Tomi on 5/10/2022 at 23:07
I gotta add to my previous post that I'm still enjoying SW: Squadrons despite my criticism. I'm always eager to start a new mission and see where the story leads me, but all those little things that I mentioned above start annoying me halfway through the mission, and as soon as I'm done, I head straight to the "exit game" button. And then I repeat that during the next gaming session. :)
However, the real reason for my double posting here is that I just finished Insurmountable!
It's a great game indeed, but I'm also glad that it's over now. It was getting a bit grindy and repetitive and I don't think I'll be returning to it any time soon. By the ending I think I had seen pretty much everything that the game has to offer. I was dreading the 5-star difficulty missions at first, but with my fully leveled up character(s) they were a piece of cake really. The danger of permadeath keeps things exciting, but the normal difficulty is quite forgiving, so most of the missions were a bit on the easy side. I would actually like to see what the toughest missions are like on the hardest difficulty level, but I think I'll leave that for another time. Still, Insurmountable is definitely a game worth playing, especially if adventure roguelikes are your thing.
Thirith on 6/10/2022 at 12:38
Just for the record: I don't like enemies in Sekiro that engage in ranged combat. And I especially don't like an entire cliff face of such enemies just waiting to fire up my ass.
Anarchic Fox on 6/10/2022 at 20:48
Quote Posted by Thirith
Just for the record: I don't like enemies in
Sekiro that engage in ranged combat. And I especially don't like an entire cliff face of such enemies just waiting to fire up my ass.
Then you get up close and discover their musket doubles as a warhammer. >>
Thirith on 7/10/2022 at 09:34
Well, that's it for that cliff face of musket jerks. Their boss (?) has shot their last shot. I'm off to fight a Junji Ito-style wannabe Wolverine (at least going by the bugger's claws).
Jason Moyer on 7/10/2022 at 17:38
I'm finally playing something other than WRC10, although I'm still playing that...doing season mode on 150% difficulty because it's hard as nuts.
Anyway, I've finally gotten around to Prey: Mooncrash, which didn't really interest much based on how it was marketed/discussed and was kind of meh at the outset but is actually quite good and growing on me. I find the roguelite aspect kind of unnecessary filler, but being forced to use character builds that I would never choose on my own is a good time. I suppose I'll post more about it in the relevant thread once I've finished it up.
After that, I need to play Deathloop. And WRC Generations, I suppose, since that's coming out in less than a month apparently.
Tomi on 9/10/2022 at 19:34
Turns out my "ten missions in" for
Star Wars: Squadrons was actually only six missions in, and the game is getting considerably more challenging now. I like that, but there really was no need for such a long tutorial section. The missions and the story are getting more interesting as well, so perhaps Squadrons is as good as they say after all! I still don't like the targeting system, and the two-stick flying controls are surprisingly hard to master, but yeah, I'm currently enjoying this game. I would imagine that it's even more spectacular in VR.
I've also been playing
Draw Slasher. You're this little ninja and you draw lines on the screen to slash monsters and stuff. It's not as simple and easy as it sounds though, and a fairly large variation of monsters (pirate monkey zombies) makes things more interesting. The game can be quite fun and I love how it looks, but it's quite a terrible tablet/mobile port. You're supposed to play the game with a mouse on PC, but it's so obviously designed for touch screen controls. You need a good mouse and an ergonomic desk if you want to beat this game. I have neither, and even though I hardly ever give up because a game is too hard, I might do an exception here. I like a challenge, but this is just annoying.
Inline Image:
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1772753397101065489/F068FEEB30AF4A6A4C09A6952E2D6581A5C885C3/
Tomi on 9/10/2022 at 21:49
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
I'm finally playing something other than WRC10, although I'm still playing that...doing season mode on 150% difficulty because it's hard as nuts.
How's WRC10 compared to
Dirt Rally 2? I love DR2, but I haven't felt like playing it lately, and I never got obsessed with it like I did with
Dirt Rally 1. I like it how it's so goddamn challenging and unforgiving, but sometimes the difficulty curve is just disheartening. Especially when you try to compete with other players online. Also, I'm just sort of hopeless at tuning the cars, and all that is in such a big role in Dirt Rally.
Anyway. To me WRC 10 looks quite a bit more arcadey than Dirt Rally, but I don't know if that
really is the case. The crashes particularly look bad I think, I watched a video clip of someone crashing into a tree at full speed, and there was barely a scratch in the car? Could be just some lower difficulty settings, dunno. On the other hand there seems to a whole lot of content in WRC10, and the tracks look a lot less monotonous than the ones in Dirt Rally. Then there are the official drivers and cars of course, but I haven't really missed those in Dirt Rally, even though I'm an armchair rally fan in real life too. The historic stuff seems interesting though. Ah, I wish Bugbear made another Rally Trophy game...
Is WRC Generations just WRC11 with a fancy name?
Jason Moyer on 10/10/2022 at 03:06
Quote Posted by Tomi
How's WRC10 compared to
Dirt Rally 2?
