaling, because otherwise it would create the opposite problem and points would feel wasted when all you find are lower level locks, but ultimately the RPG mechanics in Bloodlines make me feel like I'm treading water and having the opposite problem, being punished for not regularly paying the skill tax and stressing out about every last point buy choice as I second guess where the game expects my stats to be. Ultimately it feels a lot like if you took Fallout 3/4/NV, kept SPECIAL and skills...but removed perks entirely. No exciting "aha" moments, no involved build optimization, just slow, steady, measured incremental improvements to your stats.  Just to cover the rest of the RPG cruft.... Social skills are wildly lopsided and badly implemented. Persuasion, Seduction, Intimidation. If you picked anything other than Persuasion you hosed up. Seduction has a few specific uses, but by and large it rarely ever accomplishes anything and particularly doesn't work well if you're playing a male character. Because why would a man ever want to (or be able to) seduce someone?? Intimidation just completely sucks, struggling to find uses past the early game, and said early game uses often amount to "gimme more money". The rare times either of them can actually help...are the rare times a quest is testing for any of the three, so Persuasion still wins. Apparently there's two more alternate options unlocked by flavors of mind control, but I honestly have no idea how good or useful those are. These carry the same scaling problem described previously and also smack into a classic issue which is that it's impossible to know ahead of time what options unlock at what stat thresholds. Did you fail to persuade your way through an argument because you needed 8 but only had 6, or was there just no persuade option available at all in the first place? Or was it hidden behind some other dialogue branch? Another classic problem is what I'll pompously call the Silver Tongue Paradox where being able to talk your way out of a situation can be a satisfying payoff to investing in that skill, but it can also lead to anticlimaxes as you short circuit entire quests or other more complex situations by just nipping the problem in the bud with a stern word. Plus the whole standard "if you see a skill-related choice you should basically automatically pick it 100% of the time" problem. Final bonus gently caress you, there are no Persuasion checks past 8 with the exception of a single solitary extremely optional and missable 9 towards the end of the game. Then there's the more esoteric skills. First we have one of the all time classic useless RPG skills, Haggle, which is your bog standard mercantile skill that is never worth worrying about. Money in Bloodlines is generally no object unless you're obsessively buying up a whole armory worth of weapons and ammo or endlessly sucking down blood packs (read: combined health/mana potions). Or completely ignoring money rewards from quests, never finding sellable loot, etc. The amount of discount/extra money you get from it is unsurprisingly granular and hardly fits the pace of the game. Then you have Inspection which is uh...a weird one. Inspection may as well amount to paying in-game skill points in exchange for a strategy guide. Or maybe just a basic quality of life feature. Basically, the higher the stat, the more likely it is for objects to aggressively sparkle to announce their presence, thereby making it easier to notice and find them. This concept maybe makes a bit more sense in the likes of Arx Fatalis or Dark Messiah (I think Dark Messiah had it too?) where there's secret doors and switches and poo poo that might be legitimately hidden and non-obvious. In Bloodlines, items are almost always just strewn about and missing them is more because they're a needle in a haystack of non-interactable objects. 90% of the time items are both obvious and of minimal value. Then the last 10% of the time they're one of a kind, extremely missable pickups that are the only thing justifying this stat that otherwise is competing for points with things like making your guns actually deal damage. Then finally we have Research which a perfect little wrap up to the main stat block. I can't cleanly judge if it's unfinished, badly implemented, or just a stupid loving design to the core. In Fallout, you have skill books. Read one and you get a free +2 (or +4 with a perk) bonus to the appropriate skill. These are seeded all over the place and usually act as a useful collectible to keep an eye out for, and finding at least a few of each usually isn't an ask because there's a handful of copies of each. Bloodlines also has skill books. Except there is exactly one skill book of each type across the entire game. (With a specific exception that's either a bug or a gimme to new characters, I have no idea which.) I guess in fairness the game is proportionally smaller so the number of books is proportionally smaller too. But when the game flow is so aggressively linear...you can't just happen across one book a little sooner than another. The melee book is behind that level 10 lock I mentioned last post, at roughly the 80% mark of the game. So okay whatever, no big deal, time to read the skill books for those juicy free points. Nope. Each book has a Research requirement to even begin to read it. Like, literally, if you don't meet the stat threshold then in your inventory the book will have a title of Unknown and better still you won't even be allowed to know what stat it raises. Despite the fact that mousing over the physical book object in the world already tells you its title (which just like Fallout will obviously correspond to its stat) but I guess that information isn't canon and my character is too loving stupid to know how to read the cover of a book. So fine, I'll waste some points on the stat. Congratulations, gently caress you. Not only does every single book have its own Research requirement, but every single one has its own bespoke minimum AND maximum range at which you can actually apply the knowledge contained within. A novice can't learn from a book that's too advanced and a master can't learn from a For Dummies book. Considering this is all in service to +1 to a single skill per book, and any given build is only going to be making effective use of a smaller specific range of skills in the first place, and that the scaling renders having lots of +1s spread out across many different skills largely pointless, the entire thing is bewilderingly stupid. Again, this costs the same XP you could just take and put directly into the things you're trying to raise via skill books in the first place. The only time it could be beneficial is if you meticulously min/max to a truly ridiculous degree and manage to eke out a slight advantage from spending marginally less XP on Research than it would cost to level the skills normally, at exactly the right time and exactly the right place. Which sure seems like is exactly why all these dumb restrictions even exist, to prevent you from getting too good of a deal out of Research. AAAAAAGHGHHH. Relatedly, sometimes certain characters will also give you a bit of free training to a skill, and the exact same sort of restrictions can apply. Some of these free points are seemingly meant to be rewards for digging deeper into dialogue with those characters.  I'm thinking two more posts, neither as long.
