Yakoob on 29/6/2020 at 03:50
I got Void Bastards and experiencing the issues I saw people chatting about in the old Void Bastards thread - the great looks unique and has great atmosphere, but suffers from huge dearth of variety. 3 hours in everything honestly looks the same. I'm also seeing the same ship layouts over and over. I died, restarted with a new character, and was thrown literally into the same exact ship. It doesn't take long before you feel like you're literally going through the same set of rooms over and over.
I feel the gameplay also can't decide if it wants to be a shooter, or a stealthy survival sim. On one hand, sometimes enemies spawn in huge droves, the power will go out (forcing you quickly run to other end of the ship to turn it back on), and the oxygen makes you keep moving quickly. On the other, some enemies can take half your health in one go, there's never enough bullets, there's virtually no way to heal (25 restore health with food is a joke), there's no melee weapon, and some enemies are bullet sponges.
The game sets you up to be a shooter, but then doesn't give you the resources needed to be a shooter, and just ends up feeling really frustrating at times.
demagogue on 29/6/2020 at 04:28
Quote Posted by Yakoob
I got
Void Bastards and experiencing the issues I saw people chatting about in the old Void Bastards thread - the great looks unique and has great atmosphere, but suffers from huge dearth of variety. 3 hours in everything honestly looks the same. ...
The game sets you up to be a shooter, but then doesn't give you the resources needed to be a shooter, and just ends up feeling really frustrating at times.
I mostly just play this as one-off missions through one or two ships at a time, as a self-contained thing, not sticking with the progress part of it. That puts it more in the category of a crossword puzzle-like game that happens to be a stealth shooter. Individual moments when you're going through a ship can have good gameplay. That's not exactly the game they made, but that's the game I can play out of it.
henke on 29/6/2020 at 07:46
Quote Posted by Yakoob
The game sets you up to be a shooter, but then doesn't give you the resources needed to be a shooter, and just ends up feeling really frustrating at times.
Don't shoot enemies, if you can avoid it.
Jason Moyer on 29/6/2020 at 08:58
Quote Posted by icemann
From what I recall there was that walled off small city towards the bottom of the map (Diamond City? I forget) and that quest hub on the floating boat and that was about it.
I mean, I dunno what you consider a hub. There were certainly locations with lots of stuff to do though, outside of those 2. The house with the, uh, people who don't get old. The, er, amusement park place (not the DLC thing, but the one that's in the vanilla game). The town run by the ghoul with the mind reading stuff where you do the comic book hero quests. That place with the tower in the middle where there are a pile of shops and whatever. The underground railroad people. The friggen Institute. The Broterhood of Herp. That town where they were putting people in cages to experiment on them or something. Christ I haven't played it in like 5 years, I don't remember. But there were a bunch of quest hubs. Oh and there was a Vault that was a hub wasn't there.
Nameless Voice on 30/6/2020 at 01:34
My problem with Fallout 4 was rather that the writing was terrible.
There were a few decent bits here and there, but offset by atrocities like the boy in the fridge.
You say you had to play a goody two-shoes, but I felt that you couldn't do that either, you had to join one of the factions to complete the game and they were all morally grey to the point that I didn't find any of them sympathetic at all.
They tried to make the story darker and edgier and give it meaningful choices, but they just ended up making none of the choices appealing.
It's a problem that was already present to a lesser extent in Skyrim ("Do you want to join the racist Stormcloaks or the uncaring Empire who wanted to execute you for no reason?"), but at least that had more to the story and you could skip that choice entirely if you wanted to.
A good choice is one where both options have merit, and you have to choose which outcome you value more. Choosing between two choices which are both good and bad in different ways is interesting (I'd say much more interesting than the binary "help, or kill everyone while twirling your moustache" good/evil choices.
But what Bethesda instead managed to do was to give you a choice where none of the options is appealing and where you didn't really want to do anything.
I'd argue that the same problems apply to the game's RPG systems. Without skills, and with being able to get all of your SPECIAL stats up to 10, you aren't really making meaningful choices any more, just choosing what you want to get first.
The world was pretty and I did like the gun modification, though.
Yakoob on 1/7/2020 at 04:16
So I also got
(https://store.steampowered.com/app/794260/Outward/) Outward during Summer Sale and just rage quit. It's an open world RPG ala Skyrim but it has the most ridiculous death loop I've seen.
After I completed the "tutorial" in home village I leave to explore the world, yay! After 15 minutes of walking around empty plains I stumble upon a big fort. Cool, new city and quests? Nope! As soon as I enter, I get attacked an promptly killed. So I wake up.... inside the fort. Ok weird? I try exploring some more and get killed again. Then I respawn - you guessed it - inside the fort again. Except it's now pitch dark (night) and there's an enemy right next to me so I instantly get killed again.
Fourth time I thankfully respawn outside the fort (but half my items are gone, cool) and decide to just ignore it. I spend another 15 minutes wandering around plains with nothing to do and ran into another bandit who killed me in 2 hits.
And after I died I.... respawned in the fort.
Fuck this game.
Shadowcat on 1/7/2020 at 07:32
Should have been called "Inward", clearly.
Thirith on 1/7/2020 at 07:57
If anyone's interested in checking out
Arma 3 and possibly stopping by (
https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148063) our biweekly Saturday sessions, now's probably a good time to get into it, since the main game and the relevant DLC (
Apex, though the small DLCs add some nice hardware) are pretty cheap at the moment. The
Apex edition (which has the main game,
Apex and much of the small DLC) is about US$20.
Nameless Voice on 1/7/2020 at 14:21
Yeah, the "you can't die but just teleport around" thing in Outward is rather annoying. You ideally need to play it co-op and try to only have one of you die at a time, since you can revive each other so long as you don't both die at once.