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Weird West is a game I'm glad I bought but I will never finish. The actual gameplay just... kinda drags, in the end, for me, even though the concepts are good a lot of the fighting (and too much of the game is fighting) is just not very enjoyable. Which sucks, because it's a game that really made me want to like it! Anyways, game balance wise what I think would be cool is if immersive sims just a did a final pass to label abilities based on how powerful they seem in late playtesting and then just have a "Projected Difficulty" prior to each upgrade. No actual balancing or mechanics changings, just "If you take this skill your Estimated Difficulty becomes Easy". Players who want power would have a guide, and players who want challenge a convenient list of abilities to not use, and everyone else just continues to pick whatever they want and ignore it.
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May 20, 2024 05:10
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Rev. Melchisedech Howler posted:Weird West is a great if flawed game. It's been a bit since I've played it so can't remember the specifics but I remember having to mod away some issues with the companions - seem to remember they were a little too happy to walk into your line of fire. Yeah I believe the bit about companions. They're really happy to run in front of me; but worse, they gently caress up stealth pretty badly despite being completely invisible. The thing is, Weird West is actually pretty good about being an immersive sim-like where there's a little bit of space in between perfect stealth assassin gameplay and clusterfuck full loud. Sometimes that first shot won't kill but a few followups from sufficient range will, or I will shoot and then fall back before getting shot back, or am just far enough away that it becomes a limited engagement against two or three enemies without alerting the whole level. Or, well, it would except the moment the enemy aggros my friends sprint in with shotguns. I fully agree that the combat is very clunky though, and keep feeling like I wish it were turnbased or realtime with pause. Each character has three or four abilities with five weapons that all have three to five abilities each. There are about 25 active abilities to be thinking about and using, ideally, and the combat happens fast, usually a few shots kill and there are a half dozen enemies so characters drop in one or two volleys. This is on top of having to fight the dogass aiming system which makes even simple things like lining up shots and throwing dynamite a labor, and the result is that I don't use basically any of the abilities except the Combat Focus-like power that you start the game with. Anyway, it's too bad; there's a lot of Prey in this game in a good way, and even more Mooncrash. I wish they could have committed harder, but it's good to hear that they are working on something new. When I looked up the studio their site doesn't say what they are working on, and there's not a lot of info about them out there.
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May 20, 2024 07:38
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SCheeseman posted:It's not the same assemblage of mechanics, but it's still a grab bag. Most of the fun I had with Prey was solving the environmental puzzles, exploring the levels, that sort of thing. That goes for most imsims, OG System Shock feels like poo poo as a shooter and that's a game that puts an emphasis on combat. Nonetheless, it's considered a GOAT. My bad, I assumed you talking more about a stealth vs. combat dichotomy rather than all of the other general imsim Stuff. Hopefully we can both agree that Prey isn't really a Stealth Game in the traditional sense.  Though I guess even the exploration falls a bit flat for me because inevitably your discoveries feed back into the same gameplay problems. If your reward for solving an environmental puzzle is a neuromod or two, but neuromods have become severely devalued due to bad balance...then we're right back to square one. Like, it was a momentary thrill to discover that they actually let you go nuts and unlock every single skill in the skill tree if you wanna, but it was only momentary because it came with the realization that there's a bunch of dud picks. My overall sense of power was only marginally higher coming out of that process, and really only because of the dry "15% resistance to element" passives. This wasn't a problem in the early hours - the simple solution of breaking into the security office to get an early shotgun and similarly stumbling across other new weapons was always a thrill and skill progression is way more limited. But pretty quickly everything started to feel routine. The only other thing the game has to shake things up beyond the Nightmare is plot and story stuff, and well, I'm already on record as finding the writing to be rather lackluster. There are a few cute things you can find like the DnD game and its accompanying sidequest, or more ominous things like the chef subplot or the memory wipe chamber, but a those a few standout moments amongst loads of random hidden loot, forgettable logs, or even just checking people off the list.
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May 20, 2024 08:02
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SCheeseman posted:It's not the same assemblage of mechanics, but it's still a grab bag. Most of the fun I had with Prey was solving the environmental puzzles, exploring the levels, that sort of thing. That goes for most imsims, OG System Shock feels like poo poo as a shooter and that's a game that puts an emphasis on combat. Nonetheless, it's considered a GOAT. Im sorry, I like the original SS, but it was never the GOAT. It was abandonware for a long time even.
