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My spouse and I have been quietly making this LP one we end our nights on because it's entertaining. My stomach still drops every time Lara makes some of the more outrageous jumps, though. Ninja edit: Look, page 3!
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Mar 7, 2019 08:41
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Teledahn posted:Now do it again. I keep a lot of useless knowledge in my head and don't have a really good outlet for most of it as my wife has actually banned me from providing Arctic Facts, Native American Firearm Diffusion and Use Facts, Napoleon Facts, Early Modern Medicine Facts and Early Soviet Union Facts. Who cares about thread length as long as people are enjoying the videos.
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Mar 7, 2019 13:59
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Video title is very accurate as you do not do what Lara did in this video without a plan. And Lara had no plan. Although to be fair, Lara has kinda been winging it since the start of the previous game, so there has to be something going for her there.
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Mar 7, 2019 14:13
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 So the Divine Source is this game's MacGuffin, the Atlas is that thing that tells us how to get to it. It's like the Beacons you are chasing down in the first Mass Effect, it doesn't enhance the player's abilities to do anything, but it directs the plot to the next point. The game subverts the usual use of the Map to the MacGuffin by making it something we only hear about like an hour before we get it, and we use it almost as soon as we find it. How many planets do you have to go to in order to get the full Beacon experience in ME? Most Legend of Zelda games have you beating like a dozen dungeons before you get the Master Sword so you can continue on to the Triforce. The Atlas comes off as almost an afterthought for the game to send you this level. We're literally doing this to get directions to a place the people who built the Atlas knew about and wouldn't have needed a map to. Why make it? That never gets explained. It's one of those plot items that you aren't supposed to spend that much time thinking about.
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Mar 9, 2019 01:56
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To be fair, "Because it's COOL!" is a legitimate reason to make the Atlas considering how that thing works, in-game too really considering the whole religious cult thing. It's a video back now, but I kind of like the fact Laura responded to Ana's "join me" spiel by actually shooting and hitting her, was a nice touch to the usual "hero rejects the villain" thing by making it less "Never!" and more "If you were smart you would have joined ME". berryjon posted:Video title is very accurate as you do not do what Lara did in this video without a plan. And Lara had no plan. That is kind of a deliberate theme with her in the whole series, I rather like in Shadow that she finds out the hard way just how bad the results of constantly going without planning get eventually when everything goes Really Wrong.
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Mar 9, 2019 06:18
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Been waiting the whole LP for a crazy, big set-piece. Was not disappointed 👍
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Mar 10, 2019 14:27
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 One of the reasons I've enjoyed doing LPs for as long as I have (god, it's been a while now) is that I get to discover new things on a replay while showing off the game that I may have missed the first time through. I get caught up in grabbing things and running as fast as I can to the next minor task usually. When I'm playing for the internet I tend to slow down somewhat and take a look at the scenery. Discovering the scene painted on the ruined dome towards the end of the video is a great example of stuff I would never see if I didn't record things. I really explained what that was poorly, but that's totally Taurus fighting Orion and that sort of painting was a pretty common decoration in Rome/Byzantine times. People always think of like, marble and stone and brick when they think of that era, but in wealthier houses and temples and other structures there was a lot of plaster or clay walls that were often decorated with painted scenes and devices. It was kind of cool to watch the Spartacus series and see houses with those decorations.
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Mar 12, 2019 23:34
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 Not a ton to say about this, the majority of the episode is a pretty easy puzzle. The falling action is me being a goddamn idiot for like ten minutes straight. I'll make one point: I always assume that developers are dicks to players on purpose at times. Why have an opening in a tower that has to be blown open with a later game weapon if you aren't going to use it? It makes sense that I have to go IN through the new opening, even if the method to get there isn't clear. I have no clue what the point of the room is if the document I thought was there is actually in a room we could have accessed at any time.
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Mar 16, 2019 17:39
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I haven't watched the video yet, but to answer your thoughts - sometimes the Developers have to cut something due to time, money, or they had this great idea but it didn't pan out in practice. And they can't always get rid of the evidence before the game ships. So instead of thinking of it as a waste of the player's time and effort, ask yourself what could have been here to justify this spot, but got left on the cutting room floor.
