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Dark Souls 3 tells you the world is ending and you need to go kill these specific guys, just like 1. Like your HQ has a bunch of giant thrones with the plot bosses's names on them. The only ambiguity is whether the thing everyone's telling you to do is actually a good thing again, just like 1.
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Oct 27, 2023 18:57
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Endless Dungeons. Roguelite turret defence 3rd person shooter with multiple characters to play! Trailers look good, only one review. “Good game but lost progress 3/5 stars”. Progress loss happens, I am bored here is my $40 1. The mobs die in the spawn on Xbox. There are no mobs. 2. Key actions are one button. Pickup items, open doors, activating events and building turrets. 3. The escort target gets stuck on wall before one boss fight every time Did anyone play this before releasing it? I’m taking the $40 hit so I can keep my 1 star review up on Xbox
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Oct 27, 2023 18:58
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Crowetron posted:Dark Souls 3 tells you the world is ending and you need to go kill these specific guys, just like 1. Like your HQ has a bunch of giant thrones with the plot bosses's names on them. The only ambiguity is whether the thing everyone's telling you to do is actually a good thing again, just like 1. uhh hence why I said the doesn't require you to know the lore thing. It's not just the first game in the new series, it's also way more competently written. edit: Like you're right but it banks so much on its predecessors that I dunno how much you'd get about its concepts if you started there, as it does not really explain them. CJacobs has a new favorite as of 19:01 on Oct 27, 2023 |
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Oct 27, 2023 18:59
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CJacobs posted:uhh hence why I said the doesn't require you to know the lore thing. It's not just the first game in the new series, it's also way more competently written. You also said 2 and onward gave up on the straight forward set-up, but really only 2 did.
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Oct 27, 2023 19:01
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Morpheus posted:Playing Killzone: hell yeah take down these bad guys! Look how they're dressed, we're the good guys! except if you dig deeper into the lore you find out the Helghast's original situation was Them Doing It To Themselves and then blaming the ISA a generation later so Visari could justify his invasion. The Helghan corp was setting itself up to become Weyland-Yutani and create a monopolistic stranglehold over all space travel. EarthGov understandably doesnt want this and sends the UN fleet to shut them down and utterly obliterates this private corporation's private militia. they tell the survivng Helghan supporters that if they want to stay on Vekta they need to abide by galactic law. The Helghan Corp pulls a gently caress you and moves of its own volition to Helghan because theyd rather breath poison so they can live in their libertarian utopia. Vekta and Earth's response is essentially "weird flex but okay". decades later theyve all become a bunch of fascists and Visari is able to militarize them to attack Vetka... queue KZ1 and Liberation which once again end with EarthGov showing up with their advanced tech to vaporize the lovely colonial Helghast fleet. In the aftermath EarthGov orders Vekta to not retaliate... but Vektan's gov, a bunch of warmongering neocolonials, launch a counterattack anyways. Queue Killzone 2 and 3. EarthGov has washed their hands of their two idiot AlphaCentauri colonies so they dont show up... and KZ3 ends with the ISA suvivors accidentally irradiating all of Helghan in an attempt to stop the Helghast CEO from irradiating all of Earth. in the aftermath, EarthGov tells VektaGov to go gently caress itself for launching the counter attack and forces them to take all of Helghan's refugees creating a clumsy Cold War Germany/Israel and Palestine metaphor in Killzone Shadow Fall. the leaders of all worlds are all varying degrees of horrifying, including the offscreen EarthGov. Killzone is more about the individual soldiers getting caught up in politics they dont understand to fight senseless wars in neverending cyclical violence. This is why Killzone Mercenary is the best because you play as an actual Earthman PMC who works for whoever is paying the most and the ISA and Helghan leaders are both cartoonishly evil and yet the biggest villain of all winds up being your PMC boss who is hoping to continue the forever war so that he can make mad profits forever.
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Oct 27, 2023 19:05
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sorry i get real excited about killzone
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Oct 27, 2023 19:10
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Dark Souls 2 is a story about going everywhere you can see and killing stuff and then looking up online where to go because it's as obtuse as poo poo and then killing things in those places until you can't kill any more things and then you stop and go look up the story online.
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Oct 27, 2023 19:10
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Sally posted:sorry i get real excited about killzone Killzone rules so it's all good
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Oct 27, 2023 19:14
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Souls games actively resist any singular narrative interpretation of events. So you can mulch through the entire story like a psychotic human lawnmower or get super deep into the surrounding lore, it doesn't matter either way and your efforts were likely all for nothing regardless.