I don't really like DR2. I mean, it has superior tech probably in terms of graphics/sound, but I prefer the way the WRC games look. They have that sort of lo-fi realism you get from ArmA games, where it's not massively impressive to look at but feels more real than most games because it has a proper color palette and the right sort of details. In terms of driving, I enjoyed DR1 but DR2 doesn't do much for me. I find the cars feel really floaty for some reason. WRC10 probably has too much grip (as does DR2), but the way the cars move on their suspension and slide on loose surfaces and such looks and feels better, reminds me of a somewhat easier Richard Burns Rally. The damage model is pretty shitty in some ways, but I'd say that about DR1/2 as well. They scale the damage taken and amount of damage that can be repaired based on which car you're driving (so Jr WRC cars take a pounding, WRC2 cars can be destroyed but it takes some really bad driving, and WRC+ cars damage really easily) which is annoying, and there isn't a ton of visual stuff happening, but in a proper length rally it's quite possible to DNF because of cumulative wear/damage, especially in the WRC+ cars. It's not RBR level where it's actually realistically punishing, but it's something you have to be aware of and prevents you from banging off barriers or whatever (again, in the WRC1 and, to an extent, WRC2 cars). I had to DNF from a stage in Finland because I nosed into a tree on the previous stage, which didn't create a mechanical problem but meant I had no headlights on the next stage, which was at night.
The stages are probably the WRC series biggest strength, they're way more interesting and believable than anything Codemasters has done, while being equally unrealistic in the way they take real rallies and compress them down into the more notable bits. Codemasters has always claimed that the DR games used real stages for the long ones (that get chopped upped and reversed and so on), but the stages they use in the game are always like 1/5th of the length of the real ones. The WRC stages are similar in that way, but they base them around the interesting bits from real stages with the boring bits taken out. I'd rather just have the real stages, Mobil 1 Rally style, but whatever.
I basically play Season mode because the caRPG stuff doesn't really resemble reality in any way, and the dynamic weather in WRC makes a huge difference in the experience. As does having to put together a pool of tires to choose from at the beginning of the rally, and being able to select which compound is on which wheel. Picking the wrong tires is way more punishing than in the DR games, and seems way closer to reality to me. Soft slicks wear quickly but are the fastest on dry tarmac, work ok as a compromise on wet surfaces as long as it isn't raining too heavily, and can be used on snow (which only appears in Monte Carlo) but are really slow. Hard slicks wear slowly and are almost as fast in the dry as the soft tires, but are totally useless in the rain and snow. Grooved wet tires wear faster than slicks (especially in the dry), are the best option in heavy rain, and are ok on snow. Snow tires are ok in the dry but wear out super fast, are super grippy in snow, and have almost no grip in the wet. So in Monte Carlo, for instance, you're always trying to solve the puzzle of which tires to mount and you can only leave a service area with the 4 tires mounted on your car and 2 spares. So you might run 2 softs and 2 wets crossmounted and lose 20 seconds on a dry stage, in order to be able to run 4 wet tires on a wet stage before the next service. It's kind of awesome, plus there's strategy in trying to save your best tires for longer stages or for the power stage since you get bonus points for doing well there.
If you want to drive old rally cars I'd stick with DR. The historic cars aren't modelled with much detail in WRC, and aren't really the focus of the game. But if you want to do a career or run seasons with real, modern cars then WRC is the only game in town IMO.
Quote:
Is WRC Generations just WRC11 with a fancy name?
Yep.
[video=youtube;AbdNmbZ_ZbY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbdNmbZ_ZbY[/video]
[video=youtube;WWYZA-6syHs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWYZA-6syHs[/video]
[video=youtube;6ToqQt2QD-M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ToqQt2QD-M[/video]
[video=youtube;H_a6pvN7lLM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_a6pvN7lLM[/video]
henke on 10/10/2022 at 17:53
That's some mighty fine rallying, Jason!
I just finished
Arctico. A minimalist survival-game, tho I dunno if survival is the right word, as there's no death or fail-state in this. It's very chill, in both senses of the word. This game has been in Early Access forever and only hit 1.0 half a year ago, but the dev still regularly updates it and adds new stuff. Even after putting 10 hours into it I'm not really sure what to say about it. The game it reminds me most of is
Sable, similar relaxing vibes of skating over beautiful vistas. But what sets Sable ahead is that movement is
fun in that game, whereas in Arctico it's extremely perfunctory. It does have the traditional survival-game loop of gathering resources, then turning those resources into other resources, then setting up systems to farm resources so you can get lots and lots of WONDERFUL RESOURCES! The exploration is fun, you find some cool stuff. But the game's best feature is perhaps the way it looks. I kept snapping screenshots throughout.
Inline Image:
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1807656577912831272/790BA2DBB864AFC4650B2692F03B6DBF2D472EC5/?imw=2048&imh=1152&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=trueInline Image:
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1807656577912831501/2600634F7B74A86BDDCEBC9A37E6EE9EA4C5F32E/?imw=2048&imh=1152&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=trueInline Image:
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1834678435869910391/43D1967254CB8699BA1B670F816A4153F6F78F39/?imw=2048&imh=1152&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=trueI guess my final verdict is: if you're looking for a chill game to roam around in while listening to music or a podcast, give Arctico a go!
Tomi on 10/10/2022 at 18:40
Yeah Jason, nice driving indeed! And thanks for such a detailed reply. I'm quite tempted to give WRC10 a try, but there's something off-putting about those game series that get a new update every year, and the changes are often something quite small and insignificant. Just knowing that you're playing an "outdated" game in the series can be a bit annoying. It must also be a bit frustrating to invest a lot of time on learning to handle these cars, and then they'll change things for the next release and you'll have to learn it all over again. But I'll see if WRC10 is ever on big discount somewhere, I think I'll buy it... even though WRC Generations is most likely out by then. :D
Quote Posted by henke
perfunctory
*takes notes*That's a new word for my vocabulary.
Also, Arctico does look pretty. It's a chill game, literally. Maybe it's one to play during the Christmas holidays.