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Aug 8, 2023 20:38
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No post should be over 100gb
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Aug 8, 2023 20:39
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Inspector Gesicht posted:I do, but it's intimidating to download. Reminds me of an issue I have with Nintendo (I assume series x and ps5 are better about this than the ps4 and xbone): let me loving download your games faster, Nintendo! I can download a 150GB game over fiber very, very quickly! BG3 was done in under half an hour through Steam, would've been done faster if I wasn't playing a game in the background. Why does it take so goddamn long to download a game from the Nintendo store? 
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Aug 8, 2023 20:44
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The Wicked ZOGA posted:No post should be over 100gb felt genuine panic as I kept scrolling
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Aug 8, 2023 20:45
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The Wicked ZOGA posted:No post should be over 100gb
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Aug 8, 2023 21:00
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The Wicked ZOGA posted:No post should be over 100gb
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Aug 8, 2023 21:24
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Just add a [1gb no] warning to the thread title and it'll be fine
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Aug 8, 2023 21:28
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John Murdoch posted:I'm thinking two more posts, neither as long.
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Aug 8, 2023 22:13
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your post so big i gotta wait for the forums to stop buffering just to read it
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Aug 8, 2023 23:12
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gohuskies posted:One thing about the Riddler trophies I really appreciated was in Arkham City, there were more trophies available than you needed to collect to finish the questline, so if there was one that seemed impossible, you could skip it. I wish more collectibles that connect to an actual quest did that. I've always appreciated the Farcry games for that. They have a million things to collect, but the majority of them you only need 80% or so for any unlocks or achievements
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Aug 9, 2023 00:00
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Opopanax posted:The Riddle stuff is at least fairly interesting and there's usually some kind of puzzle to solve. That's at least more fun than just digging through every corner of the map to find something sitting around Sometimes. And I admit that several of them are rather clever and often make you do things with your gadgets and poo poo that you might never try otherwise. But, on the other hand, many are just race tracks that make you use the batmobile. Again.
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Aug 9, 2023 00:30
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I intentionally left two things off the stat  because they're more overtly RP-focused and more innately tied into the quest design than the math. You've got your Humanity score and your Masquerade score. The former is roughly your morality meter and the latter is sort of your GTA wanted stars in reverse. If either go to zero, you flatout lose the game on the spot because you either turned into a completely mindless beast or because you so loudly and consistently announced to the world that vampires exist that you are now kill on sight, persona non grata. Or I guess maybe you hosed up so bad that literally ALL vampires are now hosed, and you're one of those, so good job, idiot.The early game flirts with the intriguing idea of needing to balance those two scores. Simple dilemma: Some idiot is about to blab to the world that vampires are a real, do you murder the gently caress out of them - losing 1 humanity in the process - in order to protect the masquerade? Okay, now take that idea and do the dilemma I just said like...a couple times, identically. And then literally never do another thing with it ever again. I think the only other time it even comes up outside of general murder of innocents and masquerade fuckups is in a strange encounter where somebody from your old life recognizes you and if you don't talk them out of it (or kill them) they'll proceeds to phone your old friends and say they totally saw you walking around seemingly still alive, resulting in a masquerade violation...somehow. And the whole thing just...doesn't work because you don't know this person. Vampires don't forget their old lives, mind you, just you the player have no idea who this is and it just feels like a dumb gotcha. Basically as long as you don't play like a total monster or a total jackass it's really hard to lose points in either. Doing all of the quests and getting the job done will incur the occasional humanity loss but it's more than counterbalanced by other quests and choices restoring humanity. To say nothing of how you can literally dance your troubles away, once at each of the nightclubs in the game, to regain one point for free. (Original game: Dance for a whole loving hour. Unofficial patch: Five whole minutes.) Similarly, quests that either directly uphold the masquerade or I think maybe, kinda backwards, as a bonus for keeping things low key during story missions lead to masquerade violations being forgiven. Right, I forgot the big gaping hole in the system - combat areas. The game designates specific maps as, essentially, neutral ground (you can't use powers and you can't attack, mainly to stop you from killing major NPCs), public space (do something naughty in plain sight and it's a crime, do something vampiric in plain sight and it's a masquerade violation), and finally combat zones, which eschew any and all restrictions and you can hulk out on vampire magic and obliterate dudes, mortal or immortal alike without anyone caring. Even if there are outright civilian witnesses! Thanks to these designations, there's never really any moral ambiguity or complex decisions to make. At best, if you can be sneaky you can quietly