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Mar 16, 2019 18:46
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As pretty as that first tomb was, I find it somewhat difficult to believe Lara would be stymied by a wall made out of what appears to be scaffolding. EDIT: I really feel for you with the tower climb at the end there. Was there even a need to use the explosive arrow at all? Megillah Gorilla fucked around with this message at 11:47 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 10:59
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 Just now I noticed that when I edited things I put the documents/treasures at the front. Consider this an experiment. Unintentional as it is. We finally get our last traversal upgrade in this episode, the broadhead climbing arrow and that is a shame. The arrow is a ton of fun and opens up a lot of possibilities in both traversing the environment and in stealth combat situations. Ideally, this would have been our first special arrow type or even come before the rope arrows in "automatic use special weapons" as it would have given the player a good number of new movement/flanking options if incorporated well. I think the late introduction is because of the limitations of the arrow. You can only place them at specific intervals on a wall. Otherwise the new one knocks the old one out as I demonstrate in the episode. The fact is that there are enough bad players/reviewers out there who would have had a hard time using this without extensive training on how to play the game, so by default it becomes a late game item. The upgrade system, as we see at the end here, accounts for other people being dumb by giving Lara a second way to use the arrow, so if you gently caress up and don't place things right the game STILL gives you a way out. That's downright generous, but you know people would have skipped that perk and then later complained the game expected too much forethought.
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Mar 20, 2019 02:56
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I think the rope down under the swing in the cave went to a relic or something. There looked like there was something box-like when you went into Tomb Raider vision.
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Mar 20, 2019 05:59
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CoffeeQaddaffi posted:I think the rope down under the swing in the cave went to a relic or something. There looked like there was something box-like when you went into Tomb Raider vision. I'll have to go back and grab it after the plot driven stuff we're in now wraps up. I may have to do a collectathon video where i go back to the Baba Yaga area as well to grab some things we couldn't quite reach back then. I've also never seen the reaction the woman who gives you coins for completing tombs has when you do all of them, the end game kept me interested enough I just kept going.
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Mar 20, 2019 13:14
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I know you said in the beginning you won't be getting every last coin cache or doing all of the little area challenges, and that does seem tedious, but it would be fun to see you get every ability, or nearly every ability, from the exp collected when you hunt down all the documents. There're a neat collection of character arcs developing in them, at least in my and my wife's opinions. Also, will you be LPing the newest Tomb Raider game when it's less recently released? I like watching your stuff 
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Mar 21, 2019 10:23
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Lord Zedd-Repulsa posted:I know you said in the beginning you won't be getting every last coin cache or doing all of the little area challenges, and that does seem tedious, but it would be fun to see you get every ability, or nearly every ability, from the exp collected when you hunt down all the documents. There're a neat collection of character arcs developing in them, at least in my and my wife's opinions. I really do want to get all the documents at the very least. Like you said, there are some nice stories going on and they really flesh out the world and characters, some of whom are otherwise kind of single note. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is something I want to do eventually, but there are a couple things/shorter games I was going to do first that shouldn't take long before I started that up. Always nice to hear people are enjoying the videos, the game is really good and I hope the LP is a good showcase. My schedule continues to be messed up, I'm hoping to have a video up tomorrow instead of today; I usually build a week of backlog in case something disrupts my ability to record, but I used that up early and haven't been able to rebuild yet. We are rapidly approaching the end game, though, so there may not be much backlog to build.
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Mar 21, 2019 13:29
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 Apologies for the short video this time. The game threw a lot of information and backstory at us in a short period and while that isn't an excuse for the episode, there is a lot happening here and I wanted to provide some time to digest it all. I think one of the better things the game does, as I mentioned in the previous post, is keep things moving story wise by dumping a lot of information into the documents you find. The characters we meet and interact with can seem sort of flat if you don't go looking for the various journals and recordings, hell, they even make the random Trinity goons seem semi-interesting in one of the threads that we've seen, which is something of an accomplishment. I think that's a side effect of the "serial" style nature of the game. They very clearly saw Indiana Jones as an inspiration, and those movies used the serials of the 30's and 40's as an inspiration and both of those treated the villains and much of the supporting cast as disposable per series/film. Rise of the Tomb Raider basically only returns two characters from the previous game and doesn't use the same place as a setting, so it would be tempting to just follow that inspiration all the way and not explain who the people you are interacting with are beyond what the narrative requires. Instead we get some nicely detailed characters who not only end up explaining their own motivations, but we also get to see them assessed by other people who are not Lara. That's a really interesting prism that you don't see a lot of.