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May 20, 2024 12:00
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Dyz posted:Im sorry, I like the original SS, but it was never the GOAT. It was abandonware for a long time even. A game being abandonware for a long period has nothing to do with its quality. SS has always been highly regarded among its niche. This medium is just particularly bad at preserving its history.
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May 20, 2024 14:04
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aniviron posted:It's not Prey or Arkane but there's no thread for it so you can't stop me: I've been playing Weird West, which is Raphael Colantonio's game from a few years back, the immersive sim action RPG set in, well, the fantasy wild west. It's good so far! Has a loooot of Prey's DNA in it. Clearly doesn't have a massive budget, but as of now I'd say if you like Prey it's worth trying. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3998883 
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May 20, 2024 14:14
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I bounced pretty hard off Weird West but that was really down to the wonky aiming mechanic. Was never good at twin stick shooters anyway. But we’ll always have memories (dev tweets abt the build crashing bc cornfields caught fire and converted to popcorn) Anyway where immersive sim design is concerned, you don’t tune to prevent overpower, you tune to prevent underpower and push viability of builds. DX is pretty good with this even if a souped up starting pistol will own everything in the game. SS2 is bad at this because things like psi are interesting in practice but not truly reliable enough to commit to. Dishonored 2 is quite good abt this, though obviously Dishonored 1 ties its narrative to play style in a way that turned off a lot of ppl (myself included). Prey doesn’t have a ton of combat builds, but nearly all of them are perfectly viable — you say “psychoshock is OP”, I say “maxed out taser is OP”, and that both of us can say that means something abt the game. But it’s not perfect by any means: Enemies are so canny that even with full investment in stealth, a ghost run would be close to impossible; turrets in the core game are so fragile that they’re only useful against mimics and operators; GLOO’s stopping power against things gnarlier than a phantom is basically nil (and hilariously, the fall of a levitating enemy will break the GLOO stun effect).
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May 20, 2024 17:35
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Basic Chunnel posted:I bounced pretty hard off Weird West but that was really down to the wonky aiming mechanic. Was never good at twin stick shooters anyway. But we’ll always have memories (dev tweets abt the build crashing bc cornfields caught fire and converted to popcorn) I don't even think it's twinsticks, WW just has a terrible implementation. I've played plenty of things realtime top down perspective and even worked on one professionally and none of them have felt awful and clunky like this. It's weird. But yeah, I keep playing because of the funny emergent stuff, it's a good enough hook. I've been having this bug lately where every time I go to sell stuff at a trader, my horse has a single piece of meat on it that I didn't put in its saddlebags. I assumed I had just been accidentally storing some junk in there until one day I went to sell after a tough combat encounter and found a piece of cooked meat. Normally you can't store cooked food, as soon as you cook a raw ingredient it gets eaten. How could I have put that in there? Unless... I had just finished a tough fight where a wildfire spread out of control and my horse ran through it and set itself on fire before fleeing off-map. The horse was spawning the piece of meat that you normally get for killing one, and I had been repeatedly selling that without realizing it. Also, you said what I was thinking last night about Prey/immsim balance a more eloquently than I would have. It's funny to me to hear the insistence that Psychoshock is OP, because yeah it is, but also of all my friends who played the game all but one got scared by the warning about Typhon mods and thus played human only. They all insist that the most broken build in the game is combat focus + shotgun & mods, and handily dominated every challenge in the game on the hardest difficulties. I've done both, and I think you would really struggle to make a bad build in Prey, you'd almost have to have the expertise to know the few things that are the least useful and pick the ones that intentionally don't synergise; and even then, if you're picking up enough neuromods, eventually you will get something that's quite good. Ah, thanks! I guess this one never made it into the games index thread.
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May 20, 2024 22:12
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aniviron posted:It's not Prey or Arkane but there's no thread for it so you can't stop me: I've been playing Weird West, which is Raphael Colantonio's game from a few years back, the immersive sim action RPG set in, well, the fantasy wild west. It's good so far! Has a loooot of Prey's DNA in it. Clearly doesn't have a massive budget, but as of now I'd say if you like Prey it's worth trying. You just made a sale. I only wish we had that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind treatment so I could play Prey all over again.