do illegal things and only probably lose some humanity for murder or for stealing from orphans or whatever. Otherwise there's never any reason to run around like it's GTA getting into trouble. I guess in fairness there is a very big exception to that, which is that there's an entire character class with the primary characteristic of "extremely visibly and obviously an ugly rear end vampire" which turns that playthrough into a completely different experience involving sticking to the sewers, leaning more heavily on your ability to turn invisible, etc. because being seen in public at all is a no-go. There are additional consequences, but there's not really much there. Masquerade violations eventually attract the attention of vampire hunters (which might only be a thing in the unofficial patch? dunno). I have no idea how that actually plays out - wouldn't they basically put you on a downward spiral? - because getting there takes conscious effort. Humanity meanwhile has an impact on Frenzy, which is one of those RPG concepts that sounds good on paper but actually sucks in practice. Basically the more you trend towards mindless beast by having a low humanity score (and further effected by some clan maluses, being low on blood, or actively being on fire) the more likely you are to lose all control of your character as they attempt to go nuts and drink some drat blood and kill everything around them. I think allegedly it might be possible for this to pay off somehow but realistically it's yet another thing that's rare to go off in the first place and when it does it's not any fun because now the game is playing itself. Anyway, onto a general critique of the writing. While I haven't reached the end, the plot feels overly simplistic while acting like it's not. Maybe there's some totally sick plot twists waiting ahead, but I doubt it. The pace is the real issue. I'm 80% done and the plot has not actually moved, just stagnated in a shaggy dog story of fetch quests with only the vaguest of hints of what's really going on. It was only until exactly where I left off that a piece of intrigue was finally introduced to put a wrench in the proceedings and shake things up from "everyone, but especially Him, and especially Her, really want this macguffin, the very mysterious macguffin that you desperately want to know what it really is  ". I guess on the plus side it means it feels like I'm entering the climax, kind of. But goddamn have I spun a lot of wheels to get here.Quests are frustrating because you're basically always either doing bitch work or talking to every single NPC you're allowed to and getting lucky when they ask for your assistance. The former is infuriating when you realize it's a strict pattern in the main quest. Every single time you head to a new hub you will be roadblocked by the local bigwig demanding you do them a favor first, then they'll point you to where you actually need to go. Without fail. The latter becomes a problem because some NPCs are in seemingly restricted areas and there's zero way to tell if they'll simply shout for the guards (or open fire on you themselves I guess) or inexplicably talk to you and reveal quest content. Exploration is really limited because areas are so small and uncomplicated that points of interest either exist to give quests or are where you go to resolve them. If you're super lucky you might have reason to visit a location in service of multiple different quests. Areas also rarely change, beyond maybe shifting some incidental NPCs in or out. So many of the big events get sequestered to totally separate maps with follow-ups or consequences being extremely rare. At best you might get to hear about your exploits on the news. On the positive, the voice acting is top notch. Especially for the time but even now it's a cast full of familiar voices doing good work. Though unfortunately one thing you do lose when you become a vampire is all sense of subtlety... Where things really unravel for me is the player character's writing. Back when I played New Vegas I pinpointed some annoyances with the dialogue system, but in that game they were localized to specific NPCs or dialogue chains or DLCs. Here it's pretty much a constant across the game. Annoying dialogue loops where you get stuck needing to cycle through "I had some more questions..." loops because the game can only display four choices at a time. Falling into dialogue traps where certain trees force you to say something ranging from stupid to outright bad. The aforementioned invisibility of skill checks. Dialogue choices that mostly convey what I want to say, but inexplicably add some kind of attitude or other intent into them that make me wary of picking them. Dialogue choices that don't provide something that sounds like my character at all. And finally one that wasn't really a thing in NV but was in a different game I've kvetched about before, Divinity 2, the seeming boredom of the writers creeping in as they wrote dialogue options leading to lots of excessively jokey or stupid or rude responses being tacked on that make your character sound like a shithead or otherwise don't fit the tone. What also doesn't help is that there's a degree of realism where you can get away with asking stupid newbie questions to a degree, but try and dig too deep, too fast and you will get admonished for it. Resolving at least one situation relies on invisible reputation meters that you have no reason to know exist, but the inverse is just as bad. Either I don't know it's a thing and I lose out on this one situation through no real fault of my own, or I do know it's a thing and am disappointed at how rarely other NPCs maintain an opinion of my character. This game managed to instill a deep paranoia in me about picking dialogue options, and to some extent it felt like roleplaying, but on the other hand it got exhausting because I was afraid to press for more info on some topics, thereby losing important context for certain things. Or I'd sweat over two borderline identical responses that implied something like Fallout 4's infamous "yes" and "sarcastic yes" only for it to turn out it was yet another false choice that led to the exact same dialogue from the NPC and they didn't truly care how snarky I was. A good example of the intersection of plot and dialogue flaws: I was maybe a quarter of the way through the game. You are assumed Camarilla aligned by default because of the events of the intro, there's no wiggle room. A common protip is to, regardless of your ultimate leanings, to play nice until you get given an apartment (this is in fact largely unnecessary). The dialogue progresses roughly in this fashion: The Prince (local boss of the Camarilla) is still busy giving me headpats for being a good lapdog and doing well on the latest mission after giving me the apartment. I decide now is the time to flip so I give him the tiniest amount of lip (ie, any). He promptly gets huffy and asks WTF my problem is. My then immediately available response is, basically, "gently caress you, gently caress this organization, try prying your head out of your rear end sometime you dumb motherfucker, I'm out bitch, you can't fire me, I quit, nothing you can do about it, get hosed!  " like a complete and total meltdown, zero to 100 in an instant with really no good build up or logic to it. Naturally, the Prince gives me the boot. So I go talk to the Anarchs, which are the faction opposed to the Camarilla, since now's a good time to join, right? I promptly get told I'm an idiot, having an in with the Prince is priceless and even if I want to be with the Anarchs I should still go back and be their woman on the inside. Cue crawling back to the Prince, at which point I can say "haha whoops, guess I got a little heated back there, huh? Can I have my job back?" and he gives it right back with little more than a stern "that was your one allowed bout of stupidity, don't do it again". Playing both sides amounts to regularly checking in with the Anarchs to tattle on the Camarilla to them. It's impossible to know when it's a good time to do this, and it necessitates trekking to one rear end end of Downtown to do so.Shortly afterwards you bump into a character who is very, very clearly being mind controlled or similar and is acting completely out of character in a conspicuous and incriminating way. In previous situations you can keep your mouth shut about certain characters' indiscretions and you can even get rewarded for it. In this case, the revelation that said character was doing something hinky is central to the ongoing plot, so your character is forced to blurt it out to the Prince. And not only blurt it out, but in a way where there's not even a token option to try and explain he was acting noticeably weird and probably not acting of his own volition. Because that might derail the plot. This entire plotpoint came up hours ago and still hasn't been followed up on yet. I get that maybe they were forced to scrunch let's say 12 hours of plot down into an 8 hour game or w/e, but it seems like even if you decompressed the last couple of hours it would just be poorly paced in the other direction...The quest where I really was just done giving the game the effort was the Gargoyle. Simple setup: Boss of Hollywood wants a Gargoyle dealt with, but if by any minuscule chance you can bargain with it and get it on his side, all the better. You walk into its lair. It's a 12 foot tall golem made of stone. You fumble uselessly through its dialogue tree, unable to form a coherent argument for why it should play nice, inevitably piss it off, and what ensues is a difficult boss fight. Anything other than a blunt melee weapon will bounce off. Okay, let's walk in with 7 Persuasion instead. The internet says all you need is 7 persuasion.* You walk in, a persuasion option allows you to start forming a coherent argument for why it should play nice, then as if an entire section of the dialogue tree is conspicuously missing, your argument falls back into pieces right at the finish line and it gets pissed off and you have to fight it. What the gently caress gives? Well you see, what you were "supposed to" do was, hours earlier, take a wrong turn in the wizard vampire mansion to find a dead end containing a single conspicuous book that mentions gargoyles. If and only if you picked up that book hours ago will the quest text now suggest maybe you should ask the wizard vampire about gargoyles because he had a book about them. You can still go talk to him without it, you just have no reason to know to do that. Not only does he know about gargoyles, but with a bit of pressure he'll open up and admit it's straight up his and he wouldn't mind it being destroyed, especially if it's kept on the down low that it was his. Apparently, if you tickle his fancy just right using persuasion he's supposed to give you an amulet that will blunt the gargoyle's extreme damage, making fighting it much more doable, but that didn't happen for me. Now you essentially get a new choice: Actually be able to have a more fair fight against the gargoyle, or using this newfound knowledge of its origins, then and only then can you now find all the right words to construct a functional argument and convince the gargoyle to accept a truce. So the worst possible outcome is trying to do the quest as asked, the best possible outcomes are both equally held up on chance information that you'd never know was relevant until well after you found it. One last annoying wrinkle is that you're supposed to be able to extra super play the wizard vampire by talking down the gargoyle, accepting a payoff for "destroying" it, then turn right around and tattle to the Anarch leader that it was the wizard's doing. Only that last option was available. Possibly because I never picked up the stupid book or because I didn't navigate Mr. Wizard's dialogue tree exactly right or I missed a persuasion check. *What really, really does not help this game is that information is split between 1.5 wikis, Reddit, Steam forums, and GameFAQs and that there's also the original stock game, the basic unofficial patch version of the game (which admittedly doesn't radically change a TON, except when it did in previous versions  ), and the unofficial patch plus which dumps in all sorts of cut content and shuffles tons of random poo poo around because the guy who makes it will literally never be done tweaking the game to his standards. Why yes, people do fail to reliably state what version they're playing, or mark it appropriately on the wiki, or just flatout get poo poo completely factually wrong on the regular when claiming to be an authority. AAAAAGUUHGHGHGHUGWas this one actually longer? Eh, gently caress it, final one is definitely shorter.