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Mar 23, 2019 03:53
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I'm pretty sure that all the gear and ammo those Trinity dudes have on means their corpses will sink without Lara having to do anything else. And in that one area with the red flags, white or blue would've blended in with the bluish-white snow too much. Good decision from the designers there. But drat, that one document with Ana was unexpected.
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Mar 24, 2019 05:36
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Lazyfire posted:Shadow of the Tomb Raider is something I want to do eventually, but there are a couple things/shorter games I was going to do first that shouldn't take long before I started that up. Always nice to hear people are enjoying the videos, the game is really good and I hope the LP is a good showcase. Well, thanks for encouraging me to get into the series at least; just finished Shadow myself. Fun game (and I have a system that could show off the ridiculous graphics of the thing) but the wall climbing seems really buggy (think the game likes to "miss" and stick you inside the wall a lot) and had to play with my Windows settings thanks to one nasty bug that kept crashing the game towards the end. Here's hoping you have better luck by the time you get there; they'll probably have finished releasing the DLC tombs by then at least.
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Mar 24, 2019 08:05
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 Lots happens in this video, but that isn't why it is 40+ minutes long. No, most of the stuff important to the story happens in 20 minutes. The rest of the video is me hunting down TWO GODDAMN DOCUMENTS. Seriously. When I finished this I immediately started recording me hunting down the Baba Yaga documents like I threaten to at the end of the video...that took almost half an hour extra. Jesus. It isn't that the game puts things in out of the way locations, it's that I completely walked past stuff that is actually kind of easy to get and that means I have to trudge through sections of the game that are now completely empty. There are worse things for sure, but it doesn't make for much in the way of interesting content, that's for sure. In the spirit of making the video fun to watch for those looking for story and the backstory documents I 1) am not talking about story elements in this post and 2) put a big ol' subtitle in the video telling you where to go to see the documents I find. From here on out there won't be much like that, we've got endgame to get on to.
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Mar 26, 2019 23:37
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 I had a lot of fun with this episode, the weird room-sized mobile we climb on here is just a fantastic reminder that you are essentially playing a puzzle game that has shooting elements in it. The reboot was way more action (DUAL WIELD PISTOLS!) than puzzle, but if you go back through the videos on this game you get a lot of puzzle and exploration elements and not an overwhelming amount of combat. The third game does even more with puzzle/adventure stuff over action segments. It's an interesting move, most game franchises just expand on all the elements of the previous game and become too sprawling in the process, think the Arkham series that went from the Asylum to all of Gotham to the point you needed the Batmobile by the last game. Tomb Raider homes in on one aspect and starts putting more weight on that rather than stretching itself too thin. That's a deliberate choice and a good one for the franchise. Also let me get on my soapbox for a second and say dental coverage networks are the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my life and it's absolutely insane that I can pay a company to cover me but they can decide that they only like three places in a 50 mile radius and then refuse to provide any assistance unless I use a place I have no history with. It's also insane that a company can call an HSA insurance when it's just me paying my medical bills from an account they set up for me. That poo poo should be illegal.
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Mar 29, 2019 00:31
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The only problems I have with Shadow of the Tomb Raider is that it's too dark, especially compared with the great snowy landscapes in this game, and that the action sequences with the "supernatural" monsters are too fast paced.
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Mar 29, 2019 02:28
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I'm confused - is this setpiece puzzle better or worse than the one of the same object from Prince of Persia? Because they're both pretty awesome in their own ways.