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May 20, 2024 22:28
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Basic Chunnel posted:Prey doesn’t have a ton of combat builds, but nearly all of them are perfectly viable — you say “psychoshock is OP”, I say “maxed out taser is OP”, and that both of us can say that means something abt the game. But it’s not perfect by any means: Enemies are so canny that even with full investment in stealth, a ghost run would be close to impossible; turrets in the core game are so fragile that they’re only useful against mimics and operators; GLOO’s stopping power against things gnarlier than a phantom is basically nil (and hilariously, the fall of a levitating enemy will break the GLOO stun effect). You're circling around my point, really. I'm not singling out psychoshock as a balance outlier, what I'm saying is that there's so many incredibly strong tactics that it starts to render choices meaningless. It's like a more abstract version of the Deus Ex: Human Revolution problem where player choice often just boils down to which flavor of alternate entrance you want to take, all of which dump you out at the same location. And more vitally, regardless of which OP button you press on the enemies, for me it got boring really quickly. To which I point the finger at the enemy design as being the truly biggest issue. Tthe game fails to throw enough interesting stuff at you to push back against your ludicrous level of power. It really feels like they struck gold with Mimics and then had nothing to follow them up with, so you end up with the odd problem of early game Mimic encounters being the most memorable and frantic parts of the game and on the reverse end Nightmares turn into meaningless speedbumps. Elemental Phantoms don't do enough and the only other notable enemies are the various x-paths that have an obvious limitation of requiring an arena of some kind, leading to some memorable setpieces (the dining room forex) but no real integration into the main combat loop. Tellingly, the enemy roster includes Mimic (Tougher) so that they can stay relevant for longer. I have mixed opinions on the System Shock remake, and while it maybe pushed a little too hard in spots towards the endgame with bullshit explosive attacks, I thought it did a pretty good job of keeping things tense all the way through to the end. Meanwhile Prey's inverse difficulty curve is a well known problem. 
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May 20, 2024 23:12
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I always play all games like Thief, so while I don't doubt that you can take on enemies in Prey one on one, I was too afraid of them to try unless I was desperate. The balance for me was perfect.
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May 20, 2024 23:45
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I second literally everything this person said. I loved Prey. It might well be in my top 20 games of all time. But boy howdy the difficulty curve was hosed up, and yeah, the enemy variety (and lack thereof) was a big part of it. Honestly, I think if they had dispensed with "big floating dipshit that floats and does AOE attacks" and replaced all of them with some kind of Mimic But Cleverer And Deadlier it would have improved the game a hundredfold.
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May 21, 2024 00:01
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KillHour posted:I always play all games like Thief, so while I don't doubt that you can take on enemies in Prey one on one, I was too afraid of them to try unless I was desperate. The balance for me was perfect. 
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May 21, 2024 00:13
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Basic Chunnel posted:turrets in the core game are so fragile that they’re only useful against mimics and operators Not if you use them in multiples! They're quite effective against phantoms if you have 2 or 3 and space them out so they don't get AOEed
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May 21, 2024 00:36
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Rev. Melchisedech Howler posted:Weird West is a great if flawed game. It's been a bit since I've played it so can't remember the specifics but I remember having to mod away some issues with the companions - seem to remember they were a little too happy to walk into your line of fire. lol, you should be getting some kind of sales bonus from the devs, because I just bought the game today. lol, a quick tip for anyone else, don't forget that you are running a local session of Stable Diffusion AI when you try to launch a game because it's a teensy tiny little bit of a strain on the video card.
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May 21, 2024 01:53
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Since people have been talking up the SS remake recently just thought I should point out it launches on console tomorrow, for the 7 of us who love System Shock-esque games but don’t play on PC
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May 21, 2024 01:56
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Wafflecopper posted:Not if you use them in multiples! They're quite effective against phantoms if you have 2 or 3 and space them out so they don't get AOEed Yeah, that was basically my only viable play style for my no-neuromod run. Carry multiple turrets around, use them to tag team phantoms and then jump in with a shotgun. No turrets available? Time to hide under a table. Made for a hell of a fun game. My strategy for the nightmare mostly involved frantically running away and hiding
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May 21, 2024 01:58
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Prey's biggest weakness was absolutely its enemy design, which is just... I'm not going to say its bad, exactly, but its far, far from good. There is so much potential in the setting and concept and they basically used none of it. Enemy behaviours, mechanics, effective tactical counters and engagement strategies, and even visual design were all just mediocre at best. I loved the game, but it was definitely a weakness. The only good enemy was the mimic, and even then it felt like they did a whole lot less with them than they could have had the enemy itself been better designed - it felt like the level designers are the ones who hard carried them more than the behaviour and enemy designers pushing them to their full potential.