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Aug 9, 2023 00:35
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Man, you got a lot on your mind about video games.
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Aug 9, 2023 00:51
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BiggerBoat posted:Sometimes. And I admit that several of them are rather clever and often make you do things with your gadgets and poo poo that you might never try otherwise. I won’t defend the Batmobile ones, and I’m one of the people who actually like the Batmobile
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Aug 9, 2023 01:03
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BiggerBoat posted:Man, you got a lot on your mind about video games. and not even one of the better video games
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Aug 9, 2023 01:09
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Opopanax posted:The Riddle stuff is at least fairly interesting and there's usually some kind of puzzle to solve. That's at least more fun than just digging through every corner of the map to find something sitting around There are fun ones but there are more than a few which are just "come back when you have <Bat-gadget X>".
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Aug 9, 2023 02:04
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Coming in for a landing with a nice simple and easy complaint that doesn't descend into infinite  about RPG mechanics and quest design and will engender no further trouble, I'm sure.Bloodlines is really grating for one reason above all. This game is aggressively, endlessly, pathetically, obsessively, tiresomely horny. And not just a regular sort of  horny, but a very pervasive, skeevy, male gaze-y kind of horny. The kind that was all over games once upon a time, but taken to a maximum. I mean, they put a vampire dressed as a sexy schoolgirl right on the box. And ironically she's the rare character that's sort of like that for a reason. Maybe not that deep or complex a reason, but it's still for A purpose. The same can't really be said for the copious numbers of sex workers (all female), the strippers (obviously all female), the individual "blood dolls" that exist within each nightclub for the sole purpose of being seduced, thereby letting you drink their blood for free without penalty (guess their gender), oh and basically every other female NPC who is guaranteed to have a low cut top, visible thong strings, or some other affectation that wouldn't be out of place in one of those "I fixed the game by making all the females look like porn stars" mods. The one exception, a Nosferatu (the inhumanly butt ugly vampire type), you can naturally insult to her face about how fugly she is and her sidequest is specifically about her intense, violent jealousy towards the starlet who supplanted her after she got vamp'd. Meanwhile, the male characters tend to look either like regular dudes if they're vampires or cartoonish, exaggerated caricatures if they're not. Like I think maybe the intent was to evoke the stylized character portraits from Fallout? But somehow only a Certain Subset of characters got that treatment...Look, I know World of Darkness liked to push boundaries and toe controversy. I know the source material was anything but squeaky clean. I'm also not a prude. I'm not instantly mad just because there's a strip club in the game. But I did have to laugh when, either by a momentary physics glitch or by intentional design, it seemed like the strippers had their jiggle physics boosted. I had to second guess whether it was an intentional joke of sorts, or just yet another bit sophomoric horndoggedness. Then I found out that game has a dedicated console command to globally change the breast size of all female NPCs. . In the original game it was more like a binary switch, presumably going from big to very big. But don't worry, I'm told the unofficial patch got rid of that limitation.The real tipping point was a particular side quest chain. It's technically not a "real" side quest since it doesn't go in the quest log nor give any XP or other tangible gameplay reward. It's a scavenger hunt on behalf of the head Nosferatu. In exchange for each item he...adds a saucy pin-up of one of the main female characters to your apartment. Don't worry, the unofficial plus patch added more posters to collect and even threw in a bonus XP point if you go through the trouble of getting them all.I'm forced to even second-guess information from outside of the game. See, one of the few quests I did unfixably miss is that you're supposed to barge into a hospital room while trespassing and discover a dying woman. If you learned some info from some other characters, you'll know that feeding humans vampire blood can do useful things like heal their wounds. So you can save this poor woman's life, hooray! Oh, by the way, when a human drinks vampire blood it also subtly bends their will towards the vampire as their new master. She will eventually come find you again down the line and want to live with you in your apartment. Then you can ask her to dress up in different outfits for you. There is some actual factual character development involving trying to convince her to shake off the vampire stuff and move on, and if not she'll get killed thanks to the main plot (don't worry, the unofficial plus patch fixes that too). Now, one actual big benefit is that she'll leave behind the body armor, which is the strongest armor in the game, just in time for the endgame to kick off where you'll really need it. When people say you should make sure to save her because it's really worth doing, do they mean for the body armor or a different reason? Same thing with how people make a fuss about getting the apartment in the first place. It provides no greater benefit than a storage trunk (which you'll never actually need) and a one time gift of 3 blood packs. So when they say you should hold out for it anyway, do they mean because of how it overlaps with that one quest? Just because it's nicer than your starting craphole? Marginally more conveniently located? Or some other reason...  