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Mar 29, 2019 03:04
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 I had to take a week off because all my forward (running a sub seven minute mile) momentum became downward momentum in the blink of an eye. Now, there are positives and negatives to that. One positive is that I have a much higher pain tolerance than I thought I did, but the negative that accompanies it was that up until this weekend about every third word out of my mouth was just not intelligible. Thankfully, that cleared and here we are. This makes two Tomb Raider games in a row where an unkillable army is protecting something. In the last game the unkillable army at least had the decency to be rotting away. The undying soldiers in this game basically say "gently caress that" and are pretty much human; they just happen to be unkillable. I like how the game ends up handling them, in that they disappear "for a time" and therefore leave the way open for the player. The downside to that is that you can't booby trap their corpses like you can the Trinity goons and so one of the skills you learn is only really useful up to this point. There are a couple like that, one of which I end up noticing in the next episode. The game isn't afraid to essentially kill something you spent experience on with no warning, which is both pretty OK and pretty dumb at the same time.
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Apr 10, 2019 02:48
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Ooh, I've been in love with orreries since I first saw the Dark Crystal as a kid. Also, orrery is such a cool word. And real life orreries can be just sublime works of craftsmanship.  Megillah Gorilla fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Apr 10, 2019 |
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Apr 10, 2019 17:15
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Interestingly the Deathless Ones apparently speak actual fluent (if probably too modern) Greek from what I understand, nice touch. I got pulverized in that first fight with them; definitely shows I should used auto-shotgun, that thing went through them FAST.
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Apr 11, 2019 03:43
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 I uploaded this on Wednesday and only just now had the time to put it all together to get it posted. I have been terrible about schedule this entire LP. Megillah Gorilla posted:Ooh, I've been in love with orreries since I first saw the Dark Crystal as a kid. I'm glad at least someone knows what that giant thing was actually called, it was going to drive me nuts. I have a weird appreciation for stuff like this just because of the massive amount of precise work and calculations they require and the fact that some of the oldest examples had to overcome a lack of high end modern equipment. Old watches and clocks are other great examples. Most everything today is digital so they are everywhere and cheap, but up to the 1970's and 80's even mass produced time pieces were super complex machines. MadDogMike posted:Interestingly the Deathless Ones apparently speak actual fluent (if probably too modern) Greek from what I understand, nice touch. I got pulverized in that first fight with them; definitely shows I should used auto-shotgun, that thing went through them FAST. The Deathless are really just upscaled Trinity mooks who have slightly different weaponry and movesets. it makes timing dodges a bit difficult at first, and their arrows are like, pinpoint accurate at times, but if you are taking upgrades as you go they really aren't that bad. I think the first time I did this section I tried using the bow and eventually defaulted to the AR because the bow really ends up making you have to hit multiple headshots due to the helmets most of the Deathless run around in. If you aren't using fire arrows or explosive arrows it'll really kill you ability to kill.
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Apr 13, 2019 13:20
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I got to say, listening to the Deathless walk around really reminds me of classic Thief and the guards as they stroll around.
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Apr 13, 2019 18:13
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 As I've mentioned frequently through the LP, the developers really went and made hunting in this game more important and in many ways fun. I ground out the skins needed for the upgrades the first time I played and didn't know until this video that the predator animals would repopulate after a time. I thought that they gave you just enough skins from the initial spawn of those animals that you could get the upgrades you needed and if you hosed up and didn't skin them after killing them you were out of luck. Turns out that's wrong and also mountain lions absolutely melt when faced with an automatic shotgun. Speaking of melt, we get Greek Fire arrows from the tomb in the episode. Fire arrows are basically nukes at this point.
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Apr 17, 2019 22:55
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OK, I'm gonna say that the new costume is a very close second behind Baba Yaga's. Because it's proper armor, and it looks good in motion!
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Apr 18, 2019 04:48
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 Shadow looking great, dang.
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Apr 22, 2019 09:00
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I remember the orrery in Prince of Persia being more complex but it's also been a very long time since I played it I've come to the conclusion that "climbing all over ancient poo poo and sometimes there are fights" is one of my favourite genres of gameplay, but I also can't convince my body to climb a ladder onto my roof Maybe it's all the times I've sent Lara spinning into the void
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Apr 23, 2019 19:51
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 I was almost disappointed that the game hadn't dropped any bugs on me through the LP, as there are actually a few that, while not game breaking, can be really disorienting. A lot of them have to do with movement and how the game recognizes where and how Lara should be. Glitches like flying up to the top of the world because you got stuck in a shimmy animation where there was no logical spot to do so or getting sent through the ground when an enemy is nearby and Lara starts ducking at a bad time. What we get here, however, is the weirdest way I've ever seen a game stop you from doing something. Instead of just saying "no, we hosed up and didn't spawn guys" the game actively stops you from making progress (watch the video to find out how) and gives no hint that the problem is fixable. I almost reset from the save to see if that would resolve it. Instead you just need to run away to fix this one, so not as bad as it could be, but goddamn, this was confusing.