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Oct 27, 2023 19:14
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exquisite tea posted:Souls games actively resist any singular narrative interpretation of events. So you can mulch through the entire story like a psychotic human lawnmower or get super deep into the surrounding lore, it doesn't matter either way and your efforts were likely all for nothing regardless. As long as I get a pretty moon wife in the end.
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Oct 27, 2023 19:18
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If I remember correctly (it’s been at least one decade, maybe two) the immediate prequel to Starsiege, Earthsiege 2, also had Prometheus making it very clear how much he hated humans in the mission briefings/story. Nothing like the human scream machines though, goddamn.
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Oct 27, 2023 19:27
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Crowetron posted:The intro to Dark Souls is basically just a hit list of dudes you need to kill. Same with DS3 and Elden Ring. By the time you get to DS3 it's pretty streamlined, but DS1 spends a good bit of time on backstory stuff. Either way, a new player isn't really going to know how vital any of that information is.  And Elden Ring changed things up because while you get a few nods towards future bosses, a lot more of the hype goes towards the characters connected to the different endings.
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Oct 27, 2023 19:31
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I know this will never be a popular stance but a mob is not a single monster. A mob is a mob, goddammit. God how I've hated that term mob mob mob mob mob
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Oct 27, 2023 20:37
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credburn posted:I know this will never be a popular stance but a mob is not a single monster. A mob is a mob, goddammit. God how I've hated that term "Mob" in that context is short for "mobile object" and is a holdover from, like, the 90s or something. I think it mostly gained popularity in the last decade because Minecraft uses the term. You can have a mob of mobs, if there is a large group of enemies or whatever.
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Oct 27, 2023 20:44
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Lets mob that large mob of mobs
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Oct 27, 2023 20:46
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sounds like something a gangster in the Mob would say
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Oct 27, 2023 20:47
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DontMockMySmock posted:I think it mostly gained popularity in the last decade because Minecraft uses the term. mobs new...
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Oct 27, 2023 21:06
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The correct plural term is actually “moba” hence the genre name.
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Oct 27, 2023 21:39
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The Tony Hawk Pro Skater remake that came out a while back is pretty dope and just about as fun as it ever was. But gently caress me if I can do tricks using the analog stick. From what I can gather, most players use the d-pad and the game's combo system is built totally around it. But just rolling around skating, to me, works better with analog. Problem is, my muscle memory is hosed to the point that I can't keep my thumb on the d-pad anymore since, in most games, that's used for item selection and poo poo.
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Oct 27, 2023 23:40
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Grab an 8bit do analogless controller I guess. That's how I had to do it to stop being bad at crash bandicoot after years of analog gaming.
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Oct 27, 2023 23:46
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Gaius Marius posted:Grab an 8bit do analogless controller I guess. That's how I had to do it to stop being bad at crash bandicoot after years of analog gaming. I thought about that but not sure I want to buy a controller just to play ONE game when I can just learn to adjust. But, drat, muscle memory, man. So weird having to go backwards and re-learn, though, because I'm pretty old and just learning dual analog in the first place or even standard FPS controls took me for a good minute back in the day and now this lone game is making me play differently all over again. Even the original PS1 didn't use modern control schemes for a good while and even then it was only for certain games. I was d-pad for lyfe when this poo poo started and, now, decades later I can't re-acclimate myself to this zany input method. The thumb wants what it wants it seems. I have the same problem with older Resident Evil games. I used to wreck that poo poo and beat the gently caress out of those old tank control games but now I struggle with them.
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Oct 28, 2023 00:59
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The worst presentation of lore depends on the genre of game. In a laid back RPG, sure, give me some books to read or a conversation to engage with. In a fast paced shooter, don't. BL3 was loving painful with long, drawn out info dumps written by people who think brevity is the antithesis of wit. Just shut up and give me an arrow pointing to the next fight! The best kind of lore, though, enhances the plot without being necessary to figure out what's going on, and that's true for any form of media, not just games. Sure, it's cool to know that the dragon Snaggus has a weak point from where Saint Jeronimathematicus knicked it with the halberd Zenowaith, but showing me a glowing red gash in its side is good enough in the moment. It's Creative Writing 101: show, don't tell.
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Oct 28, 2023 03:03
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I really love the poo poo out of Starsector but god drat does it chap my rear end having an officer that I've got a long term plan for poo poo it all up by just not rolling the skill I want on level up even after dropping a story point on them.