Chinatown features a female Japanese demon hunter, naturally.* I do not need to further describe her, you can effortlessly infer everything about her design and portrayal. I guess credit where it's due, she's dressed in actual, reasonable apparel. You can end your dealings with her by making a tentacle hentai joke, obviously. Despite being in the game for all of one short side quest, there is something of a fixation on this particular character in the modding scene for some truly unknowable, unguessable reason. But all of that is just one side of the coin. What really started to come into focus was what was so obviously missing from the game. In a game with codified mechanics for keeping secrets from the normies. In a game with tons of drama, cliques, and equal amounts of politicking and politics, up to and including needing permission from the Camarilla to sire new vampires being a key part of your own character's origins. In a game where blood being shared between people is kind of a whole central conceit and the game even prominently features a whole extended subplot about a bloodborne illness infecting humans and potentially becoming a problem for vampires alike. HOW THE gently caress IS THIS GAME SO PAINFULLY, STIFINGLY STRAIGHT???? I don't give a gently caress that it's from 2003 or that it's published by Activision. This should be the most obvious, gayest poo poo you could put in a game and it somehow ended up with the bare minimum, barely extant representation. Full disclosure: Many early encounters and basic stuff like the aforementioned blood dolls are playersexual, but as every last sexual encounter sans one is with a lady and the exception is exclusive to women, you get the classic rubric of guy on girl being the default and girl on girl is just awesome  . Guy on guy? Who would want that?? To be honest I've heard contradictory statements, that male/female character choice makes no difference at all or that playing seduction on a male character doesn't do very much. Best I've been able to read up on there's exactly three direct references to actually defined sexual preferences in the entire game - what sounds like a loving joke dialogue option where male characters can flirt with one of the first hostile NPCs in the game, which sounds like it weirds him out so he waves you on past, men can also flirt with a snooty restaurant critic who exists for literally about 30 seconds of game time, and finally if you try and flirt with a specific female character way late in the game (who I guess based on context is ostensibly a devout Catholic) as a woman, she gets offended. That's literally it. If I'm grasping for straws there's a generic male NPC model that's got the whole gasmask Psycho Mantis look going on. That's sorta kinky I guess? Somebody's into that probably?  At face value the game makes a bigger deal of how the aforementioned schoolgirl outfitted woman likes to sleep with humans and that's just gross, but implicitly the developers are communicating a much more important message: Holy poo poo, boobs!!!! Just a bit of as a treat: Looking into what exactly the hell Seduction actually does reveals that about half of its checks take the form of people passively thinking your character is hot stuff, meaning it's not even really seduction, it's more like a general comeliness score. One of the skills that governs Seduction IS Appearance, but the other one is Subterfuge (which I guess also says, uh, something all by itself). So I'm still gonna say gently caress you, game.*Since it was previously mentioned, I was honestly surprised to find that Chinatown, while still very much full of the cliche orientalist crap and dodgy accents, was nowhere near as dreadful as I was expecting it to be. IE, the whitest programmer on staff imitating that one South Park character. That said, special shoutout to the shopkeeper standing around in full Chinese military regalia, who talks about how you expect, who attempts to claim to be a simple herbal remedies seller, who your character instantly sees through. At which point he pushes a button and his shelves flip around like in a spy move to reveal guns for sale. Pretty sure that guy originated from the cutting room floor of a different game and somehow got into this one by mistake. Also, similar to the Japanese demon hunter there is also a specific establishment in Chinatown with a conspicuously Japanese name you need to infiltrate. The quest giver lampshades it, then tells you not to worry about it. Oh, okay then. All done. 
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Aug 9, 2023 02:41
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I have been reading the long Bloodlines posts. I don't really have anything to add but I thought they were funny and insightful about a game that's fairly famous but not analyzed much other than being notoriously glitchy. They did start to unearth some vague memories about the modding community being completely insane? Like there's one main community mod made by someone who is crazy possessive over anyone editing their work or there's two competing ones who viscerally hate each other or something like that?