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Apr 24, 2019 00:07
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Had the exact same bug there, apparently pretty common from what I understand. Pissed me off like crazy of course till I found out the solution online, it’s apparently thanks to those guys not spawning right where they’re supposed to on the top of the trebuchet. Running out then back works as you showed.
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Apr 26, 2019 18:27
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 Can I just say that the stuff with the catapults/trebuchets in both the last episode and this one are really weird to me? Not that they are bad or entirely out of place, but this game generally keeps the gimmicks to the tombs and occasional one time puzzle in the overworld. Launching stuff for fun and profit is a nice change of pace for the area and a pretty good way to keep you from progressing in a straight line and the controls are pretty simple and easy to work. It's super unobtrusive and feels like something the developers spent a lot of time on and had to cut back to just a few cases of using it. I would have loved to have a Defend the Settlement sequence or two in the game where you had to use these things to keep Trinity from attacking the Remnant settlement or something, but, alas. Lazyfire fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 26, 2019 18:50
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It might've been something they wanted to include so they started making the assets and repurposed them when there wasn't time to do everything.
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Apr 26, 2019 20:45
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Ah, are you also doing the new movie trailer approach to audio mixing? 
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Apr 27, 2019 00:07
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Fish Noise posted:Ah, are you also doing the new movie trailer approach to audio mixing? Jesus Christ. I muted the game audio during editing to check the level on my voice and never unmuted it. I'll fix that soon.
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Apr 27, 2019 13:16
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 I had every intention of finishing the game in this episode. When I went to record, however, I was not feeling well and had no chance in hell of actually getting to the end of the game, even if it isn't far off. I was super amused by the weird bugs we start to see here, the T posing of the Deathless is probably the easiest to notice, but some button inputs started not functioning here as well. I had to mash the E button to get the grappling climbing axe to work, for example. I think the window on that is very narrow and whatever was messing with the AI was screwing with the timing there as well. At least I like to think that is the case and that I'm not just bad at games. It's so bizarre that in the last couple videos we've probably seen the game break down more than in the rest of the LP. One would think that 40 videos in there would be more that went super wrong, but Rise of the Tomb Raider has held it together for the most part. It's really weird that a setpiece that is clearly supposed to be a major showcase is the spot where the game breaks down. you have to start to wonder if they even play tested this segment.
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May 2, 2019 02:27
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 I don't want to talk too much about the contents of the episode because, hey, end game stuff and spoilers and such, but I feel like final fights in this game are a bit weaker than in the previous one. The reason I say that is the previous game had a serious boss fight at the very end while this one is a bit more...interesting. I guess in a way it is supposed to be a bit more like the Mr. Freeze fight from Arkham City, but the problem is that it's too short for that and your traversal options are not as robust as Lara as they were for Batman at that point in the game. Outside of that, the game is really well done and hits all the notes it attempts to hit. It's a solid 8.5/10 all the way through, with bugs and pacing being the biggest challenge to the total score. As I mention in the video, you may end up with huge segments of the game with no combat or story progression because you have so much stuff to collect or side missions that don't really help you get stronger/better and on top of that once you get the shotgun and there are no more combat additions outside of specialty ammo/arrows it's kind of like combat stops doing anything new or different. The fact that combat itself is really good, the stealth is good (if only I remembered I could shoot arrows to distract) and the escape/running segments are solid if not pure eye candy really help pull everything through the mire of the few things the game struggles to do at a high level. Lazyfire fucked around with this message at 16:48 on May 25, 2019 |
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May 9, 2019 02:09
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You repeat an earlier document's audio on Revenant, but eh, whatever, I have eyes. This is the most fun I've had watching flailing in a long time, so thanks for LPing!
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May 9, 2019 05:09
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