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Oct 28, 2023 08:57
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Moreowind: I've very much hit the "more or less walking god" phase of the game (though not the story) so there's not a lot to say about mechanics right now. Having near-max speed/jumping still doesn't always feel like enough when it comes to craggy terrain, but otherwise I expect the game to continue to be smooth sailing gameplay-wise. What I'm going to instead gripe about is lots of little quest nitpick stuff. For one, you have the Webspinner collectathon which is horrendously opaque and basically not doable without outside help. There's 26 Sanguine items seeded across the game world. About half to two thirds of them are dumped into your lap by doing Morag Tong assassination quests and you're directed to two more, so that's nice. The rest are held by random NPCs, of which you might, if you're lucky, get hints towards two. It honestly feels like an unfinished idea that was left in the game because 85% of the work was done. Beyond just being something no regular player likely ever accomplished when the game first came out, said items are always obtained by killing their wearer and corpses despawn after 3 days. So if you didn't realize an NPC had a special item on them and left them to rot, oops, you're not completing the quest. And then on top of all that, the guy who gives you the quest either dies or goes away at the end of the Morag Tong quest line so if you don't find them all before then, oops again! Depending on your inclination towards min/maxing, the reward - a spell that's the only way to obtain the "Fortify Attack" (aka +accuracy) spell effect - is either just alright or ridiculously vital. Though by the time you could manage to cobble all those items together I question how you'd not already be pretty well kitted out... Re: Guilds. People like to complain that guilds in subsequent games were mindless, required no appropriate skills, and that Morrowind was so much better because the guilds were in conflict and you couldn't just waltz around being master of them all. But uh, none of that is really true? There's exactly two whole quests that put different guilds in conflict such that you'd ostensibly have to choose one over another, but if you can either avoid doing them or just use some pretty simple workarounds there's nothing actually stopping you from being master of all three.* It is true that you can't do literally every single guild quest, but that's down to very simple and clear conflicts of interest and you don't have to otherwise engage with them because there's a whole separate "good" path you're free to take. How skilled you actually have to be is also pretty dubious. Guilds have stat requirements to advance...but you can freely turn money into stats. And the requirements aren't even that tight. It's like 80 in one skill, 40 in two others? Something like that. Long and short of it, I'm Arch-Mage of the Mages Guild without really doing much wizarding at all. Which also plays into some more quest design gripes I have, which in this case basically boil down to the Mages Guild being really boring. There's only a scant few quests that sort-of involve using magic...but mainly "wizards are assholes who don't build stairs". And basically every time that's the case you can find levitation potions nearby or are outright given some. The only other magical task I remember offhand is needing to soul trap an enemy, and again you just get given some scrolls to do the job because the game can't actually anticipate how easily you can cast soul trap some other way. Beyond that, it's a lot of generic adventuring or being asked to do someone's dirty work. To be clear, there was some attempt at giving most of the quest givers in the guild their own flavor and character, but between the quests being so simplistic and the storytelling so thin, you don't get a lot of narrative thrust out of them. One is really obsessed with Dwemer stuff so you get sent to Dwemer ruins to find cool Dwemer stuff, another is clearly a piece of poo poo who's sending you to play muscle against people she doesn't like under the shaky pretense of things like "collecting guild dues", etc. but those threads don't really go anywhere, they're more just an excuse for a loosely themed collection of quests. (Okay technically you can choose to gently caress over the rear end in a top hat in a bit of karmic justice, but that's about it as climactic as it gets.) The cap off is a confusing bit of design where once you blunder your way to the top of the guild one of two things happens: If you talk to one particular NPC, she basically just offhandedly goes "hey you should go challenge the current useless Arch-Mage to a duel to the death and take over" OR for no real reason other than because, one of the other quest givers gets a letter from the mainland for the current Arch-Mage telling him to gently caress off and put somebody else in charge. It is funny that because he's such a useless blowhard he magnanimously names you Arch-Mage...then refuses to step down and just goes "hahah we'll just have TWO Arch-Mages". The material doesn't totally lack nuance, but it sure feels a little underbaked. By comparison, Oblivion's Mages Guild quest line had some really strong story beats and was only let down by Oblivion's various limitations. Skyrim's had more spectacle and felt like a fun magic-tinged adventure, but lacked real teeth. The other two guilds suffer from similar issues, though they are buoyed by a great deal of intrigue going on between the two, such that both the Fighters and Thieves guild can cap off with you murdering the corrupt leader of the Fighters. The Thieves Guild also gets a whole separate side plot of quests where you go full Robin Hood. I wish there had been more stuff like that. *Now, the Dunmer Great Houses, those you only get to pick one of no matter what. ...Excepting the bugs that let you potentially sneak into an extra one. Or just CHIMing your way into all three which some people feel compelled to do. But it's weird to conflate that with the guilds in later games. Closest thing is Skyrim's civil war, I guess. On the opposite side, I was hoping for more friction between the Imperials and the Tribunal/Great Houses, and there is a little bit (and it greatly informs the backstory and significant chunks of the main quest), but it feels like missed potential to not have a more uneasy peace between them. I guess that's technically a big part of the Fighter's Guild intrigue, but it otherwise feels weird to be a highly ranked and respected part of both churches with no one finding that odd. I know there's some faction reputation stuff baked in that tries to gesture towards the idea in a mechanical sense, but realistically it doesn't matter. One last little silly thing: As your reputation grows, people will openly regard you as being that cool adventurer that's been going around doing cool stuff. When it's random people you pass by on the street, it's a neat bit of flavor. When it's the Wolverine Hall Mages Guild which is a tiny single room stuffed with like 10+ people, teleporting in cause a cacophonous roar of everyone simultaneously greeting you. I guess that's a pitfall of being a celebrity.