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Aug 9, 2023 03:01
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I feel like i can see eternity
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Aug 9, 2023 03:12
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The worst thing about Arkham Knight is it's super-focused on the Batmobile but it's the shittiest batmobile. You can get the 1966 one, but you're only allowed to use it after everything is done because the developers hate fun I guess
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Aug 9, 2023 03:16
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They didn't want to have non-combat Batmobiles until there was no combat left.
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Aug 9, 2023 03:24
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Splicer posted:more weight
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Aug 9, 2023 03:29
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mycot posted:
I don't know about VtM's community, but are you sure you're not thinking of the drama around the KotoR 2 restoration groups?
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Aug 9, 2023 03:40
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Randalor posted:I don't know about VtM's community, but are you sure you're not thinking of the drama around the KotoR 2 restoration groups? The V:tM:B modding drama has been around for-loving-ever. Wesp's unofficial patch mod is the "good" one. Tessmage's unofficial patch mod is the one that has a dirty toilet texture named "wesp" in the file because that's the kind of classy fucker Tessmage is. That bit of trivia is probably 15 years old by now and may have been removed (or I've misremembered it). I think both of them started by trying to be a "pure bugfix" sort of mod, but, well, Bloodlines is 20 years old and people get bored and add new things over time. IIRC, the KoTOR 2 stuff is pretty tame in comparison, though it was great when the 'new' restoration mod dropped, basically saying "gently caress those other guys for taking so long, we did it ourselves." But also, there's a reason a lot of the stuff cut from KoTOR 2 was cut, and there's no reason to pad out Nar Shaddaa (or anywhere else) with even more trash fights. Fifty Farts has a new favorite as of 04:20 on Aug 9, 2023 |
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Aug 9, 2023 04:18
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I remember back in the day the drama between Garry's Mod and whatever that other one that made the leaf blower
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Aug 9, 2023 04:26
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Either Minecraft or one of the Sims games (or maybe both) had mods that would crash your game if they detected mods from somebody the mod-maker didn't like. And of course, one can't forget Arthmoor (though we all should), the Unofficial Patch guy for most of the last few Bethesda games. He also just changes poo poo because he wants to rather than for any bug-fixing-related reason, like removing some of the voiced lines in Fallout 4 because they weren't subtitled, so obviously they were left in the game by mistake. It's not the most egregious thing he's done, but it's a perfect example of his attitude - he thinks he knows better than the developers what should be in their game. He also made an Open Cities mod for Skyrim that added big ugly Oblivion Gates to all the cities. A goon (I'm pretty sure it was a goon) made a mod that just removed the gates and made Arthmoor so mad that it got taken off the Nexus (big mod-hosting site if anyone is unaware).
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Aug 9, 2023 04:37
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Randalor posted:I don't know about VtM's community, but are you sure you're not thinking of the drama around the KotoR 2 restoration groups? beats for junkies posted:The V:tM:B modding drama has been around for-loving-ever. Wesp's unofficial patch mod is the "good" one. Tessmage's unofficial patch mod is the one that has a dirty toilet texture named "wesp" in the file because that's the kind of classy fucker Tessmage is. That bit of trivia is probably 15 years old by now and may have been removed (or I've misremembered it). I think both of them started by trying to be a "pure bugfix" sort of mod, but, well, Bloodlines is 20 years old and people get bored and add new things over time. beats for junkies posted:Either Minecraft or one of the Sims games (or maybe both) had mods that would crash your game if they detected mods from somebody the mod-maker didn't like.
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Aug 9, 2023 04:47
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John Murdoch posted:[...] Bloodlines is really grating for one reason above all. This game is aggressively, endlessly, pathetically, obsessively, tiresomely horny. [...] I've long thought that Bloodlines was celebrated, in large part, precisely because of this horniness and the general alternative and campy vibe the whole thing has. You point out that it's very hetero in terms of who it sexualizes and how, but I also think it's very queer coded under that (which you also hint at). So I think there's this mix of people who like things along one or more of those lines that like it especially hard because it's one of the closest things to actually delivering on those. Most games are extremely up-tight compared to Bloodlines so if you wanted something more horny or crazy or queer then you weren't going to find much better than Bloodlines, at least in the AAA space.