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May 21, 2024 03:24
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I love all of Arkanes games (haven't played Redfall) but they aren't perfect. The world design, however, is so goddamn strong that it's makes me overlook any weaknesses. Dunwall, Karnaca, and Talos One all feel like absolutely real places.
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May 21, 2024 05:34
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I had zero trouble aiming in Weird Wedt, but I was using a mouse like God intended.
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May 21, 2024 07:49
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weird wedt mods kill his rear end
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May 21, 2024 08:04
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DC Murderverse posted:Since people have been talking up the SS remake recently just thought I should point out it launches on console tomorrow, for the 7 of us who love System Shock-esque games but don’t play on PC  I never got to play System Shock but Bioshock was my favorite game until Prey came along and replaced it so I am super excited about this!I don’t have any complaints about Prey. I think it was effective for me because I let it be more of a psychological experience than focusing on the technical rooty-shooty aspects of the game. Like for me, the phantoms were a strong enemy because of the horror that it must be to be an alien creature gaining consciousness in a new way, and the overall ship of theseus style horror that the typhon represent of what even is a person/consciousness. The nightmare isnt just a big shrieking enemy that i launch the recyclers ive been hoarding at, it’s the very concept of ripping out brain tissue and replacing it with something else and BECOMING something else - the nightmare of losing the self and not recognizing the person in the mirror anymore, bit by bit. The combat was a distant third category for me and what i fell in love with was the story and the environment. drat, i wanna play it again now! But maybe ill spend the $40 on SS first to experience where all my fave games come from.
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May 24, 2024 19:15
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It sounds like the console ports of SS Remake are very rough, so you may want to monitor that a bit first.
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May 24, 2024 19:56
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matureaudiencesonly posted:
I will say that turning on subs made me react quite differently to the Phantoms; I hadn't realised they were saying fragments of sentences left from the people they used to be. Edit: I was just thinking about how replays tie in with the plot of the game - Morgan's 'self' is not resetting properly after the neuromods are removed so it makes perfect sense that the player changes how they play on subsequent runs because they know what's going to happen. I played very cautious, low-typhon on my first run, and each one since has gotten less cautious and basically weirder. The player mimics Morgan's changing self, I think that's pretty cool. Pookah fucked around with this message at 19:55 on May 25, 2024 |
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May 24, 2024 20:02
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One -shock game thing I think Prey handles very well at the beginning but loses fairly quickly is the tension. The early mimics are obviously fantastic for this and the phantoms can be pretty spooky with their super erratic movements, but honestly pretty soon after you make it to your office and everything starts being laid out for you, it loses the tension fairly quickly. This is a pretty big contrast to Bioshock and SS2 (never played 1) both of which I think manage to keep the tension fairly high all the way until the end. With Prey I felt more like I was investigating and exploring more for curiosity rather than trying to figure out an escape from a horrible nightmare (somewhat ironically)
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May 24, 2024 20:36
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I think the sense of isolation carried all the way through the game (even meeting other survivors didn't help that much), but yeah, combat became trivial or even a chore pretty quickly (except for outside the station, where the 3-dimenionsal movement made combat a great game of cat and mouse imo). Prey's gameplay is best when it uses unconventional weapons (like the dart toy, the gloo gun, or mimic matter) against unconventional enemies (like the mimic or nightmare). The phantom and the enemy bots are okay, but they're definitely one of the less interesting or original parts of the game. They're best early on, when you have limited resources and have to use the environment to your advantage.
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May 24, 2024 21:11
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Tortolia posted:It sounds like the console ports of SS Remake are very rough, so you may want to monitor that a bit first. It isn't. It works flawlessly out of the box (PS5). The only bad thing is inventory management with a controller. Mouse and keyboard support is supposed to be there but is the only thing that isn't working properly and they're looking into it so you can play it like on a PC on both PS5 and Xbox.
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May 25, 2024 16:43
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Redfall got it's final patch with a bunch of game upgrades. I don't know if that turns it into a good game, but it now has offline single player.
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May 31, 2024 13:08
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A snarky part of me wants to say "Oh good, it's probably worth looking at now that it's 1.0".
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May 31, 2024 13:13
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Serephina posted:A snarky part of me wants to say "Oh good, it's probably worth looking at now that it's 1.0". Yeah, it's certainly as good now as it's ever going to be.
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May 31, 2024 13:52
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