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Oct 28, 2023 09:23
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Kitfox88 posted:I really love the poo poo out of Starsector but god drat does it chap my rear end having an officer that I've got a long term plan for poo poo it all up by just not rolling the skill I want on level up even after dropping a story point on them. yeah it sucks poo poo. you can edit your save file to sort it out, but it really should be something doable in-game
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Oct 28, 2023 10:16
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One thing that can be kind of annoying with Alan Wake 2 is that early on it can be kind of obtuse what you actually need to do in order to continue the story. Specifically it isn't enough that you the player know what to do next you have to make sure that the character figures it out too by going into the Mind Place and piecing together clues on a board. Also the game can be kind of buggy like in the first boss fight I ran away so hard that he despawned and never came back leaving me stuck in the arena.
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Oct 28, 2023 12:41
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OutOfPrint posted:The worst presentation of lore depends on the genre of game. In a laid back RPG, sure, give me some books to read or a conversation to engage with. In a fast paced shooter, don't. 
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Oct 28, 2023 13:01
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muscles like this! posted:One thing that can be kind of annoying with Alan Wake 2 is that early on it can be kind of obtuse what you actually need to do in order to continue the story. Specifically it isn't enough that you the player know what to do next you have to make sure that the character figures it out too by going into the Mind Place and piecing together clues on a board. I got stuck in the first chapter for an extra hour or so exploring everything and I didnt realize I had one clue I forgot to place on the board. Then the protagonist suddenly finds the next plot item in the exact spot I just searched. Theres this one 6/10 review nobody took seriously that said you move way too slow and it takes forever to do things. At that point I could sorta relate. WaltherFeng has a new favorite as of 13:33 on Oct 28, 2023 |
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Oct 28, 2023 13:28
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WaltherFeng posted:Theres this one 6/10 review nobody took seriously that said you move way too slow and it takes forever to do things. At that point I could sorta relate. Ah, it's an Alan Wake game.
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Oct 28, 2023 14:03
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the tony hawk stuff is super relatable bc i grew up playing those games and then the skate series with twin stick control and when i went back to the tony hawk games i couldnt control my skater with any precision without analogue sticks but you just cant get the insane high scores or even pull specific tricks consistently for objectives without the dpad
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Oct 28, 2023 15:35
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Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:yeah it sucks poo poo. you can edit your save file to sort it out, but it really should be something doable in-game Got a guide for this? I haven't mucked with save editing in ages, since there's a mod to let you not so cheaty remove deciv pop now and adding a stable point for relay is base game.
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Oct 28, 2023 17:15
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not a particularly detailed one, i'm afraid - 
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Oct 28, 2023 17:26
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orcane posted:I can even live with long info dumps if I can skip them, or read them (logs that go into a menu and I never look at them again) or if they're relayed in the form of "calls" which can happen while I'm traveling or doing exploration, but please don't info dump me with some vid call while the world is exploding all around me. BL3's problem was that most of it was delivered in face to face conversations with NPCs who wouldn't let you skip ahead, continue the quest or do *anything else* until the info dump was done And yet it was still somehow better than the Pre-Sequel for that. I got so tired of watching Handsome Jack shoot those idiots out of an airlock and that is something I should never have to say.
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Oct 28, 2023 18:04
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Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:not a particularly detailed one, i'm afraid - Enough to bumble it out from there, thanks 
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Oct 28, 2023 18:28
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Kitfox88 posted:Enough to bumble it out from there, thanks Be sure to backup your save file first, just to be safe. It's easy to mess up a bracket or comma or other tag and make the game reject it. It's pretty straightforward once you find the things you're looking for, though. One of the game data files under starsector-core should have all the skills listed out with their proper ids
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Oct 28, 2023 18:40
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Cleretic posted:A question that's struck me, and I want to hear what comes to mind for anyone else: In Destiny you had to go to a website outside of the game to read the lore you had collected.