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Aug 9, 2023 04:55
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Snackula posted:Ah that sucks to hear about Ys IX Monstrum Nox, I played right up until the point she opens the flower shop and if that's where you dip it's actually still a pretty positive arc for the cat girl. In general I think the idea of that game being set in a massive sprawling city is very neat and it's adorable how they have a bunch of Spider-Man 2018 movement stuff going on but in practice you're spending all your time running around grimy Xbox 360 townscapes and sewers while fighting very samey looking monsters all the time, coming off VIII's ferocious Dreamcast blue skies energy it's like a dramatic reenactment of gaming's lurch into the dour brown bloom era circa 2006. Monstrum Nox felt like a pretty big step down from Lacrimosa of Dana in just about every way but the movement. While on modern Y's, it does carry the same 2 large issues that LoD did. 1. The horde battle mode is loving terrible. It was a slog in in LoD because most of the boss fights in there were just giant stacks of HP that took forever to whittle down. MNOX doesn't quite have the issue with boss HP, instead most of the defense missions have a part where the crystal is ambushed and if you haven't expected it and already been at the point the enemies arrive, there is a good chance they will kill it. 2. The 3 weapon types available mean there is no reason to use most of the characters. You need one of each for most areas. So anyone that had the same weapon type as Adol was out, and there was no reason not to take the strongest person of the other types. There was gear to actually change this in Nox, but it took up a useful accessory slot.
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Aug 9, 2023 05:02
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e: posted in wrong thread lol
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Aug 9, 2023 08:44
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beats for junkies posted:Either Minecraft or one of the Sims games (or maybe both) had mods that would crash your game if they detected mods from somebody the mod-maker didn't like. Minecraft had mods that would do poo poo like release infinite swarms of murderous bees if they detected a mod that the mod creator didn't like.
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Aug 9, 2023 10:59
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Meowywitch posted:Idk how do you not have a 1 terabyte sad yet? SAD is wretched, we don't need 1TB of it.
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Aug 9, 2023 11:08
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I wish Steam had selective downloads for asset quality levels because looking at DOS2 the PC version is 100GB but the Switch one's in the 20GB range which seems to indicate the other 80 goes into stuff that's not strictly necessary for the game to run. Baldur's Gate 3 is on Mac too and a 150GB disk space requirement is pretty brutal on an M1 machine with the storage baked directly onto the SoC considering the Macbook Air still starts with 256GB. Like yeah I know lol Mac gaming and this really shouldn't be the machine you buy to run games but like, I happen to have this thing, and it'll run this game, I just can't because it comes with a bunch of 8K textures I don't need.
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Aug 9, 2023 11:54
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Snackula posted:I wish Steam had selective downloads for asset quality levels because looking at DOS2 the PC version is 100GB but the Switch one's in the 20GB range which seems to indicate the other 80 goes into stuff that's not strictly necessary for the game to run. Baldur's Gate 3 is on Mac too and a 150GB disk space requirement is pretty brutal on an M1 machine with the storage baked directly onto the SoC considering the Macbook Air still starts with 256GB. It's sound files and textures. Low and High res install options should be a more common thing.
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Aug 9, 2023 13:10
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Phigs posted:I've long thought that Bloodlines was celebrated, in large part, precisely because of this horniness and the general alternative and campy vibe the whole thing has. You point out that it's very hetero in terms of who it sexualizes and how, but I also think it's very queer coded under that (which you also hint at). So I think there's this mix of people who like things along one or more of those lines that like it especially hard because it's one of the closest things to actually delivering on those. Most games are extremely up-tight compared to Bloodlines so if you wanted something more horny or crazy or queer then you weren't going to find much better than Bloodlines, at least in the AAA space. I think what it ends up boiling down to is the same tension that exists within Fallout. The classic games had both a salacious streak and a tendency to throw in goofy bullshit for a laugh. And beyond not all of that sitting well with me either, it feels like it fit a bit better in the already skewed and exaggerated world of Fallout. Bloodlines presents a more contemporary, realistic setting (and again, credit where it's due, I love the atmosphere and I have a soft spot for Source engine stuff in general) but then tries to do the same routine and it spoils it for me. I'm not a scholar of White Wolf, but my impression is that the source material was more edgy and gothic. Still campy, but a different kind of campy. It's sort of like marveling at the fully realized world of GTAV right up until you spin the camera around a little too far and there's another one of those Sprunk billboards making a lazy joke. Like drat, the haunted hotel quest does a lot with a little and still holds up pretty well even today, even having seen it twice before. I wish the game was more up to that standard. New Vegas of course continues to be a relevant example with the decision to separate out a lot of the goofy stuff into Wild Wasteland. Even without it on, NV has some silly stuff, and that's okay. Fisto is good clean fun! I don't need everything to be po-faced and deathly serious, I just like my games to have a little more restraint. Also, I think critically it's a full court press of issues. I could brush off the horny if I was enjoying the mechanics more, I could laugh off the deficiencies in the plot if I could roleplay more effectively. It's the weight of everything I've jabbered about pulling the game down equally. And even after all that? I'm still probably gonna file it in my "try replaying this in another few years" category. Cuz maybe I'm just at the wrong place in my life or just not in quite the right mood for it. Or maybe Bloodlines 2 will be out by then! 
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Aug 9, 2023 13:46
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