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Oct 28, 2023 21:31
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In Alan Wake 2, you can unlock cool songs from radios and cutscenes to play in your mind palace. But unless I'm missing something, leaving the radio menu instantly turns them off, so you can't actually put on some jams while you go over evidence.
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Oct 28, 2023 22:08
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Oh yeah, I dunno if it's something wrong with my mod setup that's probably not worth trying to fix midstream or some bugs just haven't ever been addressed or are only addressed in further tertiary mods or what, but I've run afoul of all manner of quest bugs in Morrowind that I'd've thought had been squashed by now. It's mostly been bizarre, uniquely broken stuff so it's a coin toss which of the above applies; the wording on some of the patches heavily imply that some bugs are simply beyond modders' immediate purview because they can't be fixed using mod tools. Like an early Tribunal Temple quest needs you to convince a plague carrier to get the hell out of the city. I went straight to her location, rested in front of her in case I needed to use persuasion, then watched her blink out of existence right in front of my eyes.  There's a common bug where she suddenly can't be found in the game world, but I didn't expect to witness it going down.On the upside, there's so much institutional knowledge built up around MW that the UESP wiki pretty exhaustively lists known bugs and will usually offer up the solution - a quick console command more often than not - right there on the page. But it's still confounding that a game so old and equally so picked over still has really flagrant problems that have slipped through the cracks of multiple layers of unofficial patches. John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 07:26 on Oct 29, 2023 |
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Oct 29, 2023 07:12
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Alan Wake 2: I’m not a fan of the changes to flashlight boost. I appreciate that you don’t actually need to break the shields on enemies like in the original, but having the boost shortened to small bursts rather than a continuous thing that burns battery as long as you use it feels off, especially if an enemy stumbles out of the beam from the initial stagger.
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Oct 29, 2023 08:38
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Oh hey, another "bad approaches to lore" game: Lords of the Fallen. It does the typical Dark Souls item description thing... except the item descriptions are all locked behind one or both of the two spellcasting stats. So if you're playing a non-caster build a typical item description will look like: Pureblade Shield A shield used by Pureblade soldiers Increase radiance to gain further insight [this is where all the interesting stuff actually is] This poo poo is such a bad idea! It's probably only a small fraction of your playerbase that is actually going to read the item descriptions for lore, so why gate that even harder? My second run actually was a radiance character, but by then the game had trained me not to bother looking at item descriptions, and I still couldn't read items that required inferno or inferno+radiance anyway. Some non-lore related stuff. The game has a weird checkpoint system. You've got "vestiges" which are your normal bonfires, but you've also got flowerbeds where you can plant a checkpoint. This doesn't sound so bad, but only one flower can be blooming at once so most checkpoints disappear once you've moved on a bit. And the seeds are rare enough that you'll probably start running out on your first playthrough, at least. And you can only hold 5 at once so any you pick up while your inventory is full are just consigned to oblivion. Within like a day of launch they cut the price of the seeds at the vendor by over half and changed his inventory from 5 to 99. But why put a bandaid on something you could just fix? The mechanic sucks full stop. Just give the player unlimited seeds and make them not despawn when you plant another one. There's also the new game+ mode. First thing it does is remove the permanent checkpoints entirely, forcing you to rely on flowers. poo poo sucks! Nobody wants this! Also, the enemy stat boosts are ridiculous. NG+ Lords of the Fallen enemies get a bigger boost than NG+7 Dark Souls enemies. The later bosses require almost perfect execution because they have so much hp that if they're atrit-ing you at all you won't last long enough to beat them (or they just one shot you). It's weird when the balance is totally fine and maybe a bit on the easy side for the first playthrough. They recently announced that they're changing NG+ so you can adjust everything about it including enemy stat boosts and whether checkpoints are gone. That's good and all, but I'm just imagining the game being directed by a weirdo who plays souls game in a very particular way saying "this is my game so we're going to do things my way" while the rank and file developers say "this poo poo sucks, we should change it". Then the game is released and all the players say "this poo poo sucks, change it" and they respond with "we hear you, we're changing it". I just can't conceive of an entire dev team who are presumably gamers themselves thinking these were fun ideas that the player base would enjoy. It's frustrating because the combat and build variety are good, but it's like a 7.0 game that could be an 8.5 it weren't for all these weird own-goals. The Moon Monster has a new favorite as of 15:39 on Oct 29, 2023 |
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Oct 29, 2023